As anticipated on twitter (@absolutesubzero) and in my previous post, I’ll be covering these two days of conference here at Social Enterprise 2.0 in Bruxelles sharing my notes for the most interesting sessions.
Establishing an effective internal governance strategy and structure to build relationships online through social media (Jef Vandecruys – Global Project Leader Digital Connections – Anheuser-Busch InBev)
- Who they are
- AB InBev has 7 centuries of brewing history with brands like Bud, Stella Artois, Becks’s.
- They are one of the biggest Food and Beverage brands selling a lot in North and South America with local (local jewels) and global brands.
- They sells 13 billions in beer globally
- They have a strategy for becoming the best beer company in a better world
- Why did they go digital
- If there’s not good reason don’t use digital. That reason is the one convincing people internally to spend money in digital
- They have collected research and arguments to convince the board. The board has been educated for 4 days about digital. The next question was how, no longer why
- 3 reasons to touch young people: they want to capture people when they are growing from youth, 24 yrs old spend more, early adoption leads a lifetime loyalty
- What they have done
- From doing digital to being digital to improve speed, efficiency, effectiveness (to engage inform, enthuse, inspire, challenge, stimulate & celebrate success)
- They have 4 pillars: web, social media, mobile, digital communication. They first collaborated with the board and the rest of the org and started measuring under a global vision and strategy
- Starting internal: they have an internal digital hub to help brand managers with their job with areas and activities
- they are going through a learning path, building case studies and best practices (with a Digital Innovation Lab)
- When you have learned you have to teach people with a Digital Academy
- Examples: they have social media projects in 50 countries. The Bud House (Budweiser) is an example of using brand and social to physically bring people together and amplify the passion
- How to measure
- Three areas: brand impact (marketing is supporting sales), event success (Superbowl, year sponsorship, etc, consumer connection
- Digital dashboard based on global KPI’s combined with local KPI’s to manage conversations across countries and regions still allowing a central view of brand influencers (earned audience reach, earned media value, engagement, brand favorability, campaign impact)
- Not just attract people to your assets but interact with people where they are
- What is the value of fans? They built a FanIdex (fan page attributes, fan page content, benefits of being a fan) to assess the impact on brand appeal (impact on brand equity, impact on engagement). Fans outspend non-fans by over 4x!
- It’s all in the preparation: Strategy – Planning
- They have a checklist on how to proceed: fun differentiator, regular posts, contests, innovation differentiator, giveaways, brand news, quality of post/interaction, community, trust, new product info
- Social Business Planning (people, process, platform): consumer centric vision, consumer engagement strategy, engagement objectives & briefing, engagement programs before executing (brand bought, brand owned, facebook, twitter, youtube, blogs & community, flickr)
- What are the challenges
- The way of doing marketing is changing from push to interacting. Less control and more consumer focus. You need to convince a lot of people internally and externally
- Consumer is generating his own content but this can help your brand if you are able to connect instead of attract. Creating content is expensive
- Hard to define and prove metrics
- It’s a learning process
- Final Q&As
- Same strategy, different local initiatives because culture and penetration are different. Do not copy and paste campaigns
- They still use external agencies to execute campaigns. Jef doesn’t have a team! They are educating internal people to challenge agencies. That’s useful to execute in the country
Exploiting video as an opportunity to build personal relationships (Amanda Jobbins – Vice President – Technology & Corporate Marketing Europe – Cisco)
I personally believe videos are inherently a channel and not a platform, in that sense a less social and more expensive approach to communication. Let’s see if Cisco changes my belief.
