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.
Luc Dumont, SVP international Business Development Manager, demoed the most recent developments at Dailymotion from their Redwood Calif. office on day 2 of our blog tour, in front of our blogger bus bloggers on the second day of the tour. Dailymotion is a video hosting platform which was created in 2005 in France. It can boast 100 million daily users per month and 25-30 million videos are hosted on the platform. There are 220 million unique viewers a month even though the company is only 113 employee big. It also now part of the France Telecom- Orange group (disclosure: I work for the Group). Dailymotion is the 2nd largest video platform behind Youtube and 80% of its audience is coming from outside France. Whereas the head-office is in Paris, US operations are based in NYC and International operations are managed from Redwood, Calif. [this post was originally composed on behalf of Orange for the http://live.orange.com blog]
the most exciting segment in digital
“This is the most exciting segment within the online business” Luc Dumontsaid by way of an introduction. The premium aspect of video is very visible in the US with very aggressive players like Netflix, Google and Amazon. “Increasingly, our business can be summarised by its player” Dumont said. This player runs on various platforms and works, obviously, with content. Dumont described all the developments initiated by Dailymotion and namely what they call the Dailymotion Publisher network. In essence, this is a service which enables content providers (websites/bloggers) to create video portals automatically or manually and earn money from other’s content. Applications are submitted directly to Dailymotion who screen them and validate them (in order to ensure that the platform is valid and compliant). Content can come from either other users or well established content providers like Reuters or the Wall Street Journal. Already 1,000 users and websites like msn or Starmedia (owned by Orange) are using the service. “There is still space for a second video platform player” Dumont said, and Dailymotion is determined to be that one. The Redwood office was opened in November 2011 and the California based headquarter is working on the international development of the French start-up which has already stopped being French.
Luc Dumont today at Dailymotion’s headquarter
Here are my notes (taken on the spot) from that meeting …
the various platforms that Dailymotion is running on:
Everything was built from the inside and it resulted in the Dailymotion.com. It’s a very large site now (see above numbers). Curators are preparing videos for users.
Social networks is the second platform. Social has been part of the DNA from day one and accounts for 1/3 of our traffic, Luc Dumont added. “It’s a great tool and there is space for a second or third player” he said. “People don’t care about who runs the video, they just consume video”
Dailymotion Publisher networks: is a new product whereby a special relationship is struck with publishers like Yahoo!, msn and the Huffington Post
mobiles and tablets (15-20% of traffic as of today)
connected TVs: partnerships with as many manufacturers as possible
The Orange Blogger bus tour – of which I am the organiser on behalf of Orange of which I am the Director of Internet and social media – was stopping by San Francisco today and the whole day was hosted by Orange Silicon Valley
Georges Nahon delivered a very inspiring keynote today before our panel of bloggers in which he shared his vision with regard to what is happening in IT in general, and in the Valley in particular. I will begin my account of Georges’s visionary presentation by detailing his conclusions. As I always do, I have taken detailed notes of the pitch and they are made available at the end of this piece. If there is one thing that should be remembered from that pitch is that the Web is everywhere and in everything that will be happening in the future. Something which established players don’t like according to the Head of Orange Silicon Valley. However, Nahon insisted on the fact that it won’t be the same Internet we used to know.
Facebook will be “Yahooed!”
“Social” has been going through a rough patch over the Summer, with the now infamous Facebook IPO, dubbed “IPOcalypse”, IPO meaning “It’s Probably Overpriced” Nahon said facetiously. Yet, Europeans are wrong when they interpret these issues as the end of social media, Georges Nahon said in essence. Social is here to stay, and beyond, it will change everything which takes place on the Web, even though Facebook itself will probably be “Yahooed!” Georges added.
But the worrying thing I got from his pitch is that, according to his analysis, next to the World Wide Web that we all know, an increasing number of companies, including Amazon, are creating a “non-searchable adjacent Web” which sounds very much like the end of the Web as Chris Anderson announced in Wired a few years ago. I think Georges is right indeed, there is a growing concern that Net neutrality is being sacrificed for the sake of user experience. Time will tell, but there are indeed worrying signs.
