Note About “Uncase Studies”: Traditionally case studies are used to describe how a company or organization solved a problem. Others with similar problems can then use the case study to understand how they may solve their own problems. I will be writing an ongoing series of “uncase studies” that will outline what companies or organizations could be doing to improve their marketing and community building efforts using social media approaches.

Disclaimer: The companies and organizations that I talk about in my “uncase studies” are not my clients. I attempt to research any of their current work to leverage social media. Just because I write about them does not mean that the people that handle their marketing (internal or external) are not planning to implement social media strategy and tactics that could be far better than the ones discussed in my posts. It means they had not been publicly implemented that I could find at the time my post was published.

This week Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang sent a message on Twitter about a posting on his job board by Aflac, who is looking for a new/social media marketing person. I think it is really interesting to see how large companies are going about creating social media teams and integrating them into the overall organization.  Here is their posting:

“New Media/General Marketer: This is a preliminary posting for a position we are beginning to search for here at Aflac Corporate headquarters. We don’t have the specifics yet, but we are looking for high level professionals with Ad Agency backgrounds and advanced knowledge with New Media, Web 2.0, and Social Networking. If you are qualified and interested please forward your resume and salary requirements to me at lwilliams5@aflac.com There are several opportunities in our marketing department and salary for these positions have not yet been determined.”

The first thing you realize after reading this is that they don’t know what they are looking for. I think this is actually a good thing, because they are willing to admit that they don’t know how social media “fits” into the organization. Though this post looks at Aflac specifically it should be seen as advice for any large company looking to build an in-house social media team.

Step 1: Call Scott Monty
Just like any thing else it is best to learn from someone who has done it before and done it well. Scott’s work as head of social media  for Ford Motor Company has been the foremost example of integrating social media into a traditional business. I would ask Scott for 10 minutes on the phone and then I would ask him these questions:

• As a business what do we need to commit to in order to successfully establish a social media team?
• Who do you recommend that we contact about leading our team?
• What qualities/knowledge do you think they NEED to have?
• What has been the hardest part for you leading social media within Ford?

Understanding the answers to these questions is the foundation to beginning to understand the type of person you are looking for.

Step 2: Take A Look Inside
Social Media does not sit solely in the marketing/communications  department it goes far beyond that. Aflac needs to look at its internal departments and understand how they will begin using social media.  Do they have someone in customer service that can understand social media’s impact on customer service like Comcast has with Frank? Is their internal communications as well as your traditional sales staff ready to have social media integrated into the work they do? The person Aflac is looking for isn’t only a marketing person that understands the social web, they are a teacher, a leader, and the organization’s advocate for transparent two-way communication. Aflac think for a moment, are you ready for that? If not, take that job posting down now! If you are, then make sure that you establish goals for what you want social media to accomplish for your organization, if you don’t it won’t matter who you hire.

Step 3: Selecting The Correct Team Members
So lets say Aflac has taken a look at themselves and decide they are ready to have social media become a part of their organization, now what? How do they pick they right team? In the world of social media it is pretty easy to separate the contenders from the pretenders if you know what you are looking for. Use these questions as a check list and make sure  your candidate can answer yes to each of them.

• Have they helped companies use social media in the past?
• Do they actively participate themselves? (blog, podcast, twitter, etc)
• Did they answer “What is the first thing you would do in leading social media at AFLAC?” with a statement referring to research and monitoring?
• How do they consume information? (They should include RSS, blogs, podcasts, reed reader, agregation, and twitter search in their response)
• Have they worked for or with agencies on social media campaigns?

Lastly, I would recommend having a conversation with any serious candidate about their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to social media. Nobody is an expert in social media but everyone has different aspects they are best at. For example you can be a great writer, but not know anything about publishing and distributing video for the web. It is important to know the person’s strengths so that you can add members to the team that fill in the gaps. If the person you are interviewing says they are an expert at all aspects of social media, then that is the end of the road for them, they are clearly a pretender and not a contender.

Step 4: Understand That You Still Need An Agency
Regardless of what team of people Aflac has and no matter how talented their social media team is, they will still need an agency to help them. Maybe Aflac’s current agency can do the job or maybe the social media team needs to select an agency on their own to work with. Regardless Aflac is not going to be able to accomplish its goals with only any internal team. Scott Monty doesn’t.

Closing Advice:
Social Media is new but hiring isn’t. Aflac knows what a good employee looks like. They need to reach out to people in the social media industry for advice and context. The honest truth is that in this difficult economy Aflac has an opportunity to lure some top-level talent into their organization and build for a successful future.

