John Castronova
castronovaj@gmail.com
Introduction
Wetpaint and Altimeter keep rankings on the most socially engaged companies.
They call it the Engagement Database. In their rankings, Starbucks (ranked #1) and
Toyota (ranked #21) have two of the most effective social media strategies among
the ranked companies. Amazingly enough, their social media strategies are very
similar, and both have high levels of Return on their customer Engagement.
Strategy 1: Social Media is a Company Wide Effort
Both Starbucks and Toyota are limited in their social media teams; Starbucks has six
people on their team, and Toyota has three people on theirs. In addition, I doubt
anyone on the Starbucks team can make a Frappuccino or anyone on the Toyota
team can explain how the sticking accelerator is being fixed. But each company has
employees that are experts in these areas.
So, when Starbucks created MyStarbucksidea.com, the social media team wasn't
creating content and responding to ideas posted by customers. Instead, "Starbucks
set out to ensure the departments impacted by the site (which includes practically
every department) had a representative who was responsible for being the liaison"
(from Engagement Database Report found on the website). The Mini-Starbucks Card
was actually a customer idea that made its way to Chuck Davidson, an employee at
Starbucks. He traced the comments, wrote a proposal, and put it into action.
Toyota has as similar breakdown in roles:
"Take a look at the Twitter account and you’ll see that in addition to DeYager, three
public relations specialists from sales, environment/safety, and public
affairs/community outreach contribute posts. The Toyota Twitter team uses
monitoring software to identify tweets mentioning Toyota, then responds from a
respective area of expertise using technology from CoTweet to manage multiple
authors on the single Twitter account. This same mode is utilized on Toyota’s
Facebook pages — response requests are sent out and come back from around the
company, depending on the topic" (from Engagement Database Report found on the
website)
Strategy 2: Choosing Platforms Requires Effort
Besides being good at spreading social media through the company, Starbucks and
Toyota are also picky about which platforms they use to engage. For instance,
Starbucks discovered that for every three person that interacted with a particular
news item on their Facebook Page, three of their friends joined the page. Facebook
enhanced their ROE.
The social media team at Toyota wanted to blog. But organizing it would have been
a logistical nightmare. In addition, the higher ups were not so keen on being that
transparent. But the team knew that breaking into social media was necessary if
they wanted to see the sort of results that Starbucks was getting. So, they began with
a YouTube Channel and uploaded pre-made content from Toyota PR. After that, the
higher ups became comfortable with the idea of a Twitter feed. They also work with
an independent blog, priuschat.com.
Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, says “It’s all about the economy, stupid. No,
it’s all about the people-driven economy, stupid” (239). Socialnomics is the simple
idea. Qualman argues that people are able to coalesce and act under single goal
without traditional barriers to organizations. Through this coalescence, small
groups are able to organize affect economics basics such as supply and demand. In
effect, social tools help individuals move markets.
That is why Starbucks and Toyota are investing so much time and money into
developing a social strategy. The question here is simple. Who is building this
strategy? If we want to be blunt, the six individuals on the Strabucks Social Media
team and the three on Toyota’s. But who are these people. Are they Marketers,
Public Relations Officers, Community Organizers, Content Managers, or something
entirely different?
I am making the argument that they are combination of all of the above. Therefore,
behavioral economics, community illiteracies, and technical communication are
three theoretical axes that a social media strategist might sit on. The following
essay explores this argument. To start, social media as a point of study will
introduced based in the work of behavioral economists such as Chris Anderson,
Yochai Benkler, and Clay Shirky. They establish social media a vital economic agent
increasing the agency of the individual consumer since traditional costs for
organizing and affecting consumer behavior has decreased dramatically. This
ability to organize calls into attention discussions of community. However, the true
point of awe in social media and community is ability of ad hoc groups to produce
and publish content under a shared understanding of roles in the production of that
content. Finally, the production of content is highly valued in the technical
communication community. Starbucks and Toyota spent much time planning how
this user-generated content would be managed and engaged within the
organization. Technical communication has been developing content management
strategies for some time. While this distributed authorship process is a new
challenge to content managers, reapplying these methods for user-generated
content can be a short leap.
