Social business will be much slower in adoption than anyone imagines. Here’s why.

The headline of this post comes from an article published yesterday by The Wall Street Journal about an business technique that, despite being a “no-brainer innovation,” was slowly adopted by very brainy people. The use of checklists in hospitals results in an astonishing 66% decrease in infections from certain procedures. The creator of the checklists, Dr. Peter Pronovost, said that the checklists’ efficacy was proven but that culture was getting in the way of adoption. Nurses can’t appear to be second-guessing doctors, who get furious if they do. His solution: showing nurses and doctors how their hierarchical culture could cause harm to patients.

If you read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I hope you recall the section about airline safety being correlated to the culture of the crew. Plane crews with an egalitarian streak are much safer than those with an unquestioning acceptance of authority where the co-pilot can’t challenge the pilot. How to speak directly and challenge without retribution are now standard training for airline officers. Oh, and by the way, pilots and cockpit staff go through elaborate checklists that require that another person repeat the item for surety.

What I’m talking about has been a theme of my career. I evangelize emerging technology for financial gain on behalf of corporations. I was an early player in commercial use of the web and see so clearly the possibilities that social media embody. But, really, I’ve spent a career trying to change culture, because what I propose is risky.

Talk among digerati about how you “have to” do social media, and how “x replaces y” ignores people and their foibles. Bran Ferren, a former Disney imagineer, gave one of the more memorable talks at TED years ago. He said something to the effect of, “Creative people, go hug a businessperson; businesspeople, go hug a creative.”

Burk’s Five Rules for Digital Marketing Adoption

1. Wait for your marshmallow. A famous experiment at Stanford in the 1960s gave four-year-olds one marshmallow and told them they could have another but only if they waited 20 minutes without eating the marshmallow in hand. They tracked the children through adolescence and demonstrated that the ones who had the ability to practice deferred gratification were better adjusted and more successful in school. The moral of the story for executives is, do a pilot first, digest the results, and then jump in.
2. Establish the measurement of success up front. Don’t use numbers such as site metrics after you create your site to justify your strategy. Do a test and measurement brief before you start to keep the statistics from lying. If you need a CHECKLIST for this brief, please contact me.
3. Embrace change in your heart. Make sure you’re not just doing something like social media on a superficial level. If you think having a Facebook fan page and a Twitter feed is social media, think again. Successful social media adoption comes from using the concept and platforms to change the way you do business, not the way you do marketing.
4. Don’t underestimate fear of disintermediation. Many valid innovations have been undermined by the fact that people are covetous of their jobs. However, if you can develop effective guidelines and policies, and overcommunicate why your effort will make the company and its employees more money, the smart people will try very hard to change.
5. Change requires partnership. A previous post of mine warns executives not to become “Lost Boys” by ignoring generation-skipping technologies. If you have children, have you discovered that they know technology better than you do, and that they find technology very compelling and a given. Gone are the days when my father told me he needed to reach a client in Addis Ababa and was told by an operator, “I’m sorry, sir. All lines to Addis Ababa are currently in use.” Executives, hug a savvy and creative geek. Geeks, hug an executive.

Individuals are the ones who bought millions of copies of Who Moved My Cheese? Move the cheese, but do so with cultural sensitivity.

Are we supposed to be authentic and transparent in social media or not? Based on the latest fuss, the answer is not. But that’s dead wrong.

Meghan McCain, a single, 24-year-old woman, took a picture of herself on a quiet Saturday night, reading Andy Warhol’s biography. I don’t know about you, but when I was 24 and I was home on a Saturday night, I became keenly aware that I wasn’t in a relationship. So, she posts a somewhat prurient picture of herself, and she ends up being called a “slut.” She was just being authentic and transparent, folks.

Ultimately, she ended up having to issue an apology: “McCainBlogette: I do want to apologize to anyone that was offended by my twitpic, I have clearly made a huge mistake and am sorry 2 those that are offended.”

In a related post, I read Robert Holland’s piece about whether or not CEOs should employ ghost twitterers. He says that using the PR firm to ghost twitter is downright unethical. Why? He says that “social media are different from traditional media. The biggest difference is that social media are about personal interaction.”

