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Social For Internal Comms – Social Media Workplace

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:07:45 +0000

A lively panel here today at the Social Media Workplace conference. The afternoon panel on Social Media for employee communications lead to a lively discussion. The panel consisted of:

Jenni Wheller, SSP UK.
Rebecca Richmond, Melcrum.
Christian McMahon, Global CIO, Jamaza.
Justin Hunt, Social Media Leadership Forum.
Doug Shaw, What Goes Around.

Interesting snippet from Rebecca from their recent survey – 50% of people were unsure of the business case for social media within the business (although 50% were).

Question: Are the senior leaders the right audience to launch a social tool to?

Justin responded that a lot of senior executives aren’t big users of social media outside of work. Is it reasonable to ask your staff to use them if you (as a leader) aren’t using the tools yourself? Justin reiterated a point I drew out during my presentation: You need to create a (safe) place for people to fail. Tools can change people’s experience.

Rebecca noted that leaders are risk averse – that can make them a difficult group, but that their buy in can help with the broader roll out. Jenni strongly argued that you shouldn’t force social media on people – it’s about giving the people the opportunity to use the tools, in an integrated way. Doug suggested getting back to understanding “why” you are doing it, and that the answer is there. Understand what works for the users. Not all users in a business are necessarily even on-line – at least during the course of their business – for example, shop floor staff (although technology is increasingly closing those gaps).

Question: Is employee engagement a fad?

Doug said he’s just trying to make work better – maybe employee engagement is an unfortunate tag? But there is something about letting go of the ‘command and control’ Taylorist model that has dominated recent centuries. There have been bad, as well as good, things done in the name of employee engagement.

Justin said it was about the delivery, and giving people chances to contribute. Jenni said it is inescapable, issues of work-life balance and fostering discretionary effort was essential. Rebecca said it isn’t a fad, because it’s not new, it’s just coming to the fore again now because senior leaders are panicking. It’s about what the business’s “employee value proposition” is, and ties into transparency, corporate social responsibility. Employee’s want to have an impact on their customer’s experience – a key business issue.

A strong theme through out the day was: Problem first. Technology second. It’s all too easy to say “social technology is the answer. What was the problem?” – be pragmatic, and start with a well defined problem was the wise advice. As employees become more comfortable with using social media personally, they are more will and expectant about using it at work.

Another clear theme from the panel was the problematic relationship between engagement and incentivises. Just because you have got people to use the tools, does not mean that they are engaged, but if they are engaged, they will use the tools.

Finally, the issue of failure, and it’s inherent ties with innovation and experimentation, was revisited multiple times. Businesses leaders can be very nervous about failure, and often rightly so, but it is an inherent part of the learning process and innovation, I defer to Edison.

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Is Ghost Blogging Ethical?

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:00:42 +0000

This is part 1 of 4 in a series of posts inspired by Steve Farnsworth. I was nudged to join in by Steve Lamb (his post is up already), and so here I am, blogging about the ethics and issues of Ghost Blogging. Before we go any further, I would like to point out that I absolutely wrote this post myself. All of the spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, factual omissions and insight are my own.

Or are they? Who is the ‘me’ in ‘my own’? I could be Dave, the office burglar and still say this post is ‘my own’, and in doing so break no laws, and engage in no deception. You read this and assume that is it written by ‘me’. There’s a photo on the side of the blog, and a name on it too. It seems fair to assume that is me that wrote it. Surely if it was written by someone else, I, they or both of us would be deceiving you? What about if it has been edited and proofread by someone else in the office? Let’s step back a bit for a moment.

So, is ghost blogging ethical? It really depends on your definition of ghost blogging, and what it entails. I’m going to give you my answer before I give you a definition. To my mind, ghost blogging is rarely ethical, or at least it is rarely executed ethically. That’s partly a matter of my career path, in that ghost blogging, in the sense that many people mean it, is essentially allowing content written by someone else to be taken and passed off as your own original work. In the academic world that is plagiarism; a pretty fast way to end your academic career.

Now, you might argue that the original author has willingly given over their work – although more often that not a junior wage-slave was cajoled into producing the piece – and that that fact makes it alright. However, be it a staff member writing for a CEO or a PR company supplying copy to a professional blogger, to my mind it is still at the very least an act of deception. It is passing off a piece of writing as something that it is, in fact, not.

