The magic left the building with Jobs

Reblogged from Mario Sundar:

• 

I remember the moment Steve Jobs scrolled through his music and uttered those magical words - "scrolls like butter" - while illustrating the beauty of the original iPhone.

It's moments like this that you lived for, as a technology obsessed professional in Silicon Valley. And with Jobs we got to watch the Michael Jordan of technology, courtside, at his best.

Read more… 712 more words

This Is Not What Social Media Was Meant To Be today's selection is ... LinkedIn's Mario Sundar's piece is, despite its title, not just about Steve Jobs, it's about the way that PR is done, and the fact that Social Media wasn't meant to become what it is now. He describes a PR exercise by Zuckerberg and Facebook officials which lacks both the lustre and pizazz of Apple's classic keynotes. I am not an Apple admirer I must admit, even though I own Apple products and acknowledge that they are beautiful products, but I'm not in synch with the philosophy behind Apple. Yet, Jobs's keynotes were undoubtedly personal and performed with style. What is most annoying is indeed, as Sundar remarks, all those who try to mimic Jobs's methods... not always with great success. As pointed out by Herman Mellville: "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

New Innovation Blog Launched

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.

via Innovation Generation – Named Documents – About Us

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (5/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 5 of 5

Name a few examples as to how social media management has helped Orange get more brand awareness?

In most markets in which it operates in the consumer space, Orange has a very good brand awareness not to say the best. So social media isn’t really used for this at Orange. We tend to use it more for image, co-creation (like with the http://sosh.fr entry level offer in France), brand and user experience (see http://pinterest.com/liveorange or http://pinterest.com/orangefrance to name but a few recent examples), charity (check the French Orange foundation blog http://www.blogfondation.orange.com), user relationship (like Orange helpers in the UK: http://oran.ge/KqyW3r) and brand nurturing (like Facebook Romania https://www.facebook.com/orangeromania for instance). These are only a few examples from different countries but there are many more than this.

The only counterexample I can think of is the one I’ve been involved in for 3 years between 2008 and 2011, and it is related to the b2b arm of Orange, that is to say Orange Business Services (http://orange-business.com) . It is understandable that being in 220 different countries and territories as Orange Business Services is, means that there are vastly different levels of brand awareness in each of those geographies. Social media can come be useful in the areas in which we are not operating in the consumer space in order to boost the knowledge of Orange Business as well as our skills. It has proven very successful in many instances, we have even been able to use the blogs to initiate sales at a later stage (this is ‘pre-commerce’ again).

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[1] Check my personal blog for this topic at http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/category/b2b-marketing/

[2] http://bitdefender.com

[3] http://ronewmedia.ro

[4] Small Office, Home Office, i.e. very small or independent companies

[5] Media Aces is the French association of enterprises involved in social media, of which I am the President. My work on the four different types of brand in social media is available at: http://bit.ly/4brandtypessm

[6] Oscar Wilde quotes at: http://oran.ge/owildetalk

[7] Check the ‘worldwide’ tab on the http://facebook.com/Orange page

[8] http://timeline.orange.com

[9] Re. Andy Sernocitz ‘Word of Mouth Marketing’ check http://oran.ge/asbooks on Amazon

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (4/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 4 of 5

What do you think the ratio for the implementation of social media campaign should be in the entire media budget of the company? How was this situation at Orange?

To begin with, I do not like the term “campaign” which I find too military and aggressive. Eventually, social media marketing is a new form of marketing, more respectful, more centred on our customer’s interests and requirements, based on the principles of crowd sourcing and customer centricity. So I ban this kind of language as well as other terms like “targets” which are often times the staples of traditional marketing but are outdated and not applicable to social media marketing. Despite what most people think, social media marketing has to be thought of in the long-term, not in the short term.

using military analogies for communications? not a good idea … From bastille day

My second recommendation would be to build engagement and then spend money, not the other way round. First, I always start building the network using content. This is what takes the greatest part of our work and energy. Each time I am in charge of a new digital department, I start working on my content strategy and building the content, both externally and internally, which will fuel my digital strategy. Once I have done that, I can start crystallise communities around the content which we have created, as well as adapt the content to the liking of our audiences. The second step is to grow the network so that it reaches a critical mass. The third stage is to create synergies between the pages and the different platforms that we use: the Facebook hub on all Orange pages[7] is a good example of that, or Orange timeline[8] which groups or Twitter accounts around Orange. But it is also a matter of linking platforms and blogs to one another, both at Orange, and with Orange partners outside of the company.

