They didn’t send out a press release, there’s no blog announcement, nobody was interviewed for it, they just figured out a way to do something cool, and made it happen.

At the present moment, it’s trending on Twitter, and about 80% of the tweets today (in my feed at least) have been about “OMG Google’s logo is a playable pac-man!!!!”, from fans of all ages and followings.

Let’s put all the talk about social media and content strategy discussion aside.  Here’s what it comes down to:

It’s not always the big flashy campaigns and press blitzes that create the most impact.  Sometimes it’s just doing something cool for your people that they’re not expecting.

In this business, we talk a lot (I mean a lot about creating client delight, connecting with customers, being ‘authentic’ and ‘transparent’), but here’s a great example of a simple selfless and well-executed idea capturing peoples hearts and attention.

Some things to consider:

• It’s quick and in-flow. Google did not build a separate page for this. Users did not have to do anything outside their normal behavior patterns with the site. They simply did what they do already (go to www.google.com) and the experience was there.  They play for a little bit, and go on with their day.
• There’s a minimal time commitment to interact. No “Go to pacman.google.com, use Facebook connect to log in, invite three friends and you can play a game!”. Just do what you were going to do anyway, play for a few minutes, go on with your day.
• It’s easy to recommend to your network. The in-flowness also made the experience that much more shareable, because people know that their friends are going to Google anyway, so it was not “extra work” for people to experience the game once it was shared.
• There is an element of surprise to the interaction. Google is known for frequently switching up the logo on their home page to celebrate assorted holidays, anniversaries and other notable events. This is the first time it’s ever been interactive.
• Users discovered for themselves. There’s no “PLAY THE INTERACTIVE PAC-MAN LOGO NOW!” star burst image.  There was an element of ownership and discovery around the “hey, you can actually play this thing”
• It’s timely and relevant. I didn’t know today was the 30th anniversary of PacMan. Now I do. So do you.
• There’s no further ‘ask’ from them. User data jokes aside, Google didn’t ask you to re-tweet, they don’t want your email address, they don’t want you to buy a deluxe version of the game.  It’s just out there because they thought they’d create something cool for today. They provided value selflessly (though ultimately what they’re getting back in visibility and publicity more than makes up for whatever dev time it took to build the game)

Good on you, Google.  Way to add awesomeness to our day.  Much for many to learn, here.

[Update: You can play PacMan (I'm assuming) forever at http://www.google.com/pacman]

Jeremy Meyers is an Engagement Strategist at Waggener Edstrom and also blogs at JeremyMeyers.com.  He was always more of a Dig Dug fan, himself.

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Over the weekend Lee Oden asked several us why strategy before tactics was so important. He received 44 different answers from some really smart and talented people. As I was crafting my response I thought I’d show how simple it could be to craft a strategy and in the process hopefully show some of the different components.

Here’s a simple example I just made up:

I need people in my town to know about my new pet sitting business in order to grow new customers (Objective: Awareness).

People are very passionate about their pets so I need them to trust me with their pets and know why I’m better than a kennel service (Goal: Brand Positioning).

(Target Audience: People in my town who are passionate about their pets)

I want to grow my business through organic Word of Mouth by building personal relationships with potential customers (Strategy).

I’ll use social media to find people in my town talking about their pets, I’ll then offer tips and advice so they can see that I know what I’m talking about and know that I care about pets as much as they do (Social Media Strategy).

I’m building my website using WordPress so I have a blog and I’ll also start a Twitter account and Facebook page (Tactics).

My Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) will be:

• Twitter: followers, RT’s, @replies and clicks
• Facebook: Fans/Likers, comments
• Blog: subscribers, comments, shares, page views (especially about and contact)
• Business leads: Track where I’m getting the most leads from and who are my best referrers.

There you go. Your very basic social media strategy. What am I missing? Anything else in there I should add?

Obviously this gets more complex the larger the organization but we should always be fighting it from getting too complicated. Because this is something we should constantly be revisiting and adjusting.

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while and have talked around the issue a few times. If you think I talk a lot about social media here and on Twitter you should talk to me in real life. Over the last few months a few people have blogged about my thoughts around social media strategy that I haven’t shared here. This post is an attempt to pull those various thoughts together.

