Posts Tagged ‘strategic planning’

D’Amico Changes Seats at the Twitter Table.

Monday, August 9th, 2010 by Jennifer Kane

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the social media campaign launched by D’Amico, a restaurant and catering mega-force here in Minneapolis.

The word on the cyber-street about the campaign had been highly negative for weeks, but it seemed like D’Amico either wasn’t listening to the feedback or – more distressingly – didn’t care.

Well, my post seemed to have struck a nerve and I received a lot of feedback on it, from people who agreed with my assessment, those who thought I was an overacting blowhard, and even D’Amico themselves.

D’Amico heard us …

Recently D’Amico made some big changes to their social media strategy that I think are important to note and to applaud.

DamicoTweet

  • They condensed accounts: As noted in the previous post, their initial strategy was to go wide and shallow, which some people interpreted as “spammy.” Going narrow and deep makes them seem more authentic.
  • They acknowledged our frustration: One of the main D’Amico accounts now sports a wallpaper message from the Director of Operations, Lynn Ulrich, that basically says, “we tried something new…you didn’t like it…we’re trying something different.” This is a very transparent and classy way to handle the feedback.
  • They’ve personalized their messaging: Accounts for D’Amico’s humans sound more, well…human. The gratuitous hash tags have been scaled back and replaced with more conversation content.

So, is it working?

The jury is still out on whether this change in strategy will be effective for D’Amico.

Since social media monitoring and measurement is one of our KaneCo capabilities (D’Amico is not a client) we have access to tools to get a quick snapshot of how their online community is reacting to their changes:

Picture 2

Since July 22, there has been a notable decrease in negative comments (shown in red) about this company, and I think that’s worth noting.

The challenge for them will be to increase the number of positive comments (shown in green) they are receiving from the community – a percentage that has remained unchanged.

(For those of you who are curious, the grey areas on this chart represents “neutral” sentiment – mainly consisting of news and information D’Amico has posted about themselves.)

While the negative comments they receive have been very specific to their social media efforts …

  • “@DAmicoandSons who planned your strategy? The name/number thing is really off putting- all d’amico tweets seem impersonal and broadcasted”
  • “Anyone else getting annoyed by D’Amico & Sons on Twitter???”
  • “I was suddenly followed by a large number of D’Amico accounts. It’s a very creepy feeling. I blocked them all.”

The positive comments they’re receiving are still only in reference to the services the company provides …

  • “with my kids + nephew + a yummy d’amico chicken salad croissant + a good book – at the Beach! Gorgeous day!!”
  • “Haven’t had this in a while, but I’m craving D’Amico’s sunday brunch breakfast pizza!”
  • “Having an amazing lunch at D’amico & Sons! The Hot Italian truely is hot”

Good luck, D’Amico.

Let me be clear, my previous post about D’Amico was not part of some personal vendetta. I wasn’t vying to get hired by D’Amico. No one paid me to write that post. (If anything, it put me in the middle of a D’Amico “drama firestorm” that distracted me from my day-to-day workload.)

My objective with the post was simply to give voice to and summarize the thoughts I was seeing surfacing in continuing waves from my feed and analyze them from my perspective as a social media strategist.

While I’m not seeing feedback on the new campaign in my feeds, I do think this company’s efforts to respond to the concerns of their social community should be recognized.

Too often we are more inclined to place blame rather than to reward the acknowledgement of it.

And that is a shame.

I think the D’Amico campaign offers a good lesson for any company entering the social space, and it is this…

If you decide to employ social media as a communications tool …

  • You will not be able to fully control it.
  • You will make mistakes.
  • You will get called out and criticized for things you say and do (whether they are valid points or not).

That’s not just D’Amico’s reality. That’s the reality of social media, and one we will all have to face eventually.

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Content Catering for Social Media

Monday, May 3rd, 2010 by Jennifer Kane

Last summer, in an effort to teach our daughter the wonders of science, my husband and I helped her make her own ice cream.

It was a pretty slick process that involved pouring a bunch of ingredients into a plastic bag, shaking it for about five minutes and, voila – instant dessert.

I was reminded of this experiment last week when I was doing a webinar for Vocus on integrated communications.

During the Q&A portion of the webinar, a few people asked specific questions about content for social media …

  • How do you come up with it?
  • How do you establish a consistent tone?
  • Should it be different in each channel?

Social media content, for me, is like the list of ingredients we placed into that bag when we made ice cream.

Each one was strategically selected for its scientific properties and pleasantness to the palette. But none of them were, in and of themselves, “ice cream.”

Strategic Groceries.

I think a lot of companies approach their social content as they would any other web content. They menu out a list of “dishes” that they hope people will consume, cook them up and then parcel them out to audiences in snackable bites.

The fatal flaw of this approach is that it overlooks the first step in engaging in any successful social interaction – listening to your audience.

