It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Barack Obama revolutionised political campaigning by using social media to the full in the run up to the presidential election, bypassing the usual handful of wealthy supporters to go straight to the grass roots. So it comes as no surprised that, now he’s taken office, the president has decided to use social media as a way of engaging with the public, opening accounts on FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter, as well as Flickr and YouTube.

Content will mainly be derived from White House blogs, though the press release making the announcement said, intriguingly: “We’re looking forward to hearing from our fans, friends and followers.”

It seems inevitable that the president will gain thousands, and probably millions, of followers. Will the White House be keeping track of all the comments generated on its social media sites? Will it use them to monitor public opinion and inform policy? Does it regard social media as a way of engaging in dialogue with the public, or simply as a way of informing them?

The press release doesn’t offer answers to any of these questions, so we’ll be watching to see how it all pans out. But it’s an initiative to be welcomed – and let’s hope it’s more successful than the faltering attempts of the British government to engage with the public through its YouTube channel.

I’m not used to thinking of the Daily Telegraph as especially cool – in fact as long as I can remember I’ve associated it with dyed-in-the wool conservatism. So it’s surprising to see it emerging so strongly in the digital space and giving The Guardian,  smugly sure of its pre-eminence in that area, a run for its money.

The Barclay brothers, the paper’s owners, are said to be spending millions on a new digitally equipped open plan office, in a bid to make the tired old format appeal to younger readers. The Guardian is all aflutter.

But these days a lot of the action is online, and the Telegraph has been scoring there with its website Telegraph.co.uk.  This got 28 million visitors in March, making it the UK’s most popular newspaper site.

According to the site’s head of audience development Julian Sambles, no less than 8% of its readership – a staggering 75,000 readers a day – now comes from social media sites like Diggit, Delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon, which enable members to choose and identify stories that they like.

The fact that Sambles chose to impart this interesting piece of information in an interview to blogger Malcolm Coles, itself says something about the company’s  understanding of social media.

“What we have done is to enable all of our stories to be submitted to these social sites by adding a ‘share this’ button on every article,” Sambles explains. “In each case they can then add their own headline and comments onto the article so enabling their point of view to get across. By continuing to deliver a large volume of good, rich content we have found that our readers enjoy engaging with it.”

Two recent examples he gave from Digg were:

* Drug Murders And Gold Machine Guns In Mexico PICS
* IMF to Create Billions of Dollars Worth of Super Currency

With a vast store of content that is refreshed daily, newspapers are clearly a prime destination for online readers.

But other types of businesses can learn from this too, especially those who are committed enough to keep adding to their sites. Where there is fresh and interesting content, providing a link to sites like Digg has been shown to bring in serious amounts of traffic.

There has been an interesting debate taking place on Buzzmachine about the future of newspapers. The blog argues that the traditional model of newspapers is now dead but old thinking still prevails which is why so many newspapers are in a mess. Here’s a summary:

Old way: Newspaper was a product
New way: News organisations provide a service

Old way: Readers sat still to observe a performance
New way: Readers are participatory

Old way: Newspapers tried to be all things to all people, serving a mass geographic audience
New way: news organisations strive to serve a mass of niche communities that already exist (some geographic, but most based on interests)

Old way: newspapers marketed themselves to a population
New way: news organisations converse, engage and collaborate with the communities they serve; the population markets the news organisation among itself

Old way: editor in charge choosing stories which the editor thought the
readers/audience wanted
New way: readers are in charge. They read what they want, when they want.

This is I think a very useful guide to the impact that social media is having not only on newspapers but on organisations as well.

Organisations have focused on just marketing products. But now they have to converse, engage and collaborate with the communities they serve. They cannot be all things to all people.

And the online audience is just going to read what it wants. Therefore it better be relevant, useful and interesting otherwise it will be ignored.

I mentioned recently how social media can help with recruitment. Now a conference on just that topic has been scheduled for mid July to show companies how it can help draw the right candidates.

The event is being organised by Web-Based-Recruitment.com, an online specialist. The firm’s founder Mike Taylor believes that despite the interest recruiters are showing in social media they are flummoxed as to how to get started. This will give them plenty of examples of how social media is currently being used in recruitment, and suggest how they can use it in their own organisations.

Speakers – as yet unidentified – will describe how to use social networking  sites such as Facebook to get messages to a target audience. The use of LinkedIn to promote vacancies and source new candidates will be covered, as will Twitter, TwitterJobSearch.com and other job search engines. There will also be separate sessions on the legal issues, and on the use of an online video to promote the company and job vacancies.

The conference is scheduled for July 16 in the British Library, London. More here.

My dad worked briefly at the Bank of London and South America in the early 1960s. He recalls how his boss was taken aside by the chairman one day and quizzed about the likely impact of computers on banking. Anything in it, old chap?  His boss duly beavered about, made a few phone calls, held a few meetings and reported back to the board three months later. Nothing in it at all, he said. Computers are a passing fad – forget about them.