What would you add? Any other advice for Aflac?

Note About “Uncase Studies”: Traditionally case studies are used to describe how a company or organization solved a problem. Others with similar problems can then use the case study to understand how they may solve their own problems. I will be writing an ongoing series of “uncase studies” that will outline what companies or organizations could be doing to improve their marketing and community building efforts using social media approaches.

Disclaimer: The companies and organizations that I talk about in my “uncase studies” are not my clients. I attempt to research any of their current work to leverage social media. Just because I write about them does not mean that the people that handle their marketing (internal or external) are not planning to implement social media strategy and tactics that could be far better than the ones discussed in my posts. It means they had not been publicly implemented that I could find at the time my post was published.

The Catalyst:
It is getting cold here in North Carolina and honestly I don’t like it much at all. However, I do like one thing about winter: skiing. Growing up in West Virginia, I was a few hours away from several ski resorts and developed a love for skiing. As I was planning my first ski trip for the winter, I started to look at different resort Web sites and began thinking about how ski resorts could leverage social media to support their marketing objectives.

The Industry:
The ski resort industry is a seasonal tourism based business that I am sure will be hit hard during this current recession.  I am not an industry expert but similar to most other industries the ski resort industry has large companies that own resorts across the country as well as smaller companies that only operates one resort in certain small mountain town. Skiing can be an expensive hobby, but also one people are willing to pay a premium for in order to have a great experience.

I think the advice and ideas discussed in this post could be applied to a ski resort big or small, today I will focus on a national company Intrawest that owns resorts across the US and Canada. Honestly, the reason I selected them is because they own Snowshoe which is the major resort in my home state of West Virginia, but the also own many other popular resorts including Steam Boat in Colorado.

The Competition:
Using social media isn’t completely new in the skiing industry. For example Eric Hoffman and his team at Park City Mountain Resort have a great blog, that seems to have developed a solid readership, by sharing important information about the mountain and resort. Mack as a complete check up of the blog which he grades pretty positivity.

Park City is not the only major resort that is into social media. Take a look at two other major icons in the ski resort industry Vail and Aspen. Both are using e-mail marketing, online video, image sharing, RSS and many other social technologies to lure visitors.

Aspen, I think take social media usage a step further by adding RSS and sharing features:

How Is Intrawest Using Social Media Now?
I contacted Ian Galbraith, Director of Communications for Intrawest and he communicated to me that the choice on how to leverage social media is made made the individual marketing groups at each resort.  This lack of integration is Intrawest’s core problem!

If I had a portfolio a great ski resorts across the country, I would want a way to connect them online to help cross market them. Leaving social media use up to each resort to me seems like creating unneeded competition when they should be leveraging the sum of all online assets.

They however, are using social media pretty well at their Steamboat, CO resort:

They have a fully featured social network for those interested in their resort and after some research it looks like it has a strong membership base and a fairly actively group of members contributing comments, responses and lots of cool skiing pictures. It seems they are having some spam issues, but that comes with any growing community. They also use twitter to deliver mountain conditions to skiers cell phones.

The problem is that Intrawest owns 11 resorts and Steamboat is the only one using social media at this level.

Advice and Strategy:

It seems like Intrawest already has staff that understands marketing and how social media can fit in their marketing efforts, they have a problem that many organizations face, a lack of integration. This lack of integration though particularly hurts Intrawest because all of it products (resorts) are so closely related and  share the same customer base.

Ideas for Integration:

The My Steamboat social network is great, but what it doesn’t do is get the person living on the east coast that normally goes skiing at Intrawest’s Snowshoe resort in West Virginia to consider taking a special trip out west to spend a long weekend at Steamboat. If I were them I would keep the My Steamboat network, but make it part of a larger integrated network across all of its resorts. This is where a social network platform that can integrate like Ripple 6‘s platform would be a good solution. Intrawest needs to empower it current customers at each of its resorts with information and experiences happening across all resorts to help keep customers within their resorts system.

They could take a similar strategy with twitter as well, Have a main Intrawest resort Twitter account that shares and answers top-line questions from customers. Then I would suggest creating multiple accounts for each resort, one to share slope conditions, one to share activities and one for customer service.  This information would help serve their community and also get indexed in Twitter Search and Google which will aid in Intrawest’s organic search marketing efforts.

