Social Media Leadership Forum

The Association of British Insurers – a leading UK Financial Services Trade Association – has just joined the Social Media Leadership Forum.

We are delighted to have them involved and look forward to their contributions and involvement especially with other members of the financial services community who form part of the membership.

Pearson – owners of the Financial Times, part owners of The Economist Group, and Penguin have just joined the Social Media Leadership Forum.

A warm welcome to them and we look forward to them joining with other members to share ideas and experiences on how best to develop social media strategies internally and externally

As The Social Media Leadership Forum gets ready for its forthcoming members session (May 23) looking at how the Olympics will use social media for the first time, it is interesting to see how Olympics coverage has evolved over the years:

(Click graphic to see full size version. Source: http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/social-media-olympics-infographic/)

By Justin Hunt

Use social media to tap the collective genius of your customers and employees was the message of Anthony Bradley, group vice president at Gartner Research, when he spoke with The Social Medial Leadership Forum last week.

He discussed how the management of CEMEX had used collaborative communities  to enable greater use of alternative fuels in its plants across the world. In the end using social technologies enabled engineers to accomplish in six weeks what would have normally taken two years.

FICO’s creation of forums to help people improve their credit score was another example of the business benefits that arise from these innovative approaches. FICO has grown sales through the mobilisation of this community.

Anthony’s mantra for success in this complicated field of collaborative communities is : Purpose. Communities need to be assigned a compelling purpose and communities need to be allowed to find a way to fulfil their purposes.

Welcome to the second edition of Social Business, a quarterly magazine that looks at the rapidly developing field of social media.  As before, this issue provides snapshots of the ways businesses embrace social networks as a means to make genuine relationships with customers.

Hiscox shows what can be achieved by getting involved in the entertainment world. The insurance firm commissioned a web TV comedy series called Leap Year, which enabled it to build from scratch an audience of 40,000 active social media followers in the US.  (If you have a spare ten minutes, watch the first episode on YouTube – you’ll enjoy it!).

Experience suggests that a careful approach to social media works best. In this issue we talk to Asda, which stresses the importance of having a smaller number of engaged followers than large numbers, and accordingly has allowed its presence on Twitter and Facebook to grow organically.

The Met Office spent a year watching how other businesses use social media before jumping in itself. Its efforts have helped to strengthen the already high levels of trust it enjoys with the British public – a crucial asset for a weather forecaster.

We hear from npower how it set up a public online forum to handle consumers queries, at a time of major upheaval in the energy markets.

We also learn from PepsicoUK about the role social media has played in marketing campaigns for its Tropicana and Walkers brands. And Dr. Andrew Currah records some of the top-line thoughts contained in his recent report on the social enterprise, examining the phenomenon of the ‘social customer’.

We hope you find the magazine useful and look forward to seeing you at future Social Media Leadership Forum events.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Social Business magazine – Q1, 2012 (PDF. 2.4Mb)

The fight against regulation

Politicians love to regulate, and with something as big and untrammelled as the internet in their sights they have plenty to work with.  But the internet is working just fine, and they should leave it alone, argue digital media commentators.

Internet freedoms are under threat as never before.  Governments everywhere are striving to control online activity, egged on by traditional businesses and industries. An outcry in the US led to draft laws against online piracy being put on hold earlier this year. But another similar initiative, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), has been making greater headway, having been quietly ratified by the US and a number of other countries, and is causing consternation among internet users in Europe especially.

As social media commentator Jeff Jarvis notes, many things bother would-be regulators: ‘piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization.’ But from another viewpoint nothing much has changed in the past ten years. The internet is working just the way it did then, and the sky hasn’t fallen in. So why the rush to fix it now?

It’s true that technological advances bring anxieties aplenty. However with hindsight these are often seen to have been overblown. Take social networking sites: when MySpace took off a few years ago, fears were aired of the potential threat it posed to young people from sexual predators. In the US that quickly led to calls that access to such sites be banned in schools and libraries, and that age verification be compulsory. In fact subsequent research showed that the concerns were seriously overstated.

