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Why brands need social media monitoring and analytics

Posted on Wednesday 4 July 2012Wednesday 4 July 2012 By Mark Wilson

This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week, I was asked to give a short (10 minute) talk about social media monitoring and analytics. I’m not exactly what you might call an expert in this field, but I have been around the loop with this as part of some work I did a couple of years ago, when the company I work for started to make better use of social media, although I’ve since moved on to other activities.

In researching for my talk, I decided to reach out via my own social network(s) and have to say that I was pretty amazed by the response. Within a few minutes of tweeting, I had responses that gave me some fantastic angles to cover.

Looking for inspiration for 10min. presentation on social media monitoring... any insight appreciated - no vendor pitches please

Wednesday 27 June 2012 8:51 via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@markwilsonit

Mark Wilson

Even though I can’t share the presentation (I used some slides that were “loaned” to me by others), I can write about what I presented, so here goes – with special thanks to David Gentle (@DaveGentle), Graeme Goulden and Jim Millen at Fujitsu; Brent Ozar (@BrentO), Consultant and Author at Brent Ozar PLF, LLC; Louise Parker (@LouParker), Sales Director at Sentiment Metrics; and Eileen Brown (@EileenB), Author and Social Media Consultant at Amastra – as well as to the many other people who offered assistance but whose work I haven’t “borrowed” here!

“Social working”

Many organisations are experimenting with (or even gaining real value from) social media and are rapidly trying to discover ways to exploit these new channels before their competitors do. The challenge here is that the steps required to gain value from social media go against conventional wisdom: In business, we want things to be routine and predictable. Social media, however, is organic in nature and is driven by people’s passions and interests.

Integrating the virtual and physical worlds

One way to consider social networks is that we need to look after customers in the virtual world, just as we would in a physical context.

For example, in a restaurant, management touch tables and customer check-backs are an integral part of the service in the UK and elsewhere. They are used to see that customers are happy with their meal, ideally before any simmering concerns become full-on dissatisfaction. In the past, restaurant customers didn’t talk to each other. But with social media, they do, and bad experiences snowball fast. In real life, you can hear your customers complaining and shuffling toward the door. The same happens in social media too.

Smart organisations can use this to their advantage and build brand advocacy. For example, one upset Mum sent a tweet after she had taken her four-year-old child to McDonald’s to complete his Marvel Set figurines only to receive a Littlest Pet Shop character (another type of toy) instead. Instead of sending a tweet to apologise, McDonald’s took the initiative to send a real mail and titled it “you tweeted, we listened”, including the missing Marvel figure with a handwritten note. Cool right? Especially for McDonalds as that mum had a popular blog and she wrote about it leading to 50,000 page views a month and, even better, the story was included in the updated version of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research)’s book Groundswell.

Some organisations are particularly smart and they integrate customer feedback into their loyalty programmes and CRM systems. In an example, which Eileen Brown wrote about on her ZDnet blog, a customer tweeted to say how much she loved cornbread when staying at Gaylord hotels (a US hotel chain). The company offered her some, but by then she’d already left. A few weeks later and she stayed at another one of their hotels and, a short while after checkin, some cornbread was delivered to her room – without even requesting it. She then blogged about the great customer service, closing the communication loop and making it clear that she was a satisfied customer.

What’s the alternative to this? Well, sadly, things don’t always work out so well. These pictures have been around for a few years now but became Internet memes. Thankfully the names of the restaurant chains involved are not so easy to find…

Losing sight of the individual

The next part of my talk was borrowed from Chris Brown and Louise Parker’s SoConBuzz talk where Chris highlights a hotel on Trip Advisor which ranked really highly (9 out of 1068 hotels in London) but for which some very negative reviews really stand out – this is the social media challenge – we need to be able to identify these individual responses, this individual dissatisfaction and react at the tactical level to address specific concerns.

Four phases to actionable insight

Louise continues her SoConBuzz presentation by talking about four phases to actionable insight. Watch the video for the full details but, in short:

Listen – monitor content and actively respond to it.
Categorise – filter out the noise and focus on what’s important.
Analyse – analyse conversation threads and identify leading topics.
Act – drive actionable insight and add real value.

The value of social media

The real value of social media is not so much as another channel to market but as a method to understand what customers are saying about you – and to engage. But, more than that, by integrating with other data it’s possible to provide a holistic view of the organisation, enabling both tactical and strategic change to take place.

My take on social media monitoring and analytics

It’s all very well quoting chunks of other people’s work but I did mention at the head of this post I’ve had some experience in this area as, two years ago, I began an experiment with corporate blogging, backed up with other social media channels. Before launch, we wanted to measure a baseline so that we could measure the impact of our efforts but we found that enterprise tools (e.g. Radian 6) were expensive and free alternatives lack functionality, granularity, or just don’t really join up. Most importantly, any social media programme needs commitment of resources – agencies can only go so far.

