Page 10 - Engage - no.9 - Summer 2017

08
Summer 2017
COVER STORY
LinkedIn Groups
In UnMarketing, Scott Stratten explains the great potential of LinkedIn’s groups function. Here are his keys for running successful groups online.
Be invested in your group.—For groups
or communities to work, you have to have moderation, cohesion, con dentiality, and exclusivity. I have been running groups online for 20 years, and the same things kill them—lack of moderation, lack of direction, and spamming.
Keep your numbers reasonable.—There’s a magic number to a group somewhere, but it’s not 100,000 people. That many people in a group is like going to a networking conference for 5,000 people. It doesn’t work.
Some of the best online groups are run by fans.—The famous Coke page on Facebook was started by fans of the brand. Coke ended up buying it and now helps run it. But generally, when they are run by brands they are likely to have brand- oriented community guidelines that prevent free- owing conversations with employees and customers.
Rule with an iron st.—Nobody can be bigger than the group itself. Even if someone posts their own blog post and it’s topical to the group, I delete it and then share the blog post myself. I do this because if I let them post a self-serving blog post, people will think it’s okay to do the same thing, or they will say that’s what happens in this group and they will leave or mute the group.
and is it easily shareable? The problem is not the color background on your Instagram photo. The value of the headline, the subject line, and the message has never changed in marketing. That’s why I find value in a marketer who can make it compelling and then link that title accurately to the content. Even at conferences such as SXSW, this is a problem, where the title might say one thing and you get there and the person’s talk is not about anything like that.
Q: You wrote about four steps to creating endearment. The rst one—listening— seems like an oft-missed opportunity, because brands are so focused on what they want to say that they miss what customers are saying. Who is really good at listening and then creating dialogue?
SS: This is the most surprising answer I’ve ever given for something: airlines. They have done a complete 180. Some of them are really responsive, especially on places such as Twitter. During what can be one of the highest-stress points in a person’s life—when they are stranded or struggling to get somewhere— airlines are really fast on social. Delta has been focused on it, and WestJet in Canada has always done a great job. I was on a WestJet flight, and an executive from WestJet got on the plane, sat in a regular seat, and told the flight attendant he would be helping with the beverage service. When we got in the air, he stood up, rolled up his sleeves, and started serving. The flight attendant told me, “They all do this.” Listening is a top-down driven event. There are companies who want to hear from customers and companies who do not. Most fall into the latter. They want you to buy the product, use the service, and not say anything. Social media is often just this apologizing mouthpiece, but it should be about listening, taking information, and saying, “This is what we have and what we know.” The worst customer complaint is one you don’t hear, because you can’t do anything about it. Fifteen years ago, if I went onstage to speak to Fortune 500 brands and said I have a tool that will listen in real time to your customers, they would have paid me
a million dollars per month for it. Now it’s here
and it’s free, and companies say, “I don’t know . . . I’m not sure I want that.”
Q: So many companies are trying desperately to connect with millennials, but you downplay the notion that they are some new species of humans.
Fifteen years ago, if I went onstage to speak to Fortune 500 brands and said I have a tool that will listen in real time to your customers, they would have paid me a million dollars per month for it.
SS: We love labels. As marketers, we love putting people in boxes. We have customer profiles where we make up pretend people, such as, “Jane, the 43-year-old wife and mother of three.” We do it with generations, too. But we’ve all shifted how we buy and how we consume content as a whole, not just millennials. My mom texts me, and she is 71. If you want to make a millennial mad, treat them like they are different. It’s just called being human. Look at people who are 15 and people who are 40. We have different needs and wants. “Millennial” is a great tag and a profitable industry, because people create fear and then revenue from that. But we have five kids in our house between ages 10 and 20, and their entire frame of reference for things is different . . . and they live in the same place! We’ve now started saying things such as, “Young people use Snapchat, older people are on Facebook, and everyone who wears a tie is on LinkedIn.”
Q: So it’s all about nding the right audience for your tactic?