Community Building and SEO:

Aside from community building another core benefit for Intrawest to integrate its social media marketing activities is the impact these activities have on organic search marketing.  Lee Oden has written a great post to explain the impact of community building on SEO, but in this situation in which so many resorts are involved the community building would have a significant impact for Intrawest. As I was doing my research for this post I saw many resorts doing paid search marketing buys and taking this organic search approach could help solidify Intrawest’s positioning on key Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

Really Integrating:

I could write on and on about the different way Intrawest could leverage social media, a social network and twitter are the tip of the iceberg but were community building methods already in use.  Integration does not mean integrating social media across an organization it means integrating marketing across and organization. Social media integration was just the core idea of this post, but Intrawest could and should be doing much more. I had a great conversation on twitter a few days ago with Beth Harte and Allan Sabo about the subject of integration regarding the hurdles it faces ranging from money to teamwork.

That being said their are small ways to integrate that could be good first steps. For Intrawest if you did have one main social network you could start printing the URL for it on lift tickets cross all resorts.  Some small steps like this one could have a major impact over time.

That is it for this uncase study, hope you enjoyed it and as always please let me know how I can make these better!

Note About “Uncase Studies”: Traditionally case studies are used to describe how a company or organization solved a problem. Others with similar problems can then use the case study to understand how they may solve their own problems. I will be writing an ongoing series of “uncase studies” that will outline what companies or organizations could be doing to improve their marketing and community building efforts using social media approaches.

Disclaimer: The companies and organizations that I talk about in my “uncase studies” are not my clients. I attempt to research any of their current work to leverage social media. Just because I write about them does not mean that the people that handle their marketing (internal or external) are not planning to implement social media strategy and tactics that could be far better than the ones discussed in my posts. It means they had not been publicly implemented that I could find at the time my post was published.

The Catalyst:
So why did I stick to food for my second uncase study? Honestly it was this situation that first gave me the idea for my uncase study series. In the case of Krispy Kreme two catalysts occurred that got me thinking about what they needed to do. The first is that I began to see that Dunkin Donuts was rolling out many social media efforts. The second was the my friend and Talk Social News co-host loves Krispy Kreme and continually tweets about them.

The Industry:
Unlike Flemings in my first uncase study, Krispy Kreme is in a completely different type of market, it is a low cost food that most people buy on the go. To put it lightly Krispy Kreme has fallen in the midst of a declining economy and low carb diets.  This is evident when you take a look at the graph below that shows the steady decline of Krispy Kreme stock over the past 5 years.

One can assume that this type of decline is the result of a variety of circumstances and executive choices, but to me looking at this one thing is certain; Krispy Kreme needs a catalyst for change to help them redirect their company and brand to drive growth in the market. Am I suggesting that leveraging social media can be the catalyst for this change: no. However, I do believe that using social media to bring together the power of existing Krispy Kreme supporters so that they can help influence others, would be any important component in the turn-around process for this iconic breakfast brand.

When speaking directly about social media in relation to Krispy Kreme, it is easy to see that they have fallen behind a core competitor; Dunkin’ Donuts.

Dunkin’ Donuts’ Approach:
Is Dunkin’ Donuts blowing me away with their social media strategy and implementation? No, but what they are doing is going beyond  listening and beginnings to participate with customers through tools like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Lets take a closer look to see how they are participating in each of these communities.

Facebook:
A quick review of the Dunkin’ Donuts Facebook presence reveals that that have made a fan page that does a good job to leverage marketing campaign materials and videos. They have a pretty active wall and message board and more than 200,000 fans. overall its seems like the have an active facebook community, but could participate more to drive conversations.

YouTube and Twitter:
Notice the their approach to YouTube and Twitter are similar to Facebook and they have manged to build good communities there.  I like that I see so many replies on their twitter account, seems like the person running it is doing a solid job. Media Post has an interesting articles about Dunkin’s jump to Twitter.

Dunkin has also started to use twitter to distribute ads spots that it posts on Youtube for new campaigns.

Krispy Kreme’s Approach:
In fairness to the folks at Krispy Kreme I did reach out to their public relations agency to see if they had a social media strategy in the works, and they indicated that they are working on somethings, but did not say when the would be rolled out.

To me the issue here is not Krispy Kreme VS. Dunkin Donuts because they are really pushing different products. It is that Dunkin has taken action to take advantage of its community online, while it seems like Krispy Kreme is ignoring it.  I am not suggesting that Krispy Kreme even needs to have a twitter account, but what it needs to do is step up and participate in a community that has strong feelings about its products.

The fact is that people freaking love Krispy Kreme Donuts and social media is allowing people to share their love more than they ever could before. For example a quick Flickr search shows more than 14,000 pictures of Krispy Kreme donuts.