Once I have sorted out all my budgets, and made considerable savings, then and only then can I invest my money, with great care, on advertising to promote this content and bring back traffic to my main platforms. This is a slightly more lengthy approach, but it pays in the long-term and is incredibly strong in terms of resilience.

My last recommendation would be to say to companies that they shouldn’t spend millions on word-of-mouth because word-of-mouth is supposed to be cost-effective; otherwise this is just advertising and advertising works best in traditional media[9].

My main frustration with regard to social advertising is to see that mainstream social media platforms have done very little to reinvent advertising so far. Innovation in that space is not on par with what we are supposed to expect. But this will probably change in the medium-term, hopefully.

As to Orange Group, this is how we work. I still haven’t spent a dime to grow the http://facebook.com/Orange page and yet we grew it from 40,000 people in May 2011 to over 215,000 a year later! Similarly, our Group Twitter account (http://twitter.com/orange) was brought from nothing to close to 9,500 followers in just a year, through sheer organic growth and content sharing.

Now that we have grown a critical mass, we might consider advertising to speed things up or bring them to the next level, but I do not expect those spends to grow out of proportion and much in excess of 10% of my overall budget, in the very long run.

 

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[7] Check the ‘worldwide’ tab on the http://facebook.com/Orange page

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (3/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 3 of 5

Can you give us 5 tips as to how company can manage a crisis through social media?

In fact, despite what most people think, and despite the usual romantic stories told about Internet crises and rumours, managing crises is a long-term rather than short-term exercise. Crises in social media in fact, reflect what is bad with your company, not what is wrong with your community management or the way you handle it. Here are my 5 tips about managing crises:

picture cc 2012 Yann Gourvennec (abstract album)

1. fix internal problems first: things that you do in your day-to-day business may be kept hidden, but not in social media. Eventually, social media tells more about the way that you are organised internally than about anything else,
2. work on the process: if you are making things up as you go along when a crisis arises, and then build the process as it happens, it means that you have done something wrong. You should work on that process from day one, before a crisis takes place,
3. make your PR go social: don’t put all your eggs in the same basket; your PR and social media departments should work hand-in-hand. There is nothing that the community management team should do without referring to PR when a crisis arises, and vice versa, there is nothing that PR is aware of that should not be communicated to the community management team, inclusive of the stances which have to be taken and displayed. Don’t take the Lone Ranger approach by letting community managers express themselves in the name of the company even though they haven’t received clearance for it. This applies to large companies and mostly listed companies, for which external communications are extremely critical, and may not be applicable to smaller enterprises,
4. prepare for the worst to happen outside normal working hours: my experience of crises online has shown that the worst problem often occur on a Friday night from 8 pm onwards or during the weekend, or at night. Work with vendors in order to set up round-the-clock moderation when necessary, in multiple languages when you are a worldwide company namely,
5. set up your alerting system: not to generate alerts in real time all the time, but mostly when something bad happens so that you know in real time when you have to do something when it is really necessary.

All these are applicable to companies with a strong brand awareness only. Listed companies rank high on the agenda with regard to crisis management issues and the need to industrialise the process around them. On the other side of the coin, other companies with weak brand awareness would gain from a negative crisis rather than lose. If your brand is entirely “under the radar”, and no one is talking about you at all, then having a crisis means that at least people will talk about you; even though the experience may be unpleasant. As Oscar Wilde once put it: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about[6].”

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[6] Oscar Wilde quotes at: http://oran.ge/owildetalk

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (2/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 2 of 6

Give us 5 tips for a Romanian company (a corporation, and medium-size company) to build brand awareness with social media

At first sight, one may think that social media marketing is only devoted to large corporations which can afford to hire big enough teams to manage such new activities.

But I think it’s just the other way round.

One of the biggest beauties of social media is that it makes word-of-mouth marketing accessible even to those who have very little means. Hence, unless you are a small and medium-size enterprise with difficulties to cope with your own business and not enough time on your hands to visit your customers and do your everyday work, I would suggest on the contrary that you use social media to gain brand awareness and do business.

small is beautiful

In fact, with social media you don’t actually do business directly. You do what Bob Pearson would call “pre-commerce” (Jossey Bass, 2011), i.e. you create the conditions for people to buy your products or recommend them to one another.

As a rule, large corporations have already built brand awareness (this is why they are large, in essence); what such companies might seek in social media marketing may differ significantly from what small and medium-sized companies may be looking for.

