Billed as the “Digital Bar Room Brawl” it was designed as an event to talk about the failure of high street companies to embrace digital, and it provoked some lively debate.

What we did not end up with though (nor were we ever going to) is a definitive answer as to why digital disruption is killing the high street.

I’ve blogged about this recently, and the issue stays the same.

A clue that digital is not entirely embedded everywhere was when I arrived at the event.

I was greeted by a man with a clipboard!!

Seriously?? Ever heard of Eventbrite and their iPad entry manager app ….but I digress.

I had my 2 minutes on the soapbox (yes there was a real soap box to stand on), and I once again mentioned the lovely Molly Flatt (@mollyflatt) who was born in 1983 – the year I started online with bulletin boards and dial-up modems.

After the formal part of the evening, Molly and I had a brief chat and both remarked about how we never really learn from the mistakes of failed companies.

I am sure that behind the failure of Jessops and HMV, while we all shake our heads and say “why did they not see digital disruption coming”, there is another story or boardroom and c-level battles that contributed to their demise.

Take any “digital” conference these days (and the event last night was actually a promotion for the Digital Marketing Show to be held in London 26-28th November at Excel), and we will all talk about the things we should be doing, or the campaigns that have been super successful.

We don’t however celebrate, or learn from our failures.

What Molly and I would like to see would be a “digital failures” conference, perhaps called #failbetter.

Why not ask along the ex-marketing manager (or CEO) of Jessops and HMV and ask them exactly what went wrong?

I am sure we could fill the Albert hall with a 1 day conference where we talk about what WON’T work, and ways to avoid becoming another high street victim.

Perhaps those involved in high street failures would not want to attend, perhaps we would have to disguise their voice and have them behind a screen – but we should not keep seeing high street companies being killed by digital disruption, we should instead embrace and learn from these failures and create better, more digitally sustainable ones.

What do you think? Would you attend such a conference?

Please leave a comment below or tweet me @AndrewGrill

As well as surveying 550 people working in companies, they also surveyed 2,177 Australian consumers aged 18 and older about their current and future expectations of interacting with organisations via traditional and digital channels.

The headline news from the report for me, and the reason for my post was that only 4% of Australian consumers using social media to contact companies.

My initial view was that the 4% number was surely a typo. As my Australian community woke to the news, this is how they responded.

Laurel Papworth was the first to respond – agreeing with the 4% figure in the report.

.@AndrewGrill @iggypintado @jeffbullas @jenwilsonsydney id say true. Oz Companies put Marketing not Customer Service on social media.

— Laurel Papworth (@SilkCharm) May 27, 2013

@AndrewGrill And given that customer service costs drop to 1/5th by using social media, Oz Companies are throwing money away ;)

— Laurel Papworth (@SilkCharm) May 27, 2013

Joanne Jacobs who until recently was based in the UK also agreed.

@andrewgrill it's terrifying… and accurate. cc @jbewes @grahamgk @Optus

— joannejacobs (@joannejacobs) May 27, 2013

@AndrewGrill @jbewes @grahamgk if businesses don't engage they will, eventually, be lost.

— joannejacobs (@joannejacobs) May 28, 2013

My former Telstra pal Andrew Inwood took a more cynical view

@AndrewGrill It will be gone in five years. 4% is effectively an error rate in this data. Twitter isn't an engagement tool. You know that.

— Andrew Inwood (@AndrewInwood) May 28, 2013

UBank Digital Director Jennie Bewes cautioned us to look at the bigger picture.

@AndrewGrill Yup, runs true. But critical to think big picture: observer pool much larger than participants @joannejacobs @grahamgk @Optus

— Jennie Bewes (@jbewes) May 28, 2013

Fellow South Australian Michelle Prak also mentioned a recent Yellow Pages Australia social media report. Note that Yellow Pages is owned by Telstra, who compete directly with Optus. I worked for both companies when I was living in Australia.

From my quick scan of the report, I can’t see a direct figure quoted for the % of Australians that use social media to engage with companies.

@andrewgrill I'm looking for intersection between that stat and Yellow Pages/Sensis recent report …

— Michelle Prak (@Prakky) May 28, 2013

@andrewgrill .. says "35% of social media users follow social media networking groups associated with businesses or brands" but …

— Michelle Prak (@Prakky) May 28, 2013

@andrewgrill .. doesn't delve into using social to proactively make contact, eg for customer service. I'm surprised.

— Michelle Prak (@Prakky) May 28, 2013

The Yellow Pages report highlights are below, and you can download the full report.

The responses from my fellow Aussies does highlight is that there is a huge opportunity for consumers to engage with companies via social media.

It feels like Australia is where the UK was in 2009 – and so we know how the story ends.

I’m going to give the final word to Kassie Sheldon who is from Optus and was kind enough to post a response from her personal point of view on my blog.

I am publishing her comment in full below, with her permission – very insightful.

Just a note, my name is Kassie Sheldon and I am the Content, Digital and Social Marketing Manager at Optus Business. The following thoughts are my own.

Andrew – firstly, great post.

Our report highlights that 20% of consumers said they expect to be able to use social media in 3–5 years to interact with businesses, but only 8% cited it as their preference (compared with other channels). Unfortunately, however, all the remaining cited statistics are correct, and it’s certainly worth asking why this is the case.

It’s not that Australians are not happy users of social media – we spend more time on social than almost any nation in the world (http://thenextweb.com/au/2010/…, and we have strong adoption of social media (http://www.socialmedianews.com…. Our report shows that over 60% of Australian organisations use social media to engage customers, which is certainly higher than the reported consumer engagement rate (http://yesopt.us/fb).

So why is there such low consumer engagement? Partly this could be because Australian businesses do not use their social channels to ‘talk’ to consumers, but more often to ‘broadcast’ information out to audiences. As a result, consumers may feel their voice won’t be heard on social media, and they revert to a phone line for information and support. Our research indicates a lack of trust in the reliability of
social as a communication platform which may also be impacting on perceived
preferred channels for engagement in 3-5 years.

But there may be a series of other possible explanations – lack of privacy, lack of time to wait for a response, or even consumers not considering their existing low-level contact with businesses in social channels as being worthy of reporting.

Regardless of the explanation, I feel this research identifies a key opportunity for Australian businesses. Adopting a more open and socially driven business can be key to driving consumer contact through social media, and this is absolutely essential to remain competitive. This can be seen as a wake-up call for businesses to focus more on social media as a communication channel and to engage with consumers in a manner that is useful, rather than just for push messages. Perceptions about preferred social channels over 3-5 years can change. It’s our responsibility to educate businesses about how to make social channels engaging and to do so in a manner that optimises business.

Follow me on twitter @tweetkas

Optus Business engaged Stancombe Research + Planning to conduct qualitative interviews and survey 550 customer experience, marketing and information technology decision makers from organisations with more than 100 employees in 10 industries and government in Australia.

In addition, they also surveyed 2,177 Australian consumers aged 18 and older about their current and future expectations of interacting with organisations via traditional and digital channels.

The results from the consumers surveyed shocked me somewhat as the headline news is that only 4% of consumers surveyed used social media in the last 3 months to interact with a company. Amazingly, the survey also showed that in 3-5 years this figure will rise to only 8%.  Surely these figures are a typo??

The breakdown from the findings can be seen below.

As someone who works extensively in the digital and social space in the UK and US, I find these figures extremely low, and expected Australian consumer use of social media to be in more in the 20-30% range, possibly higher.

For those of you that don’t know about my background, I am Australian, and have lived in London for the last 7 years and am the CEO of leading social influence platform Kred, so I have a very global view of the social space.  I lived in Sydney for 11 years, during which time I worked for both Optus and Telstra.

US Social Media use is strong and growing rapidly

In contrast to the Australian findings, a US study by Forrester in December 2012 showed “45% of people on social networks say they have interacted with a brand through social media over the previous three months”. So just what is happening in Australia??

A similar US survey by NM Incite in 2012 on “the State of Social Customer Service” for the US market showed:

• 47% of all social media users have used social care, with usage as high as 59% among 18-24 year olds
• 71% of those who experience positive social care (i.e., a quick and effective brand response) are likely to recommend that brand to others, compared to just 19% of customers that do not receive any response
• Nearly 1 in 3 social media users prefer to reach out to a brand for customer service through a social channel compared to the phone

30 – 50% of UK consumers interact via social 

The UK is also showing high engagement figures across age groups, as can be seen from this Fishburn Hedges / Echo Research report from May 2012 titled “the social media customer”. So a year ago, engagement levels of between 30% – 50% were evident, with this number to be probably 10-15% higher across the board in May 2013.

So clearly US and UK consumers are adopting social media as a way of interacting with companies, but Australia is lagging seemingly years behind.

To really show the differences between the Australian and UK markets (and remember that the UK report is now 12 months old), the graphic below shows that UK consumers actually favour social media over call centres by a factor of 9 times.

I am in that group as well – who wants to wait on hold “because your call is important to us…”?

In fact, I no longer contact call centres, I tweet! I have a number of well documented personal examples of where I was able to resolve a complaint via twitter, including this brilliant example of reporting a water leak via twitter using the hashtag #tweetaleak.

Why is Australia so far behind?

As an Australian expat, I am loathed to criticise my mother country, so I can only assume that either they surveyed the wrong people, or Australian consumers and businesses are really missing out on the benefits of social media and social business.

Given that the US and UK markets seem to be enthusiastically embracing social media for engagement and customer care, we need to look more closely at the Australian report for clues as to why Australia might be lagging so far behind.

Looking at page 12 of the Optus report, the measures used by companies as to the effectiveness of each channel provides us with a clue as to why social is a poor cousin of online, bricks & mortar and call centre channels.

Here we see a stark difference in how success in each channel is measured.

In social it is building the brand, improve customer service, and “to be seen as innovative”.

