Tag Archives: Social Media

How to Design Social Media Workshops That Appeal to Both the Left Brain and the Right Brain

by on December 28, 2011 in Essays, Slide Decks

Over the last two years, I have led 50+ workshops with 2000+ marketing and communications professionals across Asia, so I have become a workshop specialist of sorts within MSLGROUP.

I use a discovery-driven approach in designing and leading workshops, with conceptual frameworks, in-depth case studies, and post-it note gamestorms. This beautiful quote in Richard Bach’s ‘Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah’ sums up what I try to do in my workshops:

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.

My favorite parts at my workshops are games that help participants remember what they already know. These games involve large post-it notes, chart papers, marker pens, some doodling and many aha! moments. Let me use three examples to show you what I mean.

Social Heartbeat brand planning workshop

Our Social Heartbeat framework helps brands design powerful purpose-inspired platforms and programs to inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose.

We first look for a shared purpose or Social Heartbeat to inspire people, realizing that we need to build a bridge between benefit-driven and purpose-inspired communication. Then, we design a long-term online-offline platform to organize people, in a way that fully leverages paid, owned, and earned media. Finally, we design the consumer journey and create a series of short-term programs to energize people and take them from the benefit, to the bridge and then to the purpose, or the other way round.

I start by Social Heartbeat workshop by asking participants to create a social network profile on a post it note, with their name, avatar name, avatar picture, and five passion tags that define them. Then, I ask them to put up these post-it notes on the chart paper and draw lines between them, if they share a passion tag. We discuss how we connect with others around our passion tags, how some people are more connected than others and how connections lead to all sorts of good things, both online and offline. Then, I point out that less than 5% of the passion tags are related to brands. If people don’t define themselves around brands, and don’t connect with each other around brands, then what is the role brands can play on the social web? It’s an important question for marketers with an elegant answer: brands can help consumers connect around passion tags that resonate with the brand values (I call these shared passion tags Social Heartbeats).

Later in the workshop, I ask the participants to remember the last time they talked about a brand they don’t work for. I ask them to write down on a post it note the brand itself, why they talked about it (the trigger) and how they talked about it (the context or the medium). Then, I ask them to arrange the post-it notes around themes. Most groups arrange the post-it notes around the product categories their brands belong to (usually fashion, technology, gadgets, cafes, mobile or auto brands). Sometimes, they arrange the post it note around the content of the conversation (kudos, complaints, enquiries, recommendations), the context of the conversation (at home, at office, at a mall, online, on phone) or the trigger to talk (a good/ bad product or service experience, an ad, a promo, a contest). Almost always, no one mentions a FMCG brand (soft drinks, shampoo, toothpaste, snacks), which makes me wonder: if no one is talking about the brand that spend the most money on advertising, what should these brands do (apart from getting really worried)? It’s another important question for marketers with the same elegant answer: consumers will talk about these brands only if they stand for the shared passion tags (Social Heartbeats) that consumers care about.

Social Integration Journey social business planning workshop

Our Social Heartbeat framework helps corporations build enterprise capabilities for social by integrating social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes, to drive strategic change and real ROI.

Most organizations go through the social integration with these six stages. They start with inaction, then move to incubation and experiment with standalone platforms and tactical programs, before they are ready to integrate social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes. Organizations can use the framework to not only map where they are in relation to relevant others, but also plan for what’s next. So, it’s both a “how the world works” framework as well as a “how to change things” framework.

Towards the middle of my Social Integration Journey workshop, I ask the workshop participants to create a post-it note for each of the social initiatives in their organization. I ask them to write what they are trying to achieve with the initiatives, how short-term or long-term these initiatives are, and what channel(s) they use for these initiatives. Then, I ask them to draw the Social Integration Journey framework on a chart paper and place the post-it notes on the chart paper. Usually, the post-it notes cluster around one or two stages, which helps the participants map their present stage of social integration. Then, I ask them to identify other relevant organizations and repeat the exercise with their social initiatives on another chart paper. Once again, the post-it notes cluster around one or two stages, but have wider distribution, which helps the participants map the possibilities they haven’t explored yet. Finally, I ask the participants to identify their potential stage of social integration, discuss why they wish to reach there, and discover barriers that might stop them. I have found that workshops participants who engage in this participatory process of benchmarking themselves against relevant others are more open to seeing new possibilities and working towards making them real.

Crisis Curve crisis planning framework

Our Crisis Curve workshop helps organizations map out, plan for and build capabilities to manage crisis scenarios across the four stages of the crisis curve: flash point, spotlight, blame game and resolution.

