5 things to tell your colleagues that still don’t get social media

1/ It’s active, even if you’re not
Even if you or your business is not actively listening or engaging with your customers in social media, your business, product, industry, advocates, detractors are being talked about. My own firm is talked about with mainly positive and neutral sentiment hundreds of times a month on Twitter alone. Our products and industry is mentioned hundreds of times an hour.

2/ Social media is principally an online representation of what happens in the real world
In the real world we share news, photos of our children, birthday wishes and invitations, just as at work we invite clients to events, talk about products and share results. I appreciate that not everyone we work with has friends or anything interesting to say. For those that do, social media has proven itself as the easiest and most immediate way to share.

3/ What we do online stays online
I am not convinced privacy is dead, but the super injunction nonsense of the past few weeks illustrates that it is probably on its last legs. So be careful, by all means. Contrary to point 2, don’t do everything online that you would do offline, it sticks.

A large part of the success of Linked In is due to its online representation of our CVs (Resumes). Now it is a universal truth, not widely discussed, that everyone’s CVs contain a little fiction. Don’t fall into this trap, social media allows everything to be checked and verified.

4/ If you don’t engage in social media, your competitors will
Social media is by no means ubiquitous, certainly not in the developed world. But it will be. Orkut, a Facebook me too in Brazil has 84% penetration and continues to grow. Similarly renren and 51 in China, Vkontakte in Russia and Bharatstudent in India all have following on a scale that would dwarf the populations of some small European states.

Social media will become a default communications tool for most people under the age of 40 by the time the football World Cup reaches Russia in 2018, especially in the fastest growing economies with the youngest demographics such as the BRIC nations. Corporate websites will become increasingly obsolete as communities interested in a topic or product come together online, with or without your business.

Successful businesses are finding the communities that are interested in their solutions, and listen to the conversation before engaging.

5/ The big numbers aren’t the true story
Facebook is predicted to have a billion users by the end of 2012, and social media will reach 90% penetration of all internet users in 2013. By the summer of 2012, half of all mobile phone users in Europe will use smart phones. In the UK, nearly 26 million adults have Facebook accounts. Of all UK Facebook users, 50% are over 36.

However, the power of social media is isn’t in its scale alone, it is in the quality everyone’s connections. People for time in memorial have asked people they trust before making a purchase, and social media has accelerated this. Amazon understands it, and the travel industry is coming to grips with it through Trip Advisor. Havas Media’s research in 2010 found 62% of UK shoppers consult online communities before buying and 34% have looked at an online review at least once before making a purchase.

Which takes us nicely back to point 1. Social media is active, even if you are not.

Get off my business case

Continuation of my look below the surface on B2B social media…

Let’s kick off with some controversy ;-).

I am a ‘value based’ marketer. In fact, it was reading Peter Doyle’s book of the same title when I was studying my Post Graduate Diploma in Marketing that I decided that I needed to go further and get an MBA so that I could one day influence a whole organisation to the concept. (Even Kotler said the book could spark Mareting revolution).

If you are new to the approach, I recommend you look into how it can work for you. In the meantime, value based marketing is based on delivering shareholder value (in the form of return on investment/equity) based on delivering greater value to your customers (according to what they are prepared to pay) relative to your competition. There are countless examples of business that have consistently achieved this, First Direct Bank, Apple, Volkswagen and Starbucks.

So by extension, the concept goes that every marketing activity should be measured and reported in terms of shareholder value. Now as I said, I am a value based marketer, I think linking the sum of all marketing activity to shareholders returns is absolutely the right way to go. It drives the correct behaviours in the marketing function and delivers the right outcomes for the businesses ultimate owners.

However, I have had more than my fair share of exposure to management accounting at under grad, through my MBA, and from some very real experience at Honeywell. I draw the line at the minutiae of job costing including every single overhead. Firstly, because the calculation enters the realm of diminishing returns, secondly, because I don’t think the calculation adds any insight to the marketing led management decisions, and thirdly because it’s a faff.

So where’s the controversy? Well, having established I am not going to, and nor would advocate you should, measure the value of every single marketing activity, I recommend you don’t get drawn on applying some different set of metrics to social media. Yes it’s new, yes it may need an additional FTE to monitor pages or shepherd content, but that’s a marketing exec, not an administrator. A marketing exec should be adding value to every administrative task, and aligning those tasks to shareholder value (through adding value to clients).

We can’t realistically track any sale to a single brochure, single exhibition stand or video blog on our web site. It’s not even just down to the tender document we responded to. It is the sum of all these activities integrated to tell a single story that offers greater value to the client, relative to the cost of purchase and what our competitors offer.

I discussed this at the Finextra conference with another delegate from a Bank, they told me they did measure the value f every single activity, whether that be a stand at an event for thousands or an intimate event for a handful of clients, but they couldn’t tell me how they linked a sale to a specific marketing interaction, or be precise about how may pounds of revenue were returned for every pond of marketing expenditure. But they did have 3 people dedicated to generating spurious metrics that strangely enough, they always exceeded.

If you disagree, I would like to hear from you. As a committed value based marketer, I remain open to resolving this. But in the meantime, the case for B2B social media remains as and increasingly essential tool to support business developers broaden and deepen their relationships to sell more, whatever you produce. And how to measure how successful you are that? I think they call that dividends, or in other words, shareholder value…

The Modern Brand Britain.

