Monthly Archives: June 2009

In India, Social Media without the Media

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I came across this article from the Wall Street Journal last week:

The Infomercial Comes to Life in India’s Remotest Villages
Traveling Salesman Mr. Sharma Sings, Jokes To Spread Gospel of Global Consumerism

It’s an interesting profile of a man named Sandeep Sharma who travels around rural India selling products from big brands like Nokia and Nestle. He uses a variety of tactics to get locals interested in his presentations, and I couldn’t help but think that he’s essentially following a lot of the tenets of successful word-of-mouth marketing and social media campaigns, but instead of using Twitter or Facebook or the Web to reach his audience, he’s doing it in real life.

Here are a a few takeaways:

1. Blogger Relations: Respect the blogger and make sure your pitch is relevant to their audience

Sharma approaches the elders at each village he stops in and first asks their permission to deliver his sales pitch and also to find out who he should target in the village (who has the money). He doesn’t just roll into town and start selling. In blogger relations, it’s important to engage with the blogger (the village elder) and understand how they prefer to be pitched and how to appropriately reach out to their community. This means no comment spamming or depersonalized e-mails to the blogger. Like Sharma, it’s important to ask for permission to be let into their community.

2. Brand Awareness: Get the audience involved

Instead of setting up a stage and just lecturing the crowds with a sales pitch, Sharma makes his presentations interactive. He invites participants up to the stage for quizzes and giveaways about the products. He gives detailed product explanations and demos and allows the audience to test out the merchandise. He stages funny skits and plays that the audience can participate in and has even run American Idol-type contests. All of this activity is focused around getting the audience involved with the products he’s selling. Too many companies or brands are still in the mode of talking at potential customers instead of talking with them. Sharma knows how to involve an audience and make them feel like a part of his show. They’re more likely to buy if they’re engaged.

3. Community Building: Respect community norms

The soaps and lotions Sharma sells are targeted toward women, but cultural norms in rural India dictate that he shouldn’t make direct eye contact with the women in the village. He sets up a screen to shield himself and he allows the men of the village to ask the questions, even for women’s products. Sharma knows that being insensitive to the mores and rituals of the village is a quick way to get run out of town. Often brands try to burst in on an online community with a sales pitch without stopping to first understand who makes up the community and how they operate. Spamming a discussion board with sales messages is a quick way to alienate the very community that you’re trying to sell to. Know what the norms are before you engage.

4. It’s not about the tools: Really, it’s not

Sharma manages to get villagers interested and talking to each other about products without using any of the snazzy, jazzy tools that we in the social media world are all spun up about. He doesn’t Twitter, he doesn’t push out promotions via Facebook, he doesn’t use e-mail. But he epitomizes what it means to be social and encourage interaction and awareness about a product with a target audience. The “it’s not about the tools” mantra has been repeated countless times, but Sharma shows us that it’s really true!

I encourage you to check out the article on WSJ.com. What else can we learn from Sandeep Sharma?

Communications transparency: Seeing through the Brown

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It’s not exactly lying if you generally tell the truth but leave out some details, right? Well, my Irish Catholic upbringing would probably argue that’s a sin of omission. It happens all too often in marketing and when it’s inevitably revealed that a company wasn’t being entirely truthful, the reputational damage that ensues can be severe. “Leaving out” important details can be just as bad as outright lying about a product. With the social media mantra of being transparent (can we put that word to bed yet?) people are expecting, perhaps now more than ever, to get straight-up and honest communication from companies and brands.

Which brings me to FedEx. Yesterday I noticed tweets from Mike Germano and Lisa Hoffmann about a new Web site: BrownBailout.com. Check it out. It’s a site that chastises UPS for trying to insert wording in legislation that would somehow change the way FedEx is regulated. I’m not going to go into details about the actual argument presented on the site (something about whether delivering packages predominantly through the air or by ground impacts what type of regulatory act a company falls under). But in general, the goal of the site is to get average Americans to contact their legislators and let them know that they oppose the “Brown Bailout.”

