Leading Social MediaTechnology and Management PracticesFor Improving Insights and Execution

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Table of Contents

01 Introduction

02 Mission, Vision and Focus

03 Social Media Technology Applications

04 System Integration and Architectures

05 Performance Analytics and Data Science

06 Social Media Metrics and Reporting

07 Consumer Engagement and Marketing

08 Organization, Operations and Governance

09 Moving Forward and Parting Thoughts

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Introduction

Companies overwhelmingly report that social media is an important and growing priority. A recent survey found that 98% of companies reported presence on at least one major social network and more than half reported plans to expand to other platforms within the next year. Most management teams now believe in the overall value of social and senior-level executives are the ones being charged with leading social media departments and engagement initiatives in most organizations.

The vast majority of companies plan to increase their investment in social in a meaningful way going forward. Almost 70% plan to increase their internal staffing and 65%+ plan to increase their social media marketing budget.

While most companies are primarily using social media to drive brand awareness and preference, many are moving towards using social media as a mechanism for directly driving sales, loyalty and service. Some are using it for their broader public relations initiatives and crisis and risk management efforts, as well as exploring it as an input for research and development and/or a source for competitive intelligence.

Social media has become particularly important along these lines for large consumer and retail companies, where competition is increasingly fierce given the rise of e-commerce, and the global competition it has allowed, and mobile, which has empowered consumers to instantly compare product features and prices anytime, anywhere. Because of these (and other) competitive factors, many consumer and retail companies are experiencing significant brand, revenue and margin pressure.

While the importance of having a social media presence has now been widely accepted, the rapid rise of the

associated technology has created multiple challenges for organizations and the senior executives charged with leading them. There is an overwhelming landscape of applications and systems, integration and architectural structures and organizational models and processes.

Although a lot of companies have the building blocks in place to participate in and leverage social media, many leading companies are pausing and asking deeper questions around how they can best evolve and transform their technology systems and operating processes in order to maximize the benefits social media offers.

In the absence of doing this, leaders face the daunting task of trying to harness the flood of data being generated and effectively initiating and managing the organizational change needed to take advantage of it.

The primary questions now are what are the salient components of a company’s social media ecosystem that need to be evaluated and improved and what are the key considerations in doing so?

Through our work helping companies with these questions, we have found there are many steps leaders can take-- regardless of how evolved their social media program is - to improve the execution and the quantity (and value) of the insights they can generate. If issues and opportunities are addressed in a holistic, cohesive and coordinated way, organizations can make significant progress in their efforts to evolve – and do so quickly.

In this paper, we offer existing and future clients a sample of our point-of-view across the state of social media today and steps marketing and technology executes can take to move towards digital mastery.

01Social media offers organizations an excellent mechanism and exciting opportunity to improve performance and more effectively compete in today’s digital economy. Our hope is that our perspective and experience will provide senior executives with useful context and practical direction for harnessing social media within their organization.

Principal, Strategy & Digital Customer Experience

Capgemini Consulting | North America

Todd Redmon

Ray StetterVice President, Applications & Integration Services

Capgemini | North America

Suhail AhmadSenior Consultant, Business Technology & Innovation

Capgemini Consulting | North America

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Mission, Vision and Focus 02Many marketing teams were cautious to adopt social media marketing methods when social media started to gain wide recognition as a new channel five or six years ago. Since then, most large consumer and retail companies have embraced a social media mandate and duly taken on some social media personnel, or a full team, in order to maintain an active social media footprint. At the very least, firms outsource some aspect of their social media management to their marketing agency partners.

This new enthusiasm is not without challenges. The social media space is still in a significant state of flux, resulting in a patchwork of applications to understand, a slew of systems to integrate and many new roles and responsibilities to clarify. This is particularly visible when considering how social media marketing should be integrated with traditional marketing efforts, often resulting in marketing veterans and social media marketers finding it difficult to coordinate their efforts.

In order to deal with these challenges, many companies can benefit from a holistic review of their social media efforts – starting with their mission, vision and focus.

Taking the time to assess, formally define and align around these core concepts can help companies “reboot” their efforts, resulting in a renewed sense of direction and accelerated--rate of progress. In order to effectively do this, social media teams should organize their thinking around the following “must haves” and key considerations:

Mission:

Organizations need to determine what the mission of their social media program is: what is the strategic objective it is intended

to achieve? What set of broad objectives is the social media marketing team expected to meet? What is the purpose of social media? These could include, for example:

General marketing: Driving brand awareness and preference

Integrated marketing: Integration with loyalty programs and/or other promotions

Reputation management: Public relations or customer service efforts

Business intelligence: Monitoring social media “chatter” for industry or competitor trends

Identifying emerging threats: Watching for anti-brand activism, regulatory and/or supply chain issues

The answer may be different for every company, depending on their--industry and market position (and there could be multiple answers), however clarity around the team’s mission will help allocate resources, manage expectations and plan for successful execution.

