What a Skull Fracture Can Teach Us About Social Media

What does a skull fracture have to do with social media, social marketing and the travel industry? For me… Everything.

Eight weeks ago, my wife slipped on an ice patch and fell, Keystone Kops style, fracturing her skull. Our priorities were instantly reordered. Blogging was suspended and Twitter updates slowed. Content creation and curation were interrupted, but that’s only half the story.

Social media consumption was also disrupted. Real-time feeds from Twitter and Facebook became irrelevant. LinkedIn languished. All brand relationships were ignored; there was no interactive engagement – there was no engagement. I would be hard pressed to remember any traditional broadcast media messaging during the period – all were ignored.

Regardless of my favorable predisposition toward a travel brand, or timely exposure to highly compelling message, or amazing pricing for a trip that urgently required planning, no transaction resulted; the timing was bad.

The only relationships that mattered were authentic personal relationships. The top priority was a commitment made over a quarter-century ago when I married my wife – the “in sickness and in health” clause had kicked in.

It became clear that under challenging circumstances, priorities drive definitive action, and those actions trump even the best intentioned plans.

Social Media and Social Networking are Constants – Engagement is Variable
Despite the personal circumstances, the stream of social media continued unabated. What changed was the effectiveness of any social marketing efforts targeting me. Engagement evaporated. This did not mean my interaction with social networks discontinued, however. It just changed.

Social networks, initially my wife’s Facebook account, were used to inform some friends and family of the incident. Twitter’s real-time nature, lack of message threading and 140 character limit did not suit the situation. LinkedIn’s business orientation was not applicable and no, I did not try to become the Mayor of Elmbrook Hospital on foursquare.

As the online and offline lives of people continue to converge, social networks have become essential tools to maintain engagement with friends. Within a highly engaged world, failure to keep an inner circle appraised of important developments can actually strain relationships – these connections are expected to be continuously maintained. In the business world, marketers experimenting with social media need to be cognizant of this new expectation.

When the goal is customer engagement, success of any social marketing initiative is dependent on defining an effective strategy and applying the appropriate technologies to create a relevant consumer experience. Relevance requires delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. With social media however, the sole arbiter of relevance is each individual consumer. Unlike traditional marketing, there is no average demographic in personal customer interaction, only the aggregate of all social interactions with individual customers.

Note the absence of the term “user experience.” When it comes to customer engagement through social media, there are not users, only real people. In my experience, real people consider themselves as unique individuals. Reducing them to the generic commodity of “user” is demeaning.

Social networks can help to reunite old friends, keep busy people connected and rapidly disseminate highly relevant information throughout a community. Social media can help marketers establish and sustain online relationships. However, the endgame for social marketing is engaging the customer by nurturing individual customer relationships to maximize lifetime value.

Too frequently, discussions of social marketing programs forget about the consumer, instead targeting the tactical deployment of various social computing strategies. Newly developed social software applications (re/creating social conventions and contexts) or social information processing platforms (the collective organization of human knowledge) have often overshadowed customer focus due to the novelty of the latest tools.

Why Social Media Creates Headaches
Many hoteliers and destination marketing executives have complained about social media induced headaches. This new complexity is due to business objectives being filtered through a new layer of technology that encompasses many channels. The opportunities presented by the new channels are exciting, but the execution can get complicated – especially when monitoring prformance or ROI.

Before discussing the social marketing implications, let’s first eliminate some confusion surrounding social media by differentiating it from traditional mass media, social networking and social marketing.

Like all media, social media shares common characteristics of leveraging various technologies and platforms to communicate a message. Social media is not the message – it is the transport mechanism for the message. The difference between social media and traditional mass media is profound.

Social media is highly interactive and differs from mass media by fostering dialogue as opposed to the monologues broadcast by traditional media in newspapers, radio, and television. As a result, social media has dramatically democratized the creation and control of messages. Content production is decentralized and social media distribution is facilitated by a diverse set of individuals curating and sharing the content.

Social networks differ fundamentally from social media. Social networks are places where individuals sharing common interests interact online. If social media represent the new newspaper, then a social networks are the new coffee shops. The social networks are facilitated by technologies, but the engagement and interactions are uniquely human – they are communities. Like all communities, there are influential leaders, devoted followers, self-absorbed wannabes, and the occasional troll or deadbeat.

