It's ok to flash in public!

No I don't mean the dirty mack and shifty look in a local park but at least the heading made you read on. What i'm referring to is the thrill of flash mob events that seems to have sparked the imagination of us Brits. Perhaps it is the adrenaline of such an instantaneous burst of activity or perhaps it's the Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame narcissim, the Big Brother obsession with being on TV. Either way, there are some brands and agencies that are nailing the viral element of the social media evolution and creating incredible brand engagement.

If you haven't stumbled across the idea of flash mobs (where have you been all this time?!), it involves bringing together large numbers of people to act out a specific event in public locations. T-Mobile seems to have embraced this with open arms and you can see footage of their recent sing-a-long in Trafalgar Square using this Chinwag link. Scroll down to the 4 min edit and keep an eye out for Pink....actually, you don't need to do that, there is more to life. Want more examples, you can give this site a go.

The event itself is creative but it's the online marketing impact that excites me. This video has more than 450,000 views on YouTube and 1,483 ratings...not bad eh? Just think of the full social potential if the viral effect is fully exploited nationally, globally?

Having spoken to someone involved in this event (Saatchi & Saatchi organised the whole thing), it's not the free spirited utopia that you might think. Organising these events requires massive co-ordination with the local council and Police. That's inevitable, for one there has to be cover in case of an accident - who would foot the bill if hundreds of people got injured by crowd frenzy?

Do flash mobs have a direct financial benefit? I don't know how you could qualify that unless you ask people why they bought on your website/in-store and list "the flash mob in Trafalgar Square inspired me" as an option.....

However, perhaps that is missing the point. From a brand awareness point of view, it is an amazing outlet. Thousands of people coming together in waves of exaltation, hundreds of thousands perhaps millions more engaging with the creative online via social networks/seeding.

What do you think? Is flash mobbing a flash in the pan or can it become a sustainable engagement tool? Is it only for global brands that have at the core of their brand values a sense of bringing people together, like the mobile operators?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Sitting in the corner all alone

Why do some companies miss a trick? Why do marketers spend a lot of time and effort coming up with clever campaign concepts only to fail in the delivery? On the social web there is a huge opportunity to encourage people to share your ideas across their networks, provided you give them good reason to. Encouraging people to talk for you doesn't always require a financial incentive, though that is indeed the usual fare. However a quid pro quo is desireable - you scratch my back etc.

My irritation comes this week from what I think was a great piece of marketing poorly executed. The brand is Brora, the concept an Easter Egg Hunt launched via email. The email invited me to their website to hunt for easter eggs hidden on pages; there are 15 in total to collect awarding a maximum discount of 15% off your order.

On closer inspection, there was no obvious route to finding the eggs and no hints/tips to channel people to find the mother load. The landing page explaining the hunt was bland and unengaging. The eggs, when found, were easy to see and there was a nicely delivered splash page showing your new egg being added to the basket and the total eggs collected. 

However, there are 15 eggs to collect to get the full 15% discount. Firstly, 15 eggs is a lot to collect when you are not giving people any clues how to find them and they all exist on separate pages. Secondly, 15% is not a great offer anymore - anything less than 20% seems an offense! So, in my opinion  this is a really cute piece of marketing that has failed to ask the killer question - will my customers find it easy to use and will they be excited? Of course, that is my take, hopefully for Brora it will prove successful but could it have been even more successful if the execution has been smarter?

Bringing it back to the general social theme of my blog, what do I think they should have done?

1. Encourage sharing - use a standard "send-to-friend" service in the email - why are they not using such a basic tool to get more people involved?
2. Provide social bookmarking in the email so that people could post the content to their networks - Easter is abput friends & family, so encourage people to spread the word
   
3. Reward people for spreading the content virally - why not offer anyone who sends the email to X friends a bonus Y% off their order? Or free delivery. Or a free gift.
   