As it stands, given how rapidly the social media space has evolved, most teams have not organized around a well-defined mission and are not well-positioned to respond to consumer and market changes.

Vision:

Next, organizations need to determine their vision for social – both from an internal, as well as an external perspective (vis-a-vis the market).

Internally: Is the vision for social media to be the leading marketing channel or public relations initiative to achieve an organization’s defined business objectives, or just one of several components of varying importance?

Externally: Is the company trying to use social media to gain an edge over competitors, or is it just trying to keep pace with the pack and have a presence?

In our experience, a social media program should be one component of a much wider strategy. Social media insights can be powerful, but the space is changing too rapidly to yield well- defined, consistent results that can serve as a stand-alone service. We recommend that social media efforts should be integrated with classical business initiatives and marketing campaigns.

At the same time, it should be recognized that social media is more likely to draw on innovation resources that pull executives (and the company) beyond “business as usual”. Social media marketing needs all the wisdom and support of classical marketing, but should also be seen as the vanguard of new marketing efforts -- the sharp (and agile) point of the spear. Regardless of where it fits into a company’s overall vision, we have found that in today’s digital economy investing in social – in a meaningful way – is required.

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Focus:

The third consideration is focus - which includes determining which brands and businesses to put social media investments towards; which networks and communities to participate in; and which technology applications and systems to include in the company’s technology ecosystem.

Here is a closer look at some of the components of each:

Brands and Businesses:

Core and/or Cash Cows: In order to remain relevant and modern, core brands do need some sort of social media footprint. However, since the brand is likely to already be well established the social media marketing team should be relatively conservative and risk-averse in order to project a brand vision consistent with the specific brand legacy without taking any unnecessary risks or over investing.

New and/or Challenger Brands: The promise of new brands is they can drive significant growth for the business. New, up-and-coming consumers may be particularly drawn to these brands if a company can develop a brand image that speaks to the consumer. In today’s digital economy, this necessitates a strong social media strategy. Here, social media marketing teams can afford to take some risks to gain market prominence here. The rapid rise of TOMS Shoes and Warby Parker are good examples.

Mature and/or Declining Brands: These brands are likely to require minimal allocation of social media investment. That being said, if there is potential to revamp a brand to reach--new attractive consumer segments it could be approached in the same way as a company would for a new and/or challenger brand, and social is an

excellent marketing medium to use for this effect (e.g., Old Spice’s 2010 “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign).

Social Networks:

One of the main benefits of digital in general (social in particular) is the ability to deeply segment and target specific markets. This being the case, companies should formally assess the networks and communities that exist; map them to the brands and businesses they are focused on; and then architect a marketing model and strategy they can execute against (for each). For companies looking to move beyond mainstream networks like Facebook and Twitter there are additional options:

Country/region specific networks: For multi-national companies, social media marketers will have to use regional social networks to reach local audiences. For example, China has a fully developed social media--landscape independent of the rest of the world (platforms like Weibo, QQ, etc.). Similarly, Russia and the former Soviet Republics make frequent use of VKontakte, a Russian language social networking site.

Fringe networks: Within a market, some networks do not reach mass audiences, like Reddit or Pinterest, however they often reach tastemakers or influencers that can significantly help a company achieve its goal.

Technology:

Once a company has a sense for the brands and businesses it wants to focus on, and the networks it should participate in, executives can then turn a critical eye towards optimizing their technology to develop leading “listening, analysis and engagement” capabilities.

For this, we recommend awareness of the following categories – many of which will be discussed further in subsequent sections:

Social media platform: Specific social media analysis platforms that are leveraged to support social media listening.

Technical infrastructure: Systems used to tie together the different components of the platform, including both software and physical/cloud storage.

Data science tools: Tools that can support a data science team in their efforts to yield differentiated insights.Data providers:External vendors that supply the data needed for key analyses.

Case and knowledge management: Systems that help coordinate efforts across the organization and codify internal best practices.

Content management: Systems that manage digital assets so these can be stored and rapidly accessed.

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Social Media Technology Applications 03The evolution of social has resulted in the availability of a wide range of applications to support analysis, ranging from basic free tools -to- more expensive and sophisticated enterprise solutions.

The overall space is highly fragmented and characterized by rapid development times - resulting in high obsolescence - and a lack of universal coverage of all channels. Most consumer and retail companies operate at scales where an enterprise solution is necessary, but these tools should be understood alongside the wide-range of other available tools:

Commercial tools:

The social media platforms themselves offer a range of tools to support the analysis of their content. For example, Twitter offers Twitter Analytics and Facebook offers integration with Google Analytics to analyze their ad content.

Free applications:

Publicly available tools that can be used without licenses or fees, like WhereTweeting, HowSocialable and Trendsmap. Social media analysts can use these types of tools to get quick, simple answers during discrete investigations.

