Media Week

Take a look at this interview with Andy Lark, who runs corporate communications for Dell. The company is making social media central to their marketing efforts. Dell are becoming leaders in this space with teams of people working on social media with responsibility for certain social media properties such as Twitter. They see social media as crucial to engaging with customers and gaining customer feedback on products and ideas.

http://www.uberpulse.com/us/2008/08/social_media_is_dells_core_marketing_strategy_video.php

 www.itsopen.co.uk

I had a meeting the other day with a large retailer. The communications team is keen to engage with social media. But they complained that they cannot visit blogs or social networks from work. They have to actually make specific requests to visit certain blogs from their IT department!  Obviously I cannot say who they are. But they did encourage me to keep banging on about the fact that media professionals are being held back by firewall policies that are totally antiquated. While consumers and stakeholders are popping into internet cafes or browsing on their i phones and posting comments about brands, the brand owners can't even see what is being said. When will this situation change?!!!! Clearly it is not in the interests of readers of Media Week either that clients cannot see all the activities on social media networks.

www.itsopen.co.uk

Brian Solis (see link below) has come up with some interesting examples of what social media conversations look like. On his blog he's put forward some visual ideas. I think there are a lot of companies out there who are struggling to visualise the world of social media and the more they are presented with charts showing the influence all the various networks have, the better. I think companies need to understand that people are buying now after they have talked online with peers, read reviews etc. And they are forming views of brands based on what they are hearing and seeing through social media networks.

Companies who don't get their heads around social media and  in particular peer to peer reviews are going to be in trouble. We recently booked a holiday to Croatia. All the official blurb for the hotels was of course over-the-top positive. Reading the customer reviews was a different story. We looked at places in Greece and you get glowing official versions and then on another site customers are complaining the sheets were never changed etc. Those hotels are going to suffer and they will not know why unless they actually monitor what is being said and respond. Similarly companies who fail to listen and visualise what is going on through social media networks will lose an understanding of the trends in their market and their brand and organisation could lose its appeal and relevance quickly. And just because busy corporate communications executives don't have time to read blogs doesn't mean that their customers don't have time. Nor does it mean those blogs don't have influence.

http://www.briansolis.com/2008/08/introducing-conversation-prism.html

www.itsopen.co.uk

Just been introduced to a free and easy tool online which gives you a quick insight into how a brand is represented on social media. It will tell you quickly how you are doing on facebook, youtube, twitter, flickr, blogs etc. Take a look at www.howsociable.com. Just type in your brand name and see what comes up. It's a good place to start. Once you have carried out the exercise you have a rough idea of where the most social media activity is taking place around your brand. So for example if blog posts come up the highest, you know you need a blogging relations policy so that you can engage with bloggers. If videos come up highly then you might want to consider advertising on video channels or creating video applications or setting up your own YouTube channel.  If Twitter comes up highly, maybe you want to set up your own Twitter channels and monitor twitter and respond to tweets about your brand.

Making brands think about how sociable they are is a good introduction to the world of social media and a good way to get people thinking about how they are being represented online. What I like about this tool is that it presents all the information in an easily understandable format and there are good summaries. It's not perfect. Sometimes the search results confuse the name of the brand with other names which are not relevant. But that can happen on top search engines as well.

When a brand owner sees that there is a lot of social media activity in particular areas then hopefully they will see the value in supporting and connecting with that activity in order to generage additional goodwill and influence for the brand before their competitors do.

 www.itsopen.co.uk

McKinsey has released a web 2.0 survey which is free once you subscribe (see link below)

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Information_Technology/

What is interesting is that the survey shows that unresponsive corporate cultures and less-than-enthusiastic senior managers are holding up the adoption of web 2.0.  A lot of senior managers still think web 2.0 is something for their children - and not for them, or for their business.  I think web 2.0 has the potential to revitalise company cultures. Any thoughts on how you persuade senior management to adopt web 2.0 tools either internally or for their external communications?