Corporate social media presences – structuring your business for success

Most smart brand-savvy companies now have some form of social media presence. As we’ve all seen, in some companies these have sprung up as the pet project of a marketing team member, on the whim of the customer service director, or maybe because because one of the PR guys sees the potential of these new media as additional PR channels. So how do you take things to the next level? How do you transform what may well be a market-leading social media presence in one part of your business into something that is truly representative of your company as a whole, transcending internal organisational boundaries and really becoming your ‘social face’ on the web?

This is a question on the minds of many firms the world over, and whilst I don’t profess to have all the answers, I will give you my thoughts on things to keep in mind if you’re about to undertake this journey. Let’s use an imaginary telecoms company called “Joe’s” for part of this.

1 – You are Joe’s!
To your customers, you are just Joe’s. Not Joe’s Sales Division, Joe’s Customer Service Department or Joe’s Directorate of Marketing and Brand. Just Joe’s. Sounds simple, but as far as I can see, this is something that many companies totally fail to understand. Companies have complex internal organisational structures for very good reasons i.e. they would cease to function if thousands of staff had no distinct organisational responsibilities. But when facing externally, there cannot be disjoined, organisational unit-focussed social media presences. Makes no sense to customers. Seamless outward-facing unity is critical.

2 – I first started it – so that makes me the boss?
At Joe’s just like everywhere there are directors and senior managers presiding over a myriad of different functions, and rightly so. They have done a great job at using Twitter as a PR tool, but are only just toying with social media for marketing and service purposes. So does this mean that Joe’s PR Director “owns” social media as they were there first? In many firms this seems to be the norm. But I don’t think its right. Kudos where its due for those bold enough to have the initiative to get things up and running in the first place, but just because they did a great job for their function doesn’t make them the only candidate to run the show in totality.

3 – So if I’m not the boss, who is?!
A fine question, and one that’s not so straightforward to answer. My own view is that no one function in a business can be expert at everything, and so centralising social media functions into a single “do everything” team who then conceive and manage everything from PR to marketing campaigns to service requests is pretty doomed to failure if the people making up that team have only part of the functional skills required. But then I’ve also said that the organisationally-fragmented model where the original social media innovator runs the show isn’t right. So what am I saying?

4 – Get your experts together, but de-centralise where it makes sense to
As we all know, social media is very much here to stay and is not just some flash-in-the-pan moment of web madness. But we also know that in most companies real, solid expertise of what social media is, how it works, how you can best use it and so on, is relatively speaking quite thin on the ground. This makes for a quite transitionary time for most companies. Until social media becomes a widely held and practiced discipline across the company, it does make sense to partially centralise things. But – critically – centralising with the right mix of skills, and not centralising for the sake of it.

Let’s look at this in more detail. If you’re moving beyond a successful first foray into social media into something that the senior folks want to see you do more of in a big way, you’re going to have a spike in your social media expertise in one part of the business. But irrespective of this, your functional expertise on marketing, customer service, PR and whatever else will form the core of your social media presences exist in their relevant organisational units, and not necessarily with any social media expertise. One approach that some companies are taking is to build a kind of hybrid model. This means creating a role where a named, senior individual holds overall responsibility for everything related to the company’s social media work, located in a central (or functionally-agnostic) part of the business, but with a team built up of subject matter experts from each of the functional areas either physically seconded into the central team, or dedicated to social media but managed virtually. And until social media really proves its worth with the senior folks (which we all know it will, right?), this kind of transitionary hybrid model feels to me to be one of the best ways of building a successful social media unit that cuts across functional areas without ‘he who shouts loudest’ defining the precise colour of your social media offering.

5 – How’s it best to organise things?
Again there are differing views here, but what I think has the best chance of success is where each functional area either physically stumps up the people to go into the centralised social media organisation, or where they provide dedicated, ring-fenced resource that are still operationally managed by the donor unit but are a dedicated virtual part of the central social media team. For example, it may be that you need a small number of PR, marketing, technology and brand people in your social media team to be the absolute social media experts representing each of these disciplines, but you also need a larger number of dedicated customer service people. In this case, it makes sense to have those who’s day job is running volume service operations continuing to do just that, but totally on your behalf, and without the potential to have resource diverted to other things. But in the case of the marketeers, technology, brand and PR folks, bringing a smaller number of these directly into the central social media team and developing them to be the social media gurus for their function makes sense.