Georges Nahon, head of Orange Silicon Valley, on the first day of the blogger bus tour
Here is how I summed up Georges’s 5 trends for the future of IT:
Tech is all about mobile: “Twitter is a mobile-first company” and thriving he said, “Facebook isn’t and is suffering”. 10% of Internet traffic is made of mobile traffic. Yet, 25% of US users are using the Web from mobile only, but in Egypt, this number soars up to 70%, and India is close to 60%! And 68% place their mobile next to their bed while sleeping at night.
The default is now social: and social meets mobile (over 50% of smartphones connect to Facebook). Social graph (Facebook), interest graph (Twitter) and influence graph (Klout) are the new frontiers of the Web and “they are here to stay … for a long time” Nahon said. For many, Facebook is the new web (“find us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter). What is the future of search? it is social and both Google and Microsoft are working on it… “and Facebook search is coming fast” Nahon added.
Another Web: At the same time, traditional web development is slowing down, and Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Mobile will continue develop their “non-searchable adjacent webs” as Nahon called it.
The Cloud as a new frontier: “The new guys are Amazon, Zynga, Rackspace and even people like Google were taken by surprise” Nahon said. But there are even newer guys you may never heard of such as Bluejeans, Alfresco, Joyent and many many more. Explosive data growth is also forcing companies to develop solutions for data reduction. And “the next big thing isn’t Software, it’s data” Nahon concluded on that subject.
All video will be on the Net: most players in that field are coming from the Internet world, not the media world. “We think that the future of TV is to be streamed” Nahon said. There is more innovation than ever before in that area he said. Nahon added though that the concept of app-centric TV on smart TVs wasn’t entirely convincing. Time Warner see their future in apps but another trend is Social TV (described by Nahon as “a descendant of interactive TV which never worked”. 85% of tablet owners use their device while watching TV he said. What are they doing? Social websites, Zynga, Search, Craigslits (an old web survivor!) according to Nielsen.
the future of the World Wide Web
So, what is the future of the Web? Georges Nahon highlighted 10 trends in that area too:
the web is becoming data centric
apps will rule consumer and entreprise innovations and html5 will infiltrate apps and web services
non searchable adjacent webs will continue to develop and the web will be fragmented and site-less (mobile, apps)
the web of sites is dead and Facebook like buttons are the new hyper links
Real-time multi-user game cloud platforms will influence enterprise cloud technologies: the main issue will be “latency” ‘as already explained on that blog)
4G/LTE (which we all were using to day via local mifi devives) will trigger innovation
mobile payment will kick off from 2015
all video will be on the web
Enterprise IT will shift to the cloud.
Facebook will rule the web during the next 2 years and Google will be in catch-up mode and within 3 years they will be “Yahooed!” Nahon said
Amazon will continue to diversify and will create more online commerce/entertainment clouds and mobile devices (tablets/phones). “Amazon is belittled in Europe” Nahon added, “and it should be considered as a major player, for Bezos is the new Steve Jobs”.
Started as an R&D organisation and evolved towards what they are today (scouting organisation). 60 people, 40 of which are in a position to file patents and they file 20 per annum. Often, it’s about reviewing the strategy. Statement from Prussian general “no plan survives contact with the enemy” e.g. 5 years ago, no one had seen the iPhone coming. Even analysts. An none of these people has seen Apple becoming a major player in the Telecom industry => be prepared for the unexpected. There were times in which you telcos could go to the ITU organisation and get things sorted but this isn’t the case anymore.
Essentially Orange wants to get prepared for the future. One of the key elements for Silicon Valley is capital investment. In Bay Area only, venture investments represent $3.2 bn 46% of total investments in the USA (San Jose chronicle on Q2 results). Texas only represents $ 179 m (3%) despite the huge tech firms in that state. The core subjects is ICT and media but not only.
The software industry in Q2 of this year received the highest level of funding. (34 out of 39% other source) $2.37 bn i.e. 32% of the total.
Market capitalisation: Apple + Cisco +Oracle +Google +Intel have a total of $ 1,261.82 bn (IBM is only $236b or FTE $37b). What this hides is the myriad of small companies which help these companies become what they are.
For those who don’t know yet, I (as Director, Web & Social Media at Orange), I will be part of the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus Tour 2012, which will take place in September (17-22) as a blogger … and the organiser of that tour. Here is my take on why I am participating and what I am expecting to do/see there:
I’m a Jack of all trades. I’m not just a blogger, I’m also the organizer of the Tour. On this Tour we’re dealing with blogger PR in a different way than it usually is done in big companies like this.