Friday 29th April was the peak of my patriotism to date. I didn’t think it would go beyond the high it experienced while I was living in the States when England won the ashes, the whole country was celebrating the bicentenary of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar and CNN’s lead story one weekend was Routemaster buses leaving the streets of London.

Not only were 2 billion people around the world sharing the Royal Wedding experience through their TV sets, but anti monarchist parties took place across the UK. My closest friend attended one in Brighton, and some 2,000 people attended a party in London’s Red Lion Square. How many states and communities around the globe can point to such a degree of tolerance where the majority of people share in the personal delight of the Windsor family wedding, while simultaneously having celebrations of an eventual downfall of the British Monarchy. We even tolerated small Muslim protests around the UK who chose to burn the Union Flag and effigies of the happy couple.

The brand values of Britain we should be most proud of and promote to every corner of the globe were all on show. Not just the pageantry first choreographed for Queen Victoria, the use of old British brand icons like a 1960’s Aston Martin for the escape from the main wedding party, or the limos ferrying guests built by Rolls Royce when the company wasn’t owned by a German manufacturer whose brand is associated with building Hitler’s dream of automotive manufacturing. Britain’s brand is of a people coming together to celebrate as one, regardless of whether they agree with the premise of the celebration.

The UK is a nation that wears its diversity for everyone to see, that mocks our differences but understands inherently; it is these differences that make us special.

And let’s not underestimate the power of our brand. Quite deliberately I have followed the build up to the Royal Wedding through the foreign media. My family were among the 25% of Britons that followed the event live using a medium other than the BBC, through CNN in fact. We were all struck by how this little overcrowded island just off the north coast of Europe, with its own currency and transient climate, has held the headlines of newspapers, magazines and news channels across the world. Al Jazeera, France 24, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, Russia Today all had special programmes on the satellite feed I had access too. Nearly all of them invested US $200k in a special studio over looking Buckingham Palace, flying in high profile anchors.

We have a brand that it is almost unique to us, not just based on the tradition of monarchy and social order; but of diversity and harmony. A brand the world values and indeed needs. A brand that we can still command interest in.

That’s why I was proud to be British on the day of the Royal Wedding in London on 29th April 2011, and would fight to retain the monarchy.

Below the surface of B2B social media

I thought it might be useful if I scratched the surface on the recent social media events I have attended, and demonstrate I was listening.

Before I start, let me be clear, I not am going to cover consumer activity. 

Social media is evolving too quickly for me to summarise everything in a single blog, and there are many people closer to the evolution of consumer trends that have a better handle on its direction of travel. 

So for now, B2B is what I do, and on the whole, all I have done, and I guess, God willing, is what I will always do.

Clear objectives

Nothing-new there then. Well really, is there? Every management, sales, operations, project management, tactical or strategic marketing book, every book that tells you how to change your life, get fit, loose weight, find a life partner, plan a holiday starts with some cliché like “if you don’t know where your heading, then how will you know if you’ve arrived there?”

Setting clear objectives was a common theme at all the events, as if the audience needed help with that little gem. But having said that, it wasn’t until I had actually passed my driving test and become comfortable with having car as a teenager I could really appreciate what I could achieve with my new freedom, and I think the same applied with any potentially disruptive technology. I think just getting a corporate Facebook of the ground is challenge enough, without complication it further by setting corporate objectives that you have no idea how to test their reasonableness.

When we launched the www.planningportal.gov.uk to English and Welsh local authorities in 2002, we established a tiered level of engagement into the contracts. We didn’t expect everyone to start integrating back office systems such as document and workflow systems from day one. We recognised that our users, while informed professionals, such as architects, surveyors or planners, they had to get comfortable with the new way of working and experience it from themselves before they would fully adopt it. 

Taking this gradual approach has helped to create the most sustainable ecommerce site operated by the UK Government that has processed over 1 million planning applications since we launched it.

I call this approach test and learn; you may have heard it before. Instead of worrying about all that getting there business, it’s based on, let’s just get under way. As the Chinese say, “even a journey of ten thousand miles starts with a single step.” Or as Google say it 'launch early and iterate.'

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again

Social media’s role in business development, whether that is sales, service or marketing is augment what we already do. 

The very best of business developers build contacts, join networks to find opportunities, use their network to source referrals, they keep in touch with contacts, share knowledge, listen to what’s going on, develop insight and update everyone on what’s new. Tell me Linked In, Twitter, Facebook and countless industry specific applications can't add to that to that process.

Every successful business developer maintains the records of their contacts and uses this data to network with new people and source referrals. They don’t have to use Linked In for this, but it helps to have a massive online managed rollardex with potentially every professional contact you’ll need being there. But more valuable still, all of their contacts are in the same place.

All very logical, but not so social. 

The oldest adage in sales still holds true, people buy from people, and that’s where Twitter comes in. Combining the utilitarian nature of Linked In with the engaging nature of Twitter and we start to have a system. Yes, Twitter is fantastic for sharing your despair at what Joey has just said on The Only Way is Essex (#TOWIE) or telling everyone you had to have a bathroom break on the M4 for the third time, but this is how we signal our personality. 

The minutiae of our lives, our jobs, our past times are we talk about most in shaping our relationships, especially those relationships that count. It is also a platform for sharing important milestones like guess who has bought a shed load of stuff from us or look at our shiny new thing.