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Archive for June 2011
I was in Venice at our annual ITT travel conference this month and was treated to some of the pearls of business wisdom from ex Tesco chief Sir Terry Leahy which are simple but very powerful:
1. Find the truth
2. Audacious goals
3. Vision, Values and Culture
- Tesco’s were very simple so all staff could embrace them:
Vision
- No 1 Choice in UK
- Be as strong in non food as in food
- Become leader in global retailing
Values
- No one tries harder for the customer
- Treat people how we like to be treated
4. Follow the customer
5. The steering wheel
6. People, processes and systems
7. Data is priceless
8. Competition is good
9. Leadership – go further than you would go on your own.
© Sir Terry Leahy
Sir Terry also talked about the drivers of growth such as trust, information, health, convenience, simplicity, loyalty and going green. He talked about how they use their balanced score card to improve performance on things that matter to their customers. They actually bought the data mining company Dunn Humby that they used when launching their club card.
The key takeout for me was his view that the more involved the customer is in your business, the more loyal they are. This is where social media offers so many opportunities and yet many companies have still not made it easy for their customers to share great experiences via Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Delicious and other sharing tools. In fact a survey of the top 100 travel brands by think tank L2 in their Digital IQ index found that only 20% were using the “like” button on their website and only 9% were using customer reviews on their website. This represents a huge opportunity to amplify your word of mouth and yet companies are dragging their feet about using these tools.
Source:
L2 Digital IQ index
What’s more the survey even showed that those companies which have got user reviews and have social sharing on their websites were showing much higher traffic growth than those that were not over the period March 2010 to March 2011 as shown below.
Source: L2 Digital IQ index
So if you need more proofs just let me know. What’s stopping you from letting your customers share good stuff on your site?
Next week I’ll share thoughts on more learnings from the Venice speakers and a quick update on what’s new and cool in social media for those that don’t have time to trawl through all the latest updates.
Posted: 28/06/2011 09:40:11
My view is that many companies in the travel industry are not embracing social media and are just “playing at it”. There are plenty of dead travel communities full of sales speak that bear witness to this. Several travel companies have had to take down their social sites as they were not able to cope when they launched their Facebook pages as they had not thought through how they would respond. The sceptics reading this may well point to the recent plateau in the number of UK and US Facebook users as evidence that the social media bubble has burst as UK loses 100,000 of its 30million users in May 2011. However the issue is the myriad of ill conceived pages launched and not that social media is not powerful.
Cultural change
Social media is about “two way conversations”, relationship management and “cultural change” and there are few UK travel companies that fully understand this. Virgin and Center Parcs are focused on engagement but many others pay lip service. This does not only mean the two way customer conversation with the organisation but the conversation between customers and influencers. Many brands have chosen to ignore them and my questions to Thomas Cook and TUI at the Institute of Travel and Tourism conference in Venice prove that few companies and tourist boards are actually monitoring these travel conversations. Questions go unanswered, incorrect brand perceptions become reality and broken links continue to plague third party customer review sites where the travel conversations are happening. To add to this many hotels ignore their poor reviews as it’s all too difficult to engage. The same conference presentation from Trip Advisor showed that when customers are faced with two similar reviews they are more likely to pick the property where the owner or manager has responded to any negative comments rather than one where they have remained silent.
Look outside your sector for best practice
I think the industry needs to work with other industry sectors to understand how to move their business to become more social by empowering employees to be social. This is where training, company policies and processes will differentiate the possible winners from the losers.
Cross functional effort and evangelists needed
If you want to succeed at social media you have to first map out how social media is going to support your overall business and customer objectives. You need to work in cross functional teams and work hard on educating the board on how these channels have changed customer buying behaviour, so you need evangelists.
Focus on customer pain points
You need to focus on how social channels can help to solve any pain points that your customers have. You have to look at a long term view as embracing social networks has far reaching impacts on your company culture, traditional structures and ways of working. You can choose to view this as exciting or too scary and stick to how you’ve always done things and see your business slowly eroded by a new breed of competitor with “crowdsourcing” business models like Groupon or Living Social and auction sites like Priceline.
Forget silo compaigns
Social media that is driven from a silo PR or marketing perspective is doomed to failure. Those agencies focused on social campaigns and throwing up Twitter and Facebook pages without a strategy are taking their clients down the wrong path. Putting up a page with fancy graphics is the easy bit – the hard bit is what you are going to do about the customer feedback you receive.