I’ve found that the majority of social media case studies are from business to consumer (B2C) organisations. In the business to business (B2B) space, customer conversations tend to be fewer, and are less likely to be online – and even for B2C organisations there will be differences between sectors.

Critically, for marketing teams it’s important to understand that social media is different to other marketing communications channels – it shouldn’t be led by campaigns with time and budget limitations – social media endures after these have ended – and it’s a conversation, not a monologue.

tl;dr

Social networks are an important element of customer interaction and integrating virtual and physical worlds is crucial. In summary, organisations need to:

Understand what it is they want to measure – and there will be a human element to this too as humour, irony and sarcasm are still challenges for many tool sets.
Make sure that they can take action with what they find or else the exercise becomes just an expensive way to collect a lot of information, and possibly to leave customers feeling ignored (in my experience @VirginTrains is selective in the tweets that it responds to, in stark contrast to the other rail operator on my journey, which is @LondonMidland).

In addition, beware that social media has a global reach – we found it practically impossible to monitor social media for a single geographic region – and make sure you know how you will cope in the event of a crisis (there are some well-known examples in the form of Eurostar and the Ford Motor Company).

And finally…

If you’re a manager who is struggling to “get” what social media is about (you’re probably not reading this blog), but consider this tweet:

RT @euan Blogging about the real challenge with enterprise social http://t.co/geYQMJSr < agree - social business is human business!

Thursday 28 June 2012 6:05 via webReply RetweetFavorite

@Annemcx

Anne McCrossan

Euan Semple (@Euan)’s post is short and to the point but it makes an important point: to understand social networks you have to experience them – “feel the fear”.

Consumerisation think tank panel at Dell Technology Camp 2012 (#DellTechCamp)

Posted on Friday 1 June 2012Saturday 23 March 2013 By Mark Wilson

Yesterday afternoon, I took part in a panel discussion on the evolution of consumerisation as part of a Dell Technology Camp and in advance of the publication of the third part of Dell/TNS Global’s Evolving Workforce research. It was the first time I’ve taken part in an event like this and I have to admit I was pretty nervous but it was also an enjoyable experience – particularly given the wonderful surroundings of the Saatchi Gallery in south-west London. I only wish I’d been able to tweet during the event (I did scribble some notes but was focusing so much on the conversation that tweeting would have been a step to far for this Gen-Xer who isn’t so great at “partial attention”!)

Chaired by Stephen O’Donnell (@stephenodonnell), the discussion examined a number of topics related to consumerisation, including: the generational divide myth; recruiting and retaining talent; new working practices; technology choices; security;controlling costs and driving profit; and the impacts of geography and market sector on progress.

Dell have produced a Storify story about the whole day (not just the panel discussion) – and you can catch the recording of the live stream – but, for those who don’t have a couple of hours to spare, I thought I’d blog the highlights… I guess you could think of them as the tweets that never were:

