If your company's not into social media, the hottest new rocket in business will leave you in it wake.  Brenda Ward asks the experts how Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are changing the universe of marketing and communications.

There have been 153 million blogs published since 2002.  Did you write any?

Tourism New Zealand has in excess of 100,000 fans on Facebook.  How many do you have?

There were an estimated seven million messages flying on Twitter last year.  How many did you read?

Maybe your company has a website, or you're keeping up with friends on Facebook, or you're updating your LinkedIn profile...but if you're in business today, that's just not enough, say the experts.  You need to be thinking about social media on a much bigger scale.

They say businesses need to see social media as a communications and marketing tool, not just as a pastime or a way of keeping in touch with friends.  When conversations are online, that's where you need to be talking too.

But, they warn, there are risks with dipping your feet into the new media pool - managers need to accept that Twitter, Facebook and blogs demand levels of honesty never before seen in business communications, some of it intensely intrusive.  But more on that later.

HOW WE RATE

In the United States, a study by global PR company Burson-Marsteller found that 79 percent of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune Global 500 index are using social media tools.  But New Zealand is still about a year behind the United States in adopting social media in business, says American-born Auckland Social Media Club member Kevin Ptak.  Social Media Club is a 'global network of local groups of people interested in social media and the changes it is having on the way we interact and do business.'  He says the US is already moving on rapidly to the next step: using smart-phone technologies to connect to social media.

A Nielsen survey of 166 marketing professionals run by the Communications Agencies Association of New Zealand (CAANZ) showed most of those surveyed believed in the benefits of social media, for its ability to communicate directly with consumers, to deliver knowledge about what customers want and for increased brand engagement.

However, the survey showed 48 of the 166 were not on social media websites.  Of those who were, the most popular was networking site Facebook (72), followed by online video site YouTube (52) with 50 on messaging site Twitter.  There were 44 using professional network  LinkedIn.  And more than a third of those surveyed said nobody was in charge of social media in their companies.  Many companies that said they used social media had one lone staffer in charge.

One of the growing number of social media evangelists, CAANZ social media committee chairman Tony Gardner, says social media should be part of every company's marketing and communication strategy.  "The number-one influence in the world for people making decisions is word of mouth.  Social media is just a magnified word of mouth.  You have to accept that conversation has been happening for ever and social media is just a revving up of it."

Gardner, GM of Digital at Saatchi & Saatchi, sees Twitter, for example, as a huge step forward in immediacy and engagement.  It's a great method of listening to your customers, he says.  "If the God of marketing and communications said 'I can give you a tool', this would be it."

According to Gardner, not only can it tell you what your customers are saying about you, you can ask groups of customers what they think directly, which is much cheaper than running focus groups - and it's instant.

Motivational speaker Debbie Mayo-Smith sees social media as the new data-bases of the next decade.  "If you do the job correctly - adding value, educating, having a human voice, not being all 'me,me,me' - you build up a large number of fans, followers, friends and connections.  These are simply different names for your modern database."

IF YOUR COMPANY IS DOING IT, DO YOU NEED TO BE?

Probably yes, according to Forrester Research, an independent technology and market research company that provides advice to global leaders in business.  CEO George Colony told the website www.Mashable.com: "You have new employees entering companies.  They're the Facebook generation.  They're saying, 'Okay, I'm not joining this company until I see the CEO's social profile...' To have a limited social profile, although it's not logged into every week, lends legitimacy to that CEO."

However, CEOs don't need to be 'social heavy', says Colony.  "I'm proposing there would be something called 'social lite', which says that the CEO can be social, but in a different way, which is much less high-profile."  He suggests six to eight posts a year on their blog, and between 12 and 24 short statements a year - one or two tweets a month.

Surprisingly 99 of the CAANZ survey companies said they did not have a blog - something Nicholas O'Flaherty of the Auckland Social Media Club thinks is short-sighted.  He believes blogs were initially taken up widely, but have fallen out of favour and many languish, not regularly updated.

But he thinks they are still extremely valuable as a brand exercise and he often uses them in his work with businesses for his public relations company Bullet PR.  Social media is a no-brainer, he says.  "You're in a competitive space.  Customers are looking online to make purchasing decisions.  Are your competitors there? Yes.  Do you want to put a wall between your company and a major area where your customers are playing? No. That's the starting point."

Marc Krisjanous, director of Wellington-based email service provider Mobilize Mail, aims to take down that wall, without companies having to put in the effort.  Social media marketing is not effective alone, he says.  He believes email marketing is much more effective than social media marketing, and estimates a 40 percent conversion rate for leads versus 16 percent for Facebook and 0.1 percent for Twitter.

After a year researching social media and finding companies were spending too much time on too few leads, the company set up Campaign-Hub, a division that offers social media solutions software to automatically generate a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and to filter traffic for likely prospects.  They ten use email marketing to approach the leads.  He says: "If 1000 people join your network, you'll get 100 prospects, and out of that 100, you'll get 30 golden prospects who will spend money with you."