Based on the interplay between mainstream media and social media at the flash point stage, we categorize crisis situations into three types that need different approaches: real world, slow burn and flash mob. Then, we use our proprietary crisis planning and response toolkit to help organizations plan how they can best leverage social media at each stage in the crisis curve.

Towards the end of my Crisis Curve workshop, I ask the workshop participants to think of a ‘real world’, a ‘slow burn’ and a ‘flash mob’ crisis that can seriously impact their business and draw them on a post-it note. Then, I ask them to imagine each crisis situation going through the flash point, spotlight and blame game stages over three days and, for each stage, map out the best case, worst case and most likely case for each crisis situation. They draw newspaper or television headlines, blog post titles, social network updates, photoshopped parody images and viral video storyboards on post-it notes and sometimes enjoy the exercise more than they should. Finally, I ask them to plan their response for for each crisis situation, by mapping out key influencers, keywords, spokespersons, and messages for each of the scenarios they have created.

Designing workshops for both the right brain and the left brain

I believe that the best workshops are learning and discovery experiences that exercise both the right brain and the left brain. So, I structure all my workshops around a conceptual framework, to appeal to the left brain, but include in-depth case studies that are rich in storytelling, often via videos, to appeal to the right brain. The post-it note brainstorms are based on the frameworks, so they don’t frighten the left brain, but they involve drawing and storytelling, so they don’t alienate the right brain either.

The best workshops, like the best classrooms, also need to find the right balance between learning and doing. In all my workshops, the participants leave feeling that they have learned both a new way to think about their problem (the framework) and practical ways to apply that thinking (the case studies). In my most successful workshop, the participants also leave feeling that they already had all the answers and I have only helped them connect the dots in their minds.

MSLGROUP Crisis Network Report: Every Crisis is Global, Social, Viral

by on November 29, 2011 in Essays, Slide Decks, Videos

(This is an introduction to MSLGROUP’s Crisis Network report titled “Every Crisis is Global, Social, Viral” that I wrote with Pascal Beucler, MSLGROUP’s Chief Strategy Officer)

The 2010s are turning out to be the decade rich in the myriad shades of crisis. Crisis management in today’s fragile world is intrinsically interlinked with global shifts in trust and power between individuals, influencers and institutions.

The End of Trust

The decade has witnessed a profound erosion of trust in all types of institutions, including governments and corporations.

Even as North America and Europe prepare for a prolonged double dip financial crisis, we have seen social unrest in France, UK, Spain and Greece; a grassroots movement to occupy public spaces across the United States to protest against capitalism; right wing terrorist attacks in peaceful Norway; disclosure of state secrets by Wikileaks; a series of regime changes across the Arab world; and a sex scandal disgracing the IMF.

Even in the buoyant emerging economies of India, China and Brazil, the hitherto silent middle class is beginning to raise its voice and take to the streets to protest against chronic corruption that disproportionately rewards the entrenched elite at the cost of the other 99%; and the low quality of life that persists in spite of increased prosperity.

Trust in corporations, too, is at an all-time low, as a result of astronomical executive salaries paid by banks and auto companies, even as they were being bailed out by public funds; BP’s inability to either control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for almost nine months, or take full responsibility for it; and perceptions of greenwashing by corporations, brought in sharp focus a series of viral campaigns by Greenpeace.

We are also seeing anger against the inability of governments and corporations to show the will to solve our most pressing problems: the short-sighted dependence on fossil fuels that threatens to undermine our planet’s ecosystem; the tradeoffs between economic progress and the good life, like urban pollution and lifestyle diseases; and the barriers to achieve the full human potential, with more than half the world’s population still struggling with poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy.

Power to the People

At the same time, people have new sources of power, as individuals and communities.

First, people are beginning to believe that governments and corporations have failed them and only they themselves can come up with innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

Second, people are leveraging social media platforms to create new public spaces for discourse and dissent that are irrevocably reshaping the global news ecosystem; organize themselves into distributed communities with a shared purpose and a shared vision for a better future; co-create new social innovation solutions and sustainable business models; and collaborate across continents to coordinate participation and action and act as catalysts for change.

Third, people are demanding that governments become both more transparent and less intrusive with their citizens; that government and corporations work together to create an ecosystem that enables civic participation; that corporations not only rediscover their social purpose but also put it at the core of how they engage with people, as employees, consumers and citizens.

Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg underlined these shifts during the recent “e-G8” we organized in Paris: “People being empowered is the trend for the next decade: that’s the core social dynamics… People have the ability to voice their opinion, and it changes the world, as it rewires it from the ground up”.

