Digital Strategy - Servant of Chaos

Where Are You on the Trust Barometer?

Age of Conversation, Corporate Social Responsibility, Digital Strategy, Facts & Figures, Influence, Media, Social Media

Whenever the social media conversation shifts to “influence” – who has it, how you can get it and what it’s worth, you know we’re talking trust. After all, what we perceive as “influence” is simply a combination of trust and relevance – a heady mix of the right audience, a trusted shepherd and a call to action.

Don’t believe me?

Nicholas Christakis has an interesting post on the power of twitter and its ability to influence a large following. As he explains, Alyssa Milano with her celebrity and her 1.3 million strong Twitter following would normally be considered “influential”. But when she tweeted out a link to the Amazon page of a book called Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks & How They Shape Our Lives, the roar of social media silence was deafening. There was not ONE clickthrough. Not one sale.

It seems – finally – that we are seeing the reality of trust and the power of relevance. That’s why I am particularly interested in this report from Edelman Australia – the 2011 Australian Edelman Trust Barometer.

Launched today (see the Tweetstream), this is the third survey to be carried out in Australia, but we are already seeing some interesting trending:

Coming out of the GFC, we saw an upswing in trust in government (54%) and businesses (52%)
Trust in NGOs (65%) is the highest of any Australian institution, with the Media well down at 32%

The full report is embedded below and can be downloaded from Slideshare. It makes for interesting reading.

2011 Australian Edelman Trust Barometer

View more presentations from Matthew Gain.

But what does this mean for brands and marketers?

As one of the launch panellists, Vanessa Hall, pointed out, trust is created through the interplay of the message or story the brand wants to tell, the expectations of your customers/stakeholders and the promise that exists between the two (my interpretation here). This is where the challenge comes – after all, our customers are rarely interested in the brand story, and their interpretation of your brand promise is often different from where you (on the client or agency side) tend to see it.

And with social media, individuals are now well equipped to engage with brands in a public (and searchable) sphere. Positive and negative brand experiences can be published, shared and amplified around the world in minutes – and this makes “trust” all the more important. As the report points out, “Trust is a protective agent …”. And yes, it can lead to tangible sales.

But, we need to consider the following trends:

Aligning our business purpose with a greater good (CSR is a good start)
Strong support for NGOs (consider partnering with an NGO to build your trust profile)
Multiple voices in multiple channels (while CEOs have increased level of trust and respect, use expert voices across your business and in multiple channels to build a network of influence)

Perhaps, most importantly, you need to think about all this in relation to YOUR business. Where do you sit on the trust barometer? And how are you going to improve?

Five Tips to Maintain Social Media Momentum

Branding, Digital Strategy, Social Media

One of the challenges with social media is that it’s easy to start and it’s easy to stop.

Even the biggest, most resourced brands fall into the trap of running a successful social media campaign – and then nothing.

It stops.

The fan pages go quiet, the blogs stop, the Twitter channels fall into a deafening silence and YouTube dries up.

It’s difficult to maintain momentum.

Or is it?

Here are my five tips to help you maintain your social media momentum:

Mash the trend – use social channels to create content around your brand. Combine social trends, keywords and other content that you have created (say from TVCs) in a unique way
Share the message – don’t try to “control” your brand message or you’ll just end up in trouble. But you can control some of the mechanisms to do with online brand participation. Remember that knowing who drives knowing how – and some social networks outperform others
Calendaring – look at your business plan and map out the announcements, the changes and the opportunities over the coming year. Think about how this can be supported with blog posts, YouTube clips, interviews etc, and then put these into an editorial calendar
Design for participation – don’t look at entertaining people with your clever creativity. Design your social media in a way that encourages participation rather than passive consumption. Rather than just asking a question, post a Twtpoll; rather than asking for feedback, try uservoice to allow people to provide feedback and then VOTE on the answers they like best
Guest post your CEO – you are going to need support, so why not get it from the top. Reach out to your CEO and offer to write up a profile on their recent achievements. Better yet, help them write a guest post for your blog or a video for your YouTube channel. Remember, social media is also about tapping your community for contributions

So, can this really be done? Take a look at this fantastic “movie” from Uniqlo that combines Twitter with video to create your very own customised video/TVC. They employ several of these tips in a way that puts their brand at the centre of a very personal experience. Try it out yourself … oh, and then think about how you could do something similar for your brand.