No quick fix solution
It is not easy – there is no quick and dirty way to do social media. You need to process map how you will deal with the types of customer feedback you will receive on these channels and speed up your responses to meet their expectations. 28 day response times to customer issues demanded by snail mail are no longer acceptable. You can’t predict all that will happen but you need to see that embracing social can provide a myriad of benefits to all areas of your business including innovation, new product and services and motivation of your staff if they are recognised by your fans and followers and rewarded appropriately.
What’s the end game?
Whilst the number of fans and followers are important it is not the end game. The key important metrics are advocacy and engagement with your influencers and customers who are influencing potential customers. The value of the experience that you deliver on these social channels will drive advocacy and engagement and companies cannot continue to broadcast as before – it does not work. Customers want to be treated as individuals.
Plenty of proofs
If you read about the Financial Times strategy they have learnt that they earn more from their social media referrals than from any other source
[2]. They claim that Linkedin users are 6 times more likely to subscribe and Facebook referrals are 3 times more likely than other sources to subscribe. There are plenty of proofs
[3] on the value of social media but many companies have just dumped it in the “too hard” box, buried their heads in the sand and brought in a junior marketing exec to throw up their social pages. As we know social media overtook search traffic last year accounting for 12.4% of all time spent online in the UK
[4].
Those companies that have embraced social media channels and have trained and empowered their people to use social networks are the ones that are having the most success. Companies that still ban most of their employees from using social networks and who are not using social tools internally to improve collaboration, responsiveness and innovation are the ones that will lose out.
[3] http://www.face-marketing.com/Blogs/June-2011/Show-me-the-Social-Media-proofs-for-ROI.aspx
[4] Source: http://blogs.ft.com/fttechhub/2011/03/brits-spend-more-time-on-social-media-than-anything-else-online/
Posted: 21/06/2011 13:17:28
Here are some top 10 tips to improve awareness and stickiness of your blogs if you have one of those blogs with few eyeballs. If you are looking at the pros and cons of doing it yourself versus outsourcing the task to bloggers or copywriters, this blog should also help you.
1. Consistency and Content Plans matter
It’s worth checking if you have people in your business to write blogs for you but also think about your business partners, customers, suppliers and others who could help with the task. Consistency is as important as quality so it’s often best to take a team approach. Make sure you have a content plan showing key weekly themes at least two months ahead so you’re not scrambling for ideas each week.
2. Website visitors won’t read dense text
Make sure your copy has short sentences and uses subtitles as our attention span is getting shorter. Include links to improve interest and to drive inbound traffic to your website if you are hosting your blogs on 3rd party sites.
3. Ensure all posts are ranked and searchable
Ideally rank your blogs by popularity with an archive and blog titles so readers can scan quickly.
4. Add Facebook “like” Twitter “retweet” and Linked in “share” buttons
Make it easy to share to share your content with others by adding these buttons. These help to build confidence that you have good content and will encourage others to share. Don’t forget to ask your readers to share and comment aswell.
5. Emotions count
If you want people to share your content you need to generate an emotional response so think about the emotions your copy could create. Dean Hunt features a blog that proves that appealing to emotions and lists with an average of seven points can work very well.
6. A picture often speaks a thousand words
Add a photo as this helps to build interest in your blog and can help to stimulate an emotion so people will share more.
7. Recognise your “active” readers
Keep a track of anyone who retweets or shares your content and thank them for this – send them a quick private message, it will build friendships and a community around your writing. Include links to your blogs in your email newsletters and make it easy to share them and to make a comment. Don’t make readers go through a long registration process to make a comment. Remember to ask your subscribers how they heard about you. Thank those that are sharing your newsletters, posts and links.
8. Do your due diligence
If you are planning to outsource your writing to a blogger then make sure they have a good track record. Check on how much their existing web copy is shared and commented upon. This will give you a good indication of their ability to build engagement with readers.
9. Test your titles and blog
You can test your blog titles in Google Reader and see which key words and phrases have generated the largest number of searches. You can also test how effective your blog is by using the free tool from Hubspot called bloggrader. It will point to any weaknesses in the way your blog has been set up.
10. Create a feed
Don’t forget to ensure your blog has an RSS feed so people can subscribe to it. Submit it to sites such as feedburner and ensure you create links to your blogs on bookmarking sites like digg, delicious and stumbleupon to improve its distribution and number of eyeballs reading it.