EARLY ADOPTERS

Some Kiwi companies are doing social media extraordinarily well, in fact, ahead of the pack globally.  Deloitte's New Zealand People and Performance Team won a SOCRA international social recruiting award for using Facebook and Twitter to create a following of over 1200 people for its graduate recruitment programme.  The team used blogs, videos, online discussions and a world first in recruitment: live and interactive video forums.

O'Flaherty and Gardner both cite rapidly growing telco Orcon, where call centre and sales staff have Facebook and Twitter pages open alongside email on their screens while they work.  They offer advice and solutions in whichever medium their customer prefers, CEO Scott Bartlett says.

And Air New Zealand's controversial Grabaseat 'cougar' campaign illustrates how effective viral YouTube campaigns can be.  Although it was pulled after some complaints (and some compliments), CEO Rob Fyfe says he sees it as a success.  "It was controversial, but it increased our profile offshore; it got a couple of million hits on YouTube.  But we pulled it and said , 'We're sorry if it offended you.'"  He's since used a video message to the NZ Listener, www.dearlistener.co.nz, to similar effect.

Fyfe says this "human-ness" is one of the traits Air New Zealand prides itself on and adds that 30 percent of feedback he gets comes via Facebook.  "A number are staff and customers, but I have photos of my family on Facebook.  I don't isolate work and social life."

Like Fyfe, to get the best out of social media, experts agree you need to scatter personal information, hobbies and business facts into the mix.  It can be at this point that some managers get cold feet.  But, says Tony Gardner, companies have to get more human, and involved with stakeholders.  "That is what the customer wants."

As people are increasingly trusting the advice of strangers (such as on www.tripadvisor.com and www.foursquare.com) before they trust the media or company messages, communications have to change.  Says Garnder: "Social media will change advertising.  If the advertising message is different to the reality, I'll know about it pretty quickly.  Social media etiquette requires honesty and transparency.  Take Dell - it was in deep trouble, so it created the Ideas Storm [a website forum for feedback]." Dell listened to the feedback, used some of the ideas - and it worked.

In the rush to get social-savvy, social media education is becoming mainstream.  Professor Andrew Stephen, of the marketing department of Insead University - a multi-campus international graduate business school and research institution - trialled an MBA advertising and social media strategy elective in Singapore and is now teaching the course in Paris three times a year.  "Social media is the 'Wild West' of advertising and marketing communications channels," he says in the notes that go with the course.  It is a fast-growing, ever-evolving, innovative and entrepreneurial space that, despite its increasing ubiquity, is not well understood from a strategic marketing perspective."

So if you're not involved, you risk being left behind.  Where does this leave the portion of the population with very low and poor (prose) literacy skills, which is 13 percent and 27 percent respectively of New Zealand adults?

Katherine Percy of Workbase, New Zealand's leading organisation tackling literacy and numeracy issues in the workplace, says: "While many people with poor literacy use Facebook and write short texts on topics that are familiar and interesting to them, social marketing with a commercial purpose may not be accessible to them.  Will we see a wider 'digital divide', between those who can afford computers and broadband at home and those who can't?" she wonders.

THE DOUBTERS

Then there are those who fear that the disciples of social media seduced by all the euphoria of brave new technologies will be making a mistake by rejecting tried and tested forms of marketing.

Chris Marriott, vice president and global managing director of Acxiom Digital, asks: "When boardrooms are buzzing with the need to set social media policy, roll out mobile marketing programmes or explore the capabilities of the newly implemented digital platform, do we forget to keep marketing relevant and appropriate in our enthusiasm to ride that shiny new train?  "If you are plunging head first into Facebook and Twitter to keep up with your key competition, I would advise you to rethink.  Rather than questioning what percentage of your budget you should allocate to social media spend, ask if social media is best for your business."

Marriott suggests successful multichannel marketing requires multichannel management.  "Traditional marketing channels will not necessarily be less effective simply because something new has come along.  As has always been the case, any new methods should be carefully considered and introduced in conjunction with your current marketing efforts."

And will we go into social media overload, as we do with emails? Debbie Mayo-Smith says: "Yes, yes, yes.  Even though I have only 620 fans on my Facebook business page and 597 followers on Twitter, you can blink and 300 tweets will pass by; the same for status updates.  The problem - just like email - is filtering out what is relevant and what isn't."

So, when social media is right for your business. Gardner says managers shouldn't worry about the number of hits their blogs or Facebook pages reive.  "That's irrelevant at the start.  Just ask one of the early adopters in your company to help and get it set up as soon as you can," he advises.

He sums it up: "I think between 2009 and 2011, the understanding we have of social media is going to change.  It's going to move into the middle of a marketing and communications mix.  It's not the be-all and end-all, and you'll definitely be using other key channels (advertising, communications and experiential) for social engagement, but you've got to be there".

(SOURCE: Brenda Ward, New Zealand Management Magazine, June 2010 pages 35-39)