#scrm12 - Who owns social?

March 29th, 2012

Neville Hobson sets the scene by showing the recent incident of a clash between Tesco and a mummy blogger.

Panel:

Katy Howell - @katyhowell - MD, Immediate Future

Nick Sharples - @SharplesN - corporate communications manager

Martin Hill-Wilson - @martinhw - director, Brainfood Consulting

Aaron Stewart - @kanasoftware - product marketing manager, KANA Software

Discussion.

Katy: Every function with a touchpoint to the consumer needs to be socially aware.

Neville blogged about this. I responded with the idea that it will become like the telephone. Owned by all.

Nick thinks “depends” is an important word. He’s seen three owners - one each in customer support, marketing and corporate comms. You need someone to lead it, not own it.

Martin thinks that the CEO should own it. That’s going to give you a strong picture of wether social is going to work in the business. The best owner is someone whose interest span the whole business - someone with “C” at the beginning of their title. They can change the culture, to the point where everyone owns the social.

Aaron - Those who have a stake should take ownership. Objectives should drive co-ownership. Who owns e-mail? For sale enablement? Sales? For Support? Customer support?

Neville thinks that there are different views (based on the debate) - with “depends” the point of commonality. Are we even using “own” in the same way. Martin thinks that there’s always a point of focus when anything new is introduced. Katy agrees as there’s a need for a catalyst, but she’s not so sure about the idea of a centre of excellence. Creating a separate department? Gives everyone the excuse to not engage. Nick thinks there’s a difference between a centre of excellent and a steering committee, sharing experiences and ideas. Marketing have moved from thinking social might be interesting, to wholesale enthusiasm and a desire for ownership. Aaron thinks that ownership is best defined as someone who has a stake in it. If you have a stake, you should take an initiative.

Martin - if you ask who can get value - everyone turns up to the table. How do we get this thing going throughout the organisation?

So, how do we get going? What’s the start point?

Nick believes that corporate communications should lead on this. That’s the department with responsibility with protecting the brand. You need to build a brand guardianship system across the business. Autoglass have a team of people monitoring Twitter and Facebook, and the CS reps can monitor, respond and chase. And occasionally they hit things that need to go to PR or corp comms. Martin - what’s interesting about great changes is that stories are inspiring because it’s one individual that decides not to fit in the box and change things. They take the simple view “how many ‘no’s do you have before you say ‘yes’ to me”. You need someone will to push the boat. Or a group of people who can work guerrilla tactics.  Twitter is a pretty useful proxy for determining if people “live it”. The other thing that is interesting is opening up the channels. A post on the Best Buy blog saw the CEO addressing the idea that their business model was in trouble - and was inundated by replies - including rom staff - telling him that he was wrong.

Lots of interesting feedback from the audience. General agreement about distributed ownership, but some contrary views on corporate comms as a leading voice - they tend to be too focused on brand protection rather than genuine engagement. At least one company has a serious social team of 20 - out of about 8000 - that seems successful.

Katy points out we’ve talked about risk and pain, but we haven’t talked about the companies that don’t have those people. Where there’s fear, you need to take small, chunky steps that show the C-suite rewards. Adoption can come organically, but it can also come because you build it into the process.

Nick - Corporate inertia is something everyone has to deal with. It took us two years before IT allowed our social media evangelists to see what they were posting on their work computers… It takes time.

Martin - Command and control is going out of fashion. We have a fluffy word - “empowerment” - for what’s next. What does it mean? Sun Microsystems social guidebook is: don’t be stupid online. That reflects an empowered company that knows how to behave.

Aaron - Listening is important.You need to listen before you can make an intelligent engagement. And who starts? Customer support. They now the customer experience.

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#scrm12 - Martin Hill-Wilson on making marketing and customer support work together

March 29th, 2012

Martin Hill-Wilson is a director of Brainfood Consulting

There’s lots of big ideas being thrown around - the social business, etc. Where do you start? When you walk in the front door, all your colleagues all look the same as ever…

At my favourite customer services watering holes, I walk in and say “there’s this new thing, social customer service”. The general feeling is that it’s only 0.05% and we shouldn’t bother.

Customer service? What does that mean? If you listen to a marketing audience, you hear a dreadful naive view. So how do you mash these two views together?

As a recruiter, would you know how to go looking for a customer service person, a marketeer, an MD? They all look different.

Are the two tribes of customer service and marketing on the same page? The audience clearly think they’re not.

