Monthly Archives: January 2012

- by Rachel Adams

Is training the answer to the social dilemma?

This week Volume’s Key Accounts Team has been busy running a series of social media workshops! Our social media ‘bibles’ are hot off the printing press, having hosted our latest workshop just yesterday with more planned for the future.

So why are we telling you this? Most of us now accept that social media is rapidly changing the way we interact and communicate. Many of us want our businesses to be ‘social’ just like our personal lives. However, there’s still a gap between what businesses know about social media, what they want from it – and the practicalities of implementing it as a tangible and credible part of the marketing mix.

So what are the options to fill that gap? You can hire a specialist social agency to develop your social media strategy and implement it but in reality, precious budget isn’t that readily available for something still deemed intangible. This is where the social media workshop comes in.

Empowering employees

Empower employees to act as the voice of the organisation? By this we’re not suggesting you offer everyone in your company the login to your Twitter account and ‘let loose’. Instead, utilising effective training enables employees to understand the social process and how they can take part.

We suggest training your workforce to be ‘social’ – and it doesn’t just involve ‘how to tweet’. Social is something to be implemented internally and externally. Internally involves opening up the channels of communication between teams and departments amongst other things. Once a business is social, internally, it makes it easier to be social towards customers, partners and other external stakeholders. You just need to select your key people to spread the social philosophy.

So how should you go about planning your social strategy?

1. Bring in the right expertise. Trust in the right social business consultant to understand your business and advise on internal social processes.

2. Pick key stakeholders who will represent your business internally and on external social profiles, then offer them the training they need to get going.

3. Using insights and lessons learned from the training, start working out the best way for your business to communicate socially.

4. Integration. Ensure the social elements of your business integrate into other areas, whether that’s integration with the marketing mix or integration into current company processes.

All of these stages require a starting point in training and expertise. This initial outlay will save you money over time through potential mistakes and ineffective processes. The only thing worse than no social profiles at all, are ones which are badly managed – this can end up being more detrimental to your brand.

We run a range of bespoke training courses to help you get going – either in the comfort of your office or in our own digital theatre. If you want more information please contact suki.johal@volume.co.uk

- by Daryl Swinden

Social insight: understanding and adapting to your audience

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts exploring Social Business.

  • Hands up who has bought a house without getting a survey first?
  • OK, who has bought a washing machine without checking the specification?
  • Finally, who has made a sales call without knowing anything about the prospect?

My point here is that you need information and understanding before you can make an informed decision about the direction of something. The more you know, the better prepared you can be.

The same applies to marketing.

The “Spray & Pray” approach no longer works. Today, it’s all about relevance. We’ve seen this with direct mail, e-mail marketing and telemarketing. Each of these channels originally started as a percentage game: hit as many people as you can in the hope of getting a small number of responses. Over the years, however, this approach exhausted the audience, and now successful campaigns within these channels are those that are targeted and relevant.

Social media is no different: yes, it’s new, exciting and largely untapped; and yes, 46% of people access their social network every day; but in reality it’s a just different channel – the customers are the same.

So the same logic applies.

So what can you learn from social-data insight? Well, you’d be surprised.

To help explain this, I should first give a Reader’s Digest version of the history of database marketing.

First generation:

Once upon a time, customer databases were insular, collecting information that was either part of the transaction process or in response to a request, e.g. What is your date of birth? They allowed marketers to understand the customers’ relationship with their products and engage with them accordingly.

Second generation:

We then moved on; compiled data from multiple sources such as organisations, government bodies and so on. These can be used for demographic profiling to help you understand more about your customers and prospects through relationships elsewhere.

Typically, traditional demographics are based on location, on the assumption that you and your postcode neighbour are the same type of people.

Third generation:

We now have social networks. These weren’t initially designed to be a marketer’s friend, but due to the massive take-up around the globe (one in nine people alive are on a social network), they are proving to be a rich source of new information on customers and prospects.

The thing is, this information has been given, not requested.