In bricks & mortar it is to meet customer expectations, improve customer experience and to improve customer care and support.

The contact centre measures of success are similar to bricks & mortar.

My view though is that social customer care success can and should be measured in the same terms as bricks and mortar – ie customer expectations, improve customer experience and to improve customer care and support.  Social is well placed to do all three of these AND help amplify the experience in real time.

In “bricks and mortar” – read “real shops”, if I have a good experience, how can I share that at the cash register? I might yell with delight, but only the people next to me may hear. For a call centre, only the ONE person on the end of the phone will ever hear my delight.

On social, get it right and potentially millions can hear that your company got it right, and then go on to tell all of their friends via social media.

The marketing funnel is now the loyalty loop

In 2009, McKinsey published some ground breaking thinking showing how the “marketing funnel” has now become a “loyalty loop”.

In 2013, this piece of research is now even more relevant.  When we look at the impact of social media influence on purchase decisions, we see that the “active evaluation” part of the loop shown below now becomes even more influenced by social media interactions.

I think many companies globally are scared by social media. For many executives, it is not something they understand or feel comfortable with.  Also, when an organisation signs up to social media, they pay the “twitter tax“, allowing years of broken processes and policies to be exposed to the world.

Well one day a company without these legacy processes will set up and eat your business for breakfast, so why not embrace social now, listen to where you need to improve, then tell the world via social that not only are you listening, but you’ve become a better company as a result.

What happens to companies that are disrupted by digital?

Digital disruption recently caused the closure of UK camera store chain Jessops, and also claimed the scalp of 92 year old record chain HMV.  Their reliance on the “high street” or “bricks and mortar” model, while ignoring the rapid uptake by consumers of digital channels caused their demise.

Late last year Deloitte Australia produced an excellent report titled Digital Disruption – Short Fuse, Big Bang?”. The report examines those Australian industries most at risk from digital disruption and those that will simply be left behind when their more nimble counterparts embrace the power and cost effectiveness of digital channels over their traditional counterparts.

It is well worth a read, and also resonates in the UK and US markets.

Proof that Social is a force to be reckoned with

There is now an overwhelming body of evidence and thinking around how social media is now graduating beyond the marketing department and becoming a powerful tool in all parts of a social business.

I suggest you have a look at my past posts on the Altimeter “evolution of social business” report, IBM “Social Business Patterns”, the Capgemini report on how digital leaders are outperforming their peers, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations speech given by IBM CEO Ginny Rometty earlier this year as excellent examples that prove the value of social for any business.

Social media, and social business is not a “nice to have” any more. In the more developed markets of the UK and US, there are now countless examples of how social media is transforming not just entire companies, but also entire industries.

So what does Australia need to do?

When I see reports from Australia showing results such as this …

I despair to think that my Aussie mates aren’t using the evidence and experience from more mature markets to prepare for digital disruption, and promote social as more than just a response channel for marketers.  Yes we all want to “meet customer expectations”, but sitting in a phone queue or in a long line inside a store waiting to get served can’t be that great for improving customer experience.

The fundamental problems with a bricks and mortar (storefront) and customer care model is they are synchronous.  You have to wait your turn to get served.

In contrast, digital models such as online, mobile and social are asynchronous.  We send a message, we get a response to say it is bring worked on and we go about our lives, knowing that in parallel our question, or transaction is being processed.

I think if the Optus survey had asked questions such as

“do you like waiting forever in a store queue or on the phone to get served?” or “if companies allowed me to interact effectively via channels such as social media would I use these instead?”… then we may have had very different results.

I think the real reason why the social media engagement score is so low in this report is that Australian companies are yet to really understand the needs of the customer and present them with an efficient alternative to that of going into a store, or waiting on hold.

If Australian executives looked at what is already being achieved with social overseas, and wake up to the fact that the old, synchronous service models are holding their company back, then when the 2014 survey is taken, we might see a much healthier score.

Social can be used so much more effectively, and I encourage you to read some of the reports I referenced above, as I really want to see Australia take full advantage of what I am seeing every day in the form of social business around the world.

You can download the full Optus report from their website (registration required).

What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below or send me a tweet @andrewgrill

IBM has just announced that Watson will now take on the interesting field of customer service, using its incredible intellect to answer customer queries via the web and mobile.

IBM calls it the Watson Engagement Advisor and its an offshoot its Smarter Commerce initiative. Consider that Watson is smart enough to understand the natural ebb and flow of human language and is designed to answer questions in much the same way that humans do, and then quickly sort through a set of known information to determine the best answer, you realize it’s a great fit for customer service

Interestingly, instead of being deployed on a device, Watson is embedded on a brand web site, meaning that you can have a branded experience delivering smart customer service, even greeting customers by name, then providing intelligent support and advice.

In the ideal case Watson will have access to customer records plus the data stores it was trained on, and will be able to use both in giving a customer a recommendation or help.

Interesting also is the mix of clients trialling Watson’s new capabilities – they include Malaysia telecom provider Celcom, financial firms Royal Bank of Canada, Australia’s ANZ Banking Group, IT services provider IHS, and the consumer research firm Nielsen.

Here’s hoping the folks at IBM have de-programmed the phrase “I’ll have to speak to my supervisor…”.

I can think beyond being embedded on a website, smart uses for Watson would be to hook him up to the brand’s social feeds and provide smart advice via Twitter and Facebook.

With the news that mobile operators such as O2 in the UK are seeing a massive reduction in customers that use call centres, automated and intelligent systems like Watson may become the norm.

Watson and IBM seem to have a considerable head start over their rivals though, and I don’t see Apple’s Siri wining at Jeopardy anytime soon.

What are your thoughts about computer assisted customer care?

Quoting from the press release:

O2 today set out bold plans to re-define its customer service offering to better respond to growing demand from customers wanting to be served by digital means. The company expects this to accelerate with the wider availability of 4G services from this summer.

In parallel to O2 seeing more customer demand for digital interaction, the company has seen a decline in voice calls to customer service – one million fewer per month compared to two years ago. In its place, customers are increasingly opting to interact through digital channels, including social media which has seen an eight fold increase in customer interaction over the last two years.

O2’s existing digital channels have become increasingly popular, with MyO2 being used nine million times a month for customers to check their bill, account and tariff information, allowance data, and to buy more ‘Bolt ons’. Web chat services are used three quarters of a million times every month and over half a million answers per month are given to questions on the O2 Community forum.

If any business needed proof that the digital shift has started – it is here.

Consumers want choice, and increasingly are becoming content with a self-service mode rather than calling a call centre and being placed in a queue and made to wait.

The O2 move is part of a trend to digitise the front office. Expect to see more of this in the coming months.

Social business is taking hold!

I also love his Facebook updates – you never quite know what he is going to do next.

Today’s update looked like this.

Now I know Peter flies a lot with United – he would probably be played by George Clooney in a movie about frequent fliers…er that’s already been done.

What Peter’s update shows is that United really do have a strong influencer program.

They know that not only do they have a loyal customer, they have one who is really influential in the areas where the decision about which airline to fly is made.

Amazingly, even though Peter pays a great deal of money every year to fly with United, they have actually got him to “work” for them for a day for free.

Smartly, they understand that for a frequent flyer like Peter, more flights isn’t always what he is after. Also what is the “shrareability” of a free flight?

What IS sharable though is exclusive access to behind the scenes of an airline.

What United is also doing is ensuring guaranteed coverage by a key influencer.

Well played United, well played!

Below are just some of the shots Peter has been sharing on his Facebook page about his experience.

You can’t buy publicity like this, and United haven’t had to. They just asked Peter to tag along with them for the day.

The impetus was an event I attended in London on Wednesday sponsored by Microsoft “Social Media – one tool amongst many”.

There was naturally a stellar line-up including Catriona Oldershaw, Alan Patrick, Abigail Harrison and Philip Sheldrake.

The title of the event was somewhat obscure, as the event was really about social business.

Chaired by Dave Coplin, the debate kicked off with an attempt to define what we mean when we use the phrase social business. Each panelist had a slightly different take on the concept which provided a fascinating exchange of views, but a common agreement that social business was here to stay and something that would become increasingly important.

A recurring theme throughout was the need to move beyond treating social business as merely another phrase for social media and instead exploring what it meant for business, employees and customers.

One comment from Philip Sheldrake really stuck with me.

Glancing around the room (the event was held at “Bounce” – the home of Ping Pong), Philip remarked that the audience of 40 or so people could resemble a meeting in 2001 about blogging.

His point was that with social business, we are at the beginning of a new journey.

As I was leaving the meeting, I reflected on this comment.

Having been playing with bulletin boards in 1983, websites in 1994 and social media since 2004, I could totally understand what Philip meant.

Lately I have heard the phrase “social business” mentioned more often.

What worries me though, and the thrust of this piece is that those “social media gurus” (and yes we all know the sort of person we are talking about) will transform overnight into a “social business guru”, and start to provide “advice” on social business without actually knowing what they are talking about.

In a way, I have been waiting for the market to evolve to be ready for social business for my entire career.

As my Twitter bio states, I am “Part strategy, part business, part technology, 100% digital”.

My engineering-marketing hybrid training and experience, coupled with experience in actually running companies, as well as working inside large organisations means that I know first-hand how really hard it is for companies to change culture.

Sadly, Social media has never really got past the marketing department for most companies.

I also don’t see or hear many social media “gurus” presenting at board meetings – they never get that far because the C-suite still don’t see the deep business value of social media.

Don’t take my word for it, a recent Altimeter study on social business found that

1. Two Thirds of the companies surveyed were active in social with no real link to business goals

2. Only 52% of companies surveyed agreed with the statement, “Top executives are informed, engaged, and aligned with our social strategy.”

One survey respondent was heard to say “Many of our board members and executive leaders aren’t even on Facebook, so social media is foreign to them.”

If social business is to be successful, initiatives need to be developed, and pitched to the C-suite with compelling evidence that they will directly meet the company’s objectives.

