A few years ago, I used to be a regular contributor to bnet in the UK but the site pulled out of the European market in 2010. Fortunately, a new project has just been launched and I’m very happy to embark on it. It is named innovation generation and it is sponsored by our peers from Alcatel.You can find my first piece on that blog under the following title: Governments Ease Into Cyberspace. Below is the announcement for the new website; stay tuned for more info …
We are living in a truly connected world. That’s something most people might take for granted when they make a phone call or watch TV, but when you consider how a wireless network brings books to your e-reader, an Ethernet network keeps your savings account secure, and a cloud holds most of your online identity, it becomes a pretty powerful proposition.
It is the services that run on these networks that are the lifeblood of society, and the potential for innovation here is limited only by our own creativity.
Enter Innovation Generation. It’s a generation that’s not confined to baby boomers, Gen Xers, or smartphone-toting Millennials, but rather encompasses everyone living in today’s globally connected society. Our goal here is to explore the potential for personalized, interesting, and, of course, innovative new services that can increase the quality of life and work for end users while also increasing the value of the service provider in the process.
How are service providers delivering these new services to businesses and consumers? How can they get more from their infrastructures than they already do? What are the opportunities for business model innovation? How can service providers improve the customer experience?
These are just a few of the questions we’ll strive to answer on Innovation Generation. If you’re a global communications service provider or enterprise IT leader, Innovation Generation is your guide to navigating the challenges and opportunities in creating innovative business opportunities for your company and your customers. Here, we explore innovation at all levels of today’s connected businesses, from software to services to groundbreaking business models – with an eye on what’s practical, what’s clouded by hype, and what’s going to help the bottom line.
These are services that are transforming industries like utilities, transportation, the public sector, healthcare, oil and gas, manufacturing, defense, railways, and even the government. And service providers are at the heart of it.
On day 3 of the blogger bus tour we had the opportunity to meet face to face with two young start-up managers from San Francisco based Social Chorusan “influence marketing” company named Social Chorus. We were able to spend a whole hour with them and discuss influence, influencers, people-powered marketing and … “the power of the middle”, a concept which I have found particularly appealing.
Nicole Alvino (above) is SVP and co-founder of Social Chorus, she was “employee number two” in the company. Bobby Isaacson (below), senior Manager, implementation has been as Social Chorus for about three years now (he admitted “feeling like a dinosaur” which sounds strange for such a young man) and does business development that is to say that he sets up partnerships with other companies, in order to be part of their ecosystem.
Social Chorus (the company was in fact renamed in February 2012 and is the result of the merger of youcast and the halogen media group) is a social marketing/influencer platform. The main problem the company is solving is that it is virtually impossible for customers to figure out whether influencers are really influential. This is in essence, what Social Chorus is about: it provides both a tool and service for finding influencers (they might not just be bloggers, but also power twitter users for instance. There are two offices, one in New York City and one in San Francisco.
NYC and SF: a world of difference…
To European eyes, those two cities might appear very similar but in fact, according to Bobby and Nicole, they are very different. New York is more about media and advertising and agencies, whereas Silicon Valley and San Francisco have always been, at least since the seventies onwards, more about high tech. But this is not all. Mentalities are also very different. Bonding is more difficult in NYC, a very large metropolis where, according to our discussion, people and companies tend to keep things for themselves, rather than share and get together in Californian fashion. And this is what makes all the difference. As I described in my post about Rocketplace, a lot of what happens in Silicon Valley is down to the ecosystem. San Francisco has a leg up in that game. Only Boulder, Colorado and Austin, Texas are adopting the West Coast spirit our hosts both declared.
social media at the forefront of investment
Start-up investment has changed too according to Nicole. “2 years ago, investment was more into media and advertising, now it’s a lot more about social media” she said. This is changing the ball game, Nicole said, “now that agencies are becoming more social they are tending to move over to SF”.
topical and brand influencers … not who you think
Social Choris is aiming at “brands wanting to become more human and having relationships with influencers” Bobby added. But how do you identify them and how can you tell they are really influential? “it’s a combination of art and science” Bobby went on. “There are topical and brand influencers” he said. Social Chorus will traditionally tap into its 1.5 million influencers database but they might also use Kred and Klout. Sometimes the best influencers are niche bloggers through .
social media influence: the pyramid metaphor
“Imagine a pyramid” Bobby went on: “PR handles the celebs, super fans and topical bloggers are in the middle and at the bottom, you have the vast majority of fans and readers who click and comment”. They might not be bloggers, they could just be twitteres for instance. Social Chorus’s focus of the solution is measuring the impact of a conversation with influencers. Manage the relationship over time.
the “power of the middle”
As soon as I can, I will also post a video interview of Nicole in which she explains that most brands are wrong to focus on just the top celebrities. “This can become pretty expensive soon” she said. I would also add that celebrities are often too self-centred in order to be generous. All middle tier influencers on the contrary are more open and more prone to become brand advocates because they will want to develop a relationship in the long term with the brand.
only 10-20% of agencies are ready to do that for themselves
Social Chorus is working with agencies like Edelman, Ketchum and others. It’s mostly agencies who are delivering this service to clients, but there are a few clients like Gatorade for instance who do this for themselves. “What we find is that the interest in that space exceeds the knowledge of how it works” Bobby declared. As a result, only 10-20% of the brand on average are willing to do this by themselves.
One of Social Chorus’s biggest challenges though is to hire developers; there is a lot of competition for developers. A very skilled developer in the valley can be paid $100 k and even up to $ 200 k if he has very special skills it’s commonly said here. As a matter of fact, as an entrepreneur told me at an after work party last night: “the developer in question might even be paid more than the project manager he reports to!”.
Social Chorus can operate over 3 different countries: UK, US and Germany. They will soon launch a new version in 2013, which will extend the service to other countries.
On our way to San Francisco, all our French bloggers had a pit stop at the Air France super lounge at the end of terminal E in Charles de Gaulle Airport, as a matter of fact, Air France’s biggest in the whole world. And when I say big, I mean what I say!
The lounge was opened at the very end of June 2012 and we were part of the happy few who are allowed to relax, read, eat and even take a nap on location. When I write happy few, this isn’t quite right though, because the new Air France lounge at the end of the so-called ‘K.L.M’ satellite of terminal E is in fact massive (with its 3,483 square metres and close to 700 seats!). The brand new extension of the Air France hub was opened recently in order to accommodate all internal long-haul flights passengers of the airline. The ‘K.L.M’ moniker is intended as a pun and “a way to celebrate the Franco-Dutch alliance” the Air France lounge manager told me.