What we do here is we partner with the bloggers : we work together as a team, and the fact that I’m also a blogger makes it possible. It’s a matter of us going over there together, reporting and sharing our enthusiasm and content.
To me this is very important : it’s how good content is produced and engrossing stories started. And I’m not even talking about the friendships that are being initiated between members. Undoubtedly those who are taking part in these tours are invited to other tours, depending on their skills and focus.
my views on the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus tour 20 12 as an organiser
We also want to look at the way we organise the tour. A member of my team is going to have a subjective look at what other bloggers are seeing, through their blogs and contents. So we’ll be able to tell a story about the story as well.
And finally, how are we going to tackle the main subject, which is innovation in the Valley? I really wanted to give a different angle about this SoLoMo (social,local,mobile) approach in the Valley, so we’re going to see many innovators to understand whether or not innovation is still thriving in the Valley although I don’t have much doubt about that, knowing how it is over there.
It’s my 7th time there and I’m sure we’re going to have an exciting time. So stay tuned to the live.orange.com and don’t miss a thing about the Orange Blogger Bus tour 2012.
For those who don’t know yet, I (as Director, Web & Social Media at Orange), I will be part of the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus Tour 2012, which will take place in September (17-22) as a blogger … and the organiser of that tour. Here is my take on why I am participating and what I am expecting to do/see there:
So this is what we want to check out on the field with a group of 13 bloggers from all around the world : France, England, Australia, China and Romania.
So this is what I’m interested in: I want to understand how innovation is thriving beyond Facebook, Twitter and Google, which are the over-hyped companies. I want to see something else.
I also want to see how this innovation is thriving through the eyes of my colleagues from around the world so I think a lot of background is going to be thrown into that.
This is neither my first blogger tour nor my first visit to Silicon Valley, but this is probably the most interesting tour I have ever put together. This is why I can’t help but share and relay Glenn’s excitement about the tour as posted on the Orange Live Blog which will serve as the platform for our reports in September. More will be said about the tour on this and other blogs, as soon as I’m back from vacations, recharging the batteries and getting ready for that new adventure.
Orange Blogger Bus goes to Silicon Valley in search of the future | live Orange blog
by guest blogger Glenn Le Santo
I’m excited! Genuinely excited, in that kid-the-night-before-Christmas way. Why? Because I’m one of the lucky 13 writers from Europe, Australia and China to have been chosen by Orange to go on a blogger bus tour of San Francisco and Silicon Valley in September.
The tour aims to find out what makes Silicon Valley tick. We want to examine the culture of the Bay Area and meet the companies, institutions and individuals that make the area what it is: a world leader in technological innovation.
The area spawned the giants such as HP and Apple – and latterly Facebook and Twitter. We want to know how the area does this. We also want to find out if it will continue to do so, especially as some observers (such as Y combinator’s Paul Graham) think the Facebook IPO might have signalled the end of the Valley’s long reign.
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).
[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
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.
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:
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,
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,
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,
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,
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].”
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:
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,
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,
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,
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!
“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
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 16th, 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.
We’re in 2012 and 8 years after O’Reilly coined the 2.0 moniker, I still find people who are asking me whether ‘social’ is new in marketing. Yet, while certain people are still asking themselves questions, the world is moving fast; even though the path may be chaotic. More than anything else, brands will have to work on their social capital and what Edouard Austin (who works in my team at Orange) is calling the ‘digital self’. This is the modern marketing conundrum: how to be oneself and develop one’s digital self without being self-absorbed and self-obsessed. More with Edouard’s report of the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit which took place in London a few days ago:
Adobe Digital Marketing Summit London 2012 : The Digital Self
For its 2012 edition, the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit saw roughly 2000 enthusiasts converge in London, in the heart of the soothing Battersea Park, for two days of learning, sharing and discovering of new, more efficient ways for digital marketers, publishers and advertisers to reach out to their customers. Alongside a passionate team of French bloggers, including Fred Cavazza, Nicolas Malo, Carole Da Silva, Laurent Evain and Florian Giudicelli, I arrived at the impressive venue and was immediately stunned by the scale of the event : 37 countries represented, 30 partners co-sponsoring the event, members of the press from all over the world and a future-like decoration which led me to think I was embarking on some kind of out-of-this-world experience. And actually, it wasn’t far from it !
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.
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.
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.
