Social Media for Business: Oxford Brookes lectures

Posted on October 13, 2011 by andywood

I spent last night down at Oxford Brookes University, taking up their kind offer to speak at the annual Business lectures event. The session topic was Social Media for Business, hosted in one of thepresentation venues I’ve had for a while!

nicest We were treated to a great session from Dr Ana Isabel Canhoto, of the University’s Business School, who shared some powerful research insights into the effect of recession on business attitudes:

Research suggests a much reduced focus on customer service & support, combined with a heavy increase in focus on pricing strategies – short term thinking in extreme!?
Digital marketing channels are certainly seen as a cost effective way to reach audiences, but social media techniques are not fully understood by business
Barriers to effective use of social media include: lack of knowledge & training, lack of business process; lack of technical infrastructure

I ran a presentation followed by a Q&A session with an audience made up of academics, masters students & business owners from across the UK. The session threw up several reoccurring themes, which I’ll summarise for you here, together with the presentation:

1.Know your business objective! Marketing principles still apply, & you need to develop a clear understanding of what your business objectives are.

2.Understanding your audience is key. If you want people to engage with your brand, you need to understand what they are interested in AND how this relates to your brand…

3.People engage with themes, topics & issues, not brands. There are exceptions of course, but by & large people need more than just the brand to get excited…

4.Think about how you can add value to your audience communities. What do you have to say that’s going to make their life easier, more interesting or more exciting. How can you link these things back to your brand, product or service in a meaningful way?

5.If you don’t have interesting, useful, engaging content, you can’t build relationships. You need to look inside your own business for the knowledge, insight & resources that will help you find this content, you’ll be surprised how much already exists.

6.Social media cuts across business function, your audience consider your brand online as one entity. Consumers don’t care if the twitter channel is run by marketing, & service issues are managed by the Call Centre, for them the brand is the brand & you need to prepare to manage all business functions through social channels.

7.Search is heavily influenced by social media activity. Google is the gateway to your content online. If you want people to see your stuff you need to make it visible in search & one of the best ways of doing this is through intelligent use of social media.

8.Understand your influencers & treat them with respect. Influential bloggers have just as much power to make or break a brand as offline media owners. You need to think about how best to build trusted relationships with these influencers.

9.Remember you don’t own the channel, you’re a voice in a community. These aren’t broadcast channels & you don’t own them. Social media is about dialogue. Brands can participate, but they don’t automatically get a bigger share of voice.

10.Dialogue & collaboration NOT broadcast. Like all good relationships, trust & affinity is earned. Frequent, consistent, useful dialogue with your audience will build brand affinity you can use to drive your business objectives. But like traditional CRM, this trust is precious & needs to be managed carefully.

[slideshare id=9674673&doc=oxfordbrookes-111013065257-phpapp02]

Social Media for B2B marketing

Posted on May 21, 2011 by andywood

Last week I spoke at a conference on the use of Social Media for large corporations, many of which were operating in B2B markets, so I thought I’d sum up the key points for B2B marketers looking to get started in social media.

1. Understand your USP

What does your business do very well?
Why would I choose you to provide me with products & services?
What would I look for as an investor to ensure your organisation was fit for purpose?
Why would I want to work for you?
What is your company doing that deserves column inches?
If you can’t answer these questions, go back to boardroom with some post it notes & your top level execs & hash it out!

2. Understand your audience

Beyond the simple “Who?” of your target market, think…

“Who’s sitting on the other side of the computer screen?”
What are their dreams?
How would your business make their life easier?
What are their sales objections?
Have they been burned before?
How do they educate themselves online to continue their own development?
What might they type into a search engine to find this info?
What are they interested in that might overlap with your company’s objectives (eco-friendly policies, corporate social responsibility efforts, innovative technologies)
You get the gist. Find their need. Fill it!

3. Understand your own objectives

Remember that ultimately you’re trying to drive a business conversion (a lead, a relationship, a sale)
Make sure you understand what YOU need out of the situation
Work with an agency to understand which social conversion metrics best demonstrate business success for you, & which numbers you can take to the boardroom
Understand how to use these metrics to get you from “We want a website/app/social media campaign” to a fully fledged, integrated digital strategy?

