Why Facebook will NOT be “Yahooed”

This is my second contribution to the innovation generation blogs, an initiative sponsored by Alcatel. Here is my second piece entitled: Facebook, The Good, Bad and Ugly.

No one knows exactly where the social network is going, but it’s certainly going somewhere. Last September, I organised the San Francisco blogger bus tour on behalf of Orange, a unique experience, in which 14 bloggers from all over the world roamed the Valley in search of evidence that innovation wasn’t stifled by Facebook and other social media giants, as some wanted us to believe.

Yet, all along our visits, we heard claims that “Facebook was passé” and even that “Facebook would be ‘Yahooed’.” Four months later, the news that we are getting about social media is so contradictory that it is very hard to tell what’s going to happen. Yet, marketers from all over the world have invested massively in Facebook.

[photo : antimuseum.com]

The question is, will it prove useless, or will Facebook on the contrary, be the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy? And why does it matter for service providers?

The good

Facebook’s footprint is humongous and there are nos signs of “Facebook fatigue”. So many have moaned that after the one billionth user, things would start to deteriorate. Well, it didn’t happen. Socialbakers’ numbers aren’t showing evidence of that. Even though the recurring purges of fake users trigger falls in numbers, penetration rates can still go up (with less than 50 percent of the UK population, and less than 40 percent in France, there is room for improvement).

When Timeline was implemented in 2012, it was heavily criticized and doomsayers predicted users would leave the platform. They didn’t, they just got used to it, that’s all.

The bad

Facebook and Instagram have a track record for playing tricks with data privacy on the back of users. Yet, despite the recent rumors about users leaving Instagram for this reason, the news has been denied by Facebook itself. Instagram, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s firm, is even gaining users.

Zuckerberg himself admitted that privacy doesn’t matter anymore. A belief which isn’t shared by all and especially in German-speaking countries, where culturally speaking, data ownership is crucial. Max Schrems even founded a group entitled Europeans versus Facebook, which is filing legal action against Facebook.

Regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit, there is something wrong with the way the world’s largest social network is considering its users. So much so that might one rightfully wonder, like Dalton Caldwell, whether this is what social media was supposed to be, whereas it was meant to “change the world” to use one of Mr Zuckerberg’s famous quotes.

And the ugly

Very recently, LinkedIn’s Mario Sundar pointed out the lack of style in the company’s PR. This isn’t conducive to believing that marketing has changed forever like Tara Hunt had predicted.

Besides, a few months ago, Facebook decided to tweak its secret Edge Rank algorithm so that fewer users in your communities are exposed to your messages. This is no big deal for users, but for brands, it means that they are now offered to pay for “promoted posts” to reach more users. Wait a minute; what if your average TV network was offering your business advertising space and was asking for more money so that viewers are actually presented with your message? You would naturally be angry.

Yet, with Facebook, nothing has happened. Do advertisers have any other credible alternative to Facebook? As I heard one of my counterparts say at a recent advertisers’ meeting: “I know all this stuff about Google+, but Facebook is where all the users are!”

The future

What does the future hold? I’m not certain social media sells soap; what is true though is that there are a lot of similarities with the period that we are going through and the early 2000’s. Back then, everyone argued there wasn’t a business model for the Web. Yet, more than 10 years later, European e-commerce is delivering nearly as much revenue than Telecommunications companies.

Similarly, those who said there wasn’t a business model for online advertising are those who praise Google Adwords now. Multinationals spend up to several dozens of millions of euros on search engine marketing (SEM), including service providers. This is no small business.

Social media and Facebook, in particular, are no different from those early web trailblazers. The world, and service providers in particular, should stop sneering at those shaky business models. Internet business is a self-fulfilling prophecy; it has always been the case. This is high tech innovation for you, no one knows for sure where it’s going, but it certainly is going somewhere.

As a consequence, there are chances that we might have to put up with Facebook’s freaky way of handling privacy for a lot longer; that is to say as long as brands are ready to pay for advertising on Facebook and experiment on the popular social network.

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.

Google’s Page lashes out at Facebook for lack of openness

Today’s selection is…

Miguel Helft’s piece for Fortune Tech about the recent and much awaited appearance of Larry Page, the new yet not so new CEO of Google, in which many things are debated including his vocal cord problems. However, the most important passage from that story is as conclusion in which page lashes at Facebook for not being open enough and pledges openness of social data. Now you’re talking Larry! I’m almost in love with Google plus again. Let me find my old password…

[is Facebook – and other social networks – gearing towards a closed Internet?]

After long silence, Google’s Page speaks

[…] After extolling the virtues of Googles multi-year effort to develop an accurate digital representation of the real world with its mapping services, he said the company was “almost there.” In a clear reference to Apple’s embarrassing rollout of a mapping application that was riddled with errors, he added: “We are we are excited that other people have started to notice that we’ve worked hard on that for 7 years.”MORE: Facebook vs. Google: The battle for the future of the Web. He said it was “likely” that Google would try to make its maps available on Apple devices, despite its lack of control over how they would appear or be distributed.

