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Archive for May 2011
I read with interest Keith Williams' post today entitled “Marketing and Selling in the Digital Age” thinking I would learn about digital marketing but what I did learn is that someone who has clearly understood the fundamentals of marketing has not understood how social media could make his communications that much more effective.
It’s a common problem that many companies are wrestling with. They think that all they have to do is stick up their Facebook and Twitter page and their fans and followers will appear. Just as people thought in the last dotcom bubble that all we had to do was build our website and they will come. But they don’t. We have to listen first and monitor what our customers are saying about us. That’s the beauty of social media as it helps us to do just that. We can use Google Alerts and other tools such as Netvibes to track the conversations then we have to work out how we can best help them.
We have to offer something of value to engage with our customers. Over the years companies have made it harder and harder to reach them. Many no longer offer any head office number or helpline, just premium telephone lines or emails. Their increasing isolation has meant that they have lost touch and now they want to reconnect and are struggling, but that is not the fault of digital marketing.
In the interests of cutting costs we have excommunicated ourselves from the customers who we need to better understand. How things have come full circle yet again. So whilst we struggle to find a telephone number there are now endless new communities where other brands encourage consumers to share their best deals, insights, frustrations, rants and ideas.
I sense that Keith is really bemoaning the good old days of face to face interactions which many companies now moan they cannot afford as their customer acquisition costs are too high. To answer Keith’s question as to “why can’t the Web produce better contact to order ratios” – the reasons are many but include:
-We cover our websites with marketing speak and not the voice of other customers which are trusted so much more
- Customers go elsewhere to find the answers to their questions if they can’t find them on the site
- Web visitors give up trying to fathom out how to get to the shopping basket. They can’t get past the fancy flashy screens that the web designer thinks are really cool and click away, never to return.
- Companies fail to reassure you that the site is encrypted or share a privacy policy on how they will use your personal data.
Few companies other than ebay and a handful of others, make it easy to post a review on our shopping experience. We have to work harder to build trust when we ask customers to share their personal details.
However social media has already changed how people communicate and how business and people are now buying. People have conversations on Facebook with many individuals not just one. People don’t buy through one channel any more. They form their opinions from a raft of different channels and interactions that they have with their colleagues, friends and family. Some of your customers may have already checked into your Facebook Places Page without you even being there to welcome them.
I sense that Keith thinks we will continue to buy things like we have done in the past but we are now grouping together on the web and going elsewhere to get views from our social networks before we go near any company salesperson, website or representative to make a purchase. Customers are making purchase decisions on their terms from their own research using trusted networks that they control and not based on a sales pitch from a salesperson. If they are not happy with something they can quickly galvanise their average 120 Facebook friends into boycotting a product or raising awareness of an issue very fast. Witness the recent Twitter phenomenon and injunctions with famous footballers. There is no double that Twitter or YouTube will be one of the first places any breaking news will be found and not on the mainstream media channels. The fear that celebrities and companies have of social media and the damage it can create to their hard earned reputations and brands are very real.
We have a huge toolkit of applications that we can use to stay close to our networks. I agree that it’s hard to keep up with all the tweets and messages and we need the platforms to help make sense of it all. It was a key question that came up in our Social Media Summit. This was not attended by a few individuals but conducted by webinar with almost 2,000 people gathered from across the globe. Social media has shrunk the world. I can as easily assist my colleagues from the US with their social media challenges as I can my neighbour next door.
Just because we have not had the opportunity to see the colour of someone’s eyes does not mean that we cannot build an online friendship or purchase something from them – just witness the explosive growth in dating sites. Some of what Keith says I agree with 100 per cent, such as listening to your customers, staying close to them and not talking at them. Social media will never be the holy grail to sales unless we apply the same relationship building skills that we use offline. Keep sharing your social media frustrations and learning, it helps me to understand how best to help.