And who now remembers the outcry against Google’s Gmail service in 2004, in which targeted advertising is based on users’ interests? The fear of mail being read by Google led to attempts to ban such targeting. However, when it was understood that it was algorithmic processes that were ‘reading’ the email, not actual humans, the panic subsided, and the service is now happily used by 350 million people worldwide.

Digital commentator Adam Thierer notes a ‘precautionary principle’ at work here. It holds that, since every technology could pose some theoretical danger or risk, public policies should tightly control those innovations until their developers can prove that they won’t cause any harms. In other words, the law should always ‘play it safe’. But this poses a serious threat to technological progress and human prosperity, he argues. A regime guided at every turn by this precautionary principle would make digital innovation and progress impossible.

For his part Jarvis advocates resistance. The reason why governments and some businesses want to ‘throttle’ the internet is because they see it as a threat to their power, he claims, and if ordinary citizens don’t want to lose its benefits they will have to fight back.  If its enemies prevail, the digital connectivity we take for granted today could eventually be a fond but distant memory.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Social Business magazine – Q1, 2012 (PDF. 2.4Mb)

Grow your social customers organically

In recent years Asda has discovered the value of engaging with customers through social media.

Dominic Burch, head of corporate communications and social media, traces the brand’s involvement with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Until five years ago, our ability at Asda to pick up on customers’ attitudes was somewhat restricted. Internet blogs and forums were monitored, and at the end of each week the PR team would receive a report of  what was being said about the brand. But it was all a bit after the event. Reading critical comments I used to think, if only I’d known about that at the time I could have done something about it.

In those days, to make changes to our corporate website we had to ring someone up and fill in a form.  But there were so many untold stories that, from a PR perspective, were hard to tell through the mainstream media, and we wanted to talk to customers in a more compelling way.  The ASDA brand is focused around price, but there are lots of other things we do that we could talk about: how we employ people, where we source products, our relationships with suppliers, and so on.

At this time we created a YouTube channel, inviting people to send in tips on how to save money. Making a video requires effort, and the response was somewhat limited. So we did a little roadshow, going round the country in a branded VW van, and getting customers to give us saving tips directly. That generated a lot of content, and we learned how to create a new corporate website, posting regularly and allowing customers to post their own comments.  It was still a corporate site, but became an outlet for regular PR stories around food, clothing, health and consumer stories.

By now we had started viewing ourselves as a media owner in our own right rather than doing traditional PR.  This started to shift our thinking: we realised the value of listening to customers and the kinds of things they say in social media networks.

Then along came Twitter. That captured a section of our customers who gave us a good sense of the things they love about Asda, and also things that frustrate them. Twitter gave us a really good window into what people really think about us – what they say when you leave the room, that is. This was brilliant, as it gave us an opportunity to sort out customer issues before they got out of hand. We’d take them offline and find someone to talk to them directly and resolve their complaint.

We learned a lot from this. For instance when it snowed, our home shopping business was struggling to keep up with demand, and we weren’t doing a good job of communicating with customers about the problems. There was a lot of noise on Twitter about it, but when we chucked more resource at it, the noise quickly disappeared.

Some brands worry about where social media fits into the business, who should run it, and so on. In our case the business quickly understood its value. When we showed store managers typical tweets about particular store issues – for instance, an anomaly where Mars bars might be on offer at 40p for two, while a single one cost 50p – they could immediately see how convenient it was.

We came to Facebook relatively late, starting with our George clothing brand only. That was because we were concerned the network might be a lightning rod for people with individual complaints. But we soon found that people on Facebook engage with brands around products and events in a positive way. If someone comes on to make a complaint, other users themselves will tell them they’re in the wrong place.

About half of our mums are on Facebook every day, and our ambition is to have a million. But they have to be highly engaged. I’d rather have a quarter of a million highly-engaged customers on Facebook than a million who are not really that interested.  That’s where lots of brands go wrong with social media, using it to sell products from the outset.  It should be a three-pronged strategy, where you listen and engage, and only then start to influence. You need first to hold conversations with customers to build up a level of trust before offering them incentives to buy. If you try to bribe them they will simply evaporate.