And in a pointed criticism at Facebook refusal to open up its data to outside parties, including Googles search engine, he said the Internet worked best when essential data was shared across companies. Speaking specifically about social data, he said: “I would love to make use of that in any way we can.”

via After long silence, Googles Page speaks – Fortune Tech.

Social Media in business today : SMI conference – Marrakech

I will take part in the forthcoming Social Media Impact conference due to take place in Marrakech, Morocco on October 11-12. Here is an interview I delivered a few weeks ago in order to introduce my pitch over there. I have included a video recording of the interview as well as an embed of my presentation.

What is social media’s place in the professional world today?

It’s actually quite different from what it used to be. We’re about eight years after the introduction of social media in the enterprise so my perspective in this SMI presentation in Marrakech will be that of somebody that manages social media in the enterprise and that has been doing so for the last five years. So obviously the kind of place we are in at the moment is that of the structuring of the initiative. We shall see three major phases in the project surrounding the presentation in social media within the enterprise:

• the triggering of the project: proving the concept and that it is really worth doing.
• the development phase: how one ramps up and scales.
• the structuring phase: that’s where we’re at. The structuring of the organization, the processes and everything else.

With the constant growth and reach of these social networks, can a company survive without them today?

Obviously, certain companies can survive without social media, it depends what you do. If you deal in plastic for instance, there are very few chances that you’re going to be a major player in the collaborative web. Now, if you’re in a market like the telecoms, as we are, or in any CPG market, you’ll have to be where your customers are, and customers are there, online. Northern Africa has been absolutely booming in terms of social media usage and so yes, brands have to be where customers are, to initiate or engage in the conversation.

As a company, how do you know which social media fits best to the message you wish to pass along?

There are a number of things I will dwell on in this presentation. To start, I will change that notion of message, because this is not how social media is working. We’re not working with messages but with conversations which we may not have initiated, or at least not in a traditional way. I will also go through a number of business cases taken from Orange from all over the world (Spain, France, England, Romania), and I will go through all these examples and show some of these cases and their return on investments.

What are the major threats posed by the use of social media in a company?

Well, if you don’t handle social media very well then you could face a number of threats. I think threat number one is just not being there, thinking that the conversation doesn’t happen simply because you’re not listening to it. Threat number two is, once you’re actually there and have engaged in social media, letting things get out of hand. So you have to be there nurturing, every day, and be sure to respond to, if not everything, as much as you can. So there are loads of processes and organization: it’s probably easy to do social media for yourselves, but if you’re a large organization then it is very different.

How do you see the future of social media in the corporate world in the near future?

I think the landscape is going to change dramatically in the next few months and years. We’re going to see a lot more governance thrown in to social media and the way it is organized, or rather disorganized right now. There is going to be massive endeavours in terms of how we train people and get them up to speed with regards to social media, and not just the ‘experts’, or the ones in charge, but the entirety of the enterprise.

Video Interview: interview : SMI conference

Is app.net ‘s Dalton Caldwell the new Zuckerberg? – #blogbus

Dalton Caldwell, 32, is the founder and CEO of app.net but how he got there is a long story. A native from Texas, he went to university in Stanford, Calif., then joined Symbolic Systems in 2003. He was a precursor in social networks (check his bio on wikipedia) at the time (2003) when Friendster was around; he is the creator of Imeem, which was “originally a Skype-modelled Desktop social network in a peer-to-peer approach”.  After multiple incarnations it became a music sharing system, the 75th largest website in the world and “the first legal music downloading system”. Imeem, as it was called, was eventually acquired by Myspace in 2009. Caldwell was also awarded the best mobile app award by Techcrunch as early as 2008, when mobile was unknown to most. Now you start to understand. Dalton Caldwell is a trail-blazer, and anything but the average start-up founder, he is a true wizard, a brilliant mind who is responsible for the latest buzz in social media in the valley … and the rest of the world. Imagine that, he turned down an “acqui-hire” offer by Facebook which could have made evn richer he already is.

[will app.net turn out to be a home run? photo antimuseum.com]

Now, will app.net replace Facebook and Dalton Caldwell be the new Zuckerberg? If he dons the same kind of hoodies, needless to say his philosophy is entirely different; and I have to admit that I like it a lot … Let’s zoom in on app.net with the notes taken during the interview we had with him last week during the blogger bus tour in Soma*, San Francisco:

[Dalton Caldwell, the CEO and founder of app.net]

Caldwell launches mobile photo sharing app before Instagram and loses

Caldwell and his teams wanted “to do something which is mobile first”. What with the immense success of applications like Instagram and Pinterest, the focus is on mobile. Facebook is getting to grips with this now that analysts are criticising them for not being able to monetise on mobiles at a a time when users are shifting from Web to smartphones.