Stephen Yap, TNS UK: It’s a myth that only generation Y gets “social” and consumerisation; TNS’ research finds that older generations are more accepting of IT as a transformation agent (and younger people are more sceptical). [Something that one of my Baby Boomer colleagues, Vin Hughes, suggested over a year ago in a blog post about the digital world and generational labels.]
Alexis Lane, The Head Partnership: Organisations need a element of control to stay within the law, including open communication of policies.
Stephen Yap: IT is not just a utility – get it right and it can be a motivator for employees.
Mark Wilson (@MarkWilsonIT): The IT department is just a provider of “stuff” in our personal clouds – just like our bank, supermarket, email provider, etc. [Credit is due to Joe Baguley (@JoeBaguley) for that one… also see my post on the rise of the personal cloud, inspired by David Gentle (@DaveGentle).]
Helen Calthrop-Owen, Axicom: Consumerisation is part of a bigger change regarding how people work together.
Tim Weber (@Tim_Weber), BBC: Policies alone are not enough – citing Joshua Klein (@JoshuaKlein) he says that we need to “hack our work“, noting that it could get you fired, or you could be a big winner.
Bryan Jones (@BryanAtDell), Dell: It’s not “lazy IT” that holds us back so much as cultural challenges – the key is to create “competitive differentiation”.
Mathias Knöfel (@MathiasContext): Consider the cost factors and end user benefit – given a choice users will pay for flexibility.
Mark Wilson: Get under the surface of BYO and you’ll find it’s more about choice – giving users the ability to trade up to a “sexier” device [credit due to Garry Martin (@GarryMartin).]
Stephen Yap: Emerging markets see employer-provided devices as attractive (they tend not to have PCs at home); meanwhile in the US/Canada it’s about Bring Your Own Cloud [what I called the personal cloud] – questioning the need for corporate IT. Not so much about the choice of device but working in the way in which we have become accustomed to.
Alexis Lane: Increasingly difficult to draw lines of ownership (intellectual property and corporate data vs. life) – often old questions arise in a new context (e.g. the ownership of a contact database cf. LinkedIn profile).
Stuart Collingwood, Nivio: Enterprise-grade social media does exist; devices are more emotional and entitlement can create friction (i.e. who is entitled to what); light touch integration is required for end users to access corporate IT.
Bryan Jones: There is no silver bullet (in terms of technology); what’s required is a “portfolio discussion” about on premise IT; extrenal service provision (e.g. cloud) and how to bridge the gap.
Stuart Collingwood: Employee expectations for IT performance are “brutal”; tolerance of “corporate lethargy” and inflexible applications has dropped.
Tim Weber: Users tend to blame devices or applications but may be other issues; legacy holds us back (e.g. network performance).
Mark Wilson: Returning to issues of cost – tax implications with benefits in kind – need clearer advice from government.
Bryan Jones: The consumer knows what is possible – consumerisation is not solely an IT issue but raises business functional questions. The trick is to simplify IT, to become more responsive – and innovation is occurring whether we like it or not – there’s an opportunity to embrace it and to listen across the organisation, not just to IT.
Stephen Yap: There’s a shift towards outcome-based working with an unspoken contract between freedom and blurred boundaries [i.e. no more 9-5] and digital natives find this easier to understand.
PJ Dwyer, Dell: Flexible working is popular, but some employees dislike the remoteness/don’t feel part of the team.
Tim Weber: In addition to recognition issues, some roles require collaborative working and presence; interesting to see that Twitter (distributed by nature) has triggered Tweet-Ups – the Human Being is a social animal and companies are social organisations; consider team dynamics (e.g. in a large team, others suspicious that they are carrying the load) – management becomes a task of ensuring everyone knows what their colleagues are doing.
Marie-Christine Pygott, Context: Communications occur in many ways – if employees are not present, they are not on the mind of others (you can’t walk over to their desk for a chat).

Evolving #Workforce: Does a flexible working policy turn you into a flexible but virtual.. hermit?

Thursday 31 May 2012 14:32 via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@TNS_UK

TNS UK

Stephen O’Donnell: We need a virtual watercooler, do we need to use social media to highlight work milestones [or even, “I’m taking the kids to school, I’ll be back in 20 mins”]?
Stuart Collingwood: Expect to see that scenario become more common as future generations enter the workplace (and we’re already seeing changing literacy styles, such as use of “text speak” in written English).
Carly Tatum, Dell: Communications work in different ways; bringing people into a group situation from social media context can induce a different dynamic [one that doesn’t always work].
Mathias Knöfel: Often, meeting people face to face changes the relationship from that point onwards.
PJ Dwyer: Emerging markets have different perspectives, due to different stages of development.

Emerging countries leapfrogging with tech as no legacy technology. Getting best tech, big incentive #DellTechCamp

Thursday 31 May 2012 14:52 via Radian6 ReplyRetweetFavorite

@GStudentAgain

Margo Smale

Stephen Yap: In BRIC, for example, skipping PCs and moving straight to smartphones; also leapfrogging legacy in the workplace – not as encumbered. It will be interesting to see the change as security, etc. become bigger issues in developing nations. Also cultural differences as in some geographies work and technology may act as motivators.
Alexis Lane: When talking about the security of information, we need to understand what it is we are protecting. It’s not realistic to say “everything” – what can we be more relaxed about?
Tim Weber: The “castle/moat model” makes less sense as we become more mobile and blast more holes in the walls – need to look at data level and see what can be done to protect it; requires clever thinking, supported by technology, to understand how to protect the things that are critical to your company.
Stuart Collingwood: We have to think differently about how we build systems – it’s hard (and expensive) to retrofit so we need to re-architect from the ground up.