There have been multiple stories of celebrities deleting their Twitter accounts. Why? Well, there’s a music video from Miley Cyrus about it with 4.4 million views on YouTube in which she says, “I want my private life private. I’m living for me.”

This one’s an easy post for me. Social media are personal. That’s why authenticity and transparency can’t cut two ways. Or, to quote my colleague, Joshua-Michéle Ross, “Social tools follow social rules.” If you talk about work all the time, you’re boring. If you talk about your whereabouts constantly, you’re boring. If you talk to the same people over and over, you’re in a clique. But, if you talk about all the things you find interesting, you’ll be interesting!

I come back to a familiar refrain: before you start engaging in Twitter and other social media tactics, your company should have a strategy about what it’s trying to accomplish, how it can leverage social media for all the right reasons, and then start training your employees on what is and what is not appropriate for your workplace. If you think the PR firm can just do things for you in your name, social media justice will be meted out in a harsh way — and then you can hire the PR firm to do crisis communications.

Twitter is an overused, overhyped marketing tool, and I’m mad as hell about it.

Here’s the tweet that brought me to this epiphany:

RT @anamariecox: RT @kennethmoor: It is now my dream to Tweet “No money for bar…” and have Tweeters offering to buy. No one actually HAS

In annals of irony, however, if you go to a BlogHer conference, you’ll get so much CPG stuff that it will cover a king-sized mattress (thanks to @jessicaknows for that image).

Anyone starting to see the light here? There’s this perceived newfangled channel out there for the delivery of information called Twitter. So, everyone needs to use it for “marketing,” which, first mistake, usually gets associated with awareness. If you tweet at 2 a.m. about hair removal, anyone tracking a decent number of followers won’t see it. If they do, they are so jaded, that they’ll think, “Oh, so-and-so is getting paid or free samples and coupons to hype new lemon-scented hair remover!” This is what, in the business, is called a “social media campaign.” Sadly, I hear the following all the time: “We decided to pitch a social media campaign for the client, so we did a Facebook fan page and a Twitter feed.” This is across industries as diverse as CPG and B2B technology.

Hey, you say, you’re the guy who says PR firms own the future of digital. Well, I think it’s true. And that’s why I’m writing this — because marketing is about creating interest AND spurring action. Toss the “predisposed to buy” research. Show me the money, man!

Please remember the tweet above. That person wants to tweet about being at a bar and having no money — and being disappointed about no one buying him or her a drink. Marketers, enter the Trough of Disillusionment.

I didn’t make that phrase up. It’s from a Gartner article summarizing the hype cycle. Here are the five phases of the cycle:

1. Technology Trigger
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations <= Editor’s note: YOU ARE HERE!
3. Trough of Disillusionment
4. Slope of Enlightenment
5. Plateau of Productivity

Twitter’s at the trough. And I don’t mean by entertaining billion-dollar valuations. I mean the trough of disillusionment where the hype nosedives and people realize that having a few hundred followers (and I don’t have that many) on Twitter doesn’t make you all-powerful. Or, corporations realize that 700 fans on Facebook won’t even buy you a drink. If you pay Gartner, you can see a visualization of how steeply the curve goes down.

Sadly, based on my reading, it’s companies like Edelman Public Relations who are taking them there. Edelman has this training program, according to Sam Whitmore that gets you to the middle level of social media competency in 2.5 hours. This reminds me of a woman I once met who became a Reiki Master by taking a one-day class.

How do you avoid that trough and get to the “slope of enlightenment?” Well, read my previous post about how you need competent guides. Then, be sure you do the following.

1. Hire a Social Media (or Better, Social Business) Strategist

Twitter is just a tactic! Social media means much more than microblogging, and on the corporate scale, social tools used within a strategic framework can make, well, corporate money.

2. Don’t Use the C Word

The C word is “Campaign”). Social media isn’t a campaign, it “is ongoing and self-perpetuating.”

