It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

In this video you’ll see snippets from Justin’s introductory session to a full day social media workshop that ItsOpen gave to a FTSE 100 client recently.

The training workshops ItsOpen do are highly tailored to a given company’s industry and the issues they are facing.

If you are interested in our social media training we would be very happy to hear from you. Together we will discuss and plan the day and come up with the best tailored training solution for your company and your staff.

Sharing free information is what makes the whole social media thing so powerful. But what if you had to pay for it?

A crazy idea, surely, that would defeat the whole point of social networking. Information as a free commodity is increasingly what makes the world go round. But Sean Carton argues in this thought-provoking piece that for some people exclusivity is something to be sought after. Take Google’s beta trials – the cache of being asked to participate is so great for a certain audience that the restricted number of invitations are traded like a sort of currency.

Carton’s point is that as people become used to having free access to information, that which is restricted will start to have a greater appeal.  What, he asks, if businesses began to monetize social media access not by seeking more followers or subscribers or “friends” but by restricting access?

‘What if Justin Bieber charged a subscription fee for his tweets? What if you could only get “exclusive” Lady Gaga pictures when you paid for the privilege? What if you could only become a fan of a brand (with access to insider information, special deals, etc.) if you were either invited through some exclusive process or had to pay to get in?’

Reversing the paradigm faces various obstacles at present. An obvious one is that networking sites aren’t geared for a ‘pay-to-play’ model. But sooner or later businesses are going to start thinking about how they can use information not merely to draw attention to themselves but also to add revenues, and there may be an opening here they can work on.

Read Carton’s interesting piece here.

When it comes to established media training, companies are spoilt for choice. But here at ItsOpen we think that leading organisations are woefully under-served when it comes to receiving specialist social media training.

Through our work for The Social Media Leadership Forum we are getting plenty of fresh insights into what constitutes best practice. Together with our members we are learning a lot about the complex  challenges large organisations face from social media and the opportunities social media presents if these new technologies are used well.

Quality independent  training is, we believe, the way forward, as this will help improve the quality of social media engagement and understanding across organisations. We at ItsOpen already provide training services to a number of large organisations,  and we are putting together a new programme of  specialist social media training from September onwards – this will cover topics such as:  helping companies develop online conversation skills; extracting the maximum value from YouTube; enhancing your brand through Facebook and using Twitter to achieve your communications and marketing goals.

We are currently at draft stage, and discussed what we wanted to offer on our weekly team call yesterday. It was agreed that we will also continue to offer highly bespoke training services to meet the specific needs of companies and their teams. If you feel your company could benefit from independent specialist social media training which is useful, relevant and engaging – with plenty of opportunities for interaction – then please get in touch.

It could be your media team, or your investor relations team, or your marketing team or your customer service team. Social media touches all aspects of the business – it is not going to go away and it is best to be prepared and to start to develop your thinking and skills to improve the quality of your decision making going forward.  It will also help to empower you to properly assess the quality of ideas and proposals you receive from your PR or digital agencies.

If you are interested it would be great to hear from. You can reach me at: justin.hunt@itsopen.co.uk

Here are a bunch of useful case studies that offer insights into how American businesses are taking advantage of social media.

One concerns Intuit, which at tax-form filling time has 20 million customers for its online tool, but can’t rely on getting them back each year. It learned that half of its customers use Facebook and have 150 friends on average, and wanted to turn these networks to its advantage.  It encouraged them to post a review after finishing their taxes and share it via social media. 50,000 people shared reviews, and three quarters of those who viewed them and clicked through were new customers. Four times as many people were likely to click on a review than on a banner ad.

See here for more details, plus case studies on American Eagle Style Shop, Turner TV and others.

The ethic of transparency needs to be adopted by those companies who wish to flourish in the social media age. There is a need to hand over control through openness and information ; and to prosper companies should be open in terms of listening and involving their constituents in all their key processes as far as they can. Transparency will build a relationship of trust with your stakeholders and open up new opportunities.

Jeff Jarvis, named as one of the 100 worldwide media leaders by the World Economic Forum at Davos, who blogs at www.buzzmachine.com,  argues that he does not believe that  PR agencies are equipped for the social media age as they are not likely to be transparent.

‘PR people are trying to use the tools of web 2.0, Google, search, and social media to update their practices…..They have also been burned,’ writes Jarvis in his book, ‘What Would Google Do’.  Jarvis adds that PR advisers should try to convince clients that it is in their interest to be transparent and honest as obfuscations and lies can be exposed so easily online. ‘We expect companies to have sites, to share information, to be factual if not fully transparent. Openness is the best PR you can have. Still, because they only advise, PR people aren’t often in the position to change how a company is managed,’ writes Jarvis.

