Coping with Social Media

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. From Harvard Business Review, I’m Sarah Green. Today we’re talking with Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social and Interactive Media Center at Emily Carr University, and the co-founder of Social Signal, a Vancouver-based social media agency. Thanks, Alex, for joining us today.

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: Nice to speak with you, Sarah.

SARAH GREEN: Alex, I read somewhere the quip that only journalists use Twitter. Certainly that’s an industry where the business case for using social media is clear. For instance, a baseball writer could report trade rumors, could follow other writers, their avid readers could follow them. But is there a real business case to be made that every business needs to be on the social web?

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: I think there is a great business case to be made for just about every company being on the social web. That doesn’t mean that every company should be on Twitter. And I think one of the challenges that a lot of businesses face is that the social web is very trendy, and the network that you have to join seems to pop up every three months. Last year it was Twitter, this year it’s foursquare. There’s always going to be another network around the corner. And not every network is right for every business. It really depends on the customers you’re trying to reach.

So for example, Twitter I recommend really highly to companies that are oriented toward a professional customer or that are in the B2B space, great choice. If you are a company that sells cosmetics, or you’re selling home improvement products, you’re selling something that people are using in their after hours, Twitter might not be your best bet. And for consumer products you may well be better off trying to reach your customers on Facebook.

SARAH GREEN: So I’ll admit to being a Facebook junkie, and that I have a hard time keeping up on Twitter. And there is other social media that I have sort of accounts with, but they’re like zombie accounts and I almost never use them. How much do you think people really need to keep up with whatever they’ve selected?

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: It’s a tough question to ask somebody like me, because since my shtick is social media I feel like I have to keep up with almost every account I open. And it’s one of the reasons that I envy my friends who aren’t social media professionals, because I think if you aren’t someone who needs to brand yourself with social media then you don’t need to be on every network. And in fact, like anything in life, if you spread yourself too thin you really can’t have a meaningful experience on 20 different networks. And so you’re much better off figuring out which networks you need, and the only way to do that is by knowing what you’re trying to accomplish.

And actually I heard a great thing on another HBR IdeaCast a while ago with somebody you spoke to who talked about how you want to look at the different aspects of your life and think about the overall balance of your professional goals, your personal goals, and then personal development. And I think if you look at the different parts of your life and you think about where you’re out of balance, then you could look at social networks as a way of making up the gap.

So maybe you’re doing great at work and you feel like you’re really achieving your professional goals, but you’re not spending as much time connecting with your family or connecting with your kids, connecting with your friends, as you want to. Well, then what you want to do is ask yourself, is social media a tool that can help refocus my attention on that personal side of my life? And maybe one way of doing that is by setting up Facebook so that you get more content from your old friends, or you’re prompted to share your photos, and maybe you even have that pop up for yourself at a time of day, you know 5:30 when, yeah, you could keep working for another hour and a half, but maybe if that’s the time of day where you check in with Facebook it’s going to be a little bit of a reminder for you that, hey, your kids are waiting at home, it’s time to close down the computer.

On the other hand, if you’re someone who has a great and thriving social life, and maybe the fact that you’re on Facebook four times a day is what lets you keep up with the latest parties and lets you know what’s going on with your friends, then maybe your career is stalling a little bit. Maybe you’re not the expert in the office that you were five years ago. Then taking some time to find people on Twitter who are in your field who can help you build that professional network and get back on the cutting edge is a great way of moving your professional goals forward.

SARAH GREEN: I think you’re referring there to the interview we did with Stu Friedman whose forte is increasing personal effectiveness and performance. It’s interesting to hear you say that you can use the social web to actually increase your personal effectiveness and your productivity, because we focus so much of our attention on social media and how it affects company branding. But I hear you saying something much more personal.

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: Well, I think that social media has been taken up very rapidly within businesses as a marketing tool because it’s the easiest place to tell a story about our ally. And, speaking personally, when we started our company five and a half years ago and social media wasn’t even a phrase yet, and most people didn’t even know the term Web 2.0. So what we were saying to people was maybe your organization could benefit from having a more participatory web presence. That was the way we described it to people. Well, for most organizations that was a real stretch and they couldn’t really see how it would help them. And the easiest way for them see it was to say, well, this is a great way of carrying your message to your supporters if you’re nonprofit, or this is a great way of carrying your brand to your customers if you’re a business.