There is another definition of ghost blogging that is less commonly used, but that I am more comfortable with. The simple act of writing for somebody. Ghost writing has a long history. Often, celebrities or their agents will engage a ghost writer to produce their autobiography. It is slightly different than the most common form of ghost blogging, because increasingly often the ghost writer is acknowledged, and it is increasingly the case that people would assume a ghost writer has been engaged. Not to cast aspersions on Katie Price’s literary skills, but if you are reading her biography, you would probably assume that she had engaged the services of a ghost writer. Actually, Katie Price’s books are ghost written, by Rebecca Farnworth. And here is a distinction in the shades of grey in Ghost writing: Katie Price chooses the plots to her books. And the ghost is a shadowy entity; Not fully visible, but known to be present. That’s very different from the kind of ghost who’s existence is denied.

Here is the biggest danger with ghost blogging, especially for CEOs and senior figures: It’s the danger that a customer, business partner or other industry figure reads their blog that week. The believe, as they have been lead to, that the post represents the thoughts and views of the senior figure. Then they run into them in “real-life”. What happens as they strike up a conversation about the post that they read and enjoyed? The post that wasn’t written by the CEO, which doesn’t represent the CEO’s views. Firstly is the potential for the CEO to look like an idiot who forgets what he does from one minute to the next, and secondly it makes the customer look like an idiot for believing it was written by the CEO. Thirdly, it destroys trust between the two of them; Trust being the very thing blogging is meant to help with. That, for me, is the biggest no-no.

The roots of blogging were about being transparent, building trust, and ghost blogging goes against that. To be clear, I don’t think that is wrong for a busy CEO to have someone else write their post for them, particularly in the incidents where it is essentially based on an interview or conversation with them, or that they have at least defined the key points and main narrative. The idea of passing off writing that has never been past the eyes of the CEO as having come through the lips of the CEO is a dangerous thing to do. In the case of a speech writing, while the words might not have been the CEO’s, they have been spoken by them. The danger with ghost blogging is that the middle-man who is cut out is the person who should have been the messenger.

If a blog post is described as ‘written for’, rather than ‘written by’ the claimed author, then we are the right side of the line. If it claims to be ‘written by’ someone who did not originate its content, then a deception with no ethical grounds has been carried out. It is also a deception that leaves the perpetrators with nowhere to go. If there is something in that post that is factually inaccurate or professionally naive, then the CEO must either accept the error as if it was his own incompetence, or admit to the error.

Let me leave you with some words from an article in The Independent earlier this year:

In the film, adapted by Polanski with Robert Harris from his 2007 novel of the same name, McGregor’s professional author is enlisted by former Prime Minister Adam Lang, played with a Blairish glint by Pierce Brosnan, to write his long-overdue memoirs. ”So, how do we go about this?” Lang asks casually, drink in hand, in an early scene. “I interview you and turn your answers into prose,” comes the sober reply. And there, in a nutshell, is the art of ghostwriting.

Social Media at a Business Event – But Why?

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:41:41 +0000

Last week I spent a few days with a number of other bloggers at Orange Business Services at their Orange Business Live event. From my perspective, bringing a team of outside bloggers into a key customer event was a brave and bold move by them – and a very forward looking one. Brave, because most large corporates are still focused on trying to “control the message” to allow free access to their customers and staff. They want a few trusted journalists and tight control by their PR team. The reality is that control is over. Customers are already talking freely about your product or service. The imperative is to engage with those conversations.

On the last day of the event, I was talking with James Moffat (of Organic Development) and Glenn Le Santo. Rather than let the conversation float away, I caught it on video, and it’s been heavily retweeted and viewed:

And there in is my proof why you want Social Media at your event. Without the blogging team you might not have heard of the event, or seen that talk. Here’s my top 5 reasons to add social media to your event:

It extends the reach of your event. People who couldn’t make it physically, can still see it.
It extends the duration of your event. Why create all that great content to only last a day. Get it on-line. Let it last.
Create conversations. Get feedback. People pay tens of thousands for focus groups. Find out what people think for a fraction of that cost.
Have expert voices translate your message. All businesses speak in their own corporate speak. Bloggers from your customer base can translate your speak into customer-speak.
Being direct. Unpolished. And credible. Yes, you can create a polished corporate video, but a 2 minute live on-camera interview pushed to YouTube is significantly more credible.

