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.
Category Archives: communications
Angry Birds’ Bergstrom: no one has cracked the value of a Facebook fan –#istrategy
This morning the first panel discussion at the Istrategy digital conference in Amsterdam was entitled “Audience Engagement, User Experience and Social Monetisation”. The panellists were :
- Moderator: Tom Eslinger – Worldwide Digital Creative Director, Saatchi & Saatchi
- Speakers: Yme Bosma – Manager of Business Development & Partnerships, Hyves
- Amber Osbourne – VP Brand Development, Head of Lettuce Media
- Ritch Sibthorpe – VP Digital Marketing & Content Partnerships, Warner Music Group International
- Saara Bergstrom – Manager of Social Marketing & Consumer Engagement, Rovio
Amber Osbourne kick started the panel by saying that “you have to forget that you are B2B or B2C, you have to become P2P, People to People” and that you have to find the “Rockstars” in your company. She then explained how she was hired by Bruce Food in order to build a Social Media personality for the brand just because one day she tweeted about her having Bruce’s Yams for breakfast and that her audience started a letter campaign to Bruce foods saying “you should hire this girl”. She is now the Head of her Social Media agency.
Saara Bergstrom said that you “should do your Social Media in house”. She went on saying that all the relationship between the brand and its fans at Rovio is done in house. It has to be stated that Rovio is the company behind the famous ‘angry birds’ game (see picture above).
Mendler: the workspace of the future is all about conversations #live11
reporting live from Orange Business Live in Munich
Workspaces of the future, an industry analyst perspective
In his introduction, Michael Burrell from Orange Business Services described some of the main market trends include:
1. consumerization of IT, tuning the way that IT is working on its head.
2. The millenials are also changing things in the workplace
3. mobility is enabling people to work from anywhere
4. cloud technology is changing the ay that IT can be purchased and rolled out
Conversation isn’t just about Voice
Informa’s Camille Mendler (@cmendler on Twitter) introduced the subject by saying that what she wants to talk about is “conversations” before delving into workspaces of the future. Conversation isn’t about “exchange of thoughts; talk” as Merriam Webster defines it. Conversation isn’t about “voice” anymore Camille says. We have to rethink what we describe as “conversation”.
One has also to think about who is involved Camille added. One type of conversation doesn’t fit all. All regions have their preferred ways of conversing (re. conversation type slide above). The challenge is to have the flexibility to use whatever tool is best fitted.
BYOC will not be going away
BYOC/BYOT (Bring your own computer/telephone) she added is no longer a threat in a day and age when Nasa is controlling launches through iPad and iPhones. Camille says that this is not going away and the ability to take an order from a tablet, for instance, is improving business processes.
Conversations … between things
Conversation, is not only taking place between people, it includes things, and even thing to thing (like the Poken experiment which we have carried out at Orange Business Live this year in Munich).
Camille says that we are moving into “conversation as a service”, conversations is moving into mobility, cloud and “as a service”.
Bob Pearson’s “pre-commerce” book now available for pre-order from Amazon
Business readers, social media enthusiasts, rejoice! Bob Pearson’s forthcoming book PRE-COMMERCE is now available for pre-order from Amazon. As it happens, the book will be released on March 10, 2011 which, by no coincidence, is on the eve of SXSW.
This book has also received contributions by Paul Beverly (Gemalto), Lukas U. Cudrigh (Miscrosoft), Scott Anderson (TSG Customer Comms), david.witt@genmills.com (Genmills), Kerins Raymond F (Pfizer), Kathryn Metcalfe (pfizer), Richard Jalichandra (technorati), etc. etc. there are so many it’s impossible to have them all here… and also yours truly from Orange Business Services.
Pre-commerce is packed with insights and anecdotes which – to put it in the words of Bob himself – “make this book stand-out vs. many others that talk in grand theory, but rarely get to what really matters for today’s leader”; Preliminary reaction to the concept is already quite good. Just via word of mouth, orders are coming in, some in bulk.
>> The book is now available via pre-order on Amazon.com at http://amzn.to/precom
Andy Sernovitz: “large companies getting into social media need support and SMBC was the missing piece in that puzzle”
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 Marketing opus.
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 Channel on Shark Week at Blogwell: “enthusiasts are doing our marketing”
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”.
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