My view is that a “guru” is probably not experienced enough, or has the ability to win over a board of directors to social business.

The new breed of social business practitioners will need have a much broader set of skills and experience than a social media guru.

I tested my hypothesis on a number of my peers this week, and we ended up with a simple test.

Would the person charged will selling in the social business strategy ever get to present to the board? Has the person charged with driving social business initiatives ever met the CEO?

This sounds like a tough test, however if, as I strongly believe that social business will absolutely allow companies to leapfrog their competitors (see a Capgemini study proving this), then a social business strategy demands the attention of the board.

This will leave the social media gurus free to keep suggesting to the Marketing Director that they “just need to get more likes with an integrated real-time social media strategy to drive engagement and drive impressions”.

As an aside, the day of the event, Philip launched an excellent book on social business called “Attenzi – a social business story”. You can read my review as well as watch an interview with Philip, where we also explore the issue of social business gurus.

What do you think?

Am I being too tough on the gurus?

Let me know what you think in your comments below.

I have just finished reading a new book by Philip Sheldrake that looks at social business. I’ve been a fan of Philip’s writing since his first book, The business of Influence, and this book does not disappoint.

The book was released on Wednesday May 15th, and I was lucky enough to secure an advance review copy which I read in one sitting over the weekend.

It is fair to say that Philip’s book is like no other book on social I have read – in a good way. 

Instead of 100+ pages filled with personal views and predictions, Philip has created a story about the journey of a fictitious kitchen appliances company called Attenzi (complete with a back story), and the personal journey of the company’s CEO Eli Appel from becoming a business, into a social business.

On launch day, I grabbed Philip for a quick interview at the Hospital Club in London.  You can watch the interview in full below.

As I have been saying in my previous keynotes, and blog posts on social business, much of the work required in becoming a social business is centred on the cultural and structural changes required.

Quoting from Philip’s intro:

Attenzi – a social business story shines a light on social business that goes beyond the all too typical homages to social media. It’s a relatively short and easy read intended to help readers explore what social business means for their organization, marketplace, communities and career.

The story is designed to galvanize the organization.

As the tale unfolds, you’ll consider aspects of organizational design, business performance management, marketing, public relations, branding, complexity, and the imminent empowerment of the individuals that make up any and all organizations. In fact, although you’ll likely be reading the book in a professional capacity, you’ll be noting the implications for your other roles in life too.

Perhaps most controversially, the story begins to explore the evolution of the customer-centric mindset that has dominated.

Philip has also created twitter handles for the main characters CEO Eli Appel (@EliAppel), COO Marcus Wallinger (@MarcusWallinger) and @Attenzi.  Let’s hope we see some engagement from these characters when the book is out.

You can see who has pre-read the book by simply looking at who is following these accounts already.

I really like the approach Philip has taken, and he has even woven in some personal pain and introspection from the main character Eli as he deals with his divorce, and how proud he is of his socially savvy teenage daughter, Rachel.

Importantly, the book is not a how-to and it does not suggest sites and platforms to use. Instead, it spends quality time building on the realisation by Eli that his business must change rapidly to stay ahead of the curve.

The subtext that I appreciated was the subtle cultural and organisational changes that are required to get everyone on board for the change required to become a social business.

At just over 100 pages (and many pages contain only a few paragraphs), I easily completed it in just one sitting.

As explained by Philip

I wrote Attenzi – a social business story:

• To convey the essence, potential and implications of social business
• To help organizations pursue social business
• To describe what Euler Partners does

The book certainly does this – and more.

I’ll probably read it again soon, as i am sure I have missed many of the finer points that Philip has embedded in his book.

The book will be available from lc.tl/attenzi from Wednesday 15th May and I recommend that you download and read this if you have anything to do with social media or social business.

The use of social media inside an organisation is more commonly being referred to as social business.

In many of the workshops I have lead lately, one of the most common discussion points has been what about the people in our organisation that will never tweet or blog. The question is always asked, how can we enlist them using social inside the company?

Until recently, it has all been about social media – Twitter, Facebook and the like.

Those early adopters such as myself (on Twitter since 2007, using LinkedIn and blogging since 2004) find themselves completely comfortable sharing their every thought and movements, to the bemusement of those that find this a totally foreign practice.

External vs internal influence

The online influence industry, while still in its infancy is dominated by platforms such as Kred (where I am CEO), and Klout.

As well as finding real online influencers, a culture of those who try and game these platforms and become “more influential” has also sprung up. I wrote recently about how to spot a social media faker.

In my role, I see first-hand those who think they are influential try and convince brands of the same. Only when you have actually become an influencer (accidentally in my case) can you really understand how online influence actually works.

While platforms such as Kred can help you find people to connect with and promote your product or service, we may be missing a trick.

People are your greatest asset

Inside every organisation is an army of influencers, subject matter experts and “go to” people all waiting to be found, that can help us with our day-day jobs, and in turn provide better experiences for our customers.

I remember when I worked at the largest telecommunications company in Australia, Telstra in the late 90s, there were over 54,000 staff (now around 36,000). The internal directory did not list the expertise of staff members, so it was always a case of being well networked internally to get your job done and find the right people.

Amazingly, when I was working on an online portal opportunity for small businesses at the telco, I discovered through my networks that there were 6 such initiatives being run at the same time. Needless to say I was quick to convene a meeting (in a small room with no chairs so we all had to stand), where those assembled agreed to work on just one small business portal.

Had I been able to use a tool to find all of the small business people in the organisation, I could have saved weeks of effort.

Becoming a social business

Social business takes over from social media when we use the same techniques and technologies used in a very public way, and bring those inside an organisation.

Where publicly I tweet, internally I might use Yammer, Chatter, or a product from IBM called Connections. These internal social networks are secure in that you cannot see what is being said outside the organisation.

The question is how do we get people to use them when they are not natural users of social media?

Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM gave a presentation recently to the Council on Foreign Relations where described how in the future, IBM might pay a bonus based on how well you share information with your co-workers, and how your customers and partners rate you as well.

In the video below, she says

“You might have forgotten this: Peter Drucker coined the word “knowledge worker.” It was actually 1959 – 1959, so I was a little toddler at this time.

Now, non-routine work – but what’s changed? Obviously, I said tons of data.

The tools are different today than they were then. Billions of different interfaces. But today’s knowledge workers have access to something around the clock: The have access to each other.

That’s what’s different. And in a social enterprise, I will also assert that your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share. And that is a very different paradigm.”

Putting the social back into social business

At a recent conference in London, I was speaking on a panel about the next stage of social media.

A question from the audience asked what metrics can be used to look at the adoption of social media inside an organisation. My response, shown below explained how Ogilvy in London used gamification techniques to encourage their staff to get more involved with social.

In summary – make social inside an organisation fun and inclusive and then people are more likely to use it.

Those more concerned about data sharing and privacy may not be entirely comfortable with the notion of sharing at work. I see it differently though.

Imagine there has been a safety issue identified at your company that makes children’s toys.

Instantly, horrified mummy bloggers hit social media condemning your company for selling unsafe toys and demanding that your CEO resigns.

Just as quickly, your internal networks swing into action, and those from R&D through to customer service and even HR chime in with what they are hearing, along with possible solutions from subject matter experts, and then the facts emerge quickly that it is a minor fault that can be easily fixed thanks to the collaboration happening in real-time with people from across the company.

As a result of the great feedback, the product development department work on a solution, and then share exactly what is being done to fix the fault, and everyone is kept informed.

In this scenario, those people managing the company’s Twitter and Facebook pages as well as those on the end of the phone to outraged mothers are able to quickly distribute the facts, and a crisis is averted.

What happens next is those mummy bloggers turn from being outraged, into strong advocates because your company dealt with this issue in real time, were transparent and got the message out quickly.

In the same scenario, applied to the way many companies operate today, the whole company might be waiting for the PR department to release a statement, and those within the company able to provide specialist advice might be overlooked as the situation unfolds.

So in the future, when we talk about influencers, don’t forget those in your own organisation, which if armed with the same tools that help make ordinary people into influencers online, could be your greatest asset inside your organisation.

One recent report that caught my eye is titled “Patterns in achieving social business success by leading and pioneering organizations”.

You can download the report, and I have provided a brief summary below.

This is a concise report and it packs a powerful punch in the fight to move the “social media” discussion away from the marketing and communications teams and into areas of the business such as internal expertise identification, product development, internal communications and HR for recruitment.

They provide another great definition of “social business” and also expand on why this is relevant to companies of any size.

A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value.

The report goes on to say:

“Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stakeholders.

When those things happen, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied. Social businesses enjoy lower operating costs, faster speed-to-market, improved customer and employee engagement, and increased profitability.”

The report introduces the concept of Social Business Patterns.

IBM defines Social Business Patterns are similar in concept to business process flows, in that each represents a repeatable, proven set of value-producing actions.

The report contains 6 social business patterns, and here I will look at 4 that that can be applied to any business.

Social Business Pattern 1 – finding expertise

The “value producers” as IBM terns them for this pattern include

• quickly locate the right people, or published content containing, the expertise needed to solve a problem
• connect the best possible resources to effectively respond to customer needs
• document and share reusable solutions to common issues
• create highly-engaged and productive employees

Social Business Pattern 2 – gaining external customer insights

• quickly learn customers’ opinions and preferences related to existing and potential products and services
• identify and connect with key customer influencers to aid marketing efforts

Social Business Pattern 3 – increasing knowledge sharing

• more efficiently and effectively capture, share and access knowledge
• increase innovation through wider reach of ideas
• reduce excessive, unproductive time spent searching and exchanging information

Social Business Pattern 4 – improving recruiting and on-boarding

• collaboratively find and connect the right candidate to the right position
• streamline assessment and hiring processes
• better connect, engage and retain new hires
• contextually recommend expertise to increase new hires’ productivity

Rather than quoting the report extensively, I recommend you download the report and see exactly how social business can be used to provide real value in these parts of your business.