There’s plenty more. The fact is that having a social media team at your event is a very cost effective way to multiply the value of your event. Orange Business Services is one of those leading the way. Many others will follow.

A Year in Business – Orange Business Live

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:06:05 +0000

Amsterdam is a handy place for Orange Business Services to have an event – not so much because it’s one of the most connected hubs in Europe, but because the place is swathed in orange! It feels like they have branded the entire city. Location aside, it has been a timely moment to reflect on what has happened in the last 12 months since Orange Business Live 2009.

Helmut Reisinger, Senior Vice President Europe, Orange Business Services, kicked off the event, setting some local context, reminding us that 25% of the Netherlands is below the water level (the airport, where I landed, yesterday is 4m below sea level). Broadcaster Sarah Coburn, who is anchoring the event, joined Helmut for a review of the last year. It’s easy to forget how much the world has transformed in the last couple of years.

Post-Lehman Brothers, business attitudes and the financial systems have been transformed. In some ways, not as dramatically as some would like, but never the less they have changed. How are businesses now? “Cautiously Optimistic” is the phrase on people’s lips. We’ve gone down the waterfall, and are looking at the river ahead. But it isn’t just finance that has changed. From volcanos to oil spills, the environment is in sharper focus than it ever has been before. The impact for the CIOs here is two fold:

Firstly, deploying technologies like telepresence to reduce travel and its associated carbon footprint.
Secondly, looking at the environmental impact of the IT infrastructure, from data centres, to more efficient desktops.

Geography has changed too. Helmut talked about the shift to the emerging economies, and Yee May Leong, from Orange Business Services in Asia Pacific, joined him on stage to give some startling insights to China. I know China is big, but it is easy to forget how quite how big it is, and more importantly how big it will most likely become. And China is just one piece of the Asia Pacific puzzle, especially when you add India into the mix. ICT decision making is increasingly moving to China, and that is influencing service offerings for providers, with the focus moving from “5 star service” to “fast service” – getting new cities and locations up and running super-fast. The Asian economies, on average, are forecast to grow 2-5 times as quickly as the US and Europe over the next few years. That changes things.

It’s a global world, and communication technology is an increasingly important part of it. Being here with the Orange Business services team is proving a great opportunity to catch up with the latest developments and their impact. They run many of the world’s largest networks, and have done for many years, and it’s interesting to note that they see and ‘get’ the importance and impact of social technologies on business. There is a tribe of bloggers here, both internal and external. I’m surrounded by information feeds, communications technologies and it’s all about business.

Social Media is no longer a toy. It’s coming of age as a business tool for connecting employees, customers and businesses, in real-time, across the globe. Get your business onboard before the train leaves the station.

Social Media at a Business Event – But Why?

Business to Business Social Media – DellB2B Huddle

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:41:59 +0000

Photo with thanks to Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising

At Dell’s second Business to business social media event, Neville Hobson gave a great overview of the current status quo in social media. My synopsis:

Social media is about relationships. Word of mouth has an increasing impact on purchasing behaviour, and social media accelerates word of mouth like nothing else. With social media, we enabled people to move from an awareness of our businesses, to becoming an ambassador for it. We aren’t just building a connection, we are entering into someone’s personal network.

People are using all sorts of tools, and the tools providers are providing resources and education to help businesses. YouTube has its own set of guidelines for Best Practices for the B2B Marketer. Businesses should investigate all the relevant Social Media tools and channels.Test them, integrate them and build on them.

Neville’s Formula for social media success:

Knowledge – understand your marketplace
Clarity – listen and learn with precision
Influence – identify the exact locations of influence and influencers
Content – adapt and re-use.

I followed on, talking about the business case for social media and the real ROI. The Microsoft team did a great job of capturing the talk. Here is the video on uStream:

My own photos from the event, to give you a taste for the event. It was excellently put together – kudos to Kerry and Neville:

The Social Media Business Case?