SMEs and Soho[4] businesses are by definition lesser-known and  have to build their brand awareness in the first place.

Having said that, I can deliver 5 general tips for enterprises which are ready to jump on the bandwagon of social media marketing:

1. first and foremost, know thyself and use social networks consistently with regard to your image, and your overall marketing strategy (for different types of brands and strategies, check the work the non-profit Media Aces[5] did with brand monitoring company Synthesio,
2. don’t shift your focus from business to social media: obviously, social media should support your business by enhancing your brand experience, awareness and/or visibility. If it distracts you from doing business, then don’t do it,
3. focus on content: if you are in b2b, it will have to be very professional (in-depth articles about your visions and technical prowess for instance); if you are in b2c, your content has to be essentially entertaining, mostly on Facebook, on which users rarely want to be bothered with serious stuff but are more interested in games, polls and interaction,
4. be yourself: there is nothing worse than bombastic boasts (such as “we are the leaders!” mostly when it’s not true and that you are only a leader of a niche therefore not a leader) or salespeople trying to sell their wares on social media. Think of keeping your readers/users and customers happy first, and then think of yourself. Be simple and natural, and when you produce content make it interesting for them, and not for you!
5. “socialise” your website: not by multiplying Facebook buttons, but by making your (interesting) content easier to share.

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[4] Small Office, Home Office, i.e. very small or independent companies

[5] Media Aces is the French association of enterprises involved in social media, of which I am the President. My work on the four different types of brand in social media is available at: http://bit.ly/4brandtypessm

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (1/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 1 of 5

What trends have you identified in corporate social media management at the moment? Does Romania align to these trends (or what must Romanian companies do to do that)?

I have highlighted 10 major trends in the management of corporate social media in 2012 in a post which is available at http://oran.ge/10smtrends. This post served as a basis for my presentation at the Ronewmedia conference which took place in Bucharest on May 16^th, 2012. Rather than repeat what is said in this blog piece and was again developed during my presentation, I will attempt to sum it up in a few words:

First, social media is reaching maturity stage and is no longer considered an innovation. Second, barring a few exceptions (if you sell extremely boring products like plastic tarpaulins for instance), social media is now part of everything we do, and has become an integral part of digital marketing; b2b is no exception, on the contrary. Digital marketers who have failed to delve into the nitty-gritty of social media, have missed something big and they had better catch up. Lastly, social media is no longer restricted to a particular team within the digital department; it has to be used by each and every one of us in business.

Very few companies are an exception to this rule; the impact on b2b marketing might even be more important than that on b2c marketing, however counter-intuitive it may seem[1]. As to Romania, it is obvious that we are talking of a country in which there is already a very high level of IT knowledge and expertise, as you know there are even some international high-tech giants which are Romanian such as bitdefender[2] for instance; so it would be irrelevant to treat Romania separately from the rest of the world. Having said that, there are real regional differences in social media adoption both quantitatively and quantitatively, but the results of these discrepancies are sometimes surprising. If I look at the profile of the users of the Orange Worldwide page (http://facebook.com/Orange) you might be very surprised to learn that Central and Eastern European users amount to more than 35% of our overall users: Poland is by far the biggest fan base in our portfolio, but Romania is not very far behind in proportion, given it is a smaller country. More than 5% of our users are Romanian in fact! And our local Romanian Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/Orangeromania) is also booming with more than 164,000 likers.

So, Romania and Romanian companies are not out of sync and are part of this globalised world like anyone else. Only a handful of emerging countries as well as Iran and Russia standout; the Ronewmedia[3] conference provided enough evidence of the latter in its first panel.

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[1] Check my personal blog for this topic at http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/category/b2b-marketing/

[2] http://bitdefender.com

[3] http://ronewmedia.ro

Social Media in Corporations: social media week panel in Paris (Feb 15)

today’s selection…

Is the announcement of this upcoming panel discussion organised by IABC France on the subject of Social Media in Corporations. I will take part in this panel which will be hosted by the American University in Paris. 

Social Media in Corporations – Empowerment or Surveillance?

Wednesday, February 15 at 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Add to Calendar

A panel debate (in English) organized by IABC France and the American University of Paris.

As social media use becomes more pervasive in business, it raises questions about the way it is used both by employes and employers. Should employees be empowered to use social media, should employers use public social media data in their recruitment and how do you decide to draw the boundaries? In this debate experts from different backgrounds wil discuss these and other questions, relevant to anyone in the corporate world.