Am I suggesting that Krispy Kreme leave a comment on each of these 14,000 pictures and tell each user how awesome their photo is? No. This is however, an example Krispy Kreme advocates are sharing their passion about Krispy Kreme products.

Advice and Strategy:
The best thing about leveraging social media is that all situations are different but this one has some great opportunities.

Modernize What You Have
When most people think about Krispy Kreme, they think of glazed donuts and then they think of the famous “Hot Doughuts Now” sign. I know people that have to pull in and buy a doughnut if that sign is on.  It is an icon of the Krispy Kreme brand. So build on it. It is 2009 after all. My suggestion let people sign up to get SMS messages every time the “hot” sign is on at the store they choose.

Better yet, since the iPhone is now the most popular cell phone in the U.S. I would consider building an application that lets people see which stores “hot” sign is on related to their current location from their iPhone GPS. The iPhone app to me is a double win, it will help sell donuts, but also tell Krispy Kreme more about their customer base at the same time.

Enlist Your Most Passionate Customers
To be successful using social media you have to start with the best supporters in your community empower them, and currently Krispy Kreme is not doing that. It has a basic “Friends of Krispy Kreme” program that send mailings, but this is not doing much support the people that love the company’s products.

Instead I would suggest monitoring the web for active advocates for Krispy Kreme. For example my friend Wayne Sutton who I cohost the Talk Social News podcast with, absolutely loves Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and if you look at his messages on services like Brightkite and Twitter you will see that he has many about Krispy Kreme. Regardless of your brand it is important to take advantage of people like Wayne who love to talk about your product.

Krispy Kreme could identify people like Wayne across different Krispy Kreme markets and give them each a coupon for a free doughnut everyweek. By doing this the cost would be minimal, but they would keep their best customers happy and ensure a steady stream of pictures, videos and messages would steadily be pumped out on to the web to those people’s word-of-mouth network, but also indexed by search engines for discovery by people outside of their network.

Embrace What The Krispy Kreme Brand Is Today
Krispy Kreme should understand that the Internet has a powerful impact on what a brand is and what it becomes.  When I looked at the Krispy Kreme home page a saw something dramatic.

Trans Fat free doughnuts?  That is not the Krispy Kreme brand. For most people Krispy Kreme is an indulgence and they don’t want to be reminded of unhealthy the doughnut is. Instead the want it to taste the same exact way it always does, the way it tasted when they were a child. Like it or not this is a more accurate depiction of what the Krispy Kreme brand is to many people.

A quick scan of the web will showcase all of the pictures and recipes of the crazy Krispy Kreme related recipes that people are coming up with. I say take advantage of this, sponsor a contest for the craziest Krispy Kreme recipe or add a recipe generator to the Krispy Kreme Web site that would let people build a recipe quickly ans share it with friends and family members.  Embrace what people want to do with your product.

I could go on, but I think that is a good place to stop for this uncase study. Please let me know what you think. I would love to know how to improve upcoming uncase studies.

Bonus Points go to the company (Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme) that is the first to comment on this post.

Note About “Uncase Studies”: Traditionally case studies are used to describe how a company or organization solved a problem. Others with similar problems can then use the case study to understand how they may solve their own problems. I will be writing an ongoing series of “uncase studies” that will outline what companies or organizations could be doing to improve their marketing and community building efforts using social media approaches.

Disclaimer: The companies and organizations that I talk about in my “uncase studies” are not my clients. I attempt to research any of their current work to leverage social media. Just because I write about them does not mean that the people that handle their marketing (internal or external) are not planning to implement social media strategy and tactics that could be far better than the ones discussed in my posts. It means they had not been publicly implemented that I could find at the time my post was published.

The Catalyst:
Why is Flemings the first uncase study? Flemings recently opened their first restaurant in the Raleigh-Durham area and as part of their opening marketing push they sent me and others in the Raleigh area a $100 gift certificate to try their restaurant, with the goal to facilitate some word-of-mouth. Which worked, because I am writing this post. Overall I had a good experience, the food was slightly over-priced and the steaks could have been cooked a little more evenly. However, the service was good, the side dishes were very tasty and I had a tremendous bottle of 2005 Kelly Fleming Cabernet. (For me the wine was the highlight of the night. It was great stuff and will be even better with a few years of age on it. Go get on Kelly’s mailing list now, before it is full.)

The Industry:
Honestly, I don’t know that much about the high-end restaurant business overall, but I think it is safe to assume that the difficult economic times facing the the United States currently, is not a good thing for this industry.  Individuals and businesses are cutting back on top tier dinning.  It is critical now more than ever to establish leadership, build a community of supporters, and differentiate yourself from the competition.