Digital Mission – SXSWi Here We Come

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:52:50 +0000

Digital Mission, Round 5, starts this week. That means I’m off to join over 17,000 of the world’s Interactive/Digital industry folks at SXSW for Digital Mission to SXSWi ’10, together with 40 of the UKs hottest Digital Media businesses. Sam, CEO of founders/organisers Chinwag explains more:

The group includes around 90 people, and there will be other UK companies over in the US for the event as well, making the UK the biggest country group outside of the USA and Canada.

South-by, as it is known to it’s friends, does an amazing job of bringing together the digital media industry (and, yes, social media is a subcategory of that ;) ). I’ll be posting photos on Flickr and blogging on the Digital Mission blog throughout the event, and you can follow the DigitalMission on Twitter for real-time updates. The full list of companies is here:

Amberlight Audioboo Blueleaf Digital Brainient Codegent Codility Cube Interactive Face Group FreshNetworks GigLocator Howard Baines Illumina Digital KMP Digitata Likecube Little World Gifts Littleloud Mendeley Mobilized MOFILM Moonfruit MusicMetric Nsyght oneDrum Orange Bus PageDo Pixeco Plug-in Media Qhub Rummble Silence Media Skimlinks Slicethepie Smidgn SubHub TweetJobs UberVu Vibio Videojuicer Wolfstar WorldTV

I am looking forward to getting to know each of them, and sharing the wonders of SXSWi as we head through a packed agenda of events focussed on understanding and engaging with the US market. Newspepper will be there, so expect video updates from Hermione Way – they’ve already put together a trailer:

Digital Mission 2010 from Newspepper on Vimeo.

Many of the companies met up for a pre-event mixer last week, slideshow below, which gave people the chance to get to know each other before we head over to Austin Texas. Digital Mission really is a team event, and over the last couple of years it has been amazing to watch a strengthened network of hundreds of digital businesses emerge here. While the attention might be on London, the companies are from all over the UK, and watching them support each other to become international players has been, and continues to be, a real privilege.

People to People – Like Minds

Benjamin Ellis — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:53:56 +0000

I’m literally just back from the Like Minds conference in Exeter. I say I’m back, but between the ongoing conversations on Twitter and the comment exchanges on the flickr photos it does feel a little like I am still there. The event was an excellent opportunity to transfer the on-line conversations about business culture, technology trends and the social aspects of business to off-line, into face to face discussions.

Facebook and other social media are now the most visited web-destinations in the world. The way that employees and customers communicate has changed, it is now down to businesses to catch up. I caught (or maybe that should be cornered!) co-organiser Scott Gould on camera, at the end of an exhausting day, to explain some more about Like Minds:

I used my mobile phone to record the video, as I’d lost track of where I put down my HD video camera in all of the excitment, but it serves as a useful reminder that anyone in a business has the tools to be a content-creator. It doesn’t take expensive equipment, or huge amounts of time. We have the technology to enable anyone to communicate with everyone, and that changes how businesses should communicate. The pandora’s box is already open, and businesses and employees alike are riffling their way through its contents.

I’m very sure that Trey Pennington will have some excellent videos of his own, but I managed to catch him on the other side of the lens after his panel, and had him explain his perspective. The words at the end of this video are still echoing around my mind. As we emerge from the current economic challenges, however long it takes us, history suggests that there will be a shift in emphasis away from financial drivers towards the more ‘social’ people-centred aspects of business. From employee retention and engagement, to new styles of marketing to customers, businesses need to be ready:

I enjoyed the opportunity of speaking on the panel after Olivier Blanchard. (aka the Brand Builder). I’ll share the thoughts from that in another post. As I took to the stage to speak, I was actually very nervous – here’s the back stage experience:

It can feel like that for many employees when they are asked to ‘do’ social media, or edit a wiki or write a blog. Not everyone is a natural communicator, and building effective people-to-people communication systems requires keeping that in mind. Not everyone wants to be ‘on the stage’. That means it’s not just about training people to use the tools, it is also about training them to understand how to use them effectively and responsibly. Most training seems to fall at that first hurdle, and never attempts the second. Like Minds has challenged me to raise the bar on the training we do, both the in-house workshops, and the more regular courses. There are broader issues to tackle. As one member of the audience explained, with his struggles to reconcile being a company director during the week and a partying rugby player at the weekend, the age of tagging friends in photos has no respect for neat work-life social boundaries.

