Magda Walczak - personal blog about web, food and anything else that strikes my fancy

Sep 21

My Mentos moment

A very melodramatic cloud decided to have meltdown over Chicago just as I was about to step out of a restaurant. I had eight minutes to get to my car or my parking fee would go from $12 to $50. That’s half a pair of shoes wasted if I didn’t make it on time, so I had to think of something fast. Something that didn’t involve ruining my brand new purple stilettos in the flash flood accumulating just inches from my toes.

My actual purple stiletto

One of the 4-inch-sandal-stilletoed ladies also standing at the exit advised “Just wait it out. It’ll pass in ten minutes.” But I didn’t have ten minutes. I barely had eight. “Ladies, good luck,” I said, as I pulled off my pretty shoes and secured them in my yellow leather bag, which I didn’t want to ruin either so I wrapped that in my sweater, which, in turn, had nothing else left to protect it from the elements. I turned to my commiserators and announced, “I’m pulling a Mentos moment.” And with that, I bolted barefoot out the door.

Five city blocks, three minutes, and one dry pair of purple shoes later, I arrived at the parking lot. I felt like at least ten buckets of water had flushed through my hair and clothes, but I made it. Hell – I was even early!

As I inserted my ticket into the parking machine, I felt unusually optimistic – accomplished even. Sure, it’s perhaps not the biggest victory to get to the car on time when I really should have left ten minutes earlier and avoided the whole drama, but it felt good. I could have just waited it out and paid $38 extra. But I ask you – How many times do you find yourself wanting to do something just to think of a dozen excuses why you shouldn’t or can’t do it? How often do you take the easy way out and pay the extra $38? I know I’ve done it before. More times than I care to admit.

When you have those thoughts, why not pull a Mentos moment and just do it? Why is it that as children, taking off your shoes and running in the rain would seem as the more obvious option (rather than waiting), but as adults it’s the crazy exception? How many things do we miss out on in the opportunities life throws at us because we don’t want to get a little embarrassed, or a little soaked?

My small victory that night, turns out, was one such opportunity. It was an opportunity in the form of a self-realization. What I learned about myself through that experience was that I can do it. Whatever “it” is. It took a silly Mentos moment to realize it but here it is. With a clear goal in mind and a good reason for it, I can be unstoppable. Correction – I WILL be unstoppable. And so can you.

Sometimes you just gotta get soaked to get where you need to get to. There might be people who think you’re a little crazy for doing what you did (like those ladies standing at the restaurant door with me, who are probably still waiting for that bloody cloud to stop crying). You may step on a few sharp pebbles while running, which would make the whole thing seem like a bad idea and make you give up. The menacing whips of lighting in the sky above may try to scare you back indoors. But stay focused and you will get there. Maybe even with time to spare.

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Apr 6

A framework for getting started in social media

The way I see it, there are two ways of getting into social media:

1) Dive right in and see what happens or

2) Apply a sound method to what you’re doing.

Both ways can lead to success but if you put some thought into your social media efforts, your likelihood of success will surely increase. Also, when you’re trying to get a company (vs individual) started in social media, the “see what happens” approach may not be an option.

The following framework is one tool you could use to go about thinking and planning your social media program. It’s based on the GO MAD thinking framework. Here, I’ve applied it to social media. I originally presented this framework at ad:tech Sydney 2010. The full presentation is below for your reference. The actual framework starts on slide 7.

Be sure to also print out the social media framework worksheet to help you put the framework to use.

Framework for getting started in social media

Step 1: Monitor

Before you do anything else, find out what’s being said about your brand. There’s no sense taking action if you don’t know what is the status quo. There are many free and paid tools you could use so I’ve put together a list of social media monitoring tools for you. I’m still working my way through these and haven’t found the perfect tool yet.

Step 2: The reason why

There are many reasons why you could/should do social media as a company. The key is to figure out what that reason is for you and your company. It’s important since there are so many options of activities you can do in social media. Nailing down your reason why will help you frame your goal and may help you figure out what activity you should undertake. Reasons why companies do social media can vary from “My CEO says so” through “My company needs to prepare for a potential crisis,” to “We need to increase our customer engagement.” (more examples in the preso below)

Step 3: The goal

Once you know what’s currently happening (via monitoring) and you have identified the reason why your company should do social media, it’s time to answer that reason with an actual goal. As with most things, SMART goals are the best kinds of goals to set. Here’s a guide to setting SMART goals for social media.

Step 4: Confidence check

You set your goal and you know why you set it, but depending on what that goal is, you might think to yourself “Crap, I’ll never achieve this!” Which is why this confidence check is in place. Take a look at your goal. Now think to yourself, on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the most confident), how confident do you feel you can achieve this goal? If you’re at a 7 or above, continue with the framework.