Unilever’s Paul Polman has also pointed to the new risks such power creates for corporations: “If [social media activists] can bring down the Egyptian regime in a few weeks, they can bring us down in nanoseconds.”

Every Crisis is Global, Social and Viral

The social web is playing an important role in these shifts around trust, power, risk and crisis.

Specifically, we need to master three interplays shaping crisis in the “new normal”: the interplay between mainstream media and social media, the interplay between local and global dynamics, and the interplay between crisis planning and response.

First, the boundaries between mainstream media and social media are blurring as online influencers are linking to media stories and news organizations are quoting online influencers.

Second, no crisis is truly local in our interconnected world, as memes or hashtags can spread globally in seconds on the social web, yet local considerations must be factored into crisis planning and response.

Third, it’s critical to plan and prepare for crisis scenarios, but it’s even more important to respond to emergent crisis situations authentically, without over-reliance on scripted messages and workflows.

MSLGROUP Crisis Network

MSLGROUP Crisis Network is a global network of 50+ MSLGROUP crisis experts, with deep vertical expertise across industries and geographies, connected to each other by our proprietary People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform. Our experts can not only tap into each other’s insights in real time, but also leverage our proprietary crisis toolkit – including our crisis planning framework and our crisis simulation workshop — to help our clients plan for and respond to crisis situations effectively.

In a world where every crisis is global, social and viral, here’s a roadmap to think about the interconnections between trust, power, risk and crisis, from our experts at the MSLGROUP Crisis Network.

In the first section, we explore how social media is changing trust, power, risk and crisis. We start by looking at the role of social media in societal upheavals in the West, including the terrorist attack in Norway, the riots in London and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. Then, we move to the East and look at how social media is changing the news ecosystem in China, eroding the wasta system of personal influence in the Middle East and uniting the Indian middle class in a grassroots movement against corruption.

In the second section, we outline how corporations can leverage social media to manage risk and reputation. We outline how social media can play a role at each stage in the crisis curve, describe the art and science of crisis simulation, recommend engaging third party influencers in crisis planning, share lessons from managing the global Crisis Command Center for BP, provide a playbook for handling a crisis on Facebook and end with tips and tricks on crisis management from our network of senior trusted advisors.

In summary, here are the most important tips from our global network of crisis experts that you will see across this report:

1. Proactively work on crisis preparedness, including crisis simulation workshops, crisis manuals, crisis collaboration wikis and dark crisis websites.
2. Create local crisis plans in collaboration with key influencers, instead of merely localizing global crisis plans.
3. Train staff, including the C-suite, on the new news ecosystem and guidelines for social media engagement, before a crisis hits.
4. Specifically plan for communicating with all key influencers, including employees, as part of crisis planning.
5. Build trust assets, including the reputation of being rooted in a shared purpose, strong relationships with key influencers, and strong owned media channels like blogs and microblogs, before the crisis.
6. Respond to the crisis with authenticity, integrity and the will to do the right thing, not only say the right thing.

We sincerely hope that the insights and foresights we are bringing here will be useful to you. To know more about the MSLGROUP Crisis Network, or to subscribe to receive similar insights and foresights in the form of a quarterly newsletter, please visit http://crisis.mslgroup.com.

How Social Media is Changing News and Crisis: The Crisis Curve Framework

by on November 29, 2011 in Essays, Slide Decks

(This is an essay I contributed to MSLGROUP’s Crisis Network report titled “Every Crisis is Global, Social, Viral“, which I also edited.)

Social media is playing an important role in shaping news stories in general and crisis situations in particular. Specifically, even as social media makes it easy to track an emerging crisis situation, it makes it difficult to effectively manage the crisis situation.

Social media and the news curve

All news stories develop in a similar manner, following the news curve. The news curve has four stages: breaking news, context, analysis and archival. The breaking news stage is concerned with questions like: what happened, with whom and where? In the context stage, more information is added, as background. In the analysis stage, opinions are shared and responsibility is assigned. In the archival stage, the story goes off the newspaper front page, the website homepage and the evening news on TV.

Social media is playing an important role in shaping the news curve. The news curve is becoming shorter in the “breaking news” and “context” stages, but longer in the “analysis” and “archival” stages. The news curve is also becoming more fragmented and news stories are becoming more viral. Different social media behaviors play different roles across the four stages of the news curve. News stories are now being broken on the official Twitter channels of news organizations and shared via retweets. Context is being added by sharing links on Twitter using a hashtag. Blogs and video blogs are playing an important role in shaping opinion. Finally, search is making it easier to find and share archived stories that act as context for new stories.