Two and half years ago, the team started working on a mobile photo sharing “pre-instagram” application named Picplz. After they raised funds and came to realisation they would only lose the battle against Instagram, they did the right thing, folded Picpliz and went on to the next thing. It often happens like this in Silicon Valley. In the high-tech business, Pivoting moments like this happen all the time. Don’t forget that Google ended up being a search engine after Yahoo! had refused to buy their algorithm (as per the story described in Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation).

Caldwell turns down acqui-hire by Facebook

The team then “took a few shots with the same infrastructure” and of Caldwell’s own accord, “this is why they were able to catch up so quickly with App.net”. The first idea was to help third party developers find how to integrate their apps within Facebook or Twitter. Caldwell’s team started building more tools for the Facebook platform and after opengraph “came to fruition, it all worked so well with Facebook that they wanted to “acqui-hire” them”. Yet, Caldwell “wasn’t enthusiastic” to put it in his own words. A friend of his then suggested not to worry about the websites but to focus on the APIs. This was in 2008-2009. App.net wasn’t yet what it is now.

Social Networks becoming ad companies will shut down their APIs

If most social networks like Twitter and Facebook started off as APIs and helped build entire ecosystems around them, “[they] couldn’t stick to this because of monetisation” Caldwell explained. He then wrote a blog post (What Twitter could have been) on July 1 (a Sunday) in which he vented his frustration. Little did he know that his post would attract a hug following and that he was about to start something new. The blog post “took off, with hundreds of thousands of visits, (even though it only consists of a few paragraphs). In that piece, Dalton Caldwell contends that “every API will be closed by social networks because [popular social networks] went away from being API companies to become ad companies and it means that they have to control everything”.

if they decide to close their APIs, then why not build an API?

“The idea then became to build an API company!” Caldwell went on. “Most people don’t know how bad things are, and they will notice in the next few months that certain applications stop working” he said.

[apps.net : global feed page]

crowd-funding … in a matter of weeks

This is how app.net was given a front end which “looks like Twitter looked in 2007” the young entrepreneur added. Just as a proof of concept, for this front-end is not meant to be a Twitter replacement. Developers are proposed to build applications on it. Imagine a social chess game for instance, all built on the common API and digging from the common user base.

The new project son attracted 10,000 users in a matter of weeks. Which means that the $ 500k goal the company had set up for themselves by the end of August. “This is how start-ups work” Dalton Caldwell explained: “if Youtube had launched 6 month later or before it wouldn’t have succeeded. Social media made it happen it wasn’t us. We are just under 20,000 users now. No idea how long it will take for them to have million of users versus the current 20,000. I don’t know how long it will take us to reach millions, maybe it will never do. In fact in depends on whether somebody develops a killer application based on the App.net AP!” he said.

a lot of people got angry

Caldwell admitted to making a lot of people angry; with a few lines he put his finger on a fundamental issue which is plaguing the current development of social media. Social networks were developed with the idea that Marketing could be done differently and barely 3 years ago, the world was buzzing with Tara Hunt’s Whuffie Factor concept, a founding book placing social capital over financial value. With the race to monetisation – which grew even worse with Facebook’s IPO – all of this is gone for good. We are left with advertising and I admit to sharing Caldwell’s frustration; a frustration I had already vented a year and a half ago as President of Media Aces in France.

“We are building a privacy model and we are not going to impose a business model” Caldwell concluded. “Those who build the best apps will be rewarded and there are 6 apps in the application store so far” he said.

embrace the philosophy … well worth $50

It’s hard to tell whether App.net will scale to millions of users like other platforms. As a matter of fact, it’s not even competing on the same level at all. At any rate, for social media veterans like me, Caldwell is spot on in terms of how he approaches social media and it’s well worth $50 in my eyes. After all, app.net may well just remain a social network for the happy few who want to escape interruption marketing and the use of your private data and content by public companies. If only for that, I feel like joining App.net and supporting Dalton and his teams.

Caldwell may not be the next Zuckerberg after all, maybe just the other way round. Small is beautiful!

notes

---

*Soma = South of Market (downtown San Francisco district situated south of ‘Market’, a major artery in the centre of the City.

Intuit: the social media manager who found his job with social media

Intuit is a company offering business financial solutions for small businesses. It has been awarded great distinctions including the great place to work award by Fortune. This presentation was delivered by Björn Ühss, global social media manager at Intuit at the useful social media conference which took place in London last week. It was about the changing landscape and mindset of Social Media:

[Björn Ühss, in the background, behind Amber Hayward, became Social Media manager after targetting his future employer via LinkedIn adds]

“One of the things that changed is that social media reached the C-suite and it’s more and more of a priority. At Intuit it is coming from the CEO, it’s a business decision” Björn Ühss said. “It’s not a marketing decision and it concerns everyone in the company” he added.

