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?

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.

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.