And so for, I think, a lot of companies social media has gotten plugged into that marketing space because it’s an obvious fit. But the reality is that the impact of social media is only really going to be realized to the extent that people within your organization are using it to be more effective at what they do. And that’s especially the case, frankly, for organizations that are investing in it as a marketing tool, because what happens is you go out there with a story, and United is a great example, you go out there with a story and you’re on there using all these social media tools, but your customers are still having a bad experience. And then they’re talking about it with a United Breaks Guitars kind of YouTube video, and you have a huge problem.

So you actually have to be able to transform your organization internally to deliver on the brand message you’re delivering, and the only way to do that is if the people in your organization are really plugged in in that real-time way. They are becoming the best professionals they can be because they’re following best practices that they’re reading about on Twitter, or they’re connecting with the best people in their field on LinkedIn. And the same is true in your personal life. I mean, I think we all are struggling and, frankly, the internet is contributing to this. The fast pace of our professional lives now crowd out our personal time, and social media can be a very effective way for people to reassert that balance and to make more time for their personal lives. And in particular to make more connections to the people who keep them grounded.

SARAH GREEN: Now I want to press a little further on this, because this dovetails with something you’ve written about for hbr.org, which is that some of the business opportunities for the future of social media are the unsolved problems of things like contact list overload, information overload. Some of what you alluded to there is the fast pace of the internet. But can more internet really be the answer to too much internet?

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: I think it’s a question of which internet. So more definitely is not the solution. And in fact I think, more and more I hear the most thoughtful people I know and the most tech-savvy people I know talking about the choices they make around unplugging. So I met a guy recently who told me that he turns his BlackBerry off for one day every week just to be with his kids. I know people who are leaving Facebook because they just feel like it’s one more network than they can keep on top of. So I think the challenge for people is not necessarily to spend more time online, but to definitely apply more thought and more attention and more intention to the time they spend online because I think the rapid onslaught, the number of networks, the amount of information that’s out there gets us all into this mindset where we’re trying to keep up.

And what’s liberating is to realize that you absolutely can’t. There’s just so much, too much, to keep on top of. You cannot keep track of enough RSS feeds that you will always know what people are talking about when you get to the meeting. You cannot join so many social networks that you will have had a really meaningful experience and an understanding of the network that people are talking about at the last conference you just attended. It’s too much and so you’ve got to start with thinking about what you’re trying to do, and technology can help you do that. I mean, there’s wonderful blogs out there like Lifehacker that help you make strategic choices and make better use of the technology and tools that you’re using, figuring out how to make it fit with your own work flow. But, like anything, it starts with understanding your own goals and your own work habits and figuring out the tools to complement those instead of just trying to go with whatever other people say is important.

SARAH GREEN: So one thing I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into, the United Breaks Guitars YouTube phenomenon. I do think that there is this tendency in social media, it reminds me of the quip that a lie races halfway around the world while the truth is lacing up it’s sneakers. And not that the United Breaks Guitars was a lie, but it just seems that if you do have bad PR, something happens, real or imagined, it gets re-Tweeted, it goes out into these RSS feeds, and it sort of snowballs before you really can even be aware that it’s going on. If you have made a mistake that is now sort of being amplified by this echo chamber, what are you supposed to do?

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: Well, it’s an interesting question and I think there’s two answers. And you need sort of distinguish between two kinds of cases. There are the companies that make mistakes with social media that get amplified. And so for example, you’ve got the Skittles scenario where Skittles made this website that was aggregating any tweet related to Skittles, and they didn’t think about the fact that people are going to abuse that. You’ve got, arguably, the GM Tahoe campaign where they invited people to make their own Tahoe ads and didn’t think people were going to abuse that. And I think when it comes to making social media mistakes– in both of those cases folks have argued that it wasn’t a mistake and that the exposure they got was worth the negative PR that went with that, but fundamentally I think if you’re going to be using social media you need to avoid making those mistakes as much as possible by putting things out there that are genuinely integrated with your brand that you could really stand behind. I think the Tahoe is a good example because here they’re trying to promote how green GM was and at the same time they’re pushing a very high footprint vehicle, so you really have to think about your consistency and try and avoid making mistakes, and in particular think about the risk profile of what you’re doing.

The other kind of scenario we’re talking about, the Uniteds, the Dominoes, these are the companies that have a pretty typical kind of problem, bad customer service, fundamentally, in both cases. But now it can be spotlighted in a different way. Well, that, I think, is a challenge that companies have to deal with by, again, being as authentic as possible, being as transparent, and being quick.

