Scott Zalaznik elaborated that Sprint had made a conscious decision in the interest of transparency not to filter out noise. “Transparency was really core to developing a community that actually mattered,” said Zalaznik. That feedback has helped decrease return rates and helped in Sprint’s forecasting as well.
Pulliam asked what kind of success marketers had in persuading a firm to act once they evaluated and prioritized customer input.
At Gatorade, Brian Yamada noted, inertia was not an issue. As befits the product perhaps, “The leadership is built for sprinting and speed.” That much said, Yamada conceded that not all VML clients are as ready as Gatorade to heed the voice of the consumer. “You can do a lot of scenario planning beforehand, but the reality is that you can never predict what consumers are going to say or do.” The more nimble companies are prepared “to embrace the unknown.”
The challenge, Shelly Kramer explained, is making “the C-level managers” aware of social media’s marketing potential. That job is not as hard as it sounds. Contrary to popular belief, adults are well wired into the social media environment. The fastest-growing demographic on Facebook, for instance, is 65-plus females.
According to Nicole Tremblay, a highly responsive brand, even if small, has much more leverage in a social media environment than it would in a more traditional media environment. To maximize return, however, requires a sound governance policy and an understanding among all employees within a firm as to appropriate responses. “Teaching people what they can and can’t do is the best way to approach it,” Tremblay added.
Terry Pulliam explained Sprint’s practical application of that same philosophy. At Sprint, about a thousand employees have been trained to be what Sprint calls “Social Media Ninjas.” Sprint empowers the Ninjas to go out and talk about Sprint in their social networks.
“I think the surprising thing,” said Pulliam, “was how much support [the Ninjas] wanted. They wanted the boundaries. It was very nuanced. So we gave them training and they wanted more. That’s been tremendously effective for us.”
Pulliam described the program as largely self-policing. Scott Zalaznik added that occasionally employees get off message, but Sprint has had no experience with them saying something inappropriate.
The Branded Site
As Matt Anthony noted, virtually every journey on the Internet starts with a search. Generally, that search takes the traveler directly to his destination, typically bypassing a given brand’s Web site. The question he asked was, how do marketers find a balance between the brand’s home site and its other outposts in the virtual community?
“It’s a shifting place right now,” said Marcello Vergara of Propaganda 3. He described the shift metaphorically. With the branded site it was as if marketers invited people to their home and greeted them at the front door. Now, with the social media, it is more like inviting people to a party and hoping to find a way to mingle with them.
About 1.6 million searches a month lead to Sprint, but the destination is not typically the brand site. Rather, it is a sales or service endpoint. Site traffic, Scott Zalaznik explained, is fairly stable but has been increasing with the broader business recovery.
“There is no home page any more,” said Todd Decker. “A search will take someone right into the site where they are going.”
“What we’ll tell clients,” affirmed Ramsey Mohsen, “is that your Web site isn’t a destination. Get over yourself.”
“The day of typing in ‘crateandbarrel.com’ are certainly over,” agreed Zalaznik, “and who makes the most money from that are the search engines.”