Showing posts with label branding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label branding. Show all posts

03 November 2015

Why Successful Marketers Outsource Their Content Production

Technology, audience habits and our new attitude to money have changed how buying decisions are made. While consumers still respond to offers and deals, any significant purchase starts with online research.

Would you buy a car without test driving or at least going to see it? Well, 75% of decisions to buy a car start online, 99% end in face to face. In fact AutoTrader data shows we’ll spend over ten hours online choosing the right car.

The same applies to all major purchases, furniture, home improvements, holidays, mortgages and pensions. The principle applies to B2B purchasing decisions too.

It all adds up to the buyer being better informed and knowing the specification of their purchase before speaking to the firm that will supply it.

In online marketing terms, search, social media, websites, pay per click, remarketing and email all have a role to play in bringing that customer closer to buying from you. These are the channels through which someone interested in what you have, travels from curiosity to asking you a question in real life.

At the core of this process is content. Valuable, engaging and relevant content.

Without content, these channels are empty vessels that fail to fuel the knowledge driving your new customer’s decision-making. So you can see why take content creation is taken so seriously.

Content is personal. Compare a Dan Brown novel to one by Charlotte Bronte. The first is a page
turner (you can’t put it down), the second like sweet music. Well to me anyway.

To showcase what your business has to offer, content is created with a personality that resonates with your customers. So it is easy to see how Marketing Managers start the process internally. Surely your customer facing teams know exactly how to speak to your customers. Right?

Every company has a unique selling point. That thing you do best. Or your brand that is so clearly different from your competitors. Investing time on making sure you have this absolutely right is the core value of your head of marketing, not spending time crafting the content to represent it.

The awe I have always held for ad agencies is not their ability to create, but their inherent skill in understanding the value of what they are selling.

Hiring a team to produce your content allows you to deliver the best possible strategy and go to market approach. To test your view of the customer.
To carry out analysis of the gap between what you think the customer values and what they really value. To get to know your customers and articulate how they want to be sold to.

Invest your time in being absolutely clear about what your clients are searching for online and what they need to find in order to choose to buy from you.

Then leave the production of quality content to someone else. And let me emphasise that a little more. It is a production line. Not like an old Model T Ford. More like a precision Tesla X. Breathtakingly beautiful crafted outputs; consistently delivered on time and to budget. Leaving you the space to focus on the big stuff, like strategy and all the fires that need to be put out too.

There is an economic value to outsourced content production.

Yes, you have to budget for it. But consider the cost of a well produced and edited 90 second video at say £2,000. And the cost of providing your own filming facilities. Do you have an in house actor too and skilled script editor? And what about the post-production, mixing images, sound and music together? What will it cost to have all of those facilities?

The same applies for writing. Let’s say you hire a permanent writer. What does the recruitment process cost? If you recruit from an agency, you have fees too. Hiring from within means training costs. What do you pay them and how do you decide on a bonus?

You may also have someone earning a wage when they don’t have to produce content all of the time. Or worse still in my experience, the poor scribe that has to write about the same thing day in, day out. They eventually lose the sparkle, their creativity wains and then you’re just left with another pen pusher.

All this and we still haven’t touched on flexibility. What happens when you need lots produced at once and then long periods of nothing at all. How expensive do your in house resources look now?

That’s why successful marketers leave the how to the people with the skills and resources and focus on the what their customers want.

12 December 2012

How organisations can manage change in their staff’s subconscious


Most of my 20 year marketing career has involved managing change. In fact, I would go as far as to say that understanding change has been more important to my career than learning marketing theory.

Change means new processes, new metrics, different organisation structures, ground breaking technology, outsourcing part of the value chain and focusing on different customers or customer needs. Ultimately, change means we need people in our organisations to do different tasks (or tasks differently) because we are being forced to or because it will lead to greater success.


