Social business, not social media

A conversation that seems to repeat itself with my colleagues from our industry is: How many corporate twitter feeds or Facebook pages are the right number? It suggests a certain amount of indecision that it keeps boomeranging, which is never a good thing

More importantly that it comes up at all. The principle of marketing engagement, and indeed social is quite simple. It’s niche. Social is all about communities that share an interest, no matter how fleeting, coming together to discuss it. Successful marketing is based on focusing propositions to as specific customer group as possible. So the principle is simple, you need as many channels/feeds as there are identifiable, substantial and genuine interest groups.

The harder question then becomes: Should everyone be engaging with customers through social?

Well, probably not. Not everyone at my cable company answers my calls – that’s obvious by how long I have to wait on hold. However, we will all need to be able to engage with our colleagues, suppliers and other stakeholders using social media platforms.

Not everything is needed right here, right now, but as demand increases it will need to be.

A looming demand is increasing in our enterprises that mean that the whole business needs to be social. That is, have access and be adept as using the different tools and platforms. That means a single interface for managing multiple platforms, at the desk and on the go. With a single view of the customer, a simple robust access system with all the knowledge of the business at the user’s finger tips.

Now that’s what I call a really hard question: How do you build a digital business like that?

Delivering a fast customer experience isn’t everything.

Earlier in the week I headed to Vision Express for my bi-annual eye test. Having just come back from fabulous family holiday and dropped my daughter at her new ‘big’ school I was in a pretty buoyant mood.

The quality of the eye test, the price charged and the speed at which it was executed were exemplary. It should have been, the optician’s was empty and I was the only customer. My issue is not with the service, but with how it left me feeling.

Now my wife accuses me of being a demanding customer and expecting too much. You may agree, but before you do, let me explain why I don’t think I am.

During the whole time I was there, none of the staff I interacted with smiled at me. When I was asked how I was, the inquisitor wasn’t really interested in the reply. Beyond the factual questions about my spectacles, no one asked how I felt about them or how I chose them. No one asked me what I liked or disliked about them. I was treated like I was on a conveyor belt to be processed as quickly as possible. I was left feeling like an inconvenience, someone to tick off the list.

Treating customers quickly and efficiently is important, and I would guess that most customers would value it. I know some people that would value it above all else. However, I was looking for a little more. Some small talk, a little chat about my holiday, the weather - the whole back to school phenomena.

Customers are not just units to be processed quickly. They have feelings and if they didn’t branding wouldn’t work. Taking a little time to connect with me would have transformed how I had felt about my relationship with Vision Express and I would have considered them for my new sunglasses.

Consider how differently this blog would have turned out and the value of the order they have missed out on.

More of the 6 fundamentals of enterprise social media

                                            Part Two – 4 to 6

So to recap briefly on Part One; We have a shared understanding that our enterprise is in social media so we put in place our governance team. The first thing the governance team was articulate the endpoint and how it is measured and set out their road map. We defined what we wanted from a social media platform and procured it.

Managing expectations

While all this was going on we were managing eh expectations of the business.

This means explaining to the senior leadership team what is going to happen next, how you will report on it and what their role is in this. It's worth working with the Corporate Affairs chief on this, they have been through it all before with Execs for PR.

You explain to your own staff what you are doing and how they are involved. This means setting out a simple social media policy. A paragraph should do it. Explain why what they say and do in social media can impact the brand and them in the long run. HR and Internal Engagement should be able to help with this.

Speak to your customers about what you are doing, what you are providing and why that’s good for them.

Make sure everyone on the social media leadership team understand what role social plays and ask them to articulate to each other, their teams and their senior sponsor how social fits into their channel strategy.

In all cases, ask for feedback and act on it.

Reporting and analytics
Firstly, these are two different things. Both have a place and both need to be addressed contentiously and with stakeholder involvement.

Reporting, or MI, is regular time based activity. Weekly or monthly reports that set out volume data how many etc. But most importantly, what are the most important topics, users, channels and how are they and their sentiment changing with time?

Analytics is still evolving and you may need external help to get your head around this to start with. Don’t let that put you off, this data is dynamite.

Social media analytics will help you to become conscious of the conversations about your brand that your organisation is currently unconscious of. It will allow your business to understand real sentiment around share price. Or, imagine tracking responses and views on an above the line campaign in almost real time.