Panelists confirmed so far:

• Tim Cawsey, Corporate Communications at Gemalto
• Yann Gourvennec, Director Web, Digital and Social Media at Orange
• Andrew Hennigan, Consultant, Speaker and Writer on professional communications
• Nicholas Vieuxloup, Director of Operations at Viadeo, Social Media Club France Board Member

Moderated by: Matthew Fraser, Author, Associate Professor at AUP, Social Media Strategis

ONLINE REGISTRATION AT THIS ADDRESS

Amsterdam iStrategy conference digest – #istrategy

today’s selection is …

The very thorough and embarrassingly eulogistic review of day 2 of the iStrategy conference which took place in Amsterdam on October 26. The report was written by Bertram J. Croesn (@BertramCroes) a Spotzer Media Intern, and self-proclaimed Budding Writer, Marketer, Musician, and Observer of the World. Thanks Bertram for the nice words!

[panel discussion 1 on the morning of day 2 at the istrategy conference in Amsterdam]

[Review] #iStrategy Conference Amsterdam Day 2

As soon as I woke up in the morning, and without checking SEOmoz, I knew what the keyword for the day would be: opportunity! Given this unique chance to rub shoulders with the buffs in the industry, I inserted my spongiest of brains and proceeded to the Park Plaza Hotel near Schiphol International Airport, where the event was held. I was meeting up with my colleague and supervisor, Spotzer Media Group’s own Social Specialist, Nicolas Griffioen (@NicoGriffioen), who kindly provided me entrance to day two of the iStrategy Digital Marketing Conference (@iStratBuzz) here in Amsterdam.

Audience Engagement, User Experience and Social Monetisation

Upon receiving my nametag, we headed into the large conference area of the hotel, where we docked and prepared for the first panel discussion on Audience Engagement, User Experience and Social Monetisation. Here we got the inside scoop from social media celebrity and VP Brand Development at Tampa’s Head of Lettuce firm, Amber Osborne (@MissDestructo) as she shared some funny anecdotes on yams and experiences on what got her where she is today. I was particularly keen on hearing what Warner Music’s Ritch Sibthorpe (@RitchSibthorpe) had to say, mostly because of my interest in music and the industry. We got kicked off with a successful campaign they collaborated on with pop sensation Katy Perry. I jokingly tweeted that I wondered if I could slip him a demo, instead I did the next best thing.

via Nicolas Griffioen’s Blog : review of iStrategy conference day 2

iStrategy Amsterdam : keynote on social media ROI/ROE – #istrategy

 

As announced in a previous post, I will be keynoting at the forthcoming iStrategy conference in Amsterdam on Oct. 26. In order to introduce this keynote, I have recorded a short video clip with my team which you can visualise if you click the picture on the left-hand side. 

The ROE/ROI debate and controversy is still rankig very high on the Marketing agenda as shown in this post on the Sysomos blog entitled “Is Social Media ROI That Important!”. Actually, 4 years ago, I was thinking like that too, as stated in this old blog post I wrote late in 2008 and republished in 2009 entitled “Beyond the ROI Issue”. 

Nowadays though, I rather disagree that the “numbers are so low”. We are spending more and more, and that – whether we like it not – means that there must be a shift in our attitude. So, while we need to measure things, there is a requirement for us to:

1. dissociate ROI from just sales (savings work too!)
2. dissociate ROI and ROE (which is also a valid measure)
3. know what we measure and what with
4. take all this with a pinch of salt as the goalposts keep moving and we need to adjust constantly (the “Klout” index for instance keeps shifting.

I will be keynoting on this subject in Amsterdam, and you can catch a glimpse of the slides

See you at the iStrategy conference which is due to take place in Amsterdam next week.

Pespsico: from crisps to “innovation incubator”

PespsiCo UK, the company behind famous CPG brands such as Gatorade, 7up or Walkers may not be a high-tech giant as such but it has a knack for joint innovation anyway. The company indeed created an innovation challenge entitled PepsiCo10, the aim of which is to reward 10 digital entrepreneurs in the fields of social commerce and mobile technologies out of 130 appplicants.

The challenge gives these 10 startups a unique opportunity to boost their businesses as well as “drive business value for PepsiCo“. The challenge is about creating social commerce or mobile applications related to PepsiCo products; each of these 10 business ventures will be granted the status of a “strategic business partner, working closely with [PespsiCo] teams, internally and externally”. Winners will also be awarded £10,000 in cash but PespiCo will take no equity in those businesses.