To be fair, this was when a computer was still the size of a small country, but it wasn’t long before they utterly revolutionised financial services, along with everything else. These days, change and development are so perpetual, we are always having to prepare for what’s around the corner, without easily being able to conceptualise it.

Right now it seems banks are having to prepare for the coming of ‘social banking’. According to Gartner, those which don’t understand social networks  risk being ‘sidelined in the emergence of the social-banking services model’.

What could this mean? And what does social networking have to do with banking? Plenty, says Gartner: it is changing consumer behaviour in ways that could make depositing, lending and relationships with financial institutions much more transparent.

According to research director Stessa Cohen, social banking addresses social needs while meeting the consumer’s need to access and use financial products and services. “The result is an emerging model for social-banking services that removes the banks from the centre of the customer relationship,” she says. “Instead the bank takes its place among a series of loosely connected financial and social relationships mediated by online social-networking media and tools.”

What evidence might there be for such a shift. The answer is a January survey of 4000 consumers in the US and UK (evenly split). Around 7-8% said they were interested in using an online social network on their bank’s Web site to talk to other customers. Most thought it would be useful to find out how their banks compare with others and to get information to simplify their financial and personal lives.

This is a small number, but Gartner sees them as first adopters, and therefore online trailblazers for social banking. The point is, this can happen very fast. Cohen points to the rapid growth of social networking and the viral impact of new online communities. “Ideas are picked up, established and disseminated within short time scales, much too short to allow late entrants to the market to take advantage of the opportunities that will arise. Banks need to be positioned to take advantage of this shift to a new age of social banking.”

So it seems that banks, unlike other organisations, have not one but two major adjustments to make. As well as creating a social-media strategy, Gartner advises, they need also to ensure that they have the technology required to implement a social-banking model. In Cohen’s words they need to ‘evaluate opportunities to create partnerships between retail banks and social-banking providers, rather than trying to build their own social networks.’

The sceptic in me struggles a bit with this, as I’m sure bankers themselves would. Evaluating opportunities and creating strategies for social media is certainly something that banks should be doing, and many are. But investing in costly technology platforms for something which some of the more hidebound ones, as Gartner itself acknowledges, still dismiss as a fad – which will doubtless blow itself out in a few years -  would strike them as reckless at best.  It would be like a re-run of the Millennium Bug panic, preparing for something which no one knew for certain would happen, and many suspected was just dreamed up by IT consultants as a way to keep busy.

And yet… Perhaps there really is a new banking model looming, and the ones who invest a bit of time and forethought now may steal an advantage. In five years time we may be wondering what we ever did in the dark days before, as well as going online to check our balances, we could talk to other customers about the bank’s products, make price comparisons, and learn all kinds of other things that currently we have no idea about, or even realise we might benefit from.

The report is called “Social Banking: It’s All About the Money and Customer Focus”, and can be downloaded here.

Organisations need urgently to get a handle on social media as a way to maintain a dialogue with consumers. But it’s also an increasingly important channel for talking to staff members and recruiting new ones.

Unfortunately the role of social media in employer-staff relations has been pretty negative so far – responsible more for firing than hiring. There have been several stories of people being handed their P45s after telling the world through Facebook and MySpace how bored they were at work, or what idiots their bosses were. You can’t blame companies for reacting this way, but it makes them look petty. For their part, users of networking sites are having to realise that what they publish online can expose them to difficulty at work, if they are not careful.

My guess is these sorts of incidents are inevitable in the birth of a new medium, and will become less common as both sides start to understand how far they can go without getting into trouble. We’ll also start to see companies using social media in an innovative way for internal communications.

The question is, how. Personnel Today reports that a two-hour training workshop is being launched this week to help HR professionals get the benefits.  It’s being run by Phil Woodford, a former creative director at recruitment advertising agency Stafford Long, who now works as a freelance trainer and lectures in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College.

Woodford wants to demystify the terminology surrounding the new media and explain how it can help with the recruitment, management and development of people. He says, “The important thing is to harness [social media] to your advantage when recruiting staff, communicating with existing employees or delivering greater efficiency in working practices.”

There are plenty of things I  don’t like about the car industry. They are out of date and have failed to innovate. Still they are embracing social media in interesting ways. Their campaigns could inspire others to follow these patterns.

Ford is loaning its new Fiesta to  people who applied online and they are being encouraged to share their views online.

All content ie reviews etc is being aggregated.

Take a look. Ford is trying to create a groundswell of popular support for the new Fiesta. They are trying to  leverage social media to do their marketing for them. To get their customers do their marketing for them.

Engaging with bloggers is a crucial aspect of social media campaigning. We have experts who can help you identify key bloggers in your sector and help you nuture and build relations with them. Or we, together with our creative technology partners, can come up with creative campaigns to harness the power of blogging to drive support for your services and brands.

It will be interesting to see how Fiesta gets on. A lot will depend on the quality of the Fiestas people are testing out.

We advise all of our clients to start by listening before they plunge into
the world  of social media. It is crucial, we believe, to find out how your key audiences are using social media and what impact various networks and blogs are having on them.

