This is a very complex question, mostly formed by the understanding that legal and communication operate under two entirely different models. For the most part, legal is a risk based model and communications are an opportunity model. While segments of channel occasionally have similar goals, they rarely agree on much of anything.

The only real time that legal and communicators will connect is when the two niches reach a like-minded adoption point.

Right now communicators are being thrust through a speedy evolution. I’m sure many would say they are “hanging on to a rocket for one hell of a ride”

Lawyers are often 18 to 36 months behind the rocket, watching as it shoots into the sky and pondering the thought “what are we going to do about all this smoke?”

This causes many corporate communication groups to be tied up by legal concerns as they adopt the evolution trend of the lawyers. Unfortunately that means they leave the business and the marketplace open to smaller and more nimble competitors.

In the same time delay, employees and mid-management are naturally being exposed to social media channels… often creating decisions that executive teams most spend tremendous effort to maneuver around.

When we think about this fundamental scenario, most legal teams argue “we can’t build new rockets because of the danger” and communication teams are flying around saying “it isn’t our choice; we are already airborne.”

While you ponder that conflict, I decided to include MyRagan’s bullet list of “five things lawyers look for in social media.”

How many other things can you look for in your social media communications?

• 1. Use properly attributed content. Whether you’re using content—a photo, song, or video—a lawyer will want to make sure you’ve checked out licensing agreements, consents, and intellectual property rights.
• 2. Avoid unfair or deceptive trade practices. Don’t give the Federal Trade Commission any reason to investigate your company’s social media presence by making outrageous, false, or misleading claims.
• 3. Keep in mind the FTC’s guidelines that require bloggers (and now social networking sites) to disclose when they’ve received freebies in exchange for a review.
• 4. Will you allow feedback, comments or trackbacks? Erickson asks: “Do you want others to link to the company fan page? Should users be able to leave comments on a company blog anonymously? Should someone moderate, review, and possibly reject some comments? Would moderation really be manageable?”
• 5. In case something goes wrong, have a crisis communications plan in mind—or even better, in place—that includes Legal. It’s also a good idea to have a social media policy, so your employees know how they should act on the Web.

Here are two different case examples from this month to put the problem into perspective.

EXAMPLE ONE: I am presenting on social media ROI to an audience of  experienced and executive level professionals. Three different people basically said “I don’t see the benefit of marketing on Twitter, therefore social media has no benefit”

This would be the same as “I don’t see the benefit of driving a BMW, therefore cars have no benefit.”
It is the common need for people to categorize things they do not understand.

For the most part, we take for granted that everyone in the United States understands cars, but if you ask residents in Manhattan you may actually hear that “cars have no benefit.”.

You can also hear that “cars don’t have benefits” in many third world countries.

If you don’t have experience with cars or have never had someone educate you on the types of cars, it is probably a fair to assume that you must make observations about what you see.

If you live in Manhattan all your life, you could easily come to the conclusion that cars simply smell bad, cost a lot of money, and are really hard to find parking for (at least that is what you’ve heard.)

If you live in a third world country, you could easily come to the conclusion that the shape of a car is purely cosmetic, that they are noisy, and that people who drive cars must be lazy because they could just as easily walk.

Social Media is often categorized like this.

For a business mindset, the merits and flaws of tools must always be compared to the knowledge and creativity of the person using the tool. A hammer in a child’s hand is a risk, a hammer in a china shop is probably a bad idea, but a hammer in the hands of a carpenter can create a masterpiece.

EXAMPLE TWO: I organize several events in the social media niche. In the past thirty days, I decided to make my default networking introduction lead into the conversation of social media ROI. I wanted to know if professionals I was speaking with thought there was positive or negative ROI. I tracked the results on my mobile phone to help quantify my personal feeling that even in social media groups, professionals are having an extreme difficulty with the topic.

I  had 42 people in marketing/communication roles say that “social media marketing” really didn’t have good ROI.

