It’s time for corporate to stop playing with social media!

There are now enough examples and evidence to know what social media marketing strategies and tactics work and don’t work. Enough for organisations to move beyond the baby steps of adoption where about two thirds are in the UK are today.

The Board of directors are the culprits

The issue is that most organisations, particularly at board level, are still holding back their organisations by not at least gaining a fundamental understanding of the medium.  Nor, and perhaps as a result, or they recruiting the right calibre of skills into the roles of digital and new media.

I have interviewed and worked with scores of organisations on their plans for social media and many have said they now want to make social media strategic. However, they put their hands up and say that the issue is that they don’t know what strategic means when it comes to the adoption of social media for marketing and communications. So I decided to help them by defining what strategic means. 

What does strategic mean?

I have been able to define strategic by examining what companies are doing well and can point to great examples of success and examining what is holding other companies back. In this blog I will not mention any names mainly to protect the reputation of the laggards. 

Firstly, I can tell you that strategic does not mean employing a campaign manager or a creative marketing agency to take charge of your social media plan and running it. Nor does it just mean setting up Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+ or any other platform account, irrespective how funky your agency might make it look. And it also doesn’t mean overtly promoting or advertising your brand, products or services in online communities, you will drive members away in their droves if you do this. 

However, I am compelled to say that most companies are still doing all three of these tactics with sometimes disastrous results or at best attracting a few passive ‘fans’ or ‘followers’. So what’s the strategic approach I here you cry!

Well the bad news is that getting the best from social media is not straightforward and is resource intensive and demands a long term plan of action. But the good news is those companies who are finding how to go about using this new channel are getting some amazing results.  Below is a chart that I dare you to study that I produced.  I have identified eight business competencies that successful organisations are tackling to get social media working.

Industry regulation is no reason not to use social media

Levels of adoption do depend of the legislation that applies to different industry sectors. For example the financial services and pharmaceuticals sectors are regulated. But that hasn’t stopped those more ambitious organisations to use social media to great effect. For example, the Amex Open Forum online community for SME’s is held up as the benchmark for brand hosted social platforms (master-minded by a Viapoint Associate I should add). Whereas, I know of another credit card company who ban the use of all social networks and smart-phones only because it seems they lack know how.  Guess who is losing SME market share?

Despite heavy regulation, Pfizer are using social media forums to help support, educate and enthuse young scientists and school kids that are looking to go into the medical profession. You see all it needs is the right approach and a framework against which social media can be implemented across an organisation to exploit the benefits and mitigate any risk.  Hopefully, my framework will help to take you on the right journey and starting now. Please feel free to contact me if you would like me to talk you through it - paul.fennemore@viapoint.co.uk

McDonalds: Corporates Still with the Wrong Social Media Mind Set

The week that Macdonald’s makes another massive social media gaff should bring home to CEOs and their CMOs that social media is not for the inexperienced http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2090862/McDstories-McDonalds-Twitter-promotion-backfires-users-share-fast-food-horror-stories.html.

Putting social media in the hands of a well intention junior campaign manager is like a CMO putting an automatic weapon in the hands of an angry 5 year old. And yet despite the very public mishaps of MP’s, Skittles, Habitat, United Airlines, Nestle, Toyota and countless more many corporates are still lost as to how use social media effectively.  Yet paradoxically there is now enough experience and evidence to know what social media strategies work and don’t work.

The main issue is that companies and many agencies still believe that social media is about marketing campaigns and running them in the same way they always have done.  In fact social media marketing and communications is so fundamentally different a whole new approach is required.

A change of mind set is needed.  Consider social media or social commerce as a strategic marketing and communications channel that has the power to make organisations more agile, be much more in tune with their employees their market and their supply chain. Social media has the potential to transform businesses. 

Astra Zeneca this week announced drastic cut backs, making thousands redundant because they had new drugs coming to market soon enough. Yet those Pharmaceutical companies are using social media to crowdsource R&D and innovation, such as Proctor & Gamble, are keeping their share price up by having reduced R&D cycle times by 40% through using an online network of 80,000 independent innovators.

CEO’s and CMO’s need to make social media strategic and stop delegating it to marketing campaign managers and campaign managers need to understand that social media is not about campaigns. Social media marketing is its most effective when joining up traditional marketing campaigns and perpetuating ongoing consumer engagement thereby building brand loyalty and increased word of mouth.  Tactical marketing campaigns and social media do not mix as McDonald’s has yet again demonstrated.

Paul Fennemore

Managing Director Viapoint

www.viapoint.co.uk

The Science of Social Media User Participation

Online Social Networks User Motivators: The Science

Paul Fennemore – 2011

Introduction

It’s time for those involved in social media to try to understand the science of social media networks. As all professional marketers will know, marketing is a science and not an art.

