Synthesio report on Social Media Week 2013 puts me (and Nigeria) on the map #SMW13

It’s very flattering that my name appears on the list of “influencers” who took part in the social media week events of last week. Synthesio has put together this report which is very interesting and shows some of the countries and cities which are head and shoulders above the rest in terms of twittering and social media usage. Strangely enough though, Italy shows up on top of the list, above France and… even more surprisingly, England. Even more strange, we see Nigeria in the list of the most important countries of that social media week. I would have thought that people in Lagos had far too many fishes to fry at this very moment in order to become Twitteratis . Or is it that there is a glitch in the report? Identifying and measuring “influence” is definitely a very difficult and risky sport which contrasts with its apparent obviousness.

Social Media Week is a worldwide event connecting people and organizations globally, through collaboration, learning and sharing ideas. This week, 10 cities around the world celebrate the tremendous social, cultural and economic impact of social media.

Social Media Week has become an incredible platform and community that has grown to more than 100k members – this year, SMW celebrates its fifth birthday and marks this milestone with a unifying global theme that represents the connectedness and openness of the collaborative, digital world. This global theme is evident when examining overwhelming buzz around the event all across the map.

At Synthesio, we eagerly jump on the opportunity to track global conversations around an event of this magnitude with such a web frenzy surrounding it, so we decided to take a sip from our Twitter Firehose and track all Twitter conversations surrounding Social Media Week 2013, to provide you with engaging insights into the overall reach of the event, trending topics, and finally, our list of top influencers driving the conversations.

So, now it’s halftime for SMW13 and we invite you to stand up, stretch, grab a drink, and enjoy the Synthesio SMW Halftime Report. Congrats to the top influencers in the U.S., France, UK and Singapore, and don’t forget to check back for the full Post-Game Analysis!

via Social Media Week 2013 – Halftime Report – Synthesio #SMW13.

The true colour of brands and true nature of infographics (1)

today’s selection is…

Thanks to my favourite stumble upon gimmick for finding new content and subjects, I discovered this very interesting piece of infographics about the true nature of brands according to their colour. I do not know what these graphics, beautifully crafted by the way, “[tell] about your business” as the headline says, but I certainly know what it means about the way that we read, understand and are influenced by pictures. A long time ago (2003), I published a piece on my  visionarymarketing.com website by Giancarlo Livraghi, an Italian publicist and the author of a book in Italian entitled “the cultivation of the Internet“. Giancarlo, in that piece, was describing what he called PowerPointis, a concept he had come across while seeing Colin Powell use pictures to convince the UN that the war on Iraq was justified. His point was that most of Powel’s pictures were fabricated but weren’t questioned because it’s hard not to believe pictures. This theory was accredited later in a Hollywood film based on a true story (Green Zone - 2010). I will re-publish this very important piece in a forthcoming post.

Imago ergo sum …

Infographics, mostly those like this one which are beautiful and laid out with excellent taste, go straight to the point and are easy to grasp. They are emotional and aesthetic. They appeal to our feelings. Besides because they are so simple and didactic, they are taken at face value, so much so that no one dares point out that they could be wrong. All you need is a click of the mouse and hey presto! The picture is multiplied and shared throughout the world. It is no longer cogito but imago ergo sum (see this piece in French).

Yet, infographics are also simplistic and exaggerated. They save time but at the same time, pictures tend to deprive readers from their critical eye. Most of the time they are non representative and show surprising results. They often refer to “a study the world’s top 100…” (Brands in this particular case) but who selected the sample? What are those brands? Who commissioned the study? Where are the results to be found? What methodology?… Such questions are and will remain, most probably, unanswered.

ING Orange account doomed to failure? not so not so…

A close look at the details underneath is even more enlightening. I just focused on the orange colour for a reason (disclosure: I work for Orange). As this colour is used by the company I work for, I’m very happy to realise that it is popular for high-tech according to this infographics and that the colour code is consistent with the brand values which we all like. I also read that this colour is said to be unpopular for banking whereas ING has been using this colour-code very successfully not only in the Netherlands but throughout the world and especially in the US where it is well known and associated with this colour.