The top responses for bad performance (multiple reasons allowed)

• lack of understanding (11)
• executive failure (10)
• poor framework (10)
• inconsistent results (10)
• “me too” mentality (9)
• no internal support (8)
• confusion (6)

An important answer that was at the top of the list was “executive failure.” Which was the category of answers that indicated the main problem with

The top responses for good performance (multiple reasons allowed)

• Flexibility (4)
• Affordable (3)
• Niche opportunities (3)
  

While the “good performance” answers only came from 5 individuals, all of them had very like-minded answers and displayed a notable personal demeanor of “I get this stuff and I’m not scared to learn more.”

When stating an answer to ROI, I asked them to follow-up by defining what social media is:

37 of the 42 (88 percent) could not reasonable identify or expand upon the idea of social media beyond the buzz statement “it is like Facebook and Twitter stuff.”

100% of those who could not discuss the concepts of social media generated 100% of the “poor ROI” answers.

Conclusion: if 88% of professionals claiming social media has poor ROI have a problem defining what social media is, how in the world could we imagine they know how to measure ROI?

If you are in the Seattle area and would like to learn more about social media, please come by and visit Social Media Club Seattle – where hundreds of professionals are learning more about social media. (Disclaimer, I am on the board of directors for SMC Seattle), read more on my personal blog here, or visit the 123SocialMedia blog where I share many other insights.

It was originally a serious set of questions when I was working with TMP Worldwide (and through them Monster.com)

When Monster.com came into existence, it really marked an era when the web became tied to our professional lives. The change didn’t happen overnight. It tooks years and years for recruiters and corporate giants to adopt new ideas, slowly and steadily trying to integrate changing fundamentals of online communication. 

For most of the 90’s, the digital consumer was arguably led by the digital business.

Then something happened: in the past few years the digital consumer became the leader. Corporations no longer updated consumers, but consumers are now updating (more like demanding) changes to the way business is  done.

This causes a lot of problems.

Most of the problems revolve around business decision makers not “getting it.”

This is often a story that I hear from other professionals in the social media / new media / digital space. At least 3 -4 times a month I have conversations with large groups of professionals who share the frustration of critical business elements being thrown away (or worse, being given to a competitor.)

One of the local groups (Social Media Club Seattle, disclaimer: I’m a board member) has monthly meetings with 150 to 250 attendees. Roughly a quarter of them are experts in the digital field (agencies, consultants, executives) and the other attendees are often professionals trying to learn effective ways of using “all this stuff.”

In an effort to educate them, I’ve been working on more and more comparison pieces to connect the dots. I hope some of the situational comparisons work for you.

Ideas from today:

• Reputation Insurance, why it makes good sense

Some other general ideas:

• Social Media Expert – Defining Impossibilities
• Social Media Training – Trauma Room or Wellness Program?

The light-hearted ideas:

• Social Media Labels – honest, simple, funny

If you have any situational comparisons of your own, please include them below in the comments.

I believe another core advantage will be organizations that redefine the term “employee asset” to include social assets. Every single employee or contributor to a project has the ability to support both internal and external ideas with a network of 50 to 1000 individuals. Understanding that as an organization grows in size, the multiple layers of departments and business niches creates hundreds of different customer silos internally and externally.

Within this framework we can use basic examples: employees become leaders, leaders become employees, family members become thought-catalysts, friends become survey groups.

• Who can answer this legal question?
• Is this line of code correct?
• Can you validate this outside our team?

In enterprise models, the transfer of intellectual and social assets are almost non-existent.

In the intellectual transfer model: if you have a question or need an asset;

• fill out a form
• route it to Department 34
• find out it went to the wrong department for five days
• resend it to Department 6
• hope they can help you (now that you are 4 days past deadline.)

In the social transfer model: after realizing your twenty person team has three people who don’t perform properly,

• Agree to meet at coffee pot to talk about informal methods of not sending a request to Department 34.
• At end of day, inquiry with TEAM TWO about process errors that can’t be fixed within TEAM ONE (your team)

In the entrepreneur / startup / social CRM model:

In the intellectual transfer model: you have a question that needs an answer,

• Ask your immediate team members how to fix
• Propagate to external professional network of friends
• Categorize unanswered questions with new expertise when team members disclose  unknown skills or learn new ones.
• Hire friends with proven skillset/expertise when match is found.