Therefore, this paper helps marketers to understand one facet of online social media networks, the one of what motivates people to participate in them in the first place.

The Science of Social Media User Motivators

Traditional social networks have been the subject of a considerable amount of social science academic literature with regard to what motivates people and societies to socialise and form communities. Building upon existing social science theories, further research has been conducted into what physiological motivators drive people to create and participate in social networks communities .This is an important subject and needs to be addressed because it is valuable for marketers to understand user relationships and behaviours within online social network communities .Therefore, I offer the following perspectives.

Online social networks have undoubtedly entered into mainstream culture and integrated into the daily routines of many people world-wide. Social networks are transforming the way society thinks, acts and behaves. Social networks are bringing participants together to create online virtual communities, and to act as an outlet for creativity and expression.  Rheingold (1994) defines virtual communities as:

Social aggregations that emerge from the Internet when enough people carry on public discussions long enough and with sufficient human feeling to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.

According to William (2009), communities are interdependent relationships that flourish when they deal with issues or common topic of interest. A study carried out by the IABC Research Foundation (1990) concluded that successful communication was “built on relationships, and was achieved through two way symmetrical communications”. Online social networks enable people to establish these two way relationships, and provide a highly effective method for computer mediated users to interact and form communities of like minded people, but on a considerably larger scale, scope and public openness than when IABC did their research 20 years ago.

Sociologists, who have been researching traditional social structures and friendship networks, have found that patterns of friendship are strongly influenced by characteristics such as age, race, language and values. This is explained in the ‘birds of a feather flock together’ concept developed by McPherson et al. (2001), which is based on the human tendency to seek out and engage with those people who are the most similar to them. A theory known in social science as ‘homophily’. The main principle of homophily is that personal networks are homogeneous in the respect of many sociodemographic, intrapersonal and behavioural traits.  René Girard of Stanford University, a proponent of a theory of human behaviour called ‘Mimetic Desire’ (MimeticTheory.org, 2010), supports this argument.  Mimetic desire is based upon the concept that people are essentially sheep-like, and will copy one another without much reflection. This theory corroborates Thiel's view, the Facebook venture capitalist, who argues that human beings will tend to move in flocks, hence the enormous popularity of Facebook.

The principles of homophily and the aforementioned theories, might offer a rationale as to why people congregate into social networks of self organised groups but they do not explain what motivates users to act and make contributions to these groups.  I suggest that the reasons why users elect to participate in social networks are more than a subconscious desire to mimic or follow other people as proposed by the aforementioned scholars.

According to Safko and Brake (2009), people become motivated to contribute information of value to their groups because they have an expectation that they will receive useful information in return, and gain recognition for doing so by their peers. Social psychology research has found that some individuals may contribute because they are having an influence over their environment and are gratified by responses to their contribution.  Social networks give individuals a channel to broadcast and express their views quickly and easily, in a conversational manner that is highly personal and controllable. Given that personal expression is recognised by sociologists as a compelling motivator to act I propose that this could be a key reason that explains why some people actively participate in social networks beyond the basic desire to be part of a group.

Furthermore, according to Nour (2008), social networks subscribers will decide to interact with and help others based upon the value each one brings. I posit that the digital communications media of Social networks does not limit the value that users can gain from each other. In a research project on chat networks, Reid (1995) acknowledged the relationship building capability of digital communications and found that personal relationships amongst participants can be deep and emotional. Reid claimed that “individuals may explore possible public identities, create otherwise unlikely relationships, and create new behavioural norms”. In so doing, I suggest that this could be a reason why users are drawn to invent new social network communities. Moreover, online communities can be low risk environments that encourage people to form more loose relationships, to be more open with their opinions and in doing so communities collectively generate more value for its members. Therefore, I deduce that it is possible that the collective value communities generate for their members increases as the numbers of members grow. A phenomenon creating a self perpetuating cycle which might explain why some social networks have grown to the scale they have.

Clinical psychologists offer yet another reason as to why people participate in social networks such as Twitter, the micro-blog service, where each post is limited to 140 characters.  James (2010) believes that micro blogging stems from a lack of identity and through constantly blogging, users are reminding themselves as to who, what and where they are.  Cognitive neuropsychologist Lewis (2010) proposes that today’s society is narcissistic, and by using Twitter infers a level of insecurity invoked by a compulsion to be recognised.

However, Singer (2009) asserts that the main motivators of bloggers are derived from more positive behaviours that originate from an inherent desire to share their expertise, they want to become more involved with interests that they are passionate about, to speak their mind and they measure the success of their blogs through a sense of personal satisfaction.  I suggest that these behaviours relate back to earlier social science theories, specifically Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and levels of affiliation and self actualisation. Affiliation, in respect of the desire to be part of a community and self actualisation in terms of being able to express one’s self.

