We’d like to wish all of our clients, partners, employees and readers of this blog a very merry Christmas and a happy new year! All the best for 2012.
Monthly Archives: December 2011
Social Business phase 1: finding everyone. Not as simple as it sounds.
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts exploring social business.
If you’ve been following our Social Business blog series, you should be aware of what a Social Business is; the four stages of readiness; and why it’s important for your business.
So now it’s time to dig a little deeper into the different phases of Social Business enablement.
In this blog, we’re going to look at the “who”, the “why” and the “how” of phase one – mapping your social landscape.
The “who”
Map and segment to understand the connection between:
- Your official accounts – accounts you control
- Your endorsed accounts – partners, employees
- Your influencer accounts – media, industry bodies
- Your unofficial accounts – customers and prospects
The “why”
So why is this stage fundamental? Let’s put it simply. Imagine you’re organising a wedding. You need to create a guest list, work out how many heads you want to feed and send out the invites. At first it’s easy: invite your best friends and closest family. Then it gets more confusing: what about those great-aunts? Long-lost cousins? Your parents’ best friends? Then you move onto business contacts – do you need to invite colleagues? Parents’ business contacts? All of the sudden, your simple list has become confusing and difficult to manage. Now imagine you’re a multinational enterprise with offices all over the world, with different marketing teams operating from each location. You can’t possibly know where everyone is, who the key players are and what social resources you already have.
“The average number of social media accounts held by large corporations is 178.”
(State of Social Business report, 2011)
Accounts held by a corporation are accounts that can be controlled. But what about the accounts that are not controlled? That number will be significantly larger than 178.
The “how”
So how do you map your social-media real estate? With SociView, that’s how. Unlike other Social Business applications, SociView is not a listening or implementation tool. It doesn’t tell you what you customers are saying at a moment in time, but instead it enables you to have an eagle-eye, categorised view of what your current social-media real estate looks like. A new mobile SociView app, released this week, allows real-time access to this insight so you can monitor it on the go.
It doesn’t end there. With accounts mapped, you can then optimise and consolidate the accounts you own.
- Optimise: The SociScore enables you to benchmark accounts by visibility, influence, relevance and activity. Insight can be tracked over time and can be used to ensure accounts are compliant and consistent.
- Consolidate. In social media, the paradigm of quality over quantity still exists. Having hundreds of social-media instances can simply dilute the relevance and quality of the message. With SociView, you can evaluate the effectiveness of each account so you can make smart decisions about which social profiles are necessary.
So once you have established where everyone is, the next step will be to understand how to influence them. In the next post in this series, we will focus on obtaining a 360-degree understanding of customers and building a strategy to communicate and influence your audience.
Further information on SociView can be found at www.sociview.com
Social Business – Why Does it Matter?
This is the third in a series of blog posts exploring social business.
In the last post in this series, we explored the four stages of social business readiness. After reading through all the information, you may have been wondering what does social business mean for you, why does it matter? To answer those questions, we have pulled together an infographic with recent statistics to highlight a few of the benefits of becoming a social business.
In the next post, we will explore the first step in our social business enablement process – mapping your social landscape through SociView.
Don’t Tweet it, Bleat it! Bleat – Volume’s new iPhone and Android app
Emoticons are the internet equivalent of the quill and scroll. They’ve been used in chat rooms and forums since the dawn of the internet to express emotions. We’ve moved on from the quill and scroll: adapted to pen, paper and even computers. Yet, despite some additional styling, emoticons have remained much the same. We don’t seem to have developed anything more sophisticated than a 
or the overused textspeak ‘LOL’ (are you really laughing out loud?).
That’s why we’ve created Bleat. Bleat enables you to send audio-based status updates directly to Twitter and Facebook. Now emoticons can become a thing of the past, as Bleat allows you to express emotion with a level of subtlety that text can’t provide. So why don’t you share your kid’s first words with your friends, or maybe the roar of a football match when your team scores.
For any of you avid Twitter users, there’s always been some point when 140 characters just weren’t quite enough. Bleat removes the boundaries associated with micro-blogging without going overboard (the maximum length of a sound clip is 20 seconds).
If you don’t like the sound of your own voice, Bleat can also convert text into audio posts. However, if even thinking is just too much, you can use the Bleat library (containing common seasonal messages). Just select the Bleat and use the ‘Share’ button.
Volume’s Chief Executive, Chris Sykes, says:
Bleat makes it so simple to get your voice heard on the social networks. It’s easy to use, yet more effective than standard text-based status updates. It also opens up the opportunities for businesses to deliver brand messaging in a highly engaging audio format.
Find out how Bleat works in our video:
Download the app for free now; it’s available on Android and iPhone. This is only V1 – we’ve got big plans for this little app and are developing some fantastic new features as you read this. We want your input, so please comment and tell us what you think.