social media war: Twitter bans sharing on LinkedIn profiles

Below is an email I received this very morning. Twitter has just changed its strategy – according to the issuer – and LinkedIn, as a result, will no longer be able to relay your tweets automatically. This is a new battle between the warring factions of social media platforms and this is just a beginning. The various players in the social media space are all trying to keep your clicks and the name of the game is … advertising. Those who had though – benignly – that building a network patiently was a free asset – unless you are rich and wealthy and you have already purchased your “fans” – will now discover that paying for your posts to be read is no longer an option. Facebook has already started that. For instance, Google no longer lets you tweet YouTube videos unless you click quite a few submenus, Facebook took over Instagram in order to undercut Pinterest even before it had time to take off, Picasa will send all your photos to Google+ even before you have had a chance to realise you have pressed the upload button and mostly before you wished you had shared them on Facebook instead. And so on, and so forth … The good old Web 2.0 is well and truly dead by now, we are in a dog eats dog kind of world and the future’s middlename is advertising. What did you say? “Net Neutrality?” … honestly, what are you talking about?!

At least, using LinkedIn’s workaround which requires you probably click on ten more links, you will probably still have a chance to send something through Twitter … Good luck with it!

From LinkedIn Fri Jun 29 18:54:34 2012
Apparently-To: xxxxxxx@yahoo.com via 67.195.8.114
Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:54:40 –0700

Hi Yann,

LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.

We know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for our members. Moving forward, you will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.

How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter?Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn? Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

If you would like more information about what this means for your synced LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, please visit our related Help Center topics.

Thank you,

The LinkedIn Team

2012, Year of the Chinese Internet industry growing beyond borders: it is just the beginning

What is currently planned at Alibaba, Tencent, Sina, and Baidu worth an additional paper. My duty is to continue the story published last year and called “Chinese Internet industry ready to grow beyond borders”.

Some of my readers were quite skeptical in 2008 when I announced that China was a country good at disruptive innovation following a trip in Beijing. At that time, I bet for a Chinese Internet becoming almost the only alternative to American Internet. Who would have imagined at that time that it would accelerate as soon as year 2012?

China becoming an Internet giant

China has the world’s largest Internet audience thanks to its population, the world’s biggest with more than 1.3 billion people. With the strong increase of its Gross Domestic Product, extraordinary engineering talent, plenty of venture capital, Chinese entrepreneurs and large firms have now the resources to compete worldwide.

Looking at social behaviors, there is a main difference between American people and Chinese people: in the U.S.A. and Europe a majority of online users are “Spectators” while a majority of users in China are “Creators”[1]. China is a market more active and users generate a lot of content every day. This behavior explains part of the success of QQ games, a service of Tencent focused on online games.

More people than anywhere else, and a more active profile than European and American users enables the development of robust Internet firms. Now that China is an Internet giant, time to grow beyond borders is coming.

Strategic investments before 2012

In 2011, Tencent formed several strategic partnerships in China: among them, Kingsoft Corporation Limited., a firm providing software focused on Internet security and eLong, Inc, a leading online travel service provider in China. Outside China, in addition of being active in the U.S.A., Russia, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Tencent acquired a majority stake in Riot Games, a Los Angeles-based developer and publisher of online video games. [2]

Digital Sky Technologies

In 2010, Tencent invested $300m in Digital Sky Technologies (DST) of Russia, bringing two internet powerhouses of the emerging markets together in a long-term strategic partnership. In 2009, Sanook of Thailand became a partner of the Chinese firm.

Alibaba prepared the future of Alipay reaching an agreement with Yahoo!, and SoftBank. Alipay is a leader in China in providing payment processing services. Alibaba also developed operations in the U.S.A. and formed a partnership with Turkey’s Logo Group to reach Turkish companies.

Among others, Renren and Dangdang are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. We can expect more US IPOs by Chinese companies. There are at least 10 Chinese Internet companies who have made confidential filings through the Security Exchange Commission. Those Chinese tech companies aiming to IPO are also growing their business through innovation.

