Reflections on TedxTuttle

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Earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to attend the TedxTuttle event in London. The event featured a host of great speakers, mixed in with some Ted Talks and an opportunity to meet some great people.

The keynote speech was presented by Maggie Philbin, who presented a series of great clips from the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World program. This was a real treat, as I was avid fan of the programme and even today, the theme music still brings back many happy memories of the programme. The clips centred around three decades (60s, 70s and 80s) and showed a number of technologies that became popular and others that did not. Incidentally, the BBC are now presenting an archive of Tomorrow’s World clips which can be accessed here:  www.bbc.co.uk/archive/tomorrowsworld.

Maggie also presented “Philbin’s Fact File”, which touched on a number of points, the she believed would make a business successful. Nothing new here, but all good stuff nevertheless.

Communicate as if person to person
Be outstanding
Innovate, don’t imitate
Go beyond "just enough"
Create an experience
Exceed expectations

In all, it was an excellent keynote and it is great to see that she is still so passionate about science and technology.

The next talk was presented by Rachel Armstrong and discussed the future of architecture. Rachel, is a TED fellow and presented a fascinating talk, which at times was a little above my head, but interesting nevertheless. Rachel’s interest in architecture surrounds the materials that we choose to build structures. Her ongoing research examines how low tech biotech technologies could be used to build sustainable structures for the future.

Next up was Tuttle founder Lloyd Davis, who described the Tuttle experience to the audience. The Tuttle Club meets every Friday at 10am at the ICA in London and has been running for eighteen months. This is remarkable, since many social media networking meet-ups, disappear after only a few months. Lloyd, mentioned that there was no real secret to Tuttle’s success. However, he believed that ‘diversity and inclusion’ were important factors. Anyone is welcome to attend Tuttle and judging by the slideshow of photos that were presented, the event is growing with ever increasing numbers of people.  Tuttle exists and is supported by social technologies such as Twitter. However, many argue that online social networking lacks opportunities to actually meet people in the flesh. Tuttle is the antidote to such thinking.

I grabbed a quick chat with Lloyd during one of the coffee breaks. I last met him during the Blue Monster Coffee morning, at a time just before Tuttle started. It was a great to catch up and I’m going to do my best to get along to the next Tuttle meet up.

Next up was Ben Walker, who delivered a great talk (mainly in song) about the value of Twitter.  Babble+Context=Conversation!  Conversation=Value!  Ben is known for the viral Twitter Song, which you can see below.

 

The last of main speakers was Mat Morrison of Porter Novelli who delivered a very interesting talk on social media metrics. Mat debunked the traditional held view on viral marketing that person tells everyone in a cumulative fashion to spread and idea, instead he proposed that great ideas don’t spread evenly. In other words, not everyone in a network is equal. If, you take Gladwell’s theory from the Tipping Point, you get the idea here. He also, focused on Clay Shirky’s recent points that we are currently experiencing “social media overload” – We need adequate social media filters to reach out to people, to enable a great OTS (Opportunity To See).

He also shared with the audience some interesting words in relation to social media:

“Eigenfactor” – A Page Rank  for people

“Betweeenness – Someone who is very well connected

“Egonet” – A relation where size = popularity

“Homophily” -  A term relating to people who hang around other people who are most  like them. (Birds of a feather that flock together)

Mat is conducting some very interesting research into the area of influencers and has some great examples here.

Mat summed with the following excellent point, 

“We tend to associate ourselves with people who are like us, allowing us to judge people on the people they follow”.

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Photo credit – @maggiephilbin’s twitpic

He ended his presentation with remarkable honesty, “insufficient evidence for a real conclusion”. His research into this areas continues.

Between, each of the speaker talks, there were a number of excellent Ted Talks that were shown. You can view each of them below. Overall, TedxTuttle was excellent. Great speakers, inspiring talks and a great venue.  Congratulations to Alan Patrick and his Broadsight team for delivering such an excellent event.