I do not need to go any further. Looking at a nice picture like this makes me think of looking at a horoscope: it’s fun, entertaining, slightly puzzling, but this is not knowledge. Knowledge requires sources. Knowledge, requires contradiction. Knowledge can use pictures; but it certainly can do away with infographics.

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

social media API war goes on unabated (reblogged from Gigaom)

Here is an illustration for today’s talk at the French Association of Marketing on the future of social media and a sequel to our discussions with Dalton Caldwell in San Francisco last September.

What the Instagram fight says about Twitter as a media platform — Tech News and Analysis

Instagram says it is removing the ability for Twitter to embed photos because it wants users to go to its own website instead of Twitter’s to see that content. Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter.

Remember when Twitter was just a free and open conduit for whatever content its users wanted to distribute? Those days are long gone now, replaced by Twitter’s desire to control and monetize as much of its platform as possible, and as much of the content that flows through it. The latest skirmish in this ongoing battle came on Wednesday, when Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed that the service has removed support for Twitter’s “expanded tweets” feature, and therefore photos won’t be showing up in Twitter any more. While Instagram’s relationship with Twitter is complicated, its reasons for doing this should make other media companies stop and think about how they use (or are being used by) Twitter as well.

As noted by Nick Bilton in a New York Times piece and by my colleague Erica Ogg — and confirmed by a post at the official Twitter blog — what Instagram has done is to remove support for the expanded view of tweets that shows up on the Twitter website and in its official apps. These tweets have a special pane that displays excerpts from blog posts and news stories published by certain partners, or photos and videos from certain external services. Twitter originally launched this as something called “expanded tweets” but it has since become a much more ambitious platform called “Twitter Cards.”

via What the Instagram fight says about Twitter as a media platform — Tech News and Analysis.

Brogan Declares Social Media Not Dead But Boring

Today’s selection is…

Chris Brogan’s latest piece which shows that those who were in first, had to go out first too. I remember Chris from his presentation at Like Minds 2010 in Exeter where I keynoted too: he was passionate, energetic… and warning the world that something big was happening.

with Chris Brogan after Like Minds 2010

All that is gone now! three gazillion repetitive blog pieces later, you now know everything about how to optimise your corporate Twitter account and/or how to trick (or survive) Facebook’s ever-changing edge rank algorithm. Or rather, you don’t! because possessing focus focusing on tools is useless! Take a bit of hindsight with this piece and find out why…

by Chris Brogan

Isn’t it time we started telling bigger stories than this?

When Julien Smith and I wrote The Impact Equation, we had a very specific goal in mind: help people get attention, understanding, and eventually a relationship of value. We built the book around the premise that well-defined goals were needed to craft ready-to-understand ideas, and that people could build a platform to spread those ideas to a network of people who cared enough to share those ideas with others. That’s the simplest possible summary of the book.

What people maybe thought they were getting was a book about social media and social networks, about marketing and campaigns. Some people believe that’s what Julien and I do. Social media are a set of tools. They’re not all that interesting to talk about in and of themselves. The “gee whiz” has left the station. We want to talk about action– or if you’ll pardon the self-reference, impact.

via Social Media Isn’t Dead: It’s Boring.

real influencers in social media may not be those who you think! – #blogbus

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 Chorus an “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.

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).

---

[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.

 

---

[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].”

---

[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.

---

[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.

---

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

[2] http://bitdefender.com

[3] http://ronewmedia.ro

what social media tool for what message? #csmb2c

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

10 Major Trends In Corporate Social Media Management (1/2)

http://oran.ge/10smtrends

8 years after its introduction – and a few name changes – Corporate Social Media can no longer be considered as an innovation. We have clearly hit the third wave of its implementation in Corporate environments, that is to say the structuring of collaborative web initiatives in order to scale in multi-billion dollar companies (and smaller companies. In this piece which will serve as a basis for my presentation in Bucharest at the ronewmedia digital conference due to take place on May 16th, 2012. I will use my 5 years of practice in that field at Orange and dwell on some of the major trends impacting Social Media and its management in large corporations. My presentation will highlight these trends which will be illustrated with real life examples taken from the field.