According to Ühss, Edelman ranked Intuit quite high in the hierarchy of companies using social media too. “Starbucks has issued numbers whereby 38% of their fans are more likely to visit the stores when they have seen a branded message” Björn Ühss went on. “Social Media has now reached considerable scales. Besides, Facebook has now become a giant and is on a buying spree like former high tech giants were a few years ago”.

The presenters stressed that the recent IBM CEO 2012 study predicted that in five years’ time, CEOs will be hired not only on their credentials but on their ability to manage their e-reputation and that of their company.

Björn Ühss gave us his check-list on how he got social media implemented at Intuit:

1. How social is your CEO? lead by example
2. is your culture ready?
3. who are your social media supporters?
4. where are your customers?
5. what data can you use?

Intuit has also managed to make social media work for sales with £99 sale add campaigns (“despite what people say” both presenters emphasised).

But the most interesting thing maybe is that Björn Ühss himself found his job with the help of social media. He posted adds targeting Intuit executives until they thought to themselves “we’ve got to hire that guy” Intuit’s Amber Hayward, social media marketing manager concluded.

SAP: convincing the CFO that B2B social media can be a benefit

Last week I had the chance to bump into Sarah Goodall from SAP; I was very pleased to see her at the usefulsocialmedia conference in London one year after being acquainted with her at a marketing conference in London. Sarah is one of our best social media practitioners in the B2B world and I was lucky enough to sneak out of the B2C session and switch rooms to listen to her. Her presentation was about how to convince your CFO about the benefit of social media. Not an easy task, but Sarah knows how to circumvent the issue; here is how:

Sarah Goodall looks after social media for EMEA and she presented on June 26th at the usefulsocialmedia conference in London. “How can social media generate value? I haven’t got all the answers!” Sarah said as an introduction, but she has a few clues which she wanted to share with us.

Sarah has worked for small and large companies and knows “how to make things work on a tight budget”. SAP sells software and services to businesses; it is forty years old and it comes from “a traditional marketing background” Sarah said, and moving into social business “is a true cultural shift”. Hence, social media “came as a shock” to SAP according to her and “it helped [them] turnaround the sales cycle” Sarah went on. What it means is that there has been more emphasis on posting content on where customers are getting it rather than push that content over to them. Therefore, the transition is to inbound Marketing “even though we are not there yet” Sarah said, very honestly. “Outbound still represents twice the budget which is spent on inbound marketing” she added.

How to attribute social influence to revenue?

At the very heart of the business, there is the owned SAP community, using Jive internally and an external community with customers. On top of that, there are channels which aren’t owned by SAP such as LinkedIn, Slideshare, Facebook, Twitter etc. The SAP community network is fairly known outside of SAP, and is 3 million big nowadays. “A lot of bloggers are contributing in this community, most of them aren’t part of SAP by the way” Sarah added.

On external platforms, SAP have enough fans to fill in football stadiums several times “but this is still not sufficient for CFOs!” she said. Hard facts are required, more arguments needed. So what will it take to drive the point home? “What the CFO is interested in is the impact on customer value, and the bottom line and it’s tough, I’m not going to lie” Sarah said.

secret sauce

So here are a few of Sarah’s secret recipes for getting CFOs to buy in to social media:

• Potential cost of R&D saved: if you use the comments and the voting and offset that against the money saved on R&D, this is tremendous. There is also a cost of loyalty and there are savings which can be made.
• Social commerce: this is a little more tricky because “the SAP sales process doesn’t quite work like that” Sarah said. SAP tried to embed links in LinkedIn and experimented on how Facebook posts can lead to a registration. “It’s not enough to generate revenue” she said “it’s not an exact science but it’s enough to uncover value”. There are also chance engagements, they don’t happen very often, but when a potential customer has been turned into a customer later then it is a great achievement.
• Social intelligence: “this is a little bit more woolly” Sarah said but you can try and get insights from social media, and it can be shown that click-through-rates can be influenced through social media.
• Social insight: social media is also useful in order to measure brand health. SAP is monitoring what users are saying about  SAP and their competitors. “There aren’t any numbers but it is useful” Sarah said.
• Sapphirenow: this is the biggest business conference which is organised by SAP. In Orlando, 15% of twitter handles of delegates were identified, and 25% followed the @sapphirenow Twitter handle. “This is still early stage Sarah said but it is very useful to tie to something related to business and prove it’s useful” Sarah said.
• Social efficiency: social media saves a lot of money on support and reduces significantly the amount of inbound calls SAP is getting for support. SAP mentors are SAP’s brand advocates and “this is media which can’t be paid for” meaning that it is invaluable. SAP also launched a #suithugger hashtag which brought amazing results.

the right metrics

As a conclusion, Sarah said that “you would have to “communicate the right metrics to the right audience. Don’t show clicks and followers to CEOs! Show how social media is impacting productivity. You can’t really talk of the ‘ROI of Facebook’” Sarah warned.