We still organise ourselves in silos - that’s not going to change. But customers don’t obey that any more. They walk through them. Brands need to find a reason to get involved in conversations online - people were having them anyway. Over the lifecycle of a customer relationship, the customers move through all the silos. How do we better understand customer support, marketing and sales working together. Well, get them on one agenda. Do you know what the other silos’ goals are?

1. Develop a common view of your customers

In large organisations, we repeat and reinvent things. Marketing does a tonne of stuff about customer lifecycle. But the view is dumb in consumer service terms. Have the marketers even reached out to find out? “Voice of the Customer” programmes allow you to capture this, their experience of your customer. This is hard. It’s much easier to know nothing about them, and flog them stuff. So let’s not do it three or four times, just once.

2. Do joint business planning

The social business of the future - one would hope - would do business planning better. But right now, it’s all broken down and divvided up. Shouldn’t these three departments have some shared goals? And if they have shared gaols, how about shared dashboards? There are joke about customer services complaining about marketing pushing campaigns on Friday that lead to over-flowing inboxes on Monday. Those jokes are 30 years old. C’mon. If you want to change things, focus on the goals. People care about what they’re paid to care about. If you want an aligned organisational response to customers - create a common set of congruent motivators. Social is a pioneering discipline. It cocks a snoot at traditional ways of doing things - and that’s great. Revolutions begin with bonfires in the basement. That’s needed. You can do all this without permission. Just get together with some buddies from the other side.

3. Merge Customer Analytics

Marketing is good at analytics. Customer support, less so. Text and voice and video can all be monitored and analysed for sentiment. And that’s great if we can create common engagement from that.

So, you need new workflows. And it adds a whole new ares of community engagement and monitoring that then feeds into the traditional CRM., through into response and back into community. This is a model that has been for a while, but people are still exploring it - and finding the politics tough.

Being a social business is a big goal - break it down into steps, into milestones. And this is a good, practical milestone.

Customer communities - great opportunity. They lead to reduced cost of customer contact and greater reach when interventions are made. If you can reduce 10% (or even 20%) of call volumes? Wow. Great. Encourage user generated content, because it is an indication of how much people are likely to buy from you. It’s a new KPI, as there’s a relationship between that and funnel management. And you can use it to incubate ideas and knowledge. The ROI on knowledge management isn’t very high - but when customers source answers, it’s useful and used lots. It hasn’t been sanitised by the internal workflow. And this works indie the firewall as well - give people the tools to share solutions. You can use the generated content to drive a series of blog posts. Take that community, and evolve it into a broader communications strategy - one that can deliver 10 to 20% ROI.

Key themes? Customers, internal comms, one agenda, broken structures (”big is stupid”). The army thinks you can’t have an effective organisation beyond 300 people. User generated content.

So, actually, what we’re saying is that there’s a fourth element in the mix: customers.

The further you go up in organisations, the less they go out. They sit in meetings all day, playing with their iPads. That’s rubbish - how are they engaged with their customers like that? Headlines are great, the inspire the troops. But you can’t let them get mown down by the gunfire of politics.

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#scrm12 - Guy Stephens on the rise of the social customer

March 29th, 2012

Guy Stephens is a social media/scrm consultant at CapGemini

In 1999, the idea of the global conversation was just that - an idea. The Cluetrain Manifesto articulated what would come to be - the idea of markets as conversations - a decade later.

Last year the Government produced the Open Services White Paper - 5 principles around decentralisation, bringing ownership of services down to the lowest appropriate level - the lowest level at which decision making can be made. It talks about transparency and choice - similar to social media. In that decade, we’ve gone from customers being talked to to customers dominating the conversation. Some people share from the moment they wake up. Why? There are many reasons. But people didn’t have the tools to fulfil the desire to share until recently.

Within customer services we have seen huge change. Think about how decision making has changed - the shift from e-mail to activity streams like Twitter or Yammer. Think about Facebook’s move to verbs - what if customer service words became part of those verbs? What if you could check into a resolution?  We need to retain some of the cowboy, pioneering spirit that we had back when Stephens was setting up the social element of Carphone Warehouse in 2008.

People complain on Google Maps. Senior staff at BT were surprised to discover that people were complaining about them on Google Maps. People are everywhere online, and they move faster than we can move as organisations - but we need to be aware. There’s a company in the US that has turned complaining into a game. These are independent sites for complaints - why would people go there? What happens when you start to push them together? And what does mobile bring to this - 24/7 connection, with them all the time. There are some fantastic apps coming from airlines right now. Customers are pushing the boundaries and forcing the customers to catch up.

