Category: neck deep in the zeitgeist

SAS Global Forum showcases the value of social media for events

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

I’ve been back from our annual user conference, SAS Global Forum, for three weeks but I’m still amazed at what I saw. Even in this economy more than 3,300 dedicated SAS users came together to learn from each other. It was my first time attending the event, and one of the most remarkable professional experiences I’ve had.

This year’s event was a test bed for a number of social media activities as well, and we learned a lot. Here are some highlights.

The Crowdvine networking site set up for the event drew more than 200 members, which is a great base to build on. The Netvibes aggregator page brought together all the social media assets “blogs, blog searches, Twitter searches, video, photos, etc.” into one place and received positive comments from visitors. The SAS Global Forum blog at blogs.sas.com was extremely active, with 76 posts as I write this. The SAS video team put in their usual hard work chronicling the event, which also spurred us to create a SAS presence on Flickr, which I look forward to helping develop.

I want to single out Twitter as well, since it’s such a new tool and SAS Global Forum was the first time we’ve focused on it for SAS events communications. Twitter was very popular, with more than 500 messages posted using the #sgf09 hashtag during the event, and more than 1,000 since it was created.

Some people still question the value of Twitter, and just like blogs in the early days there can be a lot of noise. There’s noise on the #sgf09 hashtag. People like to talk about themselves and don’t always stop to think if anyone cares where they ate lunch. But far more important than that, if you look at the hashtag search, you see messages like this one, from a user:

SAS EG 4.2 supports office 2007 hurray. Need to get it. #sgf09

Or this one from a SAS partner, linking to a press release on sas.com:

Reading about SAS Customer awards at #sgf09. http://tinyurl.com/dfv44j


Or this one from a SAS partner in the Netherlands:

Just back from the sasCommunity.org focus group at #SGF09. Very positive, open discussion on improving the site, contributions and content.


SAS folks were also tweeting madly at the event, picking out nuggets of valuable information from customer presentations and panels and adding them to the stream.

#SGF09 presenter says SAS CI 5.1 upgrade was operational within 3 weeks. Slide says Yes Man!!

Business Analytics panel #sgf09. Customers emphasizing the necessity of analysts working closely with business units, marketers.

Business Analytics panel #sgf09. Keys to making analytics part of your org culture: Case studies, build trust, show you’re adding value.

Twitter gets mention in Customer Intelligence Panel. Companies trying to understand value of data housed in twitter and how to use it #sgf09

For every example of a banality, I see a dozen tweets talking about the event, sharing information, asking questions, thanking people for their presentations, making connections and sharing links for further information. And these are conversations that probably wouldn’t have taken place online if not for Twitter, other than in a few blogs. Even the tweets that might be dismissed as banal show there’s a life and a pulse and a buzz at SAS Global Forum that up to now you could only experience in person. Sure, following a hashtag search isn’t the same thing as being there in the flesh. But I have no doubt that anyone who didn’t attend this year’s event but followed it on Twitter feels like they missed something valuable, practical and fun. And I guarantee you some of them are already planning to attend #sgf10.

The Marketing 2.0 Council

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

My stated intention for this blog was to talk about the things we’re doing at SAS to integrate social media into our communications, and share information about what’s working and what isn’t. It’s unforgiveable that I’ve waited this long to talk about the Marketing 2.0 Council, because it’s been our biggest success story to date. I’ve recommended this as a tactic to several folks working on social media in a company setting.

The Marketing 2.0 Council began in late 2007 with a mandate to look at marketing 2.0/Web 2.0/social media as a whole, decide what was important to SAS and how we should go forward. The list of attendees at the first meeting included representatives from all corners of SAS: marketing, public relations, marketing editorial, online strategy and services, education, publications, advertising, email marketing and too many more to name. That first meeting was standing room only in a conference room designed to hold 30 people. I was lucky enough to be invited to join, having been a vocal advocate of incorporating social media into our public relations efforts. The assembled group had a wide range of awareness and understanding of social media but we were all agreed that we needed to figure out a strategy.

Our first major activity was a brainstorming session designed to put all the Web 2.0 outlets we could think of on a white board and narrow them down to the list we wanted to consider first. Somewhat surprisingly, that activity generated a manageable list without any bloodshed. We agreed to focus our attention on blogs, social networks, content syndication, podcasts, online video and Wikipedia. We soon realized that none of those channels would be worth much if we didn’t have something useful to feed them, so we added content as a category of its own.

From that starting point, we put together a task force for each area, led by a member of the Marketing 2.0 Council and made up of people who were either vocationally or avocationally interested in the field. The task forces met over the course of several weeks. They looked at the prevailing wisdom about their area, found examples of companies approaching them well, looked at what SAS was doing and put together recommendations for what we should be doing. That may sound like a simplistic explanation, but there wasn’t much more to it than that – the advantage of clearly-defined objectives.

Once we had all the task force recommedations compiled in a standard format, a working group of council members put them together and drafted a set of overarching recommendations and priorities and a proposed timetable. Even with a comprehensive outline, we felt the need to suggest only two new positions: social media manager “the one that I got” and an integrated content manager, to make sure we had valuable information delivered in a consistent manner to all the 2.0 channels.

With that work behind us, our executive sponsors were confident we had examined all the angles and gave us the green light to fill the new positions and get started on the recommendations. As the person selected to fill the role of social media manager, it’s been extremely helpful for me to know what a broad base my position was built on.

So, if you’re finding yourself trying to get your arms around social media at your company, creating your own council could be a big help. My suggestions:

1. Figure out all the people in your organization who have a stake in communicating your message and get them in the same room.

