Posts Tagged ‘public relations strategy’
Social Media: A universe expanding at an incredible rate
The more researchers study the social media space, the more value and productivity they find. Social media, enterprise media, hangs like the baby in Kubrick’s famous movie.
What does that baby represent?
A nascent technology evolving into something like a new consciousness. A metaphor for what we are becoming: SocialMind.
The collaborative expansion of knowledge-sharing for those who search becomes the competitive advantage of those who find. Creation is cosmology.
The cosmology of social media. The context of enterprise media.
Just as a focus on searching our galaxy and universe are uncovering astronomical and astrophysical discoveries day after day, so, too, are researchers finding a cosmology of the new enterprise. We are continuously looking for ways to leverage competitive advantage through new tools creating new holes in the fabric of old enterprise.
Theoretical physics in the shape of Higgs-boson, has shown us that we may exist in a multiverse. Our universe may be getting smaller as our knowledge goes beyond our stars.
The astronomy of the social media value add
McKinsey Global Institute’s research shows social media could unleash “value and productivity” through communication and collaboration that could add $1.3 trillion to the economy.
Most of this value would come through productivity:
- 98 per cent of the value add would come through the professional services companies sector
Social media universe? Multiverse? Consider what companies like Oracle, Salesforce.com and Microsoft are doing:
- Oracle bought Involver and Vitrue, and just announced it’s going to buy Eloqua
- Salesforce.com bought GoInstant and Buddy Media
- Microsoft combines with Yammer to leverage their 85 per cent of the Fortune 500
Short-term damage done and enormous opportunity
These purchases indicate where enterprise companies are going. The Facebook IPO damaged the reputation of social media, but that’s in the short-term.
Why?
Because interactions workers have the highest spread of profits per employee. Because what companies saw as their business before the explosion of social technologies, is not what they see as their business now.
Not alone.
Evolving through holes in space:
Breaking through to the new business model
Companies are lookng through holes in space. They are looking to evolve. Disruptive technologies create as part of their process.
Organizations are going through wormholes. They are seeing other worlds. Their visions and strategies continue to develop as they embrace enterprise media to travel beyond their old business models.
Ask yourself:
Where do breakthroughs come from?
The companies mentioned above aren’t in the habit of following. They are leaders. Leaders in enterprise.
The future is social. The future is perpetual change.
In industries like banking, this will be huge. Make your most important capital, your people, more effective, and you will dramatically increase the profit spread per employee. Connected by the potential in social technologies, we communicate, we collaborate, we create our cosmologies of knowledge.
Nielsen recently found total time spent on social media (U.S., PCs and mobile) increased 37% to 121 billion minutes.
To touch the face of your audience
Banking and financial services clearly demonstrate the need for tools that can reach out and engage consumers with great immediacy. The financial crisis, multiple scandals including LIBOR, are all examples of ongoing media stories compounding the reputational damage to an industry full of hard-working, honest people.
With the financial crisis, we have seen the greatest business upheaval in most of our lifetimes. The need to reach out and engage with publics to restore trust is not an option. The bold step is a necessity.
Shock wave and rebirth
The reputational damage left after the financial crisis is a star going supernova, still spreading its shock wave. But supernovae created the building blocks of life.
Reaching out, engaging, informing publics that have been burned by an exploding star, and listening to them, is crucial.
Missing the potential in these channels will separate the forward-looking from the fearful. And more channels will be born.
Social media in the context of enterprise media is spreading its influence. It’s an explosion of tweets blasting through our collective consciousness. We are going beyond where we’ve gone before.
I am become social, the creator of worlds
We are the SocialMind
Organizations are touching the faces of audiences through ideas and channels that were once just concepts. Companies are communicating with their audiences as they exist in their own times and spaces through a cloud interface.
Through social technologies, we have become something different. We are the SocialMind.
We are the creators of worlds.
What kind of worlds will we create?
Our starships are enterprise media travelling at the speed of light within and without organizational planets and galaxies.
We are going beyond where we have gone before …
And we are all made of stars.
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The social multiverse at work?
A friend of mine sent me the following, startled at how similar the beginning of it was to my pieces on the social multiverse. Interesting …
How Twitter Is Reshaping The Future Of Storytelling http://www.fastcoexist.com
Update: Here’s a great infographic on Social Media ROI.
Infographic by MDG Advertising
Coming soon:
Universes. Multiverses. Messages. Creating social cosmologies.
Reputation. Reputation. Reputation. Your key differentiator: Corporate Social Responsibility
Stand out by being a CSR thought leader
“In the business world, the rear view mirror is always clearer than the windshield.” — Warren Buffett
A study by Adam Friedman Associates continues to confirm the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR’s becoming a harder asset.