First Shannon Paul asked me the very dangerous question: What’s missing from most social media strategies? The correct answer of course is the strategy. The following is an expanded version of the answer I gave her.

Defining Social Media Strategy

When people talk about their social media strategy they are usually talking about their Goals (their desired outcome), or the specific tactics used to achieve their goals. A strategy is neither of these things. Strategy may be one of the most misunderstood and misused terms in business, probably because every business expert has their own definition. How strategy was explained to me in my MBA program was:

• A business strategy is creating operational alignment between all functions and activities of a business.

A communication strategy is a subset of the business strategy. If you buy my professors definition then:

• A communications strategy is the alignment between all the mar-com groups and their activities in support of the business strategy.

The communications strategy supports the business strategy by communicating the various messages (primarily the companies value proposition) to the various stakeholders of a company (the value proposition is different to each stakeholder). Stakeholders being customers, shareholders (if applicable), employees, partners and anyone else who is impacted by a company. For a company like Microsoft (client) or HP (former employer) that pretty much means everyone.

Therefore a social media strategy,for PR or Marketing, is a subset of the communications strategy. It should support the communications strategy in supporting the business strategy.

So to answer the question: “What are most social media strategies missing?” They are missing organizational alignment with the overall communications strategy which is often not in full alignment with the business strategy to begin with.

Because they are not aligned they are not achieving efficiency. This is why we mostly see one off social media campaigns that don’t accrue to anything.

This problem isn’t unique to social media. It plagues all comms groups; advertising, marketing, PR etc because we often work in our own silos and fail to achieve alignment.

This is no small task and I doubt that true strategic alignment is achievable; we’re imperfect people in imperfect companies. But it starts by first understanding clearly the overall business strategy and then making sure we are aligned to that and not our own personal or department goals.

The question then becomes do you have a social media strategy? Think about that before you answer. Over the last year I have noticed three different strategies for adopting social media (one strategy is to not adapt social media at all but that’s a topic for another post). At the SXSW Social Media Breakfast I presented briefly and talked about the three kinds of strategies. Aliza Sherman was in attendance and captured these three approaches on WebWorkerDaily (go read the comments, they’re great).

The Bolt On Strategy

This is where most businesses are today (assuming they’re doing anything) and really isn’t a strategy in my view because it’s not optimized with existing efforts and resources, it’s more of a phase companies go through. This is the way every company starts off. This is the toe-in-the-water, stop-gap approach. What this looks like is the one off blog, Twitter account or Facebook page that isn’t integrated into anything and many people in the company might not even be aware of. This isn’t a bad way to start, there’s a lot of learning that happens in this phase but it’s not really a strategy.

The danger becomes when more and more groups within the business start bolting on their own individual efforts. The end result is what I call Zombie Media: social media with no brains.

Optimizing Social Media For Your Business

This is the phase more advanced companies are actively working towards. When you use social media as part of your business for any length of time you will quickly realize that you are not getting the most out of your efforts. For all the external output you create you (initially) create multiple extra cycles internally.

Does this sound familiar?

1. Someone says something bad about your company on Twitter or on a blog or in a comment to a blog or on your Facebook page.  What happens next?
2. An email is sent out with a screen grab and (maybe) a link to the offending statement.
3. Multiple people hit the “Reply to All” button in Outlook and the first line reads something like this: “Adding [so-and-so] or [x-team] because (some reason that really means I don’t want to/don’t know how to deal with this).
4. Repeat step 3 a few more times and the issue gets escalated further and further up the chain.
5. Now your entire day (and maybe the next) is spent managing the email created by a tweet.
6. If you’re lucky you get a response to that person (assuming you decide to respond at all) late that day or sometime the next.

Point #6 is, of course, dependent on the fact that you have at least made it to the Bolt On Strategy. How quickly you respond is a direct reflection on how far you are along the spectrum towards optimizing social media for your business.

Within this strategy you have clear decision makers, clear roles and responsibilities and have allocated the right resources to social media. To date this is as far as I have seen any company go.

