Posts Tagged ‘social media’

I always enjoy reading about small businesses, especially in the UK, who improve their business and enhance their customer relations by embracing the Web. So I was pleased to read recently about a small UK company who have not only transformed their business by using social media to connect to their customers, but have been rewarded for their efforts by a Dell initiative to award small business excellence.

Wiggly Wigglers is a small, Herefordshire based company, operating out of some farm buildings, who are passionate about the gardening products they supply. They have successfully built, and are maintaining, an on-line strategy that includes regular blogging, weekly podcasting, and an active Facebook group.

By adopting social media, and placing it at the core of their marketing strategy, Wiggly Wigglers have reported that their business:

• Serves 90,000 customers worldwide and delivers its products across Europe;
• Cut its advertising budget by 80 percent when the company turned to social media over traditional advertising;
• Built its catalogue based on Wiki ideas generated on its Facebook page by experts and customers.

Congratulations to the team at Wiggly Wigglers, a brave decision to embrace the Web and communicate openly and honestly with their customers is clearly paying massive benefits (not to mention £25,000 worth of Dell products and services!).

Idil Cakim posted back in April on the Next Fifty Years blog, about how Wiggly Wigglers are doing social media the right way - Wiggly Wigglers: Gardening through Social Media - and summarises their on-line activity with a glowing reference, and a great checklist for others looking at marketing on-line:

There is a dotted line between being Heather’s podcast listener, blog reader and Wiggly Groupie on Facebook and becoming her customer. Heather is doing several things right from a social media marketing standpoint:

- She has a strong voice. It’s genuine and personable.
- She is passionate about what she writes.
- She informs and educates her customers.
- She offers applicable tips.
- She keeps in touch.
- She encourages product trials with discounts and give-aways.
- Her products have a social angle—they make the world greener.
- She welcomes new friends.

Wiggly Wigglers should be an essential case study, worth, er, studying, for any business looking at enhancing their web presence through social media. If you are considering implementing a social media strategy, making sure you can happily (and honestly) place a tick next to at least 6 of the above tips, will prove a solid foundation for your efforts.

Yes we can, Obama declared - and yes, indeed they did as the US Election ended with an Obama victory. In a post I wrote last week - Barack Obama Winning On The Web, I looked at how statistics on the Internet suggested that Obama was winning the race for attention and possibly, engagement, on the web.

The statistics seemed to give Obama the edge with numbers for YouTube views, Facebook friends, Blog mentions etc much larger than those of his opposition, John McCain. I suggested it would be fascinating to see analysis surface about the effect of Obama’s on-line campaign, if Obama was to win the election. Well, he did, and there has.

ReadWriteWeb have posted an article which references some data collected by Trendrr (I think that 2 ‘r’s at the end of the name future proofs them, ready for web 3.0!). The article - Obama’s Social Media Advantage - although it’s no proof that Obama’s on-line engagement helped him win the election, it does show that Obama had some 500 million mentions on the Blogosphere in the last 10 weeks or so, compared to McCain’s 150 million (although these mentions may have been positive or negative). The data also points to a huge amount of extra engagement in the days leading up to the polls - with Obama gaining more than 10,000 new followers on Twitter, and McCain just 924 (OK, I know that’s 920 more than I have in total, but still!!)

Again, it’s difficult to see how much impact the campaigns had on these figures, but it is clear that Obama managed to cause many, many more conversations, and I’d be very, very surprised if his on-line activity didn’t feed this. I’m sure that by using on-line engagement, a greater web visibility, and the ability to create a story worth talking about, Obama has managed to drive conversations.

The article finishes with a statement which should resonate with all organisations which deal with the public - not just election campaigns:

…looking forward to the next campaign cycle, it seems clear that all political campaigns, especially at this level, will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril.

I’ll keep an eye (or an RSS net) out for any further analysis on the Obama campaign, and any more direct correlation between his on-line engagement and his election win. How much impact did the on-line campaign have and how much will this trend change for the next election, or elections in other countries?

What do you think about Obama’s on-line campaign: how much of the success can be attributed to social media, and more importantly for social marketing in business: how can this be measured?

UPDATE: Several other websites have recently posted summaries of Obama’s on-line campaign, most notably the BBC.co.uk - with Online lessons for UK in Obama win, and Guardian.co.uk - with Obama’s win means future elections must be fought online.