It’s such a clever idea, one wonders why a high tech giant hasn’t yet thought about it! While launching this programme in Europe (after last year’s successful creation of the US contest), PepsiCo is promoting itself as an “innovation incubator”.

There are 5 suggested categories in this challenge:

• Social Media Community-based Marketing,
• Mobile Marketing: On the Phone, Tablets and Beyond,
• Place-based Technology,
• Online Video and Advertising,
• Gaming / Learning Platforms.

Partners of this campaign include high tech experts from OMD UK, Highland Capital Partners, Wired and Mashable. Last but not least, through this challenge, PepsiCo willl be saving on the development of innovative technologies which will help them promote their own brands … a win-win challenge and a clever Marketing trick!

more information about the 10 selected start-ups at www.pepsico10.com.

“Be Connected Forum” by LaSer – Social Media Monitoring

Today, at 6.00pm at the Champs Elysées (Espace Pierre Cardin) I will be a speaker at the “Be Connected Forum by LaSer” (programme detailed per below). My keynote will be about Social Media Monitoring and the next wave in market research.

BE CONNECTED FORUM By LaSer

Figuring out the new path leading the consumer to the brand or retailer in these times of digital revolution… such is the objective of the Be Connected Forum organised by LaSer on June 30^th, 2011 at the Espace Cardin venue in Paris.

This highly-interactive, daylong programme is intended to provide information and host exchanges on the latest challenges in today’s relationships tying the consumer to a brand or retailer; as a follow-up, a number of innovative client relation and marketing approaches will be developed.

The day’s agenda will be paced around two main highlights:

An exhibit will be dedicated to practical solutions guiding these new approaches in Client Relations and Customer Loyalty & Marketing (data marketing, mobile loyalty programmes, payment cards & solutions, Social CRM, e-signature, etc.), as well as to innovation in building Client Relations through a series of prospective demonstrations featuring the Exchanger.

(Consumer trends, Social networks, Mobility, New technologies & Retail)

A conference will be held on experience sharing with retailers and brands like Pick N Pay, Orange, Renault, Facebook and Galeries Lafayette, shaped around interactive presentations (including Client Knowledge, Card Programmes and Gamification techniques). This segment will also focus on LaSer’s study of new consumer trends in an effort to decipher customer motivations.

 

English title of my French social media opus to be announced on June 24 on Blogtalkradio

I have been invited by Eve Mayer Osburn (aka Linkedin Queen) and Mary B. Adams for a chat at Blogtalkradio. Here’s an introductory video to the show (due to take place on Friday June 24th at 5.00pm CET) and below the video, a dump from the Blogtalkradio page’s introductory text. In the video I am describing the four main items which I will talk about on the show.

Scoop: I will also make an announcement about the forthcoming adaptation  of our best-selling French book “social media taught to my boss”

[note: intro by the organisers] Summer’s sizzling on the Social Media for the CEO Radio show. Friday 24th June 2011 please join us at 10 am US Central time / 17:00 European central time when hosts Eve Mayer Orsburn and Mary B. Adams speak to Yann Gourvennec, Director, Web, Digital & Social Media at Orange, the key brand of France Telecom, one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators. Our guest is also co-founder at Media Aces, a non-profit organization whose aim is to promote the usage of social media for business, to help members to help each other. In his spare time, our guest is also blogging on Marketing and Innovation and is a lecturer atUniversité Paris Dauphine. Looking to pick up some tips on internet strategy and Web 2.0 implementation, social media for business, or corporate blogging, don’t miss this show.

Our show is broadcast live from Dallas, Texas and Paris, France while simulcasting a Twitter chat onTwitter.com/LinkedInQueen and onTwitter.com/SocialMediaDel. Join us by calling +1 (347) 850-8614 to listen or to ask a question on air. Orm Tweet your questions and comments to @LinkedInQueen or @SocialMediaDel using #SM4CEO.

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”.

start small and good and try to get better @shirky says

 

 

 

 

As I am preparing a new presentation on Corporate Philanthropy and social media, I found this Shirky quote on Andy Sernovitz’s website.

 

Tyson Foods’ Hunger Relief Program

Better late than never. I was going through my files today and I found this old piece written after a Blogwell event which took place in New York two years ago. So here it is with much delay but I thought it was worth reading and publishing anyway. Now that I have gone through it I regret I didn’t publish it earlier on because I think that this business case was/still is very inspirational:

Blogwell presentation number 3: Tyson hunger relief (http://www.tysonhungerrelief.com)
April 2009, NYC, NY

Tyson, hunger relief, presentation by Ed Nicholson
in charge of social media, Tyson foods in the US

The third presentation of Blogwell number 3 was that of Ed Nicholson, in charge of social media at Tyson foods in the US, and was entitled how Tyson foods, uses social media to build a community around the issue of hunger.