Don’t forget forums. Super users spend 40 hours a week on the forums. Paid employees are paid for 37 hours… What does that do for the employee model? There are all these changes going on at the moment. We’re seeing the shift - sometimes companies don’t actually need to be part of the conversation.

Going back to Government decentralised - their model is they decentralise. No. The people decide what is decentralised - they haven’t thought about what the outcome might be.

Gamification - getting points for doing things (for example). How might that influence behaviour? Can it help you push customers into channel? Or is that a misunderstanding? Do they use all channels. If you don’t want calls - never over the phone. He finds it curious that we set so many targets around phone calls, leading to people picking up calls after three rings and then hanging up to meet targets. That might be the only opportunity to talk to a customer in the whole life of the relationship. We need to think of the cultural issues rather than the technology. Don’t just plug it in because it’s a fad. All these social platforms are about your mindset as a company. Ignore the technology - sort yourselves out first.

All this change has left companies unsure what to do. Some companies have been in this space for a couple of years, but they’re still learning, thinking about scalability and sustainability.

Recommended Reading

Wikinomics - Jon Tapscott. The idea of the shared canvas.

Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky.

The Adaptive Organisation - Brian Solis. The ideas of empathy and real time.

There are all sorts of models. Cap Gemini has one. Other companies  do to.

“Born cloud, raised mobile, grown up social” - JP Ragaswami

How many companies have a policy about bring your own devices? Yet, how many people bring their iPads and mobiles to work?

Cognitive polyphasia is the way we can think many thinks about a single subject - including contradictory ones. Privacy is a classic one - in some contexts we’re extremely worried about it - and others we don’t care. Our attitude changes over time.

The law of infinite variety - if you want to social externally, your internal systems need to be as social if not more so. Yet most companies focus on the external. If you talk about authenticity and openness - what does that actually mean? Is it the same in every department? You need to align internally. Don’t let discussions about ownership and ROI slow you down. Have them in parallel, or your customers will be gone.

Digital literacy - do you understand your customers? Do they understand you? Do you need a currency of exchange to understand one another? You need to think about how you talk, the language you use.

Companies often go to the edge - they listen, they monitor, but they are scared to engage. And I’m never quite sure why. We’re going back to a time where business is more intimate, more personal. How do you train people to be more empathic? It’s a new language for customer service. But different parts of the organisations are starting to come together and talk to one another. We are all different, but together we can make something better.

 

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Social Customer Service infographic

March 27th, 2012

Ahead of the Social Customer event, which is taking place this Thursday, March 29th in London. Our Social Times has produced the following Social Customer Service infographic.

Luke Brynley-Jones, director at Our Social Times commented: “In recent months Customer Service has hit the social media spotlight in a flurry of reports and surveys. Fuelled by the increasing focus on engagement marketing, companies are realising that a department once consigned to contact centres in remote corners of the globe might just be one of their most important assets.

“At the same time, consumers are also looking for support via their chosen social media channels. 44% of adults now use the web to share grievances about products and 15% of 15-24 year olds prefer to interact with customer services exclusively via social media.

“In spite of this, 60% of companies don’t respond to customers via social media, even when asked a direct question. The fact that, when asked how companies could improve their customer services, 68% of people said “make contact numbers easier to find”, might explain this. Evidently, the contact centre still has its place.”

We will be attending the Social Customer event on Thursday and live blogging the highlights, so if you’re not able to make it along, please check out our updates.

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Developing Social CRM

March 23rd, 2012

This post has been written as a follow up to our ‘Defining Social CRM‘ post, which was developed to overview the basics of what is often a confusing but essential function for any brand that wishes to engage with the social customer.

In this post we want to look beyond defining Social CRM and offer a brief guide to developing Social CRM, identifying relevant focuses to allow you to get to grips with your brand’s requirements. But first, let’s remind ourselves of exactly what Social CRM is:

Mitch Lieberman defined it thus: “Social CRM is about bringing “me” [the social customer] into the ecosystem… It is not about the technology, it is about the people, process and cultural shifts necessary to support and grow a business.”

Or as Paul Greenberg put it: “Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”

Needless to say there has been a major shift in the way we communicate with our customers and we want to use this post to explore the technologies, people, processes and cultural shifts a little further.

