The Comfortable Chairs at Starbucks

Marketing and social media consultant Ken Chen (Founder of EM Marketing), recently wrote in his blog:

“The big opportunity sitting right in front of most brands is to build a meaningful community or experience inside their own site. A place where their customers come, share thoughts and opinions, talk to other customers, gain valuable information, have fun, and want to return again and again. It's the online equivalent of the comfortable chairs at Starbucks.”

Ken is absolutely right…even within the energy industry. No, utilities are not particularly sexy, but we are uniquely positioned within our communities to provide important and useful content to those we serve. National consumer research shows that consumers are more aware than ever of energy and its impact on their lives. How can you be useful to your customers? How can you provide a user experience that brings them back again and again for assistance, energy insights, community support? In other words, what could your comfortable chair be?

Finally Firefox has taken over IE...and growing!

I don't like IE.  I've never really liked IE.  It just doesn't perform well.  Thank goodness people are starting to realize there are better alternatives.  This graph from StatCounter Global Statistics shows it all.  Note the trajectory for Firefox.  Like I said...finally!

Effective Elements of Top Utility Energy Efficiency Print Ads

All utility marketing professionals recognize that energy comes with a complex and evolving set societal baggage related to finance, fairness, entitlement, pragmatism, morality, apathy, and simple understanding. Breaking through these barriers is a difficult challenge that requires the combination of creativity and properly placed pressure points to not only grab the customer’s attention, but compel engagement and action.

We, meaning my marketing research and analytics team at E Source, pulled together a national utility energy efficiency print advertising contest in 2009, which included a highly respected set of judges from Crispin Porter, SmartPower, the University of Colorado at Boulder, E Source, and others. Based on their feedback/comments and our own comparative analysis, we found that simplicity, iconic and narrative focused imagery/visuals, a clear and concise call to action, and intelligent humor and/or irony, are all effective elements and techniques used in 2009 energy efficiency utility ads. Just use those and you will be all set. Clearly, there is no way to wrap a tidy bow around any type of advertising and the suggestions above are somewhat amorphous when suggested out of their physical context (meaning the 60+ EE print ads we reviewed), but such is life. Clearly ad creative is an art linked to science; however, the insights we gained from this work were not only interesting, but also compelling, and will hopefully be helpful to the community of utility DSM advertisers. If you want to see some of the top ads, let me know and I'll happily pass them along!

Here is the link to the press release about the print ad contest results: http://www.esource.com/esource/getpub/public/pdf/press_releases/ES_PR_AdContest09.pdf

2010 Utility Marketing & Social Media Trends

I think it is clear that we will see the continued growth, commercialization and overall sophistication of online social media. This will have interesting implications for its evolution, both on the user and marketing sides of the coin. A small number of utilities will begin integrating social media presence with their traditional marketing efforts, but this will not happen on a broader scale until 2011 and beyond.

Utilities will also start seeing the cross-functional complexities of operating in the social media space. Integrating communications, marketing and customer care will be a challenge for 2011+. Few will have problems with it this year...though it will start to appear on the internal radar.

The influx of brands and other commercial interests into social media sites will continue to fracture online communities into more refined and specialized sub-groups. To keep up and maintain relevance, marketers will have to better understand the behaviours and intersections within these communities, as well as the relationship with traditional marketing. Figuring out what is valuable to customers will be ongoing process of learning; however, data and more sophisticated analytics will be increasingly mission critical. Social search optimization (SSO) will be a more recognized term in 2010, though mostly irrelevant to utilities. And yes, the argument for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will remain valid and strong.

Content will remain king, especially for utilities. Utility social media efforts that don't provide valuable, helpful and/or compelling information to users will fall flat. Being there will still not be enough in 2010 and for the foreseeable future. It will take time for customers to connect with their energy provider(s) and understand what that relationship can be.

The smart phone revolution will rapidly innovative new ways of communicating and interacting, though utilities will not be on the cutting edge of this movement. New business models will emerge, but few utilities will integrate in 2010.