Every major marketing initiative from my first ecommerce website, through implement an automated dialler, several CRM solutions, social media and analytics right up until the IPad applications that I have launched have relied more on managing change than marketing. And not just technology based marketing projects, rebranding, putting customer insight at the heart of planning, establishing lead generation campaigns, all require major change management.

Of course customer insight is part of these developments DNA, but the initiatives success is comes from managing the change effectively. 

So we educate, explain, make time for stakeholders to question, we are open to shape the change by those most impacted. We produce robust documentation, governance and risk management. All of these ingredients are baked into most organisations change or project management processes.

Yet what nearly all firms ignore is that our behaviours are driven by our values and capabilities, and they live in our subconscious. Organisations rationalise change, just as they do redundancy. They say ‘it’s not you being made redundant, it’s your role.’ Which of course rationally is true, so why does it feel like bereavement to the majority of people affected. Because our subconscious has developed values and capabilities that have always worked for us and no matter how much we try to rationalise at a conscious level, our subconscious holds these values to be true.

So how do organisations manage change at the level of their staff’s subconscious?

Firstly they must recognise that continuous change is the reality of their business.

Secondly, they must ensure that change management is monitored among their leadership as a core skill on which promotion is predicated on demonstrating it.

Finally, and most importantly, they stop looking at branding, staff engagement, culture and their stated values as nice to haves, but essential to the firm's survival. They stop talking about these pillars of successful change management as fluffy, but hard edged measures that will ensure the sustainability of the business models to deliver shareholder value.

Change comes everyday, anyone that says otherwise is a kidding themselves. Any business that doesn’t embrace it is on borrowed time.

06 November 2012

Pay sales and marketing people the same to get the best results


In my last blog I introduced the importance for marketing to have meaningful metrics in order to justify its performance. In short term sales driven cultures (yes they do still exist), marketing needs metrics to justify its very existence.

Effective marketing throughout the mix has a meaningful and sustainable effect on the long term sustainability of the business. Yet the outcomes we measure seem obscure to the rest of the business, especially the two axis of power in any enterprise, finance and sales. These functions measure their success and the success of the business using currency. ‘A Mark, a Yen, a Buck or a Pound’ are a lot more universal than conversion rates, share of voice and recall. ‘Money makes the world go around.’

But just as marketing needs to move the way that it measures to reflect what the business values, so sales has to evolve to recognise business is no generated at the point of sales but over months and years beforehand. Sales start when the product concept is tested and evolved or when the brand vision is planned and introduced.

Sales people generally believe all the hard work happened at the deal close. They choose to ignore there wouldn’t have been a deal to close without credible brand positioning and competitive products.

Interestingly, I was sent a video by a consultancy called Software Advice that shares my view. You can see the video at CRMSoftware.TV



When I led a sales channel of nearly 100 people, I worked closely with the product people to ensure my incentive schemes gave larger rewards for the most profitable products, or products that generated the most customer loyalty. Not a scheme to meet my phenomenal targets that rewards the bulk sale of the easiest to sell products.

My approach led to dramatic falls in customer churn within 6 months of its introduction and although I made new friends with the product managers; I disappointed the acquisition-marketing people. They wanted to lead on discounts and promotions to drive customer volumes, and not a sustainable share of wallet approach. Had we all shared objectives and incentives I have no doubt we would have been more focused on collaborating to deliver the overall business outcome, sustainable revenue generating customers.

Ever since that time I have been a strong advocate for product managers, sales people, marketers, and indeed fulfilment (operations) teams working to the same objectives with a shared bonus pool. Everyone across business development, including the teams that have to fulfil and service goods and services should put their compensation at risk and share in the success.

I predict that businesses that fail to grasp the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration will soon grasp the fact they are failing customers, themselves and their shareholders.

15 October 2012

£1.65bn is the cost of denying customer choice.


I imagine that Santander is as disappointed as RBS, that their plan to acquire 318 branches and 250,000 small business customers from UK’s state owned bank has collapsed due to a technology issue; A technology issue that most utilities addressed almost 20 years ago.