I have found that reasons why people are motivated to join online communities are complex, driven by deep seated psychological motivators that need to be understood by marketers if they intend to effectively create empathy and engage with community members.

Paul Fennemore is the Managing Director of Viapoint, a social media consultancy and services provider. Paul a popular speaker and panel host at digital and social media conferences and forums as well as regular blogger. Paul continues his research into social media in collaboration with Henley Business School and Oxford Brookes University. He holds an MSc with Distinction in Digital Marketing.

Google+ Roll Out New Brand Pages – Why, and What For?

Written by Katie Taylor - Viapoint Ltd

Google+ has taken it’s first steps into becoming a real Facebook rival – or so it hopes – with its brand Pages launch, allowing brands, products, companies, businesses, places, groups, and everyone else to get a foothold on the burgeoning social media platform. But will brands be taking advantage of the pages? How should they be using them for optimum performance values?

Over the next few days, companies and brands will be able to build and maintain their Google+ Pages and tailor them to fit the needs and expectations of their fans and followers on Google+. How different is this going to be than Facebook? Or more to the point, why will people use these pages rather than the accounts they know and are familiar with on Facebook and Twittter? For one thing, it’s supposed to be quicker, as you don’t actually have to visit a page in order to “like” it. 

Also, Direct Connect – the same feature that allows users to directly add pages to their circles – builds on Google’s search dominance, meaning better quality search optimisation for brands using Google+. Somewhat of a trap it would seem, but if you’re utilising social media as aprt of your marketing campaigns, there’s no reason you’d choose to leave yourselves out of Google+. It might not be totally problem-free at the moment, but purposefully avoiding a platform even as unsure of itself as Google+ is not a good idea.

The most tantalising look at the benefits Google+ Pages could have is outlined by TechCrunch: “If Google provides an efficient and accurate way to sort followers into circles by age, location, and other characteristics, Pages could publish different updates to different demographic subsets of their audience to maximize the relevancy of those updates.

For example, if retailer Macy’s could publish updates to a circle of all their followers under the age of 30, it could serve its younger audience updates about more youthful products without annoying its older followers. Similarly, rather than creating separate Google+ Pages for their presences in different cities, brands could publish city-targeted updates about local promotions. Facebook currently only allows Pages to target posts by country and language, preventing age or more granular location targeting.”

Brands circling followers based on customer worth, age, gender, previous interests…it’s a marketing goldmine that as of yet Facebook is nowhere near ready to offer. It’s definitely a a powerful addition that will be worth seriously considering.

Social Media: Don't run campaigns, create engagement

How is Social Media Changing Marketing Campaigns?

Having spoken to a lot of senior marketing executives of big brands in recent weeks such as BUPA, Barclaycard, 3M, Kodak, O2, Nokia, British Gas, Hiscox, INGDirect, Ford and many more, I found varying degrees of opinion as to the role that social media plays when it comes to marketing campaigns.

They invest millions each year in high profile traditional campaigns and the issue is that each campaign raises awareness or whatever, but then the awareness quickly fades away. So, onto the next campaign.  Great for marketing agencies, not so great for the brand.

One major financial services brand said that they sponsor, for example, a very high profile golfing event, create a lot of noise and it all fades away and we are left thinking, then what?

They have spent a lot of money with marketing agencies to design and run the campaign only for the ongoing consumer engagement opportunity to vapourise. Having got the attention of golfers for a short period they then let them go and yet the golfers are still playing golf.

Those few forward thinking brands, who have decided to adopt social media or commerce strategically, have got many things in common. One commonality is that they got over the idea that social media is about short term marketing campaigns and display ads. Sure, social media can augment campaigns but the strategy is to use social media to perpetuate the attention that a marketing event has created. And to link and carry over one campaign to the next.

Having got the attention of their audiences through a marketing campaign, social commerce savvy organisations are asking for potential and existing consumers for their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc user names. They are also directing them to the own online community. Then they perpetuate the awareness created by a campaign and start the process of ongoing engagement. In doing so they get a better return from their campaigns but more importantly,  ongoing online community engagement generates brand advocacy, increases word of mouth (or mouse), the chance to upsell and cross sell,  improves customer services and  customer life time value.

But only a few of the last 30 brands I have interviewed are applying social media this way such as Ford, Kodak, O2 and Nokia. Others are starting to recognise the benefits and others are still thinking of campaigns, campaigns and then another campaign. Guess who is going to win the battle of Attention and the Now Society.