It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

In recognizing that the debate about climate change has ended, Royal Dutch Shell decided to focus on the policy associated with mitigating climate change. Shell wanted to engage the informed public on the topic of climate change policy through a very personal venue. In January 2009 rather than relying solely on traditional media or advertising, Shell opted to launch its first ever public blog on the subject of climate change.

Shell selected David Hone to author the blog. David serves as Shell’s Senior Climate Change Advisor and is also a board member and vice chairman of the International Emissions Trading Association. Read the rest of this article »

We were kindly asked by PR consultancy Maitland to contribute to a report about the impact on social media on the reporting of business and financial news in the UK.

The report was written by Dr Andrew Currah, who is a lecturer and research fellow at Oxford University, specialising in the digital economy and the future of the internet.

ItsOpen was the only social media strategy consultancy in the UK to participate in the report. Other participants included representatives from The Financial Times, The Guardian, ITV, the BBC and The Times.

A big thank you to Philip Gawith at Maitland and his team for involving us and to our clients who suggested that we be approached to make contributions.

You can download the report (it is chunky but highly interesting) from www.maitland.co.uk.

Here are some of the points from the report which I found interesting:

The ecology of news and comment is becoming more participatory.

There are cultural, generational and operational barriers to change in the boardrooms of many UK companies.

The interactivity of social media challenges the exclusivity of business journalism. The social dynamic of the blogosphere, for example, requires journalists to view their work as a contribution to an unfolding conversation, as opposed to a finished tablet of stone that is channelled to a passive audience.

What we have traditionally celebrated as the ‘Fourth Estate’ will morph into a ‘Fifth Estate’, a network of networks in which news and comment are shaped by a wider spectrum of voices.

It would be a mistake to restrict our definition of journalism to the institutions that we currently associate with it.

Professional journalists have little interest in using web technology to artifically extend the natural life of any given story.

Publishing is being led by the crowd rather than underlying editorial judgements about what is important enough to deserve  coverage.

A growing number of newsrooms are looking to social media channels for tips, leads and assistance in shaping their coverage. That is forcing newsrooms to follow stories,sometimes without sufficient verification of the source or facts.

The linked structure of social media means that anything from a simple error to an outright hoax can rapidly permeate both the blogosphere and the traditional news media.

With more people engaged in the production and dissemination of news, there is a growing realisation among communicators that they can no longer aspire to control the news or protect stories from being contested. Instead, their best hope is to shape coverage and fix errors as fast as possible.

There is an irrational attachment to old forms of media in the boardrooms of today

The profile and value of a company is now influenced by a much broader array of news-making participants.

Social media tools help to enrich shareholder relations at a time when investors increasingly expect a higher quality of communication, irrespective of their investment, location or even language.

Corporate communicators still rely upon their relationships with established journalists when dealing with news flow and there is still a huge cultural bias when it comes to social media: the general and trade press are still seen as the real opinion formers.

For further information regarding any issues raised in this report, please contact:
Justin Hunt
justin.hunt@itsopen.co.uk
tel: 0845 0542299

or Philip Gawith
pgawith@maitland.co.uk

or Anthony Silverman
asilverman@maitland.co.uk

Today’s Independent carries a useful feature article on businesses’ use of social media. The piece, by Kate Hilpern, is a round-up of views about  how companies large and small can, and should be, taking advantage of blogs and networking sites.

Robert Epstein, head of small and medium businesses at Microsoft, takes the example of restaurants, which might use YouTube or MySpace to take customers behind the scenes visually.  Also, they could “use Twitter to provide regular updates and Facebook and LinkedIn to enable people to post electronic versions of their CV and to connect to other people to get ideas about how to improve,” he suggests.

Brands can benefit from social media to understand what their customers really think. And it’s not really an option – it will still play a role even if they don’t use it proactively. The article recalls last year’s protest by customers of Marks and Spencer, who flocked to a Facebook site complaining about its policy of charging extra for large size bras. Until then, the company had blithely assumed people didn’t mind paying extra.

Plenty of useful advice here as well on how to make the most of social media. See the article here.

Knowing that other companies are doing a good job at something – and others failing dismally – can be a spur to action. On that score alone, Altimeter’s new list of rankings of the level of businesses’ engagement with social media should attract interest.

But what should really get marketers’ attention is evidence that use of social media as a marketing tool boosts profits.

The study by Wetpaint and Altimeter Group, led by Charlene Li, investigated 100 of the brands acknowledged to set standards in marketing, to evaluate how well they engage with their customers using social media. It also shows how that engagement correlates with revenue and profit. It concludes that the most successful brands demonstrate a direct link between top financial performance and deep social media engagement.