UK telcos started planning for number portability in the mid 1990’s as they knew they would never grow with out it. After lengthy consultation by UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, all telcos, including the fledgling start ups and mobile companies had to offer customer portability of their telephone numbers from 19th January 2000.

The deregulation of gas and electricity regulators delivered a similar protocol, enabling customers to switch easily between providers within the terms of their contracts.

While telecoms and utilities companies have come and gone, customer portability being enabler of success or failure, not the root cause. Businesses with the best service and value proposition thrive, regardless of the industry.

Yet the UK retail banking sector has closed its ears to consumer group’s calls for account number portability, and now the whole industry is paying the cost; £1.65bn in RBS case. Had RBS enabled account number portability, the challenge they are facing today in preparing to transfer customers would have already been solved.

This is the ROI case for customer experience and brand. This is the case for delivering the best you can for customers to deliver shareholder value.

So isn’t it time, the new banking regulators take up the mantle for customer choice? Even if it’s just to save the UK retail bank’s shareholders from themselves.

16 September 2012

Making investment decisions from Twitter insight – Part Two

The next study in my review builds on using social media data to inform investment decisions. It is based on the assumption that sentiment towards certain brands and goods affect a firm’s earnings and therefore inform investment decisions.

A Dynamic Model of the Effect of Online Communications on Firm Sales. (Garrett Sonnier, Leigh McAlister and Oliver Rutz)

The McAlister Study found a strong connection between online chatter and a firm’s daily sales. Making social media chatter a valuable resource for investors open to making investment decisions using customer insight to make money in the stock market.

Now as a marketing practitioner, this paper really resonates with me.

Firstly, it speaks right to the principles for Value Based Marketing that the late Peter Doyle set out in his book of the same title. The book incidentally that motivated me to want to study an MBA.

The governing objective of management in all of today's leading companies is to maximise long-term returns to shareholders. Value Based Marketing defines marketing's role as contributing to the task of shareholder value creation.

Secondly, it quantifies what marketing professionals have always known, word of mouth is powerful.

If customers are saying good things about your brand to their network (friends, family, colleagues etc), more people will buy that brand’s products. If customers dislike your price, product, promotion, people, processes or place of business, they will not only not buy from you, but tell everyone too.

Thirdly, it puts customer experience of a brand at the top of the leadership team’s agenda.

McAllister et al found that there is a significant effect of positive, negative, and neutral online communications on daily sales performance. They make the case for executives to listen to customer insight and to act on it. However, one caveat on this final point, from my own experience - combine social media insight with all the other data you have collected into a single view of those topics.

Conclusions
Listening to what is being said in social media and twitter in particular is still a relatively new development. What we are finding out about an organisation’s performance from it is not.

The single biggest take away for the C-Suite is – there is no longer anywhere to hide. Your customers and stakeholders have a collective voice and they are learning how to use it.

Your investors will recognise poor customer experience in your share price.

Click here for supporting slide deck



13 September 2012

Making investment decisions based on insight from Twitter

Predicting individual shares and stock market movements is one of the oldest professions and there are people far better qualified than me to assess the validity of the models used. Automating this process is also not new.

Tech-savvy traders have been sourcing data from reports, press releases and corporate Web sites for years. Genuine advocates of automated predictive models use powerful computers to speed-read content and then letting the machines decide what it all means for the markets.

However, using Twitter is still a relatively new phenomena. In this and my next blog, I will explore how two studies I have come across can inform our thinking on social media and share price.

Twitter mood predicts the stock market. (Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, Xiao-Jun Zeng)

The Bollen et al study results indicated that the accuracy of DJIA predictions from Twitter can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions. They claimed an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA and a reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error by more than 6%.