I travelled down to Exeter the night before, which enabled me to meet the other speakers, as well as the local Lord Mayor – I have to say, from this speaker’s perspective, it was the most well organised conference I have ever attended. Scott and Andrew Ellis’ attention to detail is unrivalled and I am deeply grateful to both them and their patient team of assistants.

But back to that train journey the night before, and something that would have been most unlikely in the days before Twitter. I’ll let fellow speaker, the amazingly high energy A. J. Pape of Future Considerations explain the story:

Business success is intimately linked to an effective communciation infrastrature that not only allows knowledge to be gathered, stored and distributed, but also supports the working relationships that people need to function inside and across businesses. Social Media is becoming the de-facto communications medium, and while many businesses still have their head in the sand, an enthusiastic band of likeminded professionals are hard at work putting this new technology to good business use.

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Social Media Week London

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:15:07 +0000

Roll up roll up, it is Social Media Week. Obviously every week is social media week these days, but this is an extra special series of events all around the world. First of all, by way of full disclosure, I am on the advisory board for the London Events, which might make me even more enthusiastic than normal.

With that out of the way, let me share a little about what is happening. The first Social Media Week took place in New York last year and was a great success. This year Social Media Week is happening in six cities around the world. The schedule of events can be found on the London site, with more events being added all the time.

I plan to be at the Social Graph event at the IAB on Monday, followed by the opening night reception. I will be joining a fantastic panel including David Terrar, Ala Patrick, Euan Semple, Mat Morrison, Dr Sue Black, Shefaly and co on Tuesday Evening for a session on Social Media in Enterprise. Lightning 10 minute presentations, followed by Q&A, at Cass Business school. If you are working with social media in a business setting you’ll probably want to book here now! The week for me rounds off with “Social Media Measurement” at Sun’s offices on Friday, where I will be chairing the afternoon session.

Key event details: Mon 1st Feb – Fri 5th Feb, 2010

Location: All around London.
Website: http://socialmediaweek.org/london
Twitter: http://twitter.com/smwldn (for the latest updates)

In other news, the blog got into the Technorati top 100 for Small Business Blogs, which is a gentle nudge to blog some more. We’ve been doing some very exciting things with WordPress for Redcatco’s customers, and are adding in some new server infrastructure in the next few weeks as well!

It’s The Phone – Even in Crisis Comms

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:35:55 +0000

Back in June I wrote a post: “Twitter to Replace the Phone?” - suggesting that Twitter isn’t just another marketing channel, but it is a communications channel that may end up as important as the phone. It looks like that has come to pass faster than I had imagined. This post has loitered in drafts, but I’m going to put it out there. On a weekend late last year I watched a disastrous series of events unfold via Twitter and Facebook as Eurostar had a number of failures of their service that left friends trapped and stranded.

Techcrunch was quick to pick up on Eurostar’s lack of use of Twitter, and slam UK agency We Are Social:

“It owns a Twitter account at @little_break, allied to its marketing site Littlebreakbigdifference.com. This was registered and run by “conversation agency” Wearesocial.net. This is an agency which claims to be expert in the use of social media platforms like Twitter to communicate with the public. They appear to be slow to waking up to the crisis.”

Of course those that work in marketing in large businesses will know that there is a big difference between a marketing programs agency, a PR company and a crisis communications specialist. Campaigns-based agencies are rarely tasked with crisis comms, and in this case it would appear that We Are Social were retained around a specific campaign, rather than more general umbrella. Robin has responded on We Are Social’s Blog: A note about today’s Eurostar crisis – Within 24 hours the company had posted a video on YouTube and was tackling their communications.

In this instance, I’m fairly sure people affected weren’t asking for help on social media, and there was a more fundamental failure of communications and systems, but by day two people did want to know what was happening with their travel arrangements and bookings, and were asking on-line.

James Whatley of 1000Heads summed it up well in Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Brand Republic has a good write up on Eurostar’s next steps, which include cancelling their planned 2010 marketing activities, and re-aligning them, given where they now are.