Executives from Fortune 1000 organizations said that the C-suite and/or board of directors involve themselves directly in “decision-making and measurement processes with regards to the company’s CSR programs.” There’s lots of talk about being different but when it comes to CSR and “getting it”, decision-makers at the forefront of thought leadership understand that CSR is a key differentiator.
Be different. Be better.
Who are you? What do you stand for? Where are you going?
Competition is fierce. Tools that define who you are and what you stand for as an organization show a company to be forward-thinking with a strategy that reaches beyond the latest quarter and far into the future.
The C-suite’s talking about CSR. Executives are more and more conscious of how CSR contributes to business.
CSR: Growing. Growing. Grown.
Results of the study show:
[T]here has been an expansion in scope and focus of CSR strategies and resource allocation. Many CSR initiatives were created in response to environmental issues and pressures, but companies are now expanding their focus to social, health, diversity, labor and safety issues. While many companies still focus much of their time and resources on environmental issues, CSR has grown to include almost any issue or concern that affects the operations and reputation of the company.
So, CSR is growing its influence.
More measurement. More third parties.
Measurement’s still not universal. But there are more third parties involved and more supplier audits. Of course, reception of programs by consumers and media are important and impact evaluation.
Transparency and volume of information have made consumer opinions more important than ever.
CSR and profitability are clearly linked for many corporations. Today’s thought leaders no longer see CSR “as a ‘soft’ discipline within the corporate structure”.
CSR directly affects profitability.
Integrate. Maximize. Get results.
Still think social media is a digital smoke screen?
The study found:
Social media has become an important tool companies use to communicate to their publics about their CSR efforts in addition to traditional media. This allows companies to communicate their CSR activities and progress in a manner that is fast, easily accessible and provides them with vital feedback from their publics.
Companies are using social media to supply their stakeholders with information and content. They are building online communities.
Companies are using social media to find out what their stakeholders care about. They’re using incoming messages to help craft future social media strategies.
Thinking strategically, companies have embedded CSR communications deep into their overall communication strategies. Employees are using social media to measure the effectiveness of CSR.
Everything that makes CSR disappear, makes CSR stronger:
In integration, find strength
Some executives believe:
[T]he CSR function may disappear altogether as corporations begin to absorb CSR into all aspects of their business and make it a part of every employee’s responsibilities. As companies begin to assess and measure the effects their CSR programs have on the business’s reputation, CSR may increase in both scope and importance. Based on the interviews conducted, some CSR practitioners said they believe CSR should not be its own function or department but rather an integrated part of the business … Senior executives should pay more attention to the views of their external stakeholders when developing CSR strategies because their sentiments will affect the company’s reputation and/or its position among competitors.
The study found businesses need to look at CSR as a growing function. CSR strategies should be integrated into all areas of business.
In a world where the media is full of stories of corruption, best practices will continue to resonate.
Loudly.
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Find the study by request.
Find more on reputation and CSR/sustainability here:
The hydra upon you: Hype and its dangers for public relations and marketing
Today’s post is a continuation of Silos, silly season, social.
The many-headed hydra and key messages
If you believe in dialogue, if you believe in the multiple digital channels that can help convey key messages, then you know the potential for communications. Still, there’s been so much noise during the iPhone 5 announcement, you might wonder why the heavens haven’t opened up and why we aren’t being visited by angels of innovation blessing all things with an “i” before them.
Never mind that sales are being reported as a disappointment.
In the post-Facebook IPO era, best practices, truth and open communication should be reinforced as the way to communicate. Sustainability as a strategy looms large.
Hype is a many-headed hydra. When all the hydra’s heads are talking at once, which one will consumers believe? What are the key messages? Is it just confusion?
Do target audiences believe they have a part in the conversation, or is it just the heads of the hydra talking to themselves?
Just as I’m writing this, a connection of mine, Mark D’Cunha posted this on LinkedIn:
Ears that do not listen to advice, accompany the head when it is chopped off.
— African proverb
Media is a wonderful creator, but what it creates, it can take away.
Satire and blowback:
Reputational damage is best avoided in the first place
When people start satirizing a brand en masse, what does it say about a brand’s future business potential?
Some outcomes are beyond even the most careful planners’ control.
The blowback from the Facebook IPO resulted in a ton of reputational damage, left many who talked about Facebook’s short-term growth potential looking a little ridiculous while reinforcing the long-term thinking of those who understand what P/E ratio means.
Companies have bottom lines. Attenion has to be paid to profitability.
