Social Media Lessons from Powderfinger’s Recent Concerts

As someone who primarily focuses on social media in the B2B world, it’s always good to be able to look into different markets and industries to find examples of how companies are using social media in ways that provide examples of how to do things properly and professionally.

Earlier this month, Australian band Powderfinger did just that. As I watched the events surrounding their 3 concerts in 3 cities in one day extravaganza unfold I couldn’t help but admire a number of aspects of what they did.

Here’s what I liked.

1. They built momentum in a sustained, practical, grass roots way.
2. They were coordinated across a number of tools
3. They engaged with their community in ways that were meaningful, engaging, and personal.

I was fortunate in that I was able to watch the momentum and enthusiasm escalate because prior to the concerts, I was able to set up Scout Labs to track the band and key aspects of what they were trying to do (i.e. promote their forthcoming new album).

Lesson #1 – Sustained Momentum

Powderfinger primed their Twitter network by teasing them with details – but they did this in an intelligent way

Powderfinger priming their Twitter network prior to the concerts

What we see here is the band giving their followers a polite reminder of the pending announcement of the first venue.

As the events started to unfold the band kept up the Tweets but importantly, they also kept up the engagement.

Powderfinger engaging with the community on Twitter

Priming everyone for the first event, and following through with the teasers – getting Sydney ready. By now, mainstream press has caught on and is scrambling to position their sites as being ‘in touch’. In reality though Powderfinger has control of the story and is at this point – off on a journey with their fans and their community.

Powderfinger and the concerts now have their own life

Again using Scout Labs, what I’m seeing is that the band has created an event that now has its own life – I’m seeing the sentiment and excitement grow as tweets, blog posts, pictures, and even movies start to flood into the social sphere.
As an aside, if you get a chance, have a look at this Twitpic – http://twitpic.com/jvube – how close and personal is this performance?

I can continue to show you the Tweet stream across the day, but I think you get the point. If in doubt, go and have a look at Powderfinger’s twitter thread – @powderfinger_au

Lesson #2 – Coordination

I swear I beat this drum every day. Start with a strategy and then create an integrated, coordinated platform.
I see this with Powderfinger. From Twitter, Twitpics, YouTube and finally to their website – Powderfinger engage their community. They actively encourage their followers to share content via their site – and when I check in Scout Labs to see what photos and videos have been loaded into the social sphere – I see lots of content.

What do we learn from this?

1. Powderfinger clearly understand where they are likely to connect to their community and have placed themselves within these neighbourhoods
2. They’re not afraid to leverage others content. In fact they actively encourage it. Why suppress innovation?

Lesson #3 – Engagement

Go to Twitter and have a look at the threads. The band answering Tweets from their followers, encouraging feedback and multimedia from the day.

Post event Powderfinger continues to engage

Their website – it’s about engagement. So whilst Powderfinger are out in the social sphere creating awareness and building their profile, the core goal is to get them back to their core website.

This is not hard. Powderfinger has focused on engagement and this is a key point for companies working in the B2B world.

How did the community react?

This is why I work with Scout Labs. Scout Labs captures comments and sentiment. Here’s a comment from their service

I think these spontaneous acts are a great way to give back and show that “fame” has not got the best of them

You can’t buy this type of feedback – but without Scout Labs how do you know about this?

And when I look at the photos and the comments on the photo’s I have a clear understanding of how well Powderfinger connected and what they’ve achieved.

Summary

As I said at the start, Powderfinger did a few things really well:

• Note the subtle request for their network to spread the news? Nothing overt, just a simple request. This is trust – I don’t need to shout at you
• Did you note the followers count – the band clearly aren’t out to build a gazillion followers. I like this – respect the network and let the network do its job… Rather than what we see too often on Twitter – abusing the API to add tens of thousands of meaningless followers.
• Classic groundswell actions
  • ‘Send us links to where you’ve posted’ – we want to share this with you.
  • ‘We’ll have some photos and videos for you in the coming days’ – we’ve got fresh content to come back or use our tools to have us deliver it to you (i.e. RSS).
  • Seamless transition from the ‘event’ to promotion of the new single off the new album.
• Powderfinger know where their community is and are there ready to engage. For those of us in the B2B world, this is a critical point.

In a B2B context this is very important. They encouraged sharing rather than trying to control the message or the content.

