Comfort in the Groundswell

“The success of most ventures actually lies in the execution phase, not the idea. I’d take a decent idea and superb execution over a great idea with sub-par execution any day of the week.” This observation by Blake Mycoskie, Founder of TOMS Shoes, applies to the caution that Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff advise people to take in regards to social media in their book, Groundswell.  

Li and Bernoff note in today’s world everyone wants to be seen and heard on social media but not everyone is equipped with the skills to successfully navigate the ever changing cyber landscape. Companies today are getting lost in the execution phase when it comes to making a social media presence. A company’s intent to enter the social media world is a good idea, however it is often approached all wrong.

In chapter four of Li and Bernoff’s book, they outline the POST method for “tapping the groundswell.” The POST method:  people, objectives, strategy and technology, serves as a planning outline to follow when forming a social media presence for a company.

I found this method particularly interesting because it is a plan that is not limited to the success of social campaigns, but also applies to many other campaigns in the marketing and public relations world. In fact, thanks to the wisdom and guidance of Dr. Kathie Fleck, I have applied very similar principles to working in the TrueNorth student run PR firm on campus.

Last spring I worked on a very complex and difficult firm project for a national client concerned with driving traffic to a website to get people to take an “Energy IQ” quiz. For about the first month of the project my team failed to examine the people, objectives, strategies and technology of our campaign. 

What our group didn’t realize for some time was that in order to get people to take an “Energy IQ” quiz, we had to first get them to care about ideas such as natural gas, fuel and alternative forms of energy. We had to show them what they would gain from listening to us. We were so concerned with trying to figure out how to get people to take the online quiz that we forgot to think about what would actually make them care.

We got ahead of ourselves and we ended up formulating a whole campaign that we were ready to move forward with. However, we experienced a very frustrating and humbling moment when we presented our idea to Kathie and she completely shot it down saying, “No one is going to care!” Ouch!

The truth was we hadn’t properly thought about our people (aka our target audience consisting of ONU students). In the words of Li and Bernoff we didn’t think about “what our customers were ready for.” We lost sight of the objectives presented to us from our client, our strategy and “relationship” with our audience and our approaches for how to use technology. 

We had to scrap the entire idea and start over. This time we focused more on how we could get the attention of ONU students and then keep them interested long enough to utilize their smart phones and laptops to go online and take the “Energy IQ” quiz. 

Li and Bernoff say, “if you don’t enter the groundswell with a specific goal, you will fail.” Our campaign ended up turning out better than any of us expected. However, if it had not have been for Kathie’s tough love reminding us to take an in depth look at the people, objectives, strategies and technology involved in the campaign, we could have failed too.

Even though technology and social media creates new challenges for those in the fields of public relations and marketing there are some things that are consistent no matter the medium. There is comfort in knowing that even though I am new to the blogging world and how to use social media in terms of PR, I actually know more than I think I do simply by applying other strategies I have learned throughout my schooling at ONU.