Rohit Bhargava

Today on Lunch with an Entrepreneur we’re talking to social networking expert Rohit Bhargava. He writes the Influential Marketing Blog, ranked by Ad Age as one of the top 50 marketing blogs in the world and is author for Ogilvy Worldwide.

He talks to Amanda Gome about social networking, the biggest mistakes businesses have made and some of the secrets to using social media successfully.

Where is Australia at on the social media curve?

Australia is similar to a lot of countries: brands are very, very interested in starting to engage and experiment with social media. They want to find ways of proving the value of that to the people within their organisation.

What’s the biggest hurdle they’re having to overcome? Is it a waste of time or resources?

There’s a lot of fear around the amount of resource time, so when you think in terms of return on investment, the investment in social media is very often the time, not so much the budget. So that’s a very real cost. But the other thing is there is the fear of negativity that perhaps people might be negative about your brand or your product. So that can be a barrier sometimes.

What are some other myths or mistakes that businesses are making in this area?

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make is that they focus too much on the fear of negativity. They try something, they launch something and they don’t necessarily focus on an effective promotional strategy. Instead there’s actually a lot of silence because nobody knows that this exists, nobody engages and they look at that and they feel let down because you’ve spent this time and this excitement to launch something and it doesn’t necessarily turn out to be this viral success that everybody wants. It stalls initiatives internally sometimes because it’s very difficult to prove the value if you’ve launched something and done that effort and you really haven’t anything to show for it.

And what should you be doing in that situation?

I think you need to focus on the value exchange. Which is, why would somebody care about something you’re putting out there? Is it self-serving or does it actually solve some sort of need or offer something back to the people who might be reading or the people you want to engage? And a lot of times the mistakes that brands make with social media can be solved by asking that simple question upfront.

Okay, so you’ve got a lot of large companies at the moment setting up social networking sites where they’re becoming sort of mini publishers. What should they do if people are not coming?

Be more strategic about where you are. So just because Twitter or Facebook are in the news all the time doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be there. It really does depend on your business and where your audience is and what you’re going to use that tool for. So the first thing is don’t be tempted by the brightest, shiniest tool on the horizon. Actually think about what makes the most sense for you brand and focus on that first instead of just reacting to where you think people are.

Can you give us an example of a company that has changed position like that, made some mistakes and then got it right?

Well, I think a legendary example in social media is Dell.

In the US market, there are a number of these brands who’ve gone from starting up in a position of negativity and turning that into a positive experience. Of course Dell is one of them. Comcast is another one that’s done that quite effectively.

Take us through that strategy.

Comcast is a cable provider providing internet services and television services for people’s homes. There’s a lot of negativity in that industry, in the US at least, because people are very frustrated with their service. Sometimes if you call someone to come out and fix it, they don’t necessarily come within the time frame in which they should and there are all sorts of issues there.

So there was a gentleman who works for their customer service team who started using Twitter to answer customer feedback directly and to solve customer service issues. That turned into a very, very effective use of the platform as a way of enabling people to get customer service, where in other situations they might have been lacking that. And that was a very effective use for them of turning their customer service reputation around.

Where does the social networking function sit in companies? In marketing? In PR? In sales lead generation? Are you seeing companies restructure as a result of social networking?

Yes, some of them are. I think that there is no single formula for where social media sits within an organisation, so the Comcast example is one where social media was driven through customer service, the Dell example was one where it was driven through marketing and often it can be driven by PR which has been our example because it’s such a directly relatable effort to create content and drive people to it and the whole influencer engagement.

To some degree that’s what PR always has been and so there really is no rhyme or reason to where it starts from. The real challenge for a brand is to embrace where it is beginning to start from within their company. Because for a lot of these brands, it’s already happening within their company and the challenge is to find it and support it.

So you mean just an operations person might have already started it and it mightn’t be incorporated into any brand yet?

Yes. We do a lot of social media work with Intel and that’s a good example because a lot of their innovation comes from their technical people and these are not necessarily people that you would put out there and say they speak for the entire Intel brand, but in their area, they’re recognised as experts and they have something very valuable to contribute to the online conversation. So we’ve helped Intel to do is find a way for those people to be part of the communities that matter so that they can help position the company as the technology leader and all of that kind of brand associations that Intel would want to have.