It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

After a disastrous and well documented early foray into the world of social media, Dell has turned the situation around and is now a clear leader in this fast evolving field. The company has a coherent and well-managed approach towards engaging with and listening to customers through blogs and Twitter.

From this latest update from their chief blogger, it is interesting to read that they are now consolidating their main blogs (when many companies don’t even have any blogs!) Some criticism from customers said they had too many blogs.

Which is maybe a lesson to bear in mind. Focus is crucial and you have to ensure you have something interesting and valuable to say. Interestingly they are now looking at ways of improving how they share the content that is generated through their blogs and online communities.

It’s hard to deny that social media is essential for business that want to promote meaningful dialogue with their customers. But a new study goes further, claiming to have found a direct correlation between financial performance and clever use of social media.

‘Significant positive financial results’ are seen for companies measured as having the greatest breadth and depth of social media engagement, says the study, by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group.

The study took a list of the top most valuable brands and reviewed their use of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums. It scored them on the depth of their engagement for each, ranging from a top score of 127 to a low of 1. The top ten were:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

These brands, say the study, generally have dedicated teams active in the social media channels they utilize. Most of them evangelise social media across the entire organisation and view social media as an indispensable tool to help them achieve results. Their approach is conversational, unlike traditional communications and even the early use of blogs by businesses, which were more about issues messages and talking points.

On average the most successful users of social media grew revenues by 18% over the last 12 months, while those who cared least about it saw revenues sink 6%.

Altimeter’s founder Charlene Li thinks the results are a good guide for corporations and brand marketers in every industry. “The success stories we have uncovered provide a blueprint for companies making decisions about how to best apply their marketing and consumer relations resources,” she says.

More about the study here.

Some clients have asked us for our reaction on the Morgan Stanley social media report that was written by – shock horror (!) – a teenager.

Research shows that teenagers in large numbers are turning to Facebook to organise their social lives; and Twitter is more relevant at the moment for professional groups and adults. Although a number of pop stars like Britney Spears are hoping to communicate to their younger fans through Twitter.

The main theme is that traditional media is losing influence. The traditional monopoly on news and comment which newspapers, radio and TV have enjoyed has been broken.  Social media is rapidly changing the way the world communicates and some senior company executives seem to think only teenagers are capable of mastering this new world! Which is simply not the case and unfair on all those digital silver surfers out there.

At ItsOpen we are working with  organisations to encourage them to adopt new ways of communicating to enrichen their conversations with their stakeholders of all ages.

Social media is age-neutral – the  tools are open and accessible to everyone. The reason why social media is growing so fast is that there are hardly any barriers to adoption other than a decent broadband connection or a dated company firewall! But obviously certain networks are going to be dominated by certain sections of the population.

Just because one teenager at Morgan Stanley stands up for Facebook, doesn’t mean it is only being used by teenagers.

You can read the full report here.

Now that social media has established itself as a medium, there’s a bit of a shakedown going on among the various players. Who’s the king of the hill?

According to a new study, into mobile usage among 16 to 35 year olds, the answer is Facebook, which turns out to be more popular than Bebo, MySpace and Twitter combined.

The comparison with Twitter is particularly interesting. While a third of young people regularly access both Facebook and Twitter via their mobile, they prefer Facebook. According to the 15-year old intern who wrote the report, ‘teenagers realise that no-one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless’.

That’s perhaps not a reflection on the value of mobile social networking itself, so much as its value for particular users. I’d guess the same age group is likely still to follow tweets from high-profile individuals, celebs or brands they are interested in.

There are some other interesting points in the study, by mobile research firm CCS Insight. Younger users, it found, are the ones most likely to buy content on their mobile phones. There was a heavy (2:1) skew towards males in its sample.

The company also predicts that by the end of 2009 some 44% of mobile users will access data via their handsets.

More details here.

New research in from Nielsen shows that recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising.

Ninety percent of consumers surveyed in the latest Nielsen Global Online consumer survey noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online. Nielsen surveyed more than 25,000 internet consumers from 50 countries. To be honest, I don’t find this at all surprising. If you are booking a holiday online, for example, you’ll read the reviews before you book and you can smell one that isn’t genuine a mile off!

This research confirms the value of the approach that we are taking at ItsOpen where we are helping businesses to engage with social media, listening and having conversations with their stakeholders. If you don’t listen to what stakeholders are saying about you in social media networks you can just simply waste money on ads. If your expensive ads are saying one thing and all the blogs are saying something quite different about you, who are your stakeholders going to listen to?

You can read more about the research here.

Following Justin’s recent post on food and wine, I see that luxury wine producers are one of the casualties of the recession, according to the Wall Street Journal. In an article otherwise full of bad news, the paper mentions one success:

“Some of the newer operations are using new marketing techniques to cope. Alpha Omega, a boutique winery in Rutherford, Calif., has begun using online services Facebook and Twitter to reach out to its customers. The winery three years ago began targeting consumers directly, and the strategy is now paying off; revenue is up 40% so far this year, compared with a year ago, in part because it doesn’t have to share many revenues with a distributor, says co-owner Robin Baggett.”

