Here's the point I raised in Part 1: Building infrastructure to serve a large market is tough, just ask the telcos. The same goes for corporate interactions with customers.

This actually goes both ways. It's tough for social media to scale up or down. One of the core principles of a social media program is listening and responding (or 'conversation' as the kids call it). Conversation takes resources, people and time...and if you're a large brand using one of the monitoring tools it takes money. That's not to say people and time aren't money, they are.

For a corporation it's about scaling up, putting more people on the job. For the small business it's about scaling down, or carving out the time from your already busy day to spend time interacting online.

Let's go big first. It's simple math, the larger the corporation, the more time that needs to be spent if you're moving down that road. Yes, the monitoring tools can do a good job of aggregating and sorting the discussions, but it still takes people to review and respond.

An additional issue with large-scale corporate social media programs is internal comms getting in the way of 'conversation'. This builds upon the internal war problem I talked about before. Traversing internal business unit communications is tough, now try to go across business units.

There is the standard cliche that customers don't care about your internal org chart. Externally they see you has Brand X and they expect you to act like a single entity, but as those involved in large-scale corporate work know that's the furthest thing from the truth. Now some folks will get all preachy and say 'this has got to change' and pound their fists, but this is a reality and it's going to take a while to fix...a long while.

Internal social media leaders continue to work to break down those barriers, rooting out contacts at different divisions to help answer questions, but once again it's just something that will take a while to develop. As social media programs expand internally the external interactions will benefit, but head-count doesn't appear overnight, think more along the lines of fiscal-year.

With all these issues, comms, budget, head-count it's a slow process. What's funny though is that it may take a while to get there, but once it's there, folks seem to forget the past. Getting back to the telco analogy. I remember when Verizon put the first FiOS trunk in our neighborhood. It then seemed to take forever for the build out to complete. But eventually that build out was done and once the service started to flow, I forgot about the wait.

Now let's go small. How do you shoe-horn social media into a small business? In some ways this is tougher, especially if you're in a market that does not have a high adoption of social media/networks among users. Large brands benefit from their existing inertia. Social media can build upon audiences and communication channels already in place.

A local civic organization recently approached me and asked what they should be doing online. I provided some counsel, but considering all the factors involved: budget, market, target audience, etc, I had a tough time really justifying a significant use of social media.

What has worked for them has been offline social media....or in other words actual human interactions via community events like chamber of commerce meetings. I'm hard-pressed to say abandon that and move online.

With small staffs and small budgets, smaller organizations often can't provide the necessary planning and attention to run what could be a successful program.

The other major road block is measurement. They often don't have adequate measurement of their existing marketing and communication efforts. Without benchmarks it's difficult to say what is a better use or resources, attending a local civic function for one hour, or spending that hour interacting online.

Taking that a step further, if they have that one hour, how much of that time goes into measurement, probably not much? Measurement is always the first thing to get cut.

Succes stories with small businesses using social media usually involve an interesting product or novel idea (think Kogi). How do you bring that same excitement to fund-raising for a local medical clinic? It's tough.

Whether you're trying to scale up or down, there is no magic bullet or plan. It's always a unique process that needs to build upon the strengths and weaknesses of the organization (small or large). Having experience always helps. Of course you can't just replicate a plan from one org to another, but you can learn from what has worked and not worked in similar situations.

Next time you hear somebody say, "You should listen to your customers, and have conversations with them." at a conference, remember it's not as easy as it sounds.

My feelings are influenced by the open records laws in Florida, aka the Sunshine Law. In basic form (yes I'm oversimplifying quite a bit), communications and meetings between public officials is public record. That's transparency.

Looking for an example of this? Look at today's news about Legoland in Florida. The news breaks because of an e-mail sent to the local county commission....and yep, you guessed it, that's public record. Cat's out of the bag.

You might say, keep it out of e-mail, and you're probably right. However, if you wanted to meet with a few of the commissioners and tell them the news in person, you'd have to file public notice of said meeting....to keep it in the Sunshine :-)

The Sunshine Law has been a long-running issue, especially when corporations are looking to expand to Florida and are interested in tax breaks or other incentives. These discussions need to involve public officials from time to time. The corporation may be 'thinking' of moving, but of course they don't want that news getting out as they explore their options.

Transparency or the 'effort' can cut both ways. Next time you think you're being transparent in your communications efforts, think...how about we release all our e-mails? Didn't think so.

Oh yeah, we're getting a Legoland in our hometwon...like 5 minutes from my house. Woot!

Well done gentlemen.

First up is the internal war. This is what I originally said: 1. Jealousy from the existing marketing teams towards the 'new' social media team. This results in internal political battles that cripple both sides.