Photo 1: the lofty Air France lounge with plenty of leg-room and beautifully crafted designer spaces
I was shown around by the personnel who gave us a very warm welcome and I had a chance to take these pictures which are now available on our online live.orange.com gallery thanks to the Orange Wifi service conveniently placed at the users’ disposal.
Photo album: a visit of the exclusive super Air France lounge at CDG airport (all photos by Yann Gourvennec for the Live Orange Blog)
‘CDG’ – as the airport is known to be called by airline professionals – is in constant reconfiguration since it is one of the only European airports in Europe with space available around it. Terminals A, B, C have been left by the French company and D will be closed by October 2012. All of Air France is now moving to terminals E and F, from which all their international flights now depart. Terminal E is now dedicated to both the US and Africa. “€ 560m went into the new development and more than 7.5 million passengers will be transiting via the airport each year!” the lounge staff told me. This is the reason why Air France decided to build that second-to-none business lounge for its ‘elite’ customers. The lounge, so far, is only opened from 5.00 am till 2.00 pm CET but opening hours will be extended later, the staff told me.
The lounge is not only beautifully designed (by Noé Duchauffour Lawrance), it can also boast wide-ranging kinds of foods (Asian visitors will feast on Chinese noodles for instance), a broad selection of newspapers and various amenities such as free showers (something like 14 booths are made available to clients!), Desktop and Tablet computers, relaxing couches, a customer service desk, and even complimentary massages and other beauty services by Air France partner Clarins.
No wonder that early visitors to the lounge have covered the guest book in praises about the service, comparing it to that of Emirates’s. A well deserved compliment in my mind and that of the blogger bus tour bloggers who were with me today.
For those who don’t know yet, I (as Director, Web & Social Media at Orange), I will be part of the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus Tour 2012, which will take place in September (17-22) as a blogger … and the organiser of that tour. Here is my take on why I am participating and what I am expecting to do/see there:
I’m a Jack of all trades. I’m not just a blogger, I’m also the organizer of the Tour. On this Tour we’re dealing with blogger PR in a different way than it usually is done in big companies like this.
What we do here is we partner with the bloggers : we work together as a team, and the fact that I’m also a blogger makes it possible. It’s a matter of us going over there together, reporting and sharing our enthusiasm and content.
To me this is very important : it’s how good content is produced and engrossing stories started. And I’m not even talking about the friendships that are being initiated between members. Undoubtedly those who are taking part in these tours are invited to other tours, depending on their skills and focus.
my views on the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus tour 20 12 as an organiser
We also want to look at the way we organise the tour. A member of my team is going to have a subjective look at what other bloggers are seeing, through their blogs and contents. So we’ll be able to tell a story about the story as well.
And finally, how are we going to tackle the main subject, which is innovation in the Valley? I really wanted to give a different angle about this SoLoMo (social,local,mobile) approach in the Valley, so we’re going to see many innovators to understand whether or not innovation is still thriving in the Valley although I don’t have much doubt about that, knowing how it is over there.
It’s my 7th time there and I’m sure we’re going to have an exciting time. So stay tuned to the live.orange.com and don’t miss a thing about the Orange Blogger Bus tour 2012.
For those who don’t know yet, I (as Director, Web & Social Media at Orange), I will be part of the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus Tour 2012, which will take place in September (17-22) as a blogger … and the organiser of that tour. Here is my take on why I am participating and what I am expecting to do/see there:
So this is what we want to check out on the field with a group of 13 bloggers from all around the world : France, England, Australia, China and Romania.
So this is what I’m interested in: I want to understand how innovation is thriving beyond Facebook, Twitter and Google, which are the over-hyped companies. I want to see something else.
I also want to see how this innovation is thriving through the eyes of my colleagues from around the world so I think a lot of background is going to be thrown into that.
This is neither my first blogger tour nor my first visit to Silicon Valley, but this is probably the most interesting tour I have ever put together. This is why I can’t help but share and relay Glenn’s excitement about the tour as posted on the Orange Live Blog which will serve as the platform for our reports in September. More will be said about the tour on this and other blogs, as soon as I’m back from vacations, recharging the batteries and getting ready for that new adventure.
Orange Blogger Bus goes to Silicon Valley in search of the future | live Orange blog
by guest blogger Glenn Le Santo
I’m excited! Genuinely excited, in that kid-the-night-before-Christmas way. Why? Because I’m one of the lucky 13 writers from Europe, Australia and China to have been chosen by Orange to go on a blogger bus tour of San Francisco and Silicon Valley in September.
The tour aims to find out what makes Silicon Valley tick. We want to examine the culture of the Bay Area and meet the companies, institutions and individuals that make the area what it is: a world leader in technological innovation.
The area spawned the giants such as HP and Apple – and latterly Facebook and Twitter. We want to know how the area does this. We also want to find out if it will continue to do so, especially as some observers (such as Y combinator’s Paul Graham) think the Facebook IPO might have signalled the end of the Valley’s long reign.
In the telecommunications industry, everybody knows about the mobile world congress. The yearly event, which has been hosted in Barcelona for quite a few years now, is the obligatory focal point for all the players in that industry: carriers, service providers, infrastructure and equipment manufacturers, software vendors etc. In a word, this is where it all happens. The 2012 edition of MWC is bound to be even more exciting for all our live.orange.com readers because we have decided to send a team of high profile bloggers on location who will be reporting live from Barcelona. So if you want to know in near real time what is happening at MWC all you have to do is tune in to live.orange.com and read our coverage of some of the most interesting announcements as well as of what is happening behind the scenes on location. Some of our partners English, some not, but most of our content will be posted in 4 different languages as usual. Don’t forget to follow our @orange twitter account for live news about this blog and our live coverage. Let’s find out who our blogging partners are in this introductory post (in no random order):
It’s not everyday one gets someone from Asia (in this case, Australasia too) in one’s team and I have thought it to be an interesting experiment to bring in a partner from China, after a discussion with our representatives at Orange lab in Beijing. Jason Lim has been an Editor at TechNode since December 2010, a prominent Chinese tech blog written in English . Jason’s area of expertise is very broad and covers are start-ups, e-commerce and emerging technologies. Jason is also the Developer Relations Manager for AppStoreConnect, a white-label Android app store in China that powers brands such as HTC, BenQ and Wondermedia Flytouch. Before coming to China, he was a management consultant in strategy, operations and marketing as well as an accountant with Ernst & Young in Sydney, Australia. Jason currently lives in Beijing. Technode’s Twitter handle is @technodechina. for a sample post from Jason, check this piece on mobile payment on the TechNode blog
Mohamed Ali Sousissi is from Tunisia and is the facilitator of the Tunisian blog malissonline.com. Judging by the football shirt, Mohamed is bound to be a good team player. Mohamed can be traced on Twitter at @MedAliSouissi and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Mohamed.Ali.Souissi. Malissoline.com is Tunisian portal written in French which specialises in local and international high tech news. Mohamed’s positioning resides in its ability to explain the high tech world in simple terms, understandable to all.