Academic tools:

There is a large and vibrant ecosystem of academic tools. The Social Media Research Foundation is worth watching since they often pilot new features which are eventually mimicked by the large commercial tools providers. Academic tools are powerful, but require a high level of technical expertise and are usually not released with considerations for commercial use.

Enterprise solutions:

This core part of the technology industry has a vast number of players and a high degree of churn. The rapid emergence of the industry and the race to introduce new features and integrate with an increasing array of channels means that only a handful of these solutions have been brought up to enterprise scale and stability.

There is currently a race to develop a true turnkey solution and no firm can truly claim to have one. That being said, a sample of quality platforms includes:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce has aggressively consolidated a number of smaller social media analytics tools, including popular marketing applications like Radian6. Their tools are undergoing rapid development, and integration with the Salesforce ecosystem could result in significant ease of use -- especially when considering the potential for case management and knowledge management across the social media analysis process.

Clarabridge: Clarabridge has held onto the vision of representing a turnkey solution. They see themselves as a full-service Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite and offer a wide range of related functionality, including integration with call center data. They offer varied integration with other social media analysis tools, including Brandwatch and Sysomos. However, they add value to these platforms through deeper language support and sentiment analysis

Brandwatch: Brandwatch’s emphasis has been on ease of use. Interaction with the platform is intuitive and visually appealing. The tools available are well considered and well developed. The user friendliness of the Brandwatch suite makes it an ideal out-of-the-box solution for brands that need a highly practical solution.

Sysomos: Sysomos is very forward thinking in terms of adopting new functionality. They are currently one of only a few tools that offer a network analysis solution. Their three levels of service include:

Heartbeat: A basic real-time monitoring product.

• Heartbeat Pro: Real-time monitoring with sophisticated metrics.

• Map: Full-service monitoring tool, with historical analysis capabilities.

The above list is not exhaustive, there are other solid tools available, and companies should thoroughly evaluate their needs and the options available.

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Network coverage:

When thinking about their company’s application needs and comparing the options available, executives should evaluate their network’s “coverage”. Key considerations should include:

Established networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter): Every serious application option has good coverage of these networks in English. They offer relatively open data access (usually through vendors), and there is wide enough demand for analytics coverage to justify development -- so almost all social media tools cover them well with a comparable level of sophistication.

Peripheral networks (e.g., Reddit, forums): These channels are less structured and attract a more of a fringe audience. As a result, they are harder to understand and monitor effectively. However, this is also where it is increasingly likely that interesting conversations will originate.

Few social media tools cover these platforms well so this can present a challenge, but options should be investigated and pursued.

Foreign languages: Even on the mainstream social networks, foreign languages can represent barriers to analysis. A number of social media tools offer sentiment analysis across a wide range of languages and these should be explored and included, but companies need to be sure to keep these applications up-to-date so they can stay current with cultural ‘slang’.

Given the state of the technology landscape, enterprises should expect they will need specialized local tools if operating abroad. As a general rule, executives should not expect the mainstream analysis tools to cover every channel. Applications are evolving and improving on these fronts, but there is no dominant tools suite available yet.

Depending on the scale of a company’s social media effort, the best way to deal with this type of uncertainty is to run two or three systems in parallel and internalize a wide range of analysis approaches -- verifying outputs between different suites and hedging against obsolescence risks.

Some of the tools available offer publishing support, but in most cases social media teams should be given the versatility to manage publishing directly through the standard social media interfaces -- through marketing publishing solutions already being used in the organization’s conventional marketing effort.

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System Integration and Architectures 04

As the volume of social media content continues to expand, enterprises must invest in system architectures that allow them to store the relevant data and conduct the necessary analyses. This seems relatively straightforward, but our work with clients has shown that three critical needs are almost universally overlooked:

Centralized storage for cross-temporal analysis: Social media analytics platforms generate highly static reports with high immediacy, but minimal insight about how an event evolves over time. This data is usually not stored by the social media analytics tools and when most organizations try to conduct analysis of trends they usually have to re-submit their queries for previous time periods -- resulting in repeat charges for the same data. Centrally storing this information would resolve these issues.

In addition, in practice, a global social media effort involves multiple teams analyzing data for multiple locales in parallel. A centralized storage solution allows for local autonomy, while supporting high-level data aggregation and analysis and minimizing duplicate effort.

Distributed computing for sophisticated customized analysis: Internal analytics groups and/or formal data science functions rely on vast amounts of data in order to conduct analysis projects, both in real-time and in order to back test predictive models. This requires access to a distributed computing environment.

Enterprise integration for better insights and better execution: Organizing unstructured social media data and analyzing it alongside other enterprise data requires sophisticated

categorization and storage -- at a similar level of sophistication with other enterprise data. As social media data becomes increasingly important to the enterprise, this shift will gain urgency and companies will need to make sure their systems are thoroughly and properly integrated.

In order to meet these three important needs outlined above we suggest the following conceptual architecture:

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A system architecture built around the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), which will allow for both a sophisticated computational environment and integration with “data lake”, a central repository for the original social media source data.

