Archive for the ‘Social Networks’ Category

The question of ROI from ’social media’ tools or ‘Web 2.0′ style implementations is never far from any debate about the business worth of the new technology.

Twitter is a perfect example of a tool that is seeing huge uptake among both individuals and corporates but which has no obvious revenue model itself and lets its users determine how to monetize its use, should they wish.

The Industry Standard just published a piece on Twitter that reveals that PC manufacturer Dell reckons it can attribute $1 million in revenue directly to its use of the service. That is a solid enough number to change the game for many companies, I think. Will it change Twitter?

Hat tip to Neville Hobson for pointing me to this post - via Twitter!

Social Media has evolved, according to Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb. And we agree. Sarah reports how the social media trend is moving from place to ‘hang-out’ to a platform for communication and information sharing (how very web 2.0) in shopping and social media. Sarah writes about some interesting surveys recently released that begin to illustrate this trend.

Generation Y are those (fortunate souls, some might say) born after 1979, and for whom the Internet is an integral part of their social, and daily, lives. This hip, web-savvy group are obviously a growing target market for a vast majority of business, and those that are taking aim at them are beginning to get to grips with building a presence on social networks:

• 39.3% of retailers use social media for marketing
• 32% have a Facebook page
• 27% have a presence on MySpace
• 26% post to YouTube

Sarah also points out that another 2008 study shows that nearly three quarters of people (potential customers, some might say) are using the Internet to share experiences of dealing with businesses and brands. Tools including Blogs, RSS, Micro-Blogging, YouTube, Forums and social networking sites are all being cited as resources for sharing experiences. I would bet that a very large percentage of these same people are also influenced by what others are saying on-line - word-of-mouth 2.0, perhaps.

Now, these surveys are based on US Internet users - so should UK businesses ignore this emerging platform? We hope they don’t. Since the birth of the Web, we have seen many trends emerge and evolve, and in most the US seem to be a little ahead of the curve compared to us in the UK. I’m certain we’ll soon be talking about how many UK businesses are embracing, and benefiting, from all forms of social media.

Check out Sarah Perez’s post in full here, and draw your own conclusions. It could change the game your business plays for the better.

I was in Ireland a week or so back for a birthday party and family gathering. We hired a car at Dublin airport for the drive into County Kildare. Almost as soon as I hit the M5 out of Dublin I felt the steering a little heavy. On the N4, I had a lorry behind me that was flashing its lights at me. The roads are undergoing huge works and the traffic was moving in geological time frames - a journey that usually takes about 40 minutes took us almost 3 hours - so I put the heavy steering down to unfamiliarity and slow speeds and the flashing lights down to impatience and frustration. The car was comfortable, my left knee was starting to hurt from the constant clutch changes, and I had to concentrate on the traffic. I ignored the signs.

Ignoring warnings leads to BAD THINGS

Over the next couple of days, we made a couple of short journeys in the car. By now I was used to the way the steering handled. I even said to my wife Laura that the steering was the one thing that would stop me buying a similar car. Why would I think anything was wrong? This was a hire car from Hertz, after all: it must have been checked before I picked it up. Talk about blissful ignorance.

On the morning we were due to drive back to Dublin and fly home, I came out to start loading the car. And there it was: the inevitable flat. Then the signs all made sense: the heavy steering was from the decreasing pressure and the lorry’s flashing lights were a warning from an experienced driver. But I’d been enjoying a new car and concentrating on keeping us moving forward in tricky traffic conditions.

A ten-minute tyre change and we were off again. The flat had a nail in it, which was letting air out slowly but surely. It had obviously been there from the moment we set out.

Does your business have a slow puncture?

It’s easy to miss the signs when your focus is elsewhere and when the road ahead is clearly marked, even if the traffic is moving slowly.

Changing conditions demand changed tactics. Next time I hire a car from Hertz (or anyone, for that matter), I’m going to check the tyres as well as the bodywork and fuel level. When I returned the car, they wanted to charge me for the tyre and the puncture. I offered to charge them for my time and labour changing the tyre. They dropped the charge for the tyre but still charged me for the puncture. We had a plane to catch and no more time to argue. (But after checking in, we went to the Hertz desk in the terminal and spent longer arguing: the result was a refund. Boos to Hertz for not allowing their staff on site to make decisions but cheers for being able to make it good later.)

I’m meeting a large number of people from UK businesses who feel the steering is getting a bit heavy but who want to talk about anything other than what that might mean. They don’t want to acknowledge that the road is wider, the traffic conditions more tricky, or that their car may just no longer be the right vehicle for getting them to the next junction. Their attitude to the web and to new media and social marketing is akin to the boy racer who sticks in a pair of furry dice in the rear windscreen and a spoiler on the tail and thinks he’s turned his father’s old family saloon into a head-turning sports car.

