I recently attended a seminar organised by IT consultancy firm OCTO Technology here in Brussels, where they talked about “The Giants of the Web”.

In essence, the seminar was about the things that successful web companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon etc are doing, that accounts for their initial and continued success, and that distinguishes them from the other (i.e. unsuccessful) companies.

It was a great presentation by Ludovic Cinquin, their VP. And the points which he made were poignant and relevant. I do not wish to paraphrase him or his company here, although I’d just like to underline two points he made which I think are extremely relevant to digital communications in this age of constant connectivity.

Your time to respond was yesterday

Using Gary’s Social Media Counter, Ludovic cited how time is a vital element that web companies value. Among one of the several slogans illustrating this point was one reportedly coined by Mark Zuckerberg - “Done is Better than Perfect”. This really struck me as something which companies, not just web ones, need to do. It is not about presenting something imperfect before its time. It is about NOT over-analysing a situation in such a way that no decision or action is taken, or taken in time, such that it paralyses the outcome.

I am constantly reminded of this when companies I have worked with ‘cannot let go’ of the traditional, top-down reporting structure or hierarchy they have come up with. Hierarchies are good, in that they clearly define job scopes, responsibilities and duties. But if they hinder your company’s communications or ability to react or act in time, you have to rethink that structure. Specifically, in terms of social media, your clients’  expectation of you answering their tweets is instantaneous. You need to portray an image of wanting to help, instead of being unable or unwilling to do anything.

Horizontal organisation for productivity

Another point which I took home with me, was the idea of “pizza teams”. According to Ludovic, and contrary to popular beliefs, web giants have small teams (enough to feed with two pizzas, hence the name) comprising different members with different capacity and each team is in charge of each ‘feature’. At Spotify for example, people are organised by tribes, squads and chapters, and everyone joins a differently-composed team called guild to work on a particular ‘feature’ - i.e. a particular project. This means that everyone works with different teams on different projects at all times.

The benefits of such horizontal organisation are enormous. 

- Firstly, there is a culture of collaboration and sharing that prevents information-hogging or departmental rivalry often seen in traditional top-down structures. This encourages creativity and output, and rewards efforts in a transparent meritocracy. Inefficient individuals or those who only talk big are easily singled out and eliminated, because more people are aware of this trend because teams rotate according to features/projects.

- Secondly, in a horizontal structure, teams members achieve a sense of achievement at the end of each project because contributions are clear and team work is valued. In a traditional hierarchy, achievement is seen only in terms of upward mobility. As there can only be fewer and fewer superiors up the ladder, such mobility is limited, the sense of accomplishment is therefore restricted.

In terms of social media marketing, horizontal organisation proves to be more efficient and productive. Often, companies relegate it to one person’s role in the marketing department. But when communications relate to customer service, IT or technical support, sales, research, this person has to run to other departments who may or may not give him the information needed. When organised horizontally, one person in each of the different teams specializing in different areas is more able to engage in meaningful conversations with the clients.

The organisers of the seminars also mentioned other aspects such as continuous multivariate testing and continuous delivery, which apply once again not only to web or IT companies, but to all organisations. We are currently experiencing another global deep-cutting information revolution, that will radically change our society and social organisations. This is the time to evolve accordingly, or become extinct.

You can connect with the speaker Ludovic Cinquin (@OCTOTechnology) or Belgium Manager Philippe Guicheney (@pguicheney) on Twitter.

Twelve tweets and this guys has over twenty-seven thousand followers? Come on, Twitter. How can you allow such tweetbots to exist?!

Accounts like these bring me back to what I always say: it is not the number of followers you have that counts, it is the amount of quality, meaningful interaction you have with your followers that is going to make an impact in your digital communications/marketing efforts.

Social media is not an announcement type media like TV, print ads or billboards. To make full use of it, one has to make use of these meaningful interactions to build up an interactive community with your followers. It takes time and effort.

There is no straightforward answer to this question. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

It depends on your sector, your target audience, what you want to achieve and what impact you want to make in terms of your brand image.

But let us weigh the two options:

If you are a big company, producing consumer goods or services and have always used agencies who vy for your marketing campaigns, and you have never ever meddled in social media, outsource is a great way to start.

As I have mentioned in a previous article, social media should not be mired in your company’s power structure (believe me, this shows up in your tweets) and perhaps outsourcing will get you that political approval or bypass the political struggles by engaging external experts. This is a good way for you to learn from the experts on how to engage your customers on a more personal level. When times goes on, you have set up a social media team in your company, comprising colleagues from marketing, sales, customer service, product design, you can take over and improve your company’s involvement in social media.

I strongly recommend outsourcing when you are already giving a particular campaign project to an agency. For example if you are selling pizzas and you are using the agency to do a launch campaign of a new flavour, the use of social media is imperative to be passed to that agency. That being said, a different social media profile could be used for that campaign, if participatory actions are involved, such as taking pictures of the new flavour and uploading it onto a social network so as to guess the new secret ingredient: a different Twitter hashtag or handle could be used or a different Facebook page, so as to enhance the participatory rate of that campaign by not using your company’s normal social media profile.

If you are a small company, I do not recommend outsourcing. Not only is it a large sum of money, it takes away that opportunity for you to interact directly with your customers, especially when you can be casual enough within your company structure to get different people involved. This helps build team spirit within the company which comes through your tweets. What is also good is such direct interaction allows room for mistakes: when there is a bump in your service delivery and your company makes a mistake and admits to it readily through your tweets for example, you get your customers to empathize with you rather than reprimand you for your mistakes. Compare this to large companies where because of the power structure, they try hard to cover up and when they cannot, they have to launch a press release as some kind of official apology, which does not really win any hearts anyway.

