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?