In the social transfer model: after realizing your ten person team doesn’t have the right skills to get the job done,

• Half of team has steak dinner at local tavern to relax
• Half of team returns to family life
• Next morning three solution experts are discovered
  • The first is found over game of darts, a stranger accidentally bumping team member mid-throw.
  • The second is a developer who is a friend of your team, casually invited to dinner the night before.
  • The third is the co-founders brother-in-law, who was well recommended by the co-founders wife.

Why is having a friend of a friend in the right place at the right time so valuable?

Markets and industries are being changed from both social and technological aspects seemingly overnight. For most corporations, there is no process for having a talented change agent in place so that the business can take advantage of an opportunity today. If a team needs to be brought up to speed and redirected to a new mission, the thirty to ninety day lag time of the traditional model causes you to miss the window of opportunity.

What do you think of this? Do you see larger organizations being crippled by the inability to transfer social and intellectual assets?

In the world of forward thinking minds, one of the best places to learn is the Startup Deadpool (the place where some once great ideas now lay dead and are barely remembered.)

Some near entrants to the Deadpool:

VEOH, once a proud competitor in the online video race… declared bankruptcy last Thursday. While not in the deadpool yet, Chapter 7 is at least a good foot in the grave. I hope that survives (but Chapter 7 is a pretty large obstacle.)

In terms of ideas, VEOH focused on offering full-length video services that competitors avoided. They also have some amazing little gadgets that are good for usability… but even $70m in funding didn’t work out.

Tweepml – Seattle 2.0 Founder Marcelo Calbucci created TweepML as a solution to Twitter’s lack of lists… and that feature was eventually added to the base Twitter experience (thus killing future Tweepml adoption.)

A key lesson here is that you really need to consider basing your venture on another company that you have no control over. Twitter (Facebook, Google, Microsoft) have the ability to control APIs and information with little or no regard to the entrepreneur. The same concept can be taken to nearly any other startup model that relies on a niche of a larger company (for instance, what if you made paper placemats for McDonald’s and they decided they would simply make their own placemats?)

The site is now up for sale on Tweepml blog using online auction site Flippa.

REALLY DEAD STARTUPS

Entellium – was a startup in Seattle, providing a sales based CMS that was aiming to compete with services such as Salesforce. Unfortunately the executives of the company decided to falsify financial records and present one set internally…. and the others to investors. Entellium’s assets were eventually bought by Intuit (where the domain quietly rests on a 404 not found page.) You can read about Entellium on Wikipedia here or visit the Google search here.

One of the best parts of Eventvue for other startups is reading the CEO’s final note:

Our Deadly Strategic Mistakes:

- tried to build a sales effort too early, with too weak of a product after initial financing

- waited too long to address the “nice to have” problem

- went after enterprise sales model with a non-recurring, small price

- didn’t make eventvue self-serve to let anyone come and get it

Our Deadly Cultural Mistakes:

- didn’t focus on learning & failing fast until it was too late

- didn’t care/focus enough about discovering how to market eventvue

- made compromises in early hiring decisions – choose expediency over talent/competency

Example Social Media Policies – this is a collection of over fifty different policies from all over the globe. While reading social media policies doesn’t sound terribly sexy or interesting… reading five to ten different policies from various companies really sheds a light on how professionals see the risk and benefits associated to social media. The originating article of corporate social media policy was also popular (but didn’t get read by 25k+ people)

Social Media for Demographics – this is honestly one of my favorites (I say that with full realization of being a metrics guy…) as was one of the first times enough information was collected in one place to compare some annual numbers from early 2009. Now that the data is somewhat old, the information it contains is an even better benchmark for seeing where trends are moving (it also led to the on-going collection of data that led to the 2010 demographic report.)

101 Twitter Ideas, Tactics, and Strategies – a collection of some of the “best ideas” on the web regarding how to use Twitter. Looking back at the information, I can personally/professionally say I’ve collected over ten of thousands of followers and hundreds of good contacts using the ideas in this article.

Social Media Training, Five Must Read reports for Big Business - if you had to read nothing else about social media, these five whitepapers would be critical assets for any professional. Each one is stuffed with great tidbits of insight and actionable information.