A piece on Alastair Walker’s blog this morning. I met Alastair at Lincuplive at the end of February; The lincuplive social media conference was a real success, with hundreds of entrepreneurs and social media enthusiasts from all over the country and speakers from foreign lands such as myself. The pitches were great and the content superb, I felt energised by the sheer enthusiasm and positivity; whoever knows Celia Lacy, Tim Dowxning and Glenn Le Santo, the organisers, will understand why. But it’s not just that, it’s the people in the rooms, the questions, the urge to know which small business and startup owner were showing which really made you feel part of something. Last but not least, there was this team of bloggers from Lincoln university, the pride of that once very rural town which is awakening to other lines of businesses and proving very dynamic. And there was this chap Alastair, a former sports journalist, and a very nice bloke, who was leading this team of young writers in such a professional manner ! At the end of my break out session I remember one of students coming to me; she was very excited because the piece she’d written had been the most retweeted: indeed, social media works, that was even the tagline for the event, and we proved it in Lincoln.
Working with The Connected Generation | Social media and SEO from the North
Working with Lincoln University students at a social media conference called Linc Up Live, gave me an interesting insight into the future, and a remarkably bright, fast paced future at that.
The students in action at Linc Up Live, Feb 2012
Think about it for a moment; we browse online, from Amazon to Pinterest, our butterfly minds bookmarking products, gig tickets, experiences that shape our view of the world. Websites welcome us back by name; our virtual friends share our blogs, photos, music tracks or news links. Ours is a connected world.
The generation that are studying at Universities across Britain today are perhaps the first in history to have a digital footprint since childhood, a truly social strand to their DNA.
All twelve of the Lincoln Uni media team who arrived at the Doubletree Hilton for Linc Up Live had their smartphones at the ready, Twitter profiles set up and a good idea of what the event was about. Fact is, almost anything can be researched in seconds via Google. From laptop to X-Box – we’re all connected.
This post was originally written for the live.orange.com blog, reporting live from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona
E-health is no longer a dream and we had further evidence of this at Mobile World Congress today in Barcelona while visiting the “connected house” pavilion. And guess who’s behind this in terms of communications? Orange of course (disclosure: I work for Orange). Let’s zoom into these solutions of a very very near future in which our health and namely that of elderly citizens will be (ethically) monitored and surveyed at a distance.
Qualcomm is an interesting company. Its history goes back to the late 1980’s a time at which it was doing m2m (machine to machine communications) for the transportation sector under the omnitracs brand name. The early 1990’s saw Qualcomm moving into the mobile chips business (in actual fact, they even produced handsets before selling that division to Ericsson) for which it is known to all but their recent move is a radical one and it’s called Qualcommlife. Qualcommlife is an independent spin off from the main company with a funding of $100m (out of the total $500m which are part of the Qualcomm VC fund) I was told by the Qualcomm representative on their stand at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Qualcomm life launched towards the end of 2011 and has now signed an agreement with Orange regarding its brand new NET2 platform, as depicted in the press announcement on the Orange.com website.
health monitoring made easy
Health monitoring isn’t completely new I must admit. I remember our first demos at Orange labs in Paris more than 7 or 8 years ago! Yet this technology is slowly and surely becoming mainstream and this is made possible through the understanding that users want technology to get the job done and not spend hours fixing the wifi or bluetooth interface of their phone. This is exactly what NET2 is doing for you: “grandma doesn’t want to fiddle about with the wifi so we had to build an intelligent device which would pair automatically” the Qualcommlife representative declared. The Net2 gateway (which will be powered by Orange from a network point of view) is meant to do just that.
NET2 is a platform which enables patients to connect their devices (weight scales, blood pressure monitor, glucose monitoring device, …) directly without any complex pairing procedures. “All you have to do is plug in the gateway and it will find the patient’s device automatically Qualcommlife said.
But there are more than many ways of connecting to your GP than the NET2 gateway: standard mobile devices, embedded devices are also possible. You may even connect your treadmill to a remote monitoring device and record your data as seen in the following picture taken in the Connected House pavilion.
At last, here is a simple and promising way of enabling remote health checks, enforcing the remote monitoring and the surveying of patients with a diabetes or a heart condition for instance, in a seamless and easy way. At the end of the day, “national health authorities might even be enticed to encourage the development of such systems in order to enforce country-wide health programs” the Qualcommlife representative added.
