Uba Kontrovasie

And the wall came tumbling down

A client e-mailed me today to notify me about their IT department putting exceptions on their firewall, so all staff can now access social websites.

Long live the revolution!

Tags: corporate change, corporate culture

The value of listening

I always notice that when people start talking about Social Media they often refer to it as a new method of talking to audiences, customers and people with shared interests.

I suppose none of this is untrue, however, I rarely hear people refer to Social Media as an alternative method of LISTENING to audiences, customers and people with shared interests.

I always tell clients; if you’re using social media effectively, anything in between 50-60% of your time should be spent on listening to people.

Forums, blogs, Facebook groups and even microblogs hold so many answers in regards to how people feel about a brand and its offerings. For this reason I believe Social Media should be perceived as a valuable quantitative and qualitative research base.

Information derived from social environments can and should be used to influence product development, CRM/after-sales strategy and even marketing and advertising for traditional channels.

Should every brand be utilising Social Media?

Yes! With so many social platforms available to the public, every brand should be utilising Social Media in order to listen to relevant online communities and key influences at the very least.

For years brand owners have spent millions of pounds on product and market research. Whilst these processes are all still necessary, it is also important to realise that the foundations for these types of research can be laid with insight from social spaces and assessment of online conversations.

Tags: listening, research, social media, social media measurement

Getting it right on Facebook

I received an invite today on Facebook asking me to join a group for a company, my first reactions? Who and what the hell is this? I pretty much rejected it straight away.

There are lot’s of different types of groups on Facebook, fan based groups, interest groups and yes even brand groups.

Brand groups are often just set-up by normal people who are fans of brands or people who work for brands (brand evangelists).

There is a real need for social media marketers to understand how to use Facebook properly, there is no reason to spam people by sending invites to your brand group.

Social Media is all about permission marketing, if people like what you have to offer they will become a member of your Facebook group without any spammy requests.

LG have done good job of plugging their Facebook group on their social media hub (blog).

This allows people to join their group if they want to, in many respects a Facebook group should be seen as a brands own micro-social network.

Wake up people! Stop knocking on doors, provide people what they want by means of content and information, in time you will find people join your brand group automatically.

Tags: facebook, groups, permission marketing, social network

Hosting parties and making friends

One of my favourite quotes is:

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you” - Dale Carnegie

That quote has long sat on my Facebook profile even before I started to understand Social Media and it’s underpinnings.

There seems to be a recent trend of brands owners running out to their creative shops and getting branded social networks built. The brands that are taking this somewhat hasty approach seem to think it’s the answer to ticking another box in their advertising/media check list.

There are even white label social network platforms available on the web, which provide easy, low cost, out of the box platforms for brands owners to start building their own social networks. The popular ones of course being Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn and new to the white label arena is Groupsites.

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So…the platforms already exist, with a bit of savvy they can be quite easily customised and this is already being done quite successfully.

For some brands, however, I do not think branded social networks are the most suitable and immediate solutions. Social Media is all about creating a dialogue between brands and consumers.

Brand owners need to start conversing with their audiences in baby steps, listening to them, participating in conversations and providing them with content and dialogue which delivers value.

The best way to start doing this it to go where the conversations are taking place such as existing, blogs, social networks and interest groups. This is a very labour intensive exercise, however, it is a sure fire way of “making friends”. You’ll now understand how my Dale Canergie quote fits in to all of this.

It’s not just about talking either, listening is massively important too, what are your new friends saying? what do they want? how do they feel?

As result of all the socialising and listening, brand owners should develop what audiences are asking for. A branded social network only becomes a realistic option if it is part of greater solution which addresses understood audience needs, if it is not a viable option then brand owners should consider alternative solutions such as:

- Product feed back or suggestion mechanisms, Dell Ideastorm is a good example of this.
- Branded applications and utilities
- Branded content on websites

Owning branded social networks is akin to hosting a party. You can’t host a big party without knowing lots of friends and finding out what they’d enjoy or whether they’d want to come at all?

In every case brand owners should start off small and evolve their social media strategy in a Darwninesq manner, branded social networks should really appear during the maturity stages of a brands social strategy and not at the start.

Tags: brand audiences, brand conversation, crowdvine, goingon, groupsites, kickapps, ning, recent social media, social network, Social networks, white label social networks