Pearls of wisdom … does anyone have anything to add to this? I don’t.

social media war: Twitter bans sharing on LinkedIn profiles

Below is an email I received this very morning. Twitter has just changed its strategy – according to the issuer – and LinkedIn, as a result, will no longer be able to relay your tweets automatically. This is a new battle between the warring factions of social media platforms and this is just a beginning. The various players in the social media space are all trying to keep your clicks and the name of the game is … advertising. Those who had though – benignly – that building a network patiently was a free asset – unless you are rich and wealthy and you have already purchased your “fans” – will now discover that paying for your posts to be read is no longer an option. Facebook has already started that. For instance, Google no longer lets you tweet YouTube videos unless you click quite a few submenus, Facebook took over Instagram in order to undercut Pinterest even before it had time to take off, Picasa will send all your photos to Google+ even before you have had a chance to realise you have pressed the upload button and mostly before you wished you had shared them on Facebook instead. And so on, and so forth … The good old Web 2.0 is well and truly dead by now, we are in a dog eats dog kind of world and the future’s middlename is advertising. What did you say? “Net Neutrality?” … honestly, what are you talking about?!

At least, using LinkedIn’s workaround which requires you probably click on ten more links, you will probably still have a chance to send something through Twitter … Good luck with it!

From LinkedIn Fri Jun 29 18:54:34 2012
Apparently-To: xxxxxxx@yahoo.com via 67.195.8.114
Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:54:40 –0700

Hi Yann,

LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.

We know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for our members. Moving forward, you will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.

How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter?Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn? Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

If you would like more information about what this means for your synced LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, please visit our related Help Center topics.

Thank you,

The LinkedIn Team

using social media to stir passion #csmb2c

Richard Ayers (a former BBC journalist) has worked for Manchester City and BFI (British Film Industry) recently and he has shared his experience running social media for both of these organisations at the usefulsocialmedia conference today.

BFI has been around for 100 years and is behind each and every film. But the organisation isn’t known at all. The passion though is overwhelming, be it for films or football. Richard showed how similarly – even though the two companies are very different – social media can be leveraged for both subjects.

Man City business Case

[Richard Ayers showing the fans invading the Man City pitch: passion!]

Manchester City is an organisation which is ready to embed social media almost naturally Richard explained. They even chose the hashtag #together and it came naturally, as they asked children from school to share their feelings about the club in the “Manchester and me” project. And there is a “fascinating dynamic about connecting local and international”. TV formats were used (“inside city”) so that engagement between players in the tunnel were filmed and the videos were even 9 minutes long and retention rate was 90%.

“Of course we have a Facebook page, and an app and all sorts of things” but Richard said that it was mostly about “connecting online with the real”.  They even decided to build a community in Arabic (@cityarabia) and all that was required was to ask fans to run the service Richard added.

“Numbers shot up and there was no advertising” and “we did it via proper engagement and  not looking at the numbers” he concluded for that part. As to the nasty stuff surrounding football such as racism for instance, “we just don’t deal with that” Richard said “we are keeping away from that”.

BFI

The BFI is full of wonderful cultural artifacts, some dating from the late 19th century. Richard and his teams found a lot of remarkable material about Doctor Who and even pictures of the shooting from the Starwars film in the Tunisian desert … “and all that was sitting in a bunker!” This is an amazing thing and “this is only the tip of the iceberg” Richard added. Hitchcock was a British film-maker and one of his film is 39 steps so they used the 39 steps metaphor in “39 steps to Hitchcock”. We are at the beginning of  the journey “and we are cleaning up the pages now”.   “The BFI is non profit, but there must be a way that it can make money out of this incredible content” Richard said.

Richard showed us a lot of other examples from BFI but they all boil down to the fact that – even though the organisation isn’t known at all – the content that it has is immensely interesting and can be used to stir passion in the fans, be they football or film fans. What Richard hopes is that, by using the same method for BFI, the company will be known to all soon.

social media is like pinball wizardry Heineken social media head says

This was the second panel at the useful social media conference and it was devoted to customer interaction. This is the report for part 1 in the panel with Lennart Boorsma who works for Heineken (Global Brand Team). The moderator was Mike McGrail from the SocialPenguinBlog

Heineken presentation

It was entitled “igniting conversations” preferably over a beer, Lennart said as part of his introduction.  Heineken believe that it is  social since 1873! Beer is social by definition (as long as you don’t have too much of it though). The idea is to turn digital into a true marketing tool and Lennart sees “social as a means to create engagement and deepen connections with the audience”. Heineken mainly started its social activity 2 years ago with the merger of the most important facebook page and decided to “have more stuff in place” which meant Youtube, Twitter and a few others like Pinterest and Iinstagram. “Nobody is interested in the back-office tools for managing social media” Lennart added. “If you say you implemented a new CMS for Facebook no one is going to be thrilled”. Yet, without it, nothing is possible he said. Nowadays, social has to be embedded in the brief from the start Lennart Boorsma went on.

