An Insider’s View on Social Media

Business901 Podcast Transcription

Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Using Lean Thinking in Social Media

Copyright Business901

An Insider’s View on Social Media Guest was Ric Dragon

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CEO and co-founder of DragonSearch, Ric Dragon has more than 20 years of extensive experience in graphic design, information architecture, web development and digital marketing. He is a sought-after speaker, having spoken at numerous marketing and technology conferences.

Ric is also a regular guest columnist for Marketing Land, and Social Media Monthly. Ric has unique insights grounded in marketing, process methodologies (such as Lean), Social Media and traditional web know-how. This is a process that is repeatable, improvable and documented in his new book, Social Marketology: Improve Your Social Media Processes and Get Customers to

Stay Forever. Ric also has another eBook published: The DragonSearch Online Marketing Manual.

DragonSearch is one of the best boutique SMM (social media marketing) and SEO agencies in New York. They help companies use existing internal resources to monetize their investment in social and have extensive resources if you wish to outsource certain activities. DragonSearch provides real teams that stay on top of the latest

changes in an ever and quickly changing industry, providing an integrated holistic approach to online marketing to maximize your investment and to provide measurable results.

http://www.dragonsearchmarketing.com/

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Transcription of Podcast

Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 podcast. With me today is Ric Dragon. He has more than 16 years of experience in online

marketing, and software development. He is the co-founder and CEO of Dragon Search, where he has led social media strategy for Stuban, The Grammy Foundation, and many others.

Ric, I would like to welcome you and congratulate you on your new book, "Social Marketology," and for the fact that you wrote a book on social media and got past content is king.

Ric Dragon: Thank you. Thank you, delighted to be here.

Joe: One of the things that set you apart, and maybe this is why we did not get into that content is king issues, is that you are a social media guru, but you're schooled in fundamentals like SMO and SEO. Why is that important?

Ric: All the three-letter acronyms for sure. I guess one thing that's fundamentally different about our approach to social media. Here is that my background, in that Web development and application development world, very, very early on, we looked at it, and

we said, "Wow, all these projects fail all around us." Everybody doing large software projects, the failure rate was so high, and we really got very passionate about discovering ways of overcoming the failure rate of those types of projects.

We looked around. I don't know if you remember a company called James and Martin Co.





James Martin, an Australian fellow, had developed the process library that was eventually acquired by Computer Associates and formed their process libraries for Web development, and today is still a lot of the fundamental basis of a site called Ganthead.

Which Ganthead is every project manager's playground on the Web, so, a lot of good processes. That started us off in the whole process improvement methodologies school if you will.

Then as we're digging around in that world, we discovered Capability Maturity Model for software coming out of the Carnegie Mellon Institute.

Of course, that was developed particularly on bequest of the...I think it was Department of Defense who was experiencing a lot of failure rates with software projects, and trying to

figure out why and how we can overcome this.

That was fundamentally about creating documentation and an improvement cycle, if you will. Of course, this leads you into every other software or process improvement methodology out there in the world that we've played with, Six Sigma, Lean, and whatnot. So, I have a very strong grounding in that world.

When social media came to be something, about five years ago was when it really started

becoming a viable use in marketing, we're like, "Well, how do we bring a process to this?" That was our first impulse.

We started developing processes or process framework for social media very early on, which is where my entire tangent in the book comes from.





Joe: That's what your book's about. It's not about software development. I want to mention that it's an easy read that you can read it even if you're not a process methodology guy, or if you're not a technical software developer. It's the middle ground of taking messages and making sense to the common guy.

Ric: Sure, sure. What's interesting, and it's the same with a lot of process improvement methodologies, you see something like the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act. It's so simple. If anything, as we were working through a lot of it, some of the things seemed so painfully obvious and simple. The first step in social marketology framework is desired outcomes, really stopping and identifying what you want to come out of things. It sounds so utterly simple, and yet it's something that so many marketing and digital marketing projects fail to do.