6 – What about backup or supporting functions?
You are almost certainly going to need the regular support of specialist parts of your business like legal, regulatory, IT support and so on, for whom you won’t be able to justify 100% of their time to be dedicated to social media, but upon whom you will need to be able to get rapid access to as and when you need it. It’s important that you have agreements in place with these areas that you can get access to expertise on demand, and with an explicit understanding that traditional ‘management by committee’ decision-making simply won’t cut it. If you need legal advice on something, and your company lawyer needs to get other information from a supplier of theirs, then that supplier also has to be bought into a radically different operational model. Business processes need evaluating and where necessary re-writing such that your social media world can operate at the speed that your customers will expect of that medium.

7 – Organisational structure
So the consolidated social media team could end up looking like this:

- Head of Social Media – central, senior position that is overall accountable for everything that the company does in social media. They are the overall lead, and primary liaison at senior level with the various functions that will be involved in social media. They will thoroughly ‘get it’!
- A central team of marketing, PR, brand, technology, content, design and customer service expertise that are both experts in social media and in their own discipline. These people form the key representatives of each of the respective functional areas and continue to work as virtual parts of their donor teams
- A remotely-managed but dedicated customer service operations team
- Named individuals in supporting functions (e.g. legal or press office), with re-designed processes that facilitate rapid response to requests

8 – It won’t work without company-wide governance
This is all well and good, but without agreeing the terms of reference for your social media business there will always be the potential for conflict with parts of your business who want to do things differently or in priority to others. This is where governance is key. Your Head of Social Media is essentially representative of the various constituent parts of the social media team and overall custodian of your company-wide direction in social, and so they should be working in partnership with the directors of service, marketing, communications, technology and so on to make sure that the overall corporate social media presence meets the needs of the various parts of the business. Also, the social media team is initially unlikely to always be big enough to physically undertake every aspect of a social media activity, for example in a large marketing campaign supporting a high-profile product launch the social media marketeers will need dotted-line support from the wider marketing organisation. Again, proper governance with good planning is very important to get this right and have the right size of team (physical and virtual) available on an activity.

Summary
In summary, in this piece I’ve outlined a way in which large companies could move their social media presences from being advanced in one area but behind in others into a much broader, co-ordinated and brand-representing set of presences, and presences that present your company in a single consolidated way to your customers. I’ve talked about building a dedicated, central team who are all highly-skilled in social media, who totally “get it” but critically also are experts in their own disciplines. I’ve discussed how having a hybrid-model of centralised and de-centralised resource could be a good way to structure your social media business unit, and also looked at just how critical good governance is in making sure that all parts of your company are equally and accurately represented via your social media channels. These are my personal views and not necessarily those of my employer, and the approach that I’ve detailed here is just one of many ways that you could approach this problem – there are various ways to do this and each have their merits. Let’s hear how you’re approaching this in your business!

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Engaging your customers online – BTCare – social media for customer service from BT (video)

I recently did a talk at an Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Thought Leadership event about ‘engaging your customers online’, where I talked about how BT have embraced social media as a new customer service opportunity. At the end of the session I had the dubious pleasure of having a video interview on the same subject, and I thought it worth recording here for posterity.

You can watch the video on the Enterprise 2.0 TV site here – http://bit.ly/aRl2Y0. You do need to register to watch the videos on there, but there’s quite a bit of decent stuff on there worth a look including an excellent interview with the inspirational Gianni Catalfamo, European Social Media Director of Ketchum Pleon.

Enjoy

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Customer communities – more than just a support tool

I’m a big fan of communities. Brands the world over are successfully using customer communities as increasingly important parts of their overall online customer service models. The work we’ve done in BT with Lithium in creating the BTCare Customer Community is an example of what I mean – the power of bringing groups of like-minded customers together to help support each other is well documented as a serious tool in both delivering a better level of service, and reducing overall support costs for businesses.

But communities go much further than just service, and this is where I think that a largely untapped opportunity exists for many brands.

Whatever it is that you sell, whether that be computers, hi-fi gear, sportswear or cars, there will be a group of people on the internet who are totally passionate about what you do. Take cars for example. A simple Google search for any model of car typically brings up a myriad of fan sites devoted to that particular car. And it’s the same story for all sorts of different products and companies. But how many companies are actively embracing these communities, welcoming them into their inner sanctum, making them feel special and valued? Not as many as could, that’s for certain.