Better understanding and leveraging media convergence will be of increasing importance. Utility communicators will look for social media resource expenditure ROIs (at the request of management) and find them elusive at best in 2010. There will be significant advancements in social media tracking and analytics as provider compete, Though this automation will not match perfectly with the utility need, the industry will adapt and leverage where they can. Utility communicators and some util marketers will become increasingly savvy in this area, which will lay the ground work for 2011+.

Bottom line, social media will continue to quickly evolve and both marketing and communications will be forced to adapt along the way. While the primary focus for utilities in 2010 will still be strategic communications and brand, we will see its awareness and influence grow within other departments.

Social Media Metrics - A conversation w/ Ken Chen

I get asked all the time about how utilities should measure their social media efforts. It is an important piece of the social media puzzle for utilities, since we are measurement driven organizations. It is also easy to believe the hype that there is no effective way to measure social media, but that is simply not the case.

A lot of smart people, like respected social media and marketing consultant Ken Chen (Founder of EM Marketing), flatly reject the “no metrics” assertion and actually see the opposite. For Ken, the very nature of the web provides marketers and communicators plenty of data points they could have only dream of twenty years ago. These metrics can be found both inside and outside your site, including traffic, engagement, participation, velocity of talk, sentiment and your content uptake. As a side note, it is critical to get your baseline measurements, or access to past data sets, before you swing into action…otherwise, gaining context is significantly more difficult.

"Bah!...some of those are old metrics" you say? Well, Ken's approach to social media measurement reflects an appropriately holistic and goal-oriented view of your online marketing and communications efforts. Social media is not an end, but rather a means. It is critical to clearly understand and define what the end game really is for your utility's social media efforts (program participation, information sharing, customer care/service, brand building. etc...?). Once you are clear on that piece, the metrics, both new and old, will begin to fall into place and make a lot more sense moving forward.

Smart Meter / Smart Grid Backlash

Watch out! The SmartGrid/SmartMeter backlash wave is gaining strength with each passing week. The questions is, what do you get when you combine the bad economy, a debt crisis, rate increases of new meter installation and infrastructure upgrades that happen to be connected to billing/usage increases (whether perceived or real), surcharge increases, fuel cost increases, data privacy concerns, widespread corporate mistrust, lawsuits, and then add an very hungry and polarizing mainstream media, the blogosphere and digital social networks? The answer: A problem. In many ways, it is a perfect storm.

In the past week alone, I spoke with five major utilities in various phases of their deployments and they were all starting to feel the heat from SmartMeter/Grid controversies in other parts of the county. It is a rude awakening to the new, inter-connected world. Customers in the Northwest that were previously on-board with SmartMeters are suddenly asking questions based on events in the Southeast. The Bakersfield, CA lawsuit against PG&E is garnering national attention and coalescing resistance against these initiatives in other parts of the country.

I covered the SmartMeter communications trends and some of the critical shifts I've seen just in the past few months. The number one take away is to be flexible and be proactive, as this storm is only starting to form. Many of my clients are shifting to specific and more focused messages that address specific concerns their customers have locally and even nationally. There are certainly external factors that could stop this story's momentum, but I wouldn't count on it. I suspect we will see more legal action, and thus more negative attention, in the coming months and year. Even if the backlash hasn't reached you yet, I would start preparing and planning for when it does.

Utility Employee Pandemic Communications

Severe pandemics have the potential to impair every level of your organization. Therefore, proactive internal communications are essential to preparing your utility employees for potential operational and personal impacts. Beyond general health education and awareness (for example, how to catch sneezes and coughs properly), it’s important to provide information on your company’s pandemic flu (PanFlu) policies and procedures, such as security procedures and anti-viral drug dissemination information.

If you don’t have a PanFlu communications plan, you should seriously consider creating one. A PanFlu communications plan is a living document that requires regular updates as policies, procedures, and objectives as circumstances evolve. The plan is helpful, but the planning process itself is essential, as it will force you to walk through the many details and potential implications specific to your utility. If you have questions on what goes into a utility employee pandemic flu communications plan, let me know.