In our last post, we referenced Esteban Kolsky’s four key areas of Social CRM as follows
1. Community management
2. Social analytics engine
3. Actionable layer unit
4. System-of-record integration layer

In this post we will break down each area and look at the relevant services/focuses that brands should be considering. Therefore we’ve re-developed the four key areas into the following action points, and offered key service areas under each:

1. Listen (to our customers and wider community to understand issues and identify pain points)

2. Capture (actionable and relevant data)

3. Learn (develop a Social CRM philosophy across the organisation.)

4. Engage (using knowledge built through phases 1-3, engage in a relevant and useful manner)

Let’s look at each area in more detail:

1. Listen

As with any area of social media, or any conversation for that matter, the best place to start is by listening. In terms of customer relationship management, the importance of listening cannot be over-exaggerated. We should only engage and add value when we have listened to and understood the issues that our customers are experiencing.

Services focuses/audit areas:

Digital / social infrastructure - Trying to run a Social CRM campaign without a socially-enabled website, relevant social profiles and the ability to engage is very difficult.

Before you go any further you need to build your brand’s Social CRM tools:
• Audit your website - are you open to customer listening/engagement?
• Audit your SEO - can your digital touch points be found online?
• Audit/build social channels - are you open and available for customer engagement and listening outside of your direct website?

Social Media monitoring - Social CRM is often confused with Social Media Monitoring. Let’s be clear, although Social Media Monitoring is a crucial element of your Social CRM armoury, and will form a central part of the campaign, it is not enough to use monitoring alone. You must identify the relevant mentions, use the data and build that into your organisational approach. The data is only relevant if it is acted upon.

Team - Does your Social CRM response team consist of one marketing / customer services junior? This is not acceptable. Consider your customers, consider the amount of conversation about your brand, do you have the team to support this volume of data and conversation?

Training - Remember Social CRM is not a marketing or customer services tactic alone, your business needs to understand the key elements of Social CRM and act upon them. This means training and understanding needs to be organisational.

2. Capture

Once you have the platform, processes and people in place to listen, you need to feed this infrastructure with actionable and relevant data. This is the fuel that drives the Social CRM engine and the quality of the fuel will relate directly to the effectiveness of the Social CRM process.

The first stage is to capture the data and process it into the relevant focuses for your business.

Once you have the data you will quickly realise that much of it is irrelevant. It is crucial that time is not wasted feeding this information through the business and bringing on analysis paralysis.

Therefore in this layer the focus is identifying and actioning the useful data that will tell the business something about its customers, identify issues to be remedied or help to build the business by way of market research or insights.

Services focuses/audit areas:

Data Capture - Social Media monitoring will play a key role here, but we need to go deeper. Website analytics and data captured from any customer communities will be vital along with metrics available through LinkedIn groups and associated networking tools/ industry bodies.

Data Analysis - Data analysis is crucial. Do not overlook this phase as you could either strangle the process with too much data, or starve is of any useful information by only feeding it with the basics. Use experience here, make the most of your data and it will drive you to real success. If you don’t have the in-house skills utilise experienced consultants or agencies. The value you derive from the data can be extremely powerful for the business as a whole.

3. Learn

The third layer is the key to Social CRM success, which is taking Social CRM beyond a marketing or customer services specialism, and building a philosophy that translates across the organisation. If Social CRM is purely a function of customer services we are missing the point and will ultimately fail to achieve the brand’s CRM potential.

In today’s socially connected world, customers can intersect and engage with an organisation at many different points, and social customers do not follow traditional channels of communication. Therefore, the Social CRM strategy must be implemented across the business to succeed.

Service focuses/audit areas:

Internal communications of findings - There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps to smooth the process, as you push your business towards a more open and responsive way of thinking about your customers.

Workflow tools - these tools will ensure that information created is accessible to everyone in the organisation in the same way. This creates a context for each interaction and will enable the social customer to engage with you in way that he/she finds most relevant.

Business-wide social strategy - A social business strategy is the ultimate goal. This is the heart of social conversation and the essence of a social business. If an organisation’s Social CRM strategy cannot positively impact this process then it is failing, and to succeed it must be implemented across the board.

We now learn from and engage with our customers more than ever before, but if these learnings are not translated throughout the business, we fail.

4. Engage

Social CRM isn’t just about engaging consistently, within a reasonable timeframe and adhering to corporate guidelines. The engagement needs to be relevant and useful, and not always in the form of a simple text-based response. Content can be used to engage without a complaint and to convey a key part of your offering. So don’t just think of engagement as a response. Think of it as an opportunity to build a conversation.