“Old media used to be like a bowling alley and now it’s like pinball” Lennart said. Your messages are changed and bounce around. Likewise, content has to change and has to be fun and tell a story. It’s theory but it is hard and it takes a lot of time and requires luck too! The goal is to generate more engagement and conversations about the brand. Today a TV commercial isn’t sufficient, one has to provide a real-life experience.

This is why Heineken launched their star player dual screen app to enable football fans to score points as they answer questions wile watching football matches on their TV. It was launched on April 26th and was hugely successful. Yet there are challenges such as latency in the distribution of TV programmes, namely over cable, DSL or satellite, for users must be given a fair chance to answer all the questions in a reasonable timeframe.

Lennart also showed us a new experience around an enhanced TV commercial whereby real customers could “serenade their dates” and it provided more experience than just a classic commercial. 8 hours worth of streaming were delivered, people from 160 countries played, and 4.3 billion hits were achieved. Lennart concluded by saying that they are only at the beginning and that the work is paying off nicely with over 7 million fans now, up from above 2 millions 2 years ago and “one of the fastest growing pages worldwide”. When asked about cost, Lennart added that “when you have a great shareable idea, you don’t need to spend a lot of money”. I couldn’t agree more with that statement.

Verizon: using crowdsourcing to get products right – or wrong

A few weeks ago in San Francisco, I attended the fiftieth Blogwell presentation since the beginning. Laurie Shook is portfolio leader at Verizon, a leading US telecom operator. She is a product marketer who uses social media, not a social media expert and she even describes herself as a “marketeer with a passion for Social Media” on her LinkedIn profile.

Verizon’s Idea exchange was developed in July 2010, as a place for customers to exchange ideas about services and things that customers would like Verizon to do. The platform provides means for ranking ideas. It is “semi-anonymous” Laurie said and “gives the idea to people that they can speak freely” she added. In a nutshell, it is n opportunity for Verizon clients to express themselves and “it’s also a great opportunity for marketers” Laurie said.

HD TV high on the agenda

“Many customers comment on HD TV and mostly on TV programs. “They said for instance that they’d like to see certain channels in HD or hide channels which they aren’t subscribed to and Verizon subsequently implemented that option” she said.

There are all kinds of ideas on that platform though and some of them are content related. Customers vote and propose ideas and sometimes they even propose to vote against ideas which they oppose.

913 ideas received 280+ launched

Laurie went on describing a business case study:  the “IMG 1.9” plan; IMG is the abbreviation for “interactive media guide”. “There is one release a year, it’s a lot of work and once we’re done, we involve 100 customers before launching it” Laurie said. “Last summer [2011], we extended the HD channel guide, hid unsubscribed channels, added DVR chapter selection and made the channel guide softer and easier on the eyes. That was based on feedback : ‘made fonts bigger, change the background etc.’”

Yet, even though a majority “loved the ideas”, things weren’t so easy since there also were other users who were “very vocal and critical”. Some didn’t hesitate to post comments such as “you really screwed up your tv guide” Laurie said.

what do you do with negative feedback?

The next question is familiar to any marketer in charge of communities. “what do you do with that kind of feedback?” Should you ignore it, or make it a priority? Laurie’s answer makes perfect sense:

“You don’t respond immediately. Sometimes, people are pissed off with change and you have to wait for the dust to settle. Acknowledge the status and wait. However, the post became popular, and even the most popular on the platform” Laurie went on.

facilitation tips from Verizon

She admitted to not finding this very pleasant but you have to bite the bullet and you also have to respond she said. Here are her recommendations:

1. “Cool you jets before responding” (remain cold-blooded, there is no need to heat up and start an online battle)
2. “It’s best not to respond immediately and to respond with the medium” (i.e. Idea Exchange rather than choose another tool)
3. “a personalised response is necessary” such as “I’m sorry you are not of the same mind … and we will work to make you happy again”

are early innovators biased?