[diagram: 3 stages in social media, Kabla & Gourvennec, 2011]

First and foremost, it has to be confirmed that this is definitely the end of the beginning of social media in large enterprises. Almost 10 years after the invention of Web 2.0 and its deployment in enterprises, brands are no longer toying with the idea of jumping on the band waggon, but are rather busy at structuring and streamlining their initiatives. In our book (“social media talked to my boss” published in Paris in 2011, the English adaptation of which is in progress, the working title being “social media from the trenches”), Hervé Kabla and myself were already emphasising the need for a third stage in the implementation of social media (structuring).

This statement is even more true nowadays with the advent of a second wave of a very serious European economic crisis, to a certain extent a lot deeper and harder than the one that struck in 2009, even though the numbers related to the growth in GDP are – so far – less ominous. As a matter of fact, that crisis is beginning to wear thick on the allocation of marketing budgets (even though digital is still considered low cost by most) and to an extent it is a good opportunity to streamline our processes and curb a few excesses.

As we are working towards this streamlining phase, which is definitely on the agenda at Orange where I manage social media and digital for the group, I feel 10 major trends coming to the fore in 2012. Here they are, in random order, based on my experience in the field:

trend number 1: mobile devices/iPad (and not tablets) are becoming obligatory, whether you like it or lump it

this statement is less obvious than it may seem. I have noticed as I was attending many meetings with my peers in the digital world recently, that few actually knew how many of their users were looking at their websites via a mobile device. Facts and figures related to my website orange.com (anything between 1.2 and 1.5 million monthly uniques) are however very clear: since 2011, it’s more than 15% of our users who have gone mobile. Yet, something new has happened in that area. I mean the proportion of iPads (and I don’t mean tablets in general) which are being used by our readers. In essence, twice as many iPads as there are iPhones, in themselves by far the most used of smartphones as far as our readers are concerned! Without judging, the amount of the audience using android devices is very fragmented, non-iPad tablets being completely invisible in my statistics. These numbers are not neutral when it comes to designing websites or adapting social media platforms for brand purposes, and let alone when it comes to the socialisation of traditional websites which is another major trend which we have observed (per below).

Trend number 2: content marketing is no longer a gadget, it has become central to our strategies

I often tell the story about my beginnings at orange business services when I started to introduce business blogging and started recruiting experts among our ranks. The first few reactions which I got at the time were “we are not the New York Times!” Whereas I do agree with that statement and wouldn’t even venture to compare blogs to eminent news pages, everybody who’s been working in the web industry for at least a little while understands that the web is fuelled with content. Internet content, and particularly user generated content (UGC) has become central to our content driven strategies nowadays and is no longer debated. This is the case also at Orange where we have been able to impose many of these platforms such as orange – innovation.TV, the feed (UK), le collectif (France), as well as live.orange.com and very soon orange inside which will be available directly on the main orange.com portal (see our major trend devoted to curation). Not to mention the Orange Business Services blog which I created more than four years ago. These sources of information are now part of our communications landscape, are no longer seen as a gadget, and are directly incorporated within the enterprise and embedded in its DNA.

Trend number 3: social media has changed the way one hires new employees … for ever

Due to sociological, structural and organisational changes, the good old resume has become largely obsolete. In Canada alone more than 90% of jobseekers are using social media to find for a new employer. There is no reason why employers, this side of the Atlantic or anywhere else, should do anything else either. At a time when Monster is going through a rough patch, one could actually say that LinkedIn has killed the traditional resume and the way that one used to look for a job in the past. I won’t complain about it personally. I have always found degrading the practice of sending one’s curriculum vitae through the post so that it would end up in an unknown anonymous pile of 2000 resumes.

Social media and e-reputation now enable employees to “sell” themselves online, without having as if they were brands. Eight years after its release, LinkedIn is now slowly but surely becoming the world’s online and rich media resume. To a large extent this changes the way companies too are using social media, and the impact on HR strategies being driven by digital and how they attract new candidates is of paramount importance.