Looking back, our approach to social media has been methodical, slow and organic, and that’s the best way.  If you accept that social channels like Twitter and Facebook will be around for a while, you need to be mindful of the relationship you build. Getting the right connections matters more than just collecting numbers. You’re recruiting ambassadors and cheerleaders for your brand, and over time their positive engagement will be hugely beneficial.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Social Business magazine – Q1, 2012 (PDF. 2.4Mb)

Sponsorship allows some of the glamour of a popular TV series to rub off on a business brand. But what if the business were to go a step further, and create a whole new show from scratch? That is what insurance company Hiscox has done in America, achieving striking success with its web TV comedy series Leap Year.

The show features five young professionals who are suddenly laid off, and instead of seeking new jobs decide to strike out on their own.   Ten episodes aired last summer on YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo and other web video channels, achieving four million views and building an audience of 40,000 active social media followers.

Each episode is only eight minutes long, but in other respects the show is comparable to quality television content, with top class script, acting and production values, and plenty of laughs. Co-written and directed by Yuri Baranovsky and produced by HLG Films, the programme has even won an award from the National Association of Television Producers and Executives. Yet the brand itself gets no exposure in the footage in the first season, just a name check at the beginning. So at first sight the benefits might seem somewhat limited.

Not so, says Hunter Hoffmann, the company’s head of US communication: this is an ideal way to build awareness among its target market. Hiscox’s heritage is British, and when it decided to launch a new suite of business products in America, the challenge was to create high levels of awareness in a crowded insurance market where it was hitherto almost unknown. Social media quickly emerged as the best approach, with 61% of small business owners using it to identify new customers and nearly three quarters of web users watching video clips online. Web television, it seemed, would help it cut through the vast amount of existing insurance advertising and establish itself as a trusted voice.

“We worked with a PR firm that had done this kind of activity successfully with Ikea and Trident Gum and that we were confident could make it work,” Hoffmann explains. “What was different in our case was that we wanted to resonate with start-ups and entrepreneurs, but without being part of the actual plot. Viewers know that Hiscox is behind it but we don’t push it in their faces, and we’re not mentioned at all in the films. We got a lot of positive feedback for that.”

The company was involved in the creative conception, telling the writers how it wanted the plot to build and giving them a sense of the trials and tribulations of start-ups. After receiving the first set of scripts it got involved in the editing process until it was happy with the content. It also vetted the choice of guest appearances, who include well-known figures in the social media world, such as Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist for Apple, and Adam Ostrow, Mashable’s editor-in-chief.

Outside the show itself there is plenty of other social media activity. Each episode is backed by an opinion piece on the Hiscox blog, which expands on the risks that the characters face and that the company can address. “Sometimes these are very specific,” Hoffmann says. “For instance, in one episode one of the members of the firm makes a mistake and worries what the client will say, the same as what our clients will sometimes experience.”

Facebook contains profile pages both for Hiscox and for Leap Year, with 4000 and 13000 fans respectively. The brand also has a presence on LinkedIn and Twitter, helping users keep in touch with the tools and information they need to run their businesses and protect themselves.  The aim is to start a conversation and get more people involved, growing the networks in a way that would have been harder to do without this interesting content.

Financial services is a somewhat conservative sector, so was there trepidation within the company at such a bold creative approach? Not in the least, says Hoffmann. “Hiscox encourages innovation and trying new approaches to marketing.  It was amazing for me that people within the company were not just interested in the series, but actually excited about it – and not just here in the US, but around the world.”

That global reach is mirrored in the viewing audience, which has extended to Britain, France and other European companies, even to Russia.  Clearly this is not appointment viewing like a television show, but the ability to watch it at any time – on a computer at work or home, or on a smart phone on the move –  gives it a special flexibility. “It’s been interesting to observe viewers’ habits,” Hoffmann comments. “People would watch it the day it came out, or they might wait until the end of the week, or they might watch several episodes all in one go, having read an article in the media about it.”