In his recent WordCamp Atlanta talk, Dave Coustan had a slide that talked about the agency feeding frenzy associated with content-related programs. (It's slide 11 for those scoring at home).

You can take that same slide and replace the outer ring with internal divisions. In fact I just did that :-)

This is something that happens in organizations, the internal battle over who manages social media.

Well-run social media programs with good measurement quickly show their value, and with that value comes increased budget and internal power. It's a good place to be, if you're on the right team.

In most cases one division leads the charge and establishes the high ground (keeping with the 'war' metaphor). Sometimes the other divisions will work in partnership or relinquish control, which makes everything much smoother.

However, sometimes the battle rages on. If a truce is not reached the social media strategy becomes fragmented. Business units create their own plans and associated accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. Multiply this by a number of divisions and you have a number of things happening:

1. Duplication of Efforts: This is a duplication of budget, staff resources you name it. There is always some in-efficiency within large organizations, but this duplication starts to have a trickle-down effect....which leads to #2.

2. Confusion for the User: With a number of different channels on Twitter/Facebook/etc which one do they ask a question of? Guess what, without a clear definition of what and who the channels are for, they often ask all of them. Now you have three or four different teams interacting with one customer, that's not very efficient.

3. Mapping Back to Core Goals: Do all the different social media efforts map back to the core goals of the corporation? If not, why are you doing it? Yes community can be good, but it has to have a purpose.

4. Screw Ups: Are all the individuals managing these various programs adhering to best practices and ethical conduct? What may be a no-no for PR might be standard practice for the promotions department. As we know, social media communities have their own rules, and screw-ups tend to generate negative publicity (read: You had an intern doing what?). A mistake by one division will cast a shadow over an entire program.

5. Can You Support It?: Social media programs take a significant commitment, can every division do that? Often divisions that want a piece of the social media pie have an 'idea' or 'campaign' in mind. This may last for a few weeks or months, but after that where does it go? Why spend time building a community just to let it go?

6. How Do You Measure it?: With each different division doing different things on social networks is there a consistent measurement methodology in place? Can the measures be easily rolled-up into a overall program reach report? Measurement takes time and this goes back to #1, if you have five groups doing their own thing, then you have five staff members working on measurement in different ways. That's dumb.

All of this points to the need for internal governance and planning. Multiple presences on social networks is not a bad thing if it's planned and coordinated. In fact a distributed program can be very powerful. The ability to tailor content for specific channels while not overlapping is what social media is all about.

The internal battles will rage on, hopefully though the customer will no longer be collateral damage.

Part 3 coming in a bit.

(Cross posted to Voce Nation)

Let's look back first though. Large monopolistic telecom providers built and controlled the last mile. The 'one' phone company and the 'one' cable company. However, these providers spent billions of dollars building out that infrastructure, in fact they had to in order to maintain their franchise rights. Then along come all the new providers, looking to piggy-back or build alternative last mile solutions. Except they don't have to serve everyone and don't have to build out vast/costly infrastructure. They can pass these cost savings along and provide lower costs and often better options to the consumer. No wonder telecoms are always in such a bitter mood :-)

Compare that with the traditional media, specifically print media. They spend decades developing infrastructure, reporting staff, delivery routes all to serve 'everyone' in a market. Now, new channels exist that bypass this and many times work to serve only a portion of the market. They can operate at lower cost and at lightning speed. No wonder newspapers are always in such a bitter mood :-)

Finally, let's look at a corporation. For decades they have built a marketing and sales infrastructure. These infrastructures slowly evolve over time, hopefully learning from their mistakes. Social media is changing that.

For consumer product manufacturers, often the 'last mile' is the retailer. Here you are as a business, building the best products you possibly can, and in the end you need to turn over the final customer interaction to a retailer. (insert joke about pimply 16-year-old salesperson here). Often that leaves the only customer interaction to be customer service. In other words, you'd only talk to the customer when your product wasn't working. That's not a healthy way to start any relationship.

Change has been happening slowly though. Remember the early e-commerce revolts when manufacturers had the gall to sell their products directly online, thus bypassing the retailer? It's a common occurrence now, but a decade ago it was a big deal...and still is as many media companies switch to digital delivery of content. Ah, digital content delivery, that brings us back to the last mile, literally.

The opportunity of social media to provide that 'last mile' connection is also the challenge. It upsets many of the existing infrastructures both internally and externally within a corporation and that has consequences. In the next part of this post I'm going to look at a few things based upon the 'last mile'.