Tools like LinkedIn, Viadeo, Xing and Vkontakte in Russia and even Facebook are becoming unavoidable.

trend number 4: curation (in the noble sense of the term) can become a major asset for companies which are into content marketing

“curation”, is not a term of which I have always been fond. In the beginning, curation very often meant that people would actually steal your content using RSS feeds not quote the author and plonk the content back into their own blogs or platforms, without having to pay tribute to anyone. Whenever you came back to them they would answer something like “Oh! there is nothing I can do about it, this is just the platform you know; it’s automatic!” Even though the statement was feeble, there was indeed very little you could do about it. However, may be with a little help from the Google penguin (and before Panda) algorithm, one managed to do away with most of content aggregation platforms, and now original content is back on the agenda; content producers can at last reap the harvests they have sown. As a matter of fact, certain platforms have either disappeared or been taken over (like summify which was taken over by Twitter and for which new user registrations are now closed) while others have matured considerably. I would for instance dwell on the scoop’it platform, a Franco-American start-up, which has always taken great care at promoting original content through its curation technology rather than steal it. In early June 2012, Orange will release a new curation platform powered by Scoop’it in order to fuel is brand-new inside orange dynamic site. There will be a dual stage curation process on Insife Orange : first aggregating internal Orange content throughout the world (23 different RSS feeds) and second proposing external content curated by the team. Platform will be available at inside.orange.com.

Trend number 5: beyond the fan page

a year ago, I was already announcing that the future would not be for brands to develop bigger and bigger and bigger fan pages, even though some analysts are still stuck with a measurement of the number of fans on brand names therefore triggering a silly competition for which customers pay very little interest. Engagement rates on these fan bases are smaller and smaller, and the bigger the fan base, the smaller the engagement rate. With the advent of Facebook timeline, discussions are now even less visible on brand fan pages. The future will be about the capitalisation on such discussion platforms in order to create second to none content, which readers would want to share on their own spaces. This has now become reality on most content websites which already incorporate what is now known as Facebook opengraph and Facebook connect (not to mention Twitter and LinkedIn connect etc). Sharing buttons are now trivial and are not even part of the debate any more. Even though it has taken us a little bit of time to implement it (in fact we didn’t just change the website, we overhauled the entire platform), this vision is really central to the new orange.com website which we will release at the end of May, as well as it enhancements in mid June.

to be continued on Visionary Marketing …

learn from the savviest European social media practitioners … and save £ 100 on ticket price

I will be taking part in the oncoming Social Media B2C Marketing Summit due to take place in London, on June 25th and 26th and as I am preparing for the event, I took a few moments to dig my teeth into the programme and I realised it’s not a conference but the conference on European Social Media … absolutely packed with extremely high profile social media managers from some of the most prominent European brands. It was high time something was done to catch up with the likes of Blogwell in the USA, and here it is, right at our door, so it’s an event you shouldn’t miss.

the pitch

The Social Media Marketing Summit (25-26 June, London UK)
Social media represents a growing marketing opportunity for business to directly engage with their consumers. The phenomenal growth of social media activity has meant consumers are now interacting with their favourite brands and regularly checking for the latest updates online.

Orange, Heineken, Unilever and KLM are a selection of brands which have embedded social media throughout their marketing campaigns. Join these leading brands on the 25-26th June at the 2012 Social Media Marketing Summit, London.

Learn how to deliver engaging and interactive marketing tactics to entice your consumers to engage with your brand. O2, Honda, Tom Tom, Barclaycard and many more will share exclusive case studies, their everyday experiences and best practice, so you can improve your social media marketing efforts.

£100 off ticket price

Quote YG12 and save an £100 you register at http://bitly.com/Socialreg

about my presentation at the summit

Orange has been very active in the Social Media space since early 2008 and now has an online fanbase of over 3 million fans. With a presence on Twitter,
Google+ and Dailymotion – in which Orange has a stake – Orange has experience in using multiple networks – and insight on which networks are best for different kinds of marketing. Hear how this telecoms giant chooses different social platforms to engage with their community and meet marketing goals.

• how to decide which tools work for you : hear how Orange decides which social network works best for them and how you can decide depending on your organisations goals.
• learn which social platforms are most effective to market your brand and build brand awareness:  Orange will share which worked best for them and why
• hear why Orange doesn’t just rely on Facebook and Twitter: discover which other social networks you should be using and how these can help your online marketing.