Anybody in the French-speaking blogosphere knows (or at least knows of) Eric Dupin who is the creator and facilitator of the second to none “presse citron” blog. Presse Citron has established a serious reputation in the high tech world and it is often one of the first to break the news that side of the Channel. Eric writes in French but is fluent in English. His posts will be duly translated in other languages. Our French-speaking readers can get a flavour of “Presse Citron” at http://www.presse-citron.net/microsoft-presente-le-logo-de-windows-8, a post in which Eric and his teams disclose the forthcoming Windows 8 logo. Eric’s twitter handle is @pressecitron. Eric works and lives in Lyon, in the south of France. Eric is a long time partner of the Orange team.
Leigh Geary is the editor and founder of Coolsmartphonea well famed blog in Britain with a (very) cool domain name. Leigh is of his own admission “the one who films hands-on videos in the car” but we assure him that London Police officers aren’t reading this blog. Leigh is passionate about everything mobile, be it smartphones, tablets, phone-related innovations etc. Leigh’s Twitter handle is @gears which makes him once again number one in the name coining exercise. For a sample of the coolsmartphone blog I recommend this piece on how easier it is now to take pictures with IOS5 (Apple’s latest OS for the iPhone). Well spotted!
Frederic Lardinois despite his Gallic sounding name was born in Germany and is a graduate of Potsdam. He is a PhD student at the university of Connecticut and the writer of SiliconFilter, a blog which focuses on consumer technology related to the Internet, and deals with Web apps, mobile apps and devices, as well as Web-connected TVs, cars and similar technologies. Frederic Lardinois, has written, 1,500 stories for the highly acclaimed ReadWriteWeb tech blog before starting his own venture.
Philippe Lagane (Twitter handle @philippe_lagane) is the creator – amongst many others – of the Accessoweb blog. He is one of our most knowledgeable experts and having done business with him, I can assure his work and that of his teams are really top notch. Tune in to Accessoweb if you are a French speaking reader, and you want to know everything about devices, mobile services, mobility in general and all things relevant to that domain. Philippe will be teaming with Christos Ionnitis (@newsmobile) who already was one of our reporters at Le Web 2011 last December. Philippe lives near Perpignan in the South West of France, Christos in Annemasse, in the South East. Both Philippe and Christos blog in French but their reports will be adapted to other languages. French readers should check this piece on the ZTE smartphone announcement by Accessoweb (available in French only).
Glenn Le Santo (@lesanto on Twitter) is our high tech events wizard. Glenn has had a very lively and varied business life. He is a seasoned reported who is passionate about technology, usage and innovation. He is the Twitter driving force behind Exeter Like Minds events (at which I met him) as well as the successful organiser of LincUpLive (check the February conference schedule here) in Lincoln, England. Glenn has been a long time partner of Orange at our Orange Business Live events as well as Le Web 2011.
Raphaelle Laubie is French but she mostly blogs in English. She is probably one of the most passionate business person I have ever met and her range of skills is amazing. She is a Health 2.0 Entrepreneur and her business – a registrar in the heath Internet industry – has even filed an application for the new dotmed “gTLD” (a new generic top level domain which will be devoted to healthcare, due to ICANN’s decision to open the registration of new extensions on top of existing ones (.com, .info, .net etc.). You are invited to check Raphaelle’s blogs on management at http://raphaellelaubie.com/category/marketing/branding-management. Raphaelle is also affiliate Lecturer at ESCP Europe and has even a Doctorate in Progress… On her spare time, Raphaelle is also helping with the Orange team with the coverage of live events.
Stewart Baines (@stewartbaines) is both the co-organiser of our trip to MWC and a contributor to the live.orange.com blog and the Orange Business blogs. He is one of the founders of Futurity Media with Anthony Plewes (@antonyplewes) who will also be present with us. Stewart has been writing about technology for 15 years. His focus is in emerging technologies, social media and future gazing. As a graduate of philosophy & science, he has studied futurology & foresight to post-grad level. Stewart is bound to be our futurologist in that team and will tell us about the future trends in high tech. Check his numerous contributions on behalf of Orange Business Services on the connecting technology blog, the Orange Business Live Blog [French] or the Orange Business Virtualisation blog [French].
Yann Gourvennec (that’s me), is Director, Web, Digital & Social Media at Orange and an Internet writer since 1996. He writes in English and French on his Website (http://visionarymarketing.com) and blogs. He writes in English and French, mostly about Marketing, Web, e-commerce, Management and Change Management.
“Ha tutte le carte in regola per essere un artista” and I have a valid passport to the land of artists Piero Campi
As we are getting ready for a massive event in Paris with Likeminds and Media Aces, with an impressive line up of speakers including Brian Solis, Jeremiah Owyang, Loic Le Meur, Molly Flatt, Olivier Blanchard and yours truly, our friends from Likeminds in Exeter have asked me to write a little piece about me and the Web and it didn’t have to do with business matters, so there it is, with a few literary references of no consequence.
Businessmen, as the Little Prince found out, are only dealing with matters of consequence and they have no time for balderdash. Yet, I don’t think that my Web work is restricted to matters of consequence. Besides, I’m not just a blogger blogging about bloggers either. I am also an artist; at least I wish I were regarded as one.