In certain ways, the site/campaign is very well done. It features a video on the home page that spoofs the UPS “white board” ads. The campaign plays up the animosity that many Americans are feeling right now toward bank and auto bailouts (even though I don’t think the issue at hand actually involves any direct infusion of cash from the government to UPS). The site enables sharing across social platforms with ample “share this” links for content. It mixes media such as video, blogs and charts. Visitors can register to get more info sent to them via e-mail. There’s an online petition, a newsroom and voluminous facts and counterpoints presented that are actually quite informative about the differences in the FedEx and UPS business models.

It’s a public awareness campaign, but one of the things the site seems to try very hard NOT to make people aware of is that the site is run by FedEx. In teensy-tiny print on the home page, at the bottom, is a small notice that says “Copyright 2009, FedEx.” I had to dig around on the site to finally get to a press release within the site newsroom that acknowledges that the Brown Bailout campaign is run by FedEx. But I doubt most “average Americans” who aren’t that interested in transparency or marketing would take the time to do that. Many people could very easily visit the site and not realize that Brown Bailout is not an independent organization of concerned citizens but a public relations campaign from UPS’ biggest competitor.

blurredFedEx isn’t exactly being opaque here – you can figure out that the site is run by the company if you hunt around. But I certainly wouldn’t call it transparent, either. Part of me understands – if the site was overtly branded and labeled as a FedEx site, perhaps people would be less interested in or trusting of the information, and probably less likely to take action on behalf of one big corporation in its schoolyard rumble with another. But most of me just feels extremely skeptical about this tactic – my red flags are raised.

What do you think? How should FedEx have handled this campaign? Are you comfortable with the level of disclosure on the site? Are they putting themselves at risk of being labeled as fake or manipulative? Is it a sin of omission?

Image via Flickr user b0r0da

Why Facebook shouldn’t be your primary B2B marketing channel

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do_not_enterIt’s hard to determine which social media tool is more lauded as the second coming these days, but Facebook certainly ranks up there as a platform that many of the social media experts, mavens, gurus and even people who know what they’re talking about promote as an easy place to start your business’ foray into social media.

But here’s the thing – most of the really good examples out there are of B2C companies using Facebook to reach their target audience. There are far fewer concrete examples of successful use of B2B companies using Facebook. And I’d caution that it’s not a very good tool for B2B companies to use – as least not right now, anyway.

Why? One simple word: blocking. Those of us who dabble around in social media all day from our laptops, iPhones, or the comfort of our Web 2.0-crazed agency jobs can easily forget that THOUSANDS of people work for companies who block Facebook at work (some gobbledy-gook about productivity?). For B2B companies, their target audience is usually (obviously) other companies, but more specifically, it’s the decision-makers within those other companies. This could mean purchasing managers, marketing managers, IT managers or the C-suite. You can have the snazziest Facebook fan page in the world for your business, but if none of your target audience can actually access it during the day while they’re at work (and making those decisions about whether to use your company’s product or service), then it’s probably not the best way to engage your potential customers.

I could write a whole series of posts on the annoyance of Internet blocking software at work, how it’s a management and not an IT issue, how social media tools can actually increase productivity… but these have already been written and rehashed. Shel Holtz even founded a Web site dedicated to the issue, StopBlocking.org. But the reality is that several companies still routinely block Facebook and other services, and while those people your company is trying to reach probably DO have a personal Facebook profile, many of them can only access it at home, after the workday. Unless they are really, really passionate about finding the lowest-cost widget or solving their company’s CRM software needs or testing out a new benefits delivery system (heck, there’re probably people who are), I doubt they’re likely to spend too much of their personal time in the evenings on your company’s Facebook page.

Facebook can certainly be a key tool for your B2B business in adopting social media, but don’t forget the cardinal rule: Go where your customers are. And unfortunately, due to Internet blocking, many of them are NOT on Facebook at work.

