Odds are that a small-scale antagonist, armed with an internet connection and a $100 digital camera can pose serious threat to your business. Are you prepared for this?
After the BP disaster in Gulf of Mexico, a satirical Twitter (@BPGlobalPR) attracted tens of thousands of followers – more than the official BP Twitter account. @BPGlobalPR (mis)fed totally made-up stories on BP – from (supposedly) PR Division’s lunch menu to a lot of inane matters. @BPGlobalBP, through his efforts helped keep Americans’ rage boiling while BP was scrambling to cap the leaking well and salvage its reputation!
The rules of engagement have changed. Irrespective of your size, your strongest and most vicious critic can be a single disgruntled customer, an employee or even a self-styled crusader who has decided to launch his tirade against you. While some of the criticism may be based on truth, often a rumour or hearsay is enough to let loose a tirade and, fuelled by ‘page-hits’ continue to build the story. The most unfortunate part of the story is that the popular belief in such stories is inversely proportional to the size of the company/ public stature of the person against whom it is written!
Corporations have since long ignored the power of internet. The Internet has levelled the playing field between the large corporations and individual activists. This is not to say that traditional PR tactics are irrelevant. PR, media, advertisement still continue to influence a vast majority. However it is not enough! Companies need to integrate social media as a core building block in their strategy.
Social media does not have only a negative influence. The new generation – born and brought up in digital age – use it as a primary source of information and decision making. The traditional funnel metaphor has given way to customer decision journeys. Decisions are largely being influenced by social networking sites, product review blogs and other such forum. Another big leveller is You Tube which contains more than 50000 videos on product reviews ranging from cars, cosmetics, software, guns, financial products, mobiles.... you name it, it’s been reviewed on You Tube.
The proliferation of social media means that companies need to change the rules how they engage with their internal and external customers. You need to understand the demographics of the people who access these sites and tailor your message to help in decision making. Quite a few of us would recall ‘Second Life’ phenomenon and the advertising blitz of real-life (or first life?) companies on ‘Second Life’! It is interesting to note that most adverts on the Second-life were almost the same that you saw in real life.
Digital Strategy
So what constitutes a digital strategy for your organisation? Or better still, what is a digital strategy? Wikipedia defines Digital strategy is the process of specifying an organization's vision, goals, opportunities and initiatives in order to maximize the business benefits digital investments and efforts provide to the organization. These can range from an enterprise focus, which considers the broader opportunities and risks that digital potentially creates (e.g., changes in the publishing industry) and often includes customer intelligence, collaboration, new product/market exploration, sales and service optimization, enterprise technology architectures and processes, innovation and governance; to more marketing and customer-focused efforts such as web sites, mobile, eCommerce, social, site and search engine optimization, and advertising. Phew! Simply put, the extension of corporate strategy to include and harness the power of digital media is a simple definition of your digital strategy.
To build your digital strategy you need to identify the specific opportunities (or challenges) that digital media imposes on your business, develop a vision on how to exploit digital media to address those opportunities/challenges and prioritise a set of initiatives to deliver them. I have come across some companies who have ‘done’ their digital strategy! As with their corporate strategy the digital strategy is ever-changing. You need to constantly monitor your digital strategy and improvise it.
Digital involvement is viral – it can go extremely well for your business and create an altogether different level of branding (heard of Blendtech? If not search them on YouTube. Remember to see the page views for each of their posts!) or can go horribly wrong. If you have got your digital strategy right you are prepared for the latter!
