Scott Monty Leaves Ford: What it Means to Social Media

Scott Monty is leaving Ford Motors after six years as head of its social media group. This is a great loss for Ford, in my view. It also heightens my growing fears about how big brands will handle social media in the coming years.

Like me, Monty has long been a champion of using social media to humanize large organizations by scaling conversations and ultimately building and reinforcing brand trust.

This is in direct conflict with traditional marketing’s approach of treating social media tools as new arrows in the old outbound marketing quiver. To that line of thinking, brands can use blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as online message delivery mechanisms: Shoot millions of them up into the air and, as they fall, they’re bound to hit somebody, or so the current thinking goes.

But a half-dozen years ago, traditional markers eschewed social media. It was hard to measure; it could backfire and you’d wind up with people saying bad things about you on your own digital properties; the blog audience was comprised mostly of unwashed masses, not the more elite readers of newspapers and viewers of commercial TV. Those of us who argued that dialogue was more effective than monolog in building trust were considered disruptive—and perhaps unsavory– elements.

Monty has been one of the poster children of making the modern brand—even entrenched, iconic brands like Ford—more conversational, personal and transparent. Along with other social media pioneers who injected this new thinking into other big brands, he believes the real power of this new form of communications lies in listening to the views of customers, prospects, partners and competitors.

The belief in the benefits of listening is closely coupled to the thought that the more light that’s shed on an organization’s inner workings, the more that organization will be trusted. The greater the trust, the more loyal the customers become—to the point where they form the core of your external marketing force.

The catch is that for a brand to retain trust, it has to behave in a continuously trustworthy manner. To put a human face on an organization, it has to show humanity with humility, admitting when it has made mistakes. As we do with friends, we tolerate a brand’s little gaffes and fibs—so long as it comes clean.

In the early days of social media, Marketing simply ignored the smattering of employees who started blogging about their jobs on their own time. Then, as social media conversations started rising in numbers and influence, those in control often tried to shut it down. Finally, as the power of social media became clear—and as the dominance of traditional broadcast channels started to wane—Marketing made its move to own social media.

Many of the most successful big-brand social media programs started as tiny skunkworks operations. Small bands of bloggers and social network operatives operating on financial pittances were protected from the morass of organizational approval systems and review processes. Most acted with great speed, presuming it was wiser to ask for forgiveness, rather than permission, Many of them got away with it at least for a while.

Bloggers and those posting on social networks moved with great speed and accomplished amazing things. They gave ears to frustrated customers. They let outsiders understand the innards of large organizations, showing us  that, behind the slick graphical representations of the brand, there were real people doing their very best to build products and serve customers. We got to see that those people were just like the rest of us; they wanted to do their jobs well and for the most part, they were ethical.

Social media has humanized some brands over the past half-dozen years. It is a radical step around the traditional branding efforts that would have us believe that entire global organizations shared monolithic thoughts and visions, and walked in lockstep to a monotonous parade march. These social media pioneers revealed the truth of the matter: Companies were made up of people like you and me.

This was a promising shift; research such as the Edelman Trust Barometer shows that people trust people like themselves far more than they trust ad claims, celebrity spokespeople or company executives.

When he started blogging as a mid-level Microsoft employee, Robert Scoble was probably the first to have a big impact at a major brand. At the time, Microsoft was generally viewed with mistrust and hostility. Yet, Scoble was effervescent, with enthusiasm and almost unprecedented candor for a company representative. I know Scoble well and he is among the most human of humans, willing to share his personal flaws more publicly than me or anyone else I know. His style softens perceptions of his employer’s brand.

In 2006, Scoble and I wrote Naked Conversations, which presented an early case for why it was in the interest of modern organizations to join social media conversations.

In the years that followed, armies of social media practitioners have found jobs in the enterprise. No major company today has a go-forward strategy that does not include social media.

But, as social media matures, it’s begun to lose the magic that made it so valuable. What was so recently a proud and independent culture is being swallowed and digested into marketing cultures where that special value is being gelded

 

 

Scott Monty is among the best examples of the earlier breed of social media pioneers. I have no doubt that he will land on his feet and he has already hinted that he knows where he is going. But I see a lasting loss for Ford. The company seems to be losing a senior team of forward thinkers, Monty being the most recent. The loss of Monty in itself is not that important; individuals come and go in the enterprise at all levels. What is more important is the apparent turn away by Ford from a course of transparency and conversations with customers and prospects.

Forward thinkers like him have been leaving or getting edged out of all sorts of companies and as they leave, public trust in the brands is declining, or so it seems to me.