Not just counting the conversations and reporting some sentiment like in the weekly reports, but analysing unstructured data to get behind how a social media crowd is responding the proposition, not just the presentation.

Analytics is not just an essential part of social media for enterprises; its power is going to help organisations that master gain a real and tangible competitive advantage in the 21st century. Maybe not in the next 2 years, but certainly beyond that.

Scale and depth
Now your enterprise has everything in place, it needs to scale it by embedding it in every part of the business and every market. This is what we call social business.

Social businesses that use social media to learn from and engage with their members will develop more consistent financial performance.

They will overcome reputation challenges easier, build more brand equity and customer loyalty through trust, see higher productivity through internal collaboration and continue to evolve to serve the communities around their brand: Customers, staff and shareholders.

The 6 fundamentals of enterprise social media

Part One – 1 to 3

If my own experience is anything to go by, every large enterprise in the world has reached the conclusion that it is in social media, like it or not.


I estimate that every FTSE company with a UK consumer brand receives at least twenty thousand social media posts about it every month. From corporate news through product/service comments, sponsorship to marketing activity responses.

So now that playtime is over, what do corporate businesses need to handle this and future social media demand.

Governance
Marketing doesn't own social media in an organisation any more than any part of the business owns the telephone. However, it does, or should, own the voice of the customer, so it's a good place for governance to be initiated and led from.

The social media steering or leadership team must include executive representation of key markets and include senior responsible owners from service, sales, corporate relations, internal engagement and business continuity (risk management in financial services. The team should appoint a manager that has the authority to act and clear accountability to that governance group.

Roadmap not strategy
Like so many things that technology touches, social media continues to evolve. Therefore, large enterprises don't have time to hire expensive external advisors to carry out a social media audit that will only have a short shelf life and set a grand plan that will become obsolete as the ink is drying.

Set a course of action and move towards it.

As competitors, technology and your customers blow you off course, change it. The end destination will remain pretty fixed anyway. It will be described as something like: Creating a digital channel that £x generates incremental revenue, or y% brand awareness, or my favourite a z% promoter score.

Single management platform
This is harder than it sounds, not least because it involves IT people and procurement. You need a social media monitoring, analytics and reporting platform.

There are plenty to choose from and at a basic level, all do the same thing. But it's not until you have lived with it and the supplier that you can realise what you actually want is something else.

I can and will write a whole blog on this, but in the meantime, here are the most important things to consider:
         
Does it categorise posts as they are received?

Does it monitor all of the platforms you need?

Can it measure and reporting the metrics that are important to the business easily?

Does the vendor understand the difference between social media monitoring, analysing what has been monitored and just counting conversations?

Part two of this blog will be here next week – 28th August 2012.

Which would you rather be, a client or a member?

Being a client is certainly better than being a customer. It suggests I am valued by my advisor or supplier, our relationship is based on more than transactions. So why not go one step further and have members?

Membership suggests I belong. I am part of something bigger than me. It may even suggest exclusivity, unless we are talking about the Coop.

If I am a member I feel obliged to share, to have some involvement with how my club runs. To read the newsletter. To take my turn to do the teas. To listen to the other members. To help my fellow members.

I may even feel obliged to buy from my membership organisation.

IFA Trust: The most valuable 21st Century commodity

The year 2000 promised us the end of third world debt, to save our planet from us and the end of boom and bust economic cycles.

What the last ten years has actually delivered is:

Going to war on dubious evidence, fraudulent MP expense claims, our largest financial institutions becoming illiquid, shareholder value consistently eroded by highly paid executives and central banks printing money to stimulate economies regardless of the consequences for pensioners that have saved all their lives.

So is it any wonder that trust for corporate leaders, politicians and financial institutions are at an all time low?

Yet simultaneously, consumers trust each other in ways we haven't seen since the traders of the earliest civilisations.

Imagine buying an expensive product from someone using a false name, without knowing their exact location and paying in advance. Well that's exactly what thousands of people do on eBay every hour.

So while trust has diminished for our leaders and many leading brands, it has not disappeared completely. We still trust each other - our friends, our family and our colleagues, well some of them anyway.

So where's the opportunity?

It is in the advisors that can find a home not just in completing a transaction for their client, but in becoming part of their network and adding value to it. That is a Social Advisor.