Key takeaways

For those who find even that list too much to work through – here are the key takeaways from around the table:

Stephen O’Donnell: Consumerisation is happening, it won’t stop – indeed it will accelerate; employees like it, it frees them up from coming to the office as well as from Victorian-style employment contracts; work is becoming more outcome-based; difficult to draw line between work and home; requires serious management – need to think, plan and come up with new ways of thinking.
Tim Weber: There is no single solution; every company needs to look at legacy – not just productivity and happy employees but the underlying stategic business model – suss that out and have clarity of thinking to drive company forward; remain flexible as things will constantly change on the roadmap.
Mathias Knöfel: BYOD gives opportunities for flexibiity with the right incentives but also risks that need to be thought through more carefully (e.g. legal/risk).
Mark Wilson: From an end-user perspective, don’t just think about the “Digital Natives”, also consider “Digital Pioneers” who have seen previous waves of IT transformation and those with no time/inclination too (Digital Luddites); from a management standpoint we need to develop new attitudes to work – become more trusting and results oriented; and the IT department needs to address issues around legacy, removing barriers through innovation and avoiding stagnation; finally, we can’t close lid on this box!
PJ Dwyer: It’s happening now; organisations need to be proactive and it affects not just IT but also HR, legal – indeed the whole business. Flexibility and choice are key to success and aspirations vary by market and geography.
Marie-Christine Pygott: There are pros and cons to consumerisation – it changes the dynamic of an organisation – the way people work, their flexibility, work/life balance but also who teaches whom – employees suggest more about the technology used; there is no single solution and we need need integrated strategies; communication is vital; also differentiation in different parts of the world.
Stuart Collingwood: Consider company culture – not just policy and structural issues – need to instil communications protocols, sensitivities and context within company culture – requires a top down approach. Culture is safety net and policy handbooks are not enough. People will use technology more responsibly than you might give them credit for.
Alexis Lane: Embedding culture of the organisation and taking a decision as to what the company needs to be is important. It’s exciting to consider technology as a motivation – and from a legal perspective we need to get to heart of data issues.
Bryan Jones: Not just a technology discussion – people and process too; competitive advantage downstream is enormous; culture is critical to changing the dynamic in a company; it permeates, into how we communicate internally and how we interact with customers.
Stephen Yap: Enterprise IT has ever been more exciting than now; we’re at a tipping point, elevating the significance of IT within the organisation and to our lives; not just about IT professionals but it makes a difference to all – in how we work and how we live; not just happy and motivated workers but new business models, new ways of doing things. And the conversations that we’re having are more strategic than 10 years ago; IT is making a bigger difference than ever before.

tl;dr view

Stephen O’Donnell’s summary: there is an enormous opportunity for businesses to adopt and drive the socialisation and consumerisation of IT; to really make a difference in driving down costs, improving agility and improving employee/customer communication. On the other side, there is a risk that we “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, that we don’t follow the processes because it’s all new, that we under manage employees, don’t deal with security appropriately, don’t invest in the underlying infrastructure and so don’t achieve the benefits.

Image credits – Dell’s Official Flickr Page, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0). Visual communication/storytelling by Creative Connection.

Why I’m leaving Foursquare

Posted on Tuesday 1 May 2012Tuesday 1 May 2012 By Mark Wilson

For the last year or so, I’ve been religiously “checking in” to all venues on my business travels (not personal ones though) to try and get a handle on Foursquare. This and Farmville (long since forgotten) were part of a quest to understand two of the examples of gamification that were often quoted (back when gamification was the current buzzword).

Well, I have to admit, I don’t really see the advantage. Not to me at least.

I’ve been the mayor of a few places (I was even the mayor of Fujitsu’s UK HQ for a while, although I suspect the CEO may have a different view) but no-one has ever offered me a discount.
Not once have I been alerted to the fact that one of my friends was also at the same venue as me.
I frequently forget to check in at the station on the way home – Foursquare doesn’t let you edit your timeline.
Even as the mayor of a location I was unable to do anything about the “tip spam” – and Foursquare didn’t respond to my requests to remove the offending items either.

Meanwhile I have given Foursquare plenty of information about my travel patterns and the offices I visit. That information might be useful in a broader context but, as with every other “free” social platform, I am the product – not the customer – and I’m simply providing data for potential analysis and even sale. Foursquare, along with Google Latitude and Facebook Places, holds no interest for me any more (especially since Foursquare awarded me the “trainspotter” badge!)

So, in the words of the famous BBC “dragons”, I’m sorry, but “I’m out“.

[Updated 21:42 – added point about “tip spam”]

Using LinkedIn as a B2B social media platform (#smwmecsocial #smwldn)

Posted on Thursday 16 February 2012Thursday 16 February 2012 By Mark Wilson

Yesterday, I wrote about an event I’d attended as part of Social Media Week London, hosted by MEC Global, looking at thought leadership and B2B social media. For reasons of brevity, I skipped over much of LinkedIn‘s presentation in my original post but it provided a lot of insights that I would like to share… so here’s the follow-up!