Still, attention also has to be paid to whether a brand can wear out its welcome. How much is too much?
informalDefinition of hypenoun
[mass noun]
verb
[with object]
Origin:
1920s (originally US in the sense ‘short-change, cheat’, or ‘person who cheats etc.’): of unknown origin
Credit: Oxford online dictionary
IPO gaga and the misvaluations from Mars
If you’ve followed what’s happened to the Facebook brand since IPO, you’ve more than a clue about what could happen in a less-than-best-practices environment. From a risk mitigation point of view, when the crowd’s gone gaga, there’s definitely potential but also a proportionate increase in exposure.
What happens with Facebook is still unwritten. What’s sure is that amidst the feeding frenzy of negative news post-IPO, there were also stories working hard to portray potential, still. If public relations around the Facebook IPO had been conducted differently, less energy would’ve had to be directed toward rehabilitating the Facebook brand.
Facebook isn’t the first nor will it be the last to suffer from its own success. When hype goes out-of-control, it ceases to be good public relations, good marketing. Because target audiences are left with the feeling of being had.
This is sort of like a salesperson thinking of her potential clients as “marks”. Maybe the naming of things creates destiny. Clients are people.
Growth: The greatest investment the world ever knew was the investment in you
Audiences are made up of individuals. When they get together, they have awesome power. It doesn’t matter if they’re internal or external.
If you invest in treating people like smart human beings, they’ll invest in you.
I’ll be continuing posts on Silos, silly season and social. I’d like to share them with you.
Related articles
- The ongoing downward Facebook spiral: An absence of best practices and transparency
- Wedbush Admits To Hyping Facebook Stock Prior To IPO (valuewalk.com)
- Facebook Really Was the Worst IPO of All Time (fool.com)
- Heavy is the crown: Is Apple its own worst enemy? (johnrondina.wordpress.com)
- Silos, silly season, social: Inflating or informing the target audience? (johnrondina.wordpress.com)
Customers continue to fuel business case for sustainability and leaders are saying they get it
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most sustainable:
Helping businesses compete responsibly
Managements get it
Half do, according to a recent study:
MIT found 53 per cent of managements surveyed said sustainability initiatives have helped their companies profit.
With the wind of change at their backs, leaders changed their business model.
Policy and politcal pressure
The MIT study found that legislative or political pressure also plays a big role: 34 per cent of respondents citing the law or policy initiatives as affecting their ideas about sustainability.
People want sustainability built into an organization’s thinking. They like the idea of sustainable products.
Two of the top three reasons leaders cite as being reasons for changing their business is the value proposition that is sustainability.
The art of listening
The automotive industry and the energy and utilities sector, often criticized for not being green enough, finished first and second in making a business case for sustainability. Both industries were over 40 per cent.
Lagging
But technology and communications and the financial services sector scored low at 27 and 21 per cent respectively. These sectors have potential. If they’re behind, there’s opportunity for smart businesses in tech, communications and financial services to take the lead where competitors are lagging.
Publics are hard to ignore
Even companies like Apple, challenged regarding their supply chain, have invested in sustainability. The creation of their solar farm in Maiden, NC, (under pressure from environmental critics?) gives the company a positive. But Apple was recently hit with another bomb regarding its supply chain. Because of the company’s enormous cash horde, critics are unsympathetic, feeling Apple could do more.
Studies show the advantage of brands differentiating themselves through sustainable thinking.
If consumers and legislators are demanding more sustainability planning from companies, and businesses that haven’t been viewed as green traditionally are committing themselves to sustainability, can other companies afford to miss out on the potential value add?
The edge in keeping consumers happy
It seems like the pressure from consumers is something thoughtful managements have foremost in their minds.
As public relations and marketing find themselves increasingly challenged by astronomical growth in channels and tools, the obvious answer points to embracing sustainability and CSR as a strategy: Managements themselves say sustainability adds value.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most sustainable.
Related articles
- Should companies invest in sustainability?
- A crisis of ethic proportions (wsj.com)
- Video: Building A Sustainable Product Lifecycle (sloanreview.mit.edu)
Silos, silly season, social: Inflating or informing the target audience?
Open, honest, sustainable communications in multiple universes
The target audience is expanding as fast as the digital universe.
In one and two posts, I touched on how the target audience is vast and how writing and strategizing for those audiences is changing.
A
bandon good journalistic practices and you’re bound to upset someone: Even just stating an opinion.
What’s your strategy? How many groups do you want to appeal to?
Beware someone doesn’t put a new frame around the picture you’re trying to paint
But how will you stop them? Better yet, you shouldn’t be trying to stop them. You should be encouraging the discussion by representing your organization, company, etc., yet you have to consider that those voices are really allies. The target audiences that don’t agree with your philosophy aren’t enemies. They are the best feedback money can buy. Together, you’ll communicate better.