4. Understand SEO

Learn as much as you can about search engine optimisation & use this power
Research the words people are using to search for you or your offering
Plan the use of these search keywords across your digital activities (from press releases to CEO blogs to how you create new content pages on your corporate site, or what you Tweet or upload to Facebook)
Use this SEO knowledge to understand your audience (Where they are are, what they’re talking about & how they search to find you)
Use this more advanced method to audit your keywords, & you’ll be on the way to targeted SEO, PPC & social media campaigns
Encourage inbound links! Your knowledge of keywords & phrases means you’ll be creating content your audience will be happy to link to!

5. Understand Digital

Build websites, campaigns & content from the bottom up starting with your business objectives & metrics
Marry analytics to CMS, CRM & Social activity
Execute your web development with every consideration for search, your audience, & your objectives
Integrate all your marketing efforts, matching digital & social media strategy to every single outreach carried out in your organisation
Use analytics systems to prove increased traffic referred from social networks
Give these ‘micro-conversions’ a monetary value, just as you’d tag a banner ad
Use these systems to document your social interactions, then feed them into your CRM systems so you can begin to prove the kinds of things that make financial directors smile

6. Understand why IT departments hate Social Media

IT Heads worry about the nightmare of potential viruses from social media. They worry about hackers & security. How do you release the shackles of Corporate Group IT so the right people can start to engage in social?

Ask an outside agency to audit perceived challenges
Ask them for solutions to these challenges (tiered security profiles for different levels of the business, restrictions on downloads, etc.)
Re-package this feedback in a way that presents a good business case for social media
Kick it up the chain as high as it needs to go to get it done (after all, you won’t find many boardrooms that aren’t chattering about social media)

7. Understand Social Channels

Get out there!
Experiment in the channels in your own time
Use the platforms you hear so much about so that you understand their functionality & potential
Try & spot the gaps in what social environments are offering your audience so your business can fill those gaps
Behave properly! Be polite, just as you would in a face to face meeting
Remember the clue is in the name…be sociable!
You don’t need to act up to attract attention…just be there & be yourself
Remember it’s about opening up dialogue, building relationships & trust
Understanding the audience & engage with the things they’re interested in
Be confident in your organisation & use social channels to spread your word
If you can’t speak with confidence, ask yourself what’s wrong with your organisation & sort these issues out!

8. Understand Crisis & Reputation Management

If your organisation makes a mistake, or there’s a bump in the road what do you do?

Remember social media platforms are much more than another campaign channel, if you start to engage in social channels you have to keep the dialogue going
Don’t lie, be honest, be open
Social media properties (Twitter handles, Facebook page, LinkedIn & YouTube) are permanent digital documents, whatever you say will be around for a long long time, don’t say anything you can’t stand by
Get your social properties optimised & running well now, so if disaster strikes you have an immediate way of communicating your message & influencing search results
Use social channels to influence Google page 1 (SERPs), by flooding your social networks with well optimised content

9. It’s all about how much you put in!

The secret to success or failure in social environments is preparation. If you love yourself & your brand, do it right, put the time in to understand the points above.

Twitter Customer Care Channel: Eurostar

Posted on February 20, 2011 by andywood

Image via Wikipedia

I recently travelled to Paris to consult with a client on best practice use of social media for reputation & SERPs management, & decided to travel by Eurostar for the first time. The experience started out well with a much smoother checkin than the usual mess at Birmingham Airport. One of the big sells of Eurostar for me was the chance to get some work done in much more pleasant & relaxed environment, so I was disappointed to find out there wasn’t any WiFi on the train & amazed to find there were no power sockets to charge the laptop, it’s an electric train after all!

Things got worse when a fault with the radio on our train meant a 30min delay while the engineer tried to fix the problem, eventually resulting in us changing trains, followed by another 30min delay while the food from the original train was transferred to the new train – only to find once we got going that there wasn’t any food available because the mircowave on the new train wasn’t working – perhaps for the best anyway.

