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A brand is more than a logo: it’s a statement of what a company stands for, and what it won’t stand for; it embodies the company’s personality. But that personality is an amalgam of millions of tiny actions carried out by employees. Suppliers, customers and other stakeholders don’t judge a company by how shiny its emblem is: they judge it by how its employees behave when they encounter them.How can companies with diverse and dispersed workforces communicate their values consistently internally, to ensure that employees can always be ‘on message’?

The answer could be the intranet, but probably not as you now know it. Most companies invest a tiny fraction of their website budget in creating their intranet. Often the intranet software will be bought off the shelf, like the word processing and spreadsheets packages, rather than shaped to the needs of the business and its employees. If something is too hard to use (clue: if it needs training, it’s probably too hard to use), then it’s unlikely to communicate effectively.

By contrast, if an intranet is designed around the company and its employees, it can be highly effective in articulating the company voice, beliefs and values. Employees can be kept up to date about what’s going on in the business, and this can inform their behaviour and attitude when speaking to outsiders. Whether it’s the airline or the mobile phone company, we expect Virgin staff to be friendly, personable and efficient. Virgin’s brand experience is consistent across all its products and services, partly as a result of clear internal communications.

Some companies can benefit by tapping into the forums where their employees already share their knowledge and experiences, such as Facebook. While conservative businesses like law firms might be uncomfortable with the blurred line between formal and informal communications there, some companies can avoid reinventing the wheel by integrating the intranet with Facebook. Posts there can be reused in forums, and colleagues can see who’s online and communicate quickly in an informal atmosphere.

To create an effective intranet, companies need to ensure there is clear ownership and leadership for it. There needs to be a clear understanding of how the company’s brand is conveyed internally, and the impact that has on external perception of the company. In order to achieve that, companies should use the same analytics tools on the intranet that they already use for understanding how customers use the public website. Forums might look inactive, but could be performing a valuable service to the lurkers who are content to read posts without replying. An analysis of common search terms can also be used to identify company policies that need to be communicated more clearly. By phasing intranet growth, and building on what works well, it’s possible to achieve buy-in from employees.

Employee behaviour is the clearest expression of a brand. Isn’t it time companies devoted as much energy to helping the team understand the brand as it does to trying to convey it to end customers?

Jason Spencer is the managing director of Millward Brown in Shanghai. In the latest Foviance podcast, we discussed customer experience and digital marketing in China.

Hi Jason. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m originally from Brisbane, Australia, but I’ve been in greater China for the last 15 years. At Millward Brown, most of the work we do is helping our clients with their brand and communication strategies, predominantly in mainland China but also in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan.

I’ve heard differing stories of how digital plays a role in Asia: everybody uses mobile, nobody uses computers and all sorts of crazy ideas.

I can really only answer for China, because it’s very different across the Asia Pacific region.

Technology adoption in China has picked up and accelerated phenomenally in the last ten years or so. But it’s not so much blogging that’s big here, nor Twittering, and it’s not so much social networking in the sense that Facebook is a social network forum. What’s different about China is that when people go online here, their main activity is to go onto bulletin boards (BBS). It’s something I remember from 20 years ago when I had my first modem.

Bulletin boards are culturally and socially ideal for people in China using the internet. You can log on anonymously and have your say and air your complaints and participate in a dialogue with other web users about controversial issues. That’s something people are not able to do in real life.

What impact does the use of bulletin boards have on brands?

It’s very, very easy for a brand to make a small mistake and then have that mistake magnified by the level of discussion that goes online. Mercedes Benz about eight years ago had an issue with one of its customers. A dealership apparently didn’t want to take a car back and so the customer set up some cameras and took photos of himself bashing his Mercedes Benz to smithereens with a sledgehammer, and then published that online. Then other people started talking about the issues they’d had with Mercedes Benz, especially the after-sales service. Mercedes Benz, to their credit, responded quickly and staunched the level of discontent that was being displayed online. I think Ford have had some oil pump issues with the Ford Focus. It was only after Ford themselves were trawling and scanning what was being said online that they were able identify this as a significant issue and then address it.