These are good lessons for all of us – job well done Powderfinger

Facebook users cost SMB’s thousands – says Telstra

As hard as we try, those of us in Social Media are always going to struggle when old media giants like News Corp decides to lay the boot into social media via one of the popular tools – in this case Facebook. The report from (News subsidiary) Adelaide Now is a clear attack on social networking and social media and is designed to do nothing more than instil fear in the minds of business owners. The headline pretty much gave away the bias of the article and upon reading it I had my expectations of a hatchet job pretty much confirmed.

What really stood out for me (other than the blatant bias in the article) is the comment from a Telstra Executive.
Telstra Business Executive Director Brian Harcourt was quoted in the article as follows:

“If an employee spends as much as an hour a day on Facebook, it can end up costing a business thousands of dollars in lost time over the course of a year.”

I’ve thought long and hard about this comment and whether to just ignore this or write a stinging rebuke. I really don’t follow the logic of a senior Telstra executive making comments like this. He’s basically telling the business community to lock down internet access or “god forbid” it will cost your company thousands of dollars.

Why am I confused by this comment (or frustrated)?

1. Telstra has been promoting itself as a leader in the social media space, espousing their brilliant efforts to connect to the community and providing the means for people to have dialogue.
2. Telstra recently announced your own internal social media policies with much fan fare  (or was that just a reaction to the @fakestephenconroy fiasco).
3. Telstra sells internet access – broadband is their bread and butter remember…

So, Telstra is telling the business community to curtail use of the internet particularly the evil Facebook as that is where bludgers congregate? That would be like Jeroen van der Veer (he’s the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell) telling his customers to NOT buy the Land Rover Discovery 3 V8 HSE because it’s a V8 and man they suck the gas down. Forget about the fact you could drive it sensibly and reasonably economically and derive much pleasure and benefit along the way – “It’s a V8 man; it’ll cost you thousands of dollars a year”.

So rather than be critical of Telstra, I’m going to help them. I’d like to put forward many of the points that (I suspect) Brian didn’t get a chance to in the article. I want to believe that Telstra believes – and knows this is not about bludgers; it’s about culture and engagement (remember the former CEO’s massive spread in The Boss Magazine last year where he talked long about culture and engagement?). Telstra knows this is about accepting that technology is good and things are changing.

I can imagine Brian and his colleagues looking at this research and wanting to say to the public and their valued business customers – “the research shows that business owners are worried – they don’t quite get it like we do. So because we’re innovative leaders, we’re going to contribute some of what we know and hold true, so that others can learn how to harness the potential and find a positive. Because it’s not about bludgers it’s about empowerment and trust”.

I am of the opinion that Telstra would get much more mileage (or column inch coverage) if they said this, or if they even went a step further and followed the lead of their global innovative peers like IBM, Dell, and Harvard by saying “Our message is don’t lock down. Our message is to allow dialogue, to embrace it through a set of mutually agreed guidelines. In fact, here’s our policies – take them and modify them.

We’re Telstra, so we’re going to contribute to the community. Because we believe this is the way of the future because we’re bloody smart and innovative, and we want you using our products.”

Isn’t that a much better story line than what News Limited concocted?

I like this model where Telstra uses their PR presence/muscle to go into the community and have the balls to say “come with us, we’ve got some great ideas”.

Sports Teams and Social Media – are they doing it right?

The immersion of sport and social media continues with Sports Illustrated recently publishing an article recently regarding sports stars using Twitter. Whilst it’s interesting to watch a tool like Twitter being used by sports stars like Cadel Evans, Eli Manning, Lance, and the Shaq etc; I’ve had this nagging thought that the bigger opportunity is being missed by the players, clubs, and sporting leagues. Are they doing the right thing?

Wanting to kick this around further, I took the opportunity to sit down and chat social media with former AFL premiership winning player – David Thorpe. David is an astute businessman, a legend salesman and a guy who can see the big picture quickly. I was explaining the basics of social media and to help David I put it into a sports context – how could his former team in the AFL – the Bulldogs use social media to grow membership and game day attendance.

Two things emerged from my conversation with David that would help crystallise my view of the missing link.
Firstly David made the comment:

AFL clubs have the best membership base of any code in the country. They’re very good at getting and keeping members. It’s a very tribal sport.

This is an interesting point. They have a strong base of customers; they don’t need another tool to market to their members/customers.