Twitter Customer Complaints

Still had 3G to fall back on, for a short while before we hit the chunnel anyway, so I thought I’d tweet the experience & see if Eurostars customer service teams were monitoring the tweet channel for moaning people like me. They came back to me with a reply within the hour, they were open & asked for more information about the problems we’d been having.

Clearly the Customer Care service at Eurostar is running a monitoring service, at least bewteen the hours of 9-5, & I’d #Eurostar to make it nice & easy for them to pick me up in the stream. The Customer Care representative replying to me was responsive & gave me some good information relating to my gripes (upgrade plans for the trains on WiFi & power sockets) & they gave me an email address for their Travel Care team (who they said they’d spoken to) & asked if I could email my ticket info & they’d pick the case up directly with me.

@Eurostar Customer Care Channel

Great Customer Care service, right? I’d give it a 7/10, because although it was all very responsive, it was also very public. As you can see from the screen shots below, the back & forth dialogue we had about my moaning turned one short tweet from me into a nice big conversation describing in full detail the list of problems we encountered on the journey to Paris. Of course the Customer Care channel needs to publically broadcast service updates as well as send out crisis information where lots of people are affected (like French strikes, or the recent train breakdown), but individual problems are best delt with 121. In my opinion a more effective way of dealing with this kind of problem is to direct message the customer with a ref ID, telephone number or email address & take the conversation offline as soon as possible. Yes you need to respond via the same channel, but really all I’m looking for is some attention & for someone to help out with my problem – I don’t need to have a public conversation about it & it’s not in the brands best interest to do this, either for brand reputation or search engine results.

All the customer wants is for someone to listen & address the problem. You need to pick up & respond to complaints quickly, then take them out of the stream & importantly resolve the problem offline. If you can do this more often than not the customer will come back online at some point & praise the brand for putting things right – without airing the dirty laundry in public. See my experience with TNT from summer 2010 as a good example.

The meeting in Paris went well, but unfortunately for me I got food poisoning (karma for causing a fuss on the journey out?) so the return journey wasn’t a great experience either. No delays this time, but an overflowing toilet behind my seat wasn’t what I needed really. Ah well sh@t happens I guess!

One year after a Twitter backlash, has Eurostar finally got social media? (eu.techcrunch.com)
Train Travel on the Eurostar is Green and Fast (treehugger.com)

Social Media Marketing for a luxury brands?

Posted on February 13, 2011 by andywood

Are social media channels the right place for luxury brands to connect with their audiences? I’ve been working with a luxury kitchen brand for a while now, planning their launch into the UK market, & not unsurprisingly the question of social media marketing for luxury brands has reared its head more than once in the boardroom. Many of my clients in 2010 have shown a real desire to learn more about the opportunities social media channels offer for deeper & more meaningful connections with consumers, but I’d be lying if I said that when it comes to the crunch there isn’t a reluctance to commit budgets away from traditional marketing methods. It’s our job of course to make the case for effective Social Media ROI, & 2011 looks like the year we’ll get the chance to prove these strategies.

Social Media Marketing strategy

Social media channels offer the chance to create instant connections with consumers. By offering quality engaging content, like the exclusive behind the scenes access to the world of elite cooking we’re able to offer through our client, we can offer something of real value and interest to our target communities online. At the same time we’re introducing a real 360 degree experience of what the lifestyle brand is all about. Add into the mix, relationships with the world of high fashion & high end design & the opportunities we’ve got through these partnerships allow us to create content of real interest to our target audience, as well as incentives to share this content among their own peer groups. We’re combining streaming video, blog & chat room technology to offer customers exclusive access to content in a way that’s most relevant & natural for them, through their established online social networks.

Social Sharing is key

By creating online personas through established social media channels like Twitter & Facebook we’re giving consumers quick & easy access to the brand & an opportunity to experience the brand personality first hand. Consumers discovering new products through their own peer communities online reflect on the relevance of brands & product purchases through social media. Consumers are also increasingly sharing their thoughts & experiences within their own social networks, & this has a huge impact on influencing perception among peer groups. The value of peer to peer recommendation in the purchase decision process is well known & well documented!