There’s some well documented examples of where brands have totally missed the spot of just how important fan communities are. Ford’s experience in the States is one of my favourites, and is neatly summarised by @ronploof here. In short, one part of the Ford corporation took some action against some fan community sites without really thinking through the implications (though the excellent Scott Monty was the saviour of the day, and he well and truly ‘gets it’!). Indeed, the moral of the Ford story was that not all parts of that company truly appreciated the value of their community to them, and it is this that seems to pervade through many other large brands.

So, if you think about your own business have you stopped to think about what community means to you? Having a support community is a great start, but you can do so much more. There’s a multitude of tools like the Scout Labs and Radian6 monitoring products and plain and simple Google search that will help you identify where your ‘virtual communities’ are, and if you add in the capabilities of social tools like Foursquare which by their definition start to gather data about who’s engaging with your brand (as well as where and how), you can quickly collect basic data to input into your strategy for community outreach. And for most of us at least in the B2C space, daring to ignore Facebook is just crazy. Whether you’re starting to use social plugins to start to identify your prospective community members, or going the whole hog with all-singing all-dancing fan pages, there is a ton of stuff available to help create new opportunities for customer engagement.

There’s a few companies who I think do especially well in this space. Motorcycle manufacturer Harley Davidson have engagement with their customer communities integrated into the fabric of their business (and not just in terms of online community engagement – getting out there and riding with fan groups helps cement the brand-to-customer relationship and reinforce to the customers that Harley Davidson are more than just a bike seller). Coca Cola and Marmite are two other brands for whom direct engagement with fans online is second nature. Taking the Marmite example in particular, this demonstrates how creating a fan community where one doesn’t already exist can bring together groups of people where previously no such place existed.

In summary, communities are something that no company can afford to ignore. From creating a customer-led expert virtual support team via a support forum to creating new opportunities to celebrate brand loyalty, communities are an incredibly powerful tool in any customer engagement strategy. Whether in good times or bad, an active, vocal community where your company regularly participates in community activities can be another differentiator between those brands who ‘get’ the power of online and those for it remains largely irrelevant beyond the basic corporate website.

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Product serviceability – getting it right from the start

The past few weeks has seen me buried away deep in thought working up proposals for our social media strategy beyond service, and so I’ve had less time than I’d like to blog. In that time, there’s been some pretty significant technology updates from Apple which I thought worthy of mention.

The iPad is of course now with us, and I’m very happy to have been able to get one. First impressions are excellent – the screen is just amazing, and I’m sure that as applications start to ramp up in volume, the iPad will become yet another iconic Apple creation that changes the way we use computers. Of course Apple didn’t invent the tablet, but they have done what they do best – nailed the customer experience way beyond what anyone else has to offer. And as usual, the near-perfect execution – I say “near”-perfect as I still think iTunes is one of the most cumbersome pieces of software out there – only serves to encourage you to use the iPad more and more, spending an ever increasing amount on apps.

iPhone 4, and the new iOS4, bring yet more goodies. iPhone 4 looks essentially to be a little iPad plus a phone (or maybe it’s the other way round?!), but the multi-tasking capability of iOS4 will be that which interests many. Once developers work out what they can do to get apps working together, a whole new wave of Apple hysteria will follow I’m sure.

So what can the world of customer service make of all this? I think there’s a few angles. As I said before, Apple’s obsession with customer experience is something that all service businesses need to take notice of. I’ve never had to contact Apple with a technical problem with my iPhone – it just works, and the 100+ apps I’ve installed over the last year have caused me a grand total of, well, zero problems. What Apple have done better than anyone else is make sure that whatever product they produce, it doesn’t come with an expectation for the customer that they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives getting support. I can’t imagine the product managers at Apple sit around working out how many millions they need to assign to customer service budgets for each and everything that they do just to cater for deficiencies in their products. Actually, I’m sure that must do that to a degree, however my point is that Apple have such an obsession with customer experience, with product quality, reliability and excellence, they really don’t need to have the multi-millions in reserve to pick up the pieces when things go belly-up. I don’t pretend that nobody has problems with their gear – this is technology, after all, and nothing is totally infallible, but the overall impact is surely significantly minimised versus some of their competitors for whom speed to market or complexity of functionality are more critical than seamless user experience.