The Web has been my oyster for the past 15 years. The place – is it a place? – where I could not only write things but express thoughts, mostly about marketing; e-commerce too was on my agenda. A serious business tool in other words. But this is not how it all began. As a matter of fact, business was not my primary objective at all in the beginning. I believe that mere curiosity was the main motive.
I first heard about the World Wide Web, back in 1994, and so I went and grabbed a cheap Internet access package from the computer shop next door. People would come to my house and “see” the Internet. They had no idea what it was and I felt proud for being able to show them the way; not by sheer hubris but just because I love to share and exchange with friends, old and new.
My grandfather was like that. He could hardly get anywhere without bumping into at least one old pal. I believe one can’t escape one’s heritage. Some of us are social animals and I feel like I’m one of them. As I said above, the focus of my interest in the Web at that time wasn’t business, let alone computer science. Instead, I felt attracted to Art like a magnet, and I still do, now that I have practised watercolours for the best of the past thirty years.
Way back then, a person who went – and probably still goes – by the name of Nicolas Pioch had decided to reproduce the Louvre online and I had spotted that gem (this “webmuseum” is still available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wm). That’s what people came to see at my house at the time: online replicas of the Mona Lisa and other masterpieces, miles from today’s technical perfection, but then most beautiful of all … because this had never been done or seen before.
A few years later, I created my own picture gallery in which I could show my own work, and which eventually evolved into a blog, however poorly maintained nowadays.
Soon, I hope, I will be able to use this space to the full, mixing video, painting, etchings and music as well as creative writing and possibly organise happenings and exhibitions online and off-line. This is too early stages right now, as I have more work than ever on my plate, but I am looking forward to that day on which I will be able to devote all my time to my passion for Art, pictures, poetry and all things of absolutely no consequence.
Last week, I was attending the Blogwell and SMBC meetings in Philadelphia. I also had an opportunity to sit with Andy Sernovitz, the founder of SMBC and well known author of the Word of Mouth Marketingopus.
It’s now more than 2 1/2 years since I joined the former blogcouncil, now known as Social Media Business Council, and a lot of water has gone under the bridge. I thought, as Hervé Kabla and myself – co-founders of Media Aces in France – are currently finalising our book entitled ‘Social Media Taught to My Boss’ (in French, but I’m open to suggestions from publishers), that it would be a great idea to sit with Andy and review the history and principles of SMBC as well as take a bit of hindsight and see how things had developed over the years. It’s hard to describe but spending 3 years of field practice in Social Media for a large company implies that a lot of work and effort has been put into these initiatives. Sometimes it’s good to put down one’s tools and muse.
Andy keeps repeating that doing Social Media for large groups is not as easy as doing the same for an individual or a small shop. I know that many people must not believe that this is true. « You are a big brand hence it’s way too easy » a lot of people must think. Yet nothing has ever been more true. Innovating within a large enterprise is a never-ending, groundhod day-like heavy-lifting exercise. This is why SMBC is important. It enables the heads of Social Media like us to get together, to help each other and to learn from one another. This is what Andy is referring to as being the « missing piece in the puzzle ».
And this is also why there are now more than 150 members within SMBC. Hats off Andy!
here are some of the 150 members of SMBC as of now …
Discovery Communications were the 3rd presenters in track1 of Blogwell on November 9 in Philadelphia with Amber Harris and Gayle Weiswasser delivering the presentation. Shark week is one of the longest running television events (23 years!). How do you bring innovation and bring it to another level for Discovery? was the question that our presenters had asked themselves.
This year was to celebrate the “’national holiday” nature of Shark Week and it was rebranded “happy shark Week”. The company started a campaign against shark finning and partnered with the Georgia Aquarium with a live-stream from the aquarium.
Social Media Strategy
Social Media is all about communities added Gayle. So Discovery Communications didn’t have to invent anything but work with the influencers, the very enthusiastic people “who were doing [their] marketing for [them]”. Discovery Communications then went on a ton of monitoring in order to identify and engage with the right influencers. The week took place on August 6th, but they tried to make the event live throughout the year thanks to Social Media.
Tactics
Digital PR managed to impact major online portals, and used street marketing with a building in DC with a Shark in it: People would stop and take pictures of the building and report on it. The presenters discovered some very active enthusiasts who would wear their tee-shirt and post tweets about that on Twitter. The focus was on Twitter. People were encouraged to create some videos on Youtube and post them by themselves, showing themselves in their “Shark Week” tee-shirts. They were offered to upload them to the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week Video Challenge YouTube channel.
There was no official Facebook page, but Discovery Channel was able to claim that page and set and official Shark Week page on Facebook. Video drove a lot of traffic online. The ‘adopt a shark’ campaign also enabled people to make donations.
The results were impressive
No wonder with such an impactful theme, but one has to admit that the numbers are really great: 14,000 online media and blog posts and #sharkweek was a worldwde Twitter trending topic the 1st day of Shark Week and there was over 91,000 Shark Week mentions between Aug 1-6 which resulted in 100 million potential impressions (Tweetreach.com). Somewhat facetiously, Amber mentioned “that the Radian 6 curve showing the traffic had the shape of a shark-fin!”
What worked according to the presenters was the complementarity of digital and real-life PR, the partnerships and the Twitter engagement. However, they had mixed results with the photo contest with only 28 photo entries, showing how hard it is to get people to cooperate. Facebook was a bit disappointing but the real issue is in what Amber added: “You don’t know what goes wrong, you could do everything right and still it wouldn’t work”.
One of the things that made it for that project is that the company culture at Discovery is very much geared towards innovation according to both presenters and that there is never any push-back on anything. “Everyone has been very supportive” they said, and Amber adds that, more broadly speaking, “everybody in the company should have a vested interest in Social Media” and all of them should help make things work.
What matters is that people collaborate
Gayle concluded with what I consider pearls of wisdom: “Social Media is nothing” she said, “what matters is that people collaborate and keeping things as open as possible”.
The second presentation I attended at Blogwell in Philadelphia on November 9, 2010 was that of the Hershey Company; not a household name in some parts of Europe so we have to explain that it is a confectioner producing sweets and chocolate bars and other foodstuffs under the Jet-puffed, Honey maid and Hershey’s brands. The presentation was delivered by Anna Lingeris, PR manager at the Hershey Company.