Social Media, push & pull

Social media channels will also help natural search optimisation for your brand. Effective use of social media, & properly optimised content will have a significant effect on brand positioning on page 1 of the search engine results page, pretty important when your in-market customer Google’s ‘Luxury Kitchen Design’. Pushing quality content out through social media is an effective way of exposing the brand personality across a large peer network, but good search optimisation will create a pull effect when these consumers eventually come into market. Not forgetting of course, that social media channels like Twitter, Youtube & Flickr are search engines in their own right, where consumers can search for content on the topics & trends important to them. When these topics relate to luxury design, we want our content to be at the forefront.

Social Commerce, where to next?

Social Commerce is of course the final step. By connecting social media interactions to online commerce tools & offline lead generators we’re closing the loop to take advantage of the increase in purchase conversion rates created by social sharing features & consumer product recommendations, such is the power of peer to peer recommendation!

We’ve seen the landscape in the luxury market start to shift during the past year, there’s no question digital channels & social media marketing in particular will continue to change how luxury brands connect with customers. Luxury brands will continue to utilise social media, ecommerce & increasingly mobile applications, to connect with consumers, promote peer to peer dialogue & ultimately convert sales.

2011 trends: Luxury brands and social media ROI (commetrics.com)
Six Attributes of Successful Social Media Marketing Campaigns (blogs.constantcontact.com)
How Luxury Fashion Brands Are Maximizing Their Social Media ROI (mashable.com)

Social Media for Big Business

Posted on September 5, 2010 by andywood

We’ve heard a lot over the past 12 months about how social media channels can help solve problems you didn’t even know you had. Here are a few of the reoccurring themes I’ve come across working with our clients at Freestyle Interactive on social media campaigns.

Know your objective!

Social media is like any other marketing activity, it needs a clear business objective! You need to consider the part of the brief that asks: Why are we doing this? What do we hope to achieve from this campaign? If that bit of the brief isn’t there, you’ve got a problem. If you don’t know how to get the results you want, or even what’s possible, make sure you employ an agency – but make sure they answer the ‘what’s my objective’ question.

Make sure the objectives are clearly understood and agreed before you kick off. Your objectives in the social media space should be no different to any other bottom line business objective, and more often than not, you’ll find that they augment everything else you’re doing. Just getting involved for the sake of getting involved will lead to disappointment, and I guarantee not everyone involved at the client and agency will have the same expectations.

When it comes to objectives, think about the familiar faces: raising brand awareness, influencing brand perception, driving traffic to your website. They’re all still relevant! Remember, doing social for the sake of doing social, is not a sound business objective!

Choose the right tool for the job

Matching the channel to the job has always been a part of your skill as a marketer. Social media is not a global panacea, it’s a new and potentially very useful, tool in your toolbox, but a tool amongst many nonetheless. Social sites are a great way to build brand quickly, using ‘word of mouth’, and it’s even possible to pick up sales leads if you’re targeting the right environments. They’re also one of the best places to listen & learn about customer satisfaction & pick up genuine customer service issues, and of course to influence brand reputation, particularly if you have a stake in wider issues like the environment or sustainability.

But, remember social’s only part of the mix and should be planned, together with your agency, alongside more traditional channels like email, search engine optimisation strategy and placed ads. Think about how your target audience uses social media as part of their wider journey, a journey that incorporates brand websites, search engines and traditional media as well as social media websites. Understand and plan integrated campaigns that understand how these channels fit together for the consumer.

If you do nothing else with social media in 2011, make sure you implement a social media monitoring service. It’s your job as a marketer to understand what’s interesting and important to your target audiences. Chances are your consumers are already talking somewhere online, and it’s your job to understand how this relates to your brand.