4. Get online and get people excited about it!! Now this is supposition but I think there will have been zero online PR for this campaign - there should have been some content syndicated to raise awareness & the offer driven via channels such as the affiliate base
   

I guess my main point here is that people undersell themselves too easily and don't think laterally. A promotion is as effective as the interest of your customers and you limit the scope of involvement if you just send an email and put up a new homepage - you have to put all your eggs in one basket!

What do you think? Go to the Brora homepage and follow the instructions: do you get bored after the first 5 eggs and give up or does it really work for you? Please post comments, I welcome other viewpoints.

Can social media be applied to the public sector and politics?

I was asked recently on this blog how the principles of social media could be applied to the public sector and, specifically, politics. That got me thinking, a rare occurrence. I thought that being negative would help focus my mind - why couldn't you use social media tools to engage people in politics? That thought lasted a few minutes before I was resolved; social media is hugely relevant to politics and the proof is in the Obama pudding. Below are the key points to my response to the question posed by Oranjepan (apparently a “A balding, ginger primate verging on extinction” from Reading, you don't meet one of those every day!):

Politics is about people not words

How can you engage your voters if you don’t understand what they want? You must speak to them in a way that is conducive to their needs – too many politicians speak through soundbite and never actually listen, too interested in their own voices and pomp (yes that is a disservice to grass roots politics where more people are genuinely interested but mainstream politicians like Gordon Brown and David Cameron have a wider influence)

Engagement requires direct contact

Putting a leaflet through a door does not mean you’ve engaged with someone – engagement only happens when somebody responds to you, implicitly or explicitly.

Passion breeds interaction

Engagement involves concerted effort – you can’t just say “well I tried”; if you believe in something make others feel that passion – communicate it regularly and don't expect everyone to respond at the first hurdle. Creating true conversation takes time and effort, nature and nurture

Build it and they will come!

Use advocacy – when you find someone who is listening and responding, ask them if they would like to be more involved & reward them for their effort – doesn’t have to be money! The power of advocacy is huge and people respond far better to "people like me" than a politician they have no direct relationship with.

Make it easy for people to interact with you

Allow people to share information, make it easy for them to pass on what you are saying. Create a blog, allow people to track it; set-up an RSS feed so people can have your content fed to them in a convenient way; use social bookmarking tools to enable people to post your content around their social networks. Open the communication channels and make sure you respond; I recently sent an email to Patricia Hewitt via her website and received no response, making me dislike her and what she represents even more. Why bother having a "Contact me" section if you have no intention of replying?

Embrace the online channel

You want to see a good example how social media can influence in politics? I give you Mr Barrack Obama, President of the USA. Check out his official website and follow the social media links. This helped him engage with millions online, many of whom never embraced politics before. Here is a handy chart that my fellow blogger Oranjepan kindly sent me:

Team Obama's intelligent use of social media to engage a diverse online audience was instrumental in achieving two political milestones; record numbers of people using online to engage with the election and record amount of money raised online to fund the campaign.

Granted, Obama will have had far greater resource than local politicians but the principles are the same. People are not interested in grandiose rhetoric about solving the problems of a nation, they want to here policies that will deliver tangible results and that are relevant to their lives. Social media provides one of the channels to achieve 1-2-1 communication and build personal relationships.

In my opinion, there is no reason why social media can't be applied to politics. However, i would urge budding politicians, at whatever level, to tread carefully. Social network are not there for your manipulation; if you misjudge the culture of the community you can do your reputation a lot of damage. 

Engagement is about listening and sharing, not pushing your agenda. Take time to understand who your audience is, then spend time monitoring where they talk and what they talk about. Only when you are sure you have something positive to contribute should you join the discussion.

If you are genuinely interested in what people have to say and what to engage in dialogue with them, you could use the online space to build an effective community and influence the voting public.

Keeping up with the Joneses....getting excited about engagement

It is amazing just how many people are on Twitter sharing links about social media, not just people extending their own brand reach but genuinely interested in all things social. I struggle to keep up with the updates but am learning to be a bit more ruthless with what I read and what I act on. Otherwise, I really will have no life!