Listen. Learn. Offer your messages.
In a recent post, I blogged about how Kelly Heinrich reframed and tactically subverted Apple’s Siri ads to advance her own cause. Fair game. She’s speaking for her organization and about a tool she uses, and how she feels about what may have gone into that tool.
In the post-Facebook IPO era, best practices are more important than ever. When you read media that gush with nothing but too-good-to-be-true positives, you might wonder:
Now, what inspired this piece?
Don’t do the disservice of thinking of your target audience as if they were “sheeple”. They’re not.
Audiences are alternate and expanding universes in themselves. Ever-changing. Ever-moving. They are chaos-out-of-order and order-out-of-chaos. The ultimate shape shifters … and I mean this in a complimentary way.
When audiences start feeling suspicious about what they’re reading or hearing, damage ensues.
The iSky’s the limit
Right now, there is rampant speculation on how many iPhones Apple will sell first week despite a delay in availability. The avalanche of information is often highly speculative. There’s a fair share of Apple criticism going on, too — especially, at the time of writing, on Google+, much of it centring on innovation, litigation and old-fashioned satire.
The media’s full of talk. But there’s less talk about how many hedge fund managers are in and out of Apple stock and other variables. The momentum may continue. Then again, now that my dog has an iPhone, you have to wonder how many bones the market can bare.
Humour aside … (I have no dog).
When we are heavily vested in something, does it make our thought processes clearer? The momentum may continue.
But for how long? How many stories do you remember that never end? The markets can be a collection of short stories. What everyone aspires to is the collection of stories, or the novel that can sustain the reader (investor, stakeholder).
Ask Warren Buffett. When it comes to long-term track records, long-term thinking and valuation, very few can trade demonstrated philosophies with Buffett.
More suprising? … Buffett wonders why more don’t live his own philosophy.
The short-term hype machine and the damage done
When you talk about the kind of hype Facebook and Apple (have) generate(ed) at times, you really have to think about the variety of audiences, how that hype might be interpreted in the future, how some audiences might take issue.
How some audiences might become active.
Amongst all the noise, are critics starting to look more interesting and is Apple itself looking less interesting?
When hype gets to a volume so loud that there’s barely room to hear all the different voices pushing positive news, some begin to wonder if the creative thought process has died. Never make a promise you can’t keep. The problem is, as hype sets in, sometimes those you wanted to recruit as influencers will make the promises you can’t keep for you.
Promise something to the digital universe and you better deliver.
Deal with the world the way it is, not the way you wish it was.
— John Chambers
Silos, silly season and social continued:
The hydra upon you: Hype and its dangers for public relations and marketing
Related articles
- Would You Pay for Fake Positive Reviews?
- Here’s How The Internet Felt about the iPhone 5 Launch (Forbes.com)
- Siri, What’s “sustainability”? (johnrondina.wordpress.com)
- A crisis of ethic proportions (wsj.com)
- Heavy is the crown: Is Apple its own worst enemy? (johnrondina.wordpress.com)
Heavy is the crown: Is Apple its own worst enemy?
Reputational blowback?: Apple’s litigation strategy affects its own brand and reputation
Samsung brand on the upswing
Polling by YouGov shows that Samsung has already recovered from the recent Apple v. Samsung verdict. Actually, Samsung’s “buzz score” rating has surpassed Apple’s.
Sustainability and reputation issues are dogging Apple. Many took to Facebook and Twitter to fling abuse at the company, some saying that the brand had become everything it had once stood against.
Have you “heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or by word of mouth,” asked YouGov. The company then assigned a score depending on responses positive or negative.
YouGov’s charts are clear evidence that Samsung’s brand has risen and Apple’s has fallen.
It’s hard to gauge what effect this will have long-term, especially considering the momentum Apple has behind it, but it’s clear that its brand has taken a beating. In an August 28th post, Siri, What’s “sustainability”?, I asked questions about Apple’s strategy: Specifically, that they don’t seem to be speaking to the broader audience that now is focused, like a laser, on Apple.
On September 6th, Forbes wrote about Apple’s dive suggesting Apple’s secret talks with Google might have been strongly motivated by the reputational blowback from Apple v. Samsung, which is looking more and more like a strategic mistake.
Clearly, Apple’s campaign of aggressive litigation added to consumer’s concerns: Not to mention the sustainability of their supply chain. But is Apple listening?
Is the pattern of immense hype (hype that may have slipped out of their control) generated by Apple in the media going to increase the volume of blowback? Is Apple at or close to its zenith in profitability, or, from an investor’s point of view, the ascendency of its stock price?
Credit: Forbes
“Apple has turned into the exact product they were against in the 1984 Super Bowl Ad.”