Understanding what’s going on across the social landscape is also the first step towards formulating a plan for getting more actively involved. It’s basic stuff: first understand what the audience is doing, then formulate a strategy to engage with this audience. There’s a lot of software out there designed to measure social media activity, targeting keywords relevant and important to your brand.

Like any analytics software, in the right hands, it can revolutionise your understanding. But remember, data is not the same as intelligence. It’s crucial that what’s measured empirically is backed up with desk research and is brought together with your business objectives by those people who know your brand and customers best. Though tools and automation can help resource your social media efforts, human input into this process is key.

Create the debate

Social media channels provide a great opportunity to kick start the debates that are important to your brand. But remember, you don’t always need to own the environment where the debate takes place. Corporate systems are like Milton Keynes, efficient on the face of it with lots of well thought out signposting, but pretty boring and uninspiring when you get right down to it. Companies don’t do social media, people do. Even when your CEO is talking as the face of your company, it’s the man we’re all listening to and that’s fundamentally different to all the other marketing channels your business uses.

It’s important to remember that people want to interact with people, not marketers, and they want to use the environments that are most relevant and comfortable for them, which probably doesn’t mean the corporate website. But that’s ok, you need to worry more about creating the right content, then finding the right social environments to put this content so that it reaches the right people.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a branded blog environment, chances are it’s not what your audience want from you anyway. Remember, the really exciting opportunity here is getting to hear all those quiet consumer voices that up until now have been largely unheard, you just need to know where to look and how to listen.

Develop a crisis management plan

All brands are afraid of negative social commentary, and with good reason. As a global extension of the traditional peer group word of mouth that could make or break a brand, social media channels have the power to severely damage your reputation over night.

The viral effects of social channels are great when things are going your way, but when the brand chucks out a poor product, or your service falls short of expectations, the same word of mouth can spread bad news very quickly indeed, ask anyone Googling Toyota over the past two weeks! In these situations having a crisis management plan in place to deal with these issues can significantly limit the damage done.

Policy, procedures, content, a plan for where to post this content, as well as a good understanding of who should be doing what can save you days of negative publicity. Also, remember it’s pretty hard to hide from a genuine mistake when the weight of consumer voice is against you. I have to say in the majority of cases where social communities are listening to negative commentary about a brand, and a good number are joining in, there’s usually substance to the criticism. In these situations honesty is often the best policy, admit your mistakes and most importantly deal with them and most of your customers will understand.

Ultimately you must remember, you really have no choice but to engage, because with or without you these online conversations will continue to go on, so get involved & have fun!

TNT using Social Media for Customer Service on Apple contract

Posted on June 24, 2010 by andywood

Social Media: Listen to your customers!

No business gets it right 100% of the time, but when things do go wrong, the most important thing is: how will you respond to put things right? This can make all the difference to the future reputation of your brand & the likelihood of getting repeat business.

Community Management: what’s going on?

My work with brands like TNT, has a strong element of Community Management at its core. This involves monitoring the social media landscape using a combination of automated keyword software, & the old fashioned MK1 human eyeball. We work closely with the Customer Service department as well as the Press Office, Sales & Marketing to understand the campaigns & events likely to drive the online discussion topics relevant to the brand.

Online Customer Service via social media

In the case of a recent global delivery contract for iPhone 4 & iPad managed by TNT on behalf of their customer we were able to track & report on topics and trends developing in online forums on an hour by hour basis.

These online conversations were invaluable early warning tools indicating pressure on digital infrastructures & Customer Service Contact Centres we saw a few days later. Crucially, our social media monitoring allowed us to plan the social media & staffing resource TNT needed to effectively service their customers. In addition, our mutual collaboration with the marcomms team gave TNT insight allowing them to future plan areas of their online PR, online reputatation management (ORM), and business continuity & social media crisis management.

Alongside directly engaging with customers, we were able to plan marketing and PR messages in the run up to TNT’s peak delivery period (a 48 hour period spread across several continents), & to push these messages out through the social media networks & forums to promote positive messages, pre-empt negative inquiries & address customers directly with help and advice.