If you’re lower than a 7, ask yourself, what needs to happen for my confidence to increase? Let’s say the answer is “more resources” and you don’t think that’s likely to happen. Perhaps the goal itself needs revision? It’s OK if the goal is changed to make you more confident. It’s important that you don’t set yourself up to fail. If you’re confident that you will succeed, then you will succeed. If you’re wavering from the get go, you won’t find success.

Step 5: Getting buy-in

Since opening up as a brand on social media can be scary to some companies, it’s important that you get buy-in for your efforts from the get-go. The best way to do this is by involving others. Here’s another post I wrote on getting buy-in for your social media program to supplement this post.

Step 6: Possibilities brainstorming

You have your reason why, you’ve set your goal, you’re confident that you will achieve it and you’ve started to involve others in the process. So far, so good. Now the fun part begins! It’s time for possibilities brainstorming. There are many techniques for brainstorming so if you know some that worked for you before, use them. Otherwise, here are some suggestions of high quality questions to ask when brainstorming possibilities for a social media program.

Step 7: Prioritise

Now that you have your possibilities, the next step is to prioritise them. The way you prioritise these will differ depending on your goal. Some common ways to prioritise are:

Low-hanging fruit – What can you do quickly and easily?
Short term success – What gives you quick wins?
Long term success – What must we budget for now in order to gain wins later?
PR – What will be perceived as most important move by our customers/media/industry?

Here again is where you can involve others to continue getting buy-in. For example, let’s say your goal is to increase customer engagement. In that case, it might be good to get the Service Manager involved in your plans if it’s her team that will be executing the social media program.

Step 8: Planning

This next step simply takes your priorities and translates them into a list of tasks with individuals assigned to each task.

(Confidence check – Having done all this work, how confident are you that you will achieve your goal? If you’re at an 8/10 or above, that’s awesome! If you’re not feeling too confident, what needs to happen to increase your confidence? Remember, it’s OK to revise your goal if necessary. Just don’t set yourself up to fail.)

Step 9: Measuring success

How will you measure your success? If you’ve set a SMART goal to begin with, it will have a measurable element in there for you. Some possible ways to measure could be the ratio of positive to negative comments on a particular review site, visits to your website or increase in your company’s customer satisfaction index. There’s no one right way to measure social media ROI. You need to decide what makes sense for your goal and for your company’s individual set of circumstances.

Good luck with your social media program!

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Apr 6

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Defining SMART goals (incl. for social media)

Do you have a goal you want to achieve with your social media activities? If it’s something like “Increase customer engagement” then you have no goal at all. Like with other KPIs in your work life, your social media goals can’t be so generic. If they are, how will you know when you have achieved them? Instead, set your goals using the SMART technique.

SMART is an acronym for goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time framed. SMART goals are used often in coaching and performance management, but they work brilliantly in other areas, such as when setting the goal you want to achieve with social media. The following is an example of a SMART goal using social media.

Specific

To put it most simply, specific is the opposite of broad and general. Making a goal specific helps you to know when you’ve actually achieved the goal. For example, a general goal could be “Increase customer engagement.” What does customer engagement mean? How will you know if you’ve increased it? Make the goal more specific by changing it to something like “Increase our interactions with customers via Twitter, Facebook and the company blog by 100%.”

Measurable

Making a goal measurable is to clearly quantify the goal. Let’s take our goal so far “Increase our interactions with customers via Twitter, Facebook and the company blog by 100%.” A way to improve this goal to make it more measurable would be to further define what 100% means. For example, “Increase our interactions with customers via Twitter from 10 to 20 per day, via Facebook from 15 to 30 per day and the company blog from 2 to 4 per day.”

Achievable

Can you actually achieve the goal? Is it possible for you to increase your interactions with customers as much as we specified? Is there someone who can have those extra interactions? Are you currently replying to all comments? If so, then increasing the number of replies would mean you’d need more comments, right? Where will you get those comments from? If you don’t know, then perhaps the goal is not achievable and should be revised further. Let’s say that we’re already getting to all Facebook comments and let’s change our goal a bit to reflect it “Increase our interactions with customers via Twitter from 10 to 20 per day and via the company blog from 2 to 4 per day while continuing to answer every comment on Facebook on a daily basis.”

Relevant

Is the goal relevant? Does your company need you to increase the interactions with customers? The best way to check relevancy of the goal is to think about the reason why you’ve established the goal in the first place. If the goal relates to the reason, then you’re in good shape.

Time framed

When would you like to achieve this goal by? For now, we know it’s some time in the future but when exactly? Not three weeks or three months from now, but rather by what specific date would you like to achieve it? Let’s revise our goal a bit to illustrate this: “By September 1st, 2010, increase our interactions with customers via Twitter from 10 to 20 per day and via the company blog from 2 to 4 per day while continuing to answer every comment on Facebook on a daily basis.”

