What Happens When You Avoid the Groundswell

Janet was good at representing Exxon Mobil Corp on Twitter. She responded to people's inquiries, provided interesting facts about the company, and even talked about the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill. The problem, though, was that Janet was not an Exxon employee. Nor was she affiliated with Exxon in any way, shape or form!

As you can imagine, this scared the pants off of corporate giant Exxon, who takes great care in controlling the messages they send out to the public. They've designated only a handful of employees to deliver such messages. When the story broke in 2008, "Janet" was using http://twitter.com/exxonmobilcorp to falsely portray Exxon, even using a background picture of Exxon gas stations. Exxon reps commented at the time that they were not using Twitter or any other social networking tool, and clearly weren't monitoring the buzz about their company online, avoiding the groundswell completely.

Brand jacking is not something new to the web - because it's so easy to set up a profile, anyone can be pretend to be an employee from a company in just minutes. (See a list of official Twitter brands here.) Rather than following the steps outlined in Groundswell to listen, talk, energize, support, and embrace their online constituents, Exxon chose to deal with the situation behind closed doors - contacting Twitter to have the false feed removed because of copyright infringement of the photos and immediately talking to and responding to questions from the press.

What they should have done is participate in the groundswell from the beginning. Large corporations should invest the resources and budget to hire someone to maintain their online presences and snatch up corporate names like "exxon mobil corp" on Twitter and Facebook before brand-jackers do. They should think of a strategy for their online presence, engage their audiences, and participate in discussion. This incident cost Exxon its brand identity, called attention to their non-engagement online, and fooled the Twittersphere, costing them the precious trust of the online community.

As of today, it appears that Exxon has set up an official Twitter feed. Like Groundswell says, you cannot ignore this trend.

It Really is a Small World

"Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends to the network. If you know someone with this privilege, you can ask them to invite you. If not, please be patient and continue to ask around in your own personal and professional circles.”

Ouch? That’s the message on one of the opening pages of A Small World (ASW), a self-described “private international community of culturally influential people who are connected by three degrees.” This exclusive social network seems to contradict much of what we think when we hear “social networking sites,” which are generally described as huge, open networks that generate a lot of "noise" like Facebook or Twitter. It also contradicts Emmanuel Rosen’s faith in the six degrees of separation theory, which ASW has now tightened to only three degrees. But, this site has generated a lot of attention and highlights an interesting genre of social networking: niche networking sites. While other niche sites like Linked In, which caters to professionals, or Classmates.com which connects classmates together, or even Tripadvisor.com which brings together people based on travel experiences, this type of exclusivity is new to the online social networking model and has proven to be a contributor, generator, and facilitator of buzz.

So perhaps we’re on to something here – can a closed, tight-knit community catering to a specific demographic be a marketer's dream? ASW's strategy has proven to be wildly successful. A huge benefit of these types of networks is that they generate appeal to advertisers who want to target a specific group of people in one place (in ASW’s case, advertisers include high-end luxury brands such as Mercedes and Cartier). It also can serve as a breeding ground for word of mouth marketing among like-minded individuals who are interested in the same products.

Niche social networking sites eliminate the daunting complexity of social networks that Rosen describes. On this site, particularly, marketers can be sure that a person’s “friends” are actually a direct friend of the person, or a friend of a friend – only separated by a maximum of three degrees. Unlike larger social networks that cater to the general population, such as Facebook, ASW actually shows “tie strength,” a concept Rosen says social networks lacks. On ASW, you can click on someone’s friend and a map showing how they know each other and through who appears. It's always a close connection.

However, ASW does reinforce Rosen’s principle that people who have similar interests and likes and are generally similar to each other are more likely to link together. ASW is a perfect example of this. It’s a forum where people with similar cultural interests can gather and discuss travel, entertainment and nightlife in discussion forums. Users can gain new information from people that they are not directly connected to, but are still in the same network, which Rosen describes as important criteria for buzz to spread. The forums on ASW are brimming with comments, questions, experiences, suggestions, and advice. In addition, people on ASW also take their relationships offline, forming small gatherings. and real-life “clusters” to network with each other, share information, meet new people, etc.

Perhaps such niche social networking sites are the wave of the future?

I'm taking two classes this semester at Johns Hopkins - International Public Diplomacy and Public Relations in the Age of Digital Influence. This weekend, I've been immersed in Emanuel Rosen's book, "The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited," in what seems like the first moment of quiet I've had to just read and think in ages (thanks, blizzard!). I realized that a concept was beginning to emerge that was important, if not vital, to success in both public diplomacy and social media strategies: listening. Yep, listening.

A concept that seems so native to us is so difficult to put into practice. Listening is the silver lining of the successful case-studies that Rosen presents; the companies that listened to what their audiences wanted, whether it was to solve their grievances, answer questions, or even just to provide a way to easily contact the organization, were successful in their attempts to control the message they wanted to deliver to their audiences. Listening is the elusive task that any corporation wanting to make the most of word of mouth marketing or take advantage of the social media groundswell needs to master in order to craft a successful marketing strategy. But no one really does it.

My organization is a prime example of this. We set up both Facebook and Twitter pages just to be "involved" in the social media groundswell, without really listening to what our users wanted from us on these networks. How were these networks different from our website? Would they offer new, original content, or would they simply serve to expand the reach of the content on our website? Did our users expect us to talk to them, to engage them, to interact act with them, or to just pump out information? What did they want to know about us? Was social media important enough for us to allocate staff time and resources to it? Not having the answers to these questions is costing us to miss a prime opportunity to generate buzz around our organization using these incredibly powerful tools, especially in light of our new headquarters project that is beginning to become a visible part of the national mall's landscape.

Because of this, we can't quite call our presence on these sites a success yet, because we haven't even begun to do the initial listening and research. Stephen Colbert, the host of this year's Grammy's, asked his daughter several times during the show, "am I cool now?" She kept shaking her head. And I keep shaking mine because just having a presence on these sites, just like being present at the Grammy's, does in no way make us "cool." We have to actually do something - interact, become part of the the community, and give our users what they're looking for, just like how an artist at the Grammy's who performs something or wins something engages audiences and gives them something to talk about, to have a successful presence.

Similarly, listening is a vital, yet underused tool in public diplomacy. So many campaigns fail because they don't address what people want, or don't answer the questions people are looking for. Take the State Department's failed Shared Values campaign, for example. The undersecretary of public diplomacy commissioned a series of videos showing Muslims happily living in America. The videos were shown to Muslim audiences abroad in an effort to help combat growing anti-American sentiment. In the end, the campaign was deemed a failure. Anti-American sentiment was growing out of a dislike of U.S. foreign policies, and not out of a dislike of American culture or Muslims living in America. State department officials had failed to listen, and therefore, failed to address the root of a growing international problem.

Listening is essential to any marketing strategy. And because the Internet is identified as an important facilitator of buzz, companies and organizations should use the myriad of tools available to them online - RSS readers, search engines, newsletters, forums, etc - to listen to what their audiences are discussing and how they are doing it before attempting a strategy. Listening will help organizations identify what triggers conversation, what people are reacting to positively and negatively, and what the best ways are to engage audiences online and will help ensure an organization's success. We also shouldn't forget what Rosen points out in his book: listening is just the first part of a process. It must be in tandem with some type of action for it to be successful.