Development of operations outside China: starting to use the powerful strength of overseas Chinese presence

The strategy to develop operations outside borders is focusing on emerging countries with growing markets or developed countries where Chinese people and Chinese firms are well established. Expand abroad is a service for overseas Chinese and for non-Chinese users a form of outreach to Chinese audiences.

The service developed by “QQ International” division of Tencent is an instant messenger in either English, French or Japanese.

QQ International – Chat Messaging

This new service, launched in 2010, allows non-Chinese speaking people to use the service and communicate with Chinese people easily: they can talk to local Chinese people and stay connected with them in case they go back home.

The same is true with the English version of Sina Weibo microblogs. Sina Weibo has not only built a platform for interaction in China public, but Sina Weibo’s influence has also extended abroad. Recognizing Weibo’s importance, almost all foreign missions have started their Weibo tweets to highlight their activities and policies of their countries. Microblogging enjoyed explosive growth and emerged as a major social media contender in China. Taobao is the e-commerce firm that benefits the most from clicks on Sina Weibo.

There are 2 million Chinese living in Western Europe. To expand abroad and explore new markets, Chinese companies target the Chinese communities. The nation’s third-largest wireless carrier, China Telecommunications Corp,[3] ,facing an intensifying competition at home, has started to expand in Europe with the U.K. targeting more than half a million Chinese citizens living in the country since May. The company will become the first Chinese operator to start a mobile virtual network outside China. The service, aimed at Chinese residents, might expand to France in 2013 if it’s successful.

Alibaba aims to reach the whole world and to turn the services into a global marketplace for importers and exporters. The successful business model can work almost anywhere. The firm is establishing partnerships with other companies well established in other emerging countries, Turkey being one of them.

Alibaba is able to challenge eBay and Amazon.com for the top spot in e-commerce around the world.

Baidu is positioning itself as an access to mobile commerce in China, therefore it is a way for non-Chinese companies to reach the Chinese markets. To differentiate from the competition (mainly Google), the company focuses its efforts on emerging markets (Brazil, Argentina, Egypt among others). The firm is currently opening offices all over the world.

Tencent launched in January 2011 Weixin (微信), a free mobile application for instant communication. Weixin supports mobile instant communication through photo and video sharing, voice chatting (one to one and group chatting), and of course traditional text messages.

Social Part of WeChat Application

Weixin’s success is explained by the integration of all Tencent communication tools including QQ, e-mail and Tencent’s Weibo platform. Moreover, comparing with telecommunication operators’ services, the use of the app is free for its users. The social feature allows to find if a contact or another Weixin user is nearby!

The international version is called “WeChat” since April 2012 and users cannot guess the service is Chinese. Strategy for WeChat is to customize the product to local markets, rather than simply translating into local languages. After successful launches in Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, India and Singapore, the service is now marketed in Malaysia. [4] For Tencent, Malaysia is a new country and the firm continues its growth outside China. We can expect over 200 million users at the end of the year.

Promotion of WeChat in Thailand (2012)

Partnerships of US firms with Chinese firms

We could believe there is a business war between Chinese companies and US companies. This is not always true as they seek to cooperate in several projects.

In December 2011, in China, Dell has unleashed the Dell Streak Pro, an Android handset with a special feature.[5]

This device uses “Baidu Yi”, the Operating System (OS) from the Chinese search giant, that is modeled and built on top of on Google’s mobile platform. In this case, “Baidu Yi” replaces Google’s options for many of the handsets core functions, such as the search engine, instant messenger, ebook reader, and the app store.

American firms are investing money and time in reaching the Chinese market what could be helpful for Chinese Internet firms to expand abroad through partnerships. In China, Microsoft is using its new partner Nokia to gain market share in the internet industry in China investing in Ganji.com, and creating location-based services with Sina Corp and Tencent.

We are likely to see a greater cooperation and competition all over the world.

Conclusion

The Chinese Internet industry through innovation, but above all, a very good understanding of what a user values, is on the road to globalization. This process can count on other existing Chinese firms already well-established outside China, on overseas Chinese and on the universal need for a quick and friendly Internet.