This isn’t because they’re not smart. They run successful companies, after all. But they do rely on a team around them who may be cursed with a heavy dose of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Or it could be because:

• the marketing team doesn’t believe social media is relevant for your business;
• the PR company has spent years building up a long list of press contacts;
• the company has a reduced weekly rate for repeat advertising in your local paper;
• the web site is really just an on-line brochure;
• most of their new business comes through personal recommendations;
• they don’t seem to get that many customer service issues - usually a sign that they make it hard for customers to get in touch.

But there are ROAD SIGNS

Your customers have an increasingly short attention span: they have to wade through more and more clutter.
Your customers no longer have to tolerate interruption: they can skip adverts.
Your customers can quickly check credentials: they don’t automatically trust you.
Your customers can find more and more niche products tailored to their exact needs.
Your customers expect to be able to tell you what they want - and what they think about your products.

If you’re driving past these signs and making no changes in direction, don’t be surprised when everything just comes to a grinding halt.

If you were starting your business now and these signs stood between you and your first sale, how would you connect with your customers?

So, what stops you changing your approach now?

Facebook. Love it or loathe it, for a lot of people it’s the window to their entire social network. For 100 million people, actually. Facebook has kinda announced (via twitter) that it has hit 100 million users. Yep, that’s enough people to populate a rather large country (a rather large country with the 13th largest population in the world, actually)

And that number may only be active Facebook users.

As Facebook swells in popularity, how many businesses will embrace the tool as a platform to reach out to new customers, to empower their existing customers, or tap into a new customer base for whom social media is an integral part of life?

My prediction is those that do, may just have a better chance of winning.

More and more of the people I meet professionally these days have joined LinkedIn. The majority of these people recognise that LinkedIn has real value but haven’t quite grasped how to exploit its potential.

Step forward the Commoncraft team once more. LinkedIn approached them and asked them to create a short video that helped explain some of the benefits of belonging to the network. The original Commoncraft blog post about the video is here.

But if that’s too far to go, here’s the video.

There was a lot of tweeting on twitter today about twiddict. (Try saying that after a late and liquid night celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday.) The premise of twiddict is that it saves your tweets when twitter is down and then posts them when twitter resurfaces. On the face of it, this sounds helpful.

I won’t be using it, however. When twitter is down I get frustrated, like most people. But for me, one of the joys of twitter is the truly ephemeral nature of it. I don’t scroll back through pages of tweets to discover what I’ve missed while I’ve been away from my desk. And I don’t try to make sure everyone I know has seen a tweet of mine by sending them a direct message instead. On top of that, the beauty of tweets are surely their spontaneity. If I’m having to sit and think about a tweet, the only honest tweet I can add to twitter is: “sitting and thinking about a tweet”. And when twitter comes back up, the last thing I want to do is to catch up on reams of tweets that are no longer current.

Twiddict is obviously a bit of fun on the part of its team of Belgian creators. Basing its service offering on the continuing failure of twitter to scale successfully is probably not a long-term business plan. If Twidict becomes an essential tool for twitter users, I suspect that twitter will no longer need to worry about scaling and Twiddict may have to evolve into FriendFeedict instead.

For a slightly more positive spin on twiddict, take a look at Stan Schroeder’s post at Mashable.

We’re big fans of Commoncraft videos here on bpodr and featured one previously about Twitter. Here’s a new one from Lee LeFever and the team on Social Media. It helps if you like ice cream. Of course, I’m one of those strange people that thinks the ONLY ice cream is vanilla. But hey, it’s all about choice.

If there is one concept that best defines the benefits of web 2.0 technology, it would be collaboration. So, whether the terms ‘PR 2.0′, ’social media’, or ’social marketing’ rock your boat or, alternatively, have you heaving over the side, it all comes down to whether you believe your internet presence should involve engaging with others for some sort of mutual benefit.

For companies, in particular, this boils down to the question of whether or not they want to collaborate with customers and partners. If a company believes its customers should form no part of a collaborative effort, then however well-dressed any implemented web 2.0 tools may be, they will add nothing but cost and problems. We can call these ’selfish companies’ and they will eventually suffer for their selfishness in the great corporate playground: nobody will want to talk to them; then nobody will bother to talk about them; and finally they’ll turn up at school reunions and nobody will even remember them.

If, on the other hand, a company recognises the true potential of breaking down the ubiquitous barriers between producer and customer - barriers so often created by traditional PR, marketing, and advertising - then the tools available thanks to web 2.0 provide a flexible range of opportunities for creating a host of mutually beneficial relationships. The playground for them will be a much more interesting place: they may even skip to the head of the queue for the tuck shop.

My wife treated some of her contractors to dinner a couple of nights ago. They all went to a renovated restaurant a few miles outside town where my wife had been a week or so earlier for a birthday meal with friends.