The study investigated whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large-scale Twitter feeds are correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time.  They analysed text content of daily Twitter feeds with tracking tools that measure positive vs. negative mood and mood in terms of 6 dimensions (Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, and Happy).

Now I’m not convinced by this study.

It seems to me, if the mood is being reflected in the Twittersphere, everyone probably already knows how it will move markets, so there isn’t a whole lot of competitive advantage. Unless of course, it’s insider information, in which case and putting aside the regulatory and moral minefield that comes with this hypotheses; Investors would need a high risk tolerance to act on it without verification and the opportunity cost of seeking verification would render the Twitter news obsolete.

If that isn’t enough to be wary of, as a researcher posted on Quora “There's also a paradox: once there are enough tweets about the inside information it's no longer really inside information. Twitter is probably best used for assessing the herd mentality. One strategy might be to look at all the dumb stuff people are saying and then bet the opposite.”

In my next blog, I will look at the sales effect of the volume of positive, negative, and neutral online communications captured by social media monitoring technology and classified by automated sentiment analysis.

05 September 2012

Delivering a fast customer experience isn’t everything.


Earlier in the week I headed to Vision Express for my bi-annual eye test. Having just come back from fabulous family holiday and dropped my daughter at her new ‘big’ school I was in a pretty buoyant mood.

The quality of the eye test, the price charged and the speed at which it was executed were exemplary. It should have been, the optician’s was empty and I was the only customer. My issue is not with the service, but with how it left me feeling.

Now my wife accuses me of being a demanding customer and expecting too much. You may agree, but before you do, let me explain why I don’t think I am.

During the whole time I was there, none of the staff I interacted with smiled at me. When I was asked how I was, the inquisitor wasn’t really interested in the reply. Beyond the factual questions about my spectacles, no one asked how I felt about them or how I chose them. No one asked me what I liked or disliked about them. I was treated like I was on a conveyor belt to be processed as quickly as possible. I was left feeling like an inconvenience, someone to tick off the list.

Treating customers quickly and efficiently is important, and I would guess that most customers would value it. I know some people that would value it above all else. However, I was looking for a little more. Some small talk, a little chat about my holiday, the weather - the whole back to school phenomena.

Customers are not just units to be processed quickly. They have feelings and if they didn’t branding wouldn’t work. Taking a little time to connect with me would have transformed how I had felt about my relationship with Vision Express and I would have considered them for my new sunglasses.

Consider how differently this blog would have turned out and the value of the order they have missed out on.

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.

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

03 March 2012

Is your Exec becoming obsolete?

A friend of mine asked me how they should engage their senior leadership team is social networking. I said tell them that ‘if they don’t get on board they will be obsolete in 5 years.’

This is of course is as ridiculous as the claims made around the turn of the century about e-commerce. It has in fact taken 15 years for e-commerce to threaten high street spending. There is no such thing as a high street retailer or supermarket without an integrated e-commerce infrastructure.

Before e-commerce, the same was said of corporate e-mail.  IT Director’s, as they were called then, said ‘why would every member of staff in say a bank or insurance company need access to email?’

I once said the same about text messaging (SMS). ‘Why would I need a mobile phone that can send a text message when I have a perfectly good pager service?’

New communications tools come, and they go. The issue for executives that want to lead well performing organisations is not whether they should engage with new technologies, but how, and social media is no exception.

I don’t know an Exec that doesn’t use email, text messaging or e-commerce, even if it’s only to collect an e-ticket at the airport. Social media is more disruptive to organisations than any technology to date, because it is social. Social media is about people and groups of people interacting more openly than ever before, while the boundaries of the organisation blur.

So I do think that Execs that don’t get social media will become obsolete, if not in this decade, then the next one.

31 May 2011

Cheap social media makes marketers lazy

Just as I entered a meeting with a colleague and one of the founders of The Social Media Leadership Forum I happened up this article on the daily enews bulletin from Marketing Week.