- New global culture is emerging: some snapshots are innate trust of big business is low, we’re always connected but not always on, relationships are the new status, successful companies will demonstrate shared values
- Sight is our most powerful sense. A research shows how perceptions of trustworthiness of people are based on behavior and body language (53%), credibility and personality (40%), spoken words (7%)
- A minute of vide is worth 1.8 million words (forrester)
- Brands using online video have seen lifts of 20-40% in incremental buying over other ad forms (comscore)
- 49% of people who purchased tech cited online video as influential collateral to prepare to make a purchasing decision (eccolo media)
- Video has gone social. Consumer are doing it uploading 24 hrs of video every minute in Youtube. 24 B of videos viewed every day in Youtube. You don’t need a professional production and it leverages the innate storytelling ability of human beings
- Cisco has a number of examples with videos: telepresence suite (as an immersive experience and they are going to launch an home telepresence for hd tvs), holographic (or 3d) telepresence, healthPresence (scottish center for telehealth), the future of shopping
- Cisco social ecosystem: home base, outposts (blogs, youtube, facebook, twitter, etc), passports (delicious, scribd, blogs, slideshare, digg)
- Summary: social video is much more than broadcast and it’s becoming pervasive. Storytelling is key
Building relationship with customers through social media (Peter Epersen. Online Community Lead – Lego)
- Some thoughts on social media and LEGO
- Cocacola and Mentos become a social object. The same is true with Lego
- They take their fans seriously
- AFOL (Brad Pitt, Beckham, Obamas)
- in 2010 more than 2.6M public visitors attended events and shows organized by Lego fans (not by Lego itself)
- 70+ LEGO User Groups with +50K registered members
- How are they communicating with fans
- They have LEGO Ambassadors
- Dialogue with User Partners through Project Rooms
- They (it means also the CEO and VPs) actually go to meet fans physically.
- Why is the community important
- LEGO Fans are social much more than US online consumers (Forrester Socialtechnographics)
- LEGO can seed peer to peer conversations. Get down the tower and accept to interact at the same level without forgetting humour (see the LEGO Apology to people stepping on lego bricks :D)
- Consumer affinity pyramid (top: lead users and user partners, 1:1 community, connected community, active households). The try to bring people up the pyramid because at the top the spending is higher
- Some rules: set expectations, be respectful, ensure win-win, be reliable, ensure transparency, fair compensation, limit secrecy, be inclusive
- Idea Tyranny..
- a positive problem: they get a lot of ideas and tried to address it creatively
- they launched Design by me
- people get angry about LEGOs (bionicle case) but you can turn tension into an oportunity
- Lead user involvement
- let users hack your product and start from there to co-develop and user develop
- LEGO jewellery by Lisa Taylor
- LEGO Cuusoo piloting a crowdsourcing model. Really cool! Bringing new official LEGO sets
- What’s next
- they are looking to amplify what the community is doing
- Meet, celebrate and help fans
- Build social objects
- Avoid being first movers
- Procedures to work with fans
- Lego as a way to share ideas not products
Using Social CRM to drive value co-creation with customers (Graham hill, Optima Partners)
- Social CRM at a Crossroads (see his great recent post)
- We are a social species but Social CRM may be a paradigm shift for business
- CRM is dead. Long live Social CRM. Social CRM is moving things on from doing things at customers to for / with customers
- Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation (Paul Greenberg). You can like it or not but you still have to be part of the conversation
- Sir Ken Robinson at TED. Do you believe in the power of creativity? Children are naturally creative
- We have 3 roads to go forward: Social CRM just as another communication channel (Fiat500, Old Spice, Twelpforce at Best Buy), Social CRM is a Technology (analysts like Altimeter, Giff Gaff on Lithium for bottom-up customer support, Jet Blue on Attensity for listening to conversation, Southwest on Spigit for innovation management)
- Technology has a problem: OO + NT = EOO (old org + new technology = expensive old org)
- That’s a 3rd way: Social CRM is co-creation. Mutual value co-creation
- Look for value networks. Value flows around interaction networks. Apply Social CRM where it creates value
- Lego is a great example because it co-creates extensively with customers. For example Mindstorm
- P&G has a number of co-design programmes. See Tremor for housewives
- Rolls Royce prices its aviation engines based on the amount of time they are running. Co-Delivering! Value in use not in exchange at the point of sales. Years of value in use. Work on outcomes!