You can serve me the most beautiful, bamboo-plated array of sushi the world has ever seen, but if you neglected to ask me if I like the stuff first, (I don’t), then you just wasted an enormous amount of your time and annoyed me in the process, (particularly if I had clearly indicated to you multiple times that I was craving something else.)

Like any good cook, before you make your content “menu,” you should think about the people to whom you’ll be serving that content.

  • Who is going to eat it?
  • What are they hungry for?
  • Do they have any special requests or requirements?
  • What’s appropriate for the “occasion?”

From this intelligence, you can prepare a “grocery list” of content “ingredients.”

Just as you would with real ingredients, it’s O.K. to make some judgment calls when it comes to actually selecting your ingredients off the shelf. For instance, you can narrow your selection to words that are brand-appropriate, search-friendly and conversation engaging.

Catering, Social-Media Style.

Again, our natural inclination is to then take our ingredients and start cooking.

Try to resist that urge.

Remember, you are a creative content caterer, not a short-order cook.

Like the ice cream experiment; your goal should be to divide the ingredients into collections that will enable your audience to create their own unique dishes.

Whether they ultimately combine their eggs, flour and milk to make a cake or a soufflé is beside the point. Your primary concern is that they, ultimately, end up satiated and happy.

Order Up!

I believe that each social media channel has its own distinct vibe, which necessitates some customization when it comes to content “ingredients.”

By choosing and parceling your ingredients to play to each channel’s strengths, you’ll ensure that your content performs effectively. For instance:

  • Twitter: To me, Twitter content seems like the “assemble your own” fast food you’d pick up at a convenience store. (Like a container with yogurt and a pouch of granola to sprinkle on top, if you’re so inclined.) The choices for customization are limited and the whole thing is designed so it can be both prepared and eaten in a few gulps in your car.
  • Facebook: Content for Facebook feels more like a picnic basket of morsels that you can leisurely combine when the mood strikes. It’s content that has the potential to be traded, savored and enjoyed with good company. It can’t sit there in the basket all day, but it has a longer shelf life than your Twitter ingredients.
  • LinkedIn: To me, LinkedIn content feels like the kind of ingredients you’d find in a corporate cafeteria. Nothing risky or unexpected here … just solid choices you can customize into palatable, made-to-order dishes that stand the test of time and appeal to a wide common-denominator. (In my imagination, there is lots of “chicken” content in LinkedIn-land.)
  • Blogs: Blog content feels like the ingredients you’d find in a restaurant kitchen – each one hand-selected, at the peak of freshness and prepared to-order to please the discerning tastes of a diner who intends to linger and savor each bite.

I could go on (and officially beat this metaphor to death), but I think you get the gist here – one “ingredient” can be served in all of these environments, but how you prepare, serve and combine that ingredient with others can (and should) change based on the context and conversation.

Next time you’re producing content for social media, I challenge you to put on your chef’s hat and see how creative you can be with your content catering.

Just don’t forget the second part of that ice cream experiment: no matter what you decide to toss into your Ziploc bag, it’s not going to do you much good unless you hang around and shake things up.

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Developing Social Media Content: New Game. New Rules.

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 by Jennifer Kane

When I ask companies or clients what their content strategy is for their social media engagement, I usually hear one of three responses …

  1. What’s that?
  2. No, I don’t have one.
  3. Yes, I have one (and then they go on to describe the content strategy for their website or brand as a whole).

Each of these answers is perfectly reasonable …

  • If you use social media primarily to “talk to people,” you may not consider the words that you and others type during your conversations to be “content.” (But it is.)

  • If you believe that social exchanges are comprised of “content,” you may not think that this content could or should have some sort of strategic purpose, since that’s kind of antithetical to the very nature of the medium. (But it can.)

  • If you’re using the same content for your social media that you use for your website (which makes sense, since one may likely have been born from the other), then you may think it’s logical to treat them, strategically, the same. (But it’s not.)

Social media content is its own unique beast for one key reason: when you talk in social media, people talk back … and you can never predict what exactly it is that they’ll say.

I think this is fundamentally a “game changer,” that makes social media content worthy of a new set of rules.

It doesn’t walk like a duck. So let’s stop calling it one.

From content to analytics to optimization, as social media matures and grows, we’re learning that it often requires its own unique approaches and processes.

In the case of content, social media is comprised heavily of words, but also just as heavily of communications … the ways in which we exchange that content with other humans in real time.

The intersection of the two is uncharted terrain that is both an art to navigate as well as a science to strategize for.

In this new area, traditional Web rules don’t necessarily apply.

Pile-Magnet-PoetryIf you take your existing content strategy and apply it to the social web, it may be successful (particularly if you are using social media as a broadcast platform), but it won’t create the kind of rabid brand evangelists that are the holy grail of most marketing plans.