This is a major step forward and one more proof that innovations take approximately 10 years to settle and disseminate.
A bit of promotion for my employer but you won’t mind too much because the cause is just. The Orange greetings card is aimed at supporting its Foundation’s digital solidarity project. All you have to do is flash the following QR code with your smartphone and hey presto, this will be your first good deed in 2012. Easy! If you don’t know how to read a QR code on your smartphone, I recommend the I-nigma application for iphone or Android.
From December 7-9, I will be taking part in Le Web in Paris and leading an international team of bloggers from and outside Orange
Readers who are not able to make it to the event will nonetheless be able to keep in touch with what happens in Paris at Le Web thanks to our twitter handle @orange, which will lead them to the right resources on blog and other media. The #leweb hashtag will also be funnelled through Orange Timeline so you can see, not only what we are going to tweet and post during the event, but all the content provided by all users talking/writing about the event.
Discover our Social media team’s members
Glenn Le Santo
Writer. Journalist. Broadcaster. Photographer. PR. Social Media commentator. Speaker. His specialties are social media, mobile, people, travel Twitter @lesanto
Camille Jourdain
Social Media Manager at Up 2 Social, blogger (his own blog and a collaborative one, Locita). Social media enthuastic Twitter @camj59
Laurent Moulinier
Mobile Marketing Strategy Marketer (at Orange France) – SoLoMo evangelist. His specialities are social, local, mobile, mcommerce, etourism, startup, entrepreneurship Twitter @laurent_local
Raphaelle Laubie
Health 2.0 Serial Entrepreneur, Corporate Affiliate Lecturer at ESCP-Europe, operating on Soft Skills, Organizational Behavior, Web 2.0 and Open Innovation topics Twitter @raphaellelaubie
Kevin Dicop
Social Media Manager, Blogger and Community Manager for MyCommunityManager – Former Mba EBusiness ESG student. Web, travel, street art and cooking geek enthusiastic Twitter @KDicop
Lise Janody
President and chief content strategist at Dot-Connection, a small, fully bilingual consultancy based in Paris, France. Content and web management Twitter @lisajanody
Stewart Baines
Co-founder of Futurity Media with Anthony Plewes. Stewart’s focus in Futurity Media is in emerging technologies, social media and future gazing. A graduate of philosophy & science, he has studied futurology & foresight to post-grad level. Twitter @stewartbaines
Daniel Thorniley (left) runs his own private business consultancy, but in his own words, he is not a “loser”. He as 235 Corporate clients even though he is on his own. He was able to acquire so many clients because he knew them through partnership and trust and he had known them for many years.
How’s business?
What is going on in the world. The IT industry is doing well ane even extremely well in emerging markets. Pharmeutical and health is doing vell. Industrial and b2b products are doing rather well but b2c is more sluggish. There are several reasons why business ie emerging slowly from recession:
Reason 1 is that the banking sector is not yet functioning properly. Big companies need banks to borrow money. Whereas emerging countries like China or India are trying to slow down growth, western countries would like to be able to borrow more money to whip up the economy,
Consumption is strong in many emerging countries, but in many others like Britain, consumers are not doing that well. Interest on savings is very weak, unemployment is coming down slightly but is still strong. In the US, 9-10% of workers are jobless. But what is the average number of hours worked in US is the lowest number since 1945 with only 32 hours per week (37.5 hours in Austria, 35.6 in France, UK 41 hours). Just because people have been kept in jobs in the US doesn’t mean that they are happy and ready to spend more. The value of the housing market has fallen dramatically since 2006. The Greek issue shot up because of corruption and misspending.
BRIC should include Mexico too!
BRIC should also include Mexico. Emerging markets are low volume, fast growth, whereas western countries will be high volume and low growth. We cannot apply our western patterns to the emerging markets. In the middle East, competition is coming from new markets (BRIC and Eastern and Central Europe) competing on low quality and prices.
Thornliley’s advice for working in emerging markets
Daniel Thorniley delivered the following advice to companies which want to do business properly in emerging markets:
Don’t overburden yourself with KPI’s
talents in the emerging markets are great! give more independence to local staff on the ground
avoid short-termism: Quarterly reporting isn’t working in the emerging markets
I’m not too certain about the title, I would not like to be perceived as a smug b*****d who thinks he has succeeded and looks at his results, self satisfied and over assertive.
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.