Additionally, the Steakhouse industry seems like a crowded space with national chains like Ruth Chris, Sullivan’s and Flemings combined with local and regional steakhouses.  For the purpose of this post we are going to only discuss the three major chains: Flemings, Ruth Chris, and Sullivan’s. After some brief web and blog research it doesn’t seem like any of these three steakhouses are engaging in social media as a marketing medium. The restaurants also don’t seems to have an online community manager to react to the wide variety of forum and blog postings as well has pictures and videos, thus missing a core community building opportunity.

Advice and Strategy:
One of the other core reasons I wanted to start my uncase study series with Flemings is that a could use case study that currently exists of a single location steakhouse using social media effectively. Jason Falls over at Social Media Explorer has written a case study of Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse’s use of social media.  Anyone in the restaurant business should read it!

Here is what one of the partners of Caminito said about the ROI of their social media work:

“As far as our ROI on social media efforts, of course it’s always hard to determine that. But, what I do know is that since we turned our focus to social media, attracting inbound links, more internet marketing/less print advertising, etc., we have seen an approximate 30 percent boost in sales (year to date) in a time where a lot of restaurants are down 10-20 percent. Not all of that can be attributed to our online presence but I’m sure a good portion of it can.”

If you handle a marketing for a steakhouse or really any restaurant for that matter, that paragraph from Jason’s case study should be all that you need to sell in the potential of social media marketing to the decision makers.  The case study does a good job of outlining what Caminito is doing.  What about Flemings? What could they be doing?

Get A Community Manager:
All types of marketers are spewing lists of social media tactics and even though some may work it is more important to have an overall strategy for social media marketing. My first recommendations to the folks at OSI Restaurant Partners, LLC the folks that own Flemings and several other national restaurants would be to hire  online community manager. Yes I realize that this is a difficult time for your business, but this is also the time to get the leg up on your competition. A good online community manager will probably cost about $45,000 – $75,000 per year in salary depending on their experience and expertise.

What will this person do? Well that is really up to OSI’s marketing and customer service teams but I would imagine that this person would become the online spokesperson for Flemings and other OSI restaurants. This person would engage with folks across blogs, forums, and social networks  to answer questions related to Flemings and probably prime beef in general. Additionally, this person could become the core creator of content on a blog or other form of company run communications platform. For a major national restaurant chain to not have a online community manager is inexcusable.

Strategy:
From my brief research of some of the national steakhouse chains it seems like none of them have a strong hold on being considered the “experts in prime quality steaks”. If I were Flemings, this is where I would start my overall strategy. A smart social media marketing plan could leverage the skills of a good community manager not only to interact with current Flemings customers but to illustrate Flemings’ expertise in prime beef and fine dining. I would also suggest integrating organic and paid search marketing efforts at the same time as Flemings starts their social media marketing efforts so that all of their online marketing efforts can be tied together.

Tactics:
So when it comes down to it, how does Flemings make this happen? Most of that will be up to the community manger and the marketing team but I have a few tactical ideas that the may want to consider.

1. Make It Easier For People To Talk About Flemings – Create a Flemings Flickr account and upload logos, food and restaurant pictures that are creative commons licensed so that bloggers and other citizen journalists can easily include them when talking about Flemings.
2. Give Folks An Inside Look – Arm your community manager with a video camera and send him into operations such as meat selection and employee training.  Let him/her ask questions about how these operation works directly to the folks doing the work. On the web people want to feel like they know the people they are buying from.  This will help with this feeling as well as showcase Flemings’ expertise and high-quality products.
3. Give Wine Part of The Spotlight – Since wine bar is part of the Flemings’ name I would suggest doing video interviews with the wine-makers/wineries that Flemings features to help customers understand why they were selected and why they should feel good about buying their wine to go with high-end steak.  I would do this with a separate blog dedicated to wine, but their of course are other ways it could be done. (the wine blog would still be part of the main Flemings Web site though)
4. Adapt New Location Word-Of-Mouth Tactics – As I mentioned earlier Flemings sent out gift certificates as part of their new location opening, which is not a bad tactic. However, I think they would be better served to take some of their new location marketing budget to have a special blogger dinner where all of the relevant local bloggers could come and try a little of everything Flemings has to offer. This would generate tweets, pictures and other coverage at the event  and most likely lead to longer blog postings following the event that would help facilitate word-of-mouth across the new market.

I could go on, but I think that is a good place to start for my first uncase study. Please let me know what you think. I would love to know how to improve upcoming uncase studies. Not enough detail? Too much?