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.

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

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

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.

Seminar, Leeds

This case study seminar is being hosted by Asda at their HQ in Leeds. As reported in the latest edition of Social Business Magazine, Asda, a subsidiary of Walmart, is getting real value from engaging with customers through social media. In this seminar Asda’s new media team will be sharing how they are progressing in their social strategy. Topics will include influencing customer behaviour, internal strategies to get colleagues involved, technology updates from WalmartLabs, and also the perspective from Asda’s top suppliers .

This event is only open to members of the Social Media Leadership Forum. To register, members should contact Fran Bodley-Scott at fran.scott@itsopen.co.uk.

Seminar, London

There is little point creating great content if it fails to reach your target audiences. In this seminar the PepsiCo team will be talking about creating engaging content for the social web using video and animation, and also how they use it to influence consumers and other audiences. They will be sharing examples from their consumer brands and trade campaigns.

This event is only open to members of the Social Media Leadership Forum. To register, members should contact Fran Bodley-Scott at fran.scott@itsopen.co.uk.

How are the organisations involved in the 2012 Games exploiting social media to engage and inspire audiences around the world? This seminar featured a keynote presentation from the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) and also case studies from one of the worldwide sponsors of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

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)