I’ve been busy helping write a presentation that e-inbusiness is giving @ the Retail Week eCommerce Summit on Tuesday in London. The focus is on social buzz and how important it is to use engagement online to create a buzz for your brand. That may sounds oh so Web2.0 darling but we genuinely believe in this. Thankfully the web has moved beyond basic transactions to a more sophisticated community in which people are increasingly demanding high quality service and positive experiences. The high street has already gone through this (obvious) evolution – people have emotions, so it is only natural they want enjoyment in life and not just functional service (disclaimer – yes I know there are those of you who don’t care as long as you get the right thing at the right price).

So, this week I’ve been thinking about how retailers can leverage social tools to not only satisfy but delight and engage their customers. There is a requirement to go beyond basic shopkeeping. There needs to be something that attracts the customer to your brand beyond the purchase need. Why would I be loyal to Brand X simply because they sold me something? I am more likely to come back if they make me feel wanted. Or show me that their customers are loved. Or make me laugh. Basically, do something to engage me and give me value from paying attention. A colleague of mine, Steven Hampson, used a neat word to summarise Web3.0, or better still Consumer3.0 (yep the whole numbering thing is far too media speak but it is what people understand, so please forgive me!) – meCommerce. We’ve had eCommerce, we know about mCommerce but now we need to put the individual at the heart of our thinking. Here’s where the gaskets blow and people raise the flag of CRM. Yes, CRM gave traditional DM great propensity models, customer segments and improved personalisation. Yes, it is still hugely relevant. However, traditional CRM does not cover the social space online and look at how communication can be used to share information and build communities. It does not build direct 1-to-1 dialogue like microblogging and social networking can. meCommerce takes CRM to the next level.

Take a look at what Free People has been doing with its customer reviews. Free People pays real attention to their customer reviews, so much so that they invited their #1 reviewer to an extensive interview. They asked her about her favourite Free People clothes, her lifestyle, her interests. They collected photos of her wearing their clothes and featured them on their Flickr event set. Then they dedicated an entire blog post to the day to share what they learned with other customers. There is a good summary on the BazaarVoice blog page.

Why do I think this is a good example of “meCommerce”? I just love the attitude that drives this behaviour. Free People put in customer reviews for commercial reasons but also because they wanted to understand what their customers thought. They then wanted to go further and speak directly with their most prolific reviewer. Thinking more creatively, they wanted to share what they learned with the wider community and embraced blogging & Flicker. This shows commitment and passion. It also shows they have a handle on social media and how it can be applied to their customer base. This also shows a company willing to engage its customers and create content that is both interesting and relevant. Dialogue not monologue. Nurture and nature.

So what can other retailers learn? That engaging customers requires passion and creativity. You need to understand all the touch points for your business and work out how to knit them together. Most importantly, you need to give your customers a reason to get involved. Simply offering them somewhere to be is not reason enough.

Another week, another interesting indulgence in the world of social. There has been a lot of chatter about Obama’s impact on the world and the inauguration of the first ever black President of the United States. Quite an emotional and awe inspiring scene from the US and a genuine sense of optimism. I have followed with interest the role of the Internet and specifically social media in Obama’s rise and rise to office.

From the outset of the election trail and lengthy primaries, Team Obama has used persuasive engagement online to encourage more and more voters to engage with politics and embrace the Democratic candidate. The website also helped raise a record breaking amount to fund the election campaign and the financial impact of the online marketing was incredible.

What struck me was the engagement techniques that the Obama team used. If you check the official website you can see a link to the blog in the top nav bar. As well as regular updates, video has been embedded on this page and the ability to login in to the MyObama.com community site where you can interact with other voters to get active in the campaign trail. The MyObama.com page is personalised and acts like a social network. Here you can contact other voters, attend or organise local events, send and receive messages and link through to your Facebook account. Everywhere you go in the site, there are clear links to donate or buy Obama merchandise. The marketing and merchandising is effective but not intrusive.