He concludes: “A common response is how great it is that Hiscox is doing something that is different and creative, and here in America it has really helped put the brand on the map.”

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Social Business magazine – Q1, 2012 (PDF. 2.4Mb)

Strengthening an already strong reputation at the Met Office

We’re used to getting the weather reports from television, radio or the web. But these days we can also talk with the forecasters directly. Social Business talks to the Met Office’s Dee Cotgrove about the organisation’s increasing use of social media.

The Met Office is one of Britain’s oldest and most highly regarded brands, enjoying public trust at levels around 80%.  Traditionally most of its conversations have been one-way, mediated through other channels.  Now for the first time it can communicate directly with the public, via a highly active presence on Twitter,

YouTube and Facebook that reaches more than 75,000 people each month.

Contacts are overseen by the communications team based in the press office, which works closely with forecasters to ensure that appropriate messages are sent out.  Before taking the plunge, the team first spent a year working with consultancy It’s Open and the Social Media Leadership Forum to help it understand the environment. “We wanted to watch and learn for a while, to see how it might to apply to us,” says head of communications Dee Cotgrove. “You can’t just copy other people; you have to see how it’s relevant to what you’re doing.”

Then in 2010 the team started getting involved in online conversations, entering comment threads on web forums to correct perceptions where necessary. This in turn helped it to adjust its own messaging, making it a two-way process. “Sometimes the public attaches the wrong idea to our weather warnings, and social media has helped people understand what they mean and what they don’t mean,” Dee says.

The Met Office also started a Twitter feed, with weather warnings directed at particular parts of the country. Initially this was on weekdays only, occasionally extending to weekends in the case of major weather events. In the third year the project went fully operational, with customer contact advisors handling tweets on a daily 24-hour basis.

The catalyst was the eruption of the Iceland volcano Grimsvotn in May 2011, which threatened to repeat the travel chaos of a similar incident the previous year. “We were still providing updates at the end of that week and we felt we couldn’t just stop the conversation,” explains Dee.  The @Metoffice channel now has over 60,000 followers, who are encouraged to keep in touch by tweets such as, “I’m Dan, and I’ll be here all night for your weather questions”. Our advisors were already experienced in talking with the public, but were given extra training for contacts involving social media. The press office still oversees the messaging to ensure the nuance is right, and it provides guidance in the case of high profile events such as this winter’s snowfall.

Dee distinguishes between two elements in the Met Office’s use of social media. On the rational side, the medium can help it reach more people more quickly and improve the quality of the information. But there is also an emotional element, she says, in helping connect with audiences. “For the Met Office as a brand it’s important that people trust our warnings, as it means they are more likely to heed what we say,” she says. “It’s fantastic to see people taking action on the basis of our warnings, as they did before Christmas in Scotland when schools were shut following our gale forecasts, and again in February when Heathrow cancelled some flights in advance of heavy snow.”

“Social media is more intimate and two-way than traditional media,” she continues. “We can appeal to new audiences and interest groups, like the annual Glastonbury festival, for example, and connect to what’s important for them. That gives them more of a sense of association and affiliation. It also means that other brands or individuals can endorse what we say.”

Social media was part of an integrated campaign last August in which the Met Office celebrated 150 years of forecasting. Elements included a timeline of its activities and progress over the years, and a competition for users to send in photographs demonstrating the indominatable British spirit in combating the weather
The organisation is active on YouTube, for instance posting weather warning podcasts by the chief forecaster. There can also be found educational clips about the science behind the weather, such as the natural forces that cause thunderstorms. Clips can be freely syndicated to other web outlets, and in some cases organisations can be given special content, as happens with the NHS for cold weather alerts.

Now into its second year, the Met Office’s venture is clearly a success, reaching over 100,000 people every month. It would be overstating things to say that social media has transformed its relationship with the public, as this was already strong. But, Dee says, it has certainly provided added depth and clarity, which will help to ensure that the level of public trust remains high.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Social Business magazine – Q1, 2012 (PDF. 2.4Mb)

npower Explains All

npower’s Brighter Energy Debate website was the first foray by an energy company into social media, and is now in its fourth year. We talked to brand reputation and social media PR manager Beverley Harrington about its origins and progress.

