It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Smartphones are taking social media to a new level with applications which let you update your Facebook account while you’re on the move.

As smartphone cameras become more powerful, it is possible to record video or snap shots and upload these directly to your facebook account.

Twitter applications are growing too. On the Nokia E63, for example, you can load an application called Twibble that lets you post your status and see the updates from those that you are following.

Some corporate execs wonder how on earth people have the time to use social media. Time? They can do social media whenever and wherever they want to….

The opportunities for brands/organisations are muliplying by the minute. Twitter and Facebook provide real-time publishing platforms which enable you to connect better to your key audiences. For example, say someone is unable to use a cash point machine, they could contact the bank’s customer service via Twitter and get a fast response. Sounds fanciful and too futuristic perhaps. But who had really heard of Twitter six months ago?!

As the wheel of influence  turns, it is the smart companies, the canny ones, who are going to realise first how the world is changing. How different approaches are required. How different thinking is needed.

A lot of our clients are getting interested in Twitter. To begin with we are encouraging them to take a full look at what Twitter is about, look at how other companies are using the service and consider how best it can support your business objectives. Get the strategy right first before implementing.

The PR team at Domino’s Pizza in the US are being held up as a case study of how to deal with a crisis with its origins in social media.

A couple of Domino’s employees posted a video on YouTube showing them doing some pretty unpleasant things to food about to be served to customers.

A piece in USA Today following the story highlights a checklist for PR teams managing social media crises.

Interestingly, the advice in the article mirrors the advice we’ve been giving to companies over the last few months. Make sure you have a reliable means of monitoring social media, set guidelines for staff use of social media and respond quickly to flash points.

See the USA Today piece here.

The Guardian has proclaimed the recent mass protests in the capital of Moldova as the ‘Twitter revolution’.

When the recent election resulted in a larger than expected victory for the incumbent Communist party, Natalia Morar used Twitter and other networking sites to organise a flash mob outside the national parliament. With no real history of public protest in the country Morar expected “at the most a couple of hundred friends, friends of friends and colleagues”.

To illustrate the power of social media for crowd sourcing, 20,000 protesters gathered outside the parliament to protest.

To see the full article click here.

An interesting piece in the FT’s business education section looks at the effect of the estimated 115 million “iPoders” waiting in the wings to become tomorrow’s managers.

iPoders are “internet- savvy, phone-addicted, opportunistic and digitally conscious” and fast paced change is what they are all about.

The article suggests that when it comes to recruitment, “… organisations that iPoders will be attracted to are the ones savvy enough to welcome emerging trends, bold enough to change long before they have to and smart enough to recognise technology…”

Have a look at Benjamin Akande’s article to find out more.

The old model of feedback before the growth of social media meant that feedback flowed only one way from the community to the company or vice versa. Now the popularity of social media means that communication – both positive and negative – can flow continuously from a company to its community of customers and back again.

However where many companies are committing mistakes is that they fail to acknowledge that if they do not respond to customer feedback, it means that customers will continue in the loop with only their own feedback to respond to. In these scenarios, feeback can become increasingly negative and speculative. Which is why we have seen communities of customers building on Facebook in protest over the actions of companies and so on.

Silence on behalf of a company or brand can lead to negative perceptions. By providing feedback you acknowledge that your community exists and that you value them and this is much more likely to create brand loyalists. Which is why it is important for companies and brands to engage with social media and to keep their ears to the ground all the time, if they are to enhance their social capital.

Another extract from Martin Thomas’s new book Crowdsurfing: Surviving and Thriving in the Age of Consumer Empowerment

At the last count over 5,000 Microsoft employees blogged.  Almost none of them have been message trained or briefed by the legal team on what they can or cannot say and yet they talk to millions of Microsoft’s customers, competitors, media, partners, legislators, neighbours and other employees, every hour of every day.  The PR and marketing departments have almost nothing to do with the output.  They prefer to provide only guidance, in the form of what the company calls Blog Smart Principles, which are mercifully short.