The benefit of this structure is that queries will automate the delivery of content into the data lake; data can be stored and extracted for incremental analysis; and various analytics solutions can be run.

Other advantages of this architecture include:

Scalability: This can quickly be scaled to accommodate vast amounts of data and a wide range of tools and functions.

Modular structure: The structure is not built around any specific functionality beyond the basic HDFS ecosystem, thereby allowing for the interchangeability of any specific tools or solutions as the social media application market evolves.

Data Sources Storage AnalyticsEngine

AggregationOutputs

Data Science Data ScienceOutput

Distributionto Org

ReplicableAnalysis

BespokeAnalysis

DataScienceMethods

Visualization

DashboardsAnalyticsEngine

DataLake

QueriesFrom

Markets

Data Science

InternalEnterprise Data

Third-PartyData Sources

Market CM

Publication with Escalation

Reports

Publishing

Global CM/ KM

Alerts/Escalation toEngagement

Figure 1: Integration

Data science integration: The HDFS environment lends itself to the deployment of a data science computation environment and integrates with a wide-range of data science tools.

Organizational integration: This type of system can quickly be integrated with case management, knowledge management and/or alerts systems – systems designed to escalate opportunities or a crisis to the marketing, public relations and/or executive team.

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Performance Analytics and Data Science 05Performance analytics:

Many of the core social media analysis platforms offer out-of-the-box analytics and reporting solutions, however enterprises should supplement this technology with social media analysts who can provide critical context in real-time and subsequent performance review analyses.

Most social media tools are able to generate basic sentiment measures, but even the most sophisticated sentiment tools are essentially blunt instruments. They cannot match human operators to identify nuanced sentiment and slang. This is especially true when dealing with multiple geographies, since not every tool has effective language coverage for every market. This effectively results in the need for two parallel systems (one human, one digital):

Social media analysts: Analysts are the first line of engagement for any social media effort. Their function is to pick-up on any social media traffic through any channel, and provide context to help understand the significance. Their ability to follow audiences where they are, and identify emerging issues when they start, can give a social media team a critical edge. This is especially true when dealing with global social media analysis, where local content may be oriented around local brands, language, culture, context and/ or events. The key weakness with this as a sole solution is that it cannot scale effectively with large volumes of social media data. You can only add so many analysts in a cost effective way.

Social media analytical tools and applications: Social media tools and applications add value with higher volumes of data and can offer large- scale metrics on aggregated data -- like counts and basic sentiment. Analysis is driven by pre-defined queries which need to be adjusted in order to target newly identified situations.

These capabilities are ‘must haves’ in this regard - key components of a company’s social media ecosystem.

The weakness of having just an automated system is that it cannot always provide critical context and the sentiment tools cannot always keep pace with rapidly evolving slang and/or unorthodox hash tags. They are also not always able to follow social media chatter across all platforms.

All this being the case, a successful social media effort relies on a balanced deployment of both social media analysts and standardized analytics tools. Understanding the relative merits of social media analysts and social media analytics - and having a realistic approach to balancing their use - will put most companies a full length ahead of their peers.

Data science:

Ultimately, regardless of the combination of analysts and systems a company uses, social media insights must be internalized within the wider organization to generate “ROI”. This

requires integration with the wider data environment, like finance data and traditional marketing metrics – and is where data science can help.

A robust data science function can quickly act as a significant multiplier on the value of a social media analytics function in the following ways:

Cross-functional analysis: Data can be aggregated from a wide-range of sources, both from within the enterprise and from third-parties, to conduct highly targeted analysis.

Predictive insights: Data science methods can be leveraged to develop powerful predictive analysis around well- defined business problems.

Data science methods are particularly valuable for social media data because they are adaptable and can keep pace with the large and expanding volume of low-latency data to generate deeper consumer insights.

Data science differs from traditional analytics in several ways:

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Traditional Analytics Data Science

AnalysisOriented towards standardized analysis of traditional metrics

Oriented towards tailored analysis around a specific outcome and/or business problem

Investigation Investigations center around

validating a hypothesis

Investigations focus more on determining interrelations, even with the absence of a

hypothesis

TechniqueTreatment of data may be sophisticated, but

can be broken down to relatively conventional mathematical techniques

Mathematical and computational techniques can range from simple, to incredibly complex

ScalabilityMethodologies tend not scale

with huge volumes of dataApproach is built around scalable computation

techniques for large data sets

DataMethods rely on clean

structured data

Can accommodate structured, unstructured and semi-structured data and, potentially,

corrupted/incomplete data

ResponsivenessOutput responds to changes in underlying data in

predictable ways

Output can respond to changes in underlying data in dynamic, unpredictable ways (e.g.,

machine learning)

EquipmentCan mostly be performed on conventional

database and computational systemsRelies on sophisticated distributed computing

platforms

PersonnelStrong focus on manipulating

and presenting data

Functions range from computation techniques, ingesting data, manipulating data, presenting data and performing analysis with

specific business context

PurviewMinimal direct decision support,

mostly retrospectiveEmphasis of methods and analyses is forward

looking

SuccessSuccess is simplifying

a complex problem

Success is understanding a complex problem in a nuanced and sophisticated way—ideally

informing a decision

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Social Media Metrics and Reporting 06Social Media Metrics

Social media marketing is both an art and a science. Metrics can be powerful tools in the right context, but that context needs to be well understood. Many companies hold their social media marketing teams to rigid metrics; a certain threshold of engagement that is expected on a weekly or monthly basis.