Tips for writing SMART goals

Make them as specific as necessary. Technically, our goal is now SMART, but we could still make it better. For example, what is an “interaction”? Is it merely replying or is there more to it, which should be included in the goal? Also, should we address other social media not listed specifically in the goal? It’s up to you. Now that you know what a SMART goal is, you can decide for yourself .
What happens when your goal is something that sounds very qualitative, like “Increase quality of responses,” how can you make that measurable? This is where the 1-10 scale comes in very handy. When talking about quality of responses, on a scale of 1-10, what quality do you think the responses are now? Where do you want to get them to? What does a quality 10 response look like? You could change the goal in this example to something like “By August 15, 2010, increase the quality of responses in social media from 4 to 8.” If you like you could then write a second sentence which explains what an 8 actually means (“We’ll know we’re at an 8 if…” or “An 8 means that each response is longer than X…”)
What happens when your goal becomes a big long and begins to look like a few separate goals stuck together? At that point, you can establish an umbrella goal which is further made up of individual SMART goals (ie, umbrella goal to increase interactions and individual SMART goals for each social network).

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Apr 6

How to help save the world… one drop at a time

How can you help save the world? I think you can do it by donating to good causes… Like charity:water!

Charity:water is an organisation that builds wells in communities that don’t have access to fresh water. Because of charity: water’s unique model, 100% of all donations go directly to direct water projects costs, and each donation is “proved” and tracked to the village it helped when projects are complete.

My birthday is coming up July so I thought I’d use is as rallying point to raise some money to build a well. The goal is $5000 but between you and me, I know we can totally smash it and build more than one well .

So… if you’re feeling generous (and I hope you are!) get me the best birthday present and donate to my charity:water campaign.

Not convinced? Watch this video to see the difference your donation can make.

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Mar 29

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How to get buy-in for your social media program

Even if you have the best of plans for taking your company social, you won’t get very far without buy-in from the powers that be. (Well, unless you’re a one-man show, at which point you have all the buy-in you’ll ever need!) But how do you get buy in? Do you take a risk and start your social media activity and hope that your results are so self-evident that they convince others of the need for a social media program? Or should you rather start by getting buy-in before you do anything else? In my job at Real Insurance I jumped right in and got VERY lucky in that the whole thing didn’t backfire. If I were to do it all over again, I’d take my time and get buy-in first. Here’s my advice as to how you should go about getting started.

Identify people whose buy-in you need

First and foremost, you must identify the people essential to your social media activities. Depending on the size of your organization and your company culture, this could be a varied number of individuals. At the very least you should identify people who may already be doing some form of social media or PR, be it via their official duties (for example, marketing running a campaign on Facebook) or unofficially (for example, members of service team may be corresponding with customers via Twitter). Those are the individuals who already have a taste of what’s possible and may become your biggest allies in your social media efforts.

Some possible people to whose buy-in you may need could be:

CEO/COO/CIO
Head of Marketing
Brand manager
PR people (external or internal)
Head of IT
Service manager
Intranet manager
Webmaster
Communications manager
Copywriter

Getting buy-in by involving others

The best way to get buy-in from people is to get them involved in the beginning and keep them involved as much as possible throughout the process.

Brainstorming

In the case of building a social media program, this means getting people involved as early as the brainstorming phase. The best thing would literally be to get all parties in the room and go through some brainstorming exercises. Talk about what it is that you can possibly achieve. Think of some networks where your customers are already participating in discussions. The more ideas you generate the better since everyone will feel like they contributed something. And if people think that even a small part of the resulting plan was their idea, they’re all the more likely to support you through it. Read my social media brainstorming blog post for some suggestions of brainstorming questions.

Prioritising

After brainstorming, the next time you can involve some key individuals is when you’re prioritising the possibilities you’ve come up with. It’s good to reflect on the brainstorming you’ve done to see if there were any ideas that really stood out or if any particular person seemed very passionate about helping. For example, perhaps during the previous phase the group identified social media as a way to manage customer complaints better. If that’s the case, then you should probably involve the Service manager when you’re prioritising and putting together a plan of action as that’s the person who would deal with “traditional” complain management.

Interactions on social media

Once your social media activities are in place, you can look for ways to involve people in actual interactions with customers. At Real Insurance, many of our staff use Twitter to share some experiences they’ve had with our customers over the phone. For you, a way to get others involved may mean asking various people to do a guest post on the company blog or escalating certain complaints (that you get via social media) through the organization. The level of involvement will depend on what activities you undertake.

So there you have it. It might sound obvious, but if you want to get buy-in, involve people as much as possible. If they feel like they’re contributing, they’ll support you in your efforts.

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