Tyson’s Ed Nicholson, our fellow member from Socialmedia.org - photo courtesy of disruptology.com

To an extent, this is a similar subject to the one we already tackled in a post about a previous Blogwell presentation which took place in San Jose at the end of October 2008, when Kaiser Permanente presented its initiative against obesity. This time, even though the approach is similar, the aim is quite the opposite as it is aimed at those people in the US suffering from hunger.

I found the description of how a big company like Tyson is trying to tackle this issue, using social media, quite interesting and inspiring. Tyson’s initiative is not about just about a website. It’s about “engaging people in productive and visible ways” Ed said. And God knows there are many people at Tyson foods, even though their name may not be very well known in Europe.

In Iowa alone 9,000 people are working for them, and up to 10% of its workforce is actually involved in this hunger relief program. This hunger relief, social media initiative is more than “the campaign for Tyson.” Ed added. It is actually used to leverage donations in order to tackle the issue of hunger. It started in 2000 and has been going on for now nine years.

(Tyson Hunger Relief Food Donation at Finney County, Kansas – picture by Tyson foods inc.)

The idea is to use the website in order to “give food to the people who can’t afford it”. Ed is insisting upon the fact that there was already “a phenomenal community engaged in this issue”. These are good stories, which are also very favourable ground for online blogging and donation events.

Tyson foods has already 2,814 followers on twitter (and 8,201 2 years later). The company is actually following very strictly disclosure rules, as per Socialmedia.org guidelines, and it displays its name on its twitter page. The number of people who find food insecure, according to Ed is staggering. This is instrumental in making the social media initiative by Tyson very dynamic. In a matter of four hours, any post can receive up to 800 comments!

There is no doubt very few social media initiatives can attract that many comments in such a little time. Ed insists upon the fact that “these tools change all the time, but relationships are here to stay’”. I think this is a very wise description of the social media context, one has to focus on relationships, not on the tools, which are only a means to an end.

“Some people understand the media part”, Ed says, “but not the social part”. They are not all one-way push tools. They are about “generating communities”. And generating communities, has nothing to do about technicality, it is a human thing, hence the “social” in social media.

Ed says that agencies can’t develop communities for Tyson because they can’t create strategies. It takes times it takes time therefore, and you combine your way in.

Questions and answers

Q: negative posts.

A: They are kept because they give us an opportunity to respond. “You are using hunger for the wrong reasons,” says one very nasty comment on their blog. “But it’s one point of entry in the discussion”, Ed says.

[note, now it’s me talking: As I pointed out many many times, this kind of opportunity to respond is made available in social media, but it will not in traditional media. As as a consequence negative comments on social media in my eyes are less dangerous than in traditional media].

Q: developing policies and guidelines

A: policies and guidelines are about doing what’s right and what’s legal. But Ed insisted upon the fact that policies were not established first. It started off doing the job and then putting the policies in place.

Q: personal versus company

A: Tyson is a company account on twitter, not a personal account, but it’s managed by Ed. He decided to declare it in his own name, rather than using the company name. Sometimes he uses its twitter account to tweet about stuff, which is personal.

Q: health/nutrition issues

approximately 20% of kids (out of 37 million) are by definition obese. Moreover, they can be both obese and malnourished at the same time. Ed says that food banks are also getting into twitter too and that partnerships with agencies are possible.

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 …

Long Now Foundation: slower pace, better future … well maybe

(you may also vote for this article on Marktd)

Good morning, we are on Monday, the twenty first of January zero two thousand and eight. No this isn’t a typo, but rather a sign that we are taking into account the fact that humanity still has a few millenniums to go through. Well… hopefully! [One may have doubts when one considers the dreadful status of pollution in emerging behemoths like China (and this is just a beginning; despite courageous efforts by the likes of the ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown, there is little or no evidence that anything will be done to curb carbon emissions over there)]. Thus, focussing on the long term is what the ‘Long Now Foundation’ (a term coined by famous UK musician and innovator Brian Eno) is doing as a day job. The foundation is a think tank aimed at promoting long term thinking (by long term, the foundation member certainly don’t mean anything like 18 to 24 months). As a result their seven recommendations are that we should:

1. serve the long view (and the long viewer)
2. foster responsibility
3. reward patience
4. mind mythic depth
5. ally with competition
6. take no sides
7. leverage longevity