The report also contains vignettes of client case studies.

At under 10 pages, it is an easy, yet powerful read – something that can be used to start an internal dialogue to help get social of the marketing department and have it embedded into existing business processes across the organisation.

No sooner had I arrived, I met up with fellow blogger and friend Neville Hobson who was organising the composition of the afternoon expert panel on “the next stage of social media”.

Unfortunately three of the panellists had pulled out, so Neville asked me if I would be happy to join, and of course I said yes.

I was joined on stage along with Neville by (L – R)

Maz Nadjm - Founding Director of SoMazi

Craig Le Grice - Global Technology Performance Director at Aegis Media

Neville Hobson - Communicator, blogger and podcaster

The videos are courtesy of socialbakers who also livestreamed the whole day.

I was grateful to Neville for asking me to attend, as I feel that I can make a valuable contribution to the debate on the next stage of social media.

Introduction and the untapped potential for social media.

Here I discuss how companies can move from using social media to actually become a social business.

Senior Management resistance to adopting social media

Referencing the Altimeter Group 6 stages of social business transformation report and the fact that 48% of companies thought their senior executives were not aligned with their social strategy.

I also talked about the “Twitter Tax” that companies pay when they open a social channel for customer service, and find that their years of broken processes are exposed

Businesses open themselves to ‘Twitter Tax’ when opening accounts. It’s best feedback businesses can get. @andrewgrill #engage2013

— Steven Woodgate (@StevenWoodgate) April 23, 2013

Social is just like real life

In this section I spoke about my view that “social media is like real life”, how marketers need to behave more like people having a conversation at a conference, and why they should be using social tools to understand them better.

https://twitter.com/leebenecke/status/326687165360795648

The death of average

Quoting IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and her discussion about the “death of average” and using the incredible power of big data. I also introduced a concept of consumers having the power in a marketing relationship.

I also called out the lazy marketing we are still seeing in 2013, and the opportunities from social.

Great comments from @andrewgrill at #Engage2013. Lazy Marketing is happening. Be an informed consumer and be a smart marketer.

— Nancy Kenney(@greengirlmedia) April 23, 2013

Mobile + Social

In this segment I talked about where mobile fits with social. I also mentioned the great piece of work from my friend Alan Moore – “the allure of the mobile society” – and how mobile is always at the “point of creative impulse”.

Collaboration with social – using social inside the enterprise

Here I discussed how social can be used inside an organisation, and how the new currency will be knowledge shared inside an organisation.

I also suggested that HR departments might judge my performance in part on how well I share knowledge with my co-workers.

Knowledge will be the new currency @andrewgrill #engage2013 #internalcollaboration

— Alexandra Banks (@alexandrabanks) April 23, 2013

Change the culture

Social business is not just about technology, it involves a fundamental change in the company’s culture. Capgemini produced a report in 2012 explaining how companies that harness technology coupled with organisation change – the “Digerati” are ultimately more profitable.

Audience Question - measuring social adoption internally

A question for the audience asked what metrics can be used to look at the adoption of social media.  My response explained how Ogilvy in London used gamification techniques to encourage their staff to get more involved with social.

Gamifying social engagement to get staff into social works. Humans like to compete. #engage2013 @andrewgrill @kred

— Anne Smart (@annesmart) April 23, 2013

Closing thoughts

The panel was asked what we wanted to see next in social, below are my thoughts

These are just my segments from a 60 minute panel, and there were great contributions from the rest of the panel, which you can watch in full below.

UPDATE 23 May 2013: Twitter has just enabled 2-step (also called 2-factor) authentication.

You can read more about it on their blog. and as per my recommendations below, I suggest you go and turn this feature on NOW!

Quick steps to enable this for your twitter account

1. Visit your account settings page.

2. Scroll down towards the bottom and select “Require a verification code when I sign in.”

3. Click on the link to “add a phone” and follow the prompts (you will need your phone with you during sign-up)

4. After you enroll in login verification, you’ll be asked to enter a six-digit code Twitter will send to your phone via SMS each time you sign in to twitter.com.

Importantly. the account you prevent from being hacked may be your own or the one you run for your company.

This post was originally written following the amazing news that the Associated Press Twitter feed was hacked in April 2013, driving a 143-point fall in the Dow Jones industrial average from a single (false) tweet.

There was also some discussion that automated trading platforms that take signals from Twitter feeds such as AP’s had “mini crashes” as they were programmed to react to bad news like this from trusted and verified sources.

The AP later clarified the hack via an alternate account, and the White House confirmed the President was unharmed.

What this points to is that now Twitter feeds of news organisations, and in fact any company have become mission critical.

This attack is a timely reminder to review what security processes you have in place for your personal and corporate social media accounts.

TechCrunch reported that the hack was preceded by a Phishing attack on AP reporters.  This is a simple “social engineering” trick which asks someone to click on a link, and in this case the person who clicked on the link may have unwittingly given the AP main twitter account password to the hackers.

What is needed to stop simple hacking exploits such as this is better login and account security on social media platforms.

Facebook already offers this, and I have the feature turned on (they call it login approvals) for my personal account.

You should read how do to this, and I recommend you enable it today.

Google also offers this feature (called 2-step), and this can be applied to all Google products, including your Google account, Gmail, YouTube and Google+. If you don’t want to get hacked, turn this on today – read how on the 2-step site.

If you run a WordPress blog, you should also turn on this feature. I have it enabled on all of my personal blogs.  It is simple to do, just install the Google Authenticator plugin, and set up the app on your phone as per the Google 2-step program.

By adding this plugin, it has also thwarted the latest WordPress bonet attack, as without the right Google code, you can’t get in.

Personally, I have 2-factor enabled on all services that allow it, including Cloudflare, Amazon S3, Apple and Dropbox (the links take you to instructions on how to enable on each platform).

It gives me some extra piece of mind that my accounts will be harder to hack, and if someone does get my password through a smart phishing attack, they will still have to pass the 2-factor authentication test. Furthermore, unless they have access to my mobile phone which generates these one-time codes, just like a banking “dongle” or RSA SecurID token, my accounts are probably pretty safe.

If you run the social media accounts for your company, or personally, consider switching to 2-factor authentication today.

As soon as Twitter offers 2-factor, I am turning this feature on.  I just hope they end up using the Google Authenticator option so I can keep most of my 2-factor codes in the one place.

There is the slight inconvenience when I log in, but the 10 extra seconds it takes to grab the code from my phone (which is always with me) is much less than the reputation damage and clean-up I would need to go through if someone hacked one of my social media accounts and started tweeting nasty things a me.

I had not heard of him either until last week when I came across an article in Quartz titled “How to become internet famous for $68” by Kevin Ashton, known for inventing the term “The Internet of Things“.

I am presuming that Kevin is real, but I have no way of proving this…

In summary, Kevin created Santiago, gave him a Wikipedia entry, an official looking website, and bought him thousands of Twitter followers to make him look real.

He even faked the “verified” logo on his Twitter bio to appear legitimate.

The @SantiagoSwallow episode shows us that now you have to do your fact checking on social media as well as for all other forms of media – you just can’t believe everything you read on social media…

What the article highlighted so well is what those who work in the industry have known all along – you can game pretty much anything – even life.

People have been gaming things long before the internet – we call them “con artists” and they exist today.

The article also reminded me of the adage “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog“, first coined as the caption of a cartoon by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993.

While it is not yet a crime to buy twitter followers or Facebook likes, those people who want to appear more popular, and hence (in their own eyes at least) more valuable to prospective employers, clients or brands, are engaging in these deceitful practices, because they believe they can get away with it.

Back in February 2013, the Wall Street Journal published an expose titled

“The Mystery of the Book Sales Spike - How Are Some Authors Landing On Best-Seller Lists? They’re Buying Their Way“

What the WSJ investigation proved was that even an age old process such as the best seller list can be gamed – in an offline way just by buying lots of books just before it goes on sale.

In a follow up to the WSJ article, Soren Kaplan, the author of the book “Leapfrogging” who was quoted in the article, came clean in his own words and admitted that yes, he had manipulated the sales to claim bestseller status.

So we can probably assume the “bestseller scam” has been going on for years, and now people are turning to social media to buy fame – just as Kevin’s article proved.

When we talk about social media popularity and fame, the discussion inevitably turns to social media influence.

As Kred was mentioned in Kevin’s article, as the CEO, I thought it appropriate to respond directly to what Kevin found in his experiment.

Kred is the only influencer platform that is completely transparent. We not only publish our rules to show exactly how we score (no-one else does this), we also show on every Kred profile every single interaction. In short – I could see @SantiagoSwallow gaming the system.

On other platforms, you can see that Santiago Swallow has a score, but unlike Kred, you have no idea how that score has been developed.

While Kevin asserts that his creation of @SantiagoSwallow fooled sites such as Kred into believing he was influential, Kred can be used to weed out the fakes as well.

A quick glance at the Kred profile of @SantiagoSwallow shows quite clearly that there has been a massive influx of flowers – from zero to over 74,000 almost overnight.

To even an un-trained eye, something does not look quite right here, and would be worthy of further investigation.

Because Kred publishes every single public interaction on each Kred profile as an activity statement, with a few more clicks, you can start to see very easily that this whole profile is one big con. Click the image below to see the evidence – look at the large influx of followers in batches. You can see this for yourself at kred.com/santiagoswallow

The other giveaway that Santiago is not real can be detected by looking at his community scores.

While his global Kred influence score is a reasonable 754, when you zero on his community scores (as any well-educated brand manager would do to see where this person has influence), you see that he has very low influence in his top listed communities.

In the examples below, in Santiago’s top 3 communities, he has woeful community scores of just 150/1 for Reporters, 125/1 for Marketing and a “why bother” score of just 54/1 for publishing.  In under 30 seconds on Kred, I knew Santiago was a fake.