The table was booked for 8pm and they turned up shortly after 7.30 so they could chat in the bar and relax a little before sitting down to eat. Laura went to order the drinks. The barman apologised and told her that it was his first night and that he was finding his way around. Laura sympathised and gave her order. The guy did his best but it was soon clear that not only was this his first night at this bar but it was his first night in any bar. He couldn’t tell wine glasses from tumblers and a house wine from a vintage bottle.

What made Laura frustrated above all else was that there was another barman there who was perhaps meant to be overseeing the new guy’s work but who offered no help at all. When the new barman had wandered off in yet another futile attempt to select the right glass or bottle, Laura approached the other barman and suggested that 20 minutes was a long time to wait for a simple round of drinks for seven people. This is the conversation they had:

Barman: He explained it was his first night.
Laura: I know and I’m trying to avoid making him feel self-conscious but 20 minutes is too long.
Barman: You’re just going to have to put up with it.

That’s it. No offer to help. Laura then told him she had a table booked for 8pm and asked if he could tell the woman at the desk they were here but running late in the bar. She received a grunt in response and the man walked off.

It took another 15 minutes to get their drinks, by which time they had no time to drink them so picked everything up and walked through to the restaurant. More great service. The woman told them she had let their table go because they were late (it was 8.20 and obviously the barman had not passed on the message). Laura stood her ground and the woman told them to return to the bar and she’d call them. A table was finishing up. ‘How long?’ asked Laura. ‘No more than 10 minutes,’ replied the woman.

It was a further hour before they were finally seated. Had the restaurant been in town or had their been somewhere to go close by they would have left but everyone had come by cab and there is nothing along that stretch of road but fields. The food was good (which is one of the reasons Laura had wanted to return) but the whole experience was ruined before anything reached their mouths.

Laura is going to write a letter to the manager of the restaurant, of course, and to the owners. She has since discovered that it (The Arkle Manor) is owned by Landmark Leisure - part of M&B. What’s more important is that Laura’s bad experience became the bad experience of six others that night and that the aggressive and dismissive attitude of one barman and the confrontation attitude of the woman on the desk means that the Arkle Manor will live in their minds for a long time. None of them will return and all of them will relate the experience to their friends, family, and colleagues. Leaving an untrained barman to cope alone (and none of the blame is his) has become an expensive mistake.

Perhaps Laura should have raised merry hell at the time and demanded to speak to the manager. But why should she have to? How would that have improved the mood of the evening? I wonder if the chef knows the excellent food is being undermined by a front of house who obviously couldn’t care.

And the salient point of this little rant? If you provide no easy way for customers to describe their experiences in a forum connected to your enterprise (ie a comments section on your web page), they will resort to whatever uncontrolled medium is available. Word spreads, monitoring and responding to comments becomes difficult, and one customer’s bad night becomes a growing stain on your reputation. Perhaps not tonight or next week but once it’s on the web, it stays there and can come back to bite you on the medium rare rump steak at any time.

Adam posted a few days ago about the new Starbucks initiative. An excellent post from Todd Defren highlighted some of the ways in which Starbucks will be gaining even greater customer loyalty from something that I bet some execs inside the company felt was a risky operation. To be fair, given its history and background, Starbucks is perhaps more open to this sort of project than many companies. But there would still have been the ‘wise heads’ warning of doom and destruction as people weighed in with complaints and gripes, moans and abuse.

The plan, of course, is not to encourage new customers directly but, as Todd implies, to increase existing customer loyalty. However, a serious by-product of eliciting comments from your best customers will be a raft of suggestions that will make the ‘product’ more appealing to a wider range of people. So, new customers will arrive and become loyal customers. Try mapping that process out in a spreadsheet for ROI.

I’m not sure why but Starbucks here in the UK is a second best to coffee shops like Costa and Caffe Nero. Most of the Starbucks I visit are soulless, the tables full of used cups and plates, the food unappealing, and, worst of all, the coffee generally tastes weak and has little flavour. I’ll gladly walk another half mile to reach a Costa or Caffe Nero. Both Starbucks and Caffe Nero have recently opened in my high street. The Starbucks had a head start of about three months and was packed every day. Since Caffe Nero opened, Starbucks staff walk the street with free samples to try to get customers to return. Tells you something.

However, it’s not all good news for Caffe Nero. Although I was pleased to see them opening locally, simply from the point of view of coffee quality, I was also keen to use their wi-fi service, which I’ve always been able to use ‘free’ as part of my Skype Zones subscription. Disaster struck, however, when I discovered that they have gone over to the BT enemy. No more cheap and cheerful wi-fi. Why they can’t provide free wi-fi, I don’t know. Buy a Fon, for goodness’ sake.

At the moment, there is no way to let Caffe Nero know how I feel. As a loyal customer, this doesn’t exactly make me feel great. Perhaps if I complain to a barista, I’ll get an extra stamp on my wee loyalty card. Mmm, that should do it.

Starbucks may be losing the coffee taste battle but should they install free wi-fi on the back of their social initiative, I may just have to switch to hot chocolate while working.