Now that our kids are of an age - finally! - to be left at home alone in the care of the eldest, my wife and I take every opportunity to grab a chance for a walk. At week-ends, this can often lead to a hour or two spent drinking cider by the fire in a country pub. Yesterday, however, the sky was blue and the ground dry early on and we grabbed the chance for a walk in the fresh morning air. After a couple of days of intermittent but heavy rain and a cold cold breeze, it felt almost like late summer again. No pubs were open at that time, of course - and it was Sunday - so we made do with a long walk and a full breakfast on our return home.

So there you have a picture of marital and bucolic bliss. (Not that we live in the countryside but it’s only a short walk away.) And, of course, that is not the point of this post.

Getting to the point
On the walk back home my wife asked me about one of the bpodr proposals we sent out last week. My wife runs a successful company. bpodr recently helped the company revamp its web site. In addition, we’ve devised a strategy for increasing site traffic, helping the company expand into other markets, and set up a personal blog (and blogging strategy) for my wife. She’s well aware, then, of the benefits of the internet tools available to businesses of all sizes.

And yet, if I mention the term ’social media’ she guffaws. She snorts. She jeers and mocks. In short, she laughs. To her ears, ’social media’ is an ‘airy-fairy’ term. ‘It sounds as if it was made up to sound important,’ she says. ‘It’s an empty phrase. What does it mean?’

What’s in a name?
What indeed? This raises a couple of questions. Firstly, what is to be gained by collecting a number of internet tools and giving them a label of any sort, never mind one that has intelligent business people sniggering behind their hands? Secondly, how do people expert in these tools and passionate about the benefits they bring convey the impact they can have on a business without resorting to the ‘airy-fairy’?

(A quick aside: if you haven’t read this Dennis Howlett guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog and the huge number of responses it generated, please give it a visit. Although much of the discussion was about the take-up of the technology, there were a significant number of comments on the terminology itself. I think it will prove to be one of those posts which will be seem to mark the start of a sea-change in ’social media’ thinking. And by ‘post’ here, I include the comments - a good post is really only as good as the conversation it inspires.)

In most cases, there is a technological divide between companies of a certain size and the enterprise. The latter usually has the budget and staff - although perhaps in shrinking numbers at the moment - to allow a bit of boundary pushing, testing, and breaking when it comes to the sharp edge of internet innovation. Smaller businesses, however, are by nature and necessity slow to the curve. They need proof that any expenditure will satisfy at least a minimum ROI before they write cheques.

What are we measuring?
Terminology doesn’t often win over business owners. It’s usually about the bottom line and for companies trying to deliver services to these business owners, being unable to offer hard evidence for success and hiding behind what can, at times, appear to be condescending jargon, is not a recipe for a successful sale.

Griping about the difficulty of measuring ROI or complaining that revenue growth is hard to equate directly with increased web site traffic or asserting that the value of reputation cannot be counted in pound coins does little to instil confidence in the tools we propose to use. Surely it is up to us who hope to use the tools to be able to define exactly how the customer will benefit.

If it’s hard to measure something, it comes down to one of two reasons. Either we’re measuring the wrong thing or we’re using the wrong tool to measure it.

This goes for our set of tools, too. Hide behind a vacuous term and you don’t deserve a client’s business. Tell the client you can work wonders for the business but it will be hard to put that in hard numbers and watch while security arrives at the door.

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?

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.

We’ve decided to eat our own dog food, and that’s pretty pointless if we don’t share how sweet it tastes, so here’s a quick overview of how bpodr has been getting it’s fill in the last month…

Popular Posts. Our Google analytics shows us that our two most popular posts of the month were those introducing and discussing Socialprise. We posted these in response to a press release we read, and within 24 hours found ourselves on the front page of Google when searching for Socialprise, which then drove traffic for these posts, and our web site in general. (Notably, our blog attracted over 82% of all our traffic in March)

Extending our Reach. We’ve been busy adding new features to our blog to make it easier for our readers to er, read, and to further our blog tools to broaden our readership. These features include:

• Technorati Tags. We now let Technorati know more about our content, and allow our readers to find similar content of interest.
• Subscribe by Email. We added the ability for our readers to get email alerts when we post new content. Thank you Feedburner.
• More useful RSS feeds. Feedburner has also helped us add more features to our RSS feeds, which allow readers to easily email our posts, digg posts, or add posts to their social bookmarks.
• Wordpress Stats. We have also installed a wordpress stats plugin, which has started gathering accurate information about our post views, we will soon know which are our most popular posts by number of times they have been viewed.
• Graham’s Twitter Feed. You can now catch Graham’s ‘tweets’ (what’s this?) from right here on the blog.

So a lot of house-keeping on our blog, but all should lead to a better experience for our visitors, and wider exposure on the Net for us.