“Blogher” is a large network (25 million plus, mostly women), probably the largest blogging organisation for women. The question was “how to engage this very exacting crowd”. the Hershey company wanted to start a buzz on the S’more snacktivity suite (the booth at the exhibition) at blogher while spending $15,000 on suite sponsorship vs $75,000 as the minimum expo floor budget. The idea was to show usage occations of these products, both indoor and outdoor.
2,400 people attended the Blogher confrence, 600 came to the Suite, spending more than 30 minutes in the suite on average and more than 200 blogposts were generated. The twitter chatter for S’mores was big: more 500 uses of the hashtag namely. Results were monitored with Radian 6, a popular buzz monitoring package in the US. A separate website with photos taken by a professional photographer was put together, and it generated 500 visits in 2 days Anna said.
“ Smart doesn’t mean big”, Anna Lingeris added, so the success of that campaign was not based on big rewards and freebies but on how they shared their main experience with them.
Key learnings include
the fact that “You can’t do all by yourself” and you need to work not only with agencies but with other parts of the company too.
SAP is one of the founding members of the Social Media Business Council. On November 9, SAP was hosting Blogwell, SMBC’s open event dedicated to social media in which each presentation (8 in total) is delivered by a SMBC member. The opening presentation by SAP was dedicated to spicing up events with social media. SAP began working on its community 7 years ago, and it now comprises 2 million members. This community is about engaging with clients and starting conversations. The SAP presentation was delivered by Brian Ellefritz, Global Social Media Marketing at SAP. Brian is a former Cisco representative and joined SAP to head their global Social media team. He is a seasoned Internet expert.
Very few in the audience had tried live video when Brian asked the question. So this kind of Social Media usage added to live events is still very new to many professionals (note: Orange Business Services is doing this quite regularly in all regions, check the http://orangebusiness.posterous.com live blog for details).
Context
Sapphirenow is SAP’s most important sales event, it’s about a decade old. In 2010 SAP organised two events in Germany and Orlando at the same time, that was quite ambitious. Social media took a big part in that event.
The objective was to treat the audience as peers, not recipients and showcase SAP as a savvy user of social media. They had done something the year before but they wanted to move beyond that in 2010. SAP wanted to “take this live event and make it virtual”. “SAP had more bandwidth than CNN” during that event Brian added.
The social media Ambassador concept
Influencers, customers, partners were going to be active pushing the news that they were being told. SAP also wanted to talk to those who couldn’t be there. The way it played out was that most of the content was pushed to Twitter in realtime. The stream started in Germany in the morning and was taken over by Orlando in the afternoon. The Sapphirenow twitter feed was central to that event. Giant touch screens were also implemented.
The ambassador programme was started 2 months in advance. 6 topics were selected, and 6 ambassadors per location were recruited. They had to have large followings and had to be comfortable with social media and have a set of skills which fit in the programme. The initial expectation was 2 blog posts a day. Flip cameras were given and SAP explained what their expectations were. “permisssion forms” were signed and social media business cards were handed out to people as a courtesy. An audit was given to an impartial agency in order to “assess whether that was impactful or chaos!”
The outcome was 1.5 million views in Twitter reach (tweetreach.com), 41 blog posts written in 3 days, 152 videos were uploaded and 15,506 video views generated.
Lessons learnt
Picking personal or business account was an issue
Broad diversity of skills, it was very challenging (some didn’t know what Twitter was)
hastags were an issue (should we have one, one per topic etc.)
video “live” blogging: the camera team was just overwhelmed with too many cameras being brought to them and it was chaos
Once underway, “it’s just like one giant mashup !”
over time, we “stopped concentrating on the number of tweets and blog posts and starting enjoying the live experience” Brian added
The “1.5 million reach” Brian added when asked about what numbers really meant “is when management stops asking question” and the value is when you stop talking about the numbers and when people and managers start seeing the value in the energy and dedication put behind the event and the endeavour.
This past July I met up with Loic Moisand, co-founder of the start-up Synthesio with Thibault Hanin, specialised in web monitoring and analysis of social and online mainstream media. They are a great example of a French start-up that has succeeded, in France as well as abroad. I mentioned them previously in two videos filmed with Trey Pennington, who is in charge of Synthesio’s marketing in the US and the UK (video 1 – video 2). This time I wanted to take a moment with Loic in order to find out more about the creation of Synthesio, on one hand, and about their measurement of influence on the Interneton the other. What I discovered during this interview is a real gem that goes above and beyond a simple market analysis : a very interesting and useful market segmentation that Loic Moisand has created based on his experience in the field that I found to be a fundamental and useful discovery for online marketing experts and branding experts that set their eyes on the web.
I met with Loic in the Cybervillage of Paris at Crimée, the same place where I had met him 1 1/2 years ago ; time enough for the young entrepreneur (28 years old, to be exact) to work hard on developing his start-up. His work has paid off as Synthesio has seen their revenues grow significantly, even if I can’t just yet reveal the exact numbers since the enterprise is private (you’ll just have to trust me when I say – they’re good).
The two Synthesio founders are both graduates of ESSEC (one of Europe’s top business schools), even if Thibault Hanin is the “geek” of the group, having earned his engineering degree beforehand. One worked on the software and the other on case studies, each in their “own little corners” of the school’s campus, according to Loic, before deciding to team up for a bit, just to see. “We worked on a business plan for a month and found that we complimented each other quite nicely”. They were able to raise enough funds rapidly, complete with a student loan, and were off and running. “Our first investors didn’t even look at the details of our businesses plan, they just evaluated who we were and trusted us”. A look at entrepreneurship that is very different from the usual Gaulic jeremiads. “I don’t at all agree with people that say that we can’t invest in France. There are good grants for those that are young innovative enterprise, thanks to the Research Minister,” adds Loic Moisand. Of course the two young entrepreneurs “ate nothing but pasta” for the first year while they developed their offer. But there were numerous surprises…
Business isn’t rational, it’s linked to the entrepreneur’s desires
The story behind Synthesio is interesting in and of itself. Well-positioned today for measuring social media buzz, the start-up began along a completely different route : “We started by creating a sort of Google Alerts,” explains Loic Moisand, but we quickly realized that there was something else going on in social media. Even if we didn’t begin that way”. Founded in 2006, the company took one year to prepare their offer. “I met 400 people, communications directors, research directors, agency directors, etc. during that year” adds Loic Moisand ; and that doesn’t even take into account incidental meetings. Forced to complete an internship abroad for his degree, the entrepreneur chose India for personal reasons, a choice that proved to be incredibly important for what followed in terms of their software operations, which makes the Synthesio co-founder say, “business is not rational and many things are tied to the founders’ desires”. A lesson in humilty and reailty to be taught in business schools, perhaps… “We wanted to visit, have fun, and not make something super French” continues Loic Moisand, and that’s exactly how Synthesio began “with everything in 5 languages from the very start” in order to win – little by little – international accounts that have made a very impressive list of clients: Accor, Orange, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, BNPP, etc. that use Synthesio to measure what is said about them online.