Hitachi: making social media work for B2B

Sharon Crost is Global Online Marketing and Social Media Manager at Hitachi Data Systems and she delivered what I believe is one of the most inspiring presentations on March 27 at Blogwell in San Francisco and it’s no surprise to me ( who already made a presentation at an earlier edition of Blogwell in Atlanta a couple of years ago) that B2B is one of the major targets for social media. Here is why, in 5 questions, asked by Sharon to the riveted Blogwell audience.

“HDS products (left) are not sexy” was Sharon’s introduction to her pitch at Blogwell. It doesn’t seem very intuitive that social media could work out for products like that. Yet, it proved very rewarding for the storage and data recovery company. In just five questions, Sharon proved her case very compellingly. Here is my account of her punchy presentation.

Question 1: is social media a good investment?

Although many of the people in the room anticipated the answer to that question to be a “yes”, Sharon explained that they “were not so sure at first sight because it’ wasn’t an obvious thing”. So they “needed to test it out” she went on. Being a B2B company, they didn’t have much of a presence at first and even with a very small budget, which was used very effectively they managed to get some very good results.

They started with a test of a quiz campaign in which they tried to get people to engage on social media. The prize was a Hitachi LCD HD TV set. This campaign drew people to their social site to answer the quiz. Another campaign was the “globe campaign” and you had to spin the globe and click on the tweets, the whitepapers etc. A third one was entitled “a quest for scalability”…

Sharon concluded that first chapter by saying that “the first lesson is to think about what is socially sharable about your brand and this may not necessarily be your products!”.

[photo cc by Yann Gourvennec http://bit.ly/picasayann]

Q2: if people aren’t in the target market, should you discourage them?

Her answer was neither yes or no this time. “In fact you have to be nice to everyone (you never know), but you have to treat them nicely but differently”. For people in our targets we let them win a “storage assessment” she added; those who won TV sets were kept happy but they weren’t forcibly part of HDS’ audience.

The current campaign is a storage mapping tool. People can still engage to win an iPad “but they aren’t the target audience” Sharon added. Target customers or prospective customers are also given a chance to opt-in for free information.

Q3: can you do that on a shoestring?

Sharon’s answer is a resounding Yes! (and all voted for that answer in the room). Earned is the most important part, but “paid” comes to amplify the message.

Q4 which one works best? Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook?

The answer to that question is very counter-intuitive and it must be pointed out that it might very well work differently depending on the brand or mostly, where it’s based. The very footprint of Facebook in the US is making it unavoidable. And therefore, HDS found out that it was indeed Facebook which worked best for “with a small amount of money [they] could see the ROI for each channels and Facebook proved the more rewarding” je concluded.

Q5: what is the most obvious benefit for B2B?

There isn’t one answer to that question Sharon said, and she listed a number of benefits including

• cheaper marketing
• community of influencers
• re-engage participants
• better conversion results

The results for Hitachi Data Systems were tremendous and way above the initial goals. For whitepapers only, 9,000 of them were read said Sharon, a tremendous result when you think that most B2B companies will pay – not always wisely -  big money for doing this.

5 recommendations

Sharing issued her recommendations to B2B users:

1. test, go out there and find out what social engagement means to you;
2. segment your audience (target and non target audience). All you have to do is give them the option and let them choose what role they want to play ;
3. you don’t need a large budget but be sure to amplify the impact of your campaigns;
4. performance metrics are important (think Dashboard);
5. social interactions must be nurtured, have fun and play games.

Q&A

is there an internal program at Hitachi Data Systems ?
There is an internal social media ambassador network. HDS wants to show its people they are encouraged to retweet, share the information and be twitter/Facebook champions. and they can also win an iPad. Sister Hitachi companies provide the freebies.