LinkedIn’s Colin Smith was talking about the role of social in a digital ecosystem and he started out by saying that social media in 2011 was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to an emerging audience, with organisations testing campaigns and activity, predicting that 2012 will be the year when social gets down to business.

Brands are now what people say they are, and:

“The impact of social media is far-reaching,well beyond how we connect with our friends.It has changed how we work. It is changing how we make markets. It has, critically, re-leveled the playing field.”

[George Gallate, Global Chairman, Euro RSCG 4D]

Citing various statistics from a recent CIM/Ipsos ASI study (Social Media Benchmark), Colin Smith highlighted that:

Consumers want to be engaged in a conversation – not sold to.
Brands are now what people say they are.
Business is evolving – moving from transactional to relational. This affects the speed to close deals, the size of those deals and the length of the relationship.
Liking, sharing and commenting are all emotions – we need to build an emotional relationship with our customers [I agree: people buy from people – not brands, although there are some brands that will always be considered “safe bets”].
Decision cycles in B2B take longer than in B2C – longevity makes a difference in the relationship.
People will, on average, follow just 2.8 companies in a given sector, but 50% will follow a company in perpetuity – so you want to your brand to be in that 2.8!
Don’t forget that your staff have profiles, engage with, and are probably connected to competitors and customers – people will check what your staff profiles look like.
Sometimes you’ll know that someone is talking about you, sometimes you don’t – some reactions will be negative and some positive.

It’s important to consider that customers have [LinkedIn – and other social network] profiles too. Before they come to meetings they will check out yours, your staff, your company page, what people are saying and come armed – you need to do the same. They follow, like, share, comment – and expect engagement. They connect to your staff and communicate with them. And they will trust you if communicate and share useful information.

Social hygiene is about the ways in which people [your audience: customers; staff; business partners] expect you to engage. It’s about having an authentic voice and sharing. Businesses have a challenge to be open, authentic, honest, engaging.
Don’t just ask an agency to do this – it needs to go to the core of the business – the CEO, or others who are senior enough and have the credibility [and charisma] to speak on behalf of a brand.
Think about social media in the context of employment – it reflects your brand (even if you don’t employ someone they may make buying decisions elsewhere).

Colin gave some advice for engaging on LinkedIn:

Engagement starts with creating a presence, for example, a company page built out on LinkedIn. Many of these are generated through algorithms so claim yours and make it say what you need it to.
Once you have the presence right, think about who want to attract (think about a specific audience – CEOs, CIOs, procurement advisors, etc.) – LinkedIn can target specific audiences. Samsung ran a LinkedIn campaign and gained 20000 followers in 3 days. Mercedes were looking at just the C-suite and gained 12000 followers in 5 weeks. These are not just big numbers, they are highly targetted and therefore the reach is potentially significant.
Continue to engage through company status updates – provide value at scale. LinkedIn has found that 45% would like weekly updates.
Amplify – as with engagement, think who followers are connected to (LinkedIn average is 151 connections per person).
The only cost is building a content strategy, the hard bit is acquiring followers.
Groups can be used to position a company as a thought leader in an existing conversation or a topic that’s important. For example, Statoil is facilitating a conversation for people to talk about energy innovation. A strategy for content will be required when the group is first started (initial 3-6 months) after which it should take on a life of its own.

Finally, Colin gave some tips for better use of LinkedIn [although many of these could equally be applied to other channels]:

Improve your company page to attract a more relevant audience.
Consider engagement with followers – questions and topics to seed into a group.
Members expect insights and news from companies they follow: 66% expect industry insight; 65% expect upcoming company news (advance information before it hits the press); 45% expect the opportunity to join a group; 45% expect sneak peeks of upcoming products and services; and 43% desire inclusion in a community with similar interests.
Interrogate the social hygiene of your company.
Work across departments so that all customer-facing departments have profiles that are relevant to your company – make sure your brand is represented across the board with links to company pages, blogs, etc. Think about whether modifying a LinkedIn profile is part of the induction process for new employees – and, equally, what people say when they leave.

As an individual, I don’t use LinkedIn as a daily destination – it’s still about professional networking for me. For daily conversations, I prefer the immediacy of Twitter (besides, some of my tweets are more suitable for that audience – and the frequency would just be too high for LinkedIn) but I took a lot away from this presentation about how brands might better engage on the platform.