There is a subtle nuance that often goes overlooked when discussing social networks. Where Facebook is a social networking platform and Twitter is a micro-blogging platform, the true social networks are comprised of the individuals characterized as friends and followers, not simply the enabling technologies. Similarly, engagement with social networks should not merely be measured by the friend and follower counts. It is the level of relevant interactivity comments, mentions, forwards, replies, clicked links, etc. that indicates true engagement and interactivity.

The term “social marketing” has a storied history. Forty years ago, it was created to describe non-profit marketing aimed to benefit society. The promotion of AIDS awareness is a great example. However, since the emergence of interactive social media, the term has now been adapted (some cry hijacked) to describe interactive relationships between an organization and its customer base, as well as the larger global community.

Social marketing is interdisciplinary, involving all traditional aspects of marketing, such as market research, brand management, public relations, advertising, and sales promotion. Most importantly, social marketing is now encouraging greater direct customer interaction in product development & service delivery planing, as well as training customer service and operations personnel to address unplanned customer situations arising in real-time.

So to recap, social marketing is utilized by businesses to create engaging communication that is transmitted using social media to interact with individual consumers who are members of social networks. You may need to read that last bit multiple times. If that didn’t help, try again in a few minutes after taking a couple acetaminophen or ibuprofen…

Is this Dating or a One-night Stand?
What type of relationship is your customer seeking? A critical first step is for organizations to honestly understand their current relationship with their customers. If there is any question on this topic, the first and most beneficial activity would be to listen. The company has very little say in its current market perception or positioning. The customers are defining the playing field.

A common mistake for many travel organizations is diving into the social media melee without a clearly defined strategy. The term “engagement” is thrown around almost as carelessly as the term “love.” Customers are fully engaged. They love the product. There are varying degrees of engagement and many shades of love.

The most important consideration is that both parties share a common definition of engagement. It would not be the first time that one party got hurt upon realizing they were only being used by the other party until the next best thing came along. True mutual commitment is a precious commodity in personal relationships and an extremely rare ingredient for brand relationships.

Effective customer engagement strategies must also ensure that commitment equilibrium is maintained as customer engagement develops. If customer expectations exceed the organization’s ability to interact or respond in a timely manner, dissatisfaction will result. Similarly, if the business becomes overly invasive in its attempts to gain engagement, dissatisfaction may again be the outcome.

The engagement strategy should also allow for customer expectations to be periodically exceeded. Standard processes should be created to provide efficient and consistent service levels. The opportunity to exceed expectations requires a cultural decision by the organization to empower employees in customer contact roles to make decisions eliminate obstacles facing the customer – even if doing the right thing means bending the rules to assist the customer.

This approach provides an opportunity for brand evangelists to organically emerge from the community of fans, armed with anecdotes that substantiate examples of product superiority or unexpected service delivery surprises. Again, like in most personal relationships, keeping the customer relationship interesting may require increasing degrees of creativity as time passes.

One certainty is that travel firms must accept the fact that each customer will individually determine an appropriate level of engagement based on their own unique set of personal preferences – and the impact of external circumstances that are beyond the control of the business.

Marriage and Divorce
When more than 50% of marital relationships end in divorce, what are the odds for successful long term product-consumer relationships? Many companies proclaim “the customer comes first” but the reality is that there are almost always limits to the company’s generosity and willingness to make sacrifices that benefit of the customer.

Marketers oriented toward measuring performance based on Lifetime Customer Value are typically desire to marry customers into a long term commitment. However, marriage implies a mutual lifelong commitment, sacrifice and monogamy. While the “cherish and respect” concept should be fundamental in all brand-customer relationships, concepts like “in good times and bad,” “in sickness and in health,” and especially the “till death do us part” may be challenged by business decisions supporting short-term profitability objectives or competitive actions.

Travel brands also need to be accepting of the fickle nature of its consumers. It is unlikely that a travel brand legitimately offers the best product for a consumer across all types of destinations and itineraries. In a world increasingly focused on the individualization of the travel experience, authentically and consistently expressing gratitude to individual customers will become an operational reality and relationship management expectation.

Frequent traveler programs have long focused on quantity, rewarding trip frequency, total spend, etc. Typically corporate road warriors reap the majority of the benefits in these programs, and for good reason, they represent a very lucrative market segment. Perhaps a more interesting measure of brand devotion is the captured share of travel opportunities. It is much more of a challenge to recognize individuals that may not take as many trips, but who are militantly loyal to certain brands or destinations when they do travel.

With the democratization of communication presented by social media, these brand loyalists will become increasingly valuable to organizations – especially if they are influencers of others in large social networks. Frequency, loyalty and influence are not synonymous attributes.

