An introduction to social media, just in case you've been living in a cave for the last few years. Key implications for marketers, basic social media strategy, who owns your brand.
20. Thank you. Questions? Carry on the conversation… @acatinatree [email_address] www.mindshareworld.com
Editor's Notes
Social media refers to platforms, technologies and tools that enable social interaction, information sharing and discussion online. 24/7 Real time Immediate Peer to peer User generated content No physical borders Social media platforms and networks: Real-time web chat and instant messaging Social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn….) Video sharing websites (Vimeo, YouTube…) Photo sharing websites (Flickr, Photobucket...) Micro-blogging sites (Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed…) Geo-social networks (Foursquare, RallyUp, Gowalla…) Blogs (including corporate and personal blogs and comments…) Forums and discussion boards (e.g. Whirlpool, Yahoo! Groups or Google Groups) Wikis Podcasts
Obligatory stats slide. Fish where the fish are 1. Facebook – 10,436,860 users in Australia 2. Youtube – 9.8 million UAVs / mo (down 100,000) 3. Blogspot – 4.6 UAVs / mo (down 1,000,000,) 4. WordPress.com – 2.1 million UAVs / mo (down 200,000) 5. LinkedIn – 2 million UAVs / mo (steady) 6. Twitter – 1.9 million UAVs / mo (steady) 7. Flickr – 1.5 million UAVs / mo (steady) 8. Tumblr – 1.5 million UAVs / mo (up 600,000) 9. MySpace – 930,000 UAVs / mo (down 70,000) 10. StumbleUpon – 150,000 UAVs / mo (steady) 11. Digg – 140,000 UAVs / mo (down 20,000) 12. Reddit – 100,000 UAVs / mo (steady) 13*. Foursquare 63,000 UAVs / mo (steady) 14. Delicious – 59,000 UAVs / mo (down 17,000) 15*. Gowalla – no data, May 2011 was 9,500 UAVs / mo .
Three key implications IMPLICATIONS: Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Markets are conversations (Cluetrain):holds true But everyone produces content –the 90:90:10 rule is over. 20% of content is UGC (user generated content) 100% is USC (user shared content)
Disintermediation Overloaded with data = Scarcity of attention -actively block advertising Content proliferation means consumers need help to find what they need. Google is not enough. Peer networks, trusted sources of information become increasingly important Filtering is critical. Instant search is back on the agenda– learning your responses, serving up more targeting content – personalising what you find – ambient personalisation Brands: need better content to achieve cut-through in a world where there is too much data to humanly process Ownership becomes redundant. Sharing is more important than protecting source of content 37.2 GB of data would be produced per minute if we tried to track 500 million Facebook users in real time. 16 petabytes per year. The more information we have, the more the value of those datasets reduces.
It’s a new age. An age where an army of loud, superempowered, dissatisfied customers control your brand. Shift in balance of power towards consumer Shift away from ‘advertising” and towards more engaging content that’s useful, adding value to users. Personalisation PR: out of your control. Brand reputation: can be destroyed in a matter of hours. Promotion: at the whim of your users. To maintain brand loyalty is to a) build advocacy b) Personalise brand (my brand my rules) Segmentation of spaces means brands can now be many things to many users: talk to users on one platform in one voice, users on another in a different voice / different content The bigger the brand the bigger the backlash – sites like BrandKarma are not yet mainstream but clearly signpost the way things are moving e.g: BP –the official Twitter account to manage the oil spill crisis effectively hijacked: http://twitter.com/bp_america 18,460 followers A satirical account mocking and undermining BP’s crisis comms: http://twitter.com/bpglobalpr 187,931 followers
Privacy is dead. There is no separation of public, private, personal or professional identity Everyone is connected to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Facebook’s Open Social Graph is just the start. Tracking data and sharing info is decentralised The future is an almost completely open set of interacting networks where 99.99% of interaction between people is public (due to eradication of privacy concerns). Our connections and networks are no longer segmented into business and personal. (Already a trend in APAC where LinkedIn and Facebook are becoming interchangeable) B2B marketing and lead generation via social networks. Social CRM – we expect companies we’ve done business with to remember who we are, what we like, how we like it…
Observe and understand the conversations Discover the platforms relevant to your audience Gain insight Set benchmarks Understand landscape
Tom Cruise monitors the thoughts and feelings of millions of people simultaneously to manage risk of anti-social behaviour in 2002’s Minority Report
http://mashable.com/2010/06/15/gatorade-social-media-mission-control/ Gatorade Social Media Mission Control monitors the thoughts and feelings of millions of people simultaneously to manage risk of negative brand sentiment On a day-to-day basis, Gatorade’s tools are also being used for more conventional marketing tactics –- like optimizing landing pages and making sure followers are being sent to the top performing pages. As an example, the company says it’s been able to increase engagement with its product education (mostly video) by 250% and reduce its exit rate from 25% to 9%.