Let me paraphrase the premise, junior marketers are over using social media because it is perceived as low cost and that finance managers care more about return on investment than cost and are by default encouraging this.
We kicked it around and although we had some sympathy for the sentiment, I don’t buy any of it.

So as the charge came from with our profession here is my response. The basis of successful marketing stands, and indeed underpins all successful campaigns. I.e. target messages of a well researched proposition at a target audience you understand and will perceive the value they can extract from your proposition - that it is greater than any alternative.

The channel we choose to use to deliver the messages is informed more by our knowledge of the customer not just the cost of delivering the message. Social, and digital media more generally, are just some of the possible channels. A practicing marketer that ignores all possible ways of effectively engaging their client is lazy full stop. Not just lazy because they are using social media at the expense of the alternatives/compliments.Just an aside to this, one of the largest growth areas for use of social media is a s a second screen to TV activity.

No longer do we have to wait until the next day to have a conversation beside the water cooler about what was on the box – we can share it with our network through Facebook and Twitter as it happens. Link this new trend of dual screens (the TV and your social media device) and we could see a major resurgence in big ticket above the line TV advertising. The pursuit of which is anything but lazy.

17 May 2011

Just because it's difficult, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it


A friend told me about an online industry community she had invested her firm's money and time in over the past year. She has worked hard to cajole her colleagues into producing blogs on their areas of expertise, take part in discussion threads and even post videos from conferences and C level executives.

In spite of this effort, she just couldn’t seem to get her business behind the channel. In particular, her firm consistently failed to input to the topics the community were most engaged about as effectively as her competitors.

Despite the success of her company’s competitors had shown in increased engagement and sales, despite the investment already made and the apparent opportunity the growing community presented; A committee of recently appointed managers cancelled the initiative's budget, because changing the way her organisation operated was seen to be 'just too hard.'

I learned early in my career as a marketing manager at one of the largest organisations in the world that just because something was hard to do, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. This wasn’t the mantra of the business, but my line manager. A man in his late thirties that had risen rapidly to run a pan European US$200 million turnover division and was perceived by his peers to have the alchemist's touch. How had he done this, he changed the businesses he ran to be responsive to whatever clients valued. Even if that meant finding new ways of working.

So often in marketing we look to external solutions to achieve our commercial objectives. A different place to advertise, a new event, a bigger or better web site to push our products and services. When in fact, we should simply address the hardest challenge of them all first; Create an effective business that engages in and responds to what our communities are really interested in.

5 things to tell your colleagues that still don’t get social media

1/ It’s active, even if you’re not
Even if you or your business is not actively listening or engaging with your customers in social media, your business, product, industry, advocates, detractors are being talked about. My own firm is talked about with mainly positive and neutral sentiment hundreds of times a month on Twitter alone. Our products and industry is mentioned hundreds of times an hour.

2/ Social media is principally an online representation of what happens in the real world
In the real world we share news, photos of our children, birthday wishes and invitations, just as at work we invite clients to events, talk about products and share results. I appreciate that not everyone we work with has friends or anything interesting to say. For those that do, social media has proven itself as the easiest and most immediate way to share.

3/ What we do online stays online
I am not convinced privacy is dead, but the super injunction nonsense of the past few weeks illustrates that it is probably on its last legs. So be careful, by all means. Contrary to point 2, don’t do everything online that you would do offline, it sticks.


A large part of the success of Linked In is due to its online representation of our CVs (Resumes). Now it is a universal truth, not widely discussed, that everyone’s CVs contain a little fiction. Don’t fall into this trap, social media allows everything to be checked and verified.

4/ If you don’t engage in social media, your competitors will
Social media is by no means ubiquitous, certainly not in the developed world. But it will be. Orkut, a Facebook me too in Brazil has 84% penetration and continues to grow. Similarly renren and 51 in China, Vkontakte in Russia and Bharatstudent in India all have following on a scale that would dwarf the populations of some small European states.