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history

 

PW Singer on military robots and the future of war

Twitterville – A Book Review

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I was fortunate enough* to receive an advance copy of Shel Israel’s – Twitterville recently. The premise of the book is an examination of how businesses (of all sizes) can thrive in the digital space with the micro-blogging tool – Twitter. This is Shel’s second outing as an author, after co-authoring the highly successful book, Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble. After completing the book, I felt strongly that Twitterville was the spiritual successor to Naked Conversations.

If you are looking for a book about how to use Twitter, then unfortunately Twitterville is not designed for you. In my opinion, this is a key strength and helps to separate it from the many other Twitter books already available. Shel’s book contains a number of case studies on how individuals and companies have used Twitter to extend their reach out to lots of people, unlike any tool that they have probably used before.

The case studies featured within the book describe, how both large and small businesses have successfully used Twitter to connect to wider audiences, and the interesting results that they have achieved. Companies such as Dell, Comcast, Evernote, Starbucks and Zappos are all featured among others. Shel does a great job of sharing the insights that each company has learned during their own Twitter experiences. The chapters make great reading and contain a good blend of content versus size. Shel interviewed many people for the book, and I’m surprised at how he managed to keep the book’s size so relatively small!

My only criticism of the book is that Shel often presents an overtly positive Twitter story, while passing over some of the negative aspects of the service. For every positive contribution, there are hundreds of examples of random chatter or shameless promotion. However, Shel does present a chapter that does detail the effect spammers. Therefore, at times the book can appear to be a little one sided. Putting this point aside, if you are looking for a good business book, and are interested in how social media can be applied within a practical commercial setting. I would highly recommend that you buy Twitterville. The book is sure to become a great classic.

My good friend, Steve Clayton sums up the book with a great quote, which you can find on the back cover.

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I couldn’t have put it better myself!

Twitterville is available to order from Amazon here.

*With thanks to Maureen Cole at Portfolio


Corporate Blogging – The Harsh Truths

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Paul Boag presents an excellent post on corporate blogging over at Smashing Magazine.
I completely agree with each of Paul’s points. However, what do you think?

1. A blog does not magically generate traffic

When companies first started launching corporate websites, they perceived them as a marketing channel that would generate leads. They had a “build it and they will come” mentality. Over time they realized that a website is more like a storefront. A few people might wander in off the street, but most of the time you need to advertise to attract trade.

Many marketing departments are making a similar mistake with corporate blogs. They perceive them as a way to generate new traffic, when that is not their primary role. Admittedly, the keyword-heavy nature of a blog will help your organic rankings, but that is a secondary benefit.

To generate traffic, you need to sincerely commit to your blog, establish a relationship with your readers and engage them in conversations. And, as Rand Fishkin’s article 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic suggests, you also need to use some strategies to build up the traffic over years.

The real goal of a corporate blog is to generate recurring traffic which is considerably more likely to complete a call to action. A successful blog has a regular readership that is being constantly reminded of your brand and products. And yes, of course, building up a readership takes time.

 

2. Good corporate blog requires long term commitment

Building a readership is a long term commitment. It can take months for users to recognise your blog as a consistent source of useful information. Only then will they start visiting it regularly and recommending it to others.

It doesn’t just take time, it also takes commitment. That means posting regularly and to a schedule. Users are more likely to visit your blog if they know you release a post on a certain day each week. Of course, ultimately you want them to subscribe, so they don’t need to continually check your site for new content.

 

3. Teaser feeds are a wasted opportunity

Users can subscribe in a couple of ways. Usually they can either sign up to receive email notifications or subscribe to an RSS feed. This is a crucial step in engaging readers. That is because users are effectively giving you permission to remind them about your site and brand.

However, it is remarkable how many organisations fail to grasp this opportunity. Instead of using the chance to push content to users, they only provide a teaser of blog posts. This means users have to click through to view the whole post.

This practice is born out of a false belief that users need to see your site. They don’t. Unless your revenue is driven by site advertising, there is no need for users to click through to read your blog.