David made a further comment that has proved crucial

In my day (the late 60’s and early 70’s) we would be out on school visits conducting clinics with the kids. The club would give us tickets to give away to the kids at the clinic. These weren’t just single tickets – they were family tickets as our goal was to get the family to the game and get everyone into the sport.

Our goal was to NOT give away the tickets to just the kids in our teams jerseys. We were under instructions to target kids in opposition jerseys along with girls – giving them tickets to the game.

This was when the light bulb came on for me (and is in fact the key second point). Their unstated aim at the time was to attract “non-customers” – this bit is important, as examining how you can attract non-customers is a core premise of Blue Ocean Strategy. This link explains non-customers.

So now I was thinking about how a team could use social media as an innovation tool so as to break down the barriers for non-customers?

So I took this defining thought and got the team together – this wasn’t just one idea but two:

1. Create an integrated social media strategy that connects to the broader community; and
2. Utilise this platform to engage with non-customers

We know a lot of clubs are publishing newsletters, have their key players writing blog-type articles. Many of the teams in our national competitions have multi-media rich sites – but they still follow the monologue model of communication. We wanted to go beyond this and develop a strategy that would give a club or league a clear sustainable advantage in how they connect with the community.

In most cases where a sports star is using a tool like Twitter (or Facebook), the model looks like this:

The intersection of sports stars and community via Twitter

If we look at the major leagues and teams around Australia, the model looks like this:

The Sports Club intersection with their communities

A good example being the Brisbane Bronco’s website – rich in multi-media and information but engagement is limited to signing up for an email newsletter. This is a monologue. Dialogue is left to the community via the numerous sports forums and communities.

The real potential for clubs and players is where they bring everything together and use social media to develop a dialogue with the community. In simple terms the model might look like this:

Social media will allow the club and players to connect to the community and have a dialogue

The intersection points (all 4 of them) is where social media delivers for everyone. Using tools like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, the club can deliver a consistent message and provide the opportunity for the community to contribute and engage at a much deeper level than we’ve seen so far.  The goal is to move beyond the monologue and the use of canned blogs.

Objective #1 – A practical example

The first thing we need to do is have a high level strategy that makes sense and could be executed by a team or league. As a test case we looked at Brisbane based sports team – Logan Thunder. Logan Thunder participates in the Women’s National Basketball League in Australia. They’re new to the competition having been admitted in 2008. They already have a reasonably strong following and are located in the middle of large pool of prospective customers. What was interesting for us is that women’s basketball generates a lot of forum traffic as followers dissect games, players, and coaching performances so it seems we have a community that has some level of familiarity with social media tools.

The tools that I can see as being relevant for Logan Thunder include:

1. Creating a blog or blogs and using these as the first point of information distribution
2. Using a Twitter account to further distribute information about games, clinics, player updates, sponsor mentions, and community announcements
3. Using Facebook for the team, players, and coaching staff; creating fan pages, distributing team, player, and competition information. Facebook could also be used to allow fans to vote for their favourite player post-game

Because these tools can all be integrated, it becomes relatively simple to deliver consistent information for the community to absorb and engage with. This is the dialogue bit.

How would Logan Thunder put this into action? The ideas that we noted aren’t exhaustive by any means but we could see real value in such activities as

• Any time a player is in the community or at a school running a clinic they encourage the participants to follow them on Facebook and Twitter
• Newsletters, game information, community activities originate from Facebook and are then cross populated into Twitter, the team blog, and into the forums
• Involve the sponsors within these tools – for example a sponsor focused Facebook app that allows fans to vote for their favourite player – a fan who votes gets a prize along with the most popular player
• Get the coach involved in blogging with pre and post game reports, coaching tips, and mentor sessions for up and coming coaches
• Allow fans to Tweet from the games and feed these tweets into Facebook, and the team blog – this is already happening in Super 14 rugby
• Promote the teams social media footprint into the forums – encouraging the active contributors to engage with the team – Remember: make them love you or dislike you – just don’t leave them indifferent

These are our early thoughts and ideas and they’re by no means exhaustive. We can see some really interesting benefits coming out of this approach and given the cost is so low, we’d like to see teams and leagues get on the social media train because it’s not going away.

As I noted way back at the beginning of this post, we identified two key objectives in terms of how sports teams and players can take social media participation to the next level.