All which items should be heard by marketers as the foundation for increasing Corporate Responsibility in what they are doing. Needless to say that we still have a long way to go, but there are also encouraging signs that things are moving in the right direction. Yet, those of us who are endeavouring to take a lot of hindsight and put Nature above Fashion and not sacrifice Culture and the Environment on the altar of greed, may have a tough time now and again. It was my case when I read that issue (Vol. 171, No. 4 dated January 28, 2008) of Time magazine Europe; the ‘briefing‘ section on page of this issue triggered a few thoughts related to that subject. In this section weirdly entitled ENVIROTECH and even more weirdly substitled Green Machines, Time describes some of the highlights of the Detroit 2008 auto show:

Detroit’s annual Auto Show displays the best and brightest prototypes for eco-friendly cars Jan. 19-27. A look at some of the top innovators from the U.S. and abroad.

• TOYOTA A-BAT Utilizes solar panels
• SAAB 9-4X BIOPOWER Runs on biofuels
• FISKER HYBRID First true electric plug-in car
• JEEP RENEGADE Gets up to 110 m.p.g.
• MERCEDES-BENZ VISION GLK Powered by a diesel engine
• LAND ROVER LRX 2-L turbodiesel

This is how huge diesel-powered SUV’s, dubbed Chelsea Tractors in London by Environmental activists, are deemed “green” (for a hint on what Diesel fumes have in store for you, please check the UK Government’s official Health and Safety Executive website). Seeing this makes you think about long term view doesn’t it.

The Long Now Foundation describes its Clock and Library project in the following way:

“Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think”.

But the real question is not whether people see the clock (or Arthus Bertrand’s earth from above photos or Nasa’s or anything else) and think it’s cool. The real point is how do we go beyond this and actually do something about it. Marketing and Innovation has to go beyond this green paradox and start acting on it, or it will disappear. For those who still doubt it, I would recommend that they read Futurelab’s Alain Thys’s presentation on how Marketing committed suicide.

Let us hope that the clock is really well engineered and that we’ll keep our eyes on it all the time, there is a lot of catching up to do.

side note: many thanks to Stewart Baines from Futurity Media for telling me about the Long Now Foundation.

Start-up of the month : Synthesio describes the 4 types of brands on the web (2/2)

note: this is the continuation of an interview of Synthesio’s Loic Moisand (see part one here). many thanks to Synthesio‘s Michelle Chmielewski for her help with the Englsh version of this post

Major trends in the monitoring market: consolidation and transversal moves

The market has greatly evolved since 2006 and showed signs of maturity in the consolidation actions among various actors. Scoutlabs was bought out by Lithium Technologies, Sysomos by Marketwire. The bought-out companies were easy prey “at the moment of the explosion of social media with the desire of creating true groupings”.

That doesn’t just mean more consolidations, but also more transversal actions with integrations:

• of social CRM (integration of client relations and social media, one of the most significant trends of 2010)
• of the press (with press and social media domains becoming more and more intertwined: on the one hand press relations officers are trying to reach information producers that are not connected to the mass media, bloggers in particular, and especially using different methods to transform their press releases into social media releases)

Other actors, including early days French pioneer KBCrawl “have stayed in ‘tool’ mode and haven’t switched to SaaS dashboards” and are being overtaken by swifter players.

brands online reputation: 4 main profiles

I’ve kept the best part for now. 4 years of experience in the field have allowed Synthesio to depict the landscape of online brands in a particularly striking manner; Loic Moisand highlights 4 main types of brands (pictures in the following diagram):

1. “Under-the-radar” brands

These are the brands that…we don’t talk about, or at least not a lot. A little bit like those friends that you invite to a party that don’t show up. There is either no or very little buzz for these brands that are consequently put into a “PR intravenous drip” that could only with hope to revive interest in the brand. In this category we find a jumble of mass-produced products like dishwashing soap and some B2B brands. Here are nonetheless 2 examples of companies that managed to “break the mold” (the best way to revive interest in your brand) :

• Blendtec with their famous WebTV series “Will it Blend?” that was present at the last MediaAces conference in Paris June 22, 2010 (http://france.media-aces.org)
• “compare the Market”’s URL was too long and getting too many searches for “compare the meerkat”. Comparethemarket, a sort of “progressive.com” decided to create an online character making fun of people that were typing it wrong in order to create their own buzz.

Not only are there numerous B2B brands fitting into this category that haven’t been able to break the mold, “3/4 of brands fit into this category,” adds Loic Moisand.