Mobile commerce, through the power of social commerce and other strategies of combined business models, is the long term goal for the current efforts for being a place of interactions. Through QZone and Weixin, Tencent is well positioned in China and Asia. Facebook is dominating the social network market outside China. What can we expect from the Chinese industry in the years to come?

WeChat Expansion – June 2012

---

[1] http://blogs.forrester.com/gina_sverdlov/12-01-04-global_social_technographics_update_2011_us_and_eu_mature_emerging_markets_show_lots_of_activity

[2] http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2011-03/01/content_12095412.htm

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-04/china-telecom-to-start-first-u-k-mobile-virtual-network.html

[4] http://sfluxe.com/2012/06/26/tencent-marks-malaysian-debut-with-wechat-tech-news/

[5] http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/43552/dell-streak-pro-baidu-yi

 

source:

http://value2020.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/2012-year-of-the-chinese-internet-industry-growing-beyond-borders-it-is-just-the-beginning/

UK payment fraud: the devil is in your details! #capuk

Stephen Harrison (photo), Chief Executive , Nation Fraud Authority (NFA) delivered a presentation on June 28 regarding the importance of fraud in advanced payment methods in the UK at the marketforce future of cards & payments conference:

the National Fraud Authority was set up by a response to fraud by the UK Government in 2006 in order to understand fraud risks and develop partnerships to counter it. the NFA is part of the Home Office. The idea is to get a better handle on the reasons and the extent of fraud. NFA came with the annual fraud indicator indicator in 2012. Here are some of the metrics taken out of the report:

• £73 billion fraud loss
• £20.3 in the public sector
• £6.1 for individuals
• £45.5 in the private sector

“We are also talking of personal tragedies with people who have lost their life’s savings” Harrison added, “it’s not just an economical problem”. Focusing on the private sector (£45.5 billion). Payment frauds had impacted 71% of victims. The not for profit sector has lost £1.1 billion only and 43% of respondents had been victims.

Online banking fraud remains quite low and falling though. Plastic card fraud is by far the biggest, a little below £350 m in 2011 falling slightly from 2010 (see picure above). “It’s not always the case that the Banks are refunding individuals and there are cases in which there is a huge impact on individual users” Harrison said. Yet, whether it’s due to complacency or lack of education (or both), many consumers aren’t really protected from fraud.

how to make consumers part of the solution?

“It’s about changing behaviours” Harrison said, and the NFA is trying to work with the private sector. The “Devil’s in your details” campaign funded jointly with telecom operators. Here are 2 examples taken from the NFA Youtube channel.

phone payment

online payment

NFA didn’t have the budget for a TV commercial and using the Internet and Youtube was cost effective: “it cost only £0.068 per person who saw the add” Stephen Harrison said.

After Stephen Harrison’s presentation, there was a panel with Karen Tyler, Head of Fraud at Santander and Debbie Strickland, function leader, Cooperative financial services. Here are some of my notes during that panel:

• social engineering is one of the essence in fraud, with fraudsters using existing technologies and even traditional means of communications to steal money from individuals
• Santander is worries about the way that things are happening
• Debbie Strickland confirms  that there is an increasing issue about new modes of payment and education is the solution.
• Mobile payments is clearly seen as the future threat even though in terms of amounts, mobile isn’t really on the radar yet.
• A lot of people have gotten used to the tokens, Karen Tyler said, but there are also concerns as to how this will be used by consumers with the new forms of payment and mostly mobile-based.

what social media tool for what message? #csmb2c

I didn’t do any more reporting from the usefulsocialmedia conference yesterday as I was involved in the moderation of a number of panel sessions and I had my presentation in the evening. Talking of which, here it is, all available on slideshare.net/orange, under a creative commons licence. In that presentation, I delivered my thoughts about the status of social media today, I also delved into 10 different business cases which I – or my colleagues – have gone through at Orange and I have also added facts and figures as much as possible. I have also tried to challenge the title of the presentation.

using social media to stir passion #csmb2c

Richard Ayers (a former BBC journalist) has worked for Manchester City and BFI (British Film Industry) recently and he has shared his experience running social media for both of these organisations at the usefulsocialmedia conference today.