- Where next with Social CRM? Value co-creation is the path to follow. That’s the only way to innovate in a sustainable way both for companies and customers
- 4-5 key steps to a better Social CRM
- Focus on customer jobs in terms of outcomes. Understand what they want to achieve through your product and make their life easier
- Learn the value equation. what the customers want and what we want as a company. You also want stronger relationships, gain knowledge about customers. Look at what resources customers need to deliver their jobs and outcomes
- Map the customer journey: identify the touchpoints in the customer journey where values is delivered
- Find out how value flows: follow the flow of value between different person and players at each touchpoint
- Then build Social CRM purposely: only now you can identify where to use to co-create even more value
Effectively utilizing online co-creation and communities (Anna Peters, Promise Communications)
- More innovation is going to come from users & consumers
- The challenge is harnessing consumer creativity and ensure that we are actually involved in their conversations
- The birth of a new consumer-centric innovation paradigm. Online co-creation communities are the centre of this new paradigm
- 1/3 of market researchers plan on using communities in the next yr (Forrester). Activia (Danone) insights from their community where 82% more effective
- 8 rules of using co-creation communities for innovation challenges
- spend time and effort creating a transactional space
- be transparent and give a wider view of a challenge
- treat them as co-creators, not respondents
- engage in a two way dialogue
- relinquish control
- allow your co-creators to shape the innovation agenda
- adopt an iterative and integrated model
- be bold
Building your brands presence and maximising customer relationships online (Adam Wallace – Head of New Media Marketing – roger Smith Hotel)
- Roger Smith Hotel is a small boutique hotel reaching global visibility through social media. Really a great example for most of the tourism industry and smaller companies in Europe!
- Social media is not starting and account but addressing business in a different way
- In the past, with the website they simply tried to optimize their presence in Google. Now the experience is much more dynamic
- Their account (@RSHotel) is in the top 20 twitter accounts for bigger hotels without the same money!
- They use youtube and flickr for content/story to
- They have a blog to drive traffic. It started with a story beyond product, beyond heads in beds. Tell a story. That was a big change to them!
- RSH Created sharable content: “henry making his bed”. That’s about a dog. Fantastic!
- Show who you are by showing real faces not just the brand but the personality, employees. Everyone creates her identity and reputation online. At the end of the phrase they say: “I’m Roger Smith”
- RogerSmithShorts, The LAB Gallery, SmartCamp. Build presence for specific communities and do partnerships
- User generated content with the community and through relationships
- Build online brand ambassadors. People are talking as individual people sharing their passion
- Try to focus on the right network not a large network. Looking for the influencers though
- Have ambassadors recommend and sell for you instead of paying for the ads because people trust people. This is a different recommendation engine than google
- Engage current customers. Let them know you are following and listening to them
- Stimulate in person connections. Social media helps sociality and people come at physical events
- Maintain positive reputation caring for example about TripAdvisor. Be accessible and show that you care. Respond both to positive and negative comments
- It takes a team investment with buy-in from the top (1 full time employee, video team)
- The return is on bottom line: rooms (+20% through promo codes), events and restaurants (+30%)
- For the future: involving more employees and evolving the site to a more dynamic experience
Learning how KLM utilised social media during and after the Volcano disruption (Anna Ketting – Social Media Manager, KLM)
They went through a number of steps
- Getting acquainted: discover the magnitude of social media, feeling confortable with online reputation. They started with a video blog in Summer 2009 (Mr Safety) then with Twitter in Nov 2009 to inform people but not really answering questions about problems. In March 2010 they joined Facebook. In April they had the ashcloud
- Seizing the opportunities:
- in a large companies you had many silos. How to be in control of reputation when you have many departments and many external influencers.