If you have another favorite article, please let me know. I’m basing the above articles on traffic volumes, commentary and web activity.

I recommend sitting down and watching all of these from top to bottom, as three of the videos are part of a series (Do You Know 2.0, 3.0, 4.0) that came from 2007. While the information is old, the reality of trends in 2007 is now a historical footnote for 2010. As we see adoption take root with several technologies moving through 2012/13, some of these videos will find themselves into world economics and business fundamentals training.

If you know of any other suitable videos that have this many metrics packed into a few minutes, please leave a link below.

DID YOU KNOW, HUMAN CAPITAL EDITION

DID YOU KNOW, 4.0

THE SOCIAL MEDIA REVOLUTION

DID YOU KNOW 3.0

DID YOU KNOW 2.0

BONUS VIDEO – Social Media ROI

To help streamline my own calendar and prevent schedule conflicts, I decided to revamp my old seattlesocialmedia.com site that was used as a personal test site and provide a useful tool to the community focused around three problems I personally experienced:

1. There is a massive amount of talk about social media. Everyone has a different angle. Every business is being transformed by communication changes.
2. There are great events happening every day. In all the noise I sometimes miss them. If I miss them on the radar… the common business professional didn’t even know they happened.
3. The great conversations overlap in three basic areas: niche focus, geographic distance, and timeframe.

The forth topic is match-making. As a strategic director of Social Media Club Seattle (SMCseattle.com), I receive five to ten inquiries about companies needing specific skills and five to ten inquiries from professionals trying to find a good home.

Seattle Social Media is a partial solution right now,

It currently provides two things:

A  list of local events covering different online topics, with a presentation layer to see events happening in a geographic sense. For me location was critical, as I spend an hour or two behind the wheel each day working on various corporate projects.You can see a sample map, along with a random selection of events below it. Hopefully this will help you attend some great events.

For job hunters, it also includes list of companies and jobs related to social media, search engine optimization, buzz marketing, etc. In the near future there will be a breakdown of job functions and companies, mapped against where these great opportunities exist in the real world (who wants a new job that is 60 minutes away?)

I hope you find some personal and professional benefits from my efforts. If you discover a need using SeattleSocialMedia.com, please let me know via the contact form here or by following me on Twitter @seattlesm or @barryhurd

This combination brought an unique asset: you could get an advertisement on fifteen types of distribution channel with one phone call.

You could also break about 100 regulatory policies and ten-fold your cost in punitive damages with the same phone call.

Looking around the world, a fellow social media comrade in arms (Karthik S, the head of digital strategy for Edelman in India) asked a question specific to the health care field:

Doctors using social media, would it be considered advertising?

Regardless of laws governing advertising by doctors or hospitals, would doctors engaging about their profession on social networks amount to advertising? Read more

Worthwhile and interesting article, especially considering global food-for-thought.

The worldwide perspective comes to a bigger legal question: the actual condition of whether or not we (as social media professionals) consider it advertising. When working with 1000’s of medical ads around the world when I was in telecommunications, each territory was held to completely different sets of rules and regulations around print and broadcast.

When dealing with regulation: city, state, country and industry groups all bring different legal requirements to play and have existing definitions of advertising. The key is really understanding that web media is both print and broadcast, but have not been clarified under most legislatures.

Another core issue of social media is that consumers, supporters and critics are all publishing on doctors information. In the U.S. and many other countries, you have Superpages, CitySearch, WebMD, etc publishing medical/doctor information as a third party with and without the doctor’s permission.

PRINT + BROADCAST = WEB

As a business professional, understanding that the legal and regulatory parameters of whether or not social media is advertising is critical. In most countries, the precedence for like-minded advertising provides the legal groundwork for what will exist in the social media space. The core problem is that the social media space is ALWAYS two to five years ahead of the written legislature.

An example of this legal/policy delay: In October 2009  the United States FTC placed a policy into affect regarding advertising testimonials, bloggers and celebrity endorsements. The unfortunate side conversation of the FTCs policy work is that it condemns almost everyone into the category of “advertising testimonials, bloggers and celebrity endorsements”

Why? Everyone is becoming a Celebrity

In the web world, everyone with an internet connection is becoming a celebrity. If we compare a professional from ten years ago with a communication network of 200 contacts (once considered a tremendous asset) and the average person online via Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook with a communication network of 5000+ …. at what number of communication and adoption numbers do we consider ourselves a celebrity?