RDR provides the opportunity for advisors that are sincere about their profession and to weed out those that are not. Simultaneously, it creates the challenge for advisors to find ways to efficiently and effectively manage more close customer relationships and maintain a low cost base.

Social Advisors = Successful Business  = Trust X Network / Low Cost Client Relationships

8 steps to get the most from social media monitoring data

Regular readers of this stream or victims of my speaking events will know I have a low tolerance for anyone calling themselves a 'social media expert.'

I believe the medium and it's adoption is evolving too rapidly for anyone to claim to be a true expert, yet. Some people have a better insight on what is being delivered and some have mastered executing social media using the current knowledge pool, but experts, I'm afraid not.

 My view was reinforced by something I read recently in a industry body's monthly journal. A so called expert proclaimed that 'social media offers brands an opportunity to have a dialogue with its customers.' In isolation his statement is correct. In the context of an article that suggested that any brand not actively monitoring social media was some how irresponsible, is misleading.

 Monitoring social media is useful but not a panacea. Counting how many times your brand is mentioned in social media conversations adds little to the sum knowledge of an experienced marketer. Using un reliable automated sentiment scores even less.

 Analysing unstructured data does deliver valuable insight into the conversations customers want to have with you about your product or service performance. But so does analysing complaints, contact centre conversations, emails, analysing web traffic, focus groups, industry surveys, I can go on.

 Customer insight is key to making good marketing decisions. Social media monitoring and analysis plays an important role in developing that insight, but it is not the only data set available.

 To get the best from social media monitoring and analysis, brands need to

1. Analyse the verbatim of social media posts to identify topics important to you and your customers

2. Combine social media insight with all the other data you have collected into a single view of those topics

3. Differentiate what is trending in that data now and what are long term/fundamental themes using time series analysis

4. Prioritise what improvements can be tackled now according impact or available resources

5. Address those improvements

6. Monitor the improvements you have made

7. Monitor the low priority topics you are yet to tackle

8. Return to point 1

Amazing tech usage data from the UK's Ofcom that will affect how we consume the Olympics #2012

Countdown to London 2012

According to Ofcom research published this week, the UK's communications industry regulator, it is anticipated that at least 38 million adults in the UK will tune into the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on TV.

One quarter of working people plan to follow the Games while at work, with 25% planning to watch or listen to the Games during office hours.

More than half (53%) of adults agree technology makes accessing coverage easier, with around one fifth (19%)  likely to follow developments on many different devices.

Social networking sites will also be used by some viewers to keep tabs on results and medal tables, with over one quarter (26%) of respondents claiming that social networking sites will make following the Games easier.

Beyond the Games

Text-based communications are surpassing traditional phone calls or meeting face to face as the most frequent ways of keeping in touch for UK adults.

The average UK consumer now sends 50 texts per week - which has more than doubled in four years - with over 150 billion text messages sent in 2011. Almost another ninety minutes per week is spent accessing social networking sites and e-mail, or using a mobile to access the internet, while for the first time ever fewer phone calls are being made on both fixed and mobile phones.

Teenagers and young adults are leading these changes, increasingly socialising with friends and family online and through text messages despite saying they prefer to talk face to face.

96% of 16-24s are using some form of text based application on a daily basis to communicate with friends and family; with 90% using texts and nearly three quarters (73%) using social networking sites.

Talking on the phone is less popular among this younger age group, with 67% making mobile phone calls on a daily basis, and only 63% talking face to face.

Traditional forms of communications are declining in popularity, with the overall time spent on the phone falling by 5% in 2011. This reflects a 10% fall in the volume of calls from landlines, and for the first time ever, a fall in the volume of mobile calls (by just over 1%) in 2011.

The change in communication habits reflect the rapid increase in ownership of internet-connected devices, such as tablets and smartphones - making access to web-based communications easier.

UK households now own on average three different types of internet-enabled device - such as a laptop, smartphone or internet-enabled games console - with 15% owning six or more devices.

The full Communications Market Report website including breakdowns by medium and UK region.

The power behind social media

The power behind social media is not the tools. It’s not the hash tag, the update, the Zuckerberg or the follow. It is the evolving way we are approaching collaboration.

eBay created trust mechanisms such as public feedback that played an important role in its growth. But fundamental to its success, and the success of all sorts of crowd purchasing platforms is the diminishing trust of big brands to offer a fair deal, and consumers own self interest driving them to collaborate in groups with people they largely know nothing about.