BFI has been around for 100 years and is behind each and every film. But the organisation isn’t known at all. The passion though is overwhelming, be it for films or football. Richard showed how similarly – even though the two companies are very different – social media can be leveraged for both subjects.

Man City business Case

[Richard Ayers showing the fans invading the Man City pitch: passion!]

Manchester City is an organisation which is ready to embed social media almost naturally Richard explained. They even chose the hashtag #together and it came naturally, as they asked children from school to share their feelings about the club in the “Manchester and me” project. And there is a “fascinating dynamic about connecting local and international”. TV formats were used (“inside city”) so that engagement between players in the tunnel were filmed and the videos were even 9 minutes long and retention rate was 90%.

“Of course we have a Facebook page, and an app and all sorts of things” but Richard said that it was mostly about “connecting online with the real”.  They even decided to build a community in Arabic (@cityarabia) and all that was required was to ask fans to run the service Richard added.

“Numbers shot up and there was no advertising” and “we did it via proper engagement and  not looking at the numbers” he concluded for that part. As to the nasty stuff surrounding football such as racism for instance, “we just don’t deal with that” Richard said “we are keeping away from that”.

BFI

The BFI is full of wonderful cultural artifacts, some dating from the late 19th century. Richard and his teams found a lot of remarkable material about Doctor Who and even pictures of the shooting from the Starwars film in the Tunisian desert … “and all that was sitting in a bunker!” This is an amazing thing and “this is only the tip of the iceberg” Richard added. Hitchcock was a British film-maker and one of his film is 39 steps so they used the 39 steps metaphor in “39 steps to Hitchcock”. We are at the beginning of  the journey “and we are cleaning up the pages now”.   “The BFI is non profit, but there must be a way that it can make money out of this incredible content” Richard said.

Richard showed us a lot of other examples from BFI but they all boil down to the fact that – even though the organisation isn’t known at all – the content that it has is immensely interesting and can be used to stir passion in the fans, be they football or film fans. What Richard hopes is that, by using the same method for BFI, the company will be known to all soon.

A few takeaways from Justeat takeaway online service #csmb2c

Tess Tucker is head of digital marketing for Justeat. Justeat is an aggretator of local takeaways. You go to justeat.co.uk. The company is originally from Denmark (founded in 2001) and has just over 12,000 (1/3 of the total) restaurants in the UK.

The audience is wide and attracts young users very much. Justeat encourages the use of social media in order to engage with customers, find new customers and retain current customers and collect feedback. With such a young audience, the brand is not restricted and mostly fun. Justeat has 450k fans on Facebook, growing 1,000 a day. It is still early days for Google+ and Pinterest though.

Justeat has been focusing on social media for the best of 2 years. Justeat can actually see that the use of social media leads to order. 25% of new users have actually heard about the company from Facebook. The company experiments from various kinds of content: caption contests; provocative quotes and facts (Justeat has no problem being very controversial), polls, questions and quizzes, offers, competitions, product updates and video content.

Santa Clues campaign: 24 days of prizes, promoted in newsletter, Facebook, Twitter and Website. Once a week a bigger price was launched. One customer, Robyn asked whether she could have the penguin used in the campaign as a wallpaper and Justeat made a Penguin wallpaper and sent it over to her.

All of this is done in-house and Justeat is even moving into competitions like the “eat vs. food” competition. The advantage is that “it makes you feel like a small company and gives a realness to the company” Tess said. Justeat have also been granted an award for the best use of Twitter. “What attracted the judges is the use of Twitter for customer care” Tucker said. “Customers are looking to us to solve their complains”.