In contrast, many sophisticated companies have no, or only provisional benchmarks. They correctly understand that metrics measure quantity, but have trouble measuring quality (caveat: some metrics, like shares or retweets, do provide some indication on quality as an engagement measure). Over emphasis on metrics is a holdover from prior waves of marketing media where engagement was passive. With active engagement, where audiences have to opt-in to marketing campaigns, these metrics can fail to reflect varying levels of quality.

We offer several considerations for executives when it comes to driving performance metrics and interpreting results:

Cost: Engagement can be bought through promotions and advertising. If a social media marketing team tries to accelerate engagement through advertisements and promotions any benchmark can potentially be reached - but at quickly escalating costs - negating the practical benefits. This is especially true as some social media content is driven by “bots” (automated fake accounts) that are deployed to skim promotions and inflate metrics.

Authenticity: Expecting audiences to engage at a consistent level of intensity can erode brand authenticity, since organic audience development is likely to occur via fits and starts around specific new content or marketing efforts. This is normal and desirable.

Saturation: Over time, market saturation is natural. The addressable audience is finite for almost every brand and audiences have varied

attitudes regarding how they choose to engage with brands on social media. Aggressively forcing engagement to hit social media engagement metrics can exhaust the community and dilute the brand. Audiences value being in the “in group” and expanding the audience base too rapidly or far can erode a sense of exclusivity.

None of this is to say that metrics should be ignored. They are extremely important, but need to be incorporated into a holistic social media strategy - not all of which can be tied to well-defined measurements. Brands should focus on the quality of content they can deliver for their marketing audiences as much, or more than, what they are getting from their audiences in terms of raw metrics. Good metrics are a result of good engagement, which is a result of good content and authenticity – shared at the right time and rate.

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Reporting

Social media interaction among consumers is largely unstructured -- this is both the promise and the appeal of the medium, but also the bane of any social media management team. To combat this, social media reporting programs need to balance the need for standardized reporting, particularly for quantitative outputs, against the lack of structure necessary to report specific nuances from social media analysts and/or members of the data science team.

In order to move towards digital mastery in the social domain, an organization must accept the absorption of social media insights at some level of abstraction. To this end, we offer guidelines for helping social media executives and organizations develop and operate a functional and fruitful management reporting system:

• Guidance: Functional teams, like marketing or public relations, may need to know details about user behavior or specific actions on social media, but they need support from the social media team to determine exactly what they should be paying attention to and including in their analysis and reporting.

• Clarity: Tools can work somewhat differently with data from different social networks, but there is rough equivalence (i.e., between Facebook and Twitter, a ‘share’ is roughly equivalent to a ‘retweet’ and a ‘like’ is roughly equivalent to a ‘favorite’). This needs to be accounted for and clarified during the measurement and reporting process.

• Simplicity: Social media data is remarkable for both its volume and velocity—both of which can quickly overwhelm. Reporting must be able to distill knowledge into simple, relevant units.

• Communication: As a report is generated and escalated to management, the details and distinctions between social networks should be secondary to the distilled insights. The aggregate reaction is likely to be more important than the information on the different platforms used.

If these above principles and tenants can be kept in mind, organizations should be able to structure and maintain a fruitful metrics and reporting approach – one that provides the right balance of consumer and marketing insights and performance measurement and management oversight.

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Consumer Engagement and Marketing 07Consumers are committing an ever increasing proportion of their time to online media, whether through computers, tablets or mobile devices. Data from eMarketer suggests the proportion of their time consumers spent online has increased from just under 30% in 2010, to almost 50% in 2014 – making consumer engagement and marketing via social all the more important.

While social media marketing entails a number of fascinating and new challenges, marketing best practices are much the same. Brands are seeking to inform consumers and build a relationship with them that speaks to a common experience and cultivates trust.

Good marketing still thrives on honest, engaged storytelling and human connection; social media just provides a faster, more interactive and direct means.

A few case studies should help illustrate how these basic principles translate into social media marketing successes (and an opportunity):

Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches”

Dove released a video series featuring a professional sketch artist drawing women based on their own descriptions of themselves and then again based on a stranger’s description. In every case, the stranger’s description resulted in a prettier picture. This really resonated with Dove’s audience, as it spoke to concerns around body image that many have.