Part of the problem was, I believe in Domino’s, case it took them a little while to get online with a response to those videos. And you lose control of the story. I mean, these are situations where time is measured in minutes, literally. And so unless you’re doing really good social media monitoring where people are watching, and as stories are breaking, and if your brand mentions are picking up steam really quickly, you know something’s happening. You need to be in a position as a company where you can respond as quickly as possible. And that does not work if you have a traditional PR machine where every response has to go through 18 layers.

And one of the things we see with a lot of organizations that really slows them down in adopting social media is they don’t want to monitor because they feel like if they monitor they have to respond. And they feel like they cant respond, because to respond you have to go through layers of approval. Well, I mean, that’s just craziness. Just because you’re not monitoring, doesn’t mean you’re not getting talked about. And once you’ve decided you’re going to listen, it’s better to respond with somebody making a judgment call in the moment than to take four hours to say, it’s not true that we grind up rats and put them in our hamburgers.

SARAH GREEN: I think what I’m hearing you articulate when you talk about the need to respond with speed and not 18 layers of bureaucracy or some approvals process that just goes on for hours, is that responsiveness and authenticity are better than corporate messaging when it comes to social media.

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: Well, this is really the first rule of social media, and I think it’s the toughest for a lot of organizations. Social media is not a medium for corporate identities. It’s a medium for people to connect with people. And time again organizations that have done the best are the ones that have had some individual who’s become the face of the organization.

So for example, the guy at Comcast who became the face of Comcast on Twitter. When folks see a human being with an organization, it instantly humanizes the brand, humanizes the organization, and they’re going to feel a lot more concerned and connected to their friend Frank than they are to Comcast as some massive empire. And those relationships absolutely require authenticity because I’m not going to care about Frank if I feel like he’s just feeding me the latest bit of PR spin from the company. I want to know that he’s a person. I want to know that he cares personally about what’s happening in his company. And if he’s having a bad day, well hearing about that actually contributes to my sense of him as a real guy.

And so in a medium where it’s all about relationships, it’s all about how much we feel connected to one another, the ability for brands, the ability for organizations to transcend that kind of traditional message push and instead get into a conversation in which they are actually genuinely present as human beings connected to other human beings is crucial. But it’s incredibly hard because authenticity is almost the opposite of how we’ve come to think about brands. We think about brands as these constructions, these ways that we put the best face on an organization. Whereas in fact the most powerful brands are those that are really a distillation of what’s essential about a company or essential about an organization.

And if you can re-find that core of your brand that is connected in an authentic way to what you do well as an organization, and then see that carried through, not in messaging and not in taglines but in the voice, the behavior, the way that people in your organization think to relate your customers, then you’re going to be able to engage very successfully in social media because everything your employees do is going to speak to your brand. Whether it’s posting stuff on Twitter that they found interesting, that reflects the way that you’re engaged with your community, whether it’s reaching out to people in a personal way because you have personal relationships with your customers, you care about them. It’s all going to be of a piece.

SARAH GREEN: It does seem odd that it would be so challenging to be a human being.

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: Well, I think, frankly, it’s a reflection of the culture that we live in. And we’ve got this really long standing historical dichotomy between the personal and professional and between the work and the home. The folks who are very effective in social networks are often the people who do the least to preserve that personal-professional boundary. So you’ll see people who Twitter about their company on the one hand, and then at the same time are making jokes with their buddies about the weekend fishing trip on the other.

And so I think that this evolution towards us having integrated work and personal persona online, it’s a natural extension of the path that technology has put us on, of seeing those two converge. That can work beautifully. If it helps us be more authentic, if it helps us form real relationships, if it helps be whole people, whether we’re at the office and we’re Twittering as a customer relations officer, or we’re at home and we’re sharing photos on Facebook, we’re the same person. And to the extent that you can be that whole person 24/7, other people are going to respond to that and connect with you. And it’s going to be good for your work and it’s going to be good for your personal life.

The challenge I think we have is as they get blurred, again it becomes more challenging to maintain that work-life balance. If I’m coming home and I’m on Twitter or I’m on Facebook because that’s where I connect with my friends, but that’s also where I have conversations with people during the workday, it’s really easy for that back and forth I have with the boss or back and forth they had with one of my customers to bleed over and be something I’m dealing with while also putting supper on the table for my kids.

SARAH GREEN: Well, fascinating discussion. Unfortunately, that’s all we have time for today. Alex, thanks so much for talking with us.

ALEXANDRA SAMUEL: Thank you so much, Sarah. It was great talking to you.

SARAH GREEN: That was Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social and Interactive Media Center at Emily Carr University. For more from Alex, go to hbr.org.