own the online space domains, social profile usernames relating to brand, products negative domaining www.yourbrandnamesucks.com
Monitoring : This is about listening in on conversations that you might not have known were occurring. Look at keywords, Wang advised, and start by searching your company name and maybe your competitor's name. Use monitoring to figure out who your biggest advocates are. "Figure out influential people and communities and then think about tying this together,” Mapping: What's the point of company Twitter account if you aren't following your customers? And, what's the point of making Twitter a process if you don't connect Twitter to your CRM? "This is not just a technology problem, this is a process problem; you need to ask, ‘Can we have your Twitter handle and your Facebook page? Give it to us so we can help you.'" Get customers to map their profiles for you. Management: Once you establish where your customers are on the social Web, how do you handle the noise? There are a lot of business processes and rules within current CRM systems that can be leveraged to handle social data. Without a purpose, social data is not actionable. Middleware: ties social systems with CRM and customer service solutions. It's very possible to build business rules, test them, change them and manage them to make social media much like any other business process. Measurement: Numerous tools on the market that provide dashboards to establish and track goals and progress. The key is in establishing goals before taking action. "Rely on data to provide benchmarks and trending,” "Add mobile, geo-spatial, sentiment [data] and you've got some pretty good insight."
Framework Social media guidelines When Immediately Who Executive level Where Have accounts prepared and know the logins How Natural, human What Honest, transparent assessment and next steps
Make the point that it’s already somewhat happening to global brands – pictures of Nestle’s share price after social media backlash re. Kitkat via Facebook The bigger the brand the bigger the backlash Where does social live in organisational terms? Merging of frontline customer service and public relations– super fast response needed but no time to formulate “pr’d response” Future of social media for corporate comms: requires disaster management tactics even for small brands. Prepare an A-Z of scenarios – prepared response for multiple (infinite?) possibilities You don’t have time to ask the legal team to approve –all comms must be pre-prepared Statement for almost every nightmare scenario in the hands of frontline comms team, immediate response pre-scripted, fast escalation to relevant team / stakeholder
(NOW) http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20018883-36.html No one is immune: even Gap, who’ve been lauded for their early adoption, customer service and social media innovation (Check-in to any Gap on Foursquare, and you will receive a 25% discount on your purchases) have just received a mighty kicking on Twitter for their new logo – because they didn’t seek input from their fans / friends / advocates "Thanks for the logo buzz!" the company posted to Twitter. "After 20+ years, it's time for a change. We like the new one, but want to see your ideas." too little, too late: because your customers own your brand, not you. FB comment: "the only thing that could make the new logo worse is if you had used Comic Sans...or Papyrus,"
Reiterate: Ultra-targeted, hugely specified – marketing opps Super empowered consumer – risk and opportunity Brand personalisation – technological solution Multiple channels – integrated strategy, comms, tech platforms, ambient, outdoor Marketing – customer service – pr –comms – tech: seamless integration to deliver customer commitment, not campaigns