Objective 1 – Develop and execute a social media strategy – we’ve covered that here

Objective 2 – Utilising Blue Ocean Strategy and Social Media to attract non-customers – So we’ve connected to our members/fans, now what? How do we attract the non-customers? What does research on Facebook show? What groups of non-customers use social media tools and how could we reach out to them?

Workload permitting I’ll publish part 2 around the middle of June. Ideally we’d like to workshop some of the Blue Ocean Strategy ideas with a team – we’ll have to see if anyone’s interested.

Australian bank dodges a bullet on Twitter

There was much noise this morning about how an Australian Twitterer was able to get a home loan issue resolved and the loan approved via Twitter. The bank in question Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) was put forward as a shining example of Australian organisations getting into the social space and using tools like Twitter to deliver a superior customer experience.

Given that I’ve blogged in the past about how poor major Australian brands are with adopting Twitter, my bullsh**-detector was shrilling like a banshee. And it turns out the detector was right.

The facts of the matter are masked by the minor tweet-storm with CBA taking the bait and coming out with a vague quote from one of their exec’s about how brilliant they are. Rather than CBA painting themselves in glory, they should have their heads down looking at their shoes saying “holy bankcartels, Batman! we dodged a bullet that time”

Fact #1 – the banks internal processes broke down with the application being bogged down due primarily to (what appears to be) processor incompetence. The person responsible for processing the application doesn’t have the requisite skills to realise they had the necessary information (just stating the known facts here).

Fact #2 – the customer involved (@coogeecoup – Alison Godfrey) is a journo for the paper that published the story, and she was contacted by @ozdj (Derek Jenkins) a person who works for the bank in a customer service role. He’s clearly not an official CBA rep and doesn’t even mention his employer in his profile. If anything, he’s a normal Twitter user with a diverse range of Tweets.

Fact #3 – the CBA Twitter presence is, well, FAIL – @CBAOnline.

Here’s their profile page.

Which bank wants to communicate with you via Twitter

Do you like their tag line – determined to be different?

The fact is, if it wasn’t for Derek’s manual intervention this would have gone unnoticed and been yet another example of a bank failing to deliver on their brand promise. CBA is lucky to have someone like Derek working for them; I suspect he’s one of thousands at the bank who care. Clearly he’s a diligent hard working employee who’s simply not prepared to leave issues unaddressed. But Group Executive Ross McEwan was vague if not misleading with his comment in the article:

Ross McEwan, Head of the Commonwealth Bank’s Retail Bank said the bank would continue to reach out to customers via social networking.

“Commonwealth Bank sees the trend towards social networking sites as a channel for consumer discussion as a huge opportunity to extend our customer service beyond traditional channels,” Mr McEwan said. “It gives us the chance to understand our customers’ experience with us, to interact with them in real time and reach out for on the spot resolution. We’re seeing some really positive results and expect this to continue to grow.”

I know CBA has a profile on Facebook but this reeks more of an outlet for regurgitated PR. The CBA is not monitoring social media in the context of wanting to listen and engage. If they were they wouldn’t have a locked, soulless, friendless Twitter profile.

CBA, you dodged a bullet here today and have now tried to turn a near miss into positive spin in the press. If you want to understand what you should be doing, have a look at:

• @ask_wellsfargo
• @INGDIRECT
• @ingdirectcanada
• @lending club
• @CEO_INGDIRECT
• @Wachovia

And there’s many more. CBA has a way to go before they truly start listening, or even engaging in conversational listening. Until then, I guess they have to rely on the likes of Derek to keep digging them out of these holes

CRM Vendors Continue to Confuse the Social Media Space

I continue to spend time working on our strategy and product offering around social media for the B2B world. Having evolved our business from the CRM space, we keep a close eye on what some of the big dicks are doing and I continue to be profoundly disappointed at what I’m seeing. And whilst it dismays me that I have to mention SFDC twice in the one month, it is necessary as yet again, the propaganda from SFDC has hit the airwaves without anyone being critical of what it all means.

Firstly, this initiative is not ground breaking. I commented on this recently in another blog post and stand by those comments and this additional post.

The article in question goes to great lengths to promote the failings of the social media monitoring tools (even mentioning the thought leaders like Radian6 and Techrigy) creating in my opinion a Benioff-esque tone of “they’re not a CRM so clearly they can’t be any good” as well as promoting a “jump in with jack boots” approach to interacting with the community

Example #1

After all, monitoring a conversation is one thing, but responding to it is another entirely — the domain of CRM, something Salesforce knows better than almost anyone else.