Posted: 25/05/2011 14:38:14
I thought some healthy debate is in order on whether social media wastes time or saves money. I learnt last week in the social media success summit #SMSS11 with Mari Smith that Thursdays and Fridays are often good days for making Facebook posts, showing we use Facebook more as we approach the weekend. As so many of the UK population already has smart phones (see my
blog last week with all the usage stats) there is nothing that any employer can really do to police this other than ban mobile phone usage. This has happened in some contact centres as companies are told to comply with the new payment card industry (PCI) processing regulations to minimise card fraud.
However there are a lot of organisations which have not just banned Facebook but have banned all social media channels, including Linkedin. This means that they are missing out on key opportunities to harness ideas from their customers and partners, save money and to bring in more leads and revenues for their business.
From the evidence emerging from the US which is further down the social media learning curve, it is only when most employees are empowered and trained to use social media that they are seeing huge increases in productivity and revenues, especially in retail. A recent social media summit seminar
[1] showed how a Nordstrom front line employee was able to tweet his customers on the latest stock and deals most relevant to them, by knowing his customer preferences. This helped conversion, repeat purchase and provided a much more personal service.
Here are the top 10 ways that social media can save your organisation money:
1. It can save you a fortune on hiring people – those companies using Linkedin to advertise their vacancies are saving recruitment fees of 20-30% and are able to tap into a much wider pool of 100m users worldwide.
2. You can pre-test products and services before launch or as Guy Kawasaki
[2] would say to “premortem” your launches so you never have to do a post-mortem and wonder why your product or service launch failed. I’m amazed how many companies are still paying for expensive indepth face to face research with customers when they can do this online by engaging with their social media fans and followers.
3. You can “crowd source” and test ideas and designs for your marketing materials with your target audience which will save you time and effort which is what Guy did when he launched his book Enchantment
[3].
4. You can use features like the Facebook “reveal” tab to build loyalty and repeat purchase by offering them more content in exchange for sharing more information about themselves or with their friends. This brings more customer intelligence to tailor your products and services and more leads and market exposure for your services. If you assume that the average fan has 120 friends that can soon make a big difference to awareness. If you are starting out, those first 500-1000 fans and their 60-120,000 friends can help you reach the “tipping point” when referrals start to multiply more quickly as the “network effect” kicks in. That’s if you have given them enough value to want to share it.
5. You can use features like “Recommend” on Linkedin to do the due diligence on your prospective employees, partners and customers to review their networks and partnerships to check if they will be suitable for your business. You can use this same feature on your Linkedin company page and your website to show reviews and recommendations for your products, services and company which
Dell has rolled out. This shows me they have 187 recommendations and 7 of my connections have already recommended them which builds trust.
6. You can use the Facebook Connect and other plug ins on your website to enable your guests to
- like, share and tweet about their shopping experience with their friends across all
their social media channels
- view what is the most popular product and service
- see who in their network has also recommended your product or service
This helps to build trust to drive up conversion rates. Your Facebook Insights area also shows you the profile and location of your fans and appeal of your posts to help improve the efficiency of your marketing and communications.
7. You can use the Linkedin events feature to save money and build awareness of who is coming to your events – this transparency often drives more sign ups as users see that their connections are coming so they book too.
8. By creating and joining Linkedin groups, forums or blogs you can support your customers, partners and staff to blog, ask and answer questions, thus building engagement and learning more about your prospect needs and questions, during the all important pre-purchase phase. This helps lead generation.
9. YouTube videos can show how your products and services are being used. Organisations are starting to see reductions in their customer call servicing costs as experienced customers and partners are empowered to share their insights which are watched by others. This benefit is as relevant to B2B companies as to B2C ones.
10. You can use social media channels to “crowd source” offers which mean that your customers put in the effort to find the additional raft of customers to create a volume driven step change in sales.
Sites such as
Living Social and
Groupon are not the only sites doing this. FMCG companies such as Proctor and Gamble are now actively encouraging the sharing of coupon offers in customer communities like
Supersavvyme to drive up volume sales and to gather more data on their end customers. This improves targeting and saves them investing in expensive “above the line” campaigns such as radio and TV.