McDonald’s blog doesn’t get it right: teasers in feeds aren’t useful in corporate blogs.

The purpose of most corporate blogs is to build and maintain brand awareness while motivating users to engage. None of that needs to happen on site. The blog post itself builds and maintains awareness, while requests for comments or calls to action motivates users to engage. Users do not need to see the rest of your site to respond to the blog post. Of course for that to be true, posts need to be engaging.

 

4. You are not “engaging” anyone

The most successful blogs are more than a broadcast tool. They are a dialogue between the individuals within your organisation and your users. It is important to listen, as well as speak. Unfortunately, the most corporate blogs fail to engage.

Instead they focus on telling readers how great their products and services are. Rarely do they ask for feedback or ask questions. In fact it is not unusual for companies to disable comments for fear of criticism.

Nokia Conversations blog does a great job of engaging users in conversations, asking for their opinions and starting discussions that generate many comments and gather many opinions.

Instead you should be encouraging users to contribute to your blog through comments and constructive criticism. It is a superb opportunity to get free feedback from your customers, something many organisations pay market researchers for. Part of the problem is that most corporate blogs offer nothing more than rehashed press releases.

 

5. Press releases shouldn’t appear on a blog

Let’s set aside the debate over whether press releases have a role in today’s web centric world. Whether they do or don’t, you need to realize that a press release preforms a different role to that of corporate blog. As the name implies, a press release is meant for professional journalists. It is designed to encourage journalists to write about your product or service. It is not designed for your customers.

A blog, on the other hand, is meant to be read by prospective and existing customers. It should be engaging, informative and helpful. When writing a blog post, you should always have the end reader in mind. What will they learn? What insight will this give them into who we are? How will it help build our relationship with the reader? You should never simply copy and paste press releases or news stories.

The other problem with press releases is that they are corporate statements. A blog should have a more personal tone.

 

6. You sound like a faceless corporation

People don’t like interacting with organisations, corporations or machines. People like talking to people. One of the things I have learnt about selling web design services is that once people have established that you offer a good service at a reasonable price, the next thing they care about is you. Do they like you? Do they trust you? Do they think they can work with you?

People don’t like, trust or want to work with corporations. We associated those feelings with individuals, not companies. It is therefore important that a corporate blog is about the people within your organisation, not the organisation itself. Your blog should focus on different people and the role they perform within your company. They should be able to demonstrate their personality as well as share their expertise.

A blog is a place to let readers see behind the marketing spin and glimpse the real people within your organisation.

 

7. You need to show the warts and all

If you are a marketeer this may all sound a little scary. Its hard to control “the message” when you are blogging. You have multiple bloggers from across your organization who are effectively becoming corporate spokespeople, and you are allowing users to publicly criticize you on your own blog. This is a long way from traditional marketing.

However, today”s consumers are very savvy. They are distrustful of traditional marketing and can sense when they are being sold at. A softer approach is required, one that is more “real&” and less managed. One part of that is admitting when you make mistakes.

Dell consistently ignored criticism they received about poor customer service. They ignored the voice that the web provided their customers, until eventually a single disgruntled user stirred up a major PR nightmare with a single post entitled “Dell lies. Dell sucks.

Contrast this with the “warts and all” approach adopted by photo sharing site Flickr. When faced with community criticism over the poor performance of their website, they wrote a post on their blog entitled “Sometimes we suck.” They acknowledged the problem and laid out a plan for correcting it. This non traditional approach to their brand image allowed Flickr to quickly defuse a situation that could have grown out of control. Perhaps when it comes to corporate blogging, marketing is not always best equipped to handle the task.

 

8. Marketeers often make bad bloggers

Let me be clear. I am not saying that all marketeers should be banned from blogging. What I am saying is that traditional marketing skills are not always best suited to the medium. Because blogging should be personal, transparent and not shy away from the organisation’s flaws, it can seem an uncomfortable communication tool for some marketeers. Also the traditional writing style of many marketeers does not fit well with the informal style of a successful blog.