The 26/11 Mumbai terror attack in 2009 is a good example of how social media is shaping the news ecosystem even in emerging economies. During the 72-hour terrorist seize of India’s financial capital, Twitter, Flickr and blogs became important tools for citizen journalists to share original reporting, news, and opinions. Social media, especially Twitter, played an important role in shaping the mainstream media narrative during the crisis, both in India and internationally.

Social media and the crisis curve

The four stages in the crisis curve correspond to the four stages in the news curve: flash point, spotlight, blame game and resolution. Like the news curve, the crisis curve is becoming shorter in the “flash point” and “spotlight” stages, but longer in the “blame game” and “resolution” stages. Like the news curve, the crisis curve is also becoming more fragmented and crisis stories are becoming more viral. As a result, even as social media makes it easy to track an emerging crisis situation, it makes it difficult to effectively manage the crisis situation.

Social media and the crisis curve

The interplay between social media and mainstream media is an important aspect of the crisis curve, with online influencers linking to media stories and media quoting online influencers.

Three types of crisis situations

Based on the interplay between social media and mainstream media in the run up to the crisis flash point, crisis situations can be categorized into three types, each needing a different approach: real world crisis, slow burn crisis and flash mob crisis.

Three types of crisis situations

In the “real world” crisis, a real world incident (oil spill, financial scam, sex scandal) precipitates the crisis. Mainstream media puts a spotlight on the crisis while social media amplifies the crisis. For instance, during the protracted BP Gulf of Mexico crisis in 2010, the flash point was the oil spill itself, but social media played a critical role in the spotlight, blame game and resolution stages. BP’s crisis response was a textbook case study in terms of its scope and scale. However, a series of failed attempts to control the oil spill over months, then-CEO Tony Hayward’s “I want my life back” comment, and the online spoofs they inspired, did not help BP’s cause.

In the “slow burn” crisis, social media conversations (product quality, customer support, employee discontent) build up into a crisis and are picked up by influential bloggers and even mainstream media. For instance, in 2005, influential blogger Jeff Jarvis blogged about a series of bad customer service experiences with Dell, and became the focal point of the Dell Hell crisis. Dell Hell forced Dell to recommit to creating a positive customer experience and led to several remarkable social media initiatives including the Direct2Dell blog, the Dell Ideastorm‘ ideation community and Dell’s social media command center.

In the “flash mob” crisis, a social media meme (Greenpeace campaign, anti-brand hashtag, anti-brand video) creates a flash mob, turns into a crisis, and is picked up by mainstream media. For instance, in 2010, Greenpeace created a viral video led campaign to protest against Nestle procuring palm oil from Indonesian rainforests and endangering orangutans. Protestors hijacked Nestle’s Facebook page and filled it with abusive comments and Nestle Killer profile pics. Surprisingly, Nestle’s strong corporate citizenship reputation for creating shared value did not help during the crisis. In the end, Nestlé announced that it would stop procuring from suppliers associated with deforestation.

Using social media to manage a crisis

Social media has a specific role to play at each stage of the crisis curve. MSLGROUP has created a crisis management toolkit that includes tools and best practices for each stage in the crisis cycle.

Using social media to manage a crisis

In the flash-point stage, we track negative social media chatter, identify early warning signals, isolate issues, and resolve them, before they turn into a crisis.

In the spotlight stage, we plot a heat map of crisis flows between social media and mainstream media, identify influencers who are acting as hubs driving these flows and focus our crisis management efforts on these hubs.

In the blame-game stage, we help clients shape the narrative by leveraging owned media channels like blog and YouTube to reframe the issue more positively and avert direct blame.

In the resolution stage, we optimize owned media content for search results, so that positive and neutral stories show up alongside negative stories on keyword searches related to the brand.

Most importantly, it’s critical to map out and plan for crisis scenarios in advance, in order to respond to them effectively. We have created a toolkit for mapping out alternate crisis scenarios and planning for their best, worst and most likely cases. This toolkit include a workshop for scenario, keyword, influencer, spokesperson and message mapping, and platforms like a wiki-based war room for crisis collaboration and a CMS-based dark site for crisis response.

In the end, however, managing any crisis successfully, including a crisis on social media, is less about saying the right things and more about doing the right things. So, corporations that are rooted in purpose are likely to respond to crisis situations with authenticity, and overcompensate for mistakes, transforming potential crises into opportunities to reconnect with their stakeholders.