Summary
Check closely on the level of engagement that each post creates. In many cases only 1-5% of your readers may post a comment but a higher percentage may be persuaded to share something if you ask them. If you found this blog useful, please share with others. If you would like to know more about social media then join us at our free social media webinar on Monday 27th June at 6pm GMT. Click here to find out more.
Post a comment and tell us what you issues you are wrestling with and what other topics you’d like to see covered in this social media section.
Posted: 14/06/2011 01:02:51
In response to Keith William’s
comments last week on my social media blog at
Enterprise Britain I thought I would provide some “proofs” that demonstrate that social media can deliver a return on investment.
To address Keith’s healthy scepticism I thought I would focus on how to measure your social media and examples of companies who have invested in social media and what they have achieved.
Benefits from using social media
First let’s look at some recent research with marketers on the benefits they are seeing from social media. In the Social Media Marketing Industry survey published in April 2011 by Michael Stelzner there are key improvements marketers are seeing from using social media in 2010 versus the 2009 survey.
[1]
© Michael Stelzner Social Media Marketing Industry Survey
An extra 9% of marketers said that social media had increased traffic and subscribers for their business and an extra 8% said that it had improved their search engine rankings. A recent Amex survey showed that mid sized companies (3-10mUSDm air volume) were the largest adopters of social media as 59% of them were now using it to support their business travel management.
[2]
Key research from The Influenced report
[3] into consumer search behaviour showed that consumers who are exposed to a brand in social media are 2.4 times more likely to search for that brand’s products downstream when on the internet.
Recent research from The Hubspot showed that companies with blogs were getting on average 55% more visitors and 97% more inbound links than those sites which had no blog. It’s worth using Hubspot’s free website grader
[4] and blog grader
[5] to test the quality of both as the reports really helped me to figure out how I can optimise them even further. You can also test your website and blog score versus your competitors.
So who’s getting some results?
Retail
Here are a couple of examples of companies which are getting results with social media:
This company embraced social media from day 1 and was acquired by Amazon. It had $1.2 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2009 and only started trading in 1999. It’s an impressive 10 year record with success largely attributed to everyone at the company using social media. Compare that with the 55% of companies elsewhere that are still not allowing their employees to use social media to help them with their marketing efforts. Zappos was acquired by Amazon in 2009.
I also found an interesting list of websites getting good ROI using social media on Slideshare dating back to 2009.
[6] For those of you that have not yet used it Slideshare is a useful tool for loading up useful presentations which you can then load onto your Linkedin personal or company profile. They make it a bit easier for visitors to learn more about what you do. Your presentations can also be optimized by also inserting a video clip on the first slide aswell to bring them to life.
One of the company examples was that of
Threadless which uses social media and “crowd sourcing” to create designs for its T-shirts. What interested me was that more than two years later, when I type in Threadless into Google, the company dominates the first page of Google and no other company gets any visibility. It has used its many social media channels such as Facebook. Twitter and its Wikipage to ensure that it gets maximum first page Google rankings. This company was claimed back in 2009 to be making £10m in profit on £30m sales in an industry that you might claim is mature and commoditized. Its Facebook page has more than 286,000 fans and it’s
Twitter page has over 1.6m followers. It describes itself as a “community based company” that involves its fans in the design of its product. An interview
[7] with the CEO showed that sales in 2006 hit $18 million -- with profits of roughly $6 million. In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins. Unfortunately they do not disclose their latest financials but interestingly 75% of their employees came from their community which must save on their recruitment costs..
Another video that is well worth watching was made back in December 2009 so remember that the number of Facebook fans are now at 700million rather than 300 million. It was made by Erik Qualman who wrote Socialnomics and I trust that it has helped to convince the 349,000 viewers who have already watched it and will convince you to see the value of social media. It contains a host of B2B and B2C examples of companies making money using social media showing that Ford now spends 25% of its budget on social media.
Remember to ask this one key question
As I discover more examples I will share them with you. I can vouch for clients that I have worked with that we were tracking thousands of pounds of sales from the first couple of months of launching Facebook. However you need to make sure that you can measure any clickthroughs from your posts through to your booking engine and subsequent sales. The million dollar question to ask every buyer, on whichever channel they subsequently buy from you, is “How did you hear about us?” You may be surprised by the answers.
Do share the names of any companies you know are making money with social media. If you like this blog please share it with your colleagues. I love feedback so go ahead and give your views. What’s stopping you from investing in social media?
Posted: 02/06/2011 13:11:29