Social Media vs. Social Marketing

It isn't unusual for folks to use "social media" and "social marketing" interchangeably in conversation these days. Although similar sounding, they are actually quite different. You will hear many different definitions of both, but the basics remain distinct.

"Social Media" refers to social interactivity and content creation/collaboration tools/plaforms on the web. The most commonly referenced examples of "social media" are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube; however, there are many different ways for users to share their thoughts, ideas, expertise, as well as collaborate and network online. "Social Media" is an extension of "Web 2.0," which is a term used to describe web applications that provide user-generated content. Web 2.0 encompasses things like blogs, wikis, and podcasts, as well as the social media sites mentioned above.

"Social Marketing" is the use of marketing techniques to influence behavior or social perception, as opposed to marketing a particular product or service. Examples of well know social media campaigns include: environmental behavior change (Crying Indian Campaign), seat belt usage (Dummy Campaign, "You could learn a lot from a dummy!"), Forest Fires (Smokey The Bear Campaign), Anti-Smoking (Truth Campaign), etc... Internationally, "social marketing" is used to combat malaria, AIDS, water and environmental degradation, gender violence,. drug abuse and much more. These "behavior change" campaigns leverage social norms, competition, social networks, careful messaging, and precise targeting effectively influence their audiences.

Democratization Of Information and Voice

Thanks to Kate Rowland (@katerowland2) for this blog post from a recent conversation we had. It is an excellent snapshot of why utilities should care about, and pay attention to, social media. Welcome to the new reality.

http://www.energyblogs.com/rowland/index.cfm/2009/10/16/Tweeting-Up-the-News

The Social Media Four Step

The fundamentals of social media are no different whether a utility or Proctor & Gamble. Across industries, I see four basic steps that most most companies generally work (sometime stumble) through:

1. Ignore
2. Listen
3. Engage
4. Lead

This isn't a new or unique concept and is very high-level; however, it does provide the framework to think about where you are and where you are headed.

Let's start with the fact that ignoring social media is not a viable strategy. If nothing else, you should at least be thinking about it. One good way to begin that process is to better understand where your organization sits in the digital/social media space. Listening will help you understand how much chatter there is about your utility (a lot or a little?), who is doing the talking (mainstream media, bloggers, micro-bloggers?), what they are saying (good, bad or neutral?), and other data to points to help provide some direction. Although E Source (www.esource.com), my employer, has a more advanced, utility-focused social media monitoring and analytics platform, which we provide to all of our clients, the no-cost options (like Google Alerts, TweetDeck, Technorati, etc...) are a great place to start.

Armed with better information, you can start to develop a strategy and potentially engage in conversations at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner. Engagement is about becoming a consistent and trusted voice within the various communities you decide to join. If you are a credible source of good/helpful information/service, you will be able to eventually start conversations, influence discussions, obtain feedback, and have people actually listen to you. The bottom line is that leadership is earned over time and I think it should be a goal for most (not all) utilities.

Utility Social Media Cross-Functional Teams

I have been impressed with the increased sophistication of utility social media strategy teams. Although obvious to utility professionals, social media is a different animal for utilities, as compared to a small business or even a large consumer products company, so we need to take a more coordinated and planned approach.

One trend I see more and more across North America is the creation of cross-functional teams to outline social media goals, strategy and work flow. Communications has been the traditional home for social media in most utilities; however, these newer teams often include communications, marketing, customer care, legal, IT and sometimes even HR and investor relations.The purpose and focus of each team changes from organization to organization, but the issues I see them tackling include things like:

• Organizational goals, within the context of departmental goals
• Channel selection
• Departmental responsibilities/boundaries
• Use case planning and associated work flows
• Governance
• High-level metrics
• Strategy
• IT requirements
• Legal exposure
• Management case development
• and much, much more…

The bottom line is that social media potentially touches on so many different aspects of a utility’s operations that these cross-functional teams are not only a critical vehicle for the initial planning and implementation phases, but the ongoing evolution of the organization’s social media strategy.