One thing’s for sure, as MEC’s Shane O’Byrne highlighted at yesterday’s event, B2B social media requires effort on the part of the company, and cannot just be left to an agency. That means applying resource, possibly dedicated, but certainly as part of their work (not as an add-on to do “in their spare time”) to generate content that makes an audience want to engage. That’s been the challenge that I’ve struggled with in my own work on corporate blogs and other B2B social media activities over the last couple of years – and making a B2B brand become “social” is a lot more work than simply setting up a few accounts on major platforms…

Thought leadership and B2B social media (#smwmecsocial #smwldn)

Posted on Wednesday 15 February 2012Wednesday 5 September 2012 By Mark Wilson

This week is Social Media Week in London and there are a lot of events taking place at a variety of locations. I’m not London-based, but I do work there for a couple of days each week and I booked onto some that look particularly relevant to my role – the first of which was hosted by the social media team at MEC Global (@MECsocial), looking at thought leadership and the role of social media in B2B communications.

To be honest, it was a bit light in places on the “thought leadership” angle (MEC covered this, the invited guests less so) but I was pleased to see someone taking a serious look at B2B social media. In my experience most of the “advice” given at events like this is very B2C (or even C2C)-focused and when asking about specific challenges for B2B it’s often brushed under the carpet.

With presentations from MEC Global, LinkedIn and the Telegraph Media Group, followed by a panel discussion, there was a lot of information provided but I’d like to concentrate on just a few highlights.

Organisational considerations for social media

MEC’s Shane O’Byrne (@shaneysean) opened up the event with some organisational considerations for B2B social media. Taking the view that, in stark contrast to B2C (which is 80% agency, 20% client), B2B social media requires more client input (the 80:20 split is reversed), with the agency helping organisations to deliver thought leadership externally. Considerations include:

Hard vs. soft approach.
Thought leadership.
Lead generation.
C-suite.
Sales.
Credibility.
Prospect.

And, whilst Shane didn’t go into detail (after all, he’s showing just an insight – let’s call it thought leadership – maybe I should engage with MEC for more detail), in general, it’s about bringing people into a community, thinking about when to approach and move them down the pipeline, and shaping conversations with potential clients rather than selling.

Thought leadership may include advice about the marketplace, culture, political landscape, and even some “crystal ball” gazing; and Shane has seen success in organisations who have found the right seniority of stakeholders using a social media council – working as experts to nurture talent and expertise, turning that into rich content for digital ecosystem.

That digital ecosystem was a topic of conversation for LinkedIn’s Colin Smith and, I’ll hold back on that for a future blog post but Richard Fitzgerald, also from MEC (@fitzyrichard) spoke about the need to avoid treating social media in isolation – integrating with other channels.

Richard recommends setting a mission statement – whether that is a philosophy, a brand campaign, a goal, or a business objective, and building on top of that. In terms of time allocation, a rough split might be:

70% resource planning, data and insights, content audits, market analysis, futures studies (what are people expecting to hear about?).
20% community management – engagement strategy, moderation guidelines, escalation documents, editorial guidelines, content calendars.
10% for the unpredictable – breaking news, crisis management, reactive content, real time engagement and tactical campaigns.

Social is another means of communication, to be ignored at your peril

Matthew Margetts and Jonathan Davies spoke about the Telegraph Media Group’s experiences of social media, which they regard as another means of communicating and not as superseding a web presence or any other form of communication.

I was particularly interested to hear about their experience of digital media consumption. The Telegraph Media Group is a brand, a content provider and it has commercial solutions (with declining newspaper sales but new markets including competition applications, social video, bespoke applications and Twitter). And, on that last point – Twitter as a channel:

1.6m people consume @Telegraph content every day - a further million on Twitter (not monetised: http://t.co/DVDc7z9V) #smwmecsocial #smwldn

Wednesday 15 February 2012 9:45 via Twitter for iPad ReplyRetweetFavorite

@markwilsonit

Mark Wilson

That shows that Twitter should not be ignored and, although monetising the output might be a challenge, there are opportunities to establish presence, create a groundswell of opinion, establish oneself as a thought leader, and become a recognised (and respected) brand – all of which have positive effects later – even if they don’t lead to direct sales.

Pick your channels with care; and who owns that social profile?

The event finished up with a panel discussion and there were two main areas of interest for me here.

Firstly, there’s a lot of talk about relative sizes of social networks (Facebook is huge, Twitter is pretty big too, Google+ may be significant too, and LinkedIn is relatively small) but then think about the audience that you are targetting.

Think about context for B2B socmed. LinkedIn connects professionals but only 640m professionals in world, 12.5m in UK #smwmecsocial #smwldn

Wednesday 15 February 2012 10:13 via Twitter for iPad ReplyRetweetFavorite

@markwilsonit

Mark Wilson

This tweet is based on information given by Colin Smith from LinkedIn and, whilst it clearly plays into LinkedIn’s market position (connecting professional people), I think it makes a powerful point: perhaps the majority of those 800m people on Facebook are not actually your target audience? Perhaps Saleforce.com Chatter might serve an organisation well, in a B2B context?