For the rest of us, then, the subject of “product serviceability” is key. Product serviceability is where you design supportability into a product from its incarnation, based on the premise that an iterative process of product development including ever-increasing quality and customer experience gates will gradually drive out the likelihood of customer problems and thus support costs. You design products not to fail from every aspect of their use (i.e. from purchase to installation and into in-life use), but make sure that the service wrap that backs this up is extremely accessible, and relevant to your audience. Customers – bizarrely – generally don’t want to wait days for a reply to a support email or sit for hours in a queue pressing 1 for this and 2 for that, and so giving them simple, interactive ways of supporting themselves is critical – and again Apple excels in this area. Creating support communities where peer-to-peer customer-led support brings together experts and those in need is an extraordinarily powerful way of supporting products, and combining the aggregated intelligence of your sharpest customers with your own self-serve support capabilities is just great.

So I do wonder why more people aren’t taking notice of product serviceability. It seems to me to be pretty obvious. Design things not to fail, with a user experience that is world-class, tested to destruction and seamless in execution, but add in a well-designed and highly-specified support wrap that merges the best that you as a company can offer with the best that your customers can add and you’re well on the road to a far less stressful experience for your customers if things do go wrong. Take notice of what your customers want, and how they want to be supported. Are they likely to be YouTube users? Do they use Twitter, or Facebook? Are they predisposed to find information that is logically presented to them rather than be driven mad following a call centre script that can never totally answer every possible combination of support circumstances? Making your support wrap relevant to the media that your customers choose to use is critical.

Bringing together a relentless pursuit of excellent in product design, testing and execution with an innovative, intuitive and relevant service wrap won’t just save you money in the long term from reduced support overhead costs, but will lead to far more satisfied customers who buy more, and stay loyal. Just ask Apple.

Election 2010 – Will social media be the differentiator?

I’ve written a lot on this blog over the past few months about companies engaging with their customers using social media. With an election just two weeks away in the UK, all of the main parties would seem to have ticked the social media box and have active presences on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. So does this mean that their efforts in social media engagement are going to pay off in votes?

Having the foresight to at least get a social media presence is of course a good start, and all the main 3 parties look to have done a reasonable enough job of that. But if you scratch beneath the surface, I get less convinced that they all really ‘get it’. We all know that business use of social media can’t just be about broadcasting to your customers – it has to be a two-way dialogue. So far I’m struggling to see many good examples of this in this political context. There’s absolutely loads of reasons why we should apparently vote for each of them, but little in the way of direct voter interaction – the metaphorical knock on the virtual door just isn’t happening.

The last US general election was widely regarded as having had significant influence from various forms of social media interaction, and so by rights, with the UK typically playing catch-up to our US friends, this election should see the same effect. But as it stands, I don’t think it will. I’m struggling to see a lot of dialogue between voters and parties – for example try tweeting any of them a question about their policy, or tweeting a comment about them, and see if you get a response (and if you do, please post your experience in the comments section below). Social media in this election is essentially a propaganda tool, the 2010 way of getting the badly-printed election leaflets through your front door. With just two weeks to go, though, and with the polls showing a closer position for the parties than seen in years, the smart parties really should be stepping up a gear. Just like the many companies that we know who actively look out for comments
about them on social media and get involved, so the parties should be doing the same. I accept that this could amount a lot of work, but surely that’s the whole point? They all have armies of volunteers up and down the land who could be mobilised into helping with this – this is after all the most crucial time that they’ll all have for the next 5 years or so. Every vote has to be earned, and if there’s any opportunity to turn a voter to your cause, it simply must be taken.

Later this week I’m delighted to be talking at the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Event on ‘Engaging your Audience Online’, see http://j.mp/c5wfvj, where myself and others will be talking about how companies need to embrace social media and make new connections with their customers, taking every opportunity to enter into dialogue and hopefully drive reputational change and create advocates. Maybe some of the political parties should come along too…

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#ashtag – Twitter at its best?

Well what a week its been in Europe, and especially here in the UK. The explosion of volcano Eyjafjallajokull has led to a totally unprecedented complete closure of our airspace, with flight cancellations running into the high tens of thousands and travel disruption like never seen before that will take many weeks to finally settle back to normal. The mainstream media have, of course, been all over the story, scrabbling round for any nuggets of information they can find, and to be fair they’ve managed a pretty decent coverage. But for anyone with more than just a passing interest in the news, or – more importantly – for anyone directly caught up in the chaos, its has been Twitter that has been the real star of the information show.