Change Your Briefs

Creativity, Digital Strategy, Smart Bloggers, Social Media

I can remember hand coding my first “proper” website. It was for a small business that I was running out of an artists’ studio on a dilapidated pier. We specialised in helping publishers move from the print to the new web-ready world. Well, it was almost web-ready – it was the days when there was “an Internet” and a “World Wide Web” – and they were two different things. They were completely different experiences.

Being impatient and a risk taker, I bet my money on the graphical world wide web and created a website. It felt like I was working at the edge of the world – and in a way it was.

Fast forward to 2010 and it is a vastly different world. Knowledge of “the web” and how it works is far more widespread. Indeed, it has spread far beyond my own meagre expertise. There has been a massive transformation in the shape, technology and the platforms that enable our polyphonic internets – perhaps matched only by the huge shift in the way in which we use it. (And I do mean “use” in a very loose way.)

However, the way in which digital agencies are “briefed” has remained relatively static. Gareth Kay suggests that it is time that we changed our briefs – and has put together a great presentation, PostDigitalBriefs, that challenges us to do just that. But best of all, Gareth provides us with a way forward.

Take a good look through the presentation yourself, but my key takeouts are:

Know what we want people to do
Understand which behaviours we want to shift
Differentiate and articulate your social mission vs the commercial proposition
Identify the triggers that will prompt people to share
Make it easy for people to participate
Know where your constituents are and the social rules that operate there

Postdigitalbriefs2 – August 2010

View more presentations from Gareth Kay.

Using Social Media to Solve Business Issues

Digital Strategy, Innovation, Social Media

I have been running SocialMediaJobs.com.au as a free site for a couple of years now. The aim was to “connect the connectors” – to bring those with jobs to those who want them. When I started there was only a trickle of roles available, but it has grown quite nicely now – with regular placements coming through.

At first I wondered whether it would be useful to the community – but then I started hearing about the successes – great jobs finding great people, unexpected connections and so on. But there was also an unexpected benefit … I started to gain an insight into the way that companies were thinking around recruitment for social media. It became clear that there was often a mismatch of expectations – and that while personal engagement with social media was often expected by employers, what was required was professional business experience. In short – employers wanted the disciplines of marketing and management, coupled to the creativity and energy of personal social media.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Alex Manchester about my observations and experiences. These, together with input from folks like Euan Semple, Lee Byrant, James Robertson, Ross Dawson, Shane Morris, Philippe Borremans, Lee Hopkins and more have been incorporated into a new report featuring case studies from AEP, Aviva, BT, CBA, Deloitte, ERM, IDEO, ING, NetApp, Scottrade, Telstra, The Coca-Cola Company, Van Marcke Group and Virgin Media.

Published by Melcrum, the report covers a range of topics:

Creating the business case for social media
Developing a social media strategy
Social media technologies (and CMS integration)
Governance, policies and more
Return on investment
The role of social media in the future, including job roles

There is in-depth discussion in each of these areas – particularly useful for those putting together business cases for social media and its activation within your business. The chart below, for example, shows the top three outcomes documented in social media business cases. Interestingly, innovation and idea exchange rank highly (and yet often prove to be the most difficult), followed closely by employee engagement.

The report is now available in hard copy via the Melcrum site and you can download a free executive summary. I believe Alex will also be releasing more extracts on his blog. Don’t forget to subscribe.

Youth Mobile Trends in China 2010

China Rising, Digital Strategy, Facts & Figures

When I worked in a marketing agency, I spent a lot of time working on youth brands in China and across Asia-Pacific. I remember standing in Shanghai and being amazed at what was slapping me in the face – that China was not a communist country in the way that my education had led me to believe. It was a massive market economy – with controlled borders. And inside these borders entrepreneurialsm was rampant, individualised and driven by a restless desire for growth and economic wellbeing.

But what is this really like? How does it play out in the youth market?

One key thing to remember is that mobile phones are the most affordable and widespread of all technologies. Rather than being the “third screen” that they are in the West, for many young Chinese, the mobile, connected device is the first and most important screen.

In this presentation, Graham Brown and John Solomon talk through the three key trends impacting Chinese youth in the mobile space:

Slowing markets
Market saturation
SMS is replaced by messenger products

I have a feeling that we can look to China as a trend-setter in this regard. In Australia and the US, I expect we’ll see similar patterns. This will impact the approach we take to engaging and marketing to consumers through mobile devices. The only difference perhaps is that the messenger products already have names like Twitter and Facebook.

Interesting times ahead!