All in all, it’s a pretty sorry tail, on one hand, Eurostar’s handling of the situation, logistically, seems to have left much to be desired, on the other, the focus by some blogs on the social media aspects shows a lack of maturity and understanding of big business. Just over a week on from the event you can see the ride that We Are Social has had.

The big take away is this: While social media might be many things, it is also another communications channel, which means it should be monitored (listened to!) and responded to. And that means not just on a campaigns basis. Also, in times of crisis, it can be a very effective, low effort, way to get information out – especially if you want to reach journalists!

The Social Media Business Case?

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:59:21 +0000

Yesterday I joined Steve Lamb, Neville Hobson and a host of speakers at Dell’s B2B Social Media Huddle event. It’s always a bit nerve wracking taking to the stage after Neville and Steve, but good for getting the mental juices going – this time about making the business case for social media.

Business cases discussions seem to have narrowed down to ROI these days. The ROI of social media is a particularly hot topic – often accompanied by lots of hot air too. I like Trey Pennington’s take on the issue and personally I’m not sure that ROI is the right question – it’s far too easy to manipulate - Opportunity cost is a bigger factor in most business cases.

All that said, how do you make the business case? Here are my slides (kindly uploaded to slideshare by @KerryatDell), and some notes after them…

B2B Social Media Huddle – Benjamin Ellis – Making the B2B Social Media Business Case

View more presentations from Dell Inc.

Once upon-a-time…

Just as there is a huge amount of excitement about social media, there is also a huge amount of cynicism. Neither is fully justified or nor fully misplaced. Many senior execs are simply terrified by a huge unknown affecting their world, and fear is not the bed fellow of rational decision making.

We’ve been here before of course, the telephone was met with healthy scepticism from both the press and businesses. Older folks – how much trouble did I get into for calling us over 35′s old? – will remember the disbelief and dismissal that accompanied the arrival of business Internet use. I even remember leaving a company because I couldn’t convince them we needed a web site – a move that lead to a role at Cisco, so one I was very happy about!

Just believe?

That’s not to say that “just believe” is the right justification for venturing into social media. It certainly isn’t a business case! The nature of social media means there is a big divide between those who “get it” and those who “don’t” – it is a highly experiential thing.

The role of a good advocate is to bridge the gap, by engaging with each side on their own terms. The business needs numbers from the social media team, and the social media team needs belief and support from the business.

A few years ago we reached a tipping point which left us in a market where the majority of our audience is on-line, both at work and at home. To ignore that would clearly be folly. More interestingly, “on-line” for most consumers means on-Facebook or on- some other social platform. Consumer use of technology, and specifically the Internet, has overtaken business use in its sophistication. It’s time for business to catch up.

We don’t like what’s on – so we’re changing channel

There’s a broader shift happening – the transition from traditional media, through digital media, to social media. More money was spent on on-line advertising than on TV advertising in the UK last quarter. Now, that might well be a blip, but it is also part of a trend: The “eye balls” are moving, and so your budget better start to move with them.

Each channel is based around a different way of interacting. The interruption-based model of broadcast advertising is giving way to an engagement model that works well in the digital space. Social media requires something different: advocacy. The illusion of “the brand” interacting with “the consumer” has had the curtain pulled from it. I have a shelf full of books here that speak to the power (and difference) of the connected consumer. Customers are not alone anymore, they are part of a crowd that interacts and engages with each other as well as the business. That’s true in business to business as well as it is in business to consumer. It always has been. Social media has just made those interactions more visible. Businesses operate in commercial eco-systems, stitched together by transactions and interactions.

What’s your marketing R&D strategy?

So, what is your R&D strategy for marketing then? Any self-respecting business puts a percentage of budget into investigating new technologies. Why should it be any different for a marketing department? How do you learn new techniques and skills, and optimise what you are doing? There should always be some experimental projects in progress, with a view to turning the successful ones into core marketing practice – displacing older methods that have become ineffective. Social media really doesn’t need a big budget to get started. The biggest cost will be your time. That’s a cost not to be under-estimated, and it’s in the business case you have for all of your other activities, right? [slight ;) smiley there]

Pick a spot and shake off your preconceptions

Contrary to popular conception, the social media space is not over run by either spotty teenagers, or old men blogging in their pyjamas from bed. The statistics (I like Technorati’s state of the blogosphere) tell a different story. It is populated by people like the one’s who work for your business customers, and strangely enough, by people like you. While email still dominates business communication, the use of social software is rising rapidly, and it is more prevalent in business than you might think (around 50% of businesses, even in more ‘traditional’ sectors).