Which guest provides the greatest marketing ROI for the travel company?

• a) Fred – A training manager who is on the road 200 days per year. His trips are booked by a corporate travel planner using brands dictated by corporate travel policy. Fred is rewarded with Platimum level loyalty in three different hotel loyalty programs. With few friends and a loathing for leisure travel, he has never recommended a hotel to anyone.
• b) Wilma – A mother & volunteer who is president of a large High School PTA and manages the annual cancer society fundraiser. She stays about 20 nights per year in hotels – always loyal to her favorite hotel chain. An active social networker, both online & especially offline, her recommendations have inspired others to spend thousands of room nights in her favorite brand’s properties, although she has never benefited from preferred status in the hotel chain’s frequent guest program.

Social networking changes the rules of engagement. Organizations must now consider the value of a consumer’s social network and level of engagement into their lifetime customer value. Highly connected & engaged individuals who share primarily to benefit others, not for personal reward, are the new gold standard. Research indicates that a humanistic orientation drives these people. They are most interested in how products help people and make customers feel. Points oriented loyalty programs rewarding frequency and spend may not align well with this altruistic perspective.

With the current economic downturn, there are large numbers of individuals with priorities that have changed – in many cases, through no fault or desire of their own. Spending constraints, debt reduction or job searches all reduce the time and resources available for discretionary expenditures. Impacted individuals may continue to have favorable attitudes toward certain brands. They may even be highly engaged due to effective social media programs, but their loyalty or influence may not convert into sales in the short term.

For luxury products, previously dedicated consumers may have temporarily reverted back into aspirational buyers – they may still desire the product, but circumstances dictate that they must wait until time or available resources allow them to purchase. Other priorities, typically family or personal relationship responsibilities, may have taken precedence. In the interim, they may be forced to trade down.

On the other hand, when a corporate crisis occurs causing objectives to be reprioritzed and resources to be redeployed, customers will measure brand relationships based on demonstrated actions, not declared intentions. Consumers considering themselves in emotionally committed brand relationships will expect continuous support and dedication regardless of the circumstances endured by the business.

Given the continuing global financial malaise, I would argue that now is not the best time for airlines to have frequent flier miles expire due to an absence from flying over the past 18 months, or for a hotel chain to devalue the points in its frequent program.

Straining relationships with past customers during difficult times undermines trust and sends a distinct message about how that organization values the relationship with that particular individual. Such actions may clean up balance sheets, but they can jeopardize lifetime customer value.

Individuals who perceive themselves as brand loyalists may suddenly feel disenfranchised when the brand reduces the value of their participation tier or removes benefits. Caution and careful planning is required. New methods exist to exact consumer revenge. Social networks provide a powerful forum for individuals to vigorously expound about injustices, betrayal and indifference.

To quote William Congreve in his 1697 tragedy The Mourning Bride:

Vile and ingrate! too late thou shalt repent
The base Injustice thou hast done my Love:
Yes, thou shalt know, spite of thy past Distress,
And all those Ills which thou so long hast mourn’d;
Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman Customer scorn’d.

NOTE: I took some liberties with the last line of the passage and updated it to account of the 300+ years that have passed since its original publication…

Technology may have advanced dramatically over the past 300 years, but the impact of social networks is less about technology and more about human interaction. Reading the passage, it seems human nature has changed very little when it comes to unrequited loyalty.

So before pledging eternal devotion to customers, travel organizations must understand that expectations are being set that will not be soon forgotten. Relationships are based on trust. Trust is earned, not bought. Working hard to earn trust is a noble pursuit. Most divorces occur because trust has been violated and divorces are often messy affairs.

There is a happy ending to this tale. Miraculously, despite the skull fracture, my wife suffered no permanent damage or lingering physical disability. There are still occasional headaches due to the continued healing of the fracture, but the pain is manageable. Eight weeks later, we consider ourselves extremely fortunate that our lives have nearly returned to normal.

One major difference is our renewed understanding of our true priorities and the realization that social networks play an invaluable role in maintaining relationships with our family and friends. The actions of others in our social network included random acts of kindness that provided incredible examples of sincere engagement.

With travel possessing the incredible capability to provide intensely personal and life changing experiences, it is only a matter of time when an innovative travel company will successfully engage with customers and their social networks to consistently provide memorable and highly personalized quality travel experiences. Many are making progress, although none have yet successfully integrated the marketing strategy, technology and operational processes to support this heightened degree of engagement.

I have every reason to be optimistic.