— Twitter user
Meet the new boss. More litigious than the old boss?
Sentiment against Apple was overwhelmingly negative post-verdict. Some have seen this coming for a long time. The hype is so extreme right now as the iPhone 5 is released that it’s impossible to know what the fallout from Apple’s own self-induced reputational damage will be.
Tech consumers change their minds in what looks to a long-term investor the blink-of-an-eye. The media, while generating an immense amount of hype is also giving birth to stories that portray Apple as Goliath, a big bully, unfeeling, unthinking and a poor listener.
Apple has followed a pattern of knowing it’s right when it comes to business strategy. So far, that strategy’s worked very well, but what leadership should consider is gravity.
The weight
The gravitas of investor and consumer sentiment accumulates and acts like a social David. And we all remember what David did to Goliath. In fact, didn’t Apple base its marketing strategy on being the “little guy” taking on Goliath?
Now, David pulls back his digital sling of zeroes and ones. Take a look at how Apple’s been trending on Google+, (at the time of writing).
There’s also the fact that it looks like both HTC and Samsung will sue Apple over LTE and try to block the iPhone 5. He who lives to litigate dies by litigation?
Meanwhile, HBR points out that Google’s spending on R&D, despite what many may think, dwarfs Apple’s as a percentage of revenue. Perhaps Apple’s just giving the people what they want: Perception of innovation over actual percentage of dollars spent on innovation.
If word-of-mouth is the greatest form of marketing, the social cybersphere is talking loudly, it’s consumer-generated (though more research is needed on these consumers), and it seems to be sounding off against what it perceives to be a heavy distortion field placed over the marketplace. Perception is reality.
Regardless, satirizing Apple has become a popular sport. When will their be an app for that?
If the new standard for the anti-Apple forces is: “Innovate don’t litigate”, then Apple in pursuing an aggressive strategy of litigation may have undone some of the reputational capital it’s worked years to build. Heavy is the crown.
But also, heavy is the hype. Apple may be going down a different yet parallel road that Facebook knows all-to-well. There’s a fine line between exceptional marketing and public relations and creating the Frankenstein monster.
Still, there’s a lot of momentum for Apple. But we’ve learned that out-of-control hype can be a double-edged sword. We’ve also learned that when stock performance doesn’t meet the enormity of expectation the decline can be huge.
Facebook’s decline of 50 per cent was pretty much as large as that of BP. And Facebook didn’t leak any oil.
Still, Apple has concrete numbers.
Does Apple Marketing and Public Relations feel ecstatic about a brand that convinces people old is new (see Jimmy Kimmel)? Does this soaring rocket of hype escape Earth’s atmosphere or like Facebook fall back held by the force of gravity?
Maybe the question is simply:
Is Apple its own worst enemy?
Apple releases iNothing – Video
Related articles
- The rise and fall(?) of Apple?
- Apple’s Last Stand (fool.com)
Siri, What’s “sustainability”?
“Man is the creator of change in this world.” — Steve Jobs
How will Apple speak to its growing audiences, sustainability issues and public perception?
Just sustain it
Define “change”.
Admit it.
Sometimes, you just scan the headlines, right? And they impact on you, right?
Take a look at this one:
Siri, Do You Use Slaves?
Would you want this headline related to your product? Even if you are the biggest company in the world by market cap — or maybe, especially because you are.
Heinrich’s headline (it’s a link) made very clever use of John Stewart and The Daily Show. As Apple’s market cap has grown, so has the target placed on its brand.
And why not? Didn’t Apple make its marketing focus Microsoft (the market cap leader at the time) for years? When you become the biggest company by market cap in history right now (see below article), you have to expect this.
(By the way, The Daily Show’s taken on Apple before.)
Heinrich understood how to reframe Apple advertising well. She used a guerrilla headline to attract attention to her cause.
Expanding. Digital. Universe. There are a lot of target audiences out there.
Apple’s stepped away from greening its brand. It’s supply chain has been held up as wanting.
It doesn’t matter if Apple’s competitors are using the same supply chain (some aren’t and others are paying a lot more attention to sustainability issues.) As concerns over its closed system, sustainability, patents, etc., increase regarding the Apple brand, it’s likely we’ll see more media stories, more anti-Apple posts, challenging, satirizing or taking a negative position on Apple.
Right now, it’s hype season. The iPhone 5’s coming out. Biggest market cap in history a few days ago — ok, so that wasn’t correct, but …
When you become the biggest corporation, you’d better consider the competitive threats. Big market cap means big target audiences. Audiences have opinions.
Remember BP? Remember “Beyond Petroleum”?