The intent was less to advertise a specific product and more to demonstrate that Dove understands and empathizes with the everyday struggles of their consumers. It built significant brand equity and was perfectly tailored to social media since each video was a manageable length that could be viewed and shared on various social platforms. (SUCCESS)

Oreo “2013 Super Bowl” Tweet

Brands’ most avid consumers expect to engage with their chosen brand properties in real time, and expect

a response. Traditional marketing campaigns have life cycles spanning a quarter, a season or a year. During the 2013 Super Bowl there was an unanticipated blackout. Oreo quickly tweeted out the following image:

This has universally been lauded as a social media marketing success story– and often the benchmark for agile marketing and relevant in the moment content. The message was quick, pithy and contemporary, while remaining on message with the entire legacy of the wider brand. (SUCCESS)

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Kimpton’s “Easter Egg Hunt”

Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants executed a fun and simple strategy for engagement by posting hidden codes and promotional passwords in their social media pages and pictures.

Patrons could find and use these codes to earn free upgrades or extra perks during their visits. This not only engaged their customers, but encouraged them to continue visiting the social media pages and following Kimpton online. (SUCCESS)

BK’s “Whopper Sacrifice”

In 2009, Burger King ran a much- publicized Facebook campaign called “Whopper Sacrifice”. In exchange for deleting ten friends, a user would be granted a coupon for a free Whopper Burger (limit one per customer, of course). There was a “cost” associated with the transaction since each “sacrifice” was well publicized on

the Facebook news feed. This was a fascinating exercise in brand authenticity from two perspectives:

Out-Group Audience: The campaign drew a great deal of attention to Burger King, even among people who did not participate in the promotion. The “Whopper Sacrifice” was highly authentic with Burger King’s efforts to develop an irreverent brand persona. Burger King followed the mantra and belief that “any publicity is good publicity”.

In-Group Audience: The target audience was a younger social media-savvy demographic. The “Whopper Sacrifice” resonated with them because it poked fun at the superficiality of social media “friendships” and drove a surprising degree of self-examination. In a certain way the campaign was brilliant because it dealt with the ennui of social media in the awkward teething phase of social media adoption.

Something specifically like the “Whopper Sacrifice” is likely to be difficult to replicate since it is also costly for social media platforms (in this case Facebook), as it erodes their credibility, however the general lesson is that a certain amount of self-aware irreverence by a brand can resonate with audiences, especially younger, more “in” audiences. (SUCCESS)

US Airways “Customer Service”

On April 14th 2014, a US Airways customer complained about her flight on Twitter. US Airways quickly responded with an apology, which led the customer to respond with another irritated tweet. US Airways then posted a highly sexual image on Twitter, presumably as a means of putting down and quieting the customer. US Airways received heavy criticism, and has since apologized extensively.

What went right? What went wrong? The Oreo and US Airways incidents are two extreme cases among thousands of similar incidents, however, these incidents are two sides of the same coin (or question): how much autonomy to offer a social media marketing team.

Traditional marketing staffs are often resistant to giving social media marketing teams full autonomy, correctly

pointing out the potential for brand damage (i.e., US Airways). However, they neglect to consider the significant brand equity that a well-orchestrated social media response can yield, as Oreo so well demonstrated.

A related issue when comparing and contrasting these case studies is their frame of contact: Oreo sent out a mass-audience tweet, while US Airways was publicly communicating with a single consumer. Interacting directly with individual consumers is increasingly expected, and is important, but requires a high degree of comfort with the brand, the wider marketing effort and engagement “SOPs”.

To help with all of this, we suggest a “Goldilocks” framework (just the right amount of integration and oversight -- not too much and not too little):

A social media marketing team needs the autonomy to react quickly, as Oreo did, but this is not an excuse for the traditional marketing team to ignore the social media analysts. It is the responsibility of the senior leadership team to envision an integrated marketing approach that brings social media marketing into the fold and get them “on message” with the wider brand personality and culture. Once aligned, the “Goldilocks” threshold

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can then include flexibility: tightening during most of the year (i.e., more direct marketing oversight), but loosening strategically around key events (e.g., the Super Bowl).

Oreo clearly appears to have done this well. In contrast, US Airways’ social media reaction is likely to be the result of both insufficient oversight and poor integration with US Airways’ wider marketing efforts. An effective social media team needs both the autonomy to respond to key events in real time (and/or have an integrated communication framework, where they can loop in brand managers effectively), while also being positioned within the wider marketing effort.

Lessons learned:

Consumers are willing to be engaged by companies:

Customers value being engaged in unique and interesting ways – and social offers significant opportunity for brands to do so. Digital marketing in this respect is fascinating because consumers “opt in” to consume it. They have a much better sense of their time, and will reward brands for using their time well.

The Dove Real Beauty Sketches is three minutes and has garnered over 65 million views on YouTube as of early 2015 (an average of over 100,000 views per day since launch). Similarly, Kimpton’s strategy necessitates real customer engagement and was a good success.

