Learning and sharing... by Zoe Sands

On my quest for social media knowledge and learning I continue to attend lots of social media events, most recently SMWF. After attending many sessions it sprung to mind that although there is still a lot of buzz around social media, most businesses are not truly utilising this channel. I hope that the following piece on social business may resonate with you to take action within your organisation and start your own social business journey.

Social media to become a ubiquitous business tool 

Just as email has become a ubiquitous business tool so will social media in the coming years, therefore it is imperative that businesses take notice of social media. When I first started my digital career at Hyundai back in 1997, I was the only person within the organisation that had an email account and access to the Internet. Gradually over time more people were provided with an email account and Internet access and nowadays it’s expected you would have access or you cease to be efficient and effective in your work. This may seen completely alien for those who are generation Y, but this was the case in the late 90s early 00s. To some extent social media is seeing this restrictive access within organisations, where only certain people in certain business functions are encouraged, or in fact provided, with access to use social channels in their every day work.  Without full social media access for all employees within an organisation you can’t expect to develop a social business.

Today we see a lot of organisations blocking the use of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter within the corporate network. This dictatorial attitude only forces employees to use other methods of accessing these sites bypassing the secure corporate network and accessing social media via their own tablets or mobile devices. It is far better for an organisation to instil social media best practice and governance than it is to demonise social media and drive employees off the network.

Social business a possibility

Businesses need to realise that being social is not about your organisation having a social media presence just for the brand, but that it means empowering employees to use social media in their every day roles to influence, engage and join in conversations about business needs and opportunities. This is what leads to a social business. There are very few businesses that can truly say they are a “social business”; the businesses that spring to mind that are truly social are those who have built their businesses on social technologies; for example Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to mention a few. If businesses choose to always do what they have always done, then they can only ever expect to get the same results. Businesses should ultimately look to achieve being a social business within three to five years. The first step would be to look at social media as a new communication channel, which opens up new opportunities for businesses. Gone are the days where marketing is used in the traditional sense, and classed as a cost centre function. Marketing now needs to prove itself and show return on investment, a contribution to the bottom line and add value to sales pipeline. Social marketing allows for greater engagement in the buyers journey along with assisting the humanisation of brands. Next step is empowering your employees to be your brand advocates and utilise the social channels in their everyday work. Finally encourage your customers to actively be social with you and engage and leverage your content for their benefit.

Plenty of research has taken place over the years that says people don’t form relationships with brands, they form relationships with people. Social media accelerates the formation and depth of relationships by enabling quicker communication and sharing amongst their individual networks. If your employees are not allowed to use the social channels in their every day work then they are limiting their marketing effectiveness in this fast changing social world. So, what are you waiting for? Make a plan to pilot social media within your organisation. Enjoy and good luck!

I’ll be talking about this topic at the forthcoming IDM Knowledge & Networking event “Meet the socially skilled business marketer” on 19 April 2012 in London. Do come along if the topic interests you. 

Recently Google launched ”Search, plus Your World”, it looks like it is going to have a huge impact on search results, for those who are logged into their Google account, but it has no effect on those not logged into Google. This new update enables more personalised search results and reduces the likelihood of searchers seeing the same results, which can prove to be challenging for brands that are used to mass marketing rather than personalised marketing. So, how can brands leverage this update?

First you need to create a Google+ brand page, or at the very least you should secure your brand name on the network to prevent cyber squatting, then decide on your goals, objectives, strategy and content you want to share on this network. Remember you’ll need this resourced (either internally or externally) as you’ll be developing a community and followers will expect to be able to create a dialogue with your organisation. Once all of these are in place, you’re in a great position to start thinking about utilising “Search, plus Your World” here are a few opportunities for brands;

Personal Results - by continually producing unique, engaging content and promoting the sharing it across Google+ brands could potentially see content featured in personal results. The content shared with followers will be seen to be promoted by users’ connections. Search agencies are predicting that they anticipate higher than usual click through rates for those results. 
 
Profiles in Search - Google+ personal and brand pages will be given even more exposure with this update. The winners will be those brands with the largest follower base, as inevitably their profiles will feature in a larger volume of searches. In order to increase and develop a loyal following you need to promote your Google+ page and offer content that searchers won’t find on other brand profiles, for example, you could offer monthly hangouts with your product and development team and crowd source ideas from your followers using the video conferencing feature. If followers get featured within your Google+ activities you’ll see a higher engagement and share rate. 
 
People and Pages - if brands get placed in the ‘prominent people’ list, then this will result in the profile given far more exposure in the Google listings. Enabling users to immediately add the profile to their circles, this should result in an increase in Google+ followers and shared content across followers circles.

Although, this is yet another social network to learn, fund and resource it is worth spend some time piloting this new offering. Google is investing huge marketing funds to make its third attempt at penetrating the social landscape a success and integrating this with its other services (Gmail, YouTube, etc.) it is only a matter of time before it dominants the social landscape. Facebook should be worried about Google+ becoming a close competitor, at the moment it is more a thorn in Facebook’s side, but once the subscriber base numbers increase more (400 million  plus) it will become a direct competitor. The next year will see a lot of change in the social landscape now Google has thrown it’s hat in the ring.

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships. People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

View the original letter and Facebook IPO document.