Optimizing Your Business for Social Media – Beyond Marketing

To me this is the Holy Grail. I don’t think any company has achieved this strategy (some like StockTwits are close). There is an alternative definition of strategy that I have used that I like better than the first one I gave (I know that’s cheating).

Strategy: Art and science of planning and marshaling resources for their most efficient and effective use.

Sounds kind of close to the first definition but without all the business lingo. There’s a key difference though: operational alignment vs. most efficient and effective.

If you think of social media as only a communications channel you will never achieve this strategy. If you perceive social media as the most disruptive resource since the Internet and the Web then you will begin to see the possibilities.

HP is currently the top global PC manufacturer. There was time though when Dell was the top dog and the Investor darling. HP had an unmatched sales channel and there was no way anyone would easily beat it. That is until Dell built a business that was optimized for to the Web, completely bypassing the channel (something they’re now trying to go back and build). Eventually HP matched Dell’s price through acquisitions, scale and building out there Web sales but it was expensive and the Compaq acquisition almost sank the company (it didn’t help that Carly was CEO).

Amazon (client), Netflix and Google have all built businesses optimized for the Web.

Facebook and Twitter have built businesses that enable social media but I have argued that even they are not strategically optimized for social media (I think they’re really close though I just feel like they focus too much on acting like a “real” business – another post). In order to optimize for social media you can’t just address the technology you have to look at the cultural shift that is happening. Businesses need to realize that collectively and globally our priorities are very different than they were ten or even five years ago.

In a previous post I tried to define what some are calling the social business. I’ve adapted that definition slightly to show what a social media strategy would look like.

A business strategy that is optimized for social media will use social technologies to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders.  By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust will result in greater knowledge creation, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

Business Model vs Business Strategy

At this point some of you may be thinking that I’ve crossed over into talking about business models and not just strategy.  A business model is how you make money. Amazon’s business model is the same as Barnes &  Noble’s but their strategy is optimized for the Web by doing away with physical locations.

One Final Note

If you’re still reading this 1,400 words later, I congratulate and thank you. I fully admit to being a social media Kool-Aid drinker (strawberry kiwi) but I am not saying that the only strategy is throwing out your old business model and strategy and rebuilding it around social media. Very few companies can, will or should create a strategy like this. Just like most companies do not have a business optimized around the Web. Most will end up with some version of the second strategy.

But those few that do will be the next Amazon, Netflix and Google of their industries.

Be sure to sign up for the New Comm Biz Social Newsletter to receive a little bit of interactive magic in your mail each month.

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It’s about to.

Tired and Lonely

The supports that hold up traditional organizations have been shaken and weakened and are about to be hit by a massive aftershock that will finish the job. Business as usual will cease to exist except in the most laggard, niche markets. Org charts will get thrown out the window and MBA programs everywhere will quickly turn into business history classes.

Anytime someone tells you “We HAVE  to do it this way,” run. Run far away. You don’t HAVE to do anything. If someone says “You Can’t do that, it will never work,” you’re probably on the right path, keep going.

While I am as excited as ever about these tectonic shifts happening in our world I’m also really tired.  I love disruption more than any healthy person should. I thrive in chaos. But I’ve been doing this for a while now and sometimes it’s exhausting, lonely work.

I feel like I’ve just sprinted as fast as I could to the finish line only to realize that it was actually the starting line to a marathon. Go.

Even though I’ve been right way more often than I’ve been wrong over the last 5 years, most people aren’t going to believe me. Even those that believed me the first time are going to be skeptical, and the ones who do believe me and aren’t skeptical are tired too. Some of them are sitting this one out.

But that’s enough complaining, it’s time to get back to work. I’ve got massive destruction to prepare for.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

Photo credit: by Balakov

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Do you know this consultant/manager?

They are great at planning and strategizing and planning and brainstorming but never execute on anything?

I’ve seen managers inside companies take multiple quarters or even years to put plans together. By the time it’s done everything’s changed and they have to start all over again.

Consultants are notorious for this. They can build beautiful PowerPoint decks and churn out reams of paper in reports and strategy docs without ever really telling you what to do and are gone long before you realize you’ve been screwed. (The latest flavor of this of course is the social media consultant.)