Here are the top ten performers:

Starbucks
Dell
eBay
Google
Microsoft
Thomson Reuters
Nike
Amazon
SAP
Intel

The study provides quite a bit of detail about how some of these brands engage with social media. Starbucks, for instance, started with the advantage of a CEO who was into it from the start, and personally championed a site that promotes dialogue with consumers, MyStarbucksIdea.com

There are also useful tips for how to succeed. You can download the whole study here.

At ItsOpen we are starting to work more with brands as heads of brand strategy understand that social media is fundamentally changing the rules of brand marketing.

Brand is now a dual play: it is both online and offline. Bloggers and online communities are shaping the direction of brands. Rather than controlling brands, we are helping marketing teams to see how they can foster and nurture their brands in influential social media networks.

What underlines this stark change in approach is the simple fact that people can easily find out about a company’s offerings through a Google search than the company’s own carefully branded web site.

And what do they find through a Google search? Usually blog comments; news stories (not necessarily positive ones); unofficial videos and so on. This is all being created by the development of democratised tools of production (computers) and the democratised tools of distribution (social media networks). ‘Official’ raditional media does not have absolute sway over this new field and nor do businesses.

As social media explodes in growth, customers and other audiences will no longer remain passive recipients of brand messages but they will continue to contribute to them, alter them, create them even,and talk to one another about them.

Being a custodian of your brand in this environment is highly demanding and requires brands to learn to leverage new methods of communication in order to be heard, and to share and create information and knowledge.

Brands are having to discover their own online communities and have dialogues with key influencers and consider the content they share. The wealth of information generated by the rise of social media is being accompanied by a poverty of attention. It is harder to gain attention in this competitive environment where there is far more choice. Brands need to understand the culture of social media to prosper. The cost of dull brand content (which can often by architected from the inside out) is that it will not be read or shared through influential social media networks.

What happens when consumers are exposed to a brand in social media? It’s well established that search volume and click rates go up significantly for consumers exposed to search ads. But does the same happen when they see a brand mentioned on a social networking site?

The answer is a resounding yes, according to new research by  WPP’s GroupM Search. Consumers exposed to a brand’s social campaign, for instance watching a YouTube video or viewing the brand’s profile on Facebook, are 2.8 times more likely to go on and carry out a search for it, while click rates for such people are 50% higher than the norm.

The study also highlighted that social media users tend to be early adopters, and are more likely than other consumers to search for information online before buying.

GroupM Search’s CEO Chris Copeland says the research validates the belief that engagement with brand in social media, while not necessarily leading to direct sales, has long-term benefits.

This is exactly the kind of data that businesses need to make decisions about whether or not to invest in social media advertising. Copeland for one thinks it will encourage them to shift at least part of their spend there from other channels.

You can read about the research here.

Yes it’s true. The Spectator, sometimes categorised as the home of old
fogeys, has launched an iPhone app which enables you to access the current edition and the previous five in the palm of your hand.

It will be interesting to see how many people read The Spectator on their iPhone. It’s a good way of reaching out to readers who might not stop and buy the magazine at a newsagent, and will do The Spectator brand a lot of good.

Get more details on the development here.

Businesses may hesitate about getting stuck into social media, but one thing they should be in no doubt about is that this is where consumers are increasingly to be found.

In a new study by uSwitch.com, a quarter of adults say they need to use sites such as Facebook and Twitter at least once a day and almost a third of 18-24 year olds log onto them more than five hours a week. They even check them while they are away.

The social networking boom is clearly a major reason why people spend so much time online – up to 30 hours a week in some cases, the survey says. The average Brit now spends five hours a day online for work and leisure purposes, three at weekends. The figures for  18-24 year olds are even higher: seven hours per day during the week and five per day at the weekend.

More details here.

It’s good to see a growing number of companies getting onto Twitter. But relatively few are really using it in an innovative way, argues blogger Jennifer Leggio.

Eighteen months ago just being on Twitter was a big deal to early technology adopters, she says, but now these have moved on, and are looking for depth and substance. By contrast, for many businesses that use Twitter it seems to be enough merely to have a presence, which they think puts them ahead of the game. It doesn’t, Leggio says; they need to expand their presence, and use it to help grow their brand, otherwise they aren’t achieving anything.

Many companies think that social media begins and ends with Twitter, Leggio adds. ‘The social Web is much larger than Twitter and while it’s well and good if you’re using it, don’t expect anyone who knows better to jump up and down about it anymore.’

Leggio’s post is worth a look.