Joe: Hardly, anybody does that. I mean, I don't want to say that and, I've got to watch myself in tongue and cheek. But the desired outcomes, they may say, "We want this," or, "We want that," but it's kind of that message of how does a company start becoming social? "We created a Facebook page."

Ric: Right, right, which is terribly butt backwards.

Joe: Yes, yes. Then there's nothing on it, and nobody is being social. Then all of a sudden

someone writes something on it, that is maybe not so social, and, "Social media has all these people on it, and blah, blah, blah," and then they sour on it quickly.

Ric: Right. Well, the other thing that emerged from our work was, there was a discovery in a way to sort of understand as we dove into this in trying to develop a framework that





we could share with other marketers, was when you say a social media marketing project, you could be talking about one of at least five different types of projects. Not all projects are the same. That's really a core, fundamental element that needs to be understood.

If I am going to be doing brand management for an organization through social media, and doing community management, that's succinctly different than the type of social media project where we might be doing influence or outreach, for instance, or community development, totally different types of projects.

Joe: In your book, do you cover each?

Ric: Yes, it covers at least five of those.

Joe: Is there more?

Ric: Probably.

Joe: But you got the majority, right? You've got that 80 percent?

Ric: I don't know. This is so exciting to me and part of what was so exciting to me about writing this book was; we touch on so many different aspects of humanity. We get into psychology, the psychology of influence, for instance, and all that goes into marketing and

psychographics and whatnot. We get into the history of marketing. We get into group formation and group dynamics. There are so many different elements of what's interesting about people that go into social media. So, there's no end to it.





I think as we go along with social media, certain things are emerging that still surprise some of us. I don't think any of us in social media marketing saw Pinterest coming.

There's going to be a whole new platform that's very image based where people can curate

images. That's just going to take off like wildfire. It happened. It was amazing. There's something about it that appealed people. We don't know what. I have no doubt that more such things are going to emerge.

Joe: Does everyone need to jump on the bandwagon and get social?

Ric: Yes, they do. They do because it represents a fundamental revolution in business communications. It's turned the world upside down. We haven't seen this type of revolution in business communication since the invention of the printing press. That

completely transformed the political structure and the religious structure of Europe.

Social media is such a huge change that organizations; businesses need to adapt, they need to get involved with it. If they don't, the risk is that their competitors will gain hegemony in their space that they won't be able to overcome.

Joe: One of the problems that I struggle within explaining social media, and we talk about collaboration, open innovation, co-partnering, and all these different things now, if

your company is built on the typical hierarchy structure, it's pretty difficult to, then suddenly be social outside your company isn't it?

Ric: Yes, it is. That traditional hierarchical structure in itself is interesting. I think a lot of organizations that I look that still have that traditional structure also have other cross-role





structures underneath. I think when you really look at organizations, they're not just about one structure versus another, they often have many different structures working together.

Joe: There are self-directed directed teams or self-forming forming teams underneath

that regular structure.

Ric: Certainly, certainly. Now, of course, there're some organizations that still, "Oh, we have to have this reporting structure." But that reporting structure might just be for one particular role. It might be for HR accountability. When it comes to projects, for instance, it has to be a matrix formation.

Joe: I want to get past this question because this is one that bothers me, all right? I see every social media guru out there saying you've got to get social; all our companies have

to do that, there's no choice. One of the major hurdles affecting businesses in becoming social is the internal IT function. When you hear the gurus spouting off, they're not the ones that have to support that business networking function.

Ric: Sure.

Joe: OK? What's a happy medium?

Ric: Well, I do want to back up for a second because even the phrase, "social media

guru," is something that I think we have to eschew. I think anybody who takes on that mantle and says well I'm a social media guru, or I am an expert as opposed to gee, I've got expertise in this, should possibly be avoided, to some extent. This is such a nascent field is so revolutionary that all of us are students and need to be autodidactic.





We have to constantly be teaching ourselves and learning about this. At the same time, though, when we look at the landscape of people out there talking about social, there are people who've taken on the role of being evangelists for social.

