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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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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2010 – The year social media gets serious for business

Before I start, I should mention that this is my second version of this post. The first fully completed version mysteriously vanished when attempting to publish it from the WordPress iPhone app into live. Apparently it’s a known bug. How helpful… anyway here goes mark 2.

When we look back at 2009, it will no doubt be seen as the year that big businesses finally got round to getting involved in social media. Many large companies did of course very successfully develop social media presences way before 09, for example Sony and Logitech with their excellent forum communities, but the explosion of social media into the mainstream last year meant that it was time for more than just a couple of firms to get pretty seriously involved. Twitter was the fashionable social media platform of choice, and many businesses made a great use of it, for example BT and easyJet in the UK developing brand new service channels exclusively via Twitter, and a host of companies from one man bands to multinationals like Dell creating new marketing opportunities using Twitter. Away from the Twitter noise, LinkedIn continued to grow it’s featureset and active userbase, and of course Facebook continued their quest for world domination.

In parallel with all of this, 2009 was the year that saw smart phones progressing from being a business user niche product to totally mass market. It wasn’t just iPhones and Androids; Nokia S60-based handsets started to appear in more general consumer markets, and a raft of new proprietary mobile OSs from Samsung, Moto and others came packing native Twitter and Facebook apps on eat-all-you-can 3G data tariffs.

So as we enter 2010, the stage is set for businesses to seriously step up a gear in their social media exploits. In the B2B space sites like LinkedIn and BT Tradespace should (if they choose to embrace the opportunities) morph from being predominantly information-exchanges to more transactional environments. But it is in B2C where things get really interesting for business. And for B2C potential in social media read Facebook. Facebook’s userbase growth continued in 2009 at an astonishing pace, a pace that shows no sign of slowing (unlike the slowdown seen in Q4 from Twitter for example). In parallel with piling on new, active and loyal users, Facebook also quietly released some major Facebook mobile updates. Seemingly out of nowhere, managing your online social media presence became, well, the norm – why wait until you get back to your desk to tell the world what you’re up to and keep in touch with friends?! The releases have kept coming and with that, the opportunity for businesses to leverage this new world has exploded.

A few months ago I wrote about how businesses need to end their sole obsession with their own websites and take their online services – in a fully featured form – to where their customers hang out online. That place is, for a scarily large (and rapidly growing) number, Facebook. Savvy businesses will already be building Facebook apps extending their traditional website capabilities for sales and service into Facebook, and there are some signs of this starting beyond just the most basic of Facebook fan pages. But I think that it’s the Facebook user growth and Facebook via mobiles combined with one new magical ingredient that will really turn relatively simplistic opportunity into something way bigger. And that ingredient? On-platform financial transactions.

Paypal is one of the web’s leading payment services for small businesses, and they along with a host of other transaction providers process payments on many thousands of websites around the world every day. Facebook hinted last year that they might enter this market themselves – a tiny percentage commission on an incredible volume of transactions on their own platform can’t have escaped their interest – and although there’s been no confirmation of what – if anything – they’re proposing, the timing does feel right. And so here things get interesting. With a Facebook-powered transaction processing capability, Facebook users really never need veer off piste again. They and their friends are constantly in touch on Facebook wherever they are, the real time search developments of late are bringing a Twitter-style information inflow tuned to users own needs (so forget ever needing to trawl dozens of other websites daily for your news fix), and so the sharp businesses in 2010 will make a big push to be developing fully featured Facebook presences that allow their customers (or prospects) to do all they could ever want to – buying, managing accounts, resolving service issues and so on – without ever leaving Facebook’s platform. These Facebook presences will need to integrate back to companies’ own systems, but the key for consumers will be the ease of transaction management. I can see a situation arising pretty quickly where you can pay for pretty much everything via Facebook, from impulse purchases to your utility services. Facebook’s transactions capability could even morph into some kind of new breed of retail bank, rapidly responding to changing consumer spending habits, needs and wants. For companies, forget developing bespoke mobile apps platform by platform that you might never manage to drive any traffic to use, the smart business in 2010 will be taking advantage of Facebook’s dominant position and relentless growth.

Of course this payments platform might never materialise, or if it does it may not be this year. But all signs from Facebook in terms of their overall capability growth and development signify that they aren’t just interested in building a multi-faceted platform for people to pass the time of day on, and that’s even before you throw the extra opportunities that geo-locating brings into the mix (they aren’t throwing millions behind developing awesome mobile capabilities for the fun of it). Even if the scenario I describe doesn’t come into being this year, I still maintain that businesses with any form of consumer relationship cannot ignore the reality of Facebook’s dominance. Social media for business is today still pretty rudimentary, and whilst the tentative steps made by some fairly adventurous companies to engage in discussion with customers in the social sphere in 2009 is a start, it is by no means enough if their interest is in building and developing long term relationships with their customers. 2009 gave those companies with an ounce of creativity and a willingness to take a bit of a punt some fantastic rewards from their social media exploits. In 2010 though, things will get a lot more serious, and the game is upped from just conversation to full-blown transaction.

One thing’s for sure – whatever Facebook do, or for that matter whatever any of the prominent or new social media platforms do this year, the bar will be raised hugely from that of 09. Businesses who choose to continue to ignore social media will find the barrier to their entry to the game becomes progressively higher, both in terms of technology catch up and on being accepted into the fold. Those who do see the opportunity however, and who act on it early, will reap the rewards. Customers already are pretty choosy about who they do business with, and as social media takes an even firmer grip this year, no business can afford to not take the rapidly changing face of the web extremely seriously.

Happy new year!