Social Media Theory: Behavioral Economics
It was James Carville, a very imposing man in person and a very confusing man in
conversation, who coined this famous phrase: “It’s the economy stupid.” Whether
he is eating those words now is not a matter of concern in this essay. Qualman
found a need to readopt those words: “It’s a people-driven ecomomy stupid.” That
is the actual title of his introduction in Socialnomics in which he states,
Socialnomics is a massive socioeconomic shift. Yet, some of the core
marketing principles of the last few centuries will still apply; whilst
others basic principals will become as extinct as the companies that
continue to try to force them on the unwilling public. (xviii)
Qualman would not need to point far through the Fortune 500 companies to find
examples this principle: Strabucks and Toyota are just two of the hundreds
adopting social media into their business model.
The magic behind this is that the user/consumer is adjusting to new ways of
digesting information. According to Qualman, Web 2.0 features like social
networking and tagging are allowing users/consumers filter information that is
valuable to them from sources that they trust: family, friends, expert bloggers. This
information plays a huge role in consumer purchasing decisions. In many ways, the
role of the user and consumer is becoming increasingly blurred.
Bacon Salt=The Long Tail (Anderson): a section discussing these topics will
come here. Bacon Salt is a product that will serve as an example of the concept
of the Long Tail effect
Fortune 500 companies are quite aware of the long tail. It is these companies who
are currently being forced to embrace externalities, indirect affects of the
functioning of a business or organization. And previously, these externalities were
easily ignored or snuffed out (Not all externalities are negative: adding a competing
product to the market may drive down prices of that product across the market--a
positive for the consumer). However, in a Web 2.0 economy, externalites go from
small problems to potential threats to a company's market share.
For instance, the water bottle industry has been coming under fire in a gree political
environment. A video entitled, The Story of Bottled Water, reveals more than
controversial facts abouth the bottled water industry. As of March 30, 2010, that
video has had been tweeted 1,373 times. The average number of followers for any
given Twitter account is 126. After some multiplication, "The History of Bottled
Water" could potentially be seen by 172,998 people. All of which have the option to
Retweet this video.
In an article by Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby, "Leadership in the Age of
Transparency" published in the April 2010 edition of the Harvard Business Review,
three main factors are cited for this change: Scale, Sensors, and Sensibilities.
Scale: Many small problems became very large very quickly. For instance, as more
water bottles were used, those mountains of plastic grew larger and larger. In a
word, they became harder for consumers to ignore or for companies to hide.
That brings us to Sensors: These problems are increasingly harder to hide because
information on pollution, campaign finance, or drinking habits are tracked, logged,
and published instantly somewhere online. For instance, the EPA makes its statistics
readily available for free.
Finally, Sensibilities: Now that consumers and stakeholders have this information,
what are they going to do with it? They take action. That is what Meyer and Kirby
said: "The effect of instantaneous communications has been a rising sense of global
connectedness and responsibility" (42). Sharing information is extraordinarily easy.
Coalescing under a single cause for a very specific action is extraordinarily easy.
But what is economically significant about the lowering of barriers to assembly.
Clay Shirky attempts to clear this issue in his book, Here Comes Everybody:
Now that group forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy, we
are seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new
kinds of groups. (2008)
When Shirky says “hard,” he means that costs of group formation have gone down
due to the rapid availability of Web 2.0 communication tools.
The cost of all kinds of group activity—sharing, cooperative action, and
collective action—have fallen so far so fast that activities previously
beneath that floor are not coming to light. We didn’t notice how many
things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the
alterative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools
provide a third tier alternative: action by loosely structured groups,
operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.
(2008).
Groups of small sizes can share information, coordinate, and collectively act a very
little cost. Large groups need organizations and managerial structures in order to
share information, coordinate, and collectively act because it lowers transactional
costs in communication processes. But here is the rub: both small groups and large
groups are limited by their size. Small groups can only have so much impact due to
a lack of resources, and large groups are too large to perform certain tasks. Certain
things cost too much to get done. So, while small groups are easy to coordinate,
large groups are more effective. Until recently, it was impossible to form a group
with a large amount of relationships in an organization. These Web 2.0 social tools
enable this possibility. Shirkey makes the argument that social tools allow for large
groups to form quickly without the need for institutional infrastructure and
accomplish certain tasks previously to costly for organizations.
Social Media Theory:
Erik Qualman
Chris Anderson: The Long Tail
Clay Shirky
Connecting to Community Theory
Dewey
Grabill
Community informatics
Tech Writing / Usability / Content Management
Bill H-D
Shirky: Participatory Design