The social media landscape is huge and complex, but you don’t need to understand it all, just pick your spot – one that you feel conformable with and that your customers and prospects are already talking about.

Social media operates at the intersection of technology, social interaction and digital media (that’s why I love it so much). Pull together a group of people that have those skills, or acquire them. It isn’t as hard as it sounds.

Know what your customer says

Business policy is bifurcating around social media. There are businesses who are banning its use for all staff and not using it externally, although the occasional brave soul is trying to limp out onto the big wide web via a netbook and 3g dongle.

At the other end of the spectrum, businesses are embracing the tools internally and putting them very much at the heart of their external marketing. Understand what your customers are doing, because the biggest question is this:

Are your prospects, competitors or customers active on social media? If they are, not being there is like not having a telephone

If your customers are talking, are you listening? If they are asking, are you responding? Your favourite search engine will point you to an increasing volume of case studies, but what works for your business will be unique to you, and to your customers.

The Risks?

There are risks, but to my mind the risks of not building a social-media savvy workforce are bigger than those of using the tools. The threats to information security, brand control and reputation are not new – social media just increases the scale and makes them more visible.

If you have an employee engagement problem, then you are probably already being bad-mouthed down the pub and on Facebook. Your biggest information security threats are the ones you can’t see, not the ones that are picked up by a web alert. Oh, and your customers are already doing things to and with your brand that would truely horrify you.

How do you deal with it? The short answer: Get over it. It’s already happening. The long answer:

Your legal team became your new best friends.

Once you’ve formulated your plan, and BEFORE you execute it, work with your legal team. Understand their concerns and help them understand the risks to the company’s revenue and reputation if you don’t engage on-line – get them to take responsibility for the latter, and take responsibility for the former yourself, and you’ll be in a good position.

Don’t expect to resolve everything in one meeting – it may take months. If you can’t resolve the differences, it might be time to look for a new business or a new legal team.

The mirror case

The best way to build your social media business case it to look at its mirror: Assume that you are NOT going to engage in any social media activities. What will that cost the business? Examine and quantify each item. Now, pick one of those and build your plan and business case around it.

The best strategy?

As an old boss taught me, and as is enshrined in lean thinking:

Think Big. Move Fast. Act Small.

Start with a BIG vision of where you want to get to. What would your ideal long-term outcome be? View it as your strategic plan. Now, what is the smallest first step you can take towards it? Something that you can do quickly and that can be an integrated part of an existing or planned project.

Set realistic, conservative targets for your project. The objectives should include some meaningful financial measures, as well as behaviour/belief and engagement/interaction targets. Be careful, the wrong metrics can lead you wildly astray. Post-views, followers and the myriad of other platform-specific metrics have their uses, but they are not the same as business metrics.

Execute your plan quickly, at low cost and then review your results. In doing so you’ve built the strongest possible platform for pursuing your longer social media strategy.

It’s a marathon not a sprint

The best returns on social media use come from long term engagement. If you walked into a party and engaged someone in a conversation, then left the room just as they got interested in what you were talking about, they are going to think you are rude. Don’t do it, there or in social media.

Modern marketing, at least in the technology space, has evolved into a cycle of “launch-and-forget” – panic, panic, product launch, breath. Forget. new panic, panic, new product launch, breath. It leaves customers baffled, confused and aggravated.

Be in social media for the long-haul. I spent months blogging into what felt like a void. Years later some of those early post still get thousands of views a month and generate good quality leads each quarter.

It will take a while for customers to find you, and get used to interacting with your business via social channels. However, once they start, they won’t stop, and neither should you.

Seek conversations not content

Social media is about the conversations and the connections that they build and surface. Content is important, but it certainly isn’t king. For many that will be a mindset shift. Conversations are valuable, ask any sales team. Conversations also lead to more relevant content, and more relevant content leads to more engaged customers.

“You can’t just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other” James Farley, CMO, Ford

Remember, this is about advocacy – creating a community that understand and support what your business is doing, and who will share that with their network. A luke-warm third party recommendation will beat your most shiny-glowing marketing piece – This is reference selling, 2010 style.