Neil Beam and I were ranting about this when he reminded me of this great video from the “good days” of SNL (not to be confused with the “good old days” of SNL).

The Change Bank.

But planning, brainstorming and creating strategies but they are absolutely worthless if no one can implement them.

If you’re trying to determine if a new hire or consultant is right don’t let them wow you with their client lists or strategery ask for examples of projects they’ve actually taken from planning to execution to measurement. (Hint: run away if they don’t have any metrics.)

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None Found

There is a lot of dissent within the marketing ranks of Corporate America about quarterly reporting. The common argument is that by basing your marketing strategy on quarterly earnings you aren’t giving your company enough time to let your decisions play out. I’ve often heard people advocate for the Japanese approach to strategy which advocates for a 100 year strategy. Wow 100 years, that’s a long time. What happens if things aren’t working out after 20 years? 80 years is a long time to wait to adjust.

Having worked with and for several fortune 100 companies I’ve come to the conclusion that the real problem is how long it takes companies to come up with and execute a strategy. It typically takes at least one full quarter for you to develop a strategy. Actually it takes about a week or two and then 2 1/2 months to sell it in, get approval and budget. Then it typically takes about a full quarter to execute on that strategy. Half the year is now gone and you don’t even know what the results of your strategy are.

The reason quarterly reporting upsets most strategists is because they never know if what they are doing is working or not. (Personally, I think that’s part of the reason why marketing and measurement are in the shape they are.) The problem isn’t quarterly reporting. The problem is that it takes so long to create, approve and execute on a strategy.

The sick irony is that quarterly reporting has created a crippling fear inside public companies that has lead to so many barriers and hurdles being put in place to ensure you don’t create the wrong strategy that ultimately you’re crippling yourself from ever creating a good strategy. At best most companies end up creating an okay strategy that then has to suffer through it’s own hurdles to survive until execution. (That was a pun in case you missed it.)

There is nothing wrong with quarterly reporting. Yes it makes some companies do some crazy things but money always does. Quarterly reporting is what drives companies to improve. It motivates companies to innovate and create wealth (remember we are all capitalists here and money is still a good thing) I know (hope) I get some flack for this statement in the comments.

What needs to change is you need to tear down the hurdles that are stopping your marketers from creating truly great strategies and executing on them swiftly.

Again it’s not the reporting that’s broken, but the speed of innovation. It’s the fear and the hurdles that cause middle managers to kill real innovation. Of course the other truth is that for every innovation that was unjustly killed, there were thousands that were rightfully euthanized. You need to stop stifling your engineers and innovators from really innovating not iterating.

(And no, I really don’t know why I chose that photo. It was one of the Zemanta recommendations and it somehow seemed fitting.)

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For a long time now I (and many many others) have been talking about transparency. I’ve even gone so far as to translate it into to corporate speak by telling companies that they need to adopt a Transparent Business Strategy. Most people when I say this nod their head and agree with me as if to say “oh yeah we have one of those,” which is quickly followed by a slight look of confusion as they start to wonder what that actually means.

The goal of a Transparent Strategy is to have trust.
To have trust in others and to have the trust of others.

I hate throwing around the much over used word, “strategy” without some context. The best definition of strategy that I’ve heard is: to create fit within all practices of an organization. Each function of a company should support the other business functions to drive profit. That is the goal right?

I believe that transparency drives trust which drives greater profits.

• When your employees trust you they will work harder.
• When your customers trust you they are more loyal.
• When your stakeholders trust you they are more likely to invest in you.
• When your strategic partners trust you they will more likely share valuable information.

I don’t know a single company (I’m sure they exist somewhere) that doesn’t want to have the trust of their customers, or the trust of their employees. Far fewer companies are willing to trust their customers or employees. Most say they do, but how many actually do?

If a company trusted their employees, why would it be so scary to let them blog or have an internal forum? If a company trusted that their customers would come to their defense if some wayfaring naysayer wondered by, why wouldn’t they have a company blog?

Of course an even more poiniant question is: if a company has trust in themselves what do they have to be afraid of? I think they are afraid of the truth.

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