- The company doesn’t control the brand anymore. This hasn’t to slow you down. Use the knowledge already existing in the org.
- The ashcloud impacted suddenly and 1 one day they involved every employee behind social media account to help
- It was created a crisis operation: volunteers from KLM, 4 on twitter, 4 on facebook and 4 rebookers working 24/7
- The management was involved immediately. It really helped to get internal committment
- They put together a rebook process redirecting requests to the right channel by passing through internal approvals
- As a side effect they got a lot of visibility
- Also snow has deep impacts on travellers
- Embed social media structurally
- Created integral vision and strategy out from the ashcloud experience: not focus on a specific social media but as an integrated approach in order to do web care & servicing + commercial use
- Strategic approach in 4 waves: gain followers, from negative to neutral, from neutral to ambassador, convert to klm sales
- Organize structural team set-up: web care team made (social media hub) by social media manager, 3 social media service agents, communication expert, reputation manager, copy writers + commercial team made by 4 social media channel manager, dedicated marketing manager, communication manager
- Engaged all divisions
- Link local KLM organizations
- Focus on the customer
- Value their opinion
- Really listen to them (Fly2Miami)
- Surprise them by exceeding their expectations through social media (Facebook and Foursquare) and personalization (Surprise, for 4 weeks)
- Make their dream come true (Share your dream)
- Answer their questions
- Solve their problems
- Challenges
- Keeping track not easy especially for sentiment
- Embedding social media within KLM. Content should come from the divisions
- How to manage reputation globally. You can use guidelines but engaging can only be done locally
- How to behave with new social loyalty vs traditional established loyalty
- Questions
- You have to address social media also in the weekends and evenings (like they are doing with Web Care Team)
- To pay this kind of structure you can move money from other activities. If you can get viral you will save a lot of money through free publicity. They didn’t do any seeding
- They respond within an hour and solve the issue within a day. You need to put your processes in place
Social media – a possibility to do global communication on a budget (Linda Eidmark – Web and Social Media Advisor, Medecins sans Frontieres)
- MSF doesn’t have any budget, it’s just people time
- The Haiti case: social media helped them to change the perception of people far away (like us all in Europe and USA) about what is happening in Sudan or Somalia, reporting news and convincing the world to do social good, fund raising
- In Jan 2010 they announced the humanitarian crisis via Twitter. In 3 weeks without money they have a facebook page with 620K people, twitter followers grown 500%, thousands of people reading the blogs and social media as a tool to keep in touch with the staff given that phone wasn’t working
- Not press releases but videos, images and stories to move people’s heart
- They don’t need a perfect film to convince people to contribute. That’s the goal they had
- MSF also organized live chats for people in other countries to ask questions to field workers
- They used Facebook insights to keep track of the mentions
- They organized press conferences and shared them through Youtube
- How could you do all this: massive need for information, overwhelming media coverage, having communication staff on the ground, reactive/proactive balance (quick information out, then monitor and refine), ask for help
- Above all they were prepared: most offices had well followed social media channels, old channels more credible and better indexed by search engines, trained staff in offices and conscious staff on the ground
- Results: visibility and fund raising simply skyrocketed without any money
- Real challenges: lack of control in messaging and snowball effects, no control over their +20K staff own initiatives, too much information circulating (need to verify sources and time demanding), duplicating work load, strong efforts but weak international cooperation, patient’s permission/consent
- Need to plan for the unplannable: decision makers should be always oboard to take decisions quickly, leave room for flexibility, you need the right staff, clear guidelines, coherent messages on the web and social media but not easy with unofficial accounts
- Best practices: respect MSF principles, share passion, correct misrepresentation of MSF, ok to make mistakes if you admit and correct them, differentiate personal and official profiles, consider the media you are using, limit access when needed, operational security (kidnapping, security threats on a mission, etc), stay neutral and be impartial, don’t talk about religion and faith when talking about MSF, respect privacy and dignity