When BP CEO Tony Hayward began massive cost-cutting at BP, it’s focus on sustainability went out the window. What happened in 2010 with the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill will go down in history as one of the greatest of environmental disasters.
The disaster is now synonymous with the BP brand and a 50 per cent drop in stock price. It could have been avoided with proper risk mitigation. Sustainability leads to risk mitigation.
While Apple doesn’t face the same obvious dangers to its business that the oil industry does, it’s decision-making processes regarding sustainability may be moving in the same direction as BP. They’ve both spent a lot of time and resources in court.
Is innovation better done in the lab or in court?
Above image sent out on Twitter in response to Apple v. Samsung
iPhones have supply chain and waste issues, don’t they?
The big time: Siri, What’s “market cap”?
Audiences have opinions. Apple worked a philosophy that countered Microsoft’s, but Apple’s history isn’t going to fade away. It’s going to be subverted and used against the Apple brand. Apple doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
It’s made the big time.
Apple is awash in cash. It’s sheer size makes the company’s margins and business seem unsustainable. Doesn’t it make sense that Apple would move more toward sustainability? That it would want to improve its image from a sustainability/CSR perspective?
Isn’t that what leaders do?
Or do they litigate endlessly?
Sent by user on Twitter under #boycottApple
How does such litigation reflect on brand?
Apple has almost $117 billion in cash. Exactly the reason why people like John Stewart are taking on Apple. It’s not the “little guy”.
It’s a behemoth.
Like it or not, when you’re the biggest company in the world, stakeholders expect accountability. They expect a leader. Not just in innovation. Not just the “cool” of the product you’re creating.
But a leader in best practices, too. Across the board.
And “browning” your brand isn’t that cool. Especially when you spend cash litigating aggressively.
Stakeholders want what’s open and honest.
While Apple v. Samsung wasn’t related to Apple’s de-greening, it shows how aggressive audiences embrace issues and attack a brand accusing it of “brandwashing”.
What of a company’s own employees?
… organizations should maintain their commitments to
customers, the environment, human rights and
communities or risk significant decreases in
employees’ perceptions of their organization’s CSR
commitment …
Leaders?
Business leaders ranked the top three benefits of investing in or pursuing socially and environmentally responsible
practices as follows:
- Positive organizational reputation;
- Higher or sustained employee engagement; and
- Eliminate/reduce impact on the environment.
Does momentum last forever for the largest company by market cap? Not usually.
Global research conducted by Hewitt revealed that organizations with high engagement generated total shareholder returns that were 29% above average.
Above quotations from:
CSR as a Driver of Employee Engagement — Hewitt
As Costco CFO Richard Galanti has said about CSR:
It’s not about applying to the ‘beauty contest’.
Sure it’s about great products and profits, but it’s also about a corporate vision of a sustainable future — a sticky, feel-good sensation that stands for something beyond profit. It’s about who you are as a corporate citizen. About what your vision is for humankind.
After all, isn’t “man the creator of change in this world”?
With great power comes great responsibility.
— Stan Lee (creator of Spiderman)
- Samsung’s image doing just fine after Apple verdict, poll finds
- Did Samsung verdict hurt Apple’s reputation?
- Security researcher says Apple gadget hacking is a “privacy catastrophe” (economist.com)
- Apple’s rot starts with its Samsung lawsuit win (guardian.co.uk)
- Misleading and incomplete coverage of Apple’s ‘record’ value (cjr.org)
- Apple jurors grappled with complex patent issues that some say should rest with judges (washingtonpost.com)
- BP: “Grossly negligent and engaged in willful misconduct” (financialpost.com)
- It’s More Important to Be Kind than Clever (HBR.org)
- Wait! Now Someone’s Saying Apple Is NOT The Most Valuable Company Of All Time (AAPL, MSFT) (businessinsider.com)
Facebook and the Frankenstein monster: It’s hard to control the lightning in hype (but best practices help)
It’s alive!
After all the Facebook IPO hype, how could reality measure up?
As Dr. Frankenstein learned, tapping lightning to create life is full of peril. Creations can take on a life of their own.
Is buzz any different?
Creating life in the context of reality
From an investors point of view, how could a company at various times valued at 80 to 100 times earnings, valued in the stratosphere above companies with years of history and profits, not disappoint? The more sober reaction to the IPO, showed investors were paying attention to value.
While Facebook and engagement should prove valuable over time, investors were saying, hold on a minute, what’s your strategy for increasing earnings? The thing about Facebook is:
Right now, what is most valuable for brands on Facebook is free.
Why would investors speculate on the future of what Facebook might do? In the current climate, post-financial crisis, companies that pay dividends, handsome dividends of three to five per cent have a value that IPOs like Facebook just can’t match.