Within minutes of Thursday 15th April’s breakfast-time airspace shut-down, the first place that many were turning to – myself included – to try to find out what was going on was Twitter. At that stage a few of the specialist aviation Twitter IDs were starting to report on things, but with limited information initially available, there wasnt a lot to go on. Next up the official airline feeds started up with their own news, but again, early information was pretty sketchy (and from a customer service perspective, throughout the period, but especially at first, some of the airlines confused not having much news to tell with not saying much, and in some cases got a beating from their customers for it).

However, it was a matter of minutes before the savvy Twitter user was turning from the official airline and enthusiast Twitter accounts to more specialist sources. And its here were things start to get interesting, and quickly.

Take @eurocontrol, the Twitter account of the body that oversees airspace in Europe – hardly a mainstream source of information for the casual Twitter user, but it didn’t take long for the very switched-on folks there to turn their Twitter account into a rolling-news service par excellence. As time progressed, this and other official sources started to gradually publish more and more info on the situation – rapid, concise information bursts, honest, and transparent. This I find fascinating – most big companies (and I presume all of the affected organisations from airlines to airports and air traffic control) will have carefully planned PR strategies that are very measured in what they say, but this situation seemed to herald (for some at least) a marked shift towards being as upfront as possible, as quick as possible, and tailoring their content towards their ultimate end customer rather than necessarily their usual specialist industry audience. I wrote about speed and transparency of message from brands a few months ago on this blog, and this situation seemingly forced the hands of many companies to move from tradition ‘say nothing’ to ultra-progressive ‘say everything we know, and often!’

As is the way with Twitter, it didn’t take long for a hashtag to emerge – #ashtag being the emergent victor. The tag spread quickly, and then Twitter entered its next phase of ‘ultimate information source’. People caught up in the mess started tweeting what they were seeing and hearing where they were, which brought a new wider – if still fragmented – picture of things together. The enthusiast and specialist feeds like @flyersview and @avtips stepped up their coverage, aggregating and interpreting data from multiple sources, both official and unofficial. Within hours of airspace closing, Twitter’s unique ability to disseminate information was into probably its most important and widespread test in its relatively short life.

And so it continued. The brands who previously might have been more sceptical about using Twitter started to get in on the act, and where companies didn’t have the foresight to get involved, others did if for them. Take NATS, who run air traffic control in the UK. No official Twitter presence emerged from them (athough it has to be said that their own website proved a constant supply of basic information) – so some enterprising soul set up @nats_unofficial, and did a decent job with it too. New, dedicated accounts emerged – one example, @AshAlerts, went from being registered on Twitter on 16th Apri to 2298 followers as I write this, and provided one of the best update services during the chaos. As the situation continued, a new focus on getting people active again by alternative means sprung into life, with offers of office space, lifts to places, shared hire car offers and so on all making the best use out of Twitter’s unique, open-to-all and non-prescriptive way of working.

So, for the brands who previously thought that Twitter was just a passing fad, something they didn’t really need to be all that bothered about, this week will have been a wake-up call. Twitter has massivey proved itself to be one of the fastest-moving, most relevant sources of totally up-to-date information, data, insight and comment about what has been a quite bizarre set of circumstances. Members of the travelling public, companies, enthusiasts and experts have operated on a level playing field, each adding their own vital parts of the jigsaw. The appetite for infomation has been immense, and whilst mainstream media have – it has to be said – done well in their creative ways of unearthing and presenting news, it is Twitter that for me has been the real victor in this air travel crisis.

As I write this at 10pm on Tuesday 20th April, UK airports are all re-opening. Maybe this will be for good, and things will get back to normal over the coming days and weeks, or maybe this is a temporary opening that will end as abruptly as it came this evening. Whatever happens, Twitter’s place in the provision and dissemination of information has this week been well and truly cemented, and for any company yet to take the Twitter plunge, there can be no better example of just why they need to be using this medium, and why they need to be ready to react with no notice – quickly, without 3 weeks worth of decision making and deliberation before saying anything. By harnessing the power of their customers’ and staff’s real-time experiences with that of anyone else with interest in a subject and a desire to share what they’re seeing, brands have seen first-hand how they can really embrace social media for everyone’s benefit – it would be a particularly foolish company who didn’t sit up and take notice of the power of Twitter in particular after this week.