Finally, who owns your social profiles? Well, I’m pretty determined that I own my LinkedIn presence, this blog, my Twitter stream, etc., many of which predate my employment, but a communications director might take a different view, said the panel! One argument is that you learned the points that you communicated whilst you were working for the company (but do we? Some might argue that we build personal brands, based on experience with a variety of roles and employments). There may be cultural differences between personal and company accounts and Matthew Margetts highlighted that The Telegraph has guidelines but, equally, it employs “contrarian thinkers who are encouraged to give their opinions”. Maybe some brands are threatened by the rise of the “personal brand” – that will depend on the company and the market. One thing’s for sure – this particular issue is far from clear cut and looks set to become more and more significant, most likely to be settled in the courts…

Bring your own… or use what you are told?

Posted on Wednesday 16 November 2011Tuesday 29 May 2012 By Mark Wilson

A few days ago, I read an article about the risks presented by IT consumerisation. It rang alarm bells with me because, whilst the premise is sound (there are risks, some serious ones, and they need to be mitigated), the focus seemed to be on controlling data leakage by restricting access to social media and locking down device functionality (restricting USB ports, etc.). Whilst that was once an accepted model, I have to question if UWYT (use what you are told) is really the approach we should be taking in this day and age?

One of the key topics within the overal consumerisation theme is concerned with “bring your own” (BYO) device models. I recently wrote a white paper on this topic (a condensed “insight and opinion” view is also available) but, in summary, BYO offers IT departments an opportunity to provide consumer-like services to their customers – i.e. business end users.

In a recent dialogue on Twitter, one of my contacts was suggesting that Fortune 500 companies won’t go for BYO. But the tide does seem to be turning and there are significant enterprises who are seriously considering it. I’ve been involved in several discussions over recent weeks and I’ve even seen articles in mainstream press about BYO adoption (for example, Qantas has publicly announced plans to allow up to 35,000 employees to connect their own devices to the corporate network). Interestingly, both those links are to Australian publications – maybe we’re just a little more conservative over here?

Of course, there are hurdles to cross (particularly around manageability and security) and it’s not about undoing the work put into managing “standard operating environments” but about recognising how to build flexibility into our infrastructure and open up access to what business end users really need – information!

We need to think about device ownership too and, in particular, about whose data resides where. Indeed, one of the best articles I’ve read on the topic was Art Witmann’s suggestion that a BYO strategy should start with data-centric security, including this memorable quote:

“Understandable or not, if ‘your device is now our device’ is the approach your team is taking, you need to rethink things”

Virtualisation can help with the transition, as can digital rights management. Ultimately we need to re-draw our boundaries and we may find ourselves in a place where the office network is considered “dirty” (just as the coffee shop Wi-Fi is today) and we access services (secured at the application or, better still, at the data layer) rather than concerning ourselves with device or technology-dependant offerings.

Putting myself in a customer’s shoes for a moment, I expect that I’d be asking if Fujitsu is following a BYO model and the answer is both “yes”, and “no”. As a device manufacturer it presents some image problems if our people are using other vendors’ equipment so, here in the UK and Ireland, our PCs are still provided by a central IT function. Having said that, there are some choices with a catalogue to select from (based on defined eligibility criteria [- a choose your own device scheme]). We also operate a BYO scheme for mobile devices, based on [Fujitsu’s] Managed Mobile service.

So we can see that BYO is not an all-or-nothing solution. And, whilst I’ve only scraped the surface here, it does need to be supported with appropriate changes to policies (not just IT policies either – there are legal, financial and human resources issues to address too).

To me it seems that ignoring consumerisation is a perilous path – it’s happening and if senior IT leaders are unable to support it, they may well find themselves bypassed. Of course, not every employee is a “knowledge worker” and there will be groups for whom access to social media (or even access to the Internet) or the ability to use their own device is not appropriate. For many others though, the advantages of “IT as a service” may be significant and far-reaching.

[This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog.]

Is technology at the heart of business, or is it simply an enabler?