Twitter Engagement

The majority of our customer service conversations for TNT were handled through Twitter. By picking up conversations that were already taking place through Tweets, we were able to engage with the customer using the channel chosen by them.

Twitter works wonderfully well for customers in this situation. They send a message in their own time, get a reply directly, and see an instant audit trail for their customers service inquiry as it progresses.

It’s also good news for TNT too, removing strain on the customer service call centres, TNT’s website parcel tracking website & with a very real potential to remove operating overhead from traditional telephone infrastructure

Positive customer feedback = good search engine results!

It really does go to show that all customers really want is to be treated like people. If there’s a problem, fine, as long as you acknowledge me, deal with the issue one to one and show that you’re sorting it out, 99% of the time I won’t hold a grudge.

In fact, done right, customer service issues can be turned into an opportunity to positively influence brand perception – a chance to shine, to show you really do care!

As the hours passed and the customer engagements were managed, we were able to track the change of topics, trends and sentiment through page one of Google’s search results & online forums. What started as an uneasy scepticism, & in some cases an excited or outraged cry for help, quickly evolved into a cautious relief & final acknowledgement for the brand of a job well done.

Great news for the people whose issues were sorted & great to have a bunch of satisfied customers, especially when the search engines were singing praise for the brand on excellent customer service & delivery through Twitter. Straight from the horses’ mouth!

Social Media Monitoring

Posted on June 4, 2010 by andywood

If you do nothing else with social media this year, make sure you implement a Social Media Monitoring service. It’s your job as a marketer to understand what’s interesting & important to your audience, and the chances are your customers are already online talking about the issues that relate to your sector. It’s your job to understand how this relates to your brand!

Understanding what’s going on across the social landscape is the first step towards understanding the opportunities to engage with your audience through these new channels, & it doesn’t have to be complicated.

I’ve run social media monitoring and landscape reviews for several brands including Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance, TNT & Lufthansa, to understand the opportunities & implications of deploying social media tactics for these companies, building a business case for Social Media Marketing Engagement Plans along the way.

The first step is understanding what your audience is up to in the Social Media space. Proper analysis of Search Engine activity is a good place to start, & sound knowledge of the Search Terms your audience is using means the intelligence is based on real understanding of the topics & trends important to the customer, the cornerstone of all good marketing!

Once we’ve highlighted the key Search Terms we can start drilling into the Social Media channels. There are a number of Social Media Monitoring software tools out there designed to measure social media activity, and with intelligent use of these tools we can build a pretty good picture of the themes running through the social media landscape impacting on your sector.

Like any analytics software, in the right hands, it can revolutionise your understanding, but all the same data is not the same as intelligence. That’s why you need a team of Social Media Specialists, to add the real value to the data reports the software tools produce. What’s measured empirically is backed up with desk research, & most importantly married up with your business objectives, to define the opportunities & risks to the brand offered through Social Media.

The final report should be a combination of empirical data, analysing audience behaviours, competitor activity & the trending topics running through the Social Media landscape. This is followed by a balanced assessment of the strategic opportunities for the brand to engage through Social Media channels to achieve its marketing objectives. The report should cover Social Media Campaign opportunities, as well as possible Crisis Planning & Risk Management strategies.

Social media platforms can be a relevant communication medium across a number of business departments, from Marketing & PR to Customer Service Teams, New Business & HR, & you can focus in on these opportunities depending on your business priorities. This could include obvious areas like maximising digital marketing efforts & customer brand engagement, as well as reducing marketing overhead & engaging with prospects to drive sales leads, to less obvious uses like using social channels to augment traditional customer service channels, internal corporate communications & raising brand engagement amongst employees through social.

Ultimately, investing in a Social Media Landscape review is about driving an understanding of the social space as the first essential step to creating a roadmap for your brand to engage in these channels. It’s about providing a strategic focus to Social Media activity that can be clearly linked back to your business & marketing objectives, & the needs of your customers. This investment has provided brands like Lufthansa, TNT and Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance with a business case to open the debate with senior management around investment, & return on this investment through strategic use of Social Media Marketing techniques.

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