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Twinterview – BT use of social media for service

This week I had the fairly novel experience of doing a ‘Twinterview’, i.e. an interview over Twitter, using the hashtags #BTCare and #e20eyao. Rachel Phillips (http://twitter.com/phillips_r) from Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 team did the interview, which was all about BT’s use of social media for customer service. Here’s a transcript of the interview:

Hi Graeme, thanks for agreeing to do this interview ahead of the event on April 29th in London http://bit.ly/9i4ofi
Thanks for asking me
What is your role in BT ?
My job is working on new ways of using social media for customer service for our residential customers
What division of BT do you work for?
I’m in BT Retail, which is our UK B2B and B2C business, and I’m in the customer service operation
What is BTCare’s role in BT Retail ?
BTCare is the name we use for our online customer service for our residential customers
So what SM tools/solutions do BTCare use to engage their customers?
Twitter of course but also YouTube , our own forums at http://bit.ly/crUzob and some other forums
When did you start using SM tools and what made you start using them?
We’ve used forums on BT.com for a while but started ramping things up in a big way in early 2009
Why did you start ramping things up in early 2009 ?
Why? Well I want us to try to reach customers wherever they are, and hopefully help serve them on-channel
What specifically started you using Twitter/You Tube, seems like a big step to take for such a big brand?
Yeh indeed. We wanted to have a relevant presence in the media that our customers choose to use really
What if the comments are negative from customers, how do you respond?
Social media gives us a unique, public & visible opportunity to fix problems and try to turn perception around
Do you get positive comments too then ?
Absolutely! Have a look here http://bit.ly/aq43n6
Great comments, do you think your audience is just of one type of demographic – young digital native ?
I think it’s a real mixture, I’ve been amazed by the breadth of people using BTCare for service
Are you seeing the use of SM growing in your customer base ?
Definitely. An increasing number of people see soc media as their main use of the web, and we acknowledge that
Something I am really interested in: when it was agreed to use SM for BTCare, did you plan or just react ?
Without a doubt, plan. BTCare has to be appropriate for our brand AND the relevant media, so has to be right.
So do you employ someone to monitor traffic with Twitter and You Tube open all day, how to you consolidate ?
We have a team who monitor Twitter, the forums etc via a soc media monitoring tool to see where we can help
Are you seeing people’s attitude to BT change due to your use of SM ?
Yes, we think so. We’ve had some very positive press, customer comments and blogs impressed by what we’ve done
What are you planning next to increase customer engagement online ?
That would be telling! We’ve got lots of ideas about how we extend using social media – watch this space!
On April 29th what other key points will you highlight on Engaging Your Audience Online http://bit.ly/9i4ofi ?
Brands need to take SM seriously, its here to stay, as i said on my blog http://bit.ly/931TIV – embrace it!
Graeme – thanks for the interview and helping us understand how BT use SM to Engage with their customers.
My pleasure, thanks for inviting me

Certainly different!!

Is social media proven?

I read a great tweet today from the excellent blogger and social media supremo Andrew Grill (see http://www.andrewgrill.com/blog/ ) where he retold a discussion with someone from a traditional polling company who told him “social media not really proved in UK yet”. Earlier in the week Pirate Talking wrote here http://lesanto.com/wordpress/?p=25 about how you don’t have to ‘get’ social media, but how you really can’t just ignore it. Every day there’s dozens of examples of creative, innovative uses of social media by everyone from small groups of people to the largest corportations. Now granted I work in the social media industry (are we an industry now?!) and so I live this stuff all the time, but I really struggle to comprehend how anyone working in any business now whose role even marginally gets near social media could doubt its impact.

Look at the numbers. Just in our own little country, we have over 22 million Facebook users (source http://www.checkfacebook.com/). With a population of over 61 million (source http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=6), that’s a staggering 36% of the population using Facebook. How about Twitter – over 5.5 million of us in the UK tweet (source http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/29677/uk-twitter-users-profiled-yougov). And that’s before you go anywhere near the millions who use forums to get information, use email groups, or who are using social media without even realising they’re doing so. Trawl through Amazon book reviews (written by people just like us, not journalists), and you’re taking direct influence from social media. Decide which new TV you’re going to buy by checking out the reviews online, that’s direct social media influence. Indeed doing something so passive as watching Sky News or reading a newspaper and, whether you like it or not, the relative importance of some of the stories will be totally directed by their social media prominence.