For those of us in the field sometimes it gets a little old. Somebody's coming to the table and saying, "Gee guys, you've got to get social."

Cluetrain Manifesto was written 13 years ago, and it was exhorting businesses, "Hey, you need to tear down these old structures, and let communication flow freely between the organization and the world." Yet, there is still an amazing amount of organizations out there that have not adopted that attitude.

The evangelical role in social media is important. There are still a lot of C-suite folks out

there who need to be convinced or taught about the importance and value of social.

With that said, let's go back to the other part of your question, the fact that it's getting owned by IT. Wow, there're so many parts of that I wouldn't know where to start with the danger of that.

In other organizations, I see it being owned by marketing; I see it being owned by PR and communications, sometimes I see it owned by IT.

Ultimately, I think social media, people who are talking about social business is the model that we're going to ultimately need to adopt. Where the entire organization is social, and it's not just owned by one department versus another. Now, we're far from that.





My book talks about social media marketing, in particular; That's where we do assume that role. IT owning it? No.

Joe: But, how do they keep it running? Let's face it. My site, from my home had a DDoS

attack this weekend and that's becoming, it seems to me, more common.

Ric: But, how is that social media's sort of department, if you will?

Joe: I wouldn't say it's social media, but as we allow more freedom on the net, and more freedom within our internal LAN networks isn't that going to cause some problems of keeping the network running?

Ric: Well, I think that good IT people can create structures where you can be using

Twitter on your desk. I have seen a lot of organizations that are so locked down that people in the organization cannot be on Facebook or Twitter. That is a problem. Basically, leadership needs to say, "This is important. Let's overcome these problems." They can be overcome. Plenty of high-level organizations have overcome those problems. They can be. They need to be.

But to simply say, "Sorry, we can't let you on there because you might tweet a link to something," no, that's training. That's a danger even with email.

Joe: So, you're saying that there just needs to be a process, in effect, and some guideline given, but that you can allow these new social media networks and the new interest. "Oh, this Pinterest just came out. Let me try this." That can still happen within a work environment.





Ric: Certainly. I would even go so far as to say it needs to. The value that it can bring to an organization, when it's backed by good structure and good process is immeasurable.

Joe: Is there anything that you would say maybe would forewarn someone to say, "Don't

take this plunge without knowing this," or something?

Ric: Well, there are some fundamentals that I think every organization, whether they feel they're totally ready for social media; they need to do no matter what. One of them is that they need to go out there and take ownership of their name space. They need to own profiles in their name. We saw the instance of Netflix creating a new product, or a whole new business line with a different name, and somebody owned the Twitter handle. They should have made sure that they owned their real estate first. So, that's very important. That's just good brand management.

The second thing, you need to be monitoring. You need to be listening. There're a lot of good social media monitoring tools that allow you to manage or monitor your own brand name, to monitor your competitors, to monitor your product space or your service space.

Good monitoring needs to happen. That could be a function of PR and communications, or whoever owns marketing. That needs to happen.

The third thing that definitely needs to happen in every single organization, is they need to have policy in place. Because even if the organization isn't ready to have their own Facebook presence, for instance, that doesn't mean that Joe down in sales hasn't already started it. So, let's have policy and training.





Joe: You bring up a good point, one that leads into my next question. Can you be just as effective on other people's sites versus just always creating your own and trying to take ownership of a platform?

Ric: There's so much value by having your own home base. We can even take that concept further to the concept of the blog. By having a very strong blog that becomes the hub for all your other social media activities. Each of those social media presences become a hub for your communication with people on those platforms.

Joe: You feel blogging is still important.

Ric: Blogging is central.

Joe: That's interesting because blogging is kind of the granddad, isn't it, to social media?

Ric: It is. In fact, what's interesting is on all the research I've done, is the whole concept, and the social-media ethos of authenticity and transparency really came from the blogging world. It wasn't really in social media. The first social media platforms were all about people pretending to be other people. If you remember that famous cartoon on the Internet, nobody really knows you're a dog. It was so prevalent for people to be pretending to be something other than what they were.