Finding a good brand name
Well-taught marketers know it all too well : finding a good brand name is a fundamental step. The double-team took it upon themselves to create their own algorithm that spit out original names, and Synthesio came out. The domain name was free, so nothing more than to find a logo, which Loic created, partly Ying-Yang, partly a stylized “S” with “the red representing the human, and the gray, the technology” he clarifies.
25 employees in 3 countries and… 30 languages
Synthesio is comprised of 25 employees today working full-time, plus partners that bring that number up to 35, spread out in 3 countries : France, the UK and the US. “But we have people that work for Synthesio everywhere : Morocco, China, India, Russia, Portugal, Spain, etc because the company handles research in 30 languages (the dashboard is available in 6, including Chinese). The multilingual search engine is the cornerstone of their service along with the fact that the analyses are done by humans. The differentiating point is exactly that. The engine is a proprietary development that is partially protected, as only original features and innovations can be patented.
The buzz analysis market : a fusing of 3 stages (+1 or 2 for France that seems to do everything its own way)
The worldwide market is broken down into 3 segments : free, do-it-yourself and upscale, Synthesio belonging to this last group. France is a bit different as it has 2 different types of actors (ami and Digimind) that are editors as well but positioned on different price schemas. This category doesn’t fit – according to Loic Moisand – with Forrester’s and Gartner’s groupings, which would explain their difficulties in positioning themselves internationally, even if the two actors “perform well on French territory”. Digimind has opted, itself, for the third type of positioning in North America. The France, creative as always, also has another example that doesn’t fit with other models : Trendybuzz, a research company with publisher software.
Earlier this month, WordPress.com, on which this and all my other blogs are hosted, decided to implement social media sharing buttons as a permanent feature of their online platform. I dote on wordpress.com personally, it’s simple and stupid, forces you to focus on content, not waste your time with useless plug-in gimmicks and is fast and furiously efficient (you get indexed in search engines in a matter of minutes).
Yet, there had been growing concerns among my readers that someone preaching social media was in fact not put his money where his mouth was. http://getsociallive.com/ had provided a reasonably user-friendly workaround but that was no match for other wordpress blogs – hosted and managed by their owners – which offered many possibilities in terms of sharing on all social media platforms, facebook, Twitter and Digg being the main ones. So, somewhat reluctantly, I was considering moving my wordpress blogs to my own server, which was possible, but which I regarded as an unnecessary burden and task.
And then I caught a glance of that WordPress announcement (a little link at the top of the dashboard) almost unexpectedly: WordPress was – at long last – making sharing avaible on its wordpress.com platform!
So now you can see retweets on posts and pages easily (make sure you do select the ‘posts and pages’ options otherwise your tweets and buttons won’t be accessible from the main home page of your blog for instance) and share stuff on other platforms too including digg and reddit.
So here is a graphic representation of the “share it” function as implemented by WordPress, right beneath each piece which you have published. As this feature is somewhat hidden here is the process explained to our fellow wordpress.com owners : go to the dashboard of your wordpress.com blog, select the ‘settings’ main menu on the left, then click the ‘sharing’ option. icons have to be dragged – in your order of preference – within the bow in order to appear on your posts. If you still can’t find it, use the following link and replace XXX by your wordpress username : http://XXX.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=sharing.
My readers will not only stop taking the mickey off me now, they will also dash to open their own WordPress.com blog, to which premium features such as domain name registration and redirection are now attached.
As I have witnessed time and time again, it is customary to say that B2C is more adapted to the use of social media than B2B . As matter of fact, I am not at all certain that this is true. The fact that there are fewer B2B examples of the use of social media is probably due to the maturity of that sector with regard to the use of technology and has nothing to do in my eyes with the fact that it is not adapted to social media. Here are 7 reasons why I think this is the case:
for social media to have an impact, one has to foster collaboration and develop a community feeling. This is typically done through the mixing of three main ingredients: passion, help between members and mutual benefit. These ingredients are usually very commonplace amongst existing b2B communities,
B2B communities are niche and they are about passionate experts who can debate about fairly specific subjects in great detail. Comments may be few and far between but rewarding,
the ability to include customers in the definition of a new service, has been a staple of B2B marketing for donkeys years. Customer advisory boards, Product and Client User Groups are very commonplace in B2B environments,
B2B is less exposed than B2C:. Hence B2B players are running fewer risks when engaging in online collaboration than B2C players; there are few B2B equivalents to the Kryptonite or Nestlé blogstorms,
in the B2B world , in most cases, co-creation has already been old hat for a long long time. As a matter of fact, most business to business offers are and have been developed in close partnership with clients and third-party value add providers. Comments in social media aimed at improving products are mostly welcome,
TV and outdoor advertising is out of reach for most B2B companies. Hence the importance of digital and social media. Indeed amongst B2B high-tech companies, it is even very commonplace that they use nothing else but digital to do advertising,
B2B business is made of ecosystems. Social media is ideal for fostering discussions and brand advocacy through such ecosystems.
B2B as a result is, in my eyes, well adapted to social media and even probably more so than B2C even though B2B subjects will – barring a few exceptions – never reach the headlines. So much the better I would say, because this is also what keeps trolls at bay! Agencies solely focused on B2C should also give it a thought and start paying attention to B2B customers and prospective customers, as well as hone their skills in the area of business to business.
Last month, on Nov 10, 2009 the 7th blogwell session took place in sunny Atlanta, Ga. (this is meant to be a joke for I have been twice to Atlanta so far and have seen a lot of rain not to mention flooding). Nearly a month later – and I am a little late for that – now that the dust has settled I wish to recap on some of the best sessions I was able to attend. Stephanie Moritz, ConAgra foods presented her company and its many brands of foods (Hebrew National, Egg Beaters, Peter Pan, Banquet, Slim Jim, Kid Cuisine, Healthy choice…), most of which are huge hits in the US although less or even not at all known in Europe (another tale-telling example of non globalisation; there are many examples of brands which are immensely successful this side of the Atlantic and unknown on the other side and vice versa).