Let’s also be clear that you should not hold back from engaging until you have completed the three previous phases. Of course you need to engage before you have successfully implemented your social business strategy, otherwise it could take some time before we actually respond to our customers. However, the point remains we should not look at engagement as the quick fix or the first action point. It is important to respond to customer issues, but as we have said above, engagement is so much more than just responding.

Social media guidelines - These shouldn’t be an onerous book of dictations. The social media guidelines are important to communicate key aspects of the business dos and don’ts but they are not a script. The key here is ‘guideline’ we are not trying to stop our brand from engaging with humans as humans. Do not be tempted to speak in rigid legalese.

Content development - Content can be extremely powerful, from expressive video to simple slideshares, your content will make your brand more accessible, better understood and more useful. Think of content as your social currency, build it up, but don’t rely on irrelevant and slapdash content. Take quality over quantity every time. Not all content is the same, poor content will encourage a negative response, so get the right advice from those that have done it before and take the lead from the listening phase where you should understand exactly what it is that your customers want. You can find a recent case study example of a content community here.

Social tool management - this is very simple part of the process, but again it is very easy to mess up. Tone, frequency and unwritten rules are subtleties that can make all the difference. Just because someone in your team understands Facebook, it does not qualify them for the role. Invest in experience and training and heed the many case study examples of success and failure. Allocate resource relevant to your social/digital footprint and customer base. Look outside of the business if the skills are not in-house, do not give this job to the intern, because if/when something goes wrong, blaming an intern will only make the situation worse.

A thought to leave you with

If you’ve reviewed this post and ticked off the elements you want to take with you for your business or reconfirmed elements that you have already got in place, I hope the information was useful and best of luck. However, if you have written off Social CRM because your customers don’t act ‘that way’ think again. Your customer is no different, you are now dealing with the social customer who doesn’t play by traditional rules and does not accept that your brand is in charge. The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn his/her trust.

This post was not been designed as the definitive guide to each service area of Social CRM, but offers an introduction to reflect the activity required to build successful Social CRM.

To learn more about Social CRM, or if you would be interested in discussing any of the areas raised in this series of posts please get in touch.

We will also be taking part in the upcoming ‘Social Customer‘ event in London on March 29th, where we will be live blogging, so if you’re unable to attend please keep an eye on our blog for updates on the sessions and learnings.

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, Industry events, Liberate Media news, PR, Social media, Social networking, Trends and research, Useful resources | 1 Comment »

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Defining Social CRM

March 7th, 2012

Social CRM is a topic that we have covered at length on this blog in the past, looking at definitions, case study examples and feedback from Social CRM events that we attend and speak at.

In our experience, the one defining characteristic of Social CRM is the range of misconceptions and misunderstandings about the core elements involved. Therefore, we have decided to pull together this post to cover off three of the key questions that we come up against when discussing Social CRM, and then build on the focus over the coming weeks.

1. What is Social CRM?:

Perhaps one of the best definitions that I’ve come across on Social CRM was from Esteban Kolsky - Founder at ThinkJar, who spoke at Social CRM 2011, London, which I attended last year. He stated: “Companies tend to start using social media to talk at their customers not to listen to them” he then defined CRM as a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology, designed to improve human interactions in a business environment.

This is a good reflection of how many organisations start out on the road to Social CRM (jumping straight into a tactical approach and talking ‘at’ customers but not listening ‘to’ customers), in comparison to where they really need to be, which is simply to focus on improving real interactions with customers.

In practical terms this means the organisation will need to implement a system and related technologies, built around an overarching ‘business’ strategy. And by business strategy, I mean a strategy that is developed with the whole business in mind, understood by the business and executed by the business.

2. Why does Social CRM matter?

The key here is taking CRM beyond a marketing or customer services specialism, and building a philosophy that translates across the organisation. If Social CRM is purely a function of customer services we are missing the point. In today’s socially connected world, customers can intersect and engage with an organisation at many different points, and do not follow traditional channels of communication. Therefore, the Social CRM strategy must be implemented across the business to succeed.

This has been evidenced on many occasions by customers discussing organisations with their networks, forming opinions and influencing others through their experiences. This is the heart of social conversation and the essence of a social business. If an organisation’s Social CRM strategy cannot positively impact this process then it is failing, and to succeed it must be implemented across the board. For example, your sales staff maybe excellent relationship managers, but if your service staff are rude and unresponsive, the overall impact will be negative.