When blogging came along, and it started to compete with real journalism, the ethic of being transparent was very, very important.





Joe: We just ran across some people putting up fake LinkedIn profiles, and fake Twitter accounts, and professing to be someone they're not and not being very transparent. How do we know that's not happening?

Ric: It definitely is happening. But the risk to an organization to participate in those types of tactics is far too great. If you remember the BP oil spill and the folks at BP did something that 30 years ago would have been considered fairly innocuous. There were some photographs, or video footage of their control center where they had all of these monitors and video monitors showing pictures of the ocean floor.

The reality was they only had a few video monitors live. In order to make it look like the control room was more active they photo-shopped in some other screens. That became discovered. Somebody said, "Hey, in fact, it's bad Photoshop work."

The blow to their credibility was so great that it was utterly ludicrous for them to even try to do such a thing. The same thing is true if Chick-Fil-A was in fact, guilty of creating fake Facebook accounts in order to counter their critics. The blow to their credibility is too great.

So, it's extremely important to maintain a very high standard of ethics in social media.

Joe: You lay out a platform on how to go about this. You're a process guy, from reading

your things and following you. Can you briefly describe the platform that you outline in the book?

Ric: Sure. The framework is fairly simple. We start with having a very clear understanding of our desired outcomes, as I mentioned before. Doing that piece of work is the very first





part of the project. It's interviewing stakeholders. It’s understanding an organization's bigger purpose, their vision, their values, their culture, documenting these things and talking about the goals, objectives and particular metrics that represents that success.

I just picked up the book, recently, "What Sticks," which I think came out a few years ago.

The author of "What Sticks," in fact, the very first fundamental element that they speak about is the need for marketers to really have a better understanding of what the goals and objectives, or desired outcomes are of their programs.

They identified that as being one of the leading causes of failure in marketing. So, that's the first element in social marketology. We need to understand that and document it. Then we're able to share that with whoever's doing social media on behalf of the team.

The second element is having a better understanding of your brand voice and personality. This we take on as a real task of understanding that, again, interviewing stakeholders, understanding the bigger organization.

The idea that a brand can have personality is a concept that came out in Madison Avenue in the '60s, and it's pretty well proven that people do project personality onto brands.

So how do we take the reins of that and use it better so that, as the entity of the brand is

talking one on one with people, that the voice is clear and clearly articulated?

Joe: What you're saying is that we really have to understand who we are.





Ric: Exactly. This is beautiful, we go from desired outcomes, we go to understanding who we are. Then we look outwards, and who is our audience? We do a piece of work that we call "micro-segmentation." Now, micro-segmentation, we're not just looking at the old fashioned segments of yesterday's marketing. "Gee, soccer moms in Westchester who

have a master's degree." We're going even deeper than that.

If we look at people, for instance, who like animals, perhaps I'm selling animal figurines. I'll go into the world of people who like wild animals, African animals, people who support elephant preserves. We go into domestic animals, and all the different types. We get into dogs, and we can get into breeds.

Finally, we reach a point of granularity that we're talking about the Airedale Terrier Kennel Club of greater Duluth, Minnesota, that type of granularity.

This piece of work is brainstorming. It results in an indented document which becomes a framework for all of our social media work because we can iterate through these various micro-segments to find out where we can start to get engagement within their communities.

We can then research our micro-segments to find out where their communities are, and in fact, research those communities doing what we might call "on-line ethnography," or it's

been termed "net-nography," analyzing and studying on-line communities.

Joe: And this is not rocket science to do, is it?





Ric: Absolutely not. Of course, as we study these communities, we start to see what these people are talking about. We can start to engage that community or become part of that community, perhaps even becoming influential in that community. That's the whole community stage of the process framework. After the community stage, we've done the

study, we can identify who's influential within these communities or outside of these communities. Then we can focus on the influencer piece of work, where we identify let's say a set portfolio of influencers.