And this from a company that is beset by people attacking it for a host of reasons, real or imagined, and always under intense media scrutiny and legislator pressure on both sides of the Atlantic.  So how have they managed to enfranchise so many employees to talk from the company, and for the company, on so many subjects, without opening themselves up to lawsuits and negative press comment?  How can all these Microsoft employees manage to tread the delicate line between the public and the private so successfully, a task that is usually only trusted to grizzled press officer professionals with years of experience under their belts; who can see media entrapment strategies and leading questions almost before they have been formed in the mind of the interviewer?  The answer, if you ask some of those bloggers, is that the company “treats us like adults”.

Martin Thomas has spent 23 years running marketing communications agencies in PR, advertising, sponsorship, entertainment marketing and new media.  The blog of the book is www.crowdsurfing.net

Social Media is becoming increasingly ingrained in our lives. A recent piece by Guy Clapperton in the Guardian writes about how the convergence between social media and TV is becoming more of a reality.

Guy, who has done work for us, points out in an interesting piece how TV manufacturers are starting to add functions to their TV sets which will allow people to share photos through social networks, play online games, and watch YouTube.

The advantages for smart companies who are winning with social media is that they will be able to reach TV audiences for a fraction of the cost of TV advertising if they have valuable and interesting content through YouTube channels and so on. Tragically there are still companies who don’t even allow their communications professionals to access YouTube at work.

Meanwhile their key audiences are accessing youtube online and will soon be watching it on their TVs. For smart companies, the possibilities of social media on TV presents plenty of opportunities.

When you are swept up with the interest about social media – as we are -  it is refreshing to read a different view/opinion on the rise of social media. Take a look at this piece.

There probably will be a shake out of social media networks eventually. There are so many being launched. Not all of them can reach the heights of Facebook. But the desire of people to engage with one another using new web-enabled technologies is not going to go away. People want to connect and share interests. Familes want to stay in contact with each other despite physical boundaries. Music fans want to share music. Football followers want to chat about their team’s results and watch the video clips and so on.

Social media – technologies which enable people to share audio, pictures, text and video – is already so ingrained into our lives. Twitter is being integrated into TV. Facebook is on mobile phones. Communities of mums are organising social media-driven meet up groups in cities around the world.

Major companies are using Twitter for recruitment. The FT (see the Lex column) is on Twitter and BBC journalists are blogging. The Queen and the Pope are on YouTube and President Obama is extensively using social media. The list goes on and there are plenty more examples.

People want to take and share photos, publish videos, share news with one another, and express themselves.  Fundamental human needs are being provided with easily accessible and open platforms on the web. I don’t personally see this as a flash in the pan. The seeds of this change are already deeply ingrained within the forthcoming generations as well. How could you ever turn the clock back now?

There was a very interesting panel discussion about social media at the recent Web 2.0 Expo event in San Francisco. The panel, which included a roup of leading social media commentators including Charlene Li, who we have interviewed, discussed how you get company cultures to adopt social media and how you measure social media, as well as other topics.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Here’s some of the  key points that I picked up:

To get companies to buy into social media you need the ‘big guns’  involved. Social media has to be aligned with corporate goals. For example, if you say to a company they must use Twitter, they might not be interested. But if their corporate goal is to increase satisfaction then Twitter fits that objective.

The panel spoke about social media being about building relationships and not being about technology.  Speakers said that marketing campaigns are normally short term and that social media requires long term commitments.

Social Media marketing is misleading as a name, Charlene Li argued, as it suggests pushing something to people that they are not interested in, whereas social media is about something much more collaborative.

Measurement of social media is a tricky area. Somehow page views and clicks is not sufficient.  The panel said that measurement should be consistent with how other business communications areas are measured and has to be linked to clear business goals.

One speaker spoke about how social media is going to transform the way in which businesses communicate with their staff, their suppliers, their customers and all their key audiences. He said it would be painful and take a long time but he suggested that the rise of social media would challenge the traditional structures and traditional marketing disciplines of businesses around the world.

If you are unsure about what to do with social media for a variety of reasons then the panel urged a period of experimentation. Starting small and experimenting. It sounds a good approach to me.

In terms of how social media gets going within organisations. There seems to be a few models emerging: it comes from the edges and grows organically; it is initiated centrally by executive mandate or it grows through a multi-disciplined management team covering various functions.