Twitter, Twitter. Grahams Twitter activity has led to him being quoted by a well known Social Media thought-leader from the States. Although of no direct benefit, each referral helps us in building credibility for bpodr as a valuable resource for businesses here in the UK. (Follow Graham on Twitter here)

LinkedIn. Graham’s LinkedIn profile lead to an old work colleague who was interested in how our services could help them re-invigorate his business, which led to a business meeting, which led to drinks, which may lead to…

We may share future success - both ours, and our customers’ - in this series of ’should-be-about-once-a-month-but-may-not-be’ posts. If you want to stay tuned, easily, then just subscribe to our RSS feed on the right-hand side (that little orange icon… up a bit… that’s it!) and have future posts delivered to you.

You don’t have to eat any dog food, but you may develop a taste for engaging with your customers - and the Web - in new and exciting ways.

Social media can seem extremely anti-social at times. For those looking in from the outside who have yet to fully comprehend the benefits or who simply choose not to ‘get it’, messiahs of connectivity and conversation can often appear lost with their heads buried up to their shoulders in their lower intestines. That’s not a position that inspires confidence.

The tsunami of blog posts and a Karakatoa of social networking tools - accompanied by commentary and e-books aplenty - can leave even those most tempted by the apparent common-sense approach of engaging your customers feeling alienated and most definitely running well behind the curve. When the word ‘conversation’ starts coming up repeatedly in what, at first sight, appear to be monologues, accompanying social media terminolgy starts to lose its credibility.

These feelings can be exacerbated here in the UK. It’s partly a cultural thing, which still rewards reticence over ebullience even at the CEO level, and partly a market thing: viewed parochially, the market size for any UK-focused business is vastly smaller than the equivalent US market. Add to this an inbuilt distrust of anything that smacks of ‘relationships’ and ‘getting to know the customer’, and pitching social media to an established enterprise here in the UK can seem a Sisyphean task.

So what to do?

Clarify the message, for a start. That’s hard, though. Why? Because the social media solution for every business is as unique as the combination of that business and its audience. Sure, the overarching sentiment and the ultimate aim may be common but nobody makes a sale by talking generics.

Then we need to show social media in action. Case studies are good. But better still is being able to say, ‘this is what we did for ourselves and look what happened!’

We’ve been lucky since we started bpodr at the end of last year. We’re involved with a number of start-ups who already knew they wanted what we were selling. On top of that, we have a couple of clients who already knew that without change they would stall. Stall and disappear. So, in a way, we haven’t had to sell too hard. We just turned up and made the most of contacts. Nice work if you can get it, of course but it leads to complacency.

We think we need to start eating our own dog food. In bigger amounts. To a certain extent we have, of course because we embrace many of the ‘typical’ social media tools. But it’s time to talk directly about results and how they could relate to situations within your business. That’s what this new series of posts will be about. Whenever you see a [Dog Food] prefix, you’ll know what’s coming: a story about a success - or failure - in our own use of the tools out there. With a bit of luck, the successes will outnumber the failures or it could be a short series!

Meanwhile, if there are social media tools you’re struggling to come to terms with or which you cannot see offering any advantage to your business whatsoever, leave a comment or send us an email at ask AT bpodr DOT co DOT uk.

Perhaps you think you should get your 10th cup of coffee for free, or you would like free Wi-Fi access, or even a free birthday brew… whatever your suggestion, Starbucks want to hear it.

Starbucks have unveiled MyStarbucksIdea.com - a social community site aiming to give their customers a platform to share their ideas and suggestions, vote on the ideas they would most like to see in-store and find out what ideas Starbucks have actually implemented. It seems Starbucks have placed blogging and communicating with their customers at the core of their “New Strategic Initiatives To Transform and Innovate the Customer Experience” er, strategy.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced this week -

“We engage in millions of conversations with our customers everyday, and those conversations and ideas have helped shape the company we are today,” said Schultz. “With the launch of MyStarbucksIdea, we are extending the Starbucks community online and creating a dynamic forum that enables us to capture and act upon our customers’ best ideas.”

Starbucks seem to be doin’ it right: offering transparency for the process and what they want to do with your ideas, employee-driven content and encouraging customer engagement. If they do ‘act upon’ some of their customers ideas, it looks like Starbucks may succeed in extending the customer conversation on-line.

Regardless of how many of their customers actually choose to engage in this conversation, Starbucks are set to benefit as they gain cost-effective customer feedback, potentially improve their pubic image, and maybe even hear that gem of an idea that makes a difference to their profits.