1. Jealousy from the existing marketing teams towards the 'new' social media team. This results in internal political battles that cripple both sides.

2. Building infrastructure to serve a large market is tough, just ask the telcos. The same goes for corporate interactions with customers.

3. It does take integration. Social media is often able to capitalize on the groundwork set out from advertising, PR, etc.

4. ROI calculations get messy. Sure, that final click to buy may have come from a Tweet, but does social media deserve all the credit?

5. Customer service via Twitter is great, but are you providing a better class of service to online users?

6. Social media can't serve your entire customer base, is that a good or bad thing?

(Cross posted to Voce Nation)

The common thread through all of this is availability. You and your team need to be available to the client. Colleagues from different agencies who run programs all know about this. Client demands can come at any time...and often seem to come when you're not available. How many times have you stepped off an airplane and read 'that' e-mail?

I look at the 'social media experts' that seem to go from conference to conference, party to party and I think, "Sorry we work in different industries."

It's extremely difficult to provide a high level of service when you're all over the place. I can speak from experience on this. It's tough.

I used to speak a great deal but I don't that much anymore...why? Client service. With each speaking invitation I need to weigh travel time, how long will I be out? Will I be offline for extended periods of time?

In the end client responsibilities will always win out.

The article is a nice summary of where the county has been and where it is going. However there is some incorrect information in my section. The first sentence states:

In 1999, Josh Hallett owned the computer company Computer Data Networks. He has since sold it.

This is not correct. I was President and a partner in Computer Data Networks. As such I had equity in the firm but I was not the 'owner'. Also I did not 'sell' the company, I left the partnership.

My next venture, Hyku is what I owned, perhaps this is what should have been referenced.

UPDATE: The online article has been corrected.

Everybody can tell you what you 'should' do and you can waste a great deal of time on it. The focus is what you 'can' do. We're moving beyond theory and putting effort behind strategies and tactics that achieve the goals we set.

I'm not saying that forward-thinking is not valuable, it is, as long as it has realistic expectations. Many things that sound good in a speech or on a tweet just don't scale well. You know a broad statement like:

Companies should talk to their customers.

Great, sounds good. But how exactly do you implement that? Which department(s) manages it? How do we measure it? The list of practical questions goes on and on.

Let's talk about scale. If you're a small business how do you scale that down? As in prioritizing online activities over other core business functions? Now let's go the other way, if you're an organization of 100,000+, how do you do it?

Then of course the 'should' factor gets compounded by shiny-new-objetcts. For example, "You should be on X" Where X equals...well, take your pick (Foursquare, Posterous, etc). Really? Beyond the initial statement how does that fit into our broader communications strategy?

I can't tell you how many times a 'social media expert' has said, "You should do this...." and they've only mapped out a strategy or content for a few weeks at most and given little thought to resources

Ok, rant over.

I'll take your bag of 'should' and show you where you 'can' put it. :-)

At the AIMS event I'll be talking about program structure and measurement of some of our programs. Good stuff.

I think part of it is a shakedown racket (more on that in a second), but ultimately interactions with a person or a brand are a two way street. Maybe the reason you always receive poor service is because you're a jerk and love to complain first, ask questions later.

Ok, let's get to that shakedown thing. A 'social media expert' posts a tweet or a blog about how a company 'doesn't get it', this of course causes said company to genuflect and 'reach out' to the 'expert'. Low and behold the company becomes a client. Now I'm not saying I've seen it happen...ahem.

However it's always good to keep things in perspective, old media still has tons of influence, and when you look at Twitter perhaps a bit more. When a TV personaity like Ellen can go from 0 to 100,000 subscribers in a few days just by talking about Twitter on her program it kinda makes those new media influencers look like the days of UHF.

Last week during his general session at FPRA's Annual Conference, Peter Shankman made a quick comment about his dislike for Delta. You know one of the standard, "I hate" rants. Sitting in the back of the room I yelled, "I love Delta." I don't think he heard me though.

Yep, I love Delta. I've flown them for years and never had a major issue. I always get great service. So remember that next time somebody complains about Delta, or any brand.

Earlier this week in my post about equivalencies in social media measurement I mentioned some of the core data we collect for basic tactical elements of social media programs. What does that look like? Below is an example of basic data available for the following scenario: A corporate blog post is announcing an event, in the post there are some photos and a video. Once posted, a link is shared via Twitter.

As you can see it's quite a bit of data and it needs to be collected from a number of different services. Then you can compound this with trending, that is collecting the data at different intervals during the day.

Of course, that's just the raw data. As I said previously, the value is in the analysis. More on that in the coming weeks.

Cross posted to VoceNation