Social Media is everywhere. It is now mainstream. Consumers refuse to be marketed at. They want to participate, they have a passion. The challenge is to adapt it within a large organisation. How do you create inspiring programmes for your customers? It takes:
Targeted manageable plan,
A plan that supports business goals,
A focus on consensus building:
Setting a plan that achieves and ties to your business objectives
How do your get champions on board?
Long term commitment:
Phil Nieman from Gaspedal and Stephanie Moritz
1st step: understand how social media fits in our culture and objectives. How can you amplify your PR effort using SM
Creating a masterplan: define clear business objectives and match them with the SM initiative
Enterprise-wide solution. Not just Marketing
Establish some guidelines before moving into that space
Building the foundation first and listen to conversations. Who Responding to consumers. Addressing issues in a transparent manner.
Getting to know the blogging community. We ourselves tried blogs and tried and understand => Building communities
2nd step: getting senior management to become a champion (through CMO)
Digital immersion
3rd step: create coalition: there wasn’t much budget or staff. Experts and specialists throughout the organisation have been identified. All cross functional teams were identified. Enthusiasm made it.
(Audit) Identified key bloggers and organised discussions on products and how they could work together.
Created a Twitter page, spent a lot of time on it
Created a facebook page
Benchmarks, listened to conversations
Attended blogger events and blogger media conferences for the sole purpose of listening
When should a brand use social media? Not everyone should jump on the bandwagon Benchmarks are carried out continuously Key to success:
The question stunned me I must admit. While walking down the aisle of the yearly event of the Confederation of French Industry Medef – equivalent to CBI – I was getting ready for a session of live blogging in front of a panel of ex ministers, worldwide banking experts, and other celebrities such as former Poland’s premier Lech Walensa when a seated person stopped me by putting her hand on my arm. “Tell me”, she said while eyeing my “blogger” badge which signalled that I was one of the 50+ Internet experts invited by the confederation in order to cover the event, “what is a blogger?”
I must admit that I must have looked pretty flabbergasted. As the media is awash with blog reports and web reviews, and even mainstream Hollywood films like the recent State of Play feature blogs as a main contender in the online/offline press battle, I had surmised that blogging was an established fact of modern life. Let’s face the fact readers, it is not! Joe public still doesn’t know what it is about, or not quite.
Blogging is still exotic to many, and not just across the Channel. Judging by the frequent questions I have on the same lines in England and even in the United States, I can assure you that we are not there yet. So how long will it take for everyone to understand? Judging by what happened with core Internet activities, one started talking about the information superhighway as it was then known in England as early as 1994 but things only took off seriously towards the end of the 1990′s.
Will blogging follow the same trajectory? Maybe it just won’t happen like that. It is highly probable that people will all use blogs/microblogs (such as the outstanding Posterous service) and other Social Media gadgets even before they understand the weird names we have given them. To a large extent, this is what this Social Media revolution is all about, i.e. forgetting about the buzz-words and just going ahead with it.
Yes Madam, you are right, not everybody knows what bloggers are, yet they are truly here to stay anyway.
The second blogwell presentation at Blogwell #3 which took place on April 29 in NYC, was that of Molly Schonthal from Nokia, who is in charge of social media for the Finnish cell phone manufacturer in the US, and also one of our representatives of the blog Council.
Molly’s presentation was truly outstanding, there were so many questions and answers at the end of the presentation that I’ve had a hard time trying to keep track of them all, but a good many of them will be transcribed in this post anyway.
The presentation was entitled “from broadcast to social media”. And it started with references to Tara Hunt’s latest book, “the Whuffie factor”, on which we have already had an opportunity to comment on this very blog (click here for an interview of Tara Hunt about her new book).
Molly insisted on the fact that “what is difficult for a big company is ‘listening’, participating openly and respectfully.” It might in fact sound to be an obvious thing to do, but it’s not always for a large organisation, for it is so easy to be concentrated on one’s internal organisational issues and forget about one’s clients. So what are the changes as a big organisation is facing when trying to engage in different kinds of relationships with its customers and ecosystem?
1. One has to think, Molly says, not in terms of technological adoption, but of “psychological adoption”. Web 2.0, she says, is not difficult from a technical point of view, and it can be set up in a matter of seconds. But working with communities can take a lot longer than that.
2. Her second point is just about that, when she says that “building networks take time”. And, “it does not follow the principles of normal press relations”. She even coined the phrase “social release” which she opposed to press release. What it takes is actually creating messages that are relevant to influencers. And to stop and listen and engage. And she also insisted upon the fact that collaboration is about “cross functional interactions which are at the heart of success”.
What Molly and Nokia’s teams have been able to achieve in the field of social media is just awesome. Here are just a few examples which I have been able to catch up on the catch on the fly:
Nokia encouraged the widespread adoption of 2.0 tools internally,
Nokia developed what they called an “infopedia” internally. This is some sort of Wikipedia, but it is internal. It was actually instrumental in getting Nokia employees to understand what a wiki is what a blog is etc.,
Nokia also created a blog hub: all internal blog content was focussed in one place that is to say that access is granted to what employees are talking about, sharing thoughts and ideas,
An internal webTV was also created, which is some sort of youtube which enables employees to upload, invent and discuss,
externally, blogs have also been rolled out, therefore enabling conversations about Nokia products. They also created a platform called “blogbites”, which enables them to generate three-minute podcasts from existing text.”
Engaging with influencers is also a very important item on the Nokia agenda, and they are engaging with them on events, such as SXSW09.
Molly also insisted on what she called the blogger test centre tour which actually consisted in sending bloggers to two different countries. The stories were published in leading blogs such as Gizmodo, Techcrunch, the BBC etc. A 500,000 audience reach was achieved for that event in 2 geographical areas (the UK and Australia).
As a conclusion Molly insisted upon the fact that one had to allow company culture to evolve, beyond “PowerPoint slides with bulletsin them”. (Reminiscent of an article I published a long time ago with the help of Giancarlo, and which was entitled PowerPointitis)
questions and answers
1. how are you selecting bloggers for your events?