Posted on Monday 17 October 2011Monday 28 May 2012 By Mark Wilson

I saw a video from Cisco this morning, and found it quite inspirational. The fact it’s from Cisco isn’t really relevant (indeed, if I showed it without the last few seconds you woudn’t know) but it’s a great example of how IT is shaping the world that we live in – or, more precisely, how the world is shaping the direction that IT is taking:

In case you can’t see the video above, here are some of the key statistics it contains:

Humans created more data in 2009 alone than in all previous years combined.
Over the last 15 years, network speeds have increased 18 million times.
Information is moving to the cloud; 8/10 IT Managers plan to use cloud computing within the next 3 years.
By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25% of IT labour hours.
We’re using multiple devices: by 2015 there will be nearly one mobile-connected device for every person on earth;
2/3 of employees believe they should be able to access information using company-issued devices at any time, at any location;
60% believe they don’t need to be in an office to be productive;
This is creating entirely new forms of collaboration.
“The real impact of the information revolution isn’t about information management but on relationships; the ability to allow not dozens, or hundreds, but thousands of people to meaningfully interact” [Dr Michael Schrage, MIT].
By 2015 companies will generate 50% of web sales via their social presence and mobile applications.
Social business software will become a $5bn business by 2013.
Who sits at the centre of all this? Who is managing these exponential shifts? The CIO.

Some impressive numbers here – and we might expect to see many of these figures cited by a company selling social collaboration software and networking equipment but they are a good indication of the way things are heading. I would place more emphasis on empowered employees and customers redefining IT provisioning (BYO, for example); on everything as a service (XaaS) changing the IT delivery model; on the need for a new architecture to manage the “app Internet”; and on big data – which will be a key theme for the next few years.

Whatever the technologies underpinning the solution – the overall direction is for IT to provide business services that add value and enhance business agility rather than simply being part of “the cost of doing business”.

I think Cisco’s video does a rather good job of illustrating the change that is occurring but the real benefits come when we are able to use technology as an enabler for business services that create new opportunities, rather than responding to existing pressures.

I’d love to hear what our customers, partners and competitors think – is technology at the heart of the digital revolution, or is it simply an enabler for new business services?

[This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog and was written with assistance from Ian Mitchell.]

Could this be the ultimate unified messaging client?

Posted on Thursday 1 September 2011Monday 28 May 2012 By Mark Wilson

Much has been made of the slow death of email and the rise of enterprise social software so I was interested to read a recent paper in which Benno Zollner, Fujitsu’s global CIO, commented on the need to balance email usage with other communications mechanisms.

In the paper, Benno posits a view that we’re entering not just a post-PC era but a post-email era where we use a plethora of devices and protocols. This is driven by a convergence of voice and data (not just on smartphones, but on the “desktop” too – Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype shows how seriously they are taking this) but also the enterprise social software that’s extending our traditional collaboration platforms to offer what was once referred to as a “web 2.0” experience, only inside the corporate network. Actually, I’m slightly uncomfortable with that last sentence – not just because as I find the terms “web 2.0” and “enterprise 2.0” to be cringe-worthy but, also, the concept of the corporate network is becoming less and less relevant as we transact more and more business in the cloud, using the mobile Internet, Wi-Fi hotspots and home broadband. Even so, it illustrates my point, that social networking is very much a part of the modern business environment, alongside traditional communications mechanisms including the telephone and email.

A few months ago, I wrote about the need to prioritise communications but I can see us taking a step further in the not-too-distant future. Why do I need an email client (Microsoft Outlook), multiple instant messaging/presence/voice over IP (VoIP) clients (Microsoft Office Communicator/Lync/Skype) a Twitter client (TweetDeck), Enterprise social software (Microsoft SharePoint/Newsgator Social Sites/Salesforce Chatter) and a combination of mobile and desk-based phones (don’t forget SMS on that mobile too!)? Plenty has been made of the ability to use VoIP to ring several phones simultaneously, to call the phone that best matches my presence or to divert the call to a unified messaging inbox but why limit this to telephony?

I can envisage a time when we each have a consolidated communications client – one that recognises who we’re trying to communicate with and picks the appropriate channel to contact them. If I’m sending a message to my wife and she’s at her desk, then email is fine but if I can tell she’s on the school run then why not route it to her mobile phone by SMS? Similarly, advanced presence information can be used to route communications over a variety of channels to favour that which each of my contacts tends to use in a given scenario. Perhaps the software knows that a contact is not available via instant messaging but is signed in to Twitter and can be contacted with a direct message. Maybe I can receive a précis of an urgent report on my smartphone but the full version is available at my desk. The possibilities are vast but the main point is that the sender shouldn’t need to pick and choose the medium; instead, software can take into account the preferences of the recipient and route the communication accordingly (taking into account that some transport mechanisms may not guarantee delivery). Could this be the ultimate unified messaging client?

Email isn’t dead – but soon we won’t care whether our messages are sent via SMTP, SIP, SMS or semaphore – just as long as they arrive in a manner that ensures an efficient communication process and lets us focus on the task at hand, rather than spending the day working our way through our inboxes.

This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog and is based on a concept proposed by Ian Mitchell.