2. Resist the urge to invite only the people who you think will agree with you. Better to smoke out any objections now and deal with them.

3. Get the lawyers and the HR folks involved from the start, because they will have concerns you will probably never think of yourself.

4. Make sure you have a good cross section of decision makers and doers. In other words, if it’s all practitioners you’ll always be running upstairs to get approval, but if it’s all executives you won’t have anyone to do the grunt work like research and writing the recommendations and making pretty PowerPoint slides.

5. Make sure to create a mechanism for communicating your activities internally. We have an internal Marketing 2.0 Council blog and a SharePoint site where we house all the documents, including the task force reports and the draft social media guidelines and recommendations.

Crazy bathtime baby hair

Dave

I shot this photo this evening with my new iPhone and immediately emailed it to Jean and uploaded it to my Facebook page. That’s about the time commitment I’m able to put into this on a regular basis these days. I know some of you reading this feel like learning to read blogs was enough for a while, but I’ll go ahead and say it: If you’re not on Facebook, you’re missing a lot of Conrad photos.

Hard candy shell not as hard as you might think

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

So Skittles threw in the towel. They didn’t have the stomach for profanities and racial slurs showing up on their “homepage,” which they had given over to a Twitter search page showing real-time results for “Skittles.” When I wrote about this yesterday, I was thinking of it as a bold move, and even with all the potential pitfalls it would probably still pay off for Skittles in terms of attention.

I wasn’t surprised to see how the public played with the shiny new toy Skittles handed to them. What does surprise me, though, is that Skittles seems to have been surprised. Didn’t they know this was going to happen? They must have had hours and hours of internal debate about the wisdom of this move. I’m reminded of the movie War Games, where the computer goes haywire at the end and the screen scrolls the list of all the possible conflicts it is programmed to consider, like “USSR first strike” and “Albanian decoy” and “Canadian thrust.” In the Skittles war room, didn’t they have a big board with “racist hijack” and “profanity blitzkrieg”?

I’m wondering, based on a not-inconsiderable experience with the way decisions can be made in large companies, if someone a level or three above the person who decided to begin this experiment stepped in and decided to end it when they saw how it was going.

Corporate marketers expanding their presence in social media are used to answering the question, “What will you do if someone says something negative about your products or your company?” and the answer usually is something along the lines of, “At least the negative comments will be on our site where we will know about them and can respond in an open, transparent way.”

Yes, but what about when there’s nothing to respond to, when the negativity is purely for the sake of negativity? That’s when we really find out how thick or thin are corporate skins are.

Yesterday I also said, “Naturally, some people can’t resist the urge to spam the channel with anti-Skittles childishness, but they’ll get tired of that eventually.” I just spent five minutes paging through search results and couldn’t find a single obscene or racist tweet. While “skittles” was the number one trending topic on Twitter yesterday, it’s not even showing up on the top ten today.

Maybe Skittles melted too soon. With the short attention span of online pranksters, maybe they only had to wait another day to get out of the crosshairs. No less a social media personage than Charlene Li has already declared that the Skittles experiment “redefined branding.” Maybe they were mere hours away from becoming the social media success story of 2009, rather than a case study of how social media can bite back.

Like the number of licks required to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

Taste the social media rainbow

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

One of the conversations we’ve had most often at SAS around our participation in social media channels involves the control of our brand, or more accurately the realization that every company has come to in the last few years: We no longer control our brand. Our message is determined as much or more by what people are saying about us than what we’re saying about ourselves. That’s pretty much an accepted Social Media 101 principle these days.

Skittles, the candy company, has taken it to the furthest extreme. As of now, if you go to www.skittles.com, their homepage is a Twitter search feed for "skittles." A pop-up box gives you further options, including Friends, which takes you to Skittles’ Facebook fan page. The Media link gives you the choice for Video, which takes you to YouTube, and Pics, which takes you to Flickr.

By doing this, Skittles has turned their brand over to the public more than any company I can think of. Is it a good idea? There’s lots of debate about that on Twitter, with opinions ranging, as they inevitably do, from "brilliant" to "idiotic." But by the nature of the change they’ve made, the conversation is essentially taking place on Skittles’ homepage. And, most important of all, it’s taking place. When was the last time you thought about Skittles? What else could have gotten me to blog about Skittles?

Of course, the discussion will die down, and generating a lively debate in social media channels isn’t going to sell more candy. But this decision makes a lot of sense for a consumer product like Skittles. I never looked at their website before today, but I imagine they had a hard time keeping it interesting. How much is there to say about fruit candy other than contests and maybe a new flavor every now and then? Skittles has made the medium the message, and by adopting social media channels as their primary means of communication, they have a lot more chance of getting people talking about them. Naturally, some people can’t resist the urge to spam the channel with anti-Skittles childishness, but they’ll get tired of that eventually. In other words, I don’t think they had a lot to lose, and a tremendous amount to gain.

What’s the lesson for an enterprise technology company like SAS? Well, it’s not "replace the homepage with a Twitter search." SAS solutions come in a lot of flavors and sas.com does a great job of conveying information to customers and potential customers that couldn’t be accomplished through social media alone.

But what about the people who would never think to come to our homepage? There are lots of people in business, in academia, in government who use SAS software every day but don’t think to come find out what’s new. Plus, SAS software plays a behind-the-scenes role in nearly everybody’s life. Those are the messages we can convey in social media, to audiences who don’t know yet how much they want to know about us.