Few people can be admitted in the test centre. Loads of explanations about temperatures were given (Nokia phones had to resist all kinds of temperatures, perform the lowest to the highest). The Nokia lab folks were also very excited about the idea and about the ability to interact with real people. The way that Nokia organised this was very straightforward. All Nokia had to do was to “invite them and be nice with them”.
2. measurements?
It is very hard to track results back to sales, Molly says. They do do some monitoring at Nokia, and then look at the number of people and followers (Nokia has more than 500 followers on twitter). Another question was, “how did you convince managers?” Molly responded to that: “our company understands the value of social media”, which is great support what she and her teams are doing at Nokia across the world for social media. She also insisted that social media produces soft numbers, which do not have to be linked to sales automatically.
3. what is the hardest thing?
The most difficult thing according to Molly Schonthal is to “listen well all the time”. It is hard to get an e-mail from a blogger/influencer, she says, because it always has to be taken as an emergency. “One has to stop,” she adds, it’s a “personal challenge”. Raising expectations is an issue (a phrase which I heard often times pronounced during this blogwell session). Planning is also a major issue: “one has to avoid formatting” she adds (mainly on twitter)
“You cannot say you’re open and honest and stop people from saying things” Molly rightfully points out. So, you will have to assume that some of the comments won’t always be coming your way and you’ll have to take it like a man.
6. what is the difference between press and social media release?
Molly says that social media release comes with some video plus a bunch of pictures and multimedia files to download and text which is more appropriate for blogs. It is true that more and more packages such as these are made available on the market by agencies on behalf of big businesses.
8. what about smaller bloggers?
There is more than one approach, Molly says, and we hope to do it again with more folks.
9. responding to external comments?
Molly says that you have to ask yourself two questions:
one: do you have to respond to it? The answer may not always be yes
Kogart House in Andrassy Ut in Budapest - Digital Marketing Forum 2009
On May 5, 2009 I was invited to deliver a presentation at the Digital Marketing Forum in Budapest, Hungary. The seminar was chaired and facilitated by fellow LinkedIn networker, Marketing expert and professional presenter Davig Hughes (apparently an amateur surfboarder too).
The presentation is also made available online at Slideshare.net:
Alain Thys: a relentless innovator and profit-tracker
On March 4th, 2009, I was able to meet and have breakfast with, at last and after a few missed opportunities, Alain Thys in Paris. Alain is one of the partners of futurelab, a consultancy based in Belgium (of which he originates) together with fellow Stefan kolle. I can’t actually remember when,or how we came across each other, but it is bound to be on the web, and that’s probably how we ended up cooperating on the Futurelab blog by the way.
He describes himself as a “shopkeeper”. He has had extensive experience in European advertising and marketing at companies like Mexx and Reebok. He was in charge of marketing at Reebok Belgium for a while, when it was decided to merge it into the Dutch arm of the company, at the beginning of the 1990s, and that’s when the Internet arrived. It is also when Alain discovered these “funny computers” and the things that we could do with them. A 3-year stint in the Netherlands at the head of the Reebok marketing unit ended up in a re-org and a sabbatical in Mexico (lucky him!).
At the beginning of the year 2000, he then decided to go into start-up mode and work for a joint-venture in which AOL, and LVMH (Louis Vuitton) were involved. Their new plan was a groundbreaking online idea for the travel industry. This was “way ahead of what was done in those days with regard to online travel”. In fact, it was a bit like à la carte holiday packages, what is commonly described nowadays as dynamic packaging (although very little of it is still to be seen in the field, which means that it’s still ahead of its time).
The usual cash burning story about 2000 bubble start-ups is unfortunately repeated in this venture of Alain’s: a $130 cost per customer was leading unfortunately to a meagre revenue of $16, hardly enough to generate profit. Vision doesn’t always lead to profitability, but there is one thing about visionary people, is that they shall never be deterred. And that’s exactly why Alain decided to move on to the next idea. So he started a new incubator for e-payment in Ireland, related to mobile payment. He admitted to having a lot of fun creating the new start-up, and he did this for a couple of years before joining a media group in Belgium in 2004-5.
This media group, itself a media pioneer in Belgium, led Alain Thys to focus on “creating new things and generating new profits”. He admitted to “not being very knowledgeable about the Internet world” which actually led him to ask “the wrong questions, which turned out to be the right questions”.
Alain was lucky enough to actually see the Internet at its inception, he grew with it (not exactly generation Y though). And he learned as he was going along. As matter of fact, and to be honest with him and yourself, everybody’s learning as we are going along in this market (a case of the blind leading the blind I guess).
He then created futurelab in 2005, and Stefan joined him in this transition period. Futurelab is a consultancy geared towards “generating new profits out of marketing and innovation”. This consultancy is actually working very much based on word-of-mouth, and is expanding across Europe, doing little or no cold-calling or direct marketing. But it is taking WOM to the next level with the help of the Internet.
Their work is mostly based around marketing strategy consulting, and their aim is to “generate profit through innovation and customer centricity”. Future lab’s objective is actually to “deliver on that promise of a value to the customer”. He described innovation as being “doing something differently, and that you haven’t done before.” But he also has profitability in mind.
Alain Thys declares that “in 80% of current projects, we see marketing & innovation fail in that respect”. When asked about the reasons why such an obvious metric is actually not taken into account, which seems zanyish and at the same time is happening on a daily basis, he answers thus:
it is either that people forget about the bottom line altogether. However, there must be some sort of payback on innovation,
the second reason why innovation fails is that most innovators “forget about what it means to the customer.”
So, Alain adds, very often, “what is needed is a different perspective, and this is when consultants become really useful”.
A few years ago, I used to be a regular contributor to bnet in the UK but the site pulled out of the European market in 2010. Fortunately, a new project has just been launched and I’m very happy to embark on it. It is named innovation generation and it is sponsored by our peers from Alcatel.You can find my first piece on that blog under the following title: Governments Ease Into Cyberspace. Below is the announcement for the new website; stay tuned for more info …We are living in a truly connected world. That’s something most people might take for granted when they make a phone call or watch TV, but when you consider how a wireless network brings books to your e-reader, an Ethernet network keeps your savings account secure, and a cloud holds most of your online identity, it becomes a pretty powerful proposition.
Discovery Communications
note: many thanks to 
Finding a good brand name