Another neat touch is the “Obama Everywhere” panel that appears throughout the site. From here you can link direct into Obama’s profiles on the usual suspects, from Facebook (557,923 posts and over 4 million supporters) to Linked In, embracing the corporate and business market. There is a real intelligence to the targeting and relevance of all the profile links and the content you can find on each. Brilliant.

There is much more to this site in relation to use of social media, such as the links to the Barack Obama channel on YouTube (1,827 videos and 155,750 subscribers). Take a look around. I’m not saying it is the only way to do social media but the success of this engagement approach is proven and now much spoken of. The blogging world has embraced this event and there is a wealth of personal opinion being churned out. Despite my cynical view of politics, I genuinely enjoyed seeing Team Obama embrace online as a key channel to engage with and influence millions of voters. They are more in tune with the world and the younger generations than the Republicans. The rest is most definitely history.

Are tag clouds the new mullets?

This week I have been mostly indulging in tag clouds. With every new widget or technology, there is the potential for it to be a short lived fad rather than a lasting gift. The question I asked myself was “Do tag clouds really improve web browsing?” and I set about discovering whether, as Jeffrey Zeldman proclaimed, tag clouds are the new mullets.

If you don’t know what a tag cloud is, you can check out the bite size wiki entry for a handy description. Tag or word clouds are visual representations of data, used to organise content by meaning, relevance or popularity. It is a neat way of showing people what is important, often using word size as the barometer, such that the most popular words are the biggest in the cloud.  WAYN, the social network for travellers, uses it on the homepage to flag popular destinations which then take you to an optimised landing page for that destination. Flickr was one of the early pioneers and you can see the user friendly design in the ‘Explore’ section of the website.

I’ve seen tag clouds in many forms over the past 12 months, mainly on industry sites and personal blogs. What interests me is that retailers are increasingly using this technique to enhance site navigation and search, or searchandising if you want to be natty and oh so Web2.0. Tag clouds are a cool way to support site browsing and have many applications in a retail environment, provided they are integrated in a way that enhances rather than distracts the customer journey. So, to briefly name but a few…..

Enhance site search

Highlight popular search terms, showing people what other visitors have searched for, helping people find the most popular terms quickly.

Display product features prominently

Improve a product details page, highlighting the most relevant and popular features of the product to help people make the right buying decision.

Showcase content from customer reviews

Closely related to the last comment, customer review solutions like BazaarVoice enable review clouds so that the most popular and frequently used words contained in customer reviews can be browsed to help identify what other people are saying and learn more about products and services. It also enable customers leaving reviews to select attributes from the community to make writing the review easier.

Highlight featured content

A good example is on the blogs on Technorati. Here the tags relate to the content of the blog to help you determine the relevance of the content. This is helpful when navigating the site, looking for new blogs. Simply click on the tags that you are interested and get results that match your requirements. In the words of John Barnes, it “gets to your thirst, fast”.

For the best on-screen example of tag clouds in action, visit Smashing Magazine. Here you’ll find a deluge of screenshots of tag clouds from various websites….if you still don’t get the concept after reading this blog, give up!

If anyone has a view on the commercial benefit of tag clouds for retail websites, please post comments and suggestions. If you have any examples of websites using tag clouds to good effect, please post the URLs to this blog. In the meantime, get tagging!

2009 will see social media hit the mainstream for UK retail

If 2008 saw the UK tentatively engage with social media tools, 2009 will see us embrace with open arms. The early adopters have ducked in, experimented and put in place creative, compelling social media strategies that have engaged their customers and created a lot of noise in the online maelstrom. There have been a few learning curves to boot and the occasional backlash. Social media is not a passing fad, the concept of enabling your customers to engage with your brand on their terms is one way to start building an online buzz. Some individual tools may be short lived but the concept is not. The experience online is becoming increasingly important and as the world descends into discount fever, those brands that compete on more than just price will benefit.