If you are a marketeer responsible for the corporate blog, look for ways to encourage others within your organisation to blog. Think of yourself as an editor rather than an author. Target people who are particularly knowledgeable or already act as spokespeople for your organisation. Encourage them to blog and act as a copy editor tweaking and refining what they write. And don’t forget to give them raise once in a while, encouraging them to write more high quality content.

You may find it hard to encourage others to blog. If that is the case try interviewing them instead. You can then turn those interviews into blog posts and hopefully encourage them to respond to comments. But remember, whether you are posting an interview or an article, do not expect too much from your readers.

 

9. You expect too much from your readers

Most of the corporate blog posts I have read are long, really long, text heavy and boring. They take considerable commitment to wade through. In short, they ask too much from readers.

With so many blogs online you need to make your posts stand out from the crowd. Always ensure that users can get the gist of what you are saying by just scanning the post. This can be achieved using a number of techniques…

  • Summarize a post at the beginning and in the title. Don’t leave users guessing what the subject is.
  • Be controversial to grab users attention.
  • Use headings as a way of grabbing attention and summarizing content.
  • Use images to break up the copy and communicate key points.

Do not feel all of your posts need to be an essay. Short posts that propose a question or draw the reader’s attention to another site are just as engaging. Anything that is of value to the user is worth posting.

Finally, remember that not all blog posts need to be textual. Consider buying a flipcam and recording some video interviews with people around the company. Record an audio interview or post some photographs of corporate events. Just don’t expect users to read lots of copy. The only people who do that are your competitors.

 

10. Your competitors will read your blog – Get over it!

I am amazed at how many organisations will slow down the growth of their corporate blogs because they are worried that their competition will read it and rip off their expertise and ideas. Although it is true that your competition will do exactly this, what is the alternative? One the primary opportunities a blog provides is the chance to demonstrate your expertise. People will be motivated to buy from you because they understand that you “know your stuff.” However, if you don’t talk about your expertise, how will they know? You might be the best in your field, but if nobody knows it then what is the point?

I write about my knowledge of web design all the time. I know that many of those who read my posts are competitors and learn from what I share. However, I know that a lot of prospective clients read the content too. Should I silence myself for fear of being copied or should I prove to my clients that I am a professional who knows what he is talking about? I think the answer is clear.

 

Conclusions

Many organisations are still finding their voice online and corporate blogging is one way to achieve this. It is not surprising that they are still making mistakes. The secret to success is accepting that a blog is not a traditional marketing tool. In my opinion, it has more in common with a customer service. Once you realize that and release it from the shackles of press releases and corporate news, it will start generating return on investment.


Is Social Media a Fad?

 

Is Social Media a Fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?  This is the question posed by the folks over at the Socialnomics blog. 

The above video goes some way to answer the question. The video is designed in a similar fashion to the “Did you know” video.

Socialnomics have also been good enough to provide the stats from the video too. These can be seen below:

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

  1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network 
  2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
  3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
  4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
  5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
  6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
  7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
  8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
  9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
  10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
  11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
  13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
  14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
  15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
  16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
  18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
  20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
  22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
  23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
  26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations 
  27. Only 14% trust advertisements
  28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
  30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
  31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
  32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
  33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
  35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
  36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
  37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

A link to the sources are available here.  Incidentally, Socialnomics will soon be releasing a book too.

Welcome to the Social Media Revolution

Geek Marketing 101 (Revisited)

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Three years ago today, John Dodds posted an excellent article on “marketing disguised as a discussion of technology marketing”. Geek Marketing 101 is so named because John sees amongst many geeks, a pervasive misunderstanding and consequent distrust of what marketing is. Also, a failure to recognise that much technology marketing is no longer geek to geek since complex products are increasingly being bought by non-geeks. Of course, these observations are equally applicable to geek to geek and non-geek businesses.

John’s 10 excellent points are listed below:

1) Marketing is not a department.
Marketing is a combination of elements that creates the environment in which it is possible to meet a customer need (starting right back at product development). Promotion and sales are just sub-sets of marketing.