Important sidenote : certain brands, depending on the country, their media, and culture, may be “under the radar” here and not somewhere else. The French insurance-comparing site meilleurtaux.com generated high levels of buzz in France but Comparethemarket, the UK equivalent ended up being less successful (hence the need to do things differently)

2. Functional brands

This is another brand category that doesn’t necessarily inspire deep passion but that can generate a large number of comments. It has to do with brands that “we just want to work, and that’s it”. These are the brands that don’t leave you indifferent, but don’t necessarily cry out for your attention, either. In these types of cases the buzz level is  rather high, but focused around the product’s/service’s functions, price, the quality of customer service, etc with levels of dissatisfaction that are often quite elevated. This category includes : e-commerce sites, washing machines, household appliances, mass high-tech goods (except for Apple) and telecommunications operators. The response in this domain has been to have a community manager for their own sites (FAQ, tech support, answering questions) as well as on third-party forums to help web users with a proactive intervention (Orange has actually just taken this step).

3. Brands we love

This segment is – of course – brand nirvana. Unfortunately very few brands are able to be a part of this group, for sometimes irrational reasons. The brands that are able to attain this segment are brands from groups 1 and 2 that have “launched an emotional movement”. Apple, video games (Wii), Sony (only for certain products), Coke, and fashion brands are a few examples of “Brands we love”. They are brands that “take up all the space” and the ones that are always examples, which can almost become slightly irritating at times…They’re incredibly popular, and you can’t do anything about it. They are the brands that knew how to create “a relationship that is more imortant than the product” according to Bernard Cova.

Not everyone can get to this stage. It is full of clans of enthusiasts and brand advocates, where brands don’t need to “create communities” because they already exist, often on their own (Apple doesn’t have one blog and supposedly doesn’t intervene in social media other than to police what’s being said, which no one really seems to find surprising and hasn’t cut down on fan enthusiasm).

The best attitude to have for this group is to accompany communities : answer questions, inform fans, encourage them, occasionally give them gifts to thank them for their loyalty. Blogger clubs are also a phenomenon of this group, which can sometimes lead to large demands. Microsoft – in order to avoid always talking about Apple – organized the launche of Windows 7 at the end of 2009 in its Windows café. All interested bloggers were invited to get a very nice gift – their own complete version of Windows 7 on a DVD just for them. The brand decided not to get involved any further in blog discussions than that. It took a respectful approach of its community, which was the right attitude in this case.

4. Sensitive brands

These are brands that are “stressful” according to Loic Moisand’s terminology. The 3 sectors that are affected the most: health, safety, and children. People are scared in this segment, the brand can be scary, or becmoe a threat; the stress is real and “you have to reassure people”. It’s the only thing that can be done. Admitting you were wrong and showing that you are correcting the problem, even if, when opinion is against you, the attempt is bound to fail. Becoming a “sensitive brand” means risking becoming a disgraced brand. Certain brands will forever be in this category, like pharmaceuticals for example (without exception according to Loic Moisand); but there are other brands that switch from other segments to this danger zone :

1. banks, since the 2007 crisis, have become scapegoats for the economic problems in the West if you believe their detractors, to the point of having lost sight of their essential economic functions (see the example of Kerviel here)
2. BP, that has now become a symbol – according to their detractors – for the environmental problems like Total in France after Erika – justified or not
3. chronically : users with worries – based on facts or not (not up to us to decide) – about electromagnetic waves from WiFi connections, Wimax, telephones, etc (here’s a link towards a show with Etienne Cendrier from the site robin des toits)
4. food brands criticized for their choice of ingredients or their methods, like Nestlé, for example, that became a Greenpeace target in 2010 for their use of palm oil in chocolate products

A dynamic brand classification

A brand can pass from one segment to another at any moment. Apple did, for example, when a rumor about exploding iPhones spread in 2009, as did Renault with rumors of stuck Vel Saltis gas pedals (2005-2006), and Toyta in 2010 with with their own technical problems, even if the rumors usually disappeared along with the crisis.

I find this classification to be particularly useful as it presents us with a point of view that is different from the classic clichés heard on the web about brands. It also allows for web and PR directors to take a step back in order to decide which direction is the best for their brand.

sidenote: this is an empirical classification and is not a result of a scientific study. It may evolve over time depending on the country and brand’s history. The opinions expressed here about certain brands are the personal opinions of the author and do not reflect a proof of good or bad quality of these brands whatsoever.