SAS can’t “buy” fans but knows how to attract customers #csmb2c

The second usefulsocialmedia presentation this afternoon was presented by Christian Kamhaug from Scandinavian airline SAS. Scandinavians are known for flying a lot for business. And Scandinavians have 5 weeks holidays so they fly a lot for leisure too; also because Summers are wet and cold in Scandinavia and they want to fly where the sun is shining. “Unlike Nissan we can’t buy any fans” Kamhaug said, so they decided to do something else instead, like using their own customers, a first-rate free resource SAS had… and that proved to be a very good idea!

from simple Facebook questions …

SAS asked its 100,000 Facebook fans “where do you want to fly this Summer?” and they asked them to suggest a destination. SAS received 800 suggestions in one week and more than 180 destinations were suggested. The top 10 destinations went for vote and Alanya (Turkey) was the winner. FLights started July 3, 2012 and will be operated twice a week year-round. SAS also used this vehicle in order to make it known that a new service is on offer: after a number of years, SAS decided to offer coffee on board after years of buy-on-board policies.

to mySASidea.flysas.net 

After these 2 small campaigns, SAS decided to take the initiative to the next level. Two weeks ago, SAS walked in the steps of Dell’s Ideastorm and launched mySASidea.flysas.net. What SAS has realised is that not only customers are adding their ideas, they are also commenting on other people’s ideas. “This is really what crowd-sourcing is about” Christian Kamhaug added.

In 6 days, SAS got 500+ new regostered members, 400+ ideas and 2000+ votes. “You can save millions in consultants’ fees” Kamhaug said, “all can be done online”.

Nissan: lessons learnt from the “new star of India” business case

The first afternoon session at the usefulsocialmedia conference Nissan – David Parkinson, General Manager of Social & Digital engagement for EMEA & India (@dave_nissan). Dave introduced his pitch by saying he is not an “expert” that we all learn from our mistakes … I have made that statement very often myself so I cannot but agree more.

3 Nissan models are available in India amongst which the micra:

The New star of India video shot in Bollywood by Nissan

What was the problem?

The spending by Nissan was smaller in this country and the mindshare in the country was less than 10% compared to 40+% for VW. The aim was to double the brand awareness in India. At the time, social media awareness was lacking and a lot of the social media activity was also swamped with kinds trying to get a job before Nissan took over the page. Nissan hired the AKQA agency from London and came up with 3 big ideas:

1. big button in cities which could win prizes
2. social game for finding cool things in the city
3. crowd-sourced Bollywood movie!

Idea 3 was retained.

Indian Web

In India, mobile dominates, but 3G is still flaky. 60% of Internet users still access the Web through Internet cafés. Facebook is now the most successful platform in India so it was the right place to be. The idea started with this big idea “the star of india” off the www.facebook.com/nissanindia page.

People were asked to come and audition: an application was created on Facebook which which the users could film themselves dancing and then votes would decide who would be chosen. Podiums were set up in shopping malls and in fact, this is where most videos came from because Indians could not film themselves and upload the videos. “The application was our first mistake” David said and even, “some users couldn’t access the application at all” he added. Recruitment went on and bloggers were also brought into the campaign.

But an emerging market is “a completely different kettle of fish”

• did a good job of improving the recollection of the Micra in India (+50% awareness)
• the result for remembering Nissan was less successful David very honestly admitted
• The Facebook community went up to 500k users (from zero and became no.1 in India, above Audi!)

What went right and wrong?

• engagement was tremendous
• success with Facebook was good but wasn’t organic
• … yet the beauty is that fans are cheap in India
• the final film was good but … “it was almost too good” and besides, “there wasn’t enough money left to do the PR” David went on although PR is very important in India
• Lesson learnt is to make a lesser quality film and spend more on the PR(“the complexity of the PR market in India is tremendous”)
• apps are too sophisticated for an emerging country
• Nissan found it also very difficult to wind the campaign down and “the ending wasn’t graceful” David said.
• “never under-estimate how you work with people in India, relationships are different” so you “need someone on the ground”

Recommendations

• do your research
• Facebook may not be the right tool (in China, Russia for instance) or Twitter (in France)
• Emerging doesn’t mean cheap (in a “rupee for rupee” kind of way)

Q&A

• Q: did you consider Cricket?
• A: the first problem was that the sponsor was already another car manufacturer and the second  that Cricket is very expensive (one sponsor spent as much as $1m to support a batsman in India!)

KLM: how to pilot social media for clients’ benefit

Anna Ketting was presenting  for KLM today at the usefulsocialmedia. Her presentation was definitely aimed at better using social media for customer interaction.