So how do you minimise the risk of social channels wasting your employee time and generate revenues and cut costs? The key is to ensure that you have a usage policy that everyone understands. You need to train staff, partners and customers on how to use the tools to add value to their relationships and make their lives easier. They need to be ethical in how they use social media so that disclosures are made if they need to be. Otherwise your hard work could unravel quickly and destroy trust – the most fragile aspect of any relationship.
[1] Source: Social Media Success Summit 2011 - David Meerman Scott
[2] Source: Social Media Success Summit 2011 – Guy Kawasaki
[3] “Enchantment - The art of changing hearts, minds and actions” Guy Kawasaki
Posted: 19/05/2011 18:35:54
For those of you still undecided about mobile applications for your customers, I thought I would share some data on the rapid growth in the ownership of smartphones in the UK which may prompt some action. Having just read the latest Wired
[1] article on the “Android Invasion”, it is clear that although iPhone has been one of the most popular phones, Android is forecast to dominate market share in the smartphone market.
Of course the first place to start for any company wanting to develop a smart phone application is to research your own customer base and focus on what your most valuable customers are using and how frequently. Companies such as First Direct have been quite surprised by the high usage of their iPhone application and their “Talking Point” comments suggests that their customers are badgering them to get their Android application ready as soon as possible.
Research company
comScore published the smartphone uptake figures for Europe in April 2011 showing the UK market grew by 70% in the last year to more than 11 million smartphone users with 4m aged 18+ using Android. The UK with 22.9% smart phone ownership trails behind Italy with 32% and Spain with 28.3% but the recent rate of growth has been much higher in the UK.
There are a number of trends which should spur companies into dipping their toe into the world of mobile applications. Firstly recent research has shown that smartphone users of social platforms such as Facebook use these networks twice as often as those using them on the PC
[2] and once users buy a smartphone their usage of the internet increases rapidly. Social commerce is also starting to go mainstream as travel companies and retailers embed their search engines and shopping baskets within their Facebook pages – (blog to follow on this topic). I found a very colourful infographic from Madras Geek in Facebook which illustrates nicely some of these trends
[3], showing that already 50% of Twitter’s 165million use Twitter mobile.
In addition smartphones are now used by 250m of the nearly 600m Facebook users so they are no longer a small minority. Often you will see the iPhone or HTC name listed on your Facebook fan postings so you can start to look at your fan posts to see the prevalence of each device.
UK smartphone ownership shows Android ahead according to a YouGov[4] poll of 2,000 adults for Intelligent Environments, a digital banking provider:
28% Android,
26% iPhone
14% BlackBerry.
Interestingly this poll also showed that the profile and behaviour of each type of phone user varied.
- Android users were most likely to spend time mapping and planning travel
34% rated this in the top three "apps'', compared with BlackBerry and Apple at 28%.
- Blackberry users had higher average income levels over £50,000
- iPhone ownership of 42% was much more dominant in London versus 15% for Android and 11% for Blackberries.
Given all the hype of the iPad and iPhone launches and sheer volume of their application downloads you might wonder why Android is poised to dominate. The Wired article demonstrates that the clear driver of growth is the sheer number of devices (170) that run on Android versus only 5 that use Apple’s operating systems. This is in addition to the benefits of the favourable deals that Android cut with Verizon which provides a stronger incentive for Verizon to push the application growth.
The ratio of Apple downloads to Android downloads has shifted from 50:1 in 2008 to 4:1 in 2010
[5]. The gloves are off and it’s going to be a tough battle ahead as to which platform will dominate. Rather than wait for the battle to play out, the growth stats suggest you are likely to be losing business to your competitors if you have not embraced the smart phone opportunity.
[1] Wired Magazine Android Invasion June 2011 edition pages 116- 121
[2] Mari Smith – Social Media Success Summit 2011
[5] Wired Magazine Android Invasion June 2011 edition pages 116- 121
Posted: 13/05/2011 18:36:11
I’ve had my head fixed in front of my PC the last few evenings learning by webinar more about social media from the US. I wanted to share some key learnings this week based on working with some clients and as a participant in the Social Media Success Summit 2011 (#SMSS11) run by Michael Stelzner in the US.