Self interest is driving us to work together to achieve a better deal. Not solving our community's needs, although for some of us that is an important outcome. Adam Smith understood this in 1776, Ricardo in 1809 and more recently encapsulated in popular culture with Gordon Gheko's proclamation that 'greed is good.'

We know inherently that the crowd is wiser than us, that's why we naturally follow it. But we follow it for us, not for the crowd's sake. Social media and the commerce that has become associated with it comes from our own self interest. Which when you think about about it, and the language social media 'experts' use, that is quite an irony.

Is your Exec becoming obsolete?

A friend of mine asked me how they should engage their senior leadership team is social networking. I said tell them that ‘if they don’t get on board they will be obsolete in 5 years.’

This is of course is as ridiculous as the claims made around the turn of the century about e-commerce. It has in fact taken 15 years for e-commerce to threaten high street spending. There is no such thing as a high street retailer or supermarket without an integrated e-commerce infrastructure.

Before e-commerce, the same was said of corporate e-mail.  IT Director’s, as they were called then, said ‘why would every member of staff in say a bank or insurance company need access to email?’

I once said the same about text messaging (SMS). ‘Why would I need a mobile phone that can send a text message when I have a perfectly good pager service?’

New communications tools come, and they go. The issue for executives that want to lead well performing organisations is not whether they should engage with new technologies, but how, and social media is no exception.

I don’t know an Exec that doesn’t use email, text messaging or e-commerce, even if it’s only to collect an e-ticket at the airport. Social media is more disruptive to organisations than any technology to date, because it is social. Social media is about people and groups of people interacting more openly than ever before, while the boundaries of the organisation blur.

So I do think that Execs that don’t get social media will become obsolete, if not in this decade, then the next one.

A New Stimulus: Quantitatively ease my mortgage

As we are coming up to budget time and the UK economy continues to go to hell in a hand cart, I thought I would take a little time out to help Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gideon Osborne, get the economy going again while simultaneously winning some votes. I’m not going to list all the economic leavers, or opine on the theory of fiscal and monetary policy. 


I am suggesting just one way to put money in the pockets of families that will make a significant contribution to increasing aggregate demand and getting our economy moving again.

It’s a kind of quantitative easing that will not just work, but actually feel like it’s working.

A large number of my colleagues were just told they are likely to be laid off. As relieved as I am not to be directly impacted, I was laid off in December 2009 and also faced something similar about 18 months before that. But despite this, like many other white collar middle class homeowners I have done everything I can to make sure my mortgage is paid. We have sold our second car and settled for short, domestic holidays. We have scaled back every utility and every luxury. We don’t go out, we and we make do and mend.

While my gross salary has remained static since 2008, I estimate my net salary as reduced by around 12% in real terms. We have lost our family allowance and we have paid our increased direct and indirect taxes. Our credit rating is intact and we continue to be net contributors to the exchequer.

So now it’s time for our payback, and it won’t cost the Government a penny. The mortgage I have worked so hard to cover is provided by RBS. The bank that the Government holds around 80% of the shares on my behalf.  I have a fixed rate mortgage at around 5% because when we took it out we were curiously optimistic about the economy and thought interest rates could rise. I know, not the best decision with hindsight. If we were on the bank’s tracker rate we could be saving around £300 per month.

That’s around £7,000 per annum in gross salary we could have made available to us. However, to access this deal I would have to pay more than that in penalties. Now RBS and the other virtually nationalised bank, Lloyds HBOS, represent about 40% of the UK mortgage market. So imagine the aggregate demand that could be generated if people like me could simply remortgage, keeping the same term, but at a lower interest rate and without the penalties?

Now I’m not completely naïve, I know there are counterparties to my mortgage holding bonds etcetera. But it strikes me that buying their paper is a wholly more popular and real use for the £50 billion the Bank of England has just spunked on buying back Government debt form pension funds that they call quantitative easing.

And it doesn’t have to stop with these two banks. If the Government hadn’t shored these institutions up Barclays and HSBC would have gone the same way. I can’t think of a better way to offset the unpopularity of the bonuses of all banks than by rewarding those people that have done everything they can to keep their heads above water in one of the toughest economic environments for several generations.