KLM has a small home country and market. 70% of its traffic to KLM.com is coming from paid channels. Google for instance is one of the biggest beneficiaries in that department. When Anna started working on that 3 years ago, questions arose so as to “spend less on paid media”. Discussions ensued, campaigns too (25,000 followers on Twitter joined in) … and then there was the ash cloud. The day after the ash cloud, Schipol Airport was empty but all the phone lines went down! This is when KLM started answering questions via Twitter and Facebook. They had so many questions that they put together a 140 staff organisation to address all these questions 24/7.

[Schipol Airport on Ash Cloud day!]

“In 2 week’s time, this incident showed our management  that social media was useful!” Anna added.

3 main strategic pillars for social media at KLM.

1. customer services: address service issues and have the necessary feedback. This enables to pick up on the complains and solve them.
2. brand & reputation: that’s a straightforward department – such as was demonstrated by Heineken. Southwest had a very bad example with “Southwest breaks guitar” which did a lot of bad publicity for the brand. “This is what you don’t want to happen”.
3. commerce

KLM started with campaigns, went through service and is now putting products worth sharing online. In March 2011, wit the fly2miami campaign, KLM sold the first-ever flight on Twitter.  In May 2011, the tile and inspire campaign enabled users to propose “tiles” which then decorated a plane (120,000 of them on the whole). In September 2011, the Dutch airline launched “livereply” a video made with real-life employees who advertised live customer service on Twitter and Facebook 24/7. “This worked great for employee cohesion” Anna added.

KLM–Livereply video : approx. 350,000 views so far

Now KLM is no. 2 on Facebook and no. 1 in terms of engagement. “We’ve also had a lot of failures” Anna Ketting said, reinforcing that trial and error is necessary – as in many areas – but maybe even more in social media. Very reasonably she concluded by saying that all of this social media stuff doesn’t matter if you aren’t able to deliver your core service properly.

Social products

After two years of being focussed on social media, KLM decided to go out of communications and delve into how social media would enhance products.

1. Meet and Seat: share your social profile, see who will be on board, and pick a seat next to the person you are interested in … as long as she/he agrees to it. This generated huge media attention because it’ is focussed on the user and not on the company
2. trip planner (launched a month ago): based on questions by KLM customers : use facebook to talk to your friends, find a date and book!

KLM Trip planner video

What I liked about KLM’s approach was that they managed to take social media back closer to business and its clients. Anna told us that KLM’s social media team is made of 14 people. Facebook is still on KLM’s radar for social commerce, but isn’t really considering it short term though.

social media is like pinball wizardry Heineken social media head says

This was the second panel at the useful social media conference and it was devoted to customer interaction. This is the report for part 1 in the panel with Lennart Boorsma who works for Heineken (Global Brand Team). The moderator was Mike McGrail from the SocialPenguinBlog

Heineken presentation

It was entitled “igniting conversations” preferably over a beer, Lennart said as part of his introduction.  Heineken believe that it is  social since 1873! Beer is social by definition (as long as you don’t have too much of it though). The idea is to turn digital into a true marketing tool and Lennart sees “social as a means to create engagement and deepen connections with the audience”. Heineken mainly started its social activity 2 years ago with the merger of the most important facebook page and decided to “have more stuff in place” which meant Youtube, Twitter and a few others like Pinterest and Iinstagram. “Nobody is interested in the back-office tools for managing social media” Lennart added. “If you say you implemented a new CMS for Facebook no one is going to be thrilled”. Yet, without it, nothing is possible he said. Nowadays, social has to be embedded in the brief from the start Lennart Boorsma went on.

“Old media used to be like a bowling alley and now it’s like pinball” Lennart said. Your messages are changed and bounce around. Likewise, content has to change and has to be fun and tell a story. It’s theory but it is hard and it takes a lot of time and requires luck too! The goal is to generate more engagement and conversations about the brand. Today a TV commercial isn’t sufficient, one has to provide a real-life experience.

This is why Heineken launched their star player dual screen app to enable football fans to score points as they answer questions wile watching football matches on their TV. It was launched on April 26th and was hugely successful. Yet there are challenges such as latency in the distribution of TV programmes, namely over cable, DSL or satellite, for users must be given a fair chance to answer all the questions in a reasonable timeframe.