What this whole experiment has shown is that yes, while you may think you have fooled someone by having lots of followers, or likes, or an apparently large Kred score, you’re only fooling yourself.

Santiago’s low outreach score of just 4 is also a giveaway that he has no real influence – he doesn’t really engage with his community.

On closer inspection of his Kred profile, Santiago has 75,000 raw Kred points, and as can be seen from this double-logarithmic chart from our rules page, it is increasingly harder to increase your global score.

Those who show signs of real global influence have a Kred score above the 850 mark, where you need hundreds of thousands of raw points (vertical axis), and Santiago cannot do that by just buying more followers.

He would need to have real influence, by interacting with his community, and his community interacting with him in an authentic and sustained way.

As the CEO of Kred I see first-hand people telling me how influential they are, only to then see the same person unleashing hundreds of fake twitter profiles, who each have exactly 4 followers, using software to automate retweets by these profiles of the same message tens of thousands of times to try and increase their Kred score.

At Kred we know we cannot stop people gaming our own, or any other system. Instead, we focus on transparency and education to allow the early detection of “twitter fakes” when working with our clients so they don’t have to waste their time on those who try and artificially increase their social footprint.

Sadly, even some that appear on top “influencer” lists (and best-seller lists) openly boost their profile and score through well-known techniques such as the ones detailed above. It is an open secret in the industry.

Those of us with integrity ensure that brands don’t use these people in their influencer and advocacy programs, however I cannot get to every brand manager and agency person in the world to educate them on the pitfalls of picking the person with the “highest score”.

Experiments such as the one undertaken by Kevin highlight the dangers of relying on influence scores on their own.

Last year I wrote an article titled “Employers need to understand the dangers of influence score myopia” in response to news that Salesforce was hiring someone who as a minimum had to have a Klout score of 35 or higher.  These scores are meaningless unless you know WHERE the person has influence – not just the score.  As has been proven above, one look at Santiago’s Kred profile shows he has no real influence at all.

The challenge for the influencer industry is how do you educate people who are in a hurry to find “influencers” that it is not always about the person with the highest score.  As mentioned above, we decided to be transparent from day one, and have seem none of our competitors follow our lead.

So next time you see someone quote a high influencer score on their profile, CV or pitch response, pop over to Kred and have a look in more detail – it might just be Kevin doing another experiment, or someone trying to improve their social capital in an artificial way.

Just a few moments on Kred could save you and your company from another “Santiago Swallow” moment.

To recap, the game was plunged into darkness for a full 33 minutes due to a power failure at the stadium, and the one brand that everyone remembers from this is Oreo thanks to the tweet below

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Oreo’s “dunk in the dark” has been discussed on many blogs, including those of Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty.

Hearing that agency 360i was behind this, I took the opportunity while having lunch with David Berkowitz, Vice President, Emerging Media in London recently to ask him more about the secrets behind the “dunk in the dark” tweet.

I first meet David at the Kred New York Influencers summit held in February, and was delighted to be able to catch up with him again in London.

I had heard a lot of information online about what happened to allow Oreo to master “real time marketing”, and wanted to hear it from the agency direct.

While David was not in the room during the superbowl, he obviously has first-hand knowledge of what went on.

Key to the success, David explained was Oreo had actually been planning for this moment for 2 years. While it would be near impossible to predict a 33 minute power outage that would stop play at the Superbowl 2 years out, Oreo has been training for this type of opportunity for some time.

Their daily twist campaign in 2012 to celebrate their 100th birthday was great practice at engaging in near real-time and being able to produce compelling and sharing content on a regular and sustained basis.

It also helped on Superbowl night that the 360i team and the client were all in the same room, and therefore able to monitor the situation and the mood, develop an instant strategy and creative on the spot and get it approved, and then sent – all before the lights came back on.

The risk Oreo took was twofold:

1. was the power outage going to last just a few minutes and not 33?

2. what if the cause of the outage was something more sinister?

Over the days following the terrible tragedy in Boston, where our hearts and prayers go out all those affected, we have seen that many brands simply kept tweeting their scheduled campaign messages, oblivious to the mood of the nation, or even more amazingly, used the tragedy to promote their products.

In the case of Oreo and the superbowl tweet, according to David, the team actually held off sending the tweet for several minutes even after it had been created and approved to check that the power outage was just a normal issue.

Is Real Time Marketing appropriate for any brand?

Since the Superbowl, we have seen many brands try and copy Oreo’s spontaneity, with very mixed results.

The brand tweets during this year’s Oscars telecast, covered extremely well by Jay Baer on his blog, point to how for some brands, this strategy is not right.

Poland Spring waited nearly a day to capitalise on their #watergate moment when during Senator Marco Rubio’s GOP rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union address, he awkwardly reached for a small water bottle in the middle of the speech.

Because the water bottle was placed way too far away from where Rubio was standing, it lead to a funny moment. We all now know that he bottle he reached for was Poland Water.

The brand at the time did not actually have a Twitter feed to respond from, although they do now – @Poland_SpringW, so it is probably correct to assume that they had not been planning for such an event.

The key learning from Oreo’s success is that you can’t just “jump into” social. It needs to be planned and supported at all levels in a company.

Going further, even when you are “doing social”, something as brave as a real-time tweet during a Superbowl power outage is not to be attempted without years of practice.

She approached me about an interview to support her research and book about social media monitoring.

During our interview, she was particularly interested on my view, and the view of the industry on the status of “public” social media posts.

In particular, she wanted to know if I felt the industry would (or could) be regulated so that consumers had the right to decide if their social media posts could be monitored or captured by social media monitoring firms.

It raises a very interesting question – how private are our public posts?

Also where do we draw the line?

Can a monitoring firm collect and store a public tweet or blog post? How about a newspaper? How about a future or prospective employer? Who gets to decide? How could you technically implement this? Who would pay for it?

Randi Zuckerberg found out last December what could happen when a “private family moment”, posted on her Facebook page for her followers was subsequently posted very publicly on Twitter by someone who had access to the photo.

A more recent example, this time from the UK concerns 17 year old Paris Brown, who for less than a week held the role as the First Youth Police Commissioner, on a salary of £15,000 ($23,000) a year.

Her announcement was welcomed initially as a fantastic initiative to connect the youth of Kent with the Police. No doubt the role and her appointment were done for all the right reasons.

I am also sure at the moment her appointment was announced, several UK newspaper editors were saying “let’s see if we can dig up some dirt on her”.

As those familiar with the way UK tabloid newspapers work will know, they try to embarrass celebrities (usually highly paid footballers) and politicians for doing silly things to sell more newspapers. On the whole, this strategy works as those on high salaries and in the public eye end up doing something that an editor knows will be very newsworthy.

In the age of social media, a few searches on Twitter and Facebook can do the same job that would normally have taken an investigative reporter and a private detective weeks of work.

Less than a week later, Paris tearfully resigned after newspapers published tweets from when she was between the ages of 14 and 16, which probably did not fit the role of a Youth Police Commissioner.

Quoting from the Telegraph report:

In this case, a simple look at Paris’ (now deleted) Twitter feed showed she had different views on drugs, welfare and immigration than those you would have expected from someone thrust into the public eye at just 17 years of age to talk about the views of youth as a paid representative of the Police service.

I am not going to go into the specifics of her posts, because this is not the issue here.

The issue is twofold

1. If your twitter profile is set to public, then we can see your tweets, and you should assume that ANYTHING you post online (even an email) could eventually be made very public in the national and international press.

Regardless of the role of social media monitoring firms, others such as the press, employers, and even the Government are all interested in this publicly available information, as it can inform not just on an individual level, but also help provide research on trends and inform a company of how they are perceived in the market.

[full disclosure: I am CEO of Kred, and we have real-time access to tweets through a commercial arrangement with Twitter, and have an archive of public tweets from the last 4 years].

Interestingly, on one hand we can complain strongly to a brand using social media, and then receive a satisfactory outcome, as in my own personal example with EE last year. This access to social media by brands has actually transferred a great deal of power to consumers in the last few years, and is only set to continue.

On the other hand, if we say that brands and companies cannot have access to any content derived from social media, it will quickly erode these consumer powers, and brands will be back in the position of being able to exert more power, without consumers having a real voice.

I know which side of the (consumer) fence I sit on.

2. Young people need to understand (as in Paris’ case) what you say on social media can cost you your job. While I respect the right of people to post whatever they want on social media sites, when I employ someone (or am employed myself), I expect that their conduct online will not bring the firm’s reputation into question.

Someone who is regularly photographed (or tweets about) getting drunk every weekend is probably not someone I would want in charge of my brand. Again, it all needs to be assessed in context. There is no right/wrong for social media – it is about common sense.

My parents once told me that the best way to get through life was to never say or do something that I would not want reported on the front page of a newspaper. This knowledge was imparted way before social media existed.

Who should be responsible for educating users?

During my interview with Helen, she asked who I thought had the responsibility to educate the public about the risk that someone may read something you had written on a social network months or even years ago.

I am not sure I have the answer. The platforms concerned could possibly make the privacy settings more prominent when someone signs up for a new account, but I feel this is just like when you ignore the 24 pages of terms and conditions when Apple releases a new version of iTunes.

The Government consistently reminds us of the dangers of drinking, smoking and driving too fast yet still many people do this.

Just as when you are on a balcony, you are unlikely to see huge signs saying “don’t jump over the balcony because it is a long way down and you may hurt yourself” – we learn this from a very young age.

Perhaps more education should be undertaken in schools about the long term danger of social media (by long term I mean when they apply for a job many years in the future), and then everyone will learn naturally to understand the pros and cons of social media.

I also don’t believe that regulating social media monitoring firms will have any effect, as you would have to then monitor and regulate any firm that even looks at a social media page.