One of the key issues in social media is how best to structure the social media dashboard to ensure that the right people in the business have the right metrics to make the key decisions to move the business forward. In some cases the old adage “less is more” is very relevant and there is a danger of turning off the board by drowning them in statistics relating to the percentage of comments, active users, engagement rates and response rates. Boards already have key metrics that they use to run the business and they thrive on their profit and loss statements.
So the key challenge for the marketing and customer service teams (typically the initial owners of the social media initiatives before they migrate company wide) is how to present the right metrics to the board. The presentation by Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter last night nicely summed up that the Board and the Executive team are going to want very different metrics than those of the Community Managers and are more concerned with revenues, reputation and looking at reduced costs.
Just as we need to tailor our messages to the needs of each social media channel user, we need to tailor our metrics to our key audiences. This is why board education is also very important in ensuring that you move the whole organisation to embrace “social” like Dell or Zappos. This becomes a daunting prospect for Board members if they have not used the social media platforms themselves. Showing them how your customers are using social media is a good place to start and board education is a key component of making social media work for your organisation.
In the UK alone there are over 30 million Facebook users which makes the UK the third biggest community on Facebook after the US
[1] and there are already 250 million active mobile users who are twice as active as those using a PC. Can anyone guess the second biggest country? (answer below
[2])
The use of video to illustrate to the board how many people are already accessing social networks in your market and how often is also key for getting Board buy in to invest in social media and you will find many helpful videos already on YouTube. You can also demonstrate how video and social networks can be used to reduce recruitment costs using for example Linkedin job boards.
Many companies that have embraced social media and the web have experienced up to a 15% annual decline in call centre costs as their responses are so much more transparent and as their biggest advocates in their online communities start to help other fans. The key is to nurture and recognise these advocates who help other fans or followers.
Many companies think that social media is not relevant for B2B (Business to Business) companies and my argument is that it is just as relevant. Mari Smith
[3] nicely responded to questions on this point that the tipping point of 500-1000 followers on B2B networks like Linkedin can be just as relevant as on other social networks. In addition the process of identifying the influencers for your market is just as relevant for B2B companies, except they may be in different networks to those operating in the Business to Consumer (B2C) space.
If you are a B2B company, think about how you can connect with your suppliers, resellers and distributors and how social media could help them to share what works and how to improve your products or services. I was reviewing some very static FAQs on a manufacturing website this week and saw a lost opportunity. They could be on Facebook or Linkedin using Slideshare shared with their customers, reseller and distributor comments with video demos of how their products or service work. As we learnt from Steve Garfield if you are worried about production costs and compromising quality you can put user videos and lower cost videos on your blog or I would add your Linkedin company site. It then provides a different kind of user experience, without damaging your brand image. However we must remember that many prospective customers will be going to review sites and Linkedin industry groups for advice BEFORE they go to your website so you need to be in both places.
The key step is to start listening and learning what your customers will value and what they are already saying about you. Remember that if you click them off to a social media site you need to be sure you give them a valuable experience which leads them along that famous customer bonding staircase from awareness to advocacy. As the average Facebook fan has around 130 friends, that makes everyone’s job that much more efficient. Ensure that all your communications including emails make it easy for them to share on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and other social networks as they appear. Not all fans are created equal and the key is to motivate the magic 5-10% active fans that will deliver 80% of the future value. They will be the helpers and the influencers and you need engagement strategies for each type.
.
Keeping your board happier, and better informed about the pathway to real return on investment is key at this early stage in the evolution of social media.
If you are a B2B company what’s worked or not worked for you in social?
[2] 2nd biggest country on Facebook – Indonesia with 36million users.
[3] Mari Smith co-author of the book Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.
Posted: 05/05/2011 23:52:32