Furthermore, we now learn from and engage with our customers more than ever before, but we can also learn from the data that social and online activities offer to us. It is important however to manage this data and put it to use, not all of the data will be useful, in fact much of it will just be noise, but social CRM offers us the opportunity to learn about customers, process these learnings and engaging accordingly.

3. How do you develop your Social CRM strategy?

If we consider that Social CRM is a method of translating social activities into the fundamentals of CRM, and in turn we understand that Social CRM is part of the evolution towards the development of a wider social business then we are half way there. However, we also need to focus on the customer need, which is not to be a fan or friend of the organisation, but to derive value from his/her engagement with the organisation. As David Meerman Scott said: ‘Nobody cares about your products, people care about their problems. Customers do not want a relationship with your business, they want the benefits a relationship can offer to them’‘.

With that in mind, we need to translate our strategy into deliverables, and according to Kolsky, there are four key functions of Social CRM:
1. Community management (listening and engaging usefully)
2. Social analytics engine (gathering and processing data)
3. Actionable layer unit (identifying and actioning learnings)
4. System-of-record integration layer (Integrating learnings into the business)

It is also important to note that a key part of Social CRM is engaging with humans as humans. Machines talking to humans rarely works, especially in terms of a meaningful conversation. Therefore, remember it’s not about the technology, it’s about the person using it and the conversation. If we lose sight of the fundamentals and hide behind automated monitoring and response it will be the equivalent of a business leaving an answer machine to deal with customers, it won’t learn or react, it will just repeat.

Further reading

You can review our previous Social CRM posts on Social CRM 2011 London here, and Vikki Chowney at eConsultancy also recently did an excellent checklist on social customer service.

If you want to learn more on the subject, and speak to those organisations and agencies involved in Social CRM, I would also recommend The Social Customer event in London on March 29th, run by Our Social Times.

Posted in Blog, Content, Industry events, Liberate Media news, Social media, Social networking, Trends and research, Useful resources | 3 Comments »

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Do you own your social profile?

January 5th, 2012

Recently the issue of social profile ownership has come to the fore with the very public case
of Noah Kravitz, a blogger based in California who is being sued by his former employer, PhoneDog,  which is seeking damages because he failed to relinquish his Twitter account when he left the company to work for a rival.

This probably sounds ridiculous, but we have already experienced a similar case in the UK as far back as 2008, when a recruitment consultant working for Hays,  Mark Ions, was ordered to give the rights to his LinkedIn account to his former employer. The court ruled that information of a confidential nature was collected during his work and that the company deserved to have full access to his account. Conversely, last year the BBC’s chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg moved from the BBC to ITV and took her Twitter account, which had 58,000 followers with her. The BBC did not seek legal ownership of her account, although there was discussion of the issue elsewhere.

You may think this is a crazy conversation considering the social profiles were in the individual’s name, but the employers have a good argument if the profiles were used solely, or at least for the majority of time, for work purposes, contain work-based contacts and in effect represent the individual’s record of work-based conversations.

That’s not to say I agree with the ruling, far from it, but we need to be aware of the slow moving legal response to fast moving technologies. In other words, the law doesn’t move as quickly as social media, so expect rulings to be based on the most sensible work-based comparison, which generally would have remained the property of the employer after the employee left, e.g. customer files and or contact books. That being said, one would hope that in most cases our social profiles represent a mixture of personal and work-based discussion, so we should not see ownership battles ongoing between employers and employees, and of course this issue could have been avoided if relevant social media guidelines were in place.

It would be interesting to see the outcome of a similar case in a PR, digital or social agency, and how that might affect future norms between employers and employees across the sector. However, so far it seems common sense has prevailed, or perhaps policy has won the day.

In the current PhoneDog case, the company has said that it is taking the action because it had invested in growing the number of followers that Mr Kravitz had on Twitter and the account was its property, alleging that those followers are, in effect, a customer list and PhoneDog’s property. The company wants Kravitz to pay $340,000: $2.50 per follower per month for 18 months.

PhoneDog was quoted in the New York Times saying: “We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands.”

Jon Rettinger, President, TechnoBuffalo (Noah’s current employer) responded with the following statement: “I have remained silent on the issue, privately supporting Noah, hoping that this issue would be resolved. However, further reflection and consultation has made me realize the time for silence is over. TechnoBuffalo is a news outlet, and this situation quite clearly has become news. We stand firmly behind Noah, disagree with the frivolous suit PhoneDog has filed, and hope swift justice will be served. This equates to school yard bullying, and should be met with disgust by the world. We stand behind our employees as we would family. Noah has the full support of the Herd. I urge you all to speak up!”