Instead, let’s experiment with social, and understand the benefits. Humans can then work out for themselves, as Paris Brown did, how very powerful social media can be.

This post has started an interesting discussion over on Google+ as well on my original G+ post and then one by Jeff Jockisch.

Where to you stand on the issue of social media costing you a job and/or regulating the collection of social media posts.

Why not leave a comment below?

Some 4 years on from that post, I was reminded of it when I came across a very funny, and well produced Australian Comedy show called simply “The Checkout”.

It has been put together by the team behind The Chaser - a very smart group of Australian Comedians who are not afraid of telling it like it is.

The show “reinvents consumer affairs for the twenty first century, giving viewers a healthy and/or dangerous mix of info and attitude that hopefully might lead to smarter spending decisions“.

They also have a segment (and website) called “F.U. Tube” which allows consumers to vent about companies that provide poor service. They even had Dave Carroll of United Breaks Guitars fame on their first episode.

I watched the second episode of their show, and in particular a segment on Australian telecommunication pricing and complaints, which prompted this post.

You can see the show below – the telco segment starts at the 0:50 mark.

In the part about complaining to telcos, there is a scene where a man on the phone to a telco’s customer care line literally pokes himself in the eye with a fork in frustration (warning: the special effects team has gone to town here, and even though they switch to black & white, it looks a bit gory).

They also compliment the UK operators in having somewhat more sensible and transparent pricing – as many know in the UK, all operators state exactly how many minutes, texts and data you get per month.

Way back in 2009, my post called out Australian operators for being one of the few in the world that have “capped” pricing. This complicated method of charging was designed some years ago to (in my mind) deliberately mislead consumers to think they were getting a good deal.

For example (and shown in the program), an $80 “capped plan” per month gives you “$800 worth” of calls, texts etc. Diving deep into the small print, you discover that calls cost over $1 per minute – which will eat up your “$800″ worth of “value” pretty quickly.

I am amazed that this is still the case in Australia, and the telecommunications regulators only seem to be making slow progress in cleaning up this opaque way of charging.

I am glad that for whatever reason the UK operators have not gone down the “capped calling” path, and are very transparent with what you get.

Well done to the Chaser team – you made me laugh more than I had in years, so much my cheekbones literally were sore from laughing. My daughter Madeleine (6) thought I was crying because I was sad, and I had to explain that I was crying with laughter.

Can’t wait to feel the 4GEEEE’s soon in London.

Summary

· Enhanced 4G boosts headline speeds to 80Mbps and doubles current average speeds to 20Mbps, for new and existing subscribers.

· Double-speed 4G to be introduced to ten cities by summer: Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield.

· Doubling of 4G network capacity ensures UK’s fastest mobile network is future-proofed to meet needs of data hungry consumers and businesses, with EE forecasting network traffic to increase by 750% in next three years alone.

· EE targeting more than one million 4G users by Christmas, states ambition to stay one step ahead and always offer the fastest network in the UK.

9th April, 2013 – EE, the UK’s most advanced digital communications company, is doubling the speed and capacity of its 4G network. The arrival of double-speed 4G, which enables lab speeds of 130Mbps[i], will boost headline 4G speeds to 80Mbps plus, and double the average speeds for 4GEE customers to more than 20Mbps.

EE is doubling the amount of 1800MHz spectrum bandwidth dedicated to 4G, from 10MHz to 20MHz. This will give 4GEE customers increased capacity, and access to some of the fastest mobile speeds in the world, reinstating the UK as a leader in mobile and digital communications.

EE is forecasting mobile data traffic to grow by as much as 750% in the next three years alone. Increased speeds and capacity are vital for mobile operators to continue to deliver a consistently high quality experience. EE is committed to always having the fastest network in the UK.

What it means for 4GEE consumer and business customers

With double-speed 4G for mobile broadband and smartphones:

· Pictures can be uploaded and downloaded in HD, on larger screens, with greater resolution

· HD video can be uploaded and shared, and peer-to-peer video can be pin-point sharp and viewed with zero delay

· Multi-tasking on the move can become even quicker, with support for image and video-heavy online shopping, while uploading to Facebook and downloading an HD video

· ‘Always on’ technology, constantly taking in and sharing information from what we’re seeing and doing, can be supported

· Files so large that they previously required a fibre connection can be uploaded and shared, or stored in the cloud – all on the move from a mobile device, revolutionising working practices for content-heavy businesses

· A truly mobile office can be a reality, with smartphones, tablets and laptops connected by a 4G Mobile Wi-Fi device, serviced by average speeds around 20Mbps

· Streaming an HD video while uploading a presentation and speaking on a video conference call over IP, all in real time on mobile

EE is the only operator in the UK with the necessary combination of spectrum bands and mobile sites to undertake a rapid, widespread deployment of double-speed, double capacity 4G mobile services.

Roll out plans

The turbocharged 4G capability will roll out to ten existing 4G cities by summer – Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield. Trials of the new technology in Cardiff have already seen headline speeds reach 80Mbps plus. Once switched on, the improvements will be automatically available in those cities within existing plans to new and current 4GEE customers on all 4G smartphones, tablets and dongles.

Mark Newman, Chief Research Officer, Informa Telecoms & Media, commented:

“By rapidly expanding both the coverage and capacity of its network, EE has taken the necessary steps to maintain and extend its advantage in the UK 4G market and, importantly, to leapfrog itself into a leading position in the European LTE market. EE’s strategy to focus on network investment as a point of differentiation is helping to build a world-class, high-quality digital infrastructure that will prove as vital to future economic growth as investment in the roads and railways.”

Olaf Swantee, Chief Executive Officer, EE, said:

“We are ensuring that the UK remains at the forefront of the digital revolution. Having already pioneered 4G here, we’re now advancing the country’s infrastructure again with an even faster, even higher-capacity network, and at no extra cost to our customers.

“Since we launched 4G, we’ve seen a huge shift in the way people are using mobile. Video already accounts for 24% of all traffic on our 4G network – that’s significantly more than on 3G. Maps, mobile commerce, sat-nav tools and cloud services are all seeing a similar rise. Mobile users in the UK have a huge appetite for data-rich applications, and this will only grow as people become more familiar with and reliant upon next generation technologies and services. Our double speed 4G network will provide developers with the quality and speeds needed to develop the next wave of killer 4G apps. Whatever innovations they come up with, we’re ready.”

4G Uptake
EE has set a target of reaching one million 4G customers by the end of 2013 and will provide updates on its progress towards this in upcoming announcements. Among 4G network rollouts around the world, converting 10% of pay monthly base after 24 months is considered to indicate a successful deployment. More than one million 4GEE customers would represent around 8% of the EE pay monthly user base, upgraded or acquired from rival networks within just 14 months.

Double-speed and beyond

Building on EE’s existing 1800MHz (2G & 4G) and 2.1GHz (3G) spectrum, the successful acquisition of highly complementary 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum in the auction provides the company with the UK’s widest and most capable spectrum portfolio, allowing the boost of superfast data services and coverage – indoors and outdoors, in cities and the countryside. The newly acquired spectrum will support the existing 1800MHz network to further increase capacity and reach, and ensure consumer and business customers always have the best 4G experience in the UK.

Before the end of 2013, EE is aiming to trial carrier aggregation, a fundamental feature of LTE-Advanced, combining spectrum from different bands to further boost performance, speed and capacity. Through this innovative use of spectrum assets, EE will be able to deliver more 4G bandwidth than any other operator in the UK is able to, now and in the future.

EE is also making further investments and improvements to its core network to enable a wide range of new services for EE customers. These services will include voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi), as well as enabling the delivery of both video and voice calls over 4G/LTE (VoLTE).

The story so far

EE launched the UK’s first 4G network in October 2012, and will have 80 towns and cities, and approximately 55% of the UK population, covered by June, ensuring the rollout stays ahead of the ambitious schedule laid out at launch. According to independent network testing from RootMetrics, 4GEE customers in cities recently measured are experiencing speeds in line with or greater than the forecast average of 8-12Mbps.

EE has also made superfast Fibre Broadband available to 13 million UK households and businesses, allowing people to benefit from the best network in the home as well as on the move

For more information, please visit ee.co.uk.

- ENDS -

Notes to Editors

4GEE is available in 50 UK towns and cities today – Amersham, Barnsley, Belfast, Bingley, Birmingham, Bolton, Bradford , Bristol, Cardiff, Chelmsford, Chorley, Coventry, Derby, Doncaster, Dudley, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Harpenden, Hemel Hempstead, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Lichfield, Liverpool, London, Loughborough, Luton, Maidenhead, Manchester, Newbury, Newcastle, Newport, Nottingham, Preston, Reading, Rotherham, Sheffield, Shipley, Slough, Southampton, Southend-on-Sea, St Albans, Stockport, Sunderland, Sutton Coldfield, Telford, Walsall, Watford, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton. EE is aiming for 98% of the UK population to be covered by the end of 2014.

Frankly, in 2013, and the age of big data and social media, to have a clean, window faced envelope dropped through my letterbox (with a big sign on it that says “no junk mail”) addressed to “The Householder” smacks of lazy and desperate marketing. Click to enlarge this award winning piece of direct marketing.

UPDATE: 18:20 Sunday 7 April The Marketing Manager of Hyperoptic @1withredhair (Sunita Sharma) has been in touch. I will send her my details and we will see if their mailings stop.

@andrewgrill @jeffdodds @virginmedia @hyperoptic @jacstrattonsnhg please rts or email us and you’ll be removed from future mailings. Sorry!

— Sunita (@1withredhair) April 7, 2013

Virgin Media – over to you.

The winner of the lazy marketer of the decade would go to Virgin Media here in the UK.

I can only appeal to Jeff Dodds, Virgin’s Chief Marketing Officer to look closely at these “The Householder” letters and take them out of the marketing mix. They just show Virgin Media to be desperate and lazy marketers.  After probably 10 or 15 of these, over the last 2 years, I am STILL not interested in your products.