It is immensely valuable to access this intelligence as people are talking openly and honestly rather than in artificial traditional focus group settings. You can also pick up fascinating insights around your sector and see how your competitors are faring.

This affects everyone: all demographic groups are using social media; mums; dads; teenagers; investors are using social media; analysts are using it; journalists are using and can be reached through social media; NGOs are using social media; MPs are using social media; young, old and middle aged professionals are using social media. Social media is B2B and B2C now and it is spreading fast. Through mobiles and TV sets and always-on broadband connections.

We carry out social media ecosystem audits which are designed to shed light on the social media networks that surround brands and companies. To do this we use the BrandWatch system (www.brandwatch.net). Other agencies do but they pretend it is their system. We are open about using Brandwatch.

There are plenty of packages out there which will help you follow social media conversations and help you listen to your customers and keep your ear to the ground. We have looked at a few and Brandwatch is our favourite. The key point here is that there is a limit to these software packages. None of them are perfect. They just generate data and there is a lot of it. What you have to do is interpret the data intelligently and organise it and act upon it in an intelligent way. People are crucial to this process.

Which is why ItsOpen puts  experts onto our social media audits. We set up the Brandwatch keywords and then analyse the data and provide reports and presentations which are designed to deliver insights to keep you informed.

We then make  recommendations on how companies/brands should act upon the feedback. How it should influence your messaging and campaigns going forward and whether or not you should start to engage with existing social media channels or set up your own.

Regular audits are a good idea.  And it is also essential to be consistently tracking what is being said about your brand and organisation. But more than that is required. We believe that companies need good online representational advice. And this is something we concentrate on at ItsOpen. It is not easy for large organisations to know how they should respond to a blog or a YouTube video and this is where we can help you. So you don’t behave in a clunky way and are sensitive to the communities that are talking about you.

Some people we meet don’t want to know what social  media networks are saying about them. They are worried it will be too negative. There is no reason to assume it will always be negative. Some information can be very positive and valuable to businesses. Whatever the feedback, an ostrich-like approach is in no one’s long term interests. Ignore what is being said and speculation can grow and you will be in the dark about what people are saying about your business.

Social Media is the new media. You wouldn’t ignore what the traditional media says about you, so why should you ignore what social media says about you?

If you are interested in one of our audits to get a better understanding of how social media is affecting your brand, industry, products and customers and key audiences, please get in touch (info@itsopen.co.uk). You’ll probably find us a lot less expensive too than those agencies who continue to pretend Brandwatch is their own bespoke system!

Reid Hoffman, chief executive of LinkedIn, is a fascinating Silicon Valley entrepreneur. As well as LinkedIn, he has joined the board of directors of PayPal and provided early capital as an angel investor to Facebook, Digg and Friendster. So who better to listen to for advice on social networking?

In a fascinating interview with the FT, he says there is a strong future to come for social network sites.

‘There is still a massive shift from offline to online, which will benefit them,’ he says.

We get people asking us at ItsOpen if social media, and Twitter in particular, are fads. The world is changing rapidly. The world of communications is fundamentally altering in our view and some companies are going to be at a serious disadvantage if they don’t recognise the new reality soon.

Like us, Hoffman is very positive about Twitter. Does he think it is worth the hype?

‘It will almost certainly make money. They have yet to do the business model part of their strategy. It is a classic consumer internet path which LinkedIn itself did in the first few years to get growth and traction first and then start working on monetisation.’

There are plenty of great companies and smart communications people out there – we are very fortunate to be working with some very progressive minded and supportive individuals within well-established companies – however there are still naturally some folks who do not accept the changes that social media is engendering.

In our view, traditional media is dying on its feet. Traditional newspapers are reeling as news is commoditised by the web. Advertising agencies are struggling because they are based on mass media models when the internet is based on niches and people using social media hate big display ads because they are so disruptive. Traditional PR agencies are clunky and are based on dealing with a small group of so-called experts when social media is empowering everyone to get involved and comment on market developments. This requires very different skills.

I went to a large PR agency in the City last week. I walked into the reception and it was plastered with coverage gained in traditional paper-based magazines. But that is not the audience that matters anymore. Everyone is migrating online fast. Some companies, I feel, are wasting their money investing in traditional PR at exorbitant rates. Traditional PR services do not work in a social media context. Spin is out. Social media users are tired of the spin doctors. They ignore them. Fresh voices and fresh thinking are required to win influence through social media.

Hoffman sees trouble for traditional agencies (and by direct association for companies who base their communications models on the ideas of traditionally-minded agencies).

Asked if there is a future for traditional media companies, Hoffman says:

‘I hope so. Traditional media companies have created a lot of interesting products. The challenge is obviously that there is a massive switch of attention to online. And, as yet, relatively few traditional media companies have created the right product solutions there. Now, whether they will create it, buy it or partner or whatever, I do think there’s going to be a very strong shift online and then traditional media companies are going to need to navigate that or it will be very painful.’

Read that again and remember Hoffman has had a big part to play in creating the future that is around us now. We wholly support what he is saying.

Read more of the fascinating interview here.