Releasing the balloons: social media as opportunity

I'm sorry you were so unhappy., originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

While following up on a comment I'd made the other day on Kris Krug's blog, I noticed some of the resources he's made available on his site. For those of you who haven't heard of Kris, check out his blog and his photos on flickr. He's an extremely gracious young man (having finally achieved 'older woman' status I'm allowed to refer to him as such). I thought it was hilarious that the very first person I met at the kickoff dinner for NV08 was one of its chief instigators and organizers, but in my new, far more relaxed approach to networking (i.e. I have no expectations other than the trading of information about myself and receipt of same in kind), I am often pleasantly surprised by the people I meet without even really trying.

Today's find was SmashLAB's White Paper: A Primer in Social Media, which can be downloaded as a PDF.

What a pleasure it was to read. It's recent (March 2008), and while it's not encyclopaedic in its scope, it has reinforced something that occurred to me earlier in the week: social media presents opportunities that were always available to companies and individuals, but which few, if any, chose to employ. There were, however, some exceptions and workarounds. Here are three:

Very early in my career, I worked for Maclean Hunter in the old Maclean Hunter building at the southeast corner of University and Dundas in Toronto. This was the heart of Chinatown, close to funky little Baldwin Street, as well as to the Art Gallery of Ontario. There were tons of restaurants in the area. But on rainy days, people tended not to go out to lunch, and made their way to the cafeteria instead (Torontonians don't have that same ability to cheerfully endure rain as Vancouverites. They don't do well with snow either. In fact, the only thing they do seem to be able to endure weather wise is extreme heat and humidity, which finally drove me out of town).

Let's face it, it was cafeteria food - a step up from the slop served in high school, university and hospital cafeterias, but not exactly cutting-edge cuisine. Still, it was cheap and not totally nauseating. One of the things I noticed on the occasions I had lunch there was the the vice president of the consumer magazine division and publisher at the time of Maclean's magazine, Lloyd Hodgkinson, was always there whenever I was. In fact, he sometimes sat at my table. Other times I saw him sitting with other employees from a variety of different magazines. What I never saw was Lloyd sitting with a cabal of other executives at or near his level in the corporation.

I was once sent to talk to him about something, and while waiting to see if he had a moment to talk, he came out of his office and answered his (absent) secretary's ringing phone. I waited till he was finished the call and then teased him about - well - basically about the tail wagging the dog. And in the nicest possible way, he immediately set me straight. Basically he said, it's my job to ensure Maclean's subscribers are happy. And if they're not, I want to know about it. But, I said, doesn't the circulation department look after all that? Yes, he said, but if someone has taken the trouble to call me, I want to hear what they have to say, and make it right if I can. (I am, of course, paraphrasing here, since the conversation took place sometime between 1981 and 1983, and while I do have almost perfect short-term recall of conversations that really and truly interest me, it has been a while, hasn't it?)

I also think a lot about my stint with Coles Bookstores at the time of its most frantic expansion by opening new stores (as opposed to its later engulf and devour strategy, when it consumed first the Classic and later the W.H. Smith book chain). This expansion (I think the number of stores was supposed to double in less than three years and penetrate the entire US market in that time) was putting horrific strain on the existing stores. Making projection was well nigh impossible, given that we were operating with shrinking salary budgets and trying to cope with no less than three increases in the minimum wage within a year and a half. It was a challenge, let me tell you, and we had to get very creative indeed to keep the store adequately staffed and try to control shoplifting (our security device at the time being a single larger mirror). I heard stories of managers becoming so frustrated that they quit without giving notice and mailed their store keys back to head office. It was hard to get a district manager to visit your store (they were supposed to do a circuit of all their stores every six weeks) so you could raise issues and get some support for improvements; they were all being conscripted to help with the expansion too. Head Office seemed pretty busy too, and while there was a newsletter of sorts, it didn't really contain the kind of news that was important to us. Much to my surprise, our best sources of information were the publishers' sales reps, who did visit us faithfully (even though we did everything but our mass market ordering through head office).

I once took a creative job search techniques seminar. During this day-long event, the instructor gave us tips on how to get to the person who had the power to hire us. He suggested that if we were having trouble getting past the person's secretary or the receptionist that we lurk in the area and wait till said support staffer left her desk, then basically rush the office of the person we wanted to see. I came as close as I ever had to having an apoplectic fit at hearing this suggestion. I had done temp work as both a receptionist and an admin assistant. I had done so when the organization I was working for was hiring. Trust me on this one, not a single person who gave me attitude when I was trying to set up an interview with them (or who was following up on their application), was *ever* hired by any of the close to 30 organizations for which I temped. Because, of course, when reporting back on interviews arranged or passing on messages regarding who had called, I transmitted not only the bare bones of who, when, and how to reach, but also the substance and tone of the interchange.

The smashLAB white paper quotes Yahoo Senior VP Jeff Weiner, referring to blogs, forums, and social media in general, as saying that there has never been a tool like this in the history of market research. "We can now tap into timely responses from the public, at very little cost."

I beg to differ just slightly here. There has always been a way to tap into timely responses. The information has always been available to those who wanted it, without going to the expense of costly market research. But in order to tap into that information, corporations would have had to actually engage with their staff and suppliers and to listen to what those who were dealing with the complaints and getting feedback on products at the sales level were actually saying. They would have had to open their ears and listen, and instead of going through the motions of staff days where cake and hotdogs were consumed and paintball pellets were shot in a teambuilding fiasco, they would have had to actually get down and dirty and make a two-way flow of information not only possible but probable. They would also have to have understood how destructive the creation of silos within organizations was, and that if personal-empire building within companies was permitted, the company's death knell had probably already been rung.

The smashLAB authors say, towards the end of the paper, that the communities created by and flourishing within the social media context 'tend to respond best to authentic, honest and respectable dialogue and conduct....Effective social media efforts build relationships between companies and consumers.'

Indeed they do. But the true value of social media is that these relationships can be built and maintained quickly, easily, and cost-effectively, and that the Zeitgeist is finally such that we, as consumers, now have the ability to access, act, react, and interact with those who are trying to market to us, and that we are now perceived as having critical mass. We always did have critical mass. We just didn't used to be quite so organized about exercising it. Nor has it ever been so easy for us to communicate with corporations. And they have the ability to benefit from our collective wisdom as end users.

One final point re the white paper: another lightbulb went off for me in the discussion of the 'WalMarting Across America' blog fiasco. What WalMart did wrong was not so much not being transparent about the fact that the trip was corporate sponsored or that the idea had originated with its PR firm, Edelman. What was really wrong was that they presented only the stories of happy WalMart employees. Had they been transparent even to the point of showing the good, the bad, and the rather homely, it's unlikely they would have been 'outed' as they were.

For decades now (well okay for almost exactly two decades), I have been saying (you might say ranting but that glass is both half empty and half full - that's the definition of half ;)) that the reason women were better at sales than men was because women understood - on an almost instinctive level - that selling was as much about listening as it was about telling. More and more I think Helen Fisher is right in her book The First Sex: the early days of the 21st Century are indeed the first time in the developed world's history that there is a critical mass of educated women freed of the responsibilities of child rearing and capable of effecting change on a meaningful level. And if you don't believe me, read Kris Krug's charming redress of gender imbalance regarding tech folks to watch in 2008.