Yet, it only takes 2 minutes to very easily find some major household names in the UK who seem to still believe that social media isn’t something they need to be too concerned about. For them it indeed seems that social media is not proven. Maybe they think it’s something that only small, cool firms need to worry about? Hardly – there’s enough examples of the biggest and most traditional companies totally embracing the opportunities that being involved in social media brings. Or maybe social media is just for chatting to your mates? Well indeed it is well used for that, but by ignoring the presence of millions of people (their customers!!) doing just that, they are totally missing the opportunity. And of course where they fail to get out of bed in time, there’ll be plenty of others who’re already way, way ahead and stealing their market. If these companies don’t wake up soon then they’re essentially starting to write their own obituaries.

Social media is the biggest opportunity for companies (whatever their size) to connect directly with customers that there’s been since people all had personal relationships with their local butcher, greengrocer and baker. Business today is distributed, and is for a lot of companies faceless, without personal relationships, but social media allows direct feedback, direct customer-to-business relationships, and the opportunity to turn detractors to advocates (and to see those advocates publically tell their friends just how positive they are). Social media can influence practically anything. The power of the crowd is simply staggering, and with a general election a matter of weeks away we’ll soon see how socially switched on each of the political parties are. But coming back to the polling company, if they truly believe that cold calling or standing in a street with a clipboard is a better way of reaching a potentially incredible percentage of the population, then good luck to them…

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What’s the future of apps?

I love apps. There, I said it. My iPhone is my constant companion and I can’t seem to get enough applications for it. You can never have too many Twitter clients, restaurant finders or things that scan barcodes and rarely find the product, that’s my ethos. But I wonder what the future holds for apps. With greater smartphone penetration is coming a diversification in mobile operating systems, and so developing an iPhone app isn’t enough anymore, the relentless growth (and impending explosion) of Android being too strong to ignore. Add BlackBerry – no longer the sole preserve of the business community – into the mix, and with Windows Phone 7 looking pretty exciting, things are getting more complex.

So where does this leave the company wanting a smartphone app for their business? The current course of action seems clear – you work out what you want your app to do, engage a software firm or your internal developers if you have them, and off you go. You write something for iPhone, you re-cut in for Android, and for BlackBerry, and so on. On one level that’s all ok, if you’re prepared to put the work in and stomach the often-laborious and sometimes downright irritating and whimsical rules of app submission, validation and release. But then if you’ve got bug fixes, or every time you want to tweak a feature or add something new, you’re back to wheeling in the small army of developers, and going through the whole process again.

Of course this is great for the software firms and is doubtless uncovering developer talent that otherwise might ever have got into the game. But hang on a minute. Despite my app addiction, I’ve got some real worries about all of this. You see, I’m kind of fond of that little, essential part of our daily lives that seems to have got left by the wayside in this new world of app fantasy – the browser. And for companies who have invested sometimes huge sums of money into feature-rich websites, and with the advent of HTML5, I think there’s another way than the constant re-inventing of the app wheel.

HTML5 essentially renders browser plugins a things of the past, and with iPhone’s Safari for one already supporting it, I sense a potential shift in the corporate mobile app development spend of the next couple of years. No matter what size of business you are, your development costs of deploying your customer-facing functionality to multiple platforms and devices could be seriously cut by a new approach to development, and a move away from standalone apps by operating system to rich, fully featured HTML5 websites optimised for various devices. And as well as the obvious cost effect of this, the other upsides will immediately appeal to those who’ve been caught in the ‘app awaiting review’ nightmare of present – your website is totally under your control, and you can change it at will, whenever you want.

But companies still want their own little bit of real estate on the iPhone (and others) homepage, right? Absolutely, but it’s already easy to create a bespoke icon as a shortcut to your web app so that argument’s gone right away. And if you’re still adamant that you want to be in the App Store or Marketplace, or you don’t want the customer experience of clicking on your icon to essentially just fire up Safari, well, develop a simple browser branded as you want it, coded to point straight to your website, and you’ve got that one cracked. Maybe add in some offline capabilities so it’s not such a bad experience for those not connected, but other than that, you’re up there with the bespoke OS app.

Now I’m no developer so there’s no doubt a load of technical stuff I’ve not thought of in my simplistic mind, but in terms of allowing businesses of all size (and budgets) to get their functionality online, keeping the control of the functionality firmly with the company and allowing rapid access to a common look and feel across multiple platforms, I think the webapp (albeit potentially deployed from an appstore within a custom corporate wrapper) could just be the future.