If we take that question and apply it to a highly regulated field such as legal, medical or finance….. are these new regulations and policies forbidding regulated professionals from interacting online with the rest of the world

]]> http://barryhurd.com/2010/02/regulated-professional-is-social-media-considered-advertising/feed/ 1 http://barryhurd.com/2010/01/social-media-roi-the-art-of-metrics-and-methodology/ http://barryhurd.com/2010/01/social-media-roi-the-art-of-metrics-and-methodology/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:41:19 +0000 Barry http://barryhurd.com/?p=4133 Last week I spent an evening visiting the Seattle Art Museum’s collective display of Michelangelo. The exhibit helped define several concepts I had regarding social media and the elusive hunt for ROI. I decided to write this piece to shed the light on my perspective of looking past the numbers I love so dearly and asking the bigger question: what is the value of social media?

To answer this very complex question I needed to ask Michelangelo for assistance in defining how the world perceives his value.

How does this relate to social media?

Like Michelangelo’s artwork, social media is a connective layer of communication. Depending on the exact medium of social media and the audience we refer to, the before and after result of communication is an increased awareness on many fronts: personal, intellectual, emotional, conditional, relational and even spiritual.

When asked about the ROI of social media, I have often realized the question is attempting to quantify hundreds of interlocking pieces that are not fully comprehended. The unfortunate pitfall of the elusive social media return-on-investment question is that both the professional and the audience has allowed the term to become generic and all-encompassing.

If we compare the problem to Michelangelo’s masterpieces: any singular section can be given the YES / NO question of “Is it art?”

If Michelango’s entire work was placed into the category of “art”, defining any singular piece of his work as a beneficial statement becomes clouded.

Reducing the definition to an understandable level

If we could go back in time and question Michelangelo on the value of his insightful use of the brush: would he be able to quantify or qualify the nature of his work? would he be able to express the value of his perception and why he applied the art of his science to hundreds of masterpieces?

Can a painter quantify the percentage of return on the dollars spent on the paintbrush vs the person using it, then counter-balance the quality of paint, the absorbing factor of the canvas and comparing it against the drying time? Probably not. We wouldn’t even know where to start our question.

Even if an expert could help us define our beginning questions and help us understand the types of canvas and paint available, would you think the answer would result in anything of meaning to us? Probably not. We wouldn’t grasp his answer until much later.

If you gazed upon Michelangelo’s work and asked yourself the question: is there an ROI to art? Perhaps you would realize that the value of art is not within ROI, but expression of the human condition.

Instead of complex, perhaps simplicity?
Is Return on Investment simply a YES / NO statement?

When asked about the ROI of social media, I often realize the person asking the question is attempting to quantify the ideas of both common sense and the human condition. Streamlined and relevant communication is a fundamental component to how we function. Proving an inherent knowledge of best business practices and connected value assists in defining the value statement of Social Media, knowing that technology can assist in creating, categorizing, expediting and sharing information.

The problem with most complex projects is a failure to create this fundamental understanding.

In a perfect world the value of communication is within thousands of minute details that goes unnoticed by the casual observer.  If you grade any communication by a YES / NO qualifier AND substantiate its benefit towards reaching a communications epiphany, ROI becomes an issue of YES / NO.

EXAMPLE:

• If you are a painter, does a paint brush have value? YES / NO
• If you bring several paint brushes to the job site, does it increase credibility with clients? YES / NO
• If you can describe the use of different paintbrushes, does it provide acknowledgment of expertise? YES / NO
• If you can clarify when to use a paintbrush and when not to, can you save a client money? YES / NO

Establishing understandable points to the question of ROI is essential for any profession.

The ultimate answer to social media return on investment is not within creating a problematic equation of ROI for social media, but to educate decision makers on the fundamental benefits they are reaching by understanding communication channels. 

The next time you hear the question “Is there social media ROI?”

the rhetorical question “Is there value in communication?” may be the answer.

“Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.” ~C. W. Ceram