The modern Prometheus
Hype has a dangerous flipside.
Sure, there’s potential, but potential for what?
While most management teams want buzz for their brand, they might not necessarily want the Frankenstein monster version of it. Remember, the monster spent much of its “life” trying to kill its creator. In the aftermath of the Facebook IPO, lawsuits, finger-pointing, back-stabbing, technical failures, and other endless melodramas splayed across the media, it reminds of the classic Kubrick/Sellers line: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” 
How long before a satirical film’s made out of this story? Think Dr. Strangelove meets Frankenstein.
Dr. Strangebook or Frankenface
It’s obvious that Facebook, Morgan Stanley and the Nasdaq are all suffering reputational body blows. While some private investors made a lot of money on the IPO, does any management team, board, shareholder, or even casual user want to be associated with such a media horrorshow post-IPO? Monstrous hype only amplifies the “is that all there is?” feeling when it goes wrong.
The monster, stitched together and ashen, stumbled into the light of day.
When the hype machine overloads, marketers and public relations professionals have to remember that there’s no such thing as lightning in a bottle. Buzz, at its most extreme, has the potential to lash out in every direction.
When the hype machine creates a monster, it can become the destroyer of brands.
Social media seems like it’s been here forever but is still new. The buzz became a monster. Was there any longer the ability to manage the hype as the Facebook IPO drew near?
The blowback says no.
Fiascos have the potential to incubate revenge. Social media users will engage, but not in the way the brand wants them to. And like the Frankenstein monster, social media users who feel betrayed have a tendency toward revenge.
Brands are sure there’s a way to profit from engagement. It’s this belief that drives Facebook earnings. When GM came out and said that they’d lost faith in Facebook ads, despite criticism of GM’s social strategy, there was a revaluation of Facebook in the marketplace.
Doubtless, there are marketers and public relations professionals that do engagement very well. Social media, is, and will continue to be a tool of engagement where the permutations of dialogue are still being explored and improved.
But it should be part of a well thought out integrated marketing/public relations strategy.
Facebook had been grabbing headlines for a long time. Hype over Facebook crackled with the energy and unpredictability of lightning.
Now, Facebook’s grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons. Yet again. How does this reflect on the Facebook management team? Marketers are going to re-evaluate the brand and social engagement through it.
It’s value, after a brief pop, has dropped 25 per cent since the IPO despite the underwriters’ propping the stock price up. Argue with that metric.
Facebook has emerged from the laboratory a case study.
One thing is sure: Silly season is over for now.
Luke … I am your father
A characteristic of hype is that it is a lense that distorts. Those who work at brand, engagement, reputation and other features of the marketing and public relations matrix try to tell the story of organizations for the benefit of stakeholders. But practitioners have to remember how many audiences there are these days.
Hype is a bit like Luke and his dad, Darth: There is a light side and a dark side.
Practitioners have to remember that less than best practices have a short shelf life and lead to case study after case study of failures.
Facebook promised the opportunity of the century. It failed to deliver.
This is the chemistry for a backlash.
From a marketing and communications point of view, professionals will get more creative. But they’ll also get more analytical.
Lurching out of the laboratory: The aftermath
The nightmare of creating a monster like the one that lurched out of the Facebook laboratory reinforces the idea that best practices have to align with business objectives — and they do have to be best practices.
If Facebook’s strategy was simply to make a ton of money for its private investors then it succeeded. But as far as the long-term viability of a brand, of its sustainability, Facebook leaves a lot to be desired at the moment. Is this the image companies want to leave ricocheting around on Twitter or elsewhere?
Facebook will have to spend substantial resources trying to restore its brand and reputation. Future growth depends on earnings, and future capital depends on investors. Reputation either feeds itself or devours itself.
Alienating marketers, investors and users and being held up as a flop by the media, aren’t the kind of brand associations any organization wants. Of course, this leads to many more challenging Facebook’s business strategy.
It’s safe to say that Facebook failed at engaging with its users in the short-term. Facebook has added to retail investors suspicion of markets and valuations. Investors and the general public have tired of creature features. In the U.S., 46 per cent of people surveyed said their trust in the financial services sector had decreased.
Since stakeholders already had many questions to ask of Facebook and user privacy, you’d think that someone involved with the IPO would have been more careful before tapping the lightning that created this latest beast.
The problem with the Facebook parade’s short-term thinking is that stakeholders have long-term memories when it comes to monsters (or buzz on crank). They don’t like the feeling of being had.
Remember, the Frankenstein monster hunted down its creator across continents until it found him dead.
