Tag: social business

- by Daryl Swinden

The data laws will be changing; are you prepared?

Data drives business, provides marketers with valuable insight about consumers and enables highly targeted communications and response-tracking of campaigns. With new developments and engagements around social media (see our social insight blog), it undoubtedly is evolving into a more powerful resource.

But isn’t ‘data’ still something that just geeks worry about? Surely its impact is negligible on professional marketers who are pushing the boundaries for creative, social and integrated campaigns?

Well, something is coming to the data world that will affect all of this.

It’s the new EU Data Protection Regulation. This new legislation will look to standardise the data-protection laws across the 27 EU member states including the UK.

But you’re not affected, right?
Wrong.

EU Data Protection Regulation - DMA warns of fears it will damage UK businesses http://t.co/JXKi3wfD
January 25, 2012 4:48 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@DMA_UK
DMA UK

 

Whilst still in draft format, this proposed legislation will at best be an extra headache for business and at worst, could totally break the marketing model as we know it.

With this new regulation, we are going to have to rethink what we are doing and how we are doing it.


There will be even more emphasis on the ability to use an individual’s data - only if they are happy for you to do so. The multi-billion-pound marketing industry that uses this information is of secondary importance.

Of particular interest in the new revision are the following categories:

Explicit

Piggybacking the oh-so-popular cookie law, consumers (and that includes business consumers) will have to give “explicit consent” for an organisation to use their personal data for marketing purposes – even if the consumer has had a previous interaction. So “inferred consent” will go out of the window. Clearly, if this consent can’t be proved, then potential contact databases will have to be scrapped and started again. And nobody wants that, right?

You never saw me, right?

Individuals will also be able to request the deletion of their data – in what’s called a “right to be forgotten”.  This is the first proposed regulation to deal with social media and data protection, but will have far-reaching implications across all marketing activities. The additional administration of this, coupled with the impact of customer profiles and trends, will have both financial and planning implications.

Tell me about me

Right now, individuals can request a copy of their data.
Why aren’t we all inundated with these requests? Well, there is currently a nominal fee of £10 to obtain this information. It is proposed however, that this fee will be scrapped – meaning that these requests are likely to come thick and fast.

When is a number not a number?

When it’s an IP address.

IP addresses are a digital marketer’s dream – they allow us to recognise users. This then means we can run analytics and analyse web behaviours.

Well, it now transpires that these IP addresses are considered personal data. Even though they’re just numbers and you can’t communicate with people via an IP number.

Size matters

Companies with over 250 staff will need to have a designated data-protection officer.

 

Don’t panic just yet though. The legislation is purely draft at this stage. Bodies like the DMA will be fighting the corner for the industry and hope to make sure common sense prevails in some of these areas.

And realistically, by the time all the bickering about what is acceptable to all parties has died down and we have a new regulation, we may be three to four years down the line.

What is clear, however, is that change is happening, and whatever it entails, you should be prepared for a more transparent and open relationship with your data subjects. Those companies that will succeed are those that start planning and incorporating this into their activities now, not in four years’ time.

You can fight it, or accept the inevitable.

Is your organisation prepared for change?

- 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.

- by Suki Johal

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.

Social Business Building Blocks

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:

  1. Your official accounts – accounts you control
  2. Your endorsed accounts – partners, employees
  3. Your influencer accounts – media, industry bodies
  4. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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

 

 

- by Suki Johal

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.

 


 

- by Suki Johal

Social is now a business thing, haven’t you heard?

Though “social business” is a term you may or may not be familiar with, it is a transformation which will impact the way organisations conduct business operations.  Drawing on our client experiences and other game-changers in the social business space, we will be posting a blog series over the next few weeks which will focus on the people, the process and the technology involved in social business enablement. 

Introducing Social Business

We’re all guilty of dropping the latest jargon into a conversation without substantiating it, making the assumption that the person we’re talking to understands exactly what we mean. I’d like to share a dialogue I had with a client this week where I was guilty of doing exactly that.

Client: “So will the social sales enablement workshop provide best-practice tips on how to engage with leads on LinkedIn?”

Me: “Yes, but that will be the final part. We will first provide training on how to integrate social business processes and technology to identify, share and connect.”

Client: “By ‘training on social business processes’, you mean training the sales guys on how to use LinkedIn for business purposes?”

I realised the term “social business” was what was causing the confusion. So I quickly back-pedalled without the jargon:

Me: “What we would look to do is provide training on how to enable sales and marketing to effectively engage with each other internally on a social switchboard. We will walk through the social process, from identifying the leads, through to collaborating and supporting the sales cycle over social channels such as LinkedIn.”

The likelihood is, whilst most organisations may not have heard of the phrase “social business”, they are supporting its evolution in some shape or form. Our social business enablement services work on the premise that:

a social business is an organisation that has incorporated social engagement processes and technology across all areas of a business (both internally and externally) to maximise business value and profitability. 

 

Over the last year, we’ve worked with clients to deliver internal engagement processes and technology to help support their social marketing and sales campaigns. This, however, is only the tip of the social-business iceberg. Organisations are beginning to understand the value of exploiting the communicative properties of social media (such as collaboration), not just within marketing and sales but also to support different business objectives such as product development, customer service and human resources.

Efforts to integrate social processes and technology have so far been siloed and disjointed. To fully exploit the business benefits, organisations will need to take a holistic approach when implementing new social initiatives and tools. If 2011 was the social business awakening, 2012 will be the social business ROI.

In the next post we’ll be elaborating on defining what social business is, why it shouldn’t be ignored and what you need to get started. In the spirit of collaboration, do also let us know how you are supporting it and the challenges you face within your own organisation.