Tag Archives: social media

How can you prove the value of your social media activities, from engagement to bottom line?

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve landed myself a spot on a ‘brand expert panel’ at at the Future Digital Strategies Summit 2011 on 15 November…          

Expert panellists, from B2B and B2C, will address questions including:

  • What value can you put on brand building and customer satisfaction?
  • Can you measure the tangible impact of effective social media activity on customer service or advertising spend?
  • What metrics do CEOs want to see – what have you found to be most meaningful?
  • Which monetisation strategies really work?

Presentation below, based on the guiding idea of starting small (think less risk, test it out before scale up etc) with Facebook promotion, gamification, and blogger out-reach:

Spotlight on B2C: Attracting revenue through your social media activities

View more presentations from Stuart Hall

The growth of social media – by age, by platform, etc

Posted on by
Reply

Thanks to Social Media Badass for this great infographic:

[Social media growth infographic]

thanks:-)

Facebook Page campaign with added PR oomph!

Posted on by
Reply

Just wanted to share a brief 9 slide presentation of the 4 week Facebook Page campaign I ran at Shopping.com, which for a modest investment of less than £1K returned over 5.5K ‘Likes’ and over 1.3K survey respondents – earning great online and offline PR. A big thanks to PayPal UK and to Dinesh for helping make it happen.

The trick was combining the Apple iPhone 4 offer in a visually dynamic email which included the call to action to complete the fun social shopping survey. We did not make it mandatory to complete the survey in order to take part in the giveaway as is often the case, in order to keep that spirit of customer engagement strong!

Facebook Page Campaign
View more presentations from Stuart Hall
BTW of course it really helps if you wear the right kind of cool shoes when creating a cool campaign. I went with Converse!

Social media strategy in a flowchart

Posted on by
1

Taken from ‘Implementing a Social Media Strategy Step-By-Step’ blog post by Isra Garcia.

Calling bullshit on social media?

Posted on by
Reply

Interesting post critiquing social media jargon and hype from Scott Berkun:

While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted – if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around – first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

Is your community manager a shortcut to Enterprise 2.0?

Posted on by
1

A while back I wrote a post on 10 ways to convince CEO’s to get blogging. Today I saw a tweet from Euan Semple reflecting on a point by Lee Bryant at the Corporate Social Networking Conference:

@euan Agreeing with @leebryant that it takes years to really get social stuff going in a business.

So what advice would I give if a CEO put me on the spot and asked for my ‘cheats’ way of advancing social media in the enterprise? Talking to Rachel Happe at the Community Roundtable I better understand there’s a lot to be gained from using your online community, firmly embedded in your organisation, to drive this forward. The danger is community manger burnout. But maybe a properly managed CM strategy is a direct route to socializing the enterprise? After all shouldn’t I know by now, that was partly my role at the ICAEW; it even says so on my LinkedIn recommendation:

“When implementing a community based software inside a corporate ecosphere, the biggest challenge of all is the cultural change. Stuart is the answer.” April 10, 2008. Bozhidar Zashev , Commercial Manager, Consultcommerce Ltd.

If that’s of interest check out Dennis Howlett’s recent interview with ICAEW’s John Pearce, Director of Digital Communications, where he explains the role of cultural change in the online communities in this short video: “It’s a learning curve,and a cultural change, and (in response to a follow-up question from Dennis) …we are not frightened to fail”.

Social Media Predictions 2009

Posted on by
1

My two cents worth? To beat the competition it helps to be in the right time, at the right place. Social media can help you do this. Or to put it another way, with a quote taken from a nice post on the subject of social networking & profit: “Relevancy is not enough in advertising. It’s about relevancy and timing.”

Social Media 2009

Talking about relevancy and timing here’s a great example from Laura Fitton of how to alienate people with the way Facebook Ads suck up data from users, unless you remember to opt-out of Social Ads:

“Wow! Leaving the group efactor on Facebook! DO NOT WANT the fact that I joined their FB group to be a part of their Ads. WTH? Repeat: this was NOT efactor’s doing. this is a Facebook-wide issue. it affects you too. Social ads are opt OUT. Privacy>News Feed>Social Ads.”

Facebook Social Ads Permissions

Facebook Social Ads Permissions

 

London ain’t Beijing baby!

Posted on by
1

The challenge of 2012? To creatively use social media to generate a people-led Olympics, rather than a government-sponsored games. London ain’t Beijing baby!

  • See Rachel Clark’s blog on yesterday’s IET Pinkerton Lecture, on using social media to inspire change. Delivered by Alex Balfour, who is the Head of New Media for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games.

Here’s Alex Balfour’s presentation from the event:

Social Media and the Olympics: Change, Social Media and London 2012

View more presentations from Alex Balfour.

Social Media vs Knowledge Management, debated

Posted on by
Reply

Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War

And my comment on the blog post:

Thanks, great blog post and insightful comments. I can see what is meant by a war between KM & SM better from this discussion, as often the reality is disguised.

I’ve learned the hard way, for example in campaigning media, that the key cultural difference is between doing things *with* people — and doing things *for* them.

For example when you have suppliers talking web 2.0, but practising what are fundamentally top down solutions. I’ve experienced it first hand.

A company I worked for did the market research but didn’t test out their innovative online solution sufficency on users. I brought in web 2.0 ideas but didn’t get the support and left. Straight after they decided to launch a web 2.0 community. It never happened.

I’m now helping set up a new award winning online community. The cultural shift involved is part of the process, and the testing of the product with customers (the initial market research has been done) is also part of that learning curve.

It’s easy to under-estimate the cultural challenge SM involves within the enterprise, to get  customers to come first. Thanks again for the helpful blog piece.

It’s a long way to the bottom

Posted on by
Reply

Liked the piece in Social Media Today by Marc Meyer which asks whether we try to do too much with social media (‘Are we slaves to the rhythm of social media?‘):

“What do you think? What is acceptable? Frankly I try to limit my time into blocks built around the work day and even at home. But I can see where one could spend endless amounts of time building and maintaining social media personas from here to BFE and back. The question is. What is your ultimate plan or goal with social media? As a layperson and as a professional, do you have an end game result in mind? Do you have a plan?”

Personally, speaking as a relative outside to the mainstream of the web 2.0 world I would say I don’t want to follow the mainstream and think the more you out in the more you get out, though for most people that’s obviously true. Business like, I want to do the minimum to get the maximum return. How to do that of course requires a great deal of work and learning. Or to use the old quote about a guy’s struggle to get out of the ghetto: “It’s a long way to the bottom.”