Japan
It’s not easy because they don’t have the same culture in Japan (it’s “closed versus open kimono” she said). They don’t want to respond to any tweets. A big struggle took place but they were able to show them the purpose and they eventually were retweeted but “you had to show them first that you respected their culture” Sharon concluded.

metrics
Hitachi Data Systems have a major social media dashboard which they publish twice a year and they use it to show stakeholders what major benefits and issues are at hand and how many clicks are generated for instance (like 9,000 on whitepapers and how much you’d have to pay for such clicks)

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

about “tweetable” marketing “truths”

today’s selection is …

Pamela Vaughan‘s highly enjoyable “truth vs. myth” tweetable piece on Marketing at Hubspot. Enjoyable for sure, but you should take some of these facts and figures with a pinch of salt. Much as I believe in the power of social media, my field experience has shown that Facebook is not a catch-all tool for B2B for instance. There are many more effective ways of attracting leads when you are in B2B than writing up a Facebook post: Blog posts, affiliate marketing and well crafted, really meaty whitepapers (not those slapdash “bought from someone else” things but the real mac Coy which tell the world you are a true expert and know what you are talking about). Instead, you might want to recycle this idea of a safe tweettable piece with real myths and truths such as those taken from Scott Berkun’s Myths of Innovation opus.

42 Tweetable Facts to Squash Marketing Fantasies

We hear a ton of marketing myths everyday that have no basis on research or facts. They’re simply made-up fantasies that people have come to believe. But let’s face it, we marketers can’t afford to live in a fantasy world. Instead, we need to rely on cold, hard facts to guide is in the right direction toward inbound marketing success.

That’s why we’ve released our newest ebook to help you separate marketing fact from fantasy. Download your copy here, and tweet some of your favorite facts below! Some of them might surprise you.

Inbound Marketing

• Fantasy: Inbound marketing focuses exclusively on top-of-the-funnel objectives like attracting prospects & leads.
• Fact: Inbound marketing helps attract leads & also helps convert those leads into paying customers. (Tweet This)

Social Media

• Fantasy: B2B companies don’t need to waste their time on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn.
• Fact: 39% of B2B companies using Twitter & 41% using Facebook have acquired new customers from it. (Tweet This)
• Fantasy: Facebook may be great for building buzz, but it has yet to prove itself as an effective channel for generating sales.
• Fact: 41% of B2B companies & 62% of B2C companies using Facebook have acquired a customer from it. (Tweet This)
• Fact: 51% of Facebook fans are more likely to buy brands they ‘like.’ (Tweet This)

via 42 Tweetable Facts to Squash Marketing Fantasies.

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: measuring ROI/ROE in Social Media – #istrategy

As announced in a previous post, I was a keynote at the  iStrategy conference in Amsterdam on Oct. 26. Beside the short video clip which I have recorded with my team in order to introduce the keynote, I have also prepared a fully fledged slidecast on slideshare. The package also includes a downloadable version of my dashboard at Orange.

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 now 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.

important notice about the slidecast

The slidecast for this presentation was recorded on the day before the iStrategy presentation which took place in Amsterdam on October 26th. It is therefore slightly longer than the actual presentation which lasted only 35 minutes (this slidecasts lasts for 45 minutes).

Due to a bug in Slideshare, I wasn’t able to synchronise the sound and slides properly but you can download the presentation and change the slides manually while listening to the audio.

There is a sister presentation to this one, i.e. the social media dashboard which I will let everyone download too.

important notice about the monthly Orange social media dashboard 

This Dashboard is a version of our Orange Social Media monitoring panel as of mid October. P¨lease note that it was issued on the eve of a major change of the Klout score algorithm and that therefore I am not certain that I will not replace this metric with another more reliable one. This dashboard is an attempt at making sense and putting numbers behind our social media engagement and presence, it is no way comprehensive and it is not meant to achieve anything else than help us hone our skills and improve engagement with our audiences.

Note: this is the monthly dashboard and doesn’t include the more in-depth analysis which is being produced by the team on a weekly basis.

As the question was asked, the data source is either socialbakers or Twitter counter, or Tweetreach, or even Google Analytics for the most part. The data is crunched into Exel and then injected through Adobe Indesign. The initial design was done by a graphic artist and the maintenance is done in my team. The job of maintaining this dashboard is a couple of hours per month and should not be more than this.