Twitter’s language problem

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tripeLast week in Paris, the husband and I went to a local restaurant in the neighborhood where we were staying. We’d been doing okay up to that point in the trip with our non-existent French proficiency. At this bistro, the menu was completely in French (there weren’t even any pictures to help us cheat). I’m a notoriously picky eater and scoured the menu to decipher the words I could and hopefully ensure that I wouldn’t be ordering something I didn’t like. In the end, I chose a dish where I thought I had translated most of the words correctly. I figured I’d be getting Andouille sausage with peppers and shallots. When the owner of the restaurant sent over the lone waiter who spoke some English and I placed my order, he raised an eyebrow.

“I do not think you like that?” he said.

“Isn’t it sausage? Saucisse?” I asked him.

“No, it’s tripe. Like a stomach.”

I quickly switched my order to steak.

In my two-week sabbatical from social media, I made a ton of observations. The first, and probably most notable, was how much I take communication in English for granted. The online tools I use are in English and designed for the English-speaking world. All of the connections that I’ve made on Twitter are with English speakers. This seems like an obvious point, but for all the talk about how social media is tearing down barriers and letting people connect anywhere, anytime, well, it’s just not true. Plenty of non-native English speakers are on Twitter, but without instant translation there’s really no facilitation for me to connect with them. I’m sure there are brilliant marketing and PR minds who blog or tweet in German, French, Spanish, Mandarin or Italian. But I’m not going to find and connect with them online the way I have with English-speaking pros, because I can’t understand what they’re saying. And if they’re not proficient in English, they have no reason to find and connect with me, either.

I’m certainly not trying to sound ethnocentric here and demand that English become the lingua franca of Twitter and the Internet (although in many ways, it already is). Many social media platforms are now available in foreign languages (heck, Facebook even allows for an ”English -Pirate” option). I have several multilingual friends whose Facebook walls are an even mix of English and additional languages, based on who they’re talking to. Certain countries, cultures and language groups have developed different social networking sites that are popular within that community but not among English-speakers (think Mixi in Japan or Cyworld in South Korea). However, despite it being easier than ever before to connect and communicate with people from anywhere in the world, the online language barrier is still there and in some cases, it’s very high.

Twitter is dominated by English speakers, and I don’t really see that changing. But part of the fun of Twitter is seeing who your followers are replying to and following and then clicking on their names and seeing what they have to say. I’ve discovered many new friends this way. It’s much harder to make those types of connections when tweets are in a language you don’t speak.

I think a few interesting things could happen in the near future regarding how “global” the Twitter phenomenon becomes:

  1. Twitter will remain an anglophone service and non-native English speakers won’t join. English is a hard enough language to learn as it is, without taking into account the ROFLs, IMHOs, FWIWs and FTWs. If non-native speakers do join Twitter in droves, then I would expect the Twitterverse to become somewhat segragated by language: French speakers predominantly follow and interact with other Francophones, Spanish-speakers tweet with other Spanish-speakers, etc. You’d end up with sub-communities within Twitter that likely wouldn’t overlap a lot.
  2. Non-English speakers wanting in on the joys of microblogging will flock to or create similar services in their native languages. There will end up being a Dutch version of a Twitter-like service, a Swedish one, a Portuguese one… each of these services might even incorporate other cultural hallmarks specific to the language community (differences in privacy controls, for example).
  3. Instant or near-instant translation services will proliferate and get better and language will start to become less of an issue in allowing people to connect online. It would be great to have a Firefox plugin that could automatically, accurately translate a Tweetstream into a language of your choice, thus allowing you to connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t. I’m talking real-time, in-converstaion translation. There are some big potential pitfalls here (can auto-translation really capture nuance, figures of speech, euphemisms, etc.?), but the alternative is just never connecting with someone who’s not fluent in the same language as you.

In an excellent post a few years ago on her blog, Stephanie Booth pointed out that most people won’t use Web services that don’t talk to them in their language (it’s a long post but definitely worth reading).  Around that same time, Shel Israel noted that in the absence of translation tools, bloggers who blog for business purposes often need to move from the local network to the global one, and that usually requires English.

I’d love to hear your thoughts here. How do you see Twitter in specific, and social media in general, growing and adapting to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages? How do we connect with people but make sure we don’t end up eating tripe?

Image via Flickr user dipfan