Social media strategist are the beautiful babies being washed down the drains of companies who have otherwise fouled their bath water.

For years, Dell Computer was the equivalent of the New York Yankees of big-brand social media. They had an all-star team that included such social media home-run hitters as Richard Binhammer, Lionel Menchaca and Bill Johnston. Dell has allowed the team to dissolve. But social media in recent years was the only thing the company had going right. The real problem is they could not design products as brilliantly as Apple does. This remains their problem.

I saw trouble the last time I spoke at Dell. A PR person insisted in taping over the Apple logo on my notebook computer.

Frank Eliason spearheaded a Comcast Cares program that encouraged customers to complain on social media, and Eliason’s team would respond in public and actually solve problems. But Eliason has departed to join Citi, where he maintains a lower-profile. Comcast, it seems to me, never really cared at all. It was Eliason who cared, and he and his small team made it look like Comcast cared.  But now, the company has regressed to its former position of demonstrating general apathy toward customer problems.

Ekaterina Walter was the leading social media practitioner at Intel for several years. An inspiring public speaker and articulate writer, she kept the public interested and in Intel’s corner for years. She and other have now departed. None of that had to do with the real problem that Intel simply missed the magnitude of mobile and it has allowed Qualcomm to take the wind out of their sails.

What is going on is a variable of the ancient practice of shooting messengers. But, this time around, it is the message-mongers shooting the social conversationalists. This is not to say the companies terminated these practitioners. Most, to my knowledge, left on their own volition. But I doubt so many would have elected to do so, had they not felt power shifts that made their independence falter and their ability to talk without being “on message” increasingly difficult.

So, is social media in large enterprises dead? Not really; there are more people practicing it in more ways than ever before, polluting the streams of social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

But the sort of candid, humanistic game changing that has been so remarkable seems to me to be languishing in the intensive care ward with life support fluids slowly tapering off. Perhaps it is on it’s death bed, but I hope not.

I see hope that the brand damage being caused by this exodus will be recognized and that corporate decision makers come to understand that trust is the new currency in this age of context and if it is not resurrected, then the brand will subsequently diminish and perish as well.

Just look at what has been in the news in this month of May:

  • A Google official stomps off a stage because he failed to attract a big enough crowd. “I am Google,” he snarls to the program producer on the way out the door. But he is overheard and it is reported on Twitter, where the #iamgoogle hashtag goes viral as a satiric symbol of corporate arrogance.
  • A Paypal executive tweets while allegedly drunk and gets himself sacked for talking trash about fellow employees. He starts a new company saying he will donate cash to mental illness causes presumably to rebuild trust in his tainted personal brand.
  • Target continues to disclose the impact of its losses—in terms of customers, revenue and reputation—after exposing the personal data of over 60 million customers and being slow to report it. A disgruntled employee discloses a lackluster culture and the company CMO uses LinkedIn to respond, confessing the truth hurts. [This last piece, in my view, is the best move by Target in a very long time.
  • Snapchat settles with the FCC after admitting it consistently violated its own user data privacy rules.

I first learned about each of these in social media. Only in the case of Target, was any representative of the company charged with wrongdoing involved in the conversation. Collectively, this is the sort of stuff that kills trust. And where trust in the enterprise is receiving thousands of stab wounds, most corporations are keeping out of the conversation. No CEO is stepping forward to say, “We don’t do that kind of crap.” No social media voice is being raised in defense of trustworthy corporate behavior.

Ethics, it has been written, is what you do when no one is looking.  In each of these cases, corporate officials thought they were safely operating in shadows. In each of these cases, social media played a role in bringing the shadowy behavior to light—causing damage to the brand.

Just because a brand starts using social media only to push out authorized corporate crap, it doesn’t mean that social media will not find and report the more serious crap. In fact, it often shines a powerful spotlight on those shadows of corporate malfeasance that the official story was supposed to distract everyone’s attention away from.

Valuable social media conversations will continue to happen and companies who decide to withdraw from it will find they have no credibility when they try to rejoin the conversations the moment a crisis erupts.

They need people who are already trusted. People like Monty, Binhammer and Eliason who are already trusted, who help the brand in ways that no corporate media campaign can do.

Is social media dead in the enterprise? No, not quite yet. I will believe it will eventually get off life support in the intensive care ward and come back. But it will return, because real conversations and revelations now have the enterprise in the crosshairs and, sooner or later, they will have no choice but to rejoin the conversations they are departing.

 
Read more on Forbes

(662)