Tag: Social Marketing

- by Chris Sykes

The office party, the company smart phone, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. A cocktail for fun or disaster?

The office Christmas party is an annual highlight for any company with a reasonable headcount. More usually means merrier and messier. We’ve all I’m sure, got hilarious and mouth-dropping tales to tell from parties gone by. Office parties, particularly those that don’t involve spouses and partners, produce a plethora of memorable incidents and moments, usually at somebody’s expense. And in my experience, no one is immune from embarrassment whether self-inflicted or not.

The best parties are the liveliest, where hair is let down, inhibitions are lost and the dance floor is crowded. In these scenarios, many make mischief, a few will over indulge and one or two may undergo a remarkable change in personality turning them into love machines, hell bent on pulling whoever they can. Then there are the ‘pick a fighters’, the chest pokers and the cry-babies. There will undoubtedly be some pukers and if you’re really ‘lucky’, the pass-outers.

Needless to say, you have the potential to capture some post-worthy content on your smart phone – The quiet guy who works in the IT department swinging his trousers ‘round his head to a 80s classic on the dance floor, the girl with the boob job in accounts flashing her augmented reality, or the classic pass out ‘n’ puke shot – another ruined Karen Millen dress.

Now I know I may be generalising and exaggerating but even the most innocuous event uploaded to Facebook or Twitter could land someone in a bit of bother. Many law firms’ Christmas message to business owners warn of the perils of partying with your smart phone.

Here’s one such statement verbatim – “Party-goers with company smart phones should be extra careful this Christmas season – using the phone to Facebook pictures could breach their employment contract. Posts to social networks via company smartphones can contravene the terms of job contracts and could lead, in extreme cases, to people being fired.”

Ooer! They continue:

“Sharing confidential company information knowingly or inadvertently could also kick-start disciplinary proceedings for the employee, potentially leading to dismissal depending on the gravity of any repercussions. While useful as an incentive, BYOD (bring your own device) and CYOD (choose your own device) schemes have blurred the lines between people’s professional and personal lives further and this has increased the risks for employers.”

We`ve been warned!

- 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

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 Daryl Swinden

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of using social networks for marketing

There is no doubt that social media provides us with exciting new opportunities for marketing. Today’s social networks are a huge resource of information and give us access to a network of possible prospects through your network connections.

But beware, you may be wasting valuable time.

First let’s look at the good and the bad aspects of social media.

The Good – being socially connected

Social media is fantastic for communicating and “following” people (or accounts). It has given Joe Public a way of connecting to friends, colleagues, relatives and celebrities without potentially ever having face-to-face communication. It’s encouraging the shy to be extrovert, no longer restricted to being submissive in face-to-face conversations. You know how it is: we are far braver over email than we are when face-to-face.

Suddenly we can be socially connected to almost anybody.

The Bad – being socially connected (again)

It’s this flexibility of anybody potentially being linked to anybody else that is diluting the real relationships. Businesses are looking at social media, and thinking it’s a great opportunity to engage. A business may look at me, as a busy LinkedIn user with 700 connections, and decide I have many connections therefore I have the ability to influence and repeat their message to all 700.

The Ugly truth

Peter Beardsley, England & Newcastle United football geniusBut is this plethora of connections really the advantage it seems to be?

I decided to undertake a small experiment to highlight just one of the assumptions often made around the use of social media marketing

Before we start, let me say that Peter Beardsley is a legend. A great England footballer that, although not in the David Beckham poster-boy mold, should be an inspiration to young footballers everywhere. It’s for that very reason that he became the subject of my experiment: are all social connections equal?

I sent a connection request via LinkedIn to Peter Bearsdley, and within a few hours I am now proud to announce that Peter has kindly connected with me. Yes a very simple experiment but it speaks volumes.

I don’t know him, I’ve never spoken to him but, yes, he has accepted my connection invite. For the user this is what is great about social networks.

But the ugly truth is that connections alone don’t give the true picture. Peter adds to my connection count but clearly won’t be influenced by me as a stranger, which poses a question:

How many of our connections do we really know and influence?

I’ve got three types of connections:

  • Celebrities: I have connected with Peter because he’s a football hero. I follow other celebrities to see what they are talking about and follow their news.
  • Friends: I have connected to my friends simply because they are my friends
  • Peers: I have connected to industry peers as part of work, sharing content and gaining industry knowledge

What I don’t do is communicate with them all the same way. So not all connections are equal. They’re not even used in the same way.

Making connections count

I’m sure I’m not alone in my example with Peter and there are lots of social networkers who are connecting to people they don’t know, have never met and have zero engagement with. This puts a wholly different take on the social connections matrix.

In an age where we have so much information at our finger tips, eyes and ears we need to think more strategically in order to ensure relevance. It’s not just about pushing out to as many people as possible. Potentially, we only get one shot at attracting a prospect’s interest, so we have to make it count.

Don’t assume. Analyse & Engage

At Volume, through working with our clients, we have learnt that the importance is to understand the recipient, a cursory look at network stats is not enough. Once you understand the recipient, and their relationship to you or your brand, you can engage in a far more productive and relevant way. That is exactly why we spend a lot of time understanding the audience and socially profiling them before we commit to social media campaigns with our clients. Social profiles are here to stay.

Contact me for more details daryl.swinden@volume.co.uk