A hearing in the case, PhoneDog LLC v. Kravitz, is scheduled for January 26 in San Francisco and I expect some interesting responses from organisations across the world, in terms of tightening up policies, whatever the outcome.

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Apple announce one day shopping event - 25th November

November 22nd, 2011

Do you want an iPad, iPad, iPhone or any other Apple product? This could be you best chance to bag a bargain for Christmas.

Apple has announced that it will be holding a one day holiday shopping event on Black Friday which is this Friday, November 25^th.

From the Apple website:

“The special one-day Apple shopping event.

This Friday, 25 November.

Mark your calendar now, and come back to the Apple Online Store for the special one-day event. You’ll discover amazing iPad, iPod and Mac gifts for everyone on your list.

Until then, browse the Apple Online Store for great ideas.”

Apple has not yet given any details about exactly what discounts will be available. Last year, Apple held its Black Friday event on November 27th and discounted a number of its products, cutting the prices of its iMacs and Macbook Pro laptops by up to 7.5 per cent

You still might be able to get better deals elsewhere, but if you’re buying direct from Apple you get that added confidence of a respected supplier.

Below is a video of the iPhone 4s to whet your appetite.

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UK internet advertising spend grows 13.5%

October 5th, 2011

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) released its latest half-yearly update today, which shows that the UK internet advertising market is still buoyant, even in the face of the global economic slowdown, as the sector has achieved a 13.5% year-on-year growth.

The IAB figures show £2.26bn was spent on all forms of internet advertising in the first six months of the year, compared with a growth rate of about 1.4% across traditional media such as TV, newspapers and radio. This continues the growth trend over the last few years that has seen 11% growth in internet advertising in the same period last year and 4.6% in the first half of 2009.

The IAB attributed this growth to continued spending from fast-moving consumer goods companies, (FMCG) such as Unilever and P&G, citing digital display and online video advertising as the key growth sectors.

The report also put online spend ahead of TV for the first time since 2009, albeit marginally, with digital accounting for 27% of all ad spend and TV 26%.

Breaking down the online figures: Online display advertising accounted for almost a quarter of all digital spend (£510m), with a year-on-year growth rate of 18.5%, with Facebook likely to account for a large percentage of this.

Online video advertising also continued to evolve, doubling in size to £45m, but paid search still dominates, and grew 12.6% to £1.3bn, or a 58% share, with online classifieds growing 3% to £385m.

In terms of vertical categories, it’s a fairly even split, with finance remaining the biggest investor, accounting for 16% of all spend, closely followed by FMCGs on 15%, entertainment and media brands on 12% and travel and transport on 10%.

In the U.S online ad revenues have also grown by an impressive 23% year-on-year reaching almost $15 Billion in the first six months of the year. On the other side of the Atlantic almost half of revenue contributions come from search (49%), up by 27%, where as display advertising accounted for 37%.

For further information, see:

IAB

The Guardian

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Social Media Marketing and Monitoring 2011

September 20th, 2011

We attended Social Media Marketing and Monitoring 2011 in London yesterday, and since its launch this event, developed and run by Luke Brynley-Jones at Our Social Times, has never disappointed.

This year the event included impressive speakers such as Charles Arthur (The Guardian) , Neville Hobson (Nevillehobson.com) and Jon Morter, Big Other (organiser of Rage against the X-Factor campaign).

The event covered a range of topics, including: Social Commerce, Location Marketing, Social Search, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Management, B2B Social Media, Engagement & Social CRM and Integrated Marketing Campaigns.

The highlights for me were:

The first panel debate, which featuring Luke Brynley-Jones (Our Social Times), Charles Arthur (The Guardian), Neville Hobson (Nevillehobson.com), Wayne Gibbins (Viadeo) and Jenni Lloyd (Nixon McInnes).

The subject was ‘The Future of Social Networking’ and one of the first topics of debate was: have we ‘bloated our streams?‘ particularly Facebook, and is this fatigue or perhaps a maturing of social networking?

The panel also came out with a great statistic to highlight the difference in international usage of social networks: 48% of web users in China are content creators compared with 24% in the western world.

Neville Hobson outlined the difference between methods of measuring influence, which focused on PeerIndex’s founder who makes the distinction between “influencers” and “opinion formers”.