Take a look at what the more enlightened companies are doing in the social media space. Firstly, let’s look at Facebook. Very much maligned yet undeniably has had a huge impact on how people interact. There are 8.4m UK users alone and 67m active users worldwide. Wiggly Wigglers has taken the ethos of Facebook to heart and developed a branded page that offers excellent content and value to members, interacting with them at both the personal and company level. What it has done well is to post regular content that informs customers as well as posts that are light hearted, humorous and engaging. This has resulted in 1,063 members of the group who are all sharing information with each other, much of which is related back to Wiggly Wigglers products and service. The company has recently won the Global Dell Small Business Excellence Award. An interesting move saw Amazon acquire Shelfari (a network site dedicated to book lovers) in October 2008. This was a commercially cute way of developing its social media presence whilst giving direct access to a highly targeted audience who can buy books direct from Amazon.

You Tube is another interesting prospect for customer engagement. Hitwise data shows that UK traffic to online video websites has roughly tripled in the last year and You Tube accounts for 70% of that traffic. The number of branded video channels is increasing, with major retailers like Diesel embracing this channel for brand engagement. Diesel has 516 subscribers and 17,968 channel views (as of November 24^th). If creating a channel is not your bag, then it is easy to load videos to the site to showcase your company. Acquired by Google, You Tube also displays Google Adwords adverts on search results…. A nice way for them to get more click revenue!

One of the more intriguing sites is Twitter. This dispenses with the bells and whistles and simply enables you to give a status update (max 140 characters, aka microblogging) and to follow other members and be followed too. You have a basic update list to tell you what you and your followers are up to. Many companies are now monitoring the twittersphere [go with it….]for reference of their brand and then engaging with the twitterati where relevant. JetBlue in the US is a great example and their actions have spawned blogs on the subject. At the same time, these companies are tweeting [Twitterspeak for posting updates] to their heart’s content. Even the UK Government has muscled in with the kids, creating a twitter feed for No.10 Downing Street with 6,056 followers. If you’re feeling voyeuristic, check out twittervision where you can view the latest tweets on a global map! I really should get out more….

Similar to tweeting is the global phenomenon of blogging. In the blogosphere [detect a theme?] content is being generated rapidly by both individuals and companies. In the last 3 years, UK traffic to blogs has increased by 208%. With pingback and trackback functionality, blogging is increasingly linking people together and having a significant SEO effect. Is this relevant to your brand? Definitely. Take a look at what Ikea is embracing with the Ikea Fans site. I’m also a fan of the Topshop style blog; simple and effective and you can also sign-up to the RSS feed. The secret to a successful blog is….. well, I’m not going to give that away for free am I!

I’ve saved the peak of my enthusiasm for the subject of Customer Reviews. There has been increased uptake of the major UK providers Feefo, Bazaarvoice and Reevo and some retailers are also implementing bespoke solutions on-site. A good example of how to do reviews is Boden. If you really aren’t convinced about the power of reviews, take a peek at some of the stats. People inherently trust independent feedback more than your own product information. Providing customer reviews not only adds validity (and SEO friendly content) but has also been proven to increase order values and conversion. I don’t think customer reviews is a competitive advantage so much as a necessity.

So, social is the new black. I’ve not even touched on the more gimmicky but nevertheless popular aspects such as widgets, wikis and applications. For examples of e-inbusiness Clients going forth into social waters, take a look at New Look’s My Look community forum, and the Facebook presence of both New Look and Radley.

The eCommerce industry is itself using blogs, forums and reviews daily on sites like Chinwag and eConsultancy, so why have so few committed to social media for their customers?

I think we will see more exciting uses of social media in 2009 and we hope to help you become one of the converted! I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, so to embrace the social media theme I’ve started this blog which is also linked to Technorati. The blog starts with this article, so please tell me what you think. Are you excited by the social media potential for your brand? Do you have a SMO strategy? Or are you finding it hard to work out how your brand can be relevant in social spheres? Or can you share new information to increase my socialsphere? All comments will be welcome. 

Thanks

James