We have tried sending them back to Virgin Media to get them to stop – but they keep coming!

The latest piece of lazy marketing from Virgin Media came through the door yesterday.

A clean white (no hint it was from Virgin Media), window faced envelope to make it look “official”, addressed ever so personally to me as “The Householder”

This is just a sneaky trick. It has ensured that I WILL NEVER buy from Virgin Media, and has also prompted me to write this blog post in the hope that the smart marketers will see sense and condemn this practice.

Those of you reading this will surely point me to the UK’s Mailing Preference Service that can be used to stop unwanted direct mail.

Even this service cannot stop mail addressed to “The Occupier/Householder” – or don’t want to. It has been run by the Direct Marketing Association for the last 20 years and quoting from their website -

The Mailing Preference Service (MPS) is a free service set up 20 years ago and funded by the direct mail industry to enable consumers to have their names and home addresses in the UK removed from lists used by the industry. It is actively supported by the Royal Mail and all directly involved trade associations and fully supported by The Information Commissioners Office.

However even this service cannot stop the rise of “The Householder” direct mail – see below (click to enlarge).

Even though under section 11 of the Data Protection Act I can ask that companies stop sending me junk mail, as “The Householder” is not my actual name, I cannot ask them to stop. If I try and add “The Householder” or “The Resident” to the MPS form it does not accept it. Click to see in more detail.

So companies such as Virgin Media, Hyperoptic (2 pieces of spam last week) and JAC Strattons continue to pollute our mailboxes with completely unwanted and irrelevant material – and there is nothing we can do about it.

Thanks Brian Doherty from Hyperoptic for these 2 pieces of spam, a perfect excuse to highlight your company.

And Neil Jackson, Lettings Manager at JAC Strattons – I will never ever contact you, I promise, so please take me off your spam list.

Well perhaps if we name and shame these lazy marketers, they might see sense and also the Direct Marketing industry might wise up that their tactics are sneaky and they will stop. Wishful thinking perhaps….

In 2013, if you got an email or a tweet addressed to “The reader” what would you do?

You would probably ignore it.

In fact Direct Mail is probably the least effective advertising method around based on what I have seen – 100% of the DM pieces I have received above I have ignored, and not made a purchase, and frankly never will.

As an industry they keep pumping billions of articles out to “The Householder” expecting we will feel like this is an intelligent way of getting our attention.

Lazy marketing must stop. You are actually pushing negative marketing messages on us.

Will you join me on my campaign to rid our letterboxes of “The Householder” spam?

Leave a comment below and I also look forward to hearing from @JeffDodds, @VirginMedia, @Hyperoptic, and @JACStrattonsNHG

The other evening I watched a very interesting BBC Panorama program titled “The Age of Big Data” (note the program can only be viewed in the UK). As London Calling readers know, I am not only a big fan of Big Data, I live and breathe it every day. Kred has access to 150 Billion twitter posts collected over the last 4 years in a 400TB datamine.

The first segment of the program looked at a pilot program between the Los Angeles Police Department and the University of California. The LAPD Foothill division is trialling an algorithm that attempts to predict where in the division a crime will occur while police patrols are in the area.

Professor Jeff Brantingham and the team at UCLA examined 13 million crimes recorded over 80 years and started to predict where crimes might occur in the future.  Jeff started his research by attempting to piece together the patterns of human behaviour within the LAPD crime data.

He collaborated with Professor George Mohler from Santa Clara University, who is an expert in pattern forming systems. What fascinated me about the research was that they started with a mathematical model that was already being used in California to look at earthquake aftershocks.

While there is no mathematical model to predict huge earthquakes such as the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that devastated parts of the San Francisco Bay area, earthquake aftershocks can be predicted.

After a large earthquake, there is a high probability that aftershocks will follow nearby in space and time. Mohler developed an algorithm to understand the clustering patterns created by aftershocks.

These same patters are also found in crime data, and they looked at the “aftershocks of crime”. Mohler explains that “after a crime occurs, there is an elevated risk, and that risk travels to neighbouring regions.” You can download the detailed presentation from Brantingham and Mohler that looks at the whole pilot.

Only when you have a big data set from the last 80 years and 13 million arrests can you really work this algorithm to start to predict the future. In practice, the LAPD patrols were given “mission maps” that showed boxes of 500 square feet that predict where crimes are most likely to occur on their 12 hour watch.

Early results from the LAPD pilot has shown that by using the algorithm, there has been a 12% decrease in property crime, and a 26% decrease in burglary in the Foothill precinct – pretty interesting stats. Importantly, the crime prediction model is updated in real time with new crime data to make it even more accurate.

Using Big Data to predict consumer behaviour

It got me thinking – if big data can be used to not only predict crime – but also convert those convictions into arrests, then the marketing community can use cues from social big data and purchase history big data to predict future purchase patterns.

So using the aftershock analogy, after a purchase event from a particular brand (with an accompanying good purchase experience), there is a high probability that you will purchase again.  The extra dimension of data from social means we can start to detect patterns around recommendations and product reviews.

I’m not suggesting that we go as far as linking individual tweets to purchases – as big data is not just about a single tweet that matters, it is more about the patterns we find in the data.

I believe that if individual brands start to harness the power of big social data (and that means becoming a social business), then they can start to pull ahead of their competition.

Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry was quoted in a Capgemini consulting report recently as saying “Consumer data will be the biggest differentiator in the next two to three years. Whoever unlocks the reams of data and uses it strategically will win.”

Placing a bet on big data is not for the feint hearted.

Those brands that will lead the big data race have already started though. Watch this space.

• EE is the exclusive UK launch partner for the first smartphone with an entirely new Facebook experience, called Home, on the ‘HTC First’
• The HTC First will be exclusively available this summer on EE’s superfast 4GEE service, with details on pricing and availability to be announced in due course

4th April 2013. London. EE, the UK’s most advanced digital communications company, has partnered with HTC and Facebook to be the exclusive UK launch partner for the HTC First, the first superfast 4GEE smartphone to feature the new integrated Facebook experience, Home.

The HTC First, featuring Home by Facebook, allows customers to receive friends’ updates directly on to their home screen. Customers will also be able to share photos, interact with friends and chat instantaneously, all through the most immersive mobile Facebook experience, which will be enhanced by EE’s superfast 4G network.

The HTC First will be available exclusively in the UK on EE 4GEE plans, providing customers with download speeds approximately five times faster than 3G – so they enjoy an optimised Facebook experience. Customers will be able to take out the handset with a 4GEE phone plan this summer, via the EE online shop, EE telesales and EE retail stores.

Pippa Dunn, Chief Marketing Officer, EE, said: “We’re proud to have been chosen by Facebook and HTC to be their UK launch partner for the HTC First. In combining our unique superfast network with the latest integrated Facebook experience, customers will constantly be at the centre of conversations with their friends.”

“With Home enabled out of the box, you’ll be able to get everyone’s latest updates and messages right on your home screen,” said Dan Rose, Vice President of Partnerships at Facebook.

Peter Chou, CEO HTC said: “Along with our partners and fellow innovators—EE in the UK—we anticipate excitement from customers when the HTC First becomes available, putting a user’s friends and family at the centre of their mobile experience.”

Home is designed around a customer’s friends and when combined with 4GEE it puts them at the centre of their phone:

• Cover Feed: A constant stream of photos and updates from friends that are always available at a glance. Swipe through to see more and interact with friends by liking, commenting, and sharing right from the Cover Feed
• Notifications: Thanks to Home’s deep integration with Android, notifications from apps appear alongside updates from friends right on the home screen
• Chat Heads: Keep chatting with Facebook contacts even when using other apps. Reply right from chat heads, or move them around if you’re not ready to respond, and send SMS and Facebook messages from the same place
• App Launcher:  Set favourite apps and access them directly through Home

“The evolution of social business – six stages of social business transformation”

that I decided to do a multi-part blog post. The first post can be viewed at lc.tl/asb1

In this second post, I am looking at the section of the report that looks at defining a social business strategy.

The Altimeter report looked at 698 companies in medium-large sized companies, as well as deeper interviews with 26 executives and social strategists at 15 companies.

The Altimeter definition of a social business strategy is

“the set of visions, goals, plans, and resources that align social media initiatives with business objectives”

In a recent post, I provided an analogy of a broadway show as a way to outline the differences between social media and social business (think front of house vs backstage).

The Altimeter social business strategy definition dovetails nicely in here – as it is important to understand that when we are speaking about a social business, we need to consider the existing (and planned) social media initiatives with a company’s actual business objectives.

It scares me that many companies dive into social media, thinking they “just need to be there” without considering how what they are doing with social maps into the wider business context.

In their report, Altimeter has defined six stages of social business transformation – outlined below.

Their view (which I share), is that regardless of an organisation’s size, companies all go through these 6 stages as they transform their business into a social business.

Altimeter found that even in the early stages of a social business transformation, companies need to introduce value by aligning or meeting business goals. This is in my view critical to obtain, and keep senior management support.

In the first part of my review of this report, we learned that nearly half of the survey respondents thought that their senior executives were not aligned with the social business strategy.

This was due in part to the fact that many senior executives see social (and hence social business) as a foreign concept, because they have never really used social in any true business context.

Taking as a given that it maybe near-impossible to churn out social execs in the timeframe required, the next best thing is to always be able to defend the social business strategy against the company’s wider objectives and show how the social business program is driving real benefits.

Even if senior executives don’t “get” social, they will “get” that if a clearly articulated strategy is working and providing tangible benefits, and is delivering on their business objectives, it should be supported and funded.

Until now, it has been difficult in my view for companies that have a social media presence (without a social business strategy to tie it against) to justify to their senior management that what they are doing in social i actually driving business benefits.