3. Ban Seven Dirty Words

Read my colleague Matt Dickman’s post “Want Better Digital Strategy? Ban Seven Dirty Words.” Those words are:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Ning

4. Act Like a Millennial

It’s okay to act like a millennial, because you don’t have to be one to understand these new media. Here’s a useful post about this aimed at millennials, but it’s true for everyone. I just love the opening quote:

In times of change, learners will inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

— Eric Hoffer, American social writer and philosopher, 1902-1983

5. Learn from Seth the Blogger Guy

Seth the Blogger Guy was hired by AT&T to make a video, which was placed in the social sphere, to address head-on concerns of technophiles about the company’s wireless network problems. A perfect strategy using multiple social outlets. People were in a rage when “Seth the Blogger Guy” turned out to be an employee of Fleishman-Hillard. The vitriol knob was turned to 11 for a short time, but testing in the aftermath showed that most people appreciated the straight talk. It seems to me this is the first sign that Twitter is small and that integrated strategies are big. It also demonstrates some of the concern of early adopters that their community actually be addressed and not used.

6. Join My New Crusade

My crusade is to stop Twitter from entering the annals of Yogi Berra sayings. It’s heading to the trough because, like the White House dinner he attended, “It was hard to have a conversation with anyone; there were so many people talking.”

I’m off to tweet that I’d like some really juicy digital business projects and see whether anyone calls.

Today’s large-company executives are going to learn a harsh lesson all over again. And they will, like generations before them, waste the lessons of history and become Lost Boys.

Let me refresh your memory of J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan. The Lost Boys are those who were misplaced by their nannies, and, having gone unclaimed for seven days, were transported to Neverland to live with Peter Pan, the eternal child. There is a generation of senior executives all over the world I characterize as “Lost Boys” (Editor’s note: In Peter Pan, there are no “lost girls” because girls are too clever to be lost.) They lack understanding of social media, and unless they come to trust someone who is “switched on,” they leave a very difficult task to the next executive.

They run companies that are willing to settle for three percent growth rather than invest in disruptive technologies that comprise “emerging growth companies.” Many examples of this are cited by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma. One example he cites is fixed-line telephony vs. cellular phones. In particular, many executives have yet to comprehend the concept of social business.

While I have been pushing this for a while, today’s post acknowledges that an awakening happened today thanks to an interesting blog post by David Armano (@armano) and a daring leap in a company web site by The Dachis Group. They are taking social business to a new level on their own site. It’s a great experiment, and I’ll message them privately about emphasizing transparency over utility. I take issue with the fact that they actually try to make the point of transparency of logging in real time who they are e-mailing but do less to illustrate the value of social media culture and thinking than they should.

What this teaches is that if you don’t integrate social media into your corporate culture and encourage experimentation and use, the next generation of executives will have the awful task of undoing what you’ve done. There are so many applications for social media platforms that I won’t list them here. Instead, I’ll refer you to a post by Michael Kahn, “A Dozen Applications for Social Media.”

In 1995, I had this vision of a digital future for marketers and got rebuffed by the last generation of Lost Boys. Their attitude was, “We have Yellow Pages advertising, so why would we need a web site?” Fourteen years later, their attitude seems to be, “We can’t let go of control.” I’m a realist, and I understand that no major corporation is going to change overnight. But every major corporation now pays painstaking attention to its web site. They have brought development inside their organizations.

So, what’s next? This is a classic adoption puzzle. If you’re a senior executive, then read some blogs, search for references to your company on Twitter, and invite your PR firm to give you an executive briefing about social media. Then, authorize an experiment. Pick someone from two generations behind you, and let them recommend some ideas to you. You can even have them select from any of the dozen applications in Kahn’s post.

When you get your executive briefing, don’t let anyone tell you that they can do it for you. Yes, there are pure-play social media shops, but they haven’t demonstrated any ability to really understand how to bridge old and new at a pace other than, well, breakneck. Social media is not marketing is not digital integration. Twitter and Facebook are not the universe of social media. And there are differences between platforms and applications. The best thing any firm with social media expertise can offer you is:

1. training
2. strategy
3. guidance

If your organization is not evolving into a social business, then you will become a Lost Boy, destined to live as an eternal child and missing out on the education of a lifetime, care of the people who give you money or make you money.

The Internet is all about change, right? For 15 years, I’ve been helping companies deal with this change with the following heretofore secret formula, and now I think I know what’s next.

First, I assemble and consult with a team of brilliant thinkers to help me constantly survey the never-ending stream of innovations in digital communications technologies and techniques.