Related:
- Facebook delivers earnings let-down
- Facebook users not as satisfied as Google+ users
- Marketers Lessen Focus on Facebook Compared to Rest of Web
- Teens turn from Facebook to fresher social-media sites
- SEC spooked by Facebook’s pre-IPO mobile numbers
- Facebook worst IPO of decade
- Facebook faces extended U.S. review of Instagram deal
Social media for dummies: The Twitterforce
Still in doubt about the nascent power of 
social media?
I don’t think Chris Dodd is.
After the firestorm unleashed when Dodd made his MPAA statement, after Twitter’s tweet reckoning, it’s hard to ignore the explosive immediacy of social tools. This digital wave moves like a tsunami.
Woe unto he (or she) who doesn’t understand its potential.
Behold the social media army at work
You can watch it come at you, too late. Dodd and the MPAA did. Helpless, MPAA brass could only blink as Twitter users reloaded and fired off salvo after salvo, millions of tweets into a universe that decided Dodd’s language ignored too much, and that the freedoms associated with the Internet were sacred cows worth fighting for.
If you’ve followed this story, does any of the MPAA’s messaging resonate with you? Where’s the conversation demonstrating the validity of the MPAA’s opinion?
If good research defending the MPAA’s cause exists, why don’t we know about it? The anti-SOPA forces got their message out in a timely, effective way, and the conversation they initiated was believable and became important to stakeholders within minutes.
The MPAA’s press is more about its “blunderstatement” in a very new year than it is about persuading, informing or influencing.
And what of some of the important stakeholders that were ignored?
SOPA is dead. Long live SOPA.
SOPA may have expired through the ire of digital revolutionaries who know how to get their message heard, but there’s sure to be a Son of SOPA. Dear MPAA: Take greater stock of all stakeholders and address audiences in their own language instead of insulting stakeholders with a confused, paternal rant.
I mean, “corporate pawns”? Really?
Who came out looking unfocused and ill-prepared, hanging on a pseudo-“fight the power” statement? The MPAA was playing in the court of the digitized, where “alternate” and “alternative” are fairly normal lifestyles.
Did the MPAA consider the different levels of its audience at all? Did it forget about secondary or tertiary audiences?
It was the old world meeting the new world. No contest. The MPAA scolded everyone. It looked like the representative of a defunct business model. Not good.
Was Dodd trying to prove critics of the entertainment industry correct?
Writers have been criticizing entertainment industry decisions since Napster rose like Godzilla from the sea. Did no one at the MPAA consider that their statement might blast through cyberspace reinforcing what critics have been saying about the old business model?
The MPAA obviously didn’t know the extent of or the attitudes of a large segment of its audience. That audience just reacted with one, big techno-slap.
2.4 million tweets in a day. That’s a big chunk of your target audience to miss.
As they used to say in the Batman episodes:
Zowie!
TwitterForce: The ability to send a salvo of millions of messages in the space of a day. Quite a message.
We live in interesting times.
Don’t touch that dial!
When reality becomes perception
Reputation and brand: Facebook strikes a blow — against itself
I blogged about social media and a potential backlash to use of private information in “Three digital considerations for the year(s) to come”. In an interesting twist, “Facebookgate” is a signpost of what not to do on the road to establishing great reputational capital for companies. Not only is use of private information important but immoral tactics employed to “go negative” against competitors reveal the emperor as naked and scared.
Facebook was trying to expose Google for privacy issues through public relations firm Burson-Marsteller. Considering Facebook’s own past issues regarding users’ privacy concerns, the hypocrisy of this tactic is thick and hard to digest. Equally hard to digest is Burson-Marsteller’s use of tactics that have been described as “shadowy”. Burson-Marsteller’s former UK chairman says executives involved in the escapade acted like “backstreet spin merchants”.
Terence Fane-Saunders, ex of Burson-Marsteller UK, soundly criticised his old employer on his company blog, aptly titled: “What on earth has happened to Burson-Marsteller?”
Obviously, grubby tactics like those displayed in the Facebookgate case have done a lot of damage to the public relations industry in the past. Such tactics as those employed by Burson-Marsteller have led to the portrayal of public relations practitioners as hacks.
Amazing that such tactics still see the light of day. Facebook is now left with its brand highlighted in the media beside such less-than-brand-enhancing labels as “furtive”, “smear campaign” and “creepy” to list but a few. Not exactly words that most companies would revel in being associated with.
And, of course, every mention of Facebook adds mention of Burson-Marsteller’s involvement and bad public relations practices.
Companies would do well to pay attention to the fallout from such tactics. Perception may be more important than reality, but, in the case of Facebookgate, reality has had an enormous impact on perception. The problem is, in the Facebook case, reality was far worse than almost anybody perceived.
Video:
Blogger Soghoian speaks about Facebookgate
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