Is e-commerce playing much of a role in China?

I don’t think there’s many retailers that have independently tried to capitalise on e-commerce in China, or been successful at it. Certainly not as much as you might see in the US or in Europe.

There’s a company here called Taobao, which started off as a B to B forum for people looking for components for machinery or manufacturing, and things like that. Recently they have moved much more towards the business to consumer model.

When people here buy their houses, they basically buy an empty concrete box, and then it’s up to them to go out and renovate that and put in all the toilet fixtures and the kitchen fixtures. Now people will join websites like Taobao and engage in group buying using the bulletin boards. Everyone gets together on this third party website and then goes and bulk-buys from a particular supplier to get a better deal. That sort of thing is very successful here.

What is your prediction for digital marketing in China?

Most of our clients still devote a single-digit percentage of their communications budgets to digital. I’m expecting this will grow exponentially in the next two to three years, especially as the price of advertising in China will become exorbitant, really. I think a lot of clients are being forced into a situation where they would like to look at digital as a more cost-effective platform, and then once people are forced to use that platform a little bit more, that’s when I think you’ll see the creativity and real maturity start to develop.

Thank you Jason for taking the time to speak to us. The full podcast will be available for download from the Foviance website next week.

For any of you doubting the power of the interweb as a media channel, since the story of Facebook changing their terms of use was first reported by the Consumerist blog on Feb 15, it has been one of the most talked about issues across the world: “Facebook Privacy Fallout Goes Nuclear” The key thing I take from all this, is that it represents tangible proof that at least one person in the world reads the terms and conditions. Pretty much all of us suspect EULAs (electronic user licence agreements) or ‘click wrap’ as they’re otherwise known, are chock-a-block with weird and wonderful legal weasel words but that doesn’t mean we read them before clicking or ticking the “I have read the terms and conditions…” box, so clearly we’re not that bothered by it.

In a nutshell, the big change to the Facebook terms of use grants them the right to hang on to (and potentially “use”) archived copies of your stuff if you cancel your membership on the site. This “use” is defined in numerous ways in the fine print but one of the terms that seem to have the world’s collective panties in a bunch is “sublicence”: effectively Facebook can sell your content to a third party.

So what’s all the fuss about suddenly? Facebook can already sell your stuff right now if they want to…you gave them permission to do so when you signed up. The word “sublicence” appears in the old terms of use (hands up how many of you read it); the only real difference in the new version is that right exists after you leave. What I think annoys people is the idea that someone is able to make money off something they “own” which possesses no obvious commercial value, or which they lack the ability to monetize themselves. Frankly, the majority of us have little to worry about. The bulk of user content on Facebook is photos, and bad ones at that. I don’t want to see pictures of a hairy Irish guy in a PVC nurse outfit let alone PAY for the privelage (I’ll mention no names so their dignity remains intact).

Perhaps it comes down to a definition of ownership. Facebook have stated that they have never claimed ownership of their members’ content, but when you put your “property” into a big communal bucket you’re pretty much giving it away to the world and are clearly not seeking to make any money out of it, so why does that change if you’re no longer a member of the site? Once it’s out there it’s out there. In the words of Joe Garrelli from NewsRadio: “Getting something off the internet is like getting pee out of a pool.”

Other social networking sites have found ways to make money from user content, such as Flickr (where users’ photos can be sold to third parties and the user receives a royalty), and Threadless (essentially an enormous t-shirt design competition where artitsts submit their designs for the community to vote for and, ultimately, buy). Neither of these sites actually create anything, they merely provide the mechanism for users to submit and interact, and cream a percentage off the top. They have tapped into an enormous global market which effictively comes to them with little or no effort on their behalf. Both potentially make a lot of money, sure, but they are fostering and rewarding the creativity of people who ordinarily would have no means to commercialise their work.