“Maybe it was an execution issue or a community bias, whereby people who join forums are early innovators and do not represent customers. Maybe the rank and file TV viewers aren’t represented?” Laurie went on “but when that guy commented, we had more people joining”. Laurie suggested that there was some sort of Hawthorne effect in reverse and that conclusions had to be drawn from that experiment with regard to crowdsourcing and how much hindsight you should introduce when conducting such projects.

on the positive side

Beyond this bias, there are some positive conclusions to be drawn from that experiment Laurie added. Here is what she thinks has worked for Verizon:

1. faster customer feedback (before Idea exchange  there were disconnects but you didn’t know why or how or how much. “With direct feedback, you know immediately and you understand much better” she added)
2. nuances of customer opinions are highlighted
3. there is an incentive for more focus on customer priorities
4. there are customer expectations of “Internet time” and this forces a large organisation to do things more quickly

Laurie added that “this example is strictly consumer-orientated, and that Verizon business is working with customer advisory boards, in a much more face-to-face format”.

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 …

Amex wants to turn tweets into dollars

In March 2012, Amex decided to introduce a new plan (https://sync.americanexpress.com/twitter/Index) in order to turn its customers’ tweets into rewards. Participating brands include 1-800flowers.com, Best buy, Dell and H&M. Here is how Amex describes the service:

• Sync your eligible American Express^® Card with Twitter
• Tweet the special offer #hashtags to load exclusive Cardmember offers directly to your Card
• Save with an automatic statement credit when you make a qualified purchase in store or online with your synced Card

It’s mostly aimed at customers in the US and doesn’t seem to be available to European American Express clients. I couldn’t spot it either on the UK or France pages.

The idea is clever as it mainly touts the benefits of not having to use coupons. The main challenge will however remain, as always in e-marketing, with the ability to offer a great service (and big discounts) while reassuring clients that they are free to choose and opt-out (or even not opt-in at all).

Amex Video promoting the Sync Tweet and Save programme

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.

him who helped Obama become President with Social Media

today’s selection is…

Edouard Austin’s post on my Live.Orange.com blog in which Thomas Gensemer explains how he helped Barack Obama in the 2008 US Presidential campaign 

 In 2008, Thomas Gensemer, CEO of Blue State Digital, was in charge of the digital campaign for Barack Obama during the presidential election in the United States.

This year, he is once again involved in the campaign, but before the hard part begins, Thomas paid a visit to the Orange headquarters in Paris to explain how the social web can help with modern day politics, and how these skills could be applied to the corporate world. In the last ten years, the rapid growth of digital has given politicians new and more efficient tools to reach and connect with voters.

>> read on at live.orange.com

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)

of influence and trust by 1000heads’ @joannejacobs #lul360

Joanne Jacobs was presenting today at Lincuplive, a great social media conference put together by our friends Celia, Glenn and Tim and today was a very special day. It was Joanne’s last UK appearance as she is returning to Australia and will be leading the WOMM company 1000heads down under. Her pitch was about trust and influence and she took the opportunity of this last UK presentation for reinstating quite a few important facts.

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

what is really influence about?

Influence has been Joanne’s focus for the past 6 months. There are lots of tools for measuring influence and, some time ago, Joanne realised that she was having a great score on Klout just because she was broadcasting and tricking the systemHowever, all high scores on Kred or Klout (“nothing in social media can be spelt right” she maliciously commented) are based on activities and not influence. “Influence is much more subtle than that, it’s about how your circles perceive you”. And it’s got everything to do with how you are perceived, not how you speak.

don’t treat influencers as celebs

“Following someone doesn’t mean that you trust them” Joanne added. This is the basis for this session. “The worst thing you can do with an influencer is to treat them as a celebrity” Joanne said, because influencers are acknowledged for being independent and they can’t be forced into tweeting something and become a “loudspeaker for a brand”.  One has also forgotten that the whole rise of social media was the result of the disappointment with brands and how they were lying to clients.

Trust is the result of performance

“Trust is something which is developed through performance”. A lot of people come to me as a consultant and they ask me how to sell more widgets but social media consultants may not be the most  suited people to do that. Social media – and influencers – can help you with different ways of doing business, co-create for instance, changing the way you do business, but they can’t be used to help you sell stuff. You do need a decent website, Joanne added but if you have a very engaged audience, people will want you to engage on Facebook or Twitter, not your Website, they won’t read your pitches.

If, to an extent, she added “we all lie to each other”, “it’s because we want to project the right image of ourselves”, but there is a limit and this is when you are paid to produce fake comments.  “This isn’t influence she concluded, this is malicious commentaries online”.

5 tips for organising social media teams in large organisations (5/5)

This is part 5 of the synopsis of my Figaro Digital presentation in London on November 23, 2011. In order to gather all parts, click or use the following short link: http://bit.ly/figaroyag11 

[all photos by Yann Gourvennec: http://bit.ly/picasayann]

5. building a community of community managers

Once all the above principles have been implemented, there is a requirement for all in the organisation to get themselves organised and this is what we have been doing for at least three years now, with a community of community managers which was started by my predecessor, and is known as the “come’in” community. This community of community managers exists online on our internal collaboration platform named Plazza, but mostly, it is a community of people who actually meeting person every two months. In a well-established process now we gather all these people together in a room anything between 50 to 100, we invite renowned industry professionals who give us some of their time and knowledge in order to share with our community. This community of community managers is also working on new projects, building a repository together, establishing the tools which I described earlier on, and last but not least launching campaigns together and exchanging on best practices. In December, we will be going one step further by inviting some of our peers from other corporations in order to exchange and broaden the scope of our discussions.