Many “social strategies” have been written that have no link back to the overall company strategy, and this leaves the authors of these strategies wide open to have their funding pulled by execs – with the reason “social media isn’t working for us”.

I was speaking to a well known recruiter, Steve Ward in London recently who works placing social media candidates who said that he was seeing community managers struggling after a year or so because execs were not supporting their efforts in social, because the business benefits were not being proven.

Steve’s tweet below says it all. SMM = Social Media Manager.

https://twitter.com/CloudNineRec/status/316252199153967105

This is a pretty convincing argument for someone who does not understand social to stand behind – and even harder to defend if your efforts are not driving revenue or cost savings for the business.

Let’s go through the 6 stages as defined in the report (click to enlarge the graphic below).

Stage 1 – Planning – “Listen to learn”

Back when I was at Visible Technologies (way back in 2009), leading their international strategy efforts in London, we looked the 4 stages of social (not many people were talking about social business then) as

• Listen
• Learn
• Engage
• Integrate

It would be fair to say that in 2013, many firms are already “listening” to social media – they know that they “have to” because sometimes, people say bad things about them.

Back in 2009, what I was advising clients was that they needed to at least listen to what was being said, so they could then form a strategy about what do with this rich information.

Translating the listening stage into a social business framework, Altimeter describes the goal of the first stage is to ensure a strong foundation for strategy development, organizational alignment, resource development, and execution.

The report found that companies with successful social strategies spent a significant amount of time at this stage, building a firm foundation before moving on to the next stage.

Three goals dominate the planning stage according to Altimeter:

1. Listen to customers to learn about their social behavior. Before Dell launched its first social media presence in 2006, the company began by listening for nine months to what people were writing on blogs and discussion forums about Dell.

By understanding and working to address these identified needs through existing customer service channels, Dell was laying the groundwork to become the social organization that many social experts recognize today.

2. Use pilot projects to prioritize social efforts. With so many options available in social, which initiatives and channels should you take on first? Many social strategists Altimeter interviewed pointed to pilot programs that provided decision makers the “digital proof points” that connect social media solutions to solving business problems. These programs helped them prioritize which initiatives would have the greatest impact.

Altimeter cautions about being stuck at the pilot stage for too long though.

“The toe in the water needs to quickly be followed with an all-in jump. If you dabble, it will be a failure. So make sure the strategy reflects the resources available and feel comfortable with uncertainty“, says Don Bulmer, VP Communication strategy at Shell.

3. Use audits to assess internal readiness. Several companies interviewed for the report conducted competitive audits during planning to understand existing capabilities, as well as to understand how competitors are and are not using social media.

One of the benefits of conducting these audits is to build the case for taking action — but care must be taken that the actual initiatives are accretive to business goals rather than a reaction to competitive actions.

Stage 2 – stake our claim. In this stage, companies move from planning into action. Simple examples might be launching a YouTube channel, establishing a blog, or a Facebook page.

Back in 2010 when I was helping UK Retailer John Lewis move from listening to this next phase, they launched their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels on the same day.

The goal of this phase is for companies to establish a presence, and see first hand how customers engage with you via social.

The report observed that companies in this stage that were successful in invested in 3 key initiatives – namely

1. Leveraging social content to amplify existing marketing efforts.

In these early stages, social is already being used in different ways by different parts of an organisation. Marketing may have a focus on creating and publishing content through paid and/or owned media channels to create brand lift. On the other hand, corporate communications may seek to employ earned media programs to encourage sharing that can dramatically increase traffic volume and audience reach.

One of the most important lessons to learn from this stage is that it is important to set a clear, integrated content strategy. A well defied content strategy — which outlines the governance, roles, and responsibilities — is a crucial piece of this strategy.

Most importantly, stage 2 is the time when funds need to be set aside to provide the resources needed to create content, an headcount to staff these positions.

As it to be expected, what is often encountered at this stage is the lack of integration with existing efforts. One social strategist interviewed for the report noted, “Social is brought in after the entire program is already created and sold into leadership — who then want to improve it with social. The marketing team will nod and smile, listen to us, and then they do what they want anyway.”

2. Providing information to support post-transaction issues. By contrast, social media at Comcast is used primarily for customer support. The company anticipates potential service issues and proactively pushes out content — for example, ahead of Superstorm Sandy, Comcast activated all social channels to let subscribers know how to deal with anticipated disruptions caused by the storm.

3. Aligning metrics with departmental or functional business objectives. Once content appears in social channels, alluring engagement metrics will quickly follow — the number of visits, fans, followers, shares, likes, and retweets will lull you into a sense of success. It’s critical to create concrete goals for the strategy and metrics, even if they are softer metrics. Admittedly, this is difficult. Our survey data and interviews found that across the board, companies find this challenging.

Altimeter lists the following best practices to ensure the “presence” stage of the transformation maximises business impact:

1. Link your social presence to business objectives. Start with the priorities identified in the Planning stage and make sure that any presence you establish in social channels has a clear link to business impact and outcomes.

2. Pass on engagement — leave this for the next stage. Instead, focus on presence strategies where you are not setting or feeding expectations for response and engagement.

Translating this – “don’t bite off more than you can chew”. If you’re setting up your presence strategy and “staking your claim” you will very quickly find out what processes are broken (think delivery, customer service…). Until you are ready to fix years of broken processes, you will be paying the “twitter tax” until you get these fixed.

3. Develop sharable content. Develop content and programming that is shareable so that there is some social activity around your presence, and importantly something worth sharing.

You will also get a chance to see what pieces of your content resonates and what is of no interest to your community. Do NOT simply send out press releases from the press office – this will telegraph to the world that you have absolutely no idea what you are doing (and that the press office owns your social strategy).

4. Establish governance with an eye to the future. As your social presence grows, more and different parts of your organization will inevitable want to participate. To ensure that you don’t have 29 different Facebook and Twitter accounts within a year, anticipate how you will respond to the first requests to expand your social presence from within your organisation.

We’re only up to the second of six phases in the transformation, and probably time to give you the reader a break – so we’ll look at the next 4 stages in a follow up post.

In the meantime, why not download the report.

I first came across Tonya and her show at last year’s South by Southwest (SXSW), when she topped our Kred real-time leaderboard for the event on a daily basis. She wanted to know more about Kred and I wanted to know more about her and her daily radio show on the Bloomberg Radio Network.

Tonya has also been a Kred leader, and we have become firm friends.

You can listen to the show in 4 parts below, and I have summarized what we discussed in each segment.

Part 1 (7 mins) We discussed how we first met through social media, the April Fools jokes circulating on social media, and how no brand is too big to fail on social media.

Part 2 (10 mins) We discussed the difference between social media and social business using my Broadway show analogy, how companies need to prepare properly to be a social business, and the “twitter tax” that many companies pay when they start out in social.

Part 3 (10 mins) We discussed and the 6 stages you need to go through to become a social business – referencing the Altimeter report ”the evolution of social business”, the internal use of social media in companies, and turning likes into leadership - moving away from our fixation on the number of likes. In addition we discussed how companies should embrace those internal advocates in an organisation and how they should not regulate their use of social media, and how to deal with negative feedback on social media.

Part 4 (10 mins) In this final part we looked at how CEOs should give back, and help educate the leaders of the future. We also looked at what the CEO of the future will look like and the skills they will need, as well as the importance of using tools and blogging to really understand how social works.

Thanks so much to Tonya for having me on her show – you can tune in each weekday at 11am eastern time, 4pm London time and listen live.

My original post from 2010 explained how I was using the open source YOURLS platform (Your Own URL Shortener) to power my custom, branded URL shortener at lc.tl.

In 2012, I looked at how the two US Presidential candidates were using their own branded URL shorteners – OFA.BO for the Obama team and mi.tt for Romney’s team.  Not surprising, only Obama’s domain and shortener is still active.

Some brands use the bit.ly pro service – one such example is the BBC who run their shortener at bbc.in

You can easily tell this by looking at any of their short URLS such as bbc.in/177uAeA and adding a + at the end.  Clicking on bbc.in/177uAeA+ takes you to the statistics for that link – and it clearly shows it is hosted by bit.ly.

I started using bit.ly with my original shortening service, but wanted to have full control over my links, having seen some of the early shorteners such as tr.im (which I used many years ago), be shut down only to be resurrected later on.

My view is the only way to completely control your own brand and branded shorteners is to run your own.

Whenever I see a new short URL service appear via tweets on Twitter, I always have a quick look to see what service they are using.

A few weeks ago, I came across the Virgin Group using virg.in on Twitter, and looked further to see what service was powering it.

Thinking simply and clearly is hard to do virg.in/dgb

— richardbranson (@richardbranson) March 28, 2013

Clicking on virg.in drove me straight to this holding page – which shows some stats on the trending links, as well as stats on the number of links shortened, and the total number of clicks to date – click the image below for a better view.

To my amazement, on the bottom right of this page, a simple notice states “powered by YOURLS“.

This is a smart move from Virgin, using a powerful, open source platform which gives them greater freedom and flexibility

I am sure that Ozh Richard (@Ozh) who has been responsible for making YOURLS the success it is would be very pleased that such a major brand as Virgin has decided to adopt his platform as a key part of their online presence.

If you want to read the reasons behind why I chose to set up my own URL shortener, and why brands should so this as well, head over to my 2-part post at lc.tl/url – naturally shortened by my own branded shortener.

In each case I have been extremely humbled that they would want to have me into their class to present either in person, or via Skype.

My recent string of lectures started in New York, when I met Lindsey Fair and her 3rd year marketing students from St. Lawrence College, Ontario at the Pivot conference in New York in October 2012.

I blogged last October about meeting these socially savvy students, and in particular Sabrina Eshoo who made a very convincing pitch to the organisers to be allowed to attend at a discount.  Below is a snap of the team in New York.

After I met with Lindsay and the class, I offered to run a session on Skype – which they