Social media lets commoditized brands differentiate themselves:

A product like soap is relatively commoditized, however Dove took the opportunity to share an emotional connection with potential consumers which helped set them apart. In this sense, social media marketing gives brands an opportunity to take appropriate risks that can increase brand preference and ultimately sales.

Traditional marketing values are important within social as well:

US Airways likely lost meaningful brand equity with some of their consumers because of their social media gaffe. Consumers expect marketing to meet some combination of the same needs it always has: acknowledgement, respect, emotional connection, information and entertainment. Now they just want it faster, and more targeted to them as individuals.

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Organization, Operations and Governance 08For companies that have been trying to evolve their social capabilities over the last few years, many of the challenges that exist revolve around organization, operations and governance.

Like many new initiatives, resources are often leveraged from different groups within the company to help a new social media program scale (e.g., marketing, public relations and various technology functions) and then augmented with additional external resources (e.g., agencies). This often leads to a situation with many stakeholders, minimal structure and little wide-spread clarity.

While the challenges this creates are not new (this often happens when new products or businesses are launched within an existing company as well), social media is a unique discipline with many complexities.

There are three initial things companies can do to minimize this complexity and improve the execution of their social media function:

Establish Governance Standards

Executives should develop and implement formal governance standards for both the technology aspects of the system, as well as the business management processes. This is particularly crucial for large global organizations that have very large social media teams, resources across multiple geographies and/or are heavily leveraging agencies – all situations where day-to-day visibility and management control can be a challenge.

On the technology side, while there does need to be some autonomy for local markets, particularly as it relates to listening tools (given the language and sentiment requirements), technology executives need to have an overarching set of standards that provide structure and direction to the field around the technology applications and architectures they can employ.

Beyond business requirements, the key drivers for these standards should include system stability, security and costs. Stability and security are particularly important given the fluidity of the market and possibility of data breaches.

For companies operating in multiple geographies – that are each operating at various levels of sophistication - organizations should still have technology governance standards in place. This can be accomplished through a tiered system, along a maturity curve, whereby individual markets migrate to different technology applications and architectures over time.

On the business side, companies should also have formal governance mechanisms in place for strategy and business process changes, as well as to manage the on-going performance and evolution of the program. This should take the form of quarterly (or at least bi-annual) planning sessions for larger strategic decisions and process changes, as well as weekly or monthly meetings for on-going performance and tactics management.

In all of these cases, executives need to be mindful of who needs to be involved within the company (and who does not), as well as those that need to be involved from outside the organization (e.g., marketing agencies). Even in companies that are in the early stages of their social program, leaders should at least establish an executive steering committee to review, establish and manage governance standards -- and make decisions.

Clarify Roles and Responsibilities

There are several sets of roles and responsibilities that need to be clarified within a social ecosystem. The first is related to the role of corporate stakeholders vs. those in the ‘field’. The field meaning the professionals on the

front lines dealing with specific markets and consumers. In this case, markets could be geographic markets or a unique product or specific brands – depending on how a company has organized itself.

One of the keys to a successful program is to be able to appropriately ‘listen’ to and engage with local markets in a quick and agile way. In order to do this, those responsible (i.e., the field) need autonomy and flexibility in what they can do. On the other hand, those in “corporate” need the operating leverage, data capture and analysis capabilities a centralized reporting structure brings – as well as control over large, global brands and broad-based marketing initiatives.

As illustrated previously in the Consumer Engagement and Marketing section, without clarity and communication between groups, efforts can be duplicated, excess cost incurred and/or opportunities squandered. This includes misalignment of marketing messages, the mishandling of public relations issues and/or missed opportunities for product and service enhancements.

The second set of roles and responsibilities that need to be clarified (and managed on an on-going basis) is the role of internal resources vs. external marketing agencies. Here again, driving clarity between groups can help minimize costs, challenges and missed opportunities. Clarifying the expectations between these parties is particularly important for those companies that plan on growing their social media organizations and/or bringing more of the work in-house.

In this case, clarity needs to cover the geographies, brands and/or social platforms the agencies will be responsible for, as well as additional delineation related to what they are each listening for; how they are analyzing and reporting; and what they are and are not supposed to be publishing.

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The final set of relationships important for a leading social program to clarify - perhaps most important - are the roles and responsibilities between the business and technology stakeholders within the company.

Like many other functions and /or initiatives within an organization in today’s digital economy, the lines between traditional business functions (e.g., marketing, sales, supply chain, etc.) and technology groups (e.g., application development and management, enterprise architecture, data management, etc.) are blurring.

Within the social media function, having resources that understand both the business and technology aspects of social media is important (and nice to have, if possible), but delineating a formal structure in terms of which groups and individuals are responsible for the various aspects of the ecosystem is key.