We see “come’in” (one of our meetings in the above picture) as one of our most important assets, a forum in which we can devise new projects and launch new initiatives a place in which we can exchange and debate and move forward and implement the dandelion organisation. Our most important goal now with regard to this community is to internationalise it and we will be taking “come’in” to Tunisia in order to kick-start this process.

Key to our new programmes is also the so-called “social media champions” programme which is going to enable us to distinguish the people throughout the organisation who are actually better than others in social media. As I said earlier on, I don’t believe in social media experts. It’s more a case of “the blind leading the blind” and helping the company to move one step at a time and succeed in its business endeavours via social media and improve the way it communicates online as well as its e-reputation.

5 tips for organising social media teams in large organisations (4/5)

This is part 4 of the synopsis of my Figaro Digital presentation in London on November 23, 2011. In order to gather all parts, click or use the following short link: http://bit.ly/figaroyag11 

[all photos by Yann Gourvennec: http://bit.ly/picasayann]

4. using tools as platforms for change

Social media is a difficult discipline which requires many different tools for management, monitoring and statistics. Using your team’s expertise, you can build credibility and offer tools which could exponentially equip your entire organisation, therefore improving cross channel communications and mutual help. These mutualised tools can therefore serve also as a basis for the implementation of the multiple hub and spoke organisation. At Orange, we have been able to work in those directions more than once.

First and foremost, we have worked on the standardisation of processes and the industrialisation of moderation around our social media platforms. Because our teams cannot be behind their screens all day long, let alone speak all languages and especially difficult or rare tongues (even though we already speak three or four), we are resorting to external teams in order to moderate the comments and posts by our audiences on social media platforms, in order that each and every customer (this is our ultimate goal) gets an individual response by the Orange helpers teams in the country relevant to the customer who has an issue.

We have been able to work beyond this though, with the equipment of the entire organisation with a social media platform Administration tool which we are using to help teens better communicate between each other and respond within platforms across the organisation. With this kind of platforms (many vendors exist) you can very well ask somebody from, say the Orange helper team, to take ownership of your twitter platform any time somebody has a problem which needs to be solved. Slowly but surely, we are improving the process, and the equipment of our entire organisation with tools like this is making it possible.

Beyond social media (but including social media), we are implementing what we call a websites factory, based on the popular open source software CMS EZpublish in order not only to establish consistency throughout the group, but also to achieve the merger between social media and web platforms. In essence, this is undoubtedly the topic which is the most important in my eyes, a lot more important than just an merely growing one’s fan bases on Facebook and other platforms, because through this websites factory, we will be able to establish governance, enforce consistency, make social media work for the company and its business and eventually, establish this decentralised, dandelion organisation which I was talking about at the beginning of my pitch.

It is possible to enforce organisational change through the implementation of new tools, even though the tools in themselves do not really matter. They can be changed one-minute to the next, but in the same way that we do business process re-engineering through tools i.e. that we encourage people to change their behaviour by mimicking those of others which have been translated into Information Systems, we can use this tools as platforms to help people communicate with one another and better respond to our customers and audiences.

to be continued …

5 tips for organising social media teams in large organisations (3/5)

This is part 3 of the synopsis of my Figaro Digital presentation in London on November 23, 2011. In order to gather all parts, click or use the following short link: http://bit.ly/figaroyag11 

[all photos by Yann Gourvennec: http://bit.ly/picasayann]

3. structuring your own social media approach

… is a must, but it has to be performed in stages. First one has to foster usage and establish credibility, second educate, evangelise and support. Social media guidelines are made for that. They are a tool aimed at encouraging best practices, rather than a weapon of mass destruction of your enterprise team spirit. This is why I didn’t want to have Social Media Guidelines posted at the beginning of our Social Media endeavours. Instead I thought it was best to foster usage, gather a number of like-minded people who would contribute to the same platforms in a collaborative manner.

It is any wonder that the strongest community on our internal collaboration platform is that of our experts who are blogging on the Orange Business Services platform (http://blogs.orange-business.com)? Right from day one, we started to structure this initiative in a decentralised way, ensuring that our experts were empowered in order to create user generated content. Now, this has created motivation and enthusiasm amongst the teams who are more than ever determined to keep this new media. Once and this empowerment has been established, then and only then can we deploy our social media guidelines, as was done in early October 2011; they are also made available to all viewers at http://orange.com/smg.

to be continued …