Lennart also showed us a new experience around an enhanced TV commercial whereby real customers could “serenade their dates” and it provided more experience than just a classic commercial. 8 hours worth of streaming were delivered, people from 160 countries played, and 4.3 billion hits were achieved. Lennart concluded by saying that they are only at the beginning and that the work is paying off nicely with over 7 million fans now, up from above 2 millions 2 years ago and “one of the fastest growing pages worldwide”. When asked about cost, Lennart added that “when you have a great shareable idea, you don’t need to spend a lot of money”. I couldn’t agree more with that statement.

social media governance: that necessary evil …

On June 25, I attended the Usefulsocialmedia conference in London, at the Marriott Regents Park. The first panel was dedicated to social media governance. “Everybody now has a printing press” , so that this creates huge issues in terms of Governance; anyone can publish anything, and to what degree should we “grant people permission”?

Panel members:

• Justin Hunt (“it’s open” social media consultancy)
• Ben Padley, Barclaycard, former Sony-Ericsson
• Alkesh Shah, GSK
• Vijay Solanki, Philips

Governance and social media panel

• Sony Ericsson (B.P.): setting guidelines was essential in order to establish some level of discipline. Local moderation was also set up. They also wen through the wiping out of all abandoned social media presence. Because the brand was global, a lot of people were discovering the brand from the central hub and then were directed to the local pages.
• GSK: Al’s view is that if you value your employees and want them to become brand advocates you have to give them leeway. GSK tried to set up control at the outset and then realised it wasn’t possible and had to drop the initiative after a few months. GSK is a regulated firm and Al realised that when the company was into trouble in the Press, employees would jump into social media and that could have caused trouble. Employees “are all adults” and they “are already marketers”, it’s mostly a matter of education. But how do you control when employees speak on your behalf? Al said they chose a roundabout way of liaising with everyone in the organisation using Yammer. Then staff’s questions and concerns can be addressed through Yammer. “That was a hard sell to legal” Al added, “because they wanted to vet everything which was posted”.
• Philips (V.S.): “We all know what has to be done, but the real issue is the organisational culture, hence the very first step is that you understand what management thinks”. Vijay had a previous experience in which the GM didn’t want it, and found it didn’t make sense trying to force it onto them. “You have to understand the rhythm of your organisation” Vijay added. But “there are ways of circumventing the issue”. You can use “champions” and countries which are in the lead and you can shine the light on those countries. “At Philips, different country, different cultures, we are empowering our employees. Only the Chinese would know what to do in China” Vijay very wisely said.
• about the Barclaycard process (B.P): One of the things that Brad found out is that Social Media in actual fact is about business, not tools. Barclaycard has also used the rise of social media in order to improve on its customer service and “jump on every issue raised by customers online”. Barclaycard’s is also a regulated industry. “When people are talking about governance, they are thinking about control, whereas it’s mostly an issue of effectiveness”, Brad added.

a necessary evil

Social media governance is particularly challenging because it’s even hard to know about all the comments which employees are making about their company. On the one hand, mostly in regulated industries such as the ones which were represented today. Yet, as Vijay pointed out very rightly “only the Chinese would know what’s best for China!” and similarly, employees re professionals above all. They know how to behave in public when they talk about their company and, in essence, in social media, things aren’t that different. Trust really has to be at the core of social media governance, but I’d also add education and counselling because most employees need help and are requesting it. At the end of the day, social media guidelines and social media governance is a necessary evil; maybe it’s just the vocabulary which isn’t right. What about social media induction?

#leweb12 – hoteltonight: “smartphones are where the market is going”

The Silicon entrepreneur explained that there are 2 main groups of hotel bookers. One is for people who have the time to book in advance, be it for business or leisure, whereas the other group is impulse bookers. These are the ones that Hoteltonight is catering for: “they are presented with last minute deals. Having an app in your pockets truly changes the way you think about hotels” Shank added.