At first sight the Brighter Energy Debate website looks like a general advisory service, pleasant and colourful, and the kind of place one can go to find out about the energy sector or let off steam about gas bills. While that’s true, it’s actually run by npower, one of the energy sector’s heavyweights.

The absence of corporate branding is a way to demonstrate an openness not normally associated with utilities. This is neutral ground, where customers can air questions and gripes. All kinds of topics are covered, from smart meters and direct debits, to solar profits and green energy. Each question gets a public response from a customer services expert, and this is often followed up with one-to-one contacts.  The site is also open to non-customers to ask general questions about the energy market.

It’s easy to see why an initiative like this can help, as these are challenging times for both sides. Energy companies are under pressure from a major programme of investment as existing power stations reach the end of their lives. But so too are long-suffering consumers, as upward price fluctuations leave them frustrated and confused.

“We wanted to be on the front foot more often,” says Beverley Harrington, npower’s brand reputation and social media PR manager.   “For a long time we’d been concerned that the energy sector was taking a bashing, but instead of telling its own story was just reacting to criticism. Instead of stories about successful recruitment, new technologies and ambitious infrastructure projects, the headlines tend to be of the ‘energy giant rips off customers’ kind.”

So the forum fills an urgent public need, a place where genuine dialogue can develop. Indeed, an initial concern was that the response would be so overwhelming that the company would not be able to cope. So there was little fanfare when the site launched in November 2008. Yet even without any overt publicity, it has gained 110,000 visitors and handled more than 1000 questions. It has also won critical acclaim, taking a silver for best website at the CIPR awards.

The aim is to talk to customers directly about their concerns, such as pricing, customer service and environmental issues. Smart metering is a current hot topic, and many questions centre on whether the next generation of technology can save money. The questions are answered by panel members recruited from across the business: visitors can be sure to receive a personal response from a company expert rather than from a faceless forum user. That helps to give the site a friendlier, more open feel.

Honesty and transparency were watchwords from the start, Harrington says. “We wanted the website to have its own look and feel, rather than being npower branded. That encourages people not to hold back. I’ve sometimes had battles inside the company about publishing hostile comments, but I maintain that’s what it’s all about, to focus on what people are feeling. If they’ve got the courage to come and say it to us, then we should have the courage to respond in an open manner.”

A challenge is to keep the site fresh, and ensure that the search is optimised so that it gets found. Video helps here, with new clips going up all the time and receiving large numbers of hits.  One  video featured chief operating officer Kevin McCullough explaining the future investment required by the energy industry at the same time as npower released its annual results.   There are also peeks inside power stations and at new construction sites – a means to remind viewers that npower generates electricity as well as selling it.

On the subject of smart metering, customers have been filmed in their homes talking about their experiences of npower’s recent trial. There are also clips of television news journalist Peter Snow interviewing the npower contact centre staff who deal with customer complaints and give energy efficiency advice. “If we’re facing a possible issue, say a price rise, we’ll normally post a clip on the site to give more background detail – and also help present a human face to the issue,” Harrington says.

The Brighter Energy Debate is not the brand’s only use of social media. It is represented on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, where McCullough, a savvy social media user, is an enthusiastic participant. It also monitors online forums, such as Money Saving Expert, intervening to give an npower response. “That’s quite popular, and we’ve had good feedback from it – people even sometimes ask if they can talk to the npower rep,” Harrington says. “We also monitor customer service sites where people have a bit of a gripe against us, or an issue with their bill, and we say ‘hi, anything we can do to help?’ ”

“We often get asked, why would anyone want to follow an energy company? It’s not exactly sexy,” Harrington concedes.  But as a way to relate to anxious consumers in troubled times, using social media makes sense.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Social Business magazine – Q1, 2012 (PDF. 2.4Mb)