Social Media

The rise of the power of user generated content is leading organisations to offer new ways of enticing participation, and an innovative example I will be following is that of Simon Seeks.

There are plenty of sites vying for participation, in the form of user generated content: some offer to pay up front for the content, while others hope that by linking into other successful social networking sites, that they will boost their usage, and a confident few are content to start by carefully seeding, hoping that the community will grow, simply through brand, interest or both.

However Simon Seeks offers rewards based on both conversion and loyalty. Registered users of the site write reviews. If their review leads to other users booking a holiday, they are then given financial rewards back. Conversion and loyalty are not new, but it’s a model of encouragement that I have never seen before.

I guess the hope is that if reviewers are rewarded with something in context, it should lead them to have another experience, and in return, for the site can hope for loyalty, and more crucially, another review posted of that new experience.

In my recent podcast with Richard Hewitt, I asked him what new features he thought sportsbook operators could introduce to their mobile channel that would add value to their users. His belief was that location based services within a community based environment would be the next biggest innovation. Providing content that is relevant to the user based on when and where they access your product would obviously greatly enhance the experience. However, determining what that content should be is a massive challenge.

As with online sportsbooks, operators need to determine what added content such as statistics or news is relevant and appreciated by their users. This can be tricky, but creating an appropriate social media strategy is even harder. The news that social betting site Pikum has folded, will scare people away from experimenting with social media on their site (although there were other reasons behind Pikum’s demise).

I’ve no doubt that the most successful sportsbooks in the future will be those that create a community around their site, as the days of acquiring and retaining customers purely on the basis of bonuses are limited. What a community on a sportsbook should look like, is something I don’t know, but the important thing to remember is that a community does not have to mean a social network. Sportbooks will need to understand what media their users are currently consuming, to develop an understanding of what content and functionality they are currently missing that should be offered to them. By creating content that leads users back to their site regardless of whether they intend to place a bet or not, will build loyalty and inevitably increase revenues.

Catriona Campbell is presenting at the From Business to Buttons session, June 11th in Malmö, southern Sweden.

Catriona will be discussing all manners of social media (e.g. user generated content) are now added to digital media.. How do we really create and show Return on Investment from social media? Another dot com boom? Or really adding value to customers?

Rather than sit back and ignore seemingly crazy social media,Catriona say’s: Let’s educate the design and development world in constructive user research and user needs analysis.

Whilst the multi-million pound Chelsea footballers were having their summer breaks (well the few English ones in the squad at least) the developers of the Chelsea website were hard at work. In July the redesigned site was launched with an emphasis on the social community, with a new area of the site called ‘The Shed’. This area of the site is aimed at promoting user generated content with chat, blog, rumour mill, polls and fan galleries. It also allows fans to ask the players questions in live web chats.

A friend on Saturday night was raving not only about their victory but also about the chatting that he had been involved in on the site before the game. Sites placing user generated content at the heart of a website is not new; I just think the opportunity in sports club sites is massive. There is a large loyal fan base that are more than happy to debate their latest club stories for hours, and this in turn spares them boring their non-Chelsea friends (like myself) in the pubs.

Any other football fans out there got some stories to tell about their club’s website?

Social networking sites have been banned by a great number of businesses in the UK, and mostly because IT departments fail to understand ‘bottom up technology’; that is, adoption before the IT department has had a chance to fully understand it.

Earlier this year, researcher firm Cutter Consortium narrowed down the motives of businesses choosing to block social media to three key reasons: security concerns, productivity loss and bandwidth ‘hog’. Senior consultant San Murugesan claimed that “to ban or not to ban social networks at workplaces is an ongoing dilemma” but also highlighted the fact that social networking simply reflects modern communications trends, and by failing to embrace it, businesses could well be making costly mistakes.

In business, we cannot fail to realise the benefits of mass communications of any medium, US President Rutherford B Haynes said of the telephone in the early days: “An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?” Just like social media the telephone was soon usurping face-to-face communication, just as social media is doing the same to the voice-to-voice communication of the telephone.

It is essential we embrace new technology if it is user-led, working out how best to exploit it safely for our own brand means.

Analyst organisation Beyond Analysis believes 2008 will continue to witness a great deal of evolution in the way in which social media is used, particularly regarding its impact on business. Strategy director Will Beresford has said that the customer experience in particular will only be enriched by data found on the social web, often superseding traditional sources and research tools, such as questionnaires and focus groups. Certainly, opinions and discussions circulating social media platforms are having an ever greater influence upon our purchasing decisions and our brand perception.

A good example of a company exploiting social media effectively is www.zappos.com, a US online shoe retailer. At Zappos all 429 of its employees, including the CEO, have a Twitter account. But instead of merely uploading a few words around where they are (like I do), they use it to better inform customers in an open forum. They share information about where their stock or order is, as well as any updates on other issues. If you log into the Zappos section of the Twitter site, you can see all the Zappos people communicating with their customers.

Publicly displaying information like this can be a dangerous game, but if you aim to be a transparent organisation, and get your customers loving you for you openness - then why not use media which they are most comfortable with, instead of creating long call centre queues or websites support quests that lead nowhere.

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.

At a sold-out session at Adtech London, half the audience admitted they were cynical about virtual worlds. Despite that, big brands like Adidas, Reebok, Toyota and Vodafone have invested thousands to create an enticing presence in worlds like Second Life. What benefits are they seeing, beyond the PR value of grabbing the headlines?

Craig Hepburn, Global Webmaster for STA Travel, told the audience how the student travel brand is using Second Life to build a social sales channel, around a community of people who enjoy travelling and talking to each other about where they have been. The virtual environment that they’ve created allows users to place bookings through an avatar (they employ a real person in Second Life to take bookings and give advice) and on the Second Life STA island which incorporates dorms for students, Lonely Planet travel guides, video footage and posters of recommended destinations. STA’s customers love it, and they are already making money through a multitude of round the world bookings made in Second Life. That’s a good return on their initial investment of ‘only tens of thousands of pounds’, a fraction of what some brands have spent.
RBS, the world’s fourth largest financial services group, was also on the Adtech panel, represented by Sion Mooney, Channel Development Manager in the resourcing division of RBS Group HR. He talked about RBS launching the world’s first Virtual Careers Event in Second Life. Why do that? Because beyond the PR value, Second Life is allowing RBS’s careers team to connect with people in geographic locations that they would otherwise have had to reach by more traditional and expensive means, such going on the road with a recruitment fair.

In the Second Life environment, candidates can pose questions to the virtual careers advisers, meet current RBS employees, and see a mocked-up version of where they would be working, without having to leave their homes. Recruitment is incredibly expensive, and Sion revealed that just one successful hire would more than pay for the whole Second Life project.

The session demonstrated that Second Life is not the money pit that some brands have reportedly experienced, as long as a sales strategy is applied at the early conception phase. While Second Life remains in the early adoption phase, it won’t work for everyone, but the platform is ripe for brands wishing to attract a youthful and experimental audience.