I am a big fan of the use of social media by Mobile Vikings, a Belgian mobile phone operator. They are a small company which has employed social media positively in their interaction with their customers. Follow them on Twitter and Facebook and you will see what I mean.

That being said, social media is about engaging in a fun way with your customers, not about upping your ranking on Google search or making people go to your website so that you can show your boss an increase in visitor rate. 

I am often bemused by these enumerated mantras churned out by marketing gurus. To what extent people exactly believe such mantras is a mystery to me, but it is certain that with the rise of social media, advertising and marketing directors and managers have been cooking up new theories and methodologies, invented words and ideas to mystify the things that they do so as to raise the status of their work.

As cynical as I may sound, I am actually one of them. But unlike them, I seriously advise you NOT to engage in social media should you identify with any one of the reasons below:

1. Social media is part of Marketing

What is marketing? As much as marketing professionals like to insist that it is an art that dates from ancient Egypt, the birth of the current idea of marketing only began in the 1950s. Back then, there was one person in the company who designed ads that got sent to the press. That person may also have designed some pamphlets to be distributed in letterboxes in homes. Now, every company has a department with a marketing director or manager running a team of executives thinking of novel ways to advertise their products and calculations to justify the costs spent. But when you get down to the basics, marketing is about telling your target customers, either future or present, why they should buy your products. It is a one-directional information flow.

From the time of Gutenberg to the age of colour television, information has flowed from one group down to another group: church to believers, radio broadcaster to listeners, newspaper editors to readers, manufacturers to households, politicians to citizens. 

But the internet has changed that paradigm. Individuals have started to select the type of information they want, with whom they want to interact, when and where they want to interact, based on what kind of shared interest they want to interact about. Most importantly, there is no hierarchy on this interaction. It is a two-way information flow that is instantaneous.

Social media is a manifestation of that development, not a result of it. And with the portability of the internet, through the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, this mode of interaction is becoming more current.

If you understand this change of paradigm, then you will understand how social media is not part of marketing. It replaces it. Many marketing professionals try to prevent this change of traditional power structure by harnassing or controlling it, like engaging a junior guy to tweet or update the company’s Facebook page. If you are one of these marketing directors, then social media will never work for you. 

You will most likely treat social media as another platform of one-directional information flow. Your tweets will be a 140-character long version of your advertising tagline, or simply links to your website. Your Facebook updates will also be your tweets. Your social media engagements will also most likely be subjugated to a particular marketing campaign.

2. I believe that social media has to have KPIs and ROIs

You are most likely one of those marketing directors I mentioned before, if you believe in the above statement. 

I have seen marketeers setting targets on the number of people who LIKE the company’s Facebook page, or have a certain explosive numbers of followers on Twitter or Pinterest. They have also done that to websites, stating how many visitors they have had in a certain period.

Depending on the information you post, the kind of profile you have, the level of interesting-ness of your profile and posts, you are not going to get a whole lot of visitors nor friends. Social media is a place where friends giggle over something funny or cool, not where you blast how good your product is.

3. Everyone else is using social media, so should we

Just like how everyone rushes to make an iPad app and in the end the app turns out to be a tablet version of their website, everyone rushes to be on social media without thinking whether it works for them.

Those top managers and marketing directors who insist on using social media because everyone else is on it, then they do not know their customers. If you are a B2B company that produces mechanical parts for engines in the automobile business, do you seriously expect your customers to find you on Facebook and look forward to you tweeting about new products?

If you are sincere about engaging in conversations with your customers, you need to know: what are the profiles of people who engage in a particular social network platform in your country, in which language and in what settings? What are the social-networking profiles of your (current and potential) customers? Do the two coincide?

4. We need to be on the latest social media platform before other companies do

The race to be on social media has led to a race to using the latest platform.

I had some advertising person who asked me the other day whether I use Pinterest. I do. But it does not mean that I promote its usage by that particular company, because in the country where this company is located (i.e. Belgium), no one really uses Pinterest. Yelp for example is used to the brim in the US, and outside of it, no one has even heard of it. You only go to where your customers are, not where your competitors are not.

5. Social media is an online call centre

I have seen some companies getting social media engagement out of the marketing department and put it in the hands of their customer service department. It works brilliantly in many small B2C companies, where you get personalised replies and greetings. Customers feel like they are visiting a small neighbourhood shop where you get to chat with your usual helpful cashier (who does not hesitate to help you or even bend some rules for you). Comparatively, large companies that have tried the same thing have only muddled along: they are like cashiers in a gigantic supermarket who have to scan thousands of items per day and they cannot wait for the queue to get shorter or for the lunch bell to ring. This is especially so when the Twitterer of the company has to have his tweets double-checked and authorized by a senior manager. The guy cannot promise assistance to a complaint or call for help because it has to be approved by the manager concerned. Most awkward of all is when the company outsources its social media engagement so the agency has to first forward the requests to the marketing director who then forwards them to the right department, it takes days before a response is formulated.

What is social media and who should use it?

Social media are platforms on which individuals engage in a conversation with one another on common interests. If you intrude that space with a traditional one-way broadcast mentality, then you will quickly find yourself isolated. 

The way I see it, it is an opportunity for you to talk about things that binds you together with your customers. You, as an individual, not the company. If, for example, your company is selling shoes for women, perhaps the conversation should be about shoes some actresses were wearing in Cannes. It allows you to find out what people like and why they like it.

Social media is a personal conversational platform. To use it to your advantage, you have to first break free of your marketeer mentality and talk to the people you want to talk to as an individual. There is no immediate or mid-term ROI, and you cannot set a KPI target.