Social media will become a default communications tool for most people under the age of 40 by the time the football World Cup reaches Russia in 2018, especially in the fastest growing economies with the youngest demographics such as the BRIC nations. Corporate websites will become increasingly obsolete as communities interested in a topic or product come together online, with or without your business.

Successful businesses are finding the communities that are interested in their solutions, and listen to the conversation before engaging.

5/ The big numbers aren’t the true story
Facebook is predicted to have a billion users by the end of 2012, and social media will reach 90% penetration of all internet users in 2013. By the summer of 2012, half of all mobile phone users in Europe will use smart phones. In the UK, nearly 26 million adults have Facebook accounts. Of all UK Facebook users, 50% are over 36.

However, the power of social media is isn’t in its scale alone, it is in the quality everyone’s connections. People for time in memorial have asked people they trust before making a purchase, and social media has accelerated this. Amazon understands it, and the travel industry is coming to grips with it through Trip Advisor. Havas Media’s research in 2010 found 62% of UK shoppers consult online communities before buying and 34% have looked at an online review at least once before making a purchase.

Which takes us nicely back to point 1. Social media is active, even if you are not.

09 May 2011

Get off my business case


Continuation of my look below the surface on B2B social media…


Let’s kick off with some controversy ;-).


I am a ‘value based’ marketer. In fact, it was reading Peter Doyle’s book of the same title when I was studying my Post Graduate Diploma in Marketing that I decided that I needed to go further and get an MBA so that I could one day influence a whole organisation to the concept. (Even Kotler said the book could spark Mareting revolution).


If you are new to the approach, I recommend you look into how it can work for you. In the meantime, value based marketing is based on delivering shareholder value (in the form of return on investment/equity) based on delivering greater value to your customers (according to what they are prepared to pay) relative to your competition. There are countless examples of business that have consistently achieved this, First Direct Bank, Apple, Volkswagen and Starbucks.


So by extension, the concept goes that every marketing activity should be measured and reported in terms of shareholder value. Now as I said, I am a value based marketer, I think linking the sum of all marketing activity to shareholders returns is absolutely the right way to go. It drives the correct behaviours in the marketing function and delivers the right outcomes for the businesses ultimate owners.


However, I have had more than my fair share of exposure to management accounting at under grad, through my MBA, and from some very real experience at Honeywell. I draw the line at the minutiae of job costing including every single overhead. Firstly, because the calculation enters the realm of diminishing returns, secondly, because I don’t think the calculation adds any insight to the marketing led management decisions, and thirdly because it’s a faff.


So where’s the controversy? Well, having established I am not going to, and nor would advocate you should, measure the value of every single marketing activity, I recommend you don’t get drawn on applying some different set of metrics to social media. Yes it’s new, yes it may need an additional FTE to monitor pages or shepherd content, but that’s a marketing exec, not an administrator. A marketing exec should be adding value to every administrative task, and aligning those tasks to shareholder value (through adding value to clients).


We can’t realistically track any sale to a single brochure, single exhibition stand or video blog on our web site. It’s not even just down to the tender document we responded to. It is the sum of all these activities integrated to tell a single story that offers greater value to the client, relative to the cost of purchase and what our competitors offer.


I discussed this at the Finextra conference with another delegate from a Bank, they told me they did measure the value f every single activity, whether that be a stand at an event for thousands or an intimate event for a handful of clients, but they couldn’t tell me how they linked a sale to a specific marketing interaction, or be precise about how may pounds of revenue were returned for every pond of marketing expenditure. But they did have 3 people dedicated to generating spurious metrics that strangely enough, they always exceeded.


If you disagree, I would like to hear from you. As a committed value based marketer, I remain open to resolving this. But in the meantime, the case for B2B social media remains as and increasingly essential tool to support business developers broaden and deepen their relationships to sell more, whatever you produce. And how to measure how successful you are that? I think they call that dividends, or in other words, shareholder value…