Update: Facebook have reverted back to their old terms of use while they “resolve the issues that people have raised.” Facebook backtracks.

The title of this article does not relate to new privacy measures introduced to protect Facebook users. Instead, since this incredibly popular community’s new look appeared a few weeks ago, Facebook has changed into something a lot more complicated and unusable.

Many people use Facebook with alarming regularity. For others it has become a convenient way to keep up to date with a social network, something to be dipped into rather than focused on. The new design does not seem to reflect this. I would argue that a large percentage of people use the site to snoop on other people, and they do so in three main ways; reading their friends’ messages, looking at their friends’ photos and reading their status updates. It is these actions that have been made particularly difficult by the new design.

The redesign offers more choice to users by enabling them to comment on all site content while providing more shortcuts, but it also forces them to do a lot more work to get even the most basic information. The most immediately noticeable change with Facebook is the move to a wider screen format, and the total overhaul of navigation. This is the first point at which complications arise, as there are now multiple navigation points across every page, as well as tabs within the page.

The site is also now full of jargon. Facebook does not seem to feel the need to explain itself, its new wording, or the new design. The homepage opens with ‘Top Stories’, but how stories qualify as top is unclear. The site uses proprietary phrases such as ‘Log mode’ and has the title ‘Boxes’ as a profile tab.

Emphasis has been placed on odd features of Facebook, such as the large space dedicated to ‘Bookmarks’ on the ‘home’ page, and the extremely large ‘What are you doing right now’ text box as a call to action to provide a status update. This means that quirky features such as the three latest status updates have been taken away, and instead of a quick glance at a page to receive updates of friends’ activities, users now have to actively go into a status updates tab.

In some ways the user is now given too much choice, by being able to comment on everything that is shown, even whether they like adverts or not. However, how to provide this input is not obvious, with the hidden ‘options’ boxes at the side of every story being hard to notice. With all this space for user feedback, Facebook has taken away the choice over where items are placed. Users are no longer allowed to move boxes within their profile, and therefore Facebook now appears to decide what is important on each user’s page.

The profile page is also extremely confusing. All of the content is mixed together, which makes it harder to see anything. It is true that filtering options are still there, but a mixture of wall posts and mini-feed items makes it hard to focus on any information. There are also a few major usability problems here, for example with internal tabbing. ‘Add photos’, for instance, adds a box to the page within which you enter the content. However the page then gives no ability to undo these actions if you change your mind. There is no cancel option, so the box stays on the page until you navigate away from it.

Facebook has made its core functionality more complex by making information searches on people more difficult, and by taking away the simple and orderly layout of the old design. With functionality more confusing, the other changes to Facebook become less interesting. This is a prime example of how user input and feedback is essential before any kind of redesign, because even a site with such incredible support as Facebook can get it wrong.

By Mark Gristock

The Daily Telegraph (a UK broadsheet newspaper) reported a story on 16 June 2008 regarding a High Court ruling that required an ex-employee of Hays to hand over business contacts built up on the social networking website LinkedIn.

The story has since been picked up in various publications including Brand Republic and Computer Weekly but none raise the obvious, more expansive question of what the repercussions of this ruling might be for the rest of us? Computer Weekly does make reference to a legal specialist that advises employers to add clauses to employment contracts and to ask employees to set up business-only networks, but I think this misses the point.

Social networks are just that - social. The dictionary definition of ’social’ is: “living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone”. These networks don’t have boundaries and certainly don’t separate colleagues from friends. In many ways if they did, it would defeat their object. For many, however, this level of transparency is unnerving.

I had lunch with a customer recently who talked about her younger sister connecting with her on Facebook. I have a similar scenario where I am connected to my niece and nephew. They have very different interests and circles of friends to me, being as they are, about 25 years younger. But what is my alternative? Deny their existence? Compartmentalise them?