We then heard from PJ Verhoef at Clarion Consulting, who covered: The What, Why and How of Social Local Marketing, and hit us with a range of useful figures, including:

Over 50% of internet connections are location enabled smartphones and 20% of ALL search is mobile.

• 96% felt QR codes were useful, 92% would use it again.
• 55% of tweets are from a mobile.
• 55% of people will travel 15 minutes for a 10% discount.

Following a brief break, we went into a discussion on monitoring, measurement & engagement

Chair: Andrew Grill (PeopleBrowsr), Joshua March (Conversocial) , Giles Palmer (Brandwatch), Catriona Oldershaw (Synthesio), Tammy Kahn Fennell (MarketMeSuite)

Catriona Oldershaw made a good point about brands often having too many metrics and not enough measurable insights, and that social monitoring and responding shouldn’t be siloed, i.e. within an agency, or marketing department.

Andrew Grill used BT as an example of using Twitter engagement, stating BT has 25 people monitoring and talking to customers via Twitter.

Giles Palmer at Brandwatch referenced analysis that his team had completed on the top 200 brands in UK and U.S., which showed 5% UK, 8% U.S. brands are responding to customer service issues through social media.

Tammy Kahn Fennell from MarketMeSuite offered input on the issue of Compliance and liability through social media, confirming the law is going to have to catch up, but it is also going to have to understand we are social people.

One of the key discussion points centred around how the Metropolitan Police should have reacted to the London Riots.

Giles Palmer confirmed the issue was difficult to track as much of the conversation was on BBM (Blackberry Messenger) which is a closed network and so difficult to access/monitor.

However, assuming the data is public, he suggested sentiment analysis could be employed around hate management detection. i.e. normalising traditional language usage, and then monitoring ‘hate language analysis’ that could act as pre-cursors to potential unrest. He confirmed it would be important to set up alerts to bring in humans who will interpret the conversations and act appropriately.

Joshua March also made a good point, confirming he used Social Media during the riots to understand where to avoid, and where was safe to go, so it wasn’t all bad.

Then came one of the presentations that many of us had been waiting for: How I Beat Simon Cowell Using Social Media by Jon Morter - Big Other.

John gave an excellent presentation on his two campaigns to beat The XFactor to the Xmas number one. He used the learnings from his first campaign, which didn’t bring the desired results, and the successes of the second campaign, which as we know kept The XFactor from the number 1 spot, something that we should all be thankful for, at Christmas or any other time.

John achieved some amazing results through his campaign, including achieving 72,000 sales of the track in the last 3 hours after releasing a live version (which is more sales than is needed most weeks to top the chart).

Jon Morter also told us that he got a call from Simon Cowell 3 hours before the chart result was due to be issued. Apparently Simon congratulated him and offered him a drink, which he still has not yet followed up on.

You can read Gordon Macmillan’s write up here.

Then Raf Keustermans an independent Consultant, (former EA and Playfish) spoke about Using Gaming Mechanics for Marketing. His presentation offered real insight into the opportunities available through gamification, including:

Before 2008 games were Niche, a big but closed industry, which rose from 250M gamers in 2000, to over 1Billion gamers in 2011.

He also confirmed 150 billion minutes are spent every month on social games, that’s an average of 10 minutes for everyone on the planet.

Next, Marcus Taylor from SEOptimse spoke about Social Search & Social SEO for Marketing, and posed the question, through various experiments: ‘Does Facebook Likes have effect on Google rankings?’

His answer being: directly no, but as part of ‘ranking circle’ yes. And that it is safe to assume Google +1’s are an influencing factor towards search rankings.

Marcus also offered five tips on encouraging brand search and getting the benefits of personalised search:

1. Appear for comparison and head of tail key terms where people start stopping.
2. Be awesome and encourage return visits.
3. Run offline radio / TV / print) ads with a ‘search for us’ call to action (Pontiac were first to do this in the Superbowl).
4. Run branded events / sponsor events.
5. Link or reference search results from products - tell people to ‘search google for X” if you know you rank number 1 for that term.

There were also case studies on the day from Play.com, Captain Morgan’s Rum and BMi Baby, as well as a final panel discussion: Is Social Commerce the Future of e-Commerce? Chaired by  Luke Brynley-Jones (Our Social Times) and featuring Peter Parkes (Expedia), Amy Kean (Havas Media), Jenny Chiu (BrandAlley), Robin Grant (We Are Social)

The event was a massive success, and congrats once again to Luke Brynley-Jones and the Our Social Times team.

Slides from most of the presentations are available at Our Social Times’ Slideshare.

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