28 August 2012

More of the 6 fundamentals of enterprise social media


                                            Part Two – 4 to 6
So to recap briefly on Part One; We have a shared understanding that our enterprise is in social media so we put in place our governance team. The first thing the governance team was articulate the endpoint and how it is measured and set out their road map. We defined what we wanted from a social media platform and procured it.

Managing expectations
While all this was going on we were managing eh expectations of the business.

This means explaining to the senior leadership team what is going to happen next, how you will report on it and what their role is in this. It's worth working with the Corporate Affairs chief on this, they have been through it all before with Execs for PR.

You explain to your own staff what you are doing and how they are involved. This means setting out a simple social media policy. A paragraph should do it. Explain why what they say and do in social media can impact the brand and them in the long run. HR and Internal Engagement should be able to help with this.

Speak to your customers about what you are doing, what you are providing and why that’s good for them.

Make sure everyone on the social media leadership team understand what role social plays and ask them to articulate to each other, their teams and their senior sponsor how social fits into their channel strategy.

In all cases, ask for feedback and act on it.

Reporting and analytics
Firstly, these are two different things. Both have a place and both need to be addressed contentiously and with stakeholder involvement.

Reporting, or MI, is regular time based activity. Weekly or monthly reports that set out volume data how many etc. But most importantly, what are the most important topics, users, channels and how are they and their sentiment changing with time?

Analytics is still evolving and you may need external help to get your head around this to start with. Don’t let that put you off, this data is dynamite.

Social media analytics will help you to become conscious of the conversations about your brand that your organisation is currently unconscious of. It will allow your business to understand real sentiment around share price. Or, imagine tracking responses and views on an above the line campaign in almost real time.

Not just counting the conversations and reporting some sentiment like in the weekly reports, but analysing unstructured data to get behind how a social media crowd is responding the proposition, not just the presentation.

Analytics is not just an essential part of social media for enterprises; its power is going to help organisations that master gain a real and tangible competitive advantage in the 21st century. Maybe not in the next 2 years, but certainly beyond that.

Scale and depth
Now your enterprise has everything in place, it needs to scale it by embedding it in every part of the business and every market. This is what we call social business.

Social businesses that use social media to learn from and engage with their members will develop more consistent financial performance.

They will overcome reputation challenges easier, build more brand equity and customer loyalty through trust, see higher productivity through internal collaboration and continue to evolve to serve the communities around their brand: Customers, staff and shareholders.

21 August 2012

The 6 fundamentals of enterprise social media



Part One – 1 to 3
If my own experience is anything to go by, every large enterprise in the world has reached the conclusion that it is in social media, like it or not.


I estimate that every FTSE company with a UK consumer brand receives at least twenty thousand social media posts about it every month. From corporate news through product/service comments, sponsorship to marketing activity responses.

So now that playtime is over, what do corporate businesses need to handle this and future social media demand.

Governance
Marketing doesn't own social media in an organisation any more than any part of the business owns the telephone. However, it does, or should, own the voice of the customer, so it's a good place for governance to be initiated and led from.

The social media steering or leadership team must include executive representation of key markets and include senior responsible owners from service, sales, corporate relations, internal engagement and business continuity (risk management in financial services. The team should appoint a manager that has the authority to act and clear accountability to that governance group.

Roadmap not strategy
Like so many things that technology touches, social media continues to evolve. Therefore, large enterprises don't have time to hire expensive external advisors to carry out a social media audit that will only have a short shelf life and set a grand plan that will become obsolete as the ink is drying.

Set a course of action and move towards it.

As competitors, technology and your customers blow you off course, change it. The end destination will remain pretty fixed anyway. It will be described as something like: Creating a digital channel that £x generates incremental revenue, or y% brand awareness, or my favourite a z% promoter score.

Single management platform
This is harder than it sounds, not least because it involves IT people and procurement. You need a social media monitoring, analytics and reporting platform.

There are plenty to choose from and at a basic level, all do the same thing. But it's not until you have lived with it and the supplier that you can realise what you actually want is something else.