Second, I draw on my anthropology training to rigorously evaluate which of those innovations are both (a) being successfully used by only 20 percent of mainstream businesses and (b) have the potential to break out into the mainstream because of the way they appeal to natural behavior patterns of homo sapiens interneticus.

Third, I help businesses adopt and refine these techniques in ways where success can be measured. By the time we master these techniques and adoption is at 80 percent, we’re ready to introduce the next innovation that is currently at only 20 percent adoption but poised to break out.

Okay, maybe it’s not that secret a formula. It’s really just Internet common sense developed to an uncommon degree. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a crystal ball, and it’s telling me this:

If companies want to stay connected to their customers, they need to make the Internet the focus of their efforts, and join the part of the Internet where users generate the content, where the sharing of values leads people to create their own communities, and where individuals socialize with other individuals for non-commercial reasons.

Yeah, there’s nothing earth-shattering here, but consider this quote from a PR Week piece: “When you get to some digital areas … typically in our world PR is the lead.” That’s Mark Addicks, the CMO of General Mills, talking. I’m fond of saying that the Internet is a cultural phenomenon — don’t go there without a guide. When it comes to the Internet’s cultural sensitivities, do you think that an art director at Grey Advertising “gets it” better than PR professionals?

Based on these convictions, on September 1, 2009 I joined Fleishman-Hillard as Senior Vice President, West Coast Digital.

Why Public Relations Over Digital Marketing?

I led Clear Ink, a digital marketing agency, for more than a decade, and I’ve been watching in recent years as marketing has been augmented with — and even replaced by — the grassroots, bottom-up world of social media. I believe that the most effective consultants to help corporations navigate the digital world are public relations firms, not advertising agencies, pure-play digital agencies, or similar advertising- and marketing-based consultants.

• Marketers are good at speaking, but PR professionals are better at both speaking and listening — better at conversations, which drive social media.
• PR professionals understand communications that are based on relationships, and that’s what social media is all about.
• PR professionals know how to understand individual influencers, what they need, and what they’re sensitive to. If you have a famous blogger trashing you, who you gonna call — your ad agency or your PR firm?
• PR professionals are more humble. They understand that in this revolution, having a seat at the table is often the best you can hope for. They are learning earlier than others that the appearance of control or lack of transparency is a death sentence for a corporate client.

I know that more companies are agreeing with this perspective, because it’s reflected in their budgets. Advertising agencies and direct mail firms are suffering for their lack of ability to adapt to the digital snowball. Some internal numbers I can’t share right now show that in the recent recession, traditional advertising agencies have seen revenues decline much more steeply than PR firms. I think this is because pure-play digital firms such as Razorfish and others are not good at integrating different types of communications. They are quite good at their specialties, but they abhor the fact that sometimes clients do need to integrate advertising customer insights with creativity not just rooted in technology, which is why companies such as General Mills are asking their PR firms to take the lead.

Why Fleishman-Hillard Over Other PR Firms?

Over the months I was pondering the new challenges raised by the digitization of business in general and the prominence of social media, and how I can best help companies meet these challenges, I met with several people including Joshua-Michéle Ross, Robin Harper, Steve Nelson, Curt Kundred, Mark Celsor, and Demian Entrekin, trying to crack the nut. After discussions with them, I realized it was time for a new chapter. Then, I looked around, did some contracting work, and landed with pleasure at Fleishman-Hillard. Here’s why.

First, in my 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area communications community, several firms really stood out to me for their commitment to high ethics, which is extremely important to nearly all social media communities. Clear Ink partnered with Fleishman-Hillard on a large project, and I was so impressed with the people and the work, I made it a point to get to know the firm better.

Second, during a visit to Fleishman-Hillard earlier this year, I was overwhelmed with how well they were developing their offerings around the world. I felt at home instantly. It reminded me of when I decided what college to attend. I visited all sorts of colleges and was accepted by one of my first choices. But then I visited Pomona College. I spent the day with a student, just seeing what life was like. By that evening, I had decided that I was going to Pomona. It was one of the best decisions of my life. I’ve had the same experience with Fleishman-Hillard: I’m right where I belong.