Building customer loyalty by social media transparency

Once upon a time, what went on inside a business, and what was represented externally, were two different things. Companies went to extraordinary lengths to present a serene, problem-free exterior, hiding whatever technical, political, operational or commercial wrangles going on behind the scenes.

The advent of social media, though, gives companies an opportunity to do something that many will inately feel deeply uncomfortable with. The idea that you might actually want to be transparent, sharing your problems and issues, your decision making processes and your decisions about future direction will strike fear into the hearts of PR folks, board members and legal types. But a new style of thinking spurred on by the social media revolution is starting to permeate more adventurous businesses, and could be a key tool for corporates to adopt in differentiating them from their competitors and winning and retaining business.

Here’s an example. Let’s take two airlines. Both run simillar routes, with similar aircraft and at a similar price point. They both have their share of delays.

Airline A resoultely keeps customers in the dark, and trots out the usual routine of predictable excuses; “air traffic control restrictions,” “delayed inbound aircraft,” and so on. They only ever really reveal these if you really press them for the information on what’s going on, so for the majority of people most of the time, all they know is that there are delays.

Airline B also faces the same problems, however they take a different approach. With this company, when you make your booking, they offer the ability to keep you updated with info about your flight via Twitter, Facebook, and traditional channels like email and SMS. And rather than just tweet you the same generic excuses as Airline A, they do something novel – tell the truth. They say “this morning’s ice means we’re expecting a 30 min queue to get de-icer”. Then “the de-icing queue is not as bad as predicted and we’re now expecting a 15 min queue.” Or they might say “our flights from Heathrow due to go between 6 and 7 averaged 35 min delay over the past week, which was mainly caused by the normal ground congestion at that time.” Or when you’re stranded at some outpost and the departure board just says “indefinite delay”, the airline is tweeting with the real story. “Your aircraft had a technical problem on it’s first flight of the day, which meant it was 35 mins late taking off, it then had congestion getting into it’s 1st destination, and a take off time restriction getting back out. All combined this put the crew over their hours for your flight, so we’re calling in a standby crew. They’re due in by 1600 latest but it could be sooner, so we’ll keep you updated”. And so on.

So on one hand you could say that Airline B are completely mad to be so honest about their problems. But on the other hand, as customers start to develop closer ties to their suppliers via social media engagements, that honesty can start to translate into loyalty. You always expect some kind of delay when travelling, but would you prefer to know nothing and grin and bear it whatever happens, good or bad, or would you actually like to be treated like a grown up and kept informed. Not just ‘lip service informed’ but real, actual accurate information? Where companies choose the latter, it opens the door to a totally different kind of customer-supplier relationship. It shifts from “I buy from you and I get what I’m given” to “You’re my partner, and I respect what you tell me.”

Of course this flies in the face of tradition corporate wisdom – admit nothing and deny everything would seem to be the norm for many businesses. But taking the time to engage with your customers, especially via social media, and you open the door to a new kind of relationship. As you build up more trust, you can start to have different kinds of conversation with your customers. Their opinions can start to inform your business decisions, and a customer who has helped make a decision and direct your future will be far more loyal than one whom you’ve constantly kept in the dark. With a critical mass of engaged Facebook followers for example, you can have honest, difficult conversations that no focus group would ever give you real insight on. “In the last monh we told you 16 times out of 30 that our 6am flight would be delayed due to take off air traffic restrictions, which led to an average daily delay of 20 mins. We’ve had to build in the cost of extra aircraft fuel used waiting to take off into your ticket prices. If we changed our departure time to 7am, there’s 30pc fewer fligts taking off and we predict a far more on time set of departures, and with reduced fuel costs we can reduce the ticket price. Do you support us doing this? Vote yes or no”. And so on.

This approach won’t be for everyone, and only those with courage, commitment to provide the customer information on on ongoing basis, and a desire to stand out from the pack, will make it work. It’s not without risks, some customers might prefer to live in ignorant bliss and believe that reading nothing negative must mean that everything is positive. But customers are getting smarter at using the opinions of the crowd to make purchasing decisions, so why wouldn’t you want to be doing your bit to help inform those decisions? Honesty and transparency will ultimately repay in loyalty and advocacy, and with more people actively using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media to get real time intelligence on everything from football transfer rumours to who has the most reliable mobile network, brands need to make a decision. Are they in, or out. If it’s in, then it has to be fully in and not just lip-service. It won’t be easy, but I think the bold will ultimately be repayed.