I can and will write a whole blog on this, but in the meantime, here are the most important things to consider:
         
Does it categorise posts as they are received?

Does it monitor all of the platforms you need?

Can it measure and reporting the metrics that are important to the business easily?

Does the vendor understand the difference between social media monitoring, analysing what has been monitored and just counting conversations?

Part two of this blog will be here next week – 28th August 2012.

14 August 2012

Which would you rather be, a client or a member?


Being a client is certainly better than being a customer. It suggests I am valued by my advisor or supplier, our relationship is based on more than transactions. So why not go one step further and have members?
Membership suggests I belong. I am part of something bigger than me. It may even suggest exclusivity, unless we are talking about the Coop.
If I am a member I feel obliged to share, to have some involvement with how my club runs. To read the newsletter. To take my turn to do the teas. To listen to the other members. To help my fellow members.
I may even feel obliged to buy from my membership organisation.

07 August 2012

IFA Trust: The most valuable 21st Century commodity


The year 2000 promised us the end of third world debt, to save our planet from us and the end of boom and bust economic cycles.
What the last ten years has actually delivered is:
Going to war on dubious evidence, fraudulent MP expense claims, our largest financial institutions becoming illiquid, shareholder value consistently eroded by highly paid executives and central banks printing money to stimulate economies regardless of the consequences for pensioners that have saved all their lives.
So is it any wonder that trust for corporate leaders, politicians and financial institutions are at an all time low?
Yet simultaneously, consumers trust each other in ways we haven't seen since the traders of the earliest civilisations.
Imagine buying an expensive product from someone using a false name, without knowing their exact location and paying in advance. Well that's exactly what thousands of people do on eBay every hour.
So while trust has diminished for our leaders and many leading brands, it has not disappeared completely. We still trust each other - our friends, our family and our colleagues, well some of them anyway.
So where's the opportunity?
It is in the advisors that can find a home not just in completing a transaction for their client, but in becoming part of their network and adding value to it. That is a Social Advisor.
RDR provides the opportunity for advisors that are sincere about their profession and to weed out those that are not. Simultaneously, it creates the challenge for advisors to find ways to efficiently and effectively manage more close customer relationships and maintain a low cost base.
Social Advisors = Successful Business  = Trust X Network / Low Cost Client Relationships

01 August 2012

8 steps to get the most from social media monitoring data

Regular readers of this stream or victims of my speaking events will know I have a low tolerance for anyone calling themselves a 'social media expert.'

I believe the medium and it's adoption is evolving too rapidly for anyone to claim to be a true expert, yet. Some people have a better insight on what is being delivered and some have mastered executing social media using the current knowledge pool, but experts, I'm afraid not.

 
My view was reinforced by something I read recently in a industry body's monthly journal. A so called expert proclaimed that 'social media offers brands an opportunity to have a dialogue with its customers.' In isolation his statement is correct. In the context of an article that suggested that any brand not actively monitoring social media was some how irresponsible, is misleading.

 
Monitoring social media is useful but not a panacea. Counting how many times your brand is mentioned in social media conversations adds little to the sum knowledge of an experienced marketer. Using un reliable automated sentiment scores even less.

 
Analysing unstructured data does deliver valuable insight into the conversations customers want to have with you about your product or service performance. But so does analysing complaints, contact centre conversations, emails, analysing web traffic, focus groups, industry surveys, I can go on.

 
Customer insight is key to making good marketing decisions. Social media monitoring and analysis plays an important role in developing that insight, but it is not the only data set available.

 
To get the best from social media monitoring and analysis, brands need to

1. Analyse the verbatim of social media posts to identify topics important to you and your customers

2. Combine social media insight with all the other data you have collected into a single view of those topics

3. Differentiate what is trending in that data now and what are long term/fundamental themes using time series analysis

4. Prioritise what improvements can be tackled now according impact or available resources

5. Address those improvements

6. Monitor the improvements you have made

7. Monitor the low priority topics you are yet to tackle

8. Return to point 1