Monitoring or listening is one of the most fundamental activities of any company wanting to harness the power of the groundswell (with due credit to Li and Bernoff).

SFDC’s strategy seems to not so much put them on a collision course with the community monitoring start ups but puts you the customer on a collision course with your own community. I can’t help but feel SFDC are rushing into this space with grand plans about how you can use their platform to “respond” to social media activity yet they haven’t given a second of time to understanding the strategy that MUST reside behind the use of web 2.0 tools.

These “monitoring tools” deliver far more value than they are given credit for. Tools like Radian6 and Techrigy have a rich set of features that if used properly will allow a company to quickly and easily tap into the true feeling of the community. And it’s not just the “I’m interesting” bit that you should be tracking. Why not use these tools to keep an ear to what the community is saying about your strategic customers. Can you imagine going to one of your major customers with a solution to a problem that you unearthed via Radian6 when they probably don’t even know the problem exists? How can you use this information to deliver innovation to a major customer? I’m sorry but SFDC isn’t going to do that for you…

Example #2

But monitoring thousands of conversations across Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and blog comments is only part of the challenge. You still have to respond to them.

Absolute rubbish. If anyone goes into this thinking they need to respond to every piece of social noise about their company or products then they will fail quickly (and spectacularly).

This is what you’ll be doing if you follow what the author and SFDC are suggesting:

Due credit to Marta Zagan

Let me repeat something else Marta Zagan suggests – “The goal is not to control the conversation”.

In simple terms, the goal of using social network analytics is to watch, listen, and share some information with your community.

Don’t ever think you can skip the listen bit. And without tools like Radian6 or Techrigy you won’t be listening properly. Brian Solis (Social Media Manifesto) commented – “It’s about conversations, and the best communicators start as the best listeners”. Think about that for a minute. Isn’t this suggesting we step back and listen, then contribute? Not jump in boots and all with a human-being charged with responding and controlling?

Don’t go jumping in thinking you can communicate. You will need humans involved, but more importantly you need to have everyone understanding what the strategy is and what effort and commitment is required. Because this social media stuff isn’t easy. Get your VP of Sales in and let them see the data, let the Exec’s see what people are saying, in fact, make it a priority to have non-sales and marketing people looking at some of this information so that you can gain insights into the information.

CRM will have a role to play in how you engage with your communities, but it can’t be the driving force behind this. You must have everyone understanding how you as a company will harness these tools to deliver a dialogue and engagement. And you must also confront the problem of whether you even want this data in the CRM in the first place.

And just so you know, there are some CRM vendors doing some far more interesting work in this space than SFDC. RightNow is really ahead of the curve when it comes to customer experience management and SugarCRM are miles ahead in terms of how they are harnessing the power of open source with these great new web 2.0 tools.

Gorilla in their midst – hardly…

Your comments are welcome as always

Salesforce.com – behind the times but applauded by the analysts

Tech Target reports today that Salesforce.com is moving customer service into the cloud and allowing integration with communities, discussion groups, forums etc. Whilst the analysts are (yet again) falling victim to the relentless PR machine that is Salesforce.com what this release actually says is two things.

Firstly, they are way behind the times when it comes to innovation in customer service. What SFDC has announced here was actually pioneered by RightNow Technologies and Lithium around 3 years ago. RightNow Service was integrated into the Lithium community platform providing a complete customer experience solution that focuses the overall customer care experience. So why is it news that it’s taken SFDC 3 years to catch up?

Secondly, they still don’t get this whole social media/web 2.0 space. Their approach so far has been to latch themselves onto other people’s ideas and let hubris take over. I particularly liked the comment from SSPA VP Ragsdale – “They’ve done a good job of latching the Salesforce brand with the FaceBook brand”. Many SFDC customers must be truly confused as to what all this means.

Innovation in customer service (or customer experience management as it is rightfully called) is being done elsewhere. Here’s a good example – Greg Gianforte – not spewing out noise or grandstanding, but actually getting out into the field and talking to real customers, listening to real business issues and bringing this back into his organisation.

Ragsdale rightly comments that as many organisations are new to social networking and many of the web 2.0 ideas and need help understanding how to leverage these ideas and technology components – something we’ve been championing at Smart Selling for a while now.