We really work hard to engage those people. We follow their blogs. We comment on their blogs. We do what we call the "influencer project," where we can really get involved with those people.

For some organizations, particularly in B to B, you might totally put all of your social media

energy into that type of influence or project.

Because, let's say if you sell antibiotics for poultry. Well, there're only five people in the world that you really need to talk to, or maybe 10 or 20. It's a pretty small audience. So you can really find out whose influential in that world and try to speak with them directly.

After you've gone through this process, you've looked at your desired outcomes, you've done your brand voice and personality, you've done the micro-segmentation, you've

studied the communities, and you’ve studied the influencers. At that point, you can put together an action plan.





Your action plan can be based on a lot of different elements of what your marketing objectives are, different types of plans that you can put together. Then, of course, measure, study, reiterate, and come back around and do it again.

Joe: I can get rid of a real lot of waste in the process because I'm not marketing to this huge, wide-open funnel. I'm marketing to a cylinder, just about.

Ric: Exactly, exactly. The other beauty of it, and you can bring in some of the Scrum tactics, for instance, that we use internally, where we're creating stories around our users. It is extremely user-centric, and trying to add value to the people out there in their communities.

Joe: I think that's a key thing that I enjoy is, I think, where you find your marketing voice

and where you find your niche, is through user stories, if you really pay attention to them. User stories are neat anymore, because they're not just writing a user story. You can record them and gain so much richness out of a user story.

Ric: Because we've done all that work in really looking at our communities, and being able to pull that information from the social stream, it's so much easier and richer than it would have been let's say 30 years ago.

Joe: What I like about this, more than anything, Ric, is the fact that it's common sense. You can explain it in audio. It's not that difficult to understand. I'm sure there's a lot more, using one of your terms, granular work in place to do that with. But I walk away from that saying, "I already know that."





Ric: Thank you, Joe. I think it is fundamentally simple. I don't think it's rocket science or rocket surgery. Details, the difficulty of anything, are in juggling all the different parts, and making sure that you keep an eye on the bigger picture. I think what can happen for all of us at times, particularly in doing these types of projects, is we get so focused on the

miniscule and the micro-picture, and we've stopped looking at the bigger picture.

Joe: Should I expect immediate results? How do I sustain this effort? Because, if I don't see a return on it, if I don't see anything, what's some good signs that say that I'm moving forward?

Ric: Well, this is one of the very interesting challenges of social media marketing in general. There's a tremendous amount of dialogue around the idea that, what is the ROI of social media marketing? A lot of people are very, very focused on the transaction. How

much has my social media marketing efforts led to a particular transaction, so that I can say, "Well? We made this amount of money from it"?

The challenge in that, actually, I think goes back to a lot of the fabulous thinking that we saw coming out of the '90s with more complex ROI or ROM-I models that emerged from let's say marketing models, or even books like, "What Sticks." It wasn't so simple.

Social media contributes to so many different aspects of the customer relationship. Now, in

a world where we see on most-traded stocks, about 80 percent of companies' value is in brand equity, 80 percent.





So, if we look at the value of marketing in that mix, any marketing, not just social media marketing, how much is marketing contributing to that overall value, not just in transactions?

There're also elements where these marketing efforts can contribute to advocacy, and we have to measure back, well; how much does advocacy contribute to our bottom line? How much does awareness contribute to our bottom line? There's each of these aspects.

So, the models for understanding the value or the ROI of social and other marketing can be pretty complex.

Now, the reality is, if we're having the across-the-lunch-table discussion, a couple of beers, and you're going, "OK, Come on, Ric. How quickly is this stuff going to bring value to the

company?" It is not overnight. It's not a quick fix.

Social media marketing, to really start seeing returns, typically I see projects of six to nine months, to even 12 months, before you start seeing real tangible changes.

Sometimes we can see it more quickly. It depends on the budgets. But typically it's a longer-haul thing. We look to other means of digital marketing for those quick fixes.

Joe: It is something that it is not overly expensive to do. It's resource-consuming,

though, isn't it?