Only five days earlier (11 June) Times Online ran a feature that advised people to keep their social and business networks separate. This is an interesting idea and there were various suggestions made by different people - all in recruitment (or ‘talent management’ if there is a difference). One suggested he used a nickname on Facebook that only his friends know, and then used LinkedIn for business contacts only. I don’t see how this can work. There have to be crossovers. Otherwise, what happens when you conduct business with family members or if your business contacts are among your best friends?

The article concluded with a suggestion that soon software will simply track you down by making connections between you, friends and colleagues, then bingo - your profiles are connected for all to see.

What this really means is we have to get ready for a time when virtually everything we post online will be attributable to us. Potential employers will be able to see our connections with dodgy friends and family members and start judging us across a wider set of values. Is this good or bad? I am certain there will be losers as there always are, but I think this is akin to businesses getting used to corporate blogs - which of course many have yet to do.

There are countless examples of businesses gaining stronger brands as a result of honest information about them going up on blogs. They are measured by how they respond to negative comments about poor performance. People realise that no business is perfect and actually, if you can see them warts and all, you tend to trust them more. The same will surely happen for individuals and I think it will be refreshing.

I predict that the transition will be ugly, but when we get there we may see a levelling of the playing field on a scale never seen before.

On Monday 9th June I attended the EDM08 conference. It was a fairly small affair with perhaps 100 delegates, but they had travelled far and wide to be there and on my table were people from the US, Nordic region and mainland Europe.

EDM stands for European Directories Marketplace and the event is run by Whitaker Associates. I had little idea about how the connection with directories worked before attending, but soon discovered that it was all to do with the delivery of information services, leading to this year’s theme: mobile.

The keynote was delivered by Dr Mike Short, director of R&D at O2 and a man with impressive credentials in the mobile arena. Chair of the mobile data association (MDA) among other things, Dr Short has spent 20 years in the mobile and wider telecoms industries. He shared plenty of industry stats and previews of O2 research to be published in July, both of which I can summarise here for you in a few bullet points.

General statistics:

• There were 2.95 billion mobile subscribers globally by June 2007.
• The forecast for the end of 2008 is 3.3 billion (source: The Mobile World).
• There is 115 percent mobile penetration in the UK, equating to 69 million handsets.
• There were 57 billion SMS and 449m picture messages sent in the UK in 2007.
• The mobile internet was accessed by 17 million UK individuals in 2007.

From O2’s research:

• Most people would rather leave home without their wallet than their mobile.
• Trials which combined mobile SIMs with Oyster and Credit cards (separately and together) using near field communication technology (NFC) resulted in a greater degree of success with Oyster cards than credit cards. It will be interesting to see what conclusions O2 draws from this, as it seems to me that it is a moot point because ultimately they will all surely be combined anyway.
• Mobile development began at phase one with voice and text. Present
  day is phase six which is the ‘content’ phase. He believes that the next stage, phase 7, is the ‘application’ phase.

Following the keynote there was a range of presentations, discussions and some really interesting debates and opinions that I would like to record.

There was plenty of debate around the importance of mobile compared to PC. James Levey of Amdocs suggested that click-through rates online were currently at about two percent on average but predicted mobile would achieve four percent click-through rates in the near future. Mobile search currently represents two to four percent of desktop search globally, with the exception of China where mobile search accounts for 25 percent. Google predicts that the crossover point, where mobile search overtakes desktop, will come within four years, then rapidly grow to double the desktop search share.