We can see you – when we search

The changes in the search space are a complete talk in their own right, but for now consider this: When people search for information about your business space, will they find you? What conversations will they see?

Not when they search for your company name – you should already have that one firmly in your radar – but when they search on issues in your space. Conversations in social media are searchable and in customer language. That is digital gold-dust.

Four steps

This is another way of framing the social media strategy for business folk, and was echo’d by talks throughout the day:

Listen – appreciate enquiry will help you understand the space and set a base line for whatever you do.
Engage – add value and start to contribute – be there to help.
Measure – understand your impact and the scale of the conversations.
Build capabilities and build community – these will be your key assets.

Not all cows produce milk

Donning a cow costume does not make you a cow. Think about it. Getting a traditional agency to do digital marketing via social media is not the same as doing social media marketing. You’ll get results, but no social media juice.

One of the advantages of executing your first social media project as part of an existing campaign is that it helps to make the distinction clear – just ensure you can identify the contribution of the social media component.

The upside of social media is huge, but hard to predict - @radiokate‘s fox (mentioned during my presentation) has now been viewed over 50,000 times: http://twitpic.com/sebvd – and it just jumped from social media to mainstream media. Could you have predicted that?

Which takes me neatly to my final points: Social media shouldn’t be viewed as an island. Without exception, every social media success story I have been involved in has worked exactly because in was integrated into a broader marketing and communication plan, and because it had a knock on impact into other channels.

‘Doing social media’ isn’t a case of walking through the blue door, never to see the old world again, it is a matter of organically building new skills and extending traditional marketing activities. See it as a gradual transition to a different way of engaging with customers, suppliers and prospects, one step at a time.

Tweetcamp London – Beyond 140 Characters

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:12:01 +0000

The recent Tweetcamp event was organised by Farhan Rehman (@farhan), Dees Chinniah (@cyberdees), and Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds), I just ran around with a microphone on the day, and chatted with Farhan before hand! It was far from being another BarCamp. While many familiar faces from the social media space came along, it also reached people who hadn’t been to any sort of unconference before.

The idea that a community can get together and self-organise an event is still a refreshing one, but when Farhan first suggested the idea of Tweetcamp I knew it was going to be something a bit different, pushing at the boundaries between the on-line and off-line world. What was it about? I’ll let Farhan explain:

TweetCamp is about bringing communities together, in real life. It’s about accelerating the conversations that happen on Twitter, in real life. It’s about creating richer, more personal connections… …It’s all about bringing the people together who you know from and through Twitter, into a physical space, and then having some of those great conversations and interactions you would have online, but in real life.

You can get a feel for the day by watching the video I put together:

The process of on-line to off-line bridging is something I pursue in the corporate space. On-line platforms work best with people who have met off-line and interacted face-to-face. Similarly, on-line tools let people sustain relationships when time and distance – from remote working or hectic schedules – would otherwise curtail them. Tweetcamp was an opportunity to experiment with different ways of stimulating discussion and self-organising a very large group (about 150 people or so).

Amy Sample Ward has challenged the team to build on this start at bridging on-line and off-line communities in her thoughtful post. The conversations and activities were very varied. I met someone I knew by swapping a toilet seat for a wonderful water spray – you had to be there. You’ll also hear Ray mentioned in the video. He is a poet and ran a poetry workshop. Inevitably he was ‘dragged’ on to Twitter, where you can now find him as @TheEducatedfool. He was there as part of the BBC poetry initiative, which came up with an innovative live idea for the event, linking Tweetcamp to Glastonbury via Twitter. People tweeted short poems from the event, which were displayed live over there. I told you it wasn’t your usual barcamp!

As well as a wonderful lunch, and Muesli, from sponsors Mymuesli, Addlestones provided a wonderful end to the day with their cider. A big thank you to all of the sponsors. The day wasn’t about the food though, it was about the conversations, which covered topics as diverse as children’s use of the Internet to internal business communications, and a range of other topics between.

There are lots of photos from the day up on Flickr, including these by Adam Tinworth and some from Chris Heuer (who recently ebayed himself) as well as a few I took:

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