Ric: It depends on the size of the organization. If you have an organization that's spending $10 million a year on marketing, to spend $500,000 on social media marketing





would be a pretty healthy budget, but not that much of the bigger spend. The interesting thing is that the majority of consumers are now spending a preponderance of their time in social media, and yet we're still not shifting more of that budget over into social.

Joe: I think also that goes to the fact that people don't really understand social, because when they shift the budget, they shift the thought process of advertising, and sending things out, and how many links they send out, or how many Twitter messages they send out with that. Though some of that's accepted, there just has to be a balance.

Ric: Exactly. I think the word "balance" is beautiful, because I think what organizations and the C-suite need to adopt is a balanced scorecard approach to marketing that we don't want to put our entire marketing budget into promotions for the immediate future. If we're putting our entire budget into transactional sales in the next six months, we're not building

the brand equity or awareness aspect of things.

If, on the other hand, we put too much of our budget into brand awareness and brand-equity work, we're not covering our sales increases for the next six months.

I think the wonderful, beautiful job of a marketing strategist is trying to devise ways and create a balanced approach to the whole thing, where each of these components is contributing to the other component.

Joe: Is there something that you would like to add that maybe I didn't ask?

Ric: You got me on surprise there, Joe. There're so many things to add to this conversation, there're so many different parts of this conversation that's rich. I think when





you start diving into social media as an endeavor; social media marketing, in particular, the amount of richness is never-ending. When we first started the conversation earlier today, you said, "How are things?" I'm just like, "Wow; it's so busy." There's so much interesting work to be doing and new approaches to things.

One of the things we didn't talk about that I think is important for marketers to understand is we need to try to understand social media in terms of the patterns of what's really happening.

We have to try to get past the immediate frenzy of, "Oh, well it's Facebook," or "It's Twitter," or "It's Pinterest," and try to see the patterns of behavior that people are engaging in.

When we start to look at social media platforms and these various behaviors, things like micro-gifting emerge. Things like curation occur. Things like the sharing process.

How can we then approach social media to enrich our activities from this viewpoint, as opposed to getting so bogged down in the constant and never-ending change of these various platforms?

Joe: You bring up a great point there, Rick. I'm just going to ask you a quick question

here. Should I go into this easily, and only look at one platform at a time, or should I jump into the middle of everything and start with three or four?

Ric: Well, it's going to change with different organizations, and what your desired outcomes are. It's very typical for us to, as we're creating a social media marketing plan,





to see things in terms of where we're going to get our largest immediate gain. So let's just say we're in a B to C environment, and we know that the majority of our audience and our communities are taking place on Facebook. We're probably going to put 75, 80 percent of our effort in the next three months in Facebook.

Then we'll start migrating into Twitter or Pinterest, depending on the types of products we sell, wherever we're going to get the most leverage.

We also want to look at ways that we can create trans-media storytelling bridging these various platforms. But yes, it's true, we're going to probably focus on one of those big four.

Joe: I would like to thank you very much. Tell me where we can get your book, and is there a book website, and where can someone get a hold of you? I'll throw like three

questions in there.

Ric: Well, thank you and all of them can be solved with going to dragonsearchmarketing.com. At dragonsearchmarketing.com we have a page for the book. You can contact me. You can read our blog at our organization. We've got a lot of wonderful bloggers here at DragonSearch contributing to the blog, and a lot of interesting conversations there.

You can also find me; I think I own the top 50 to 100 results if you search on ricdragon without a "k" just R-I-C dragon on Google that I come up.

Joe: Well thank you very much. This podcast will be available on the Business901 blog site and Business901 iTunes store, so, thanks again, Ric.





Joseph T. Dager

Business901

Phone: 260-918-0438

Skype: Biz901

Fax: 260-818-2022

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://www.business901.com

Twitter: @business901

Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in bringing the continuous

improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will allow you to interact with like-minded individuals and organizations, purchase related tools, use some free ones and receive feedback from your peers.

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Documents

An Insider’s View on Social Media