To provide a little more context to this, it is worth mentioning stats presented by Russell Buckley of Admob, the world’s largest mobile ad marketplace. Russell currently estimates that Admob sees three billion page views per month on its network, on which they serve ads today. The largest contributors to that number, notably all in the English language, are:

• US = 50 percent
• India and UK = 10 percent each
• South Africa = 5 percent
• Indonesia = 5 percent

Other presentations gave me some interesting nuggets worth noting, such as: “In ten years you will be able to access the knowledge of humankind from a mobile.” Or: “The fastest growing age of penetration of mobile phones in the UK is seven to eight year olds. All exciting stuff, but I was most impressed by Simon Grice of www.ideas.org. He managed to rattle off more concepts and ideas in ten minutes than I have in a decade. The few I managed to grab were:

• Information is the new pollution. In a conference focusing on information services and directories Grice argued that in the future this will be too much and humans won’t be able to deal with the flow of info.
• Search will become useless because the range of results will be too difficult to filter. Grice suggested that when people get bogged down with information they ask people they know for advice and in this way sites like Twitter and Facebook become the information services networks of the future.
• Discovery as opposed to search. Search is fine if you know what you are looking for but what if you don’t? For example your local pub is holding an Italian night. If you don’t search for that you may not find out so you need to be told or have a way to discover it that is not necessarily advertising. Location based services have a role to play but it is not clear what role at this stage.

All of the great new ideas discussed at EDM08 are definitely worth exploring further, which is exactly what I intend to do now.

Last month, Hitwise reported that visits to the top 25 social networking sites now outnumber visits to webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail. It’s too early to pronounce email dead: for a start, that report only covered webmail, and didn’t look at desktop mail. But it does show an interesting trend.

There are several flaws with webmail: most significantly, it’s plagued by spam. The user experience is one of wading through mountains of junk to get to the occasional friendly greeting from a friend. It can also fall foul of viruses and the threading of discussions can be somewhat primitive (depending on which provider you use).

Facebook solves all these problems and makes for a superior user experience. Although you can receive messages from strangers, you tend to only get messages from people you have already identified as your friend. Since the messages are sent through a webform, the risk of a virus being attached to a message is relatively low. The inbox also threads discussions and presents them on a single page, so you can see the whole correspondence. The site also provides fun new ways to communicate with your friends which go beyond email into interactive quizzes and games of tag.

Doubtless there will come a time when spammers and virus authors penetrate Facebook’s defences, but for now Facebook offers a superior user experience to webmail for most of its users. But even this experience is under threat. While Facebook is good at keeping out spam, the site does tend to plaster adverts and other rubbish on the user’s profile page. If they don’t rein in this excess, they risk harming the fragile relationship they have with users. Ultimately, usability wins.

By Mark Gristock

2007: The year we all went social networking crazy. The year that the corporate takeover came back into fashion, and when shoddy research became the accepted norm.

Many of us have struggled with how to turn social networking and the proliferation of rich media into business advantage this year. I’ve consistently wrestled with the blog problem for most of it. The challenge can best be likened to the retirement of Tim Henman - when you are busy, you don’t have time to keep updating a blog and the interesting things you could say are often confidential. Once you’ve got time on your hands, nothing interesting actually happens and nobody cares what you have to say any more.

You can’t have a discussion about Web 2.0 without talking about Facebook and its new advertising system. Personally I don’t have any interest in how anyone rates me, or what products I like, but then I’m not 16. On the other hand, the people at Facebook seem genuinely pleased with themselves, so I’m sure they understand their audience much better than I do.

This year, the iPhone and Skype mobile arrived and promised to change the way we use mobile. I struggle to see how either innovation will help people to look where they’re going when they’re misspelling every third word, but at least the new options are more attractive and cheaper.

I’ve been to a great number of events and conferences this year, and if I could have one wish for 2008 it’s this. If you are invited to be a keynote speaker, it’s not an excuse to not prepare a presentation, or to take a great deal of time revealing how surprisingly dull your company actually is. Many of your audience have travelled a long way to hear your thoughts. The least you could do is actually have some.

Finally, I was listening to Radio 5 at the weekend, and the hot story was the return of Mrs. Canoe. The report went something like this: “Let’s go to the journalist that’s covering the story. David - what’s the latest?” “Well, according to the Daily Mirror Website…” Proof, if proof be needed, that if you hear it on the Internet it must be true.

And on that note, I’m off to buy a kitten in a jamjar for my mother. I’m sure she’ll be pleased.