2) Marketing is a conversation, but most people don’t speak geek.
Successful technology marketing must translate the creations of the uncommunicative into the needs of the untechnical. Spin is not good marketing. Lucid two-way communication is.

3) Simplicity does not negate complexity.
Reductive marketing that simplifies ideas does not undersell your complex creation. It facilitates an entree to your world. You can’t have passionate users until they start using.

4) Think what, not how?
Think of the "product" in terms of what it does, not how it does it. You may be interested in the latter, but your users generally aren’t. Portable computer memory is not a difficult concept to enunciate, yet flash drive and USB drive nomenclature is predicated on technological aspects not the actual function. Long words confuse, don’t they?

5) Think will, not can.
Think of the "product" in terms of what most people will be happy doing with it and not in the myriad possibilities it offers. You may think speed and multiple settings are hot, but outside the lab such attributes may not provide the greatest satisfaction. Simple, intuitive interfaces will.

6) Only you RTFM.
Regular people don’t read the manual. It’s too big (see 5), too complicated (see 3) and thus incomprehensible. It’s not that people are averse to science and technology – they’re averse to being made to feel helpless. The demand for books that simplify science is huge the world over. Your manual is marketing.

7) Technical Support is marketing.
In the absence of all of the above, your users inevitably need help. A technical support department speaking in non-technical, hand-holding language transforms their purchase from waste of money to life-enhancing boon and is the greatest marketing tool you have.

8) You’re not marketing to people who hate marketing.
Don’t allow your misguided prejudices about advertising and snake-oil to infect your approach and damage sales. People hate hype, spin and unfulfilled expectations. They do not hate having their needs met (see 1).

9) You’re not marketing to people who hate technology products.
They’re not Luddites, but nor are they geeks – that’s what you’re paid to be. However, they often hate how technology products make them feel because blinding with science is as bad as baffling with bullshit.

10) Marketing demystifies.
As the conversations develop, the users comprehend your products better and you better understand their needs. With increased confidence, they utilise more and more of your geekiness and, with increased awareness, you are better able to adapt to their behaviours. They feel more warmly about geeks and you may get the chance to buy them a drink. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Great Stuff

Seth Godin and Tom Peters On Social Media

Three great videos from Seth Godin and Tom Peters.

Seth Godin 

“… It doesn’t matter if no one reads your blog. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it”.

“…How do you force yourself to describe in three paragraphs, why you did something? How do you respond out loud?”. If you are good at it, some people are going to read it. If you are not good at it, stick with it, you will get good at it”.

“…You are doing it for yourself, to force yourself to become part of the conversation”.

Tom Peters

"I will simply say, my first post was in August of 2004. No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life, it has changed my perspective, it has changed my intellectual outlook. It has changed my emotional outlook, parenthesis and it is the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude, that I have ever had and it’s free”.

 

Seth Godin

"Networking is always important when it is real, and its always a useless distraction
when its fake. What the Internet has allowed, it an enormous amount of fake networking".

25 Reasons Why We Left Facebook?

Could this be the reason why we are all leaving Facebook?

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Twitter 101 – The Guide For Your Business

Twitter has launched a new site dedicated to helping businesses to become au fait with the microblogging service. Twitter 101 A Special Guide is a great online resource that I would highly recommend to anyone looking to use Twitter as part of their social media mix.

Of particular interest are the getting started guide and the case studies from companies such as Dell, JetBlue, Etsy and others who share their insights of using Twitter. Also, of notable interest are the best practices guidelines.

Download the PDF deck here

Engaging The Top 100 Global Brands – Report

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The Engagementdb 2009 report was released earlier this week from Ben Elowitz of Wetpaint and Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group. The excellent report ranks the world’s most engaged brands, that are using social media tools. It’s a beautiful report to look at (see below) and they also have a great accompanying website, where you can rate your own business social media engagement.