It’s a tantalizing thought. Can something like the high-end wine market, with a long-established network of distributors and resellers, successfully sell directly to consumers? Are the sorts of people who drink expensive wine the same sorts of people who spend lots of time on social networking sites? Don’t these customers prefer the personal touch offered by a long-term relationship with a particular distributor?

It would be interesting to know how much of Alpha Omega’s increased revenue is down to cutting out middlemen costs and how much is down to improved sales. Blogger Dr Vino is a sceptic, arguing:

“I fail to see how the winery’s 296 friends on Facebook, 407 followers on Twitter and no blog can really help them move their wines…there must be some other secret sauce at Alpha Omega.”

The post has attracted some thoughtful comments, from social media fans and sceptics alike -  including one from an Alpha Omega winemaker. Whatever the firm’s secret ingredient, there must be many failing wine producers who would love to get their hands on it.

Following on from my post yesterday, here are a couple of examples of food and drinks companies using social media video competitions: Jim Beam and Doritos.

The Doritos competition invited people to create an ad to be screened during  the Super Bowl. The Doritos one takes a while to load when you have a look at it. The counter hits 100 and then it starts to play.

These are two good examples of how companies are collaborating with their audiences to create content. They are mobilising online supporters of their brands. Rather than guessing and researching what their audience would like. They are inviting their audience to participate online and create content they would like to see.  The companies, of course, judge the content before it is published. It is not a complete free for all!

This is likely to create good word of mouth support for your company. Now I don’t imagine for a minute these examples get a lot of publicity from your traditional agencies because they always want to make the ads! Or they want to be in charge of the content that your customers see.

In the world of social media relationships between audiences and organisations are changing. Your customers want to be able to express themselves: publishing videos, photos, rating products, commenting on blogs, twittering etc. And you can harness that to your advantage by putting them in control.

To quote Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?:  ‘The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads. I can hear the agency: You can’t hand messaging over to the people: they will be off-message. Well, tell your agency their message may be off.  Your customers have always owned your brand’

Take a look at these: people are not as apathetic or as passive as you might think, especially when good prizes are on offer. And think what a return you get on these ideas compared to a standard traditional media competition which is not interactive and which does not spread virally and has practically no life to it, other than statically occupying a small space on a page!

Social media video competitions are starting to gain popularity across the web.

With companies understanding that they don’t have much control over social media, they are realising  that if they tap into the creativity of their customers and key audiences they can create something of immense value for their businesses.

Some of the video competitions are being tied to particular events or they are linked to specific products.

Take a look at these examples below from the IT sector. Other sectors are joining in too, and we will be sharing their examples with you as well in due course.

These social media video competitions underline the importance of enabling your customers to collaborate with you in creating, distributing, marketing, and supporting your products and services.

This is one of the golden rules of social media. Previously powerful organisations and governments were in control. But no longer.

Social media is enabling people to organise themselves and find and spread information and challenge old ways of doing things.

People are using social media to retain control. We are witnessing through social media the rise of the empowered audience.

So what can you do about it? One of the ways to handle this, is to look to give control to your audiences. A competition to create and submit videos does this and it can be very effective. As the audience is in effect doing your marketing for you. They are creating content about your business. Just take a look at the results here and here.

Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast has just been published and it is good news for social media! From 2009 to 2014, US Forrester analysts are predicting that social media will steadily gain a greater share of budget as companies move away from traditional media.

This reflects the underlying shifts that we at ItsOpen have been writing about on this blog and talking to our clients and prospects about.

There is a significant migration online away from traditional media.  Key audiences are using social media to share news,  comments,  rate products, and publish videos and share photographs about organisations.  They are having conversations online in real-time about organisations.

However, the important point to remember is that this is not traditional media, it is new and therefore it requires a quite different approach. Traditional methods of communications will not work in this space.

There are already plenty of examples of companies who have turned to traditional agencies to advise them on social media and it has gone wrong because they have, for example, not been transparent about who they are; or they have mishandled bloggers.  By failing to observe blogging etiquette.

Companies need to obviously take account of this research and begin to develop social media strategies to enable themselves to connect to social media for the long term.

You can read more about the forecast here.

Some executives are very nervous about social media. Caroline Dangson, a research analyst covering social media for IDC’s digital marketplace team, has some interesting insights into this condition.

Caroline argues that some executives are fearful of the transparency of social media. Others fear that it means them losing their traditional power bases.  This condition, she says, can be overcome by education. Fear comes from inexperience.

But social media will not go away, and all the time individual employees are bringing social media tools into organisations.

You can read Caroline’s post here in full.

I can remember being nervous about writing and publishing my first blog post. You soon get over it. Companies must give people a chance to experiment.

It is also worth pointing out that the fear of key executives could be putting good companies at a severe competitive disadvantage.  Social media enables you to gain valuable insights into your market and provides new channels of communication for listening and engaging with key audiences.  It’s not just another  narrow branch of IT.

If you are not connected to social media as a business then you could fail to maintain the loyalty of key audiences who are already using these new technologies.  And more nimble and less fearful competitors could begin to edge ahead of you.

As Jeff Jarvis says in his book, ‘What Would Google Do?’, it is time for companies to ‘blog, interact with bloggers, enable customers to critique your products, enable them to share ideas. Next, involve them in the genesis of your products, even your design process….Go ahead, try it. It’s about people and making new connections among them. It all comes back to relationships.’