This should be done, at a minimum, via the creation of a RACI matrix

whereby the roles and responsibilities needed to successfully operate and evolve a top-notch social program are identified, documented and assigned. As organizations begin to have a meaningful social program, they should move towards a more robust and formalized Center-of-Excellence structure.

Create a Social Center-of-Excellence

The final thing companies can do to minimize complexity and improve performance is to institute a formal Social Center-of-Excellence (S-CoE) – be it a physical location or virtual model –from which their social program can be led and managed.

In order to establish and maintain a robust S-CoE, companies need to address both the technology components of the ecosystem, as well as the business processes and systems. On the technology front, this means ensuring there are dedicated resources charged with maintaining

systems, managing technology vendors and ensuring there is proper data integration and management, as well as staying up-to-date on the latest technology developments in social – be it new applications, competitive dynamics and/or other technology- related topics that could affect the company’s program.

On the business side, an S-CoE should have individuals focused on SOP development and best practices (for listening and engagement); hiring, training and development (including the cultural differences that can be different for a social function vis-à-vis other functions within a company); and reporting, analytics and data science, among other things.

In addition, there needs to be individuals accountable for managing the marketing agencies, as well as interfacing with the other aspects of the company (the overall marketing organization, public relations, investor relations, etc.), including the field/front- line staff.

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Moving Forward and Parting Thoughts 09Social media allows consumers to reset the ‘marketing’ clock at any time. Many consumer and retail companies have found it difficult to embrace this transition and the speed now required. Traditional marketing teams and technology groups are finding their old processes, systems and tools cannot keep pace with the brave new world of social media. Consequently, these practical challenges are affecting the ability of many companies to optimize their investment in social media and achieve the business impact they are seeking.

The decline of Myspace and rise of Facebook, Twitter and many other notable platforms, shows the dramatic ways the social media landscape can shift rapidly over short periods of time. At this pace, there is a very real possibility the ecosystem will look meaningfully different 3-5 years from now. With that, brands should not think of themselves as tied to a specific social media platform, but should instead see themselves as following their consumers wherever they choose to migrate – and making sure their internal technology and business practices are agile enough to do so.

To do this, companies and their executives need to have clarity around the mission, vision and focus of their social media program. They need to routinely evaluate the applications, infrastructure and integration architectures they are using, as well as employ robust data analytics capabilities and data science functions to make sense of all the information generated.

Along the way, they need to make sure their operating procedures and governance practices are sufficient, and their metrics and reporting approaches make sense.

Most importantly, from a marketing perspective, they need to keep in mind that good marketing still thrives on honesty, engaged storytelling and human connection -- and that social media just provides a faster, more interactive and more direct means to engage consumers.

If they can do all this, insights and execution will improve – as well as their ROI.

Recognition

A special thank you goes to the following Capgemini professionals for their contributions to “Leading Social Media” and for significantly expanding the firm’s expertise and project delivery capabilities in the social media domain:

• Ashwin John, Senior Manager, Enterprise Applications & Integration Services

• Thomas Dornis, Manager, Business Information Management

• Reed Dailey, Senior Consultant, Capgemini Consulting

• Nick Pahountis, Consultant, Capgemini Consulting

The team would also like to thank Chetan Nikam, Madhan Dhandayutham and Akshay Tyagi from Capgemini’s Strategic Research and Creative Services Group for their assistance and support in publishing “Leading Social Media”.

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Capgemini Consulting is the global strategy and transformationconsulting organization of the Capgemini Group, specializing in advising and supporting enterprises in significant transformation - from innovative strategy to execution - and with an unstinting focus on results. With the new digital economy creating significant disruptions and opportunities, our global team of over 3,600 professionals work with leading companies and governments to master Digital Transformation, drawing on our understanding of the digital economy and our leadership in business transformation and organizational change.

Find out more at: http://www.capgemini-consulting.com/

With more than 140,000 people in 44 countries, Capgeminiis one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The Group reported 2014 global revenues of over $13 billion. Together with its clients, Capgemini creates and delivers business and technology solutions that fit their needs and drive the results they want. A deeply multicultural organization, Capgemini has developed its own way of working, the Collaborative Business ExperienceTM, and draws on Rightshore®, its worldwide delivery model.

Learn more at: http://www.capgemini-consulting.com/

About Capgemini and the Collaborative Business Experience

Capgemini Consulting is the strategy and transformation consulting brand of Capgemini Group. The information contained in this document is proprietary. © 2015 Capgemini. All rights reserved.

Todd RedmonPrincipal, Strategy & Digital Customer Experience

Capgemini Consulting | Consumer, Retail and Distribution Practice

todd.redmon@capgemini.com

+1.404.569.5689

Suhail AhmadSenior Consultant, Business Technology & Innovation

Capgemini Consulting | North America

suhail.ahmad@capgemini.com

+1.917.370.3988

Ray StetterVice President, Enterprise Applications & Integration Services

Capgemini | Consumer, Retail and Distribution Practice

ray.stetter@capgemini.com

+1.404.953.9810

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