The goals of the study were to measure how deeply engaged the top 100 global brands are in a variety of social media channels and, more importantly understand if higher engagement is correlated with financial performance.

The researchers found that brands fall into one of four engagement profiles. Depending on the number of channels and how deeply they are engaged in them. There four specific profiles include:

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Mavens. These brands are engaged in seven or more channels and have an above-average engagement score. Brands like Starbucks and Dell are able to sustain a high level of engagement across multiple social media channels. Mavens not only have a robust strategy and dedicated teams focused on social
media, but also make it a core part of their go-to-market strategy. Companies like these could not imagine operating without a strong presence in social media.

Butterflies. These brands are engaged in seven or more channels but have lower than average engagement scores. Butterflies like American Express and Hyundai have initiatives in many different channels, but tend to
spread themselves too thin, investing in a few channels while letting others languish. Their ambition is to be a Maven and they may get there — but they still struggle with getting the full buy-in from their organizations to embrace the full multi-way conversation that deep engagement entails.

Selectives. These brands are engaged in six or fewer channels and have higher than average engagement
scores. Selectives like H&M and Philips have a very strong presence in just a few channels where they focus on engaging customers deeply when and where it matters most. The social media initiatives at these brands tend
to be lightly staffed — if they are at all, meaning that by default, they have to focus their efforts. These are
beachheads, started by an impassioned evangelist with a shoestring budget.

Wallflowers. These brands are engaged in six or fewer channels and have below-average engagement scores. Wallflowers like McDonalds and BP are slow to or are just getting started, dipping their toes into social media waters. They are still trying to figure out social media by testing just a few channels. They are also cautious about the risks, uncertain about the benefits, and therefore engage only lightly in the channels where they are present.

I have highlighted several key takeaways below, but there are many others. I highly suggest that you read the report for yourself, to gain some great insight into companies such as Starbucks, Dell, Toyota and SAP

Selected best practices from the report include:

1. Deputise people throughout the organisation

When Starbucks launched MyStarbucksidea.com. The company ensured that every department impacted by the site (practically every one) had a representative who was responsible for being the liaison.

2. Find champions who can explain and mitigate risk

Starbucks had one major advantage in its entry into social media – CEO Howard Schultz personally introduced and championed MyStarbucksidea.com from the start. Apart from the CEO, there was also an "everyday" champion. Someone who not only gets social media but can also translate it for the organisation.

3. Pick channels carefully

From the start, Toyota’s social media team realised that there would a lot of resistance to having a Toyota blog. So they started with a YouTube channel first that showcased video content that Toyota already had handy – it was simply a matter of uploading the content to YouTube. Twitter came next and then Facebook.

4. Be in it for the long haul

Toyota realised the key to successful engagement is to commit to a relationship with customers in new channels and convince your customers that you will be there for them. "If you are going to engage, you have to have a plan and make sure that resources are available. Because you can’t gracefully exit – once your’re in, you’re in”.

5. Encourage employees to tap into social media to get work done.

With 1500 SAP employee bloggers and 400 employees actively publishing content to other forms, SAP clearly has few control issues about allowing employees to engage. Product managers are using social tools to communicate information about their new products and to get feedback even down to product documentation.

My personal favourite best practice from the report is from Dell:

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As Steve notes, "[Make social media] just one of the tools of a daily diet of information. it’s often what people get wrong – they create a social media department and it thus becomes ‘someone else’s job’”.

To succeed, social media need to become pervasive within the organisation, just like email is today. Social media not only can bring opportunities for rich engagement with customers and potential new customers. The organisation itself can benefit, where social media works to fulfil a ‘knowledge management’ function.

The world’s top brands are learning what it means to be social, but it is important to note that by "social", reference is made to deep engagement not merely having a presence. And what exactly does deep social engagement mean? “Going Social” requires more than just being there – you have to interact with others, instigate discussions, and respond during conversations.

You can read the full report below (Click the full screen button)


The world’s most valuable 2009 brands.Who’s most engaged?