I am  sure there are plenty of PR agencies who will want to tell Jarvis where he is wrong, especially as he accuses them of joining ‘in any new digital fad that comes round the corner’ to educate their clients about them. However Jarvis makes some important points about the ways in which leading companies have to engage with the social networking culture: you need to speak with a human voice as if you were speaking face-to-face and be honest when admitting your mistakes and when you are disagreeing with the public. He also critises PR agencies for using social media tools to simply update traditional PR stunts.

A lot of important and well-known organisations have seen their reputations badly bruised through social media – some have been ravaged . More will follow. As social media becomes  increasingly more influential and pervasive, it surely will not be long before more CEOs, marketing directors and directors of corporate communications recognise that they require the best specialists rather than a one-size fits all approach to their  company communications.

We are really excited with the news that Barclays has just joined The Social Media Leadership Forum.

To have all these major companies now coming together regularly to discuss social media developments and issues provides an excellent platform for learning, experience-sharing and for practical insights.

The Social Media Leadership Forum is managed by ItsOpen, (www.itsopen.co.uk) who created the initiative last year.

If you are part of a leading organisation and would also like to get involved with all these other major companies, please contact simon.welsh@itsopen.co.uk

It’s easy to think that social media has eclipsed email as the new must-have advertising channel. It’s what everyone is talking about these days, while email is so over.

Not so. A recent survey from eConsultancy showed 42% of US consumers saying they prefer to get ads for sales and offers via email, compared with only 3% who preferred social media.

The reality, as Steve Rubel argues, is the same as it has always been, that marketing channels work best when they are used in combination, and that applies as much to email and social media as to anything else.

‘Quietly and steadily,’ Rubel says, ‘email marketing is evolving and turning more social, thanks to a blitz of homegrown innovations, acquisitions and start-ups that are reinventing the platform. Many companies are building end-to-end “social CRM” tools that will help marketers manage their relationships by mashing up existing customer touch points and social-networking sites.’

Rubel goes on to identify some of the key players in this space, such as  Constant Contact, Rapportive and MailChimp. See his piece here.

We are putting together some really exciting events for members of the Social Media Leadership Forum over the next coming months.

I’m really excited to hear that Microsoft is looking to host an event for members before the end of the year. It will be fascinating to hear first hand how Microsoft – one of the world’s best known brands – is engaging with social media and to learn their insights and experiences.

If you are a major brand and you want to engage successfully with social media and learn from some of the world’s leading organisations about what they are doing, then please contact simon.welsh@itsopen.co.uk who can explain how you and your colleagues can become a member and learn more from these great companies.  Don’t get left behind, playing catch up!!

The Camelot Group has become the latest leading organisation to join the Social Media Leadership Forum (www.socialmedialeadershipforum.org) which is managed by ItsOpen (www.itsopen.co.uk).

The Social Media Leadership Forum is designed as a friendly place through which leading organisations can share their experiences of social media, learn from each other and gain valuable insights to help ensure their social media presence pays off.

As well as members presenting their experiences to each other, we do invite industry experts to speak with members. We also regularly collect feedback and develop the programme with members to ensure it is highly relevant and useful for them and the companies they serve.

A lot of interest is building around the next key event with Facebook in September which I am really excited about. This will enable members to investigate more about what this immensely influential social network can offer companies; the key tactics for engagement and how to ensure engagement with Facebook works to enhance brands, build awareness and boost the bottom line.

If you feel you are at risk of being left behind with social media or would like to learn more about how to use these powerful new tools to remain relevant with your stakeholders, then please get in touch with Simon (simon.welsh@itsopen.co.uk) and he can provide you with all the joining information.

A lot of the companies we are working with are very interested to know more about the level and nature of  the coverage they are getting across social media sites, and the impact this could be having on their reputations. They may have detected coverage they don’t like, or they may sense that something is being said in forums that could be holding back take-up of their services. Or else they might want to know how their competitors are getting involved.

We are finding that search engines, or even official monitoring services, are not as effective as a specialist researcher going deep into forums manually and diving into blogs, for example, to find out what is actually going on.

Even Google comes up with the wrong results sometimes when you are looking for something. Clients really appreciate receiving bespoke reports which are specifically relevant to a particular topic, knowing that it has been researched by people in the know, rather than automatically served up by web crawlers thatdon’t understand the nuances of business sectors or the sensitivities of issues.

When I say specialist researchers, we use people who have written for publications like Prospect or the Economist, to research online topics. We believe it needs that level of expertise to extract real value and insights for companies.

The sheer volume of data and information being generated by social media is enormous. However within this data there is often gold dust that can give you opportunities and help inform the development of wider communications programmes and also help you with ideas for new product and service developments.

But it is important to remember that there are so many areas now where automated search cannot reach. That is why personal expert manual insights – although time-consuming – are critical.