Broadcasting a schedule of brand messages in an engaging or entertaining way can convince someone to “fan” or “follow” your brand, but …

  • To get people to fall in love with your brand;
  • To get people do your marketing for you;
  • To get people to virally shepherd your content on your behalf;

… you need to establish a connection or build a relationship.

And that means using social media SOCIALLY.

Do you have a content strategy for that?

A new approach to “content.”

Much of what we could call “social media content strategy” is just revisiting the basics of human psychology and communications that are the seeds of most of the marketing and PR practices we employ today.

What makes us successful in our virtual engagements is the same thing that makes us successful in our face-to-face ones – having the ability to explore and improvise within the gray area that occurs between creating words and exchanging them.

Social media has just made that space a little more gray and a lot more lively.

In social media, your “content” won’t always take the shape of a collection of “on brand” phrases, but rather, will consist of the words you develop and use to:

  • Engage people in an open and interesting way.
  • Actively listen, in addition to sharing.
  • Ask compelling questions based on intelligence you’re gathering in real time (i.e. “Tell me more about the trade show you’re producing.”) rather than topics identified in advance (i.e. “Did you know that my company does X?”).
  • Present your brand as a solution for a client or customer’s identified problem, rather than a kick off for a marketing or sales qualification process.
  • Draw effective conclusions from your interaction that can lead to the next engagement, (i.e. “Are you going to X Conference? I’d love to take you out to lunch and continue this conversation there.)

As a society, we were once great at this navigating this gray area. But after decades of building layers of communication bureaucracy between marketer and consumer, we’ve become pretty rusty at just plain ole talking to each other.

It’s as if we’ve all been using the “communicating with people” script so long that all of our inherent improvisation skills have atrophied.

Get your words back into fighting shape.

I invite you to come explore this topic with me at our Kane Camp event on Thursday, April 15. We’re going to break it down and talk about how to develop a strategy for choosing the words and communication style to use for your social media engagement.

While this is still an evolving concept (I’ve never seen it covered at a conference, webinar, etc.), even if I can’t provide all the answers, I can promise that you’ll leave asking the right questions.

Hope to see you there.

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The Social Media Secrets That No One Wants to Tell You

Friday, July 24th, 2009 by Jennifer Kane

Every time I hand someone a strategic plan I get a little sad.

Not because the project is over (I’m usually pretty happy about that.)

Mostly it’s because – if I’ve done my job right – at that moment I’m staring face-to-face with a client who has a little spark in their eyes that seems to be saying, “Awesome. Now we are done.”

Then, like a oncologist looking at a suspicious mass on a CT scan, I have to be the bad guy and say to them, “Know what? Actually the hard part has just begun.”

This is particularly confusing when the client and I are talking about strategies for social media.

This stuff just looks so darn easy. They figure that once I give them a roadmap, some pretty apps and some technical partners to support them, they’re all set up for “strategic success.”

But what I CAN’T give them (and what they’ll need most to succeed), is the “social” part. That part they have to do themselves.

And that’s going to take some work.

There…I said it…successful marketing using social media takes work: dedicated, frequent, thoughtful and innovative work done by someone with some sort of interest and investment in your social circle and your brand.

(so, no…it’s not a good idea to outsource this stuff to a “Twitter intern.”)

Writing this blog post took some work. Sending a tweet out later to share with my network that it’s posted will take some work. Finding the time to read and respond to comments that are posted in reply will take some work.

And it’s going to cost some money.

(Man, I’m just full of fun news today, aren’t I?)

Because while I’m blogging and tweeting and replying, I’m using my billable time. I’m making a choice to invest my time in people and relationships and that may produce a (possibly career-transforming) return on investment down the road…or, just as easily, they may not.

So why bother?

First, It’s about the most fun work you can snag these days.

If you are using social media as a marketing or public relations tool – and you are using it effectively – you won’t feel like a human press release feed, “socially” distributing lame marketing spam to the masses. Instead your job will be to have relationships – share stories, listen to concerns, offer advice, (and yes, from time to time, share your salesy news.)

If you make the process a habit, build a network based on authenticity and genuine interest in others and treat each social contact as the prime client engagement vehicle that it should be, you actually might have a delightful time.

Secondly, the stuff you put work into will last longer and ultimately have more value.

Look at weight loss. There are a million books, plans, tools and services out there that are essentially designed to avoid smacking you over the head with the cold hard reality of the matter: if you want to lose weight, you need to eat less and move more.

No one really wants to hear that.

But the ones who do, and who accept it, are the ones who lose the weight and KEEP it off.

Same holds true for this “micro marketing” approach. Do the work, do it well and avoid being an ass while you’re doing it, and it will work.

Even better, it will deliver benefits to your doorstep that you could have never planned for.

And that, my friends, is the thing that puts a spark into my eyes.

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