Meaning that it has no particular bias.

The same can’t be said for the information gathered for those competitions that require you to answer questions with a view to winning a shiny new widget. Who is going to be honest and say the product is rubbish if they think it will mess up their chance of winning?

The trick now is to listen to what your customers aren’t telling you.

This data is new, powerful and constantly updating.

For example, want to know how far someone tends to travel to events?

What other interests do they have outside your relationship with them?

Which brands would be good affiliates?

Have they changed jobs, moved house?

Are they sport fanatics? Football? Which team?

Are they party animals?

The answers to the questions above aren’t the sort of things we would necessarily know. However, through the inherently dynamic style of social media, we have this information instantly. Social DNA can be derived, so to speak.

BUT (and it’s a big but) this data is not freely available. It needs to be earned. Through relevance and trust. The user must authorise the sharing of their social data with you.
So you need to consider why a user would authorise this. This is the marketing challenge, and to be blogged about at a later date. Once a strategy has been devised for the incentivisation, the use of Facebook’s Connect functionality (for example) opens up this new world of information.

Each one of the three generations of marketing data is useful in its own right, but blending them can prove extremely powerful, by making the unknowns known, and enhancing the marketer’s knowledge of the customers.

Now, hands up who wants to know more about their customers and their social DNA?

Contact me: daryl.swinden@volume.co.uk

So, now you have powerful insight on your customer, but what about understanding the brand connection? In next week’s blog, we’ll discuss the brand relationship.

- by Suki Johal

New year, new predictions, new hype… our advice: proceed with caution

Leading up to the New Year and the weeks following, you will have been inundated by experts providing their predictions for the year – an annual ritual usually followed by “told you so” at the end of the year.

In her Social Business predictions, Charlene Li of Altimeter Group explains her prediction pet peeve.

My pet peeve about the annual predictions ritual is that they lack context for action. It’s nice to know that tablets and big data are important — but what should you do about it?

I echo Li’s comment. Don’t get me wrong; I think it is important to provide analysis and foresight into future trends, but this needs to be coupled with insight and direction. Similarly, overambitious statements like, “2012 will be the year Social Business will revolutionise organisations” only risk relegating this business transition to mere hype.

Those of you who have been following our Volume blog will have noticed we are doing a fairly in-depth series on Social Business. We do not believe Social Business is hype, nor do we believe it will revolutionise organisations in 2012.

As individuals, we already understand the value of communicating across social channels. We are able to share pictures, videos and updates with friends and family around the world. Social-media channels make it easier for us to communicate effectively. 2012 will be the year that businesses also begin to really understand how the communicative properties of social media can be utilised to improve business performance. Businesses will begin to understand how a socially-connected ecosystem of employees, partners, distributors, influencers and consumers will improve engagement, collaboration, lead generation, customer retention and new sales. It will be the year that organisations seek out consultants to guide them through the implementation of Social Business processes and technology.

The direction I offer around this prediction is to proceed with caution. To effectively integrate Social Business technology, processes and people, understand your options and how they fit with your current environment and culture. Evaluate all the advice, including our blog series, and understand the tools on the market. There are currently several tools available to you, but you should define your need before looking at the solution. This is a simple but often overlooked task that often results in unused and redundant technology. With 2012 likely to be a challenging financial year for most businesses, throwing money at unused and expensive technology is not a luxury many can afford.

When looking for a Social Business consultant, make sure they can provide demonstrable experience and success. Social Business consultants should have experience working inside and outside an organisation, to effectively implement social technology and processes internally to improve social communication externally to customers. Furthermore, consultants should be able to show concrete results and success stories.

We currently provide Social Business consultation to businesses varying from Fortune 50 companies to small-to-medium-sized businesses. For more information on what we have done, please do get in touch: suki.johal@volume.co.uk or via twitter: @sukijohal.

In the forthcoming blogs, we will continue with our Social Business series. The next post will focus on stage two of our methodology: consumer insight and direction.