[note: this is a guest post I did yesterday on behalf of the live.orange.com blog]

[Sam Shank, chain start-up entrepreneur and founder of Hoteltonight]

In the US there are a lot of chains but a lot less in the UK. “The ownership is very fragmented, and this is the bread and butter because people can choose and pick up new places that are nice” Shank said.

not just a High end service?

One could be tempted to think that this is a very exclusive service for the rich and wealthy, but Sam Shank disagrees strongly with that statement: “we want to be something for everyone. It goes from luxury hotels to more basic hotels and even business hotels” he said. The application delivers 3 deals from a selection of 20 hotels each night. Hotels are competing amongst themselves and “nothing can be predicted” Shank said. This emphasises the lastminute effect in so far as you can’t choose what hotel to stay in in advance.

the market?

Admittedly, there are “many vendors in the same space” and some are multi-million companies such as Expedia for instance. “The main way hoteltonight competes is from singular focus and mobile, content and merchandising, customer support and online marketing” Shank said. The start-up’s singular focus on mobile, and their advantage on competition is that they have no legacy systems. Most businessmen are using their smartphones on the move but “it is still a challenge when teaching people that they should use only mobiles” Shank added.

In essence, Hoteltonght is focussing only on last minute deals and mobiles are well suited for this. Besides, it’s a marketing channel for hotels because 90% of buyers have never stayed in the selected hotel before.

Shank’s third start-up

Hoteltonight is Sam’s third start-up: “all have been successful but I know that lack of focus is reason number one for failure” Sam Shank explained, and this is why they focus on smart phones, also because “this is where the market is going” he concluded.

Horowitz recognises Google+ is late to market but announces growth

Where is Google+ at nowadays. Barely a year after its launch in Summer 2011, Bradley Horowitz, President product management at Google gave us an overview of where they are at and where they are heading … and evaded a few questions too ! [this post was originally written live from Le Web 12 in London on behalf of the live.orange blog]

“Google search had a very short-lived memory and Google+ has been introduced to change that. Google+ is helping us understand our users betters and provide better services to them” Horowitz said as an introduction. As a proof of how Google wants to improve the user experience of its social media platform, he pointed out that Google Local has been made a part of Google+ for a couple of weeks. “The idea is for Google to improve existing services by enhancing them with the power of sharing”.

“We recognise being late to market”

When pressed with questions by Loic Lemeur, he replied: “We recognise being late to market but this offers opportunities to do things differently and enable users to have different kinds of discussions with different kinds of users”.

[Google’s Bradley Horowitz live on stage at Le Web 12 in London]

The strategy is not to have people wishing happy birthday”. What we have is hangouts. “Every kind of user, from music artists to politicians are using hangouts” he said. This is a differentiator and we are only getting started. A very effective demonstration of a live hangout was delivered introducing participants in a multicast presentation from all around the world (Canada, US, UK and France) and remote users were able to ask questions to Bradley Horowitz who answered them. In essence, this isn’t very different from traditional Web conferencing as it has existed for over 10 years, but the fact that it is linked to a social platform should “change the world for users to interact in the same way that Youtube did” Horowitz added

[a live demo of a Google+ hangout at Le Web 12 in London]

numbers?

“170 million users have upgraded their accounts, have updated their profiles. Getting 200 million users in just eleven month is a real challenge and we will be announcing new numbers soon and they are really good”, Horowitz said. “our best days are ahead of us”. One example of the good things they have introduced are the mobile clients which were launched on IOS and Android, more graphical and much more emotional. This has led to a dramatic increase in mobile usage (but no precise numbers were given despite Loic Lemeur’s insistance). Similarly, the number of actual users wasn’t unveiled by the Google exec.

“We have tried to compress a decade of social networking into 11 months! and now I am “happy to announce that Google is opening to another partner “Flipboard” and it will be opened as soon as it is safe for our users and is debugged” the Google exec added. But “we are admittedly moving cautiously” he added, before taking this to the next level.

Sonia Carter from Kraft Foods explained how they are using Google+: Chocolate is the main subject, but also sponsorships that the brand is involved in, because they realised “that people were already talking about this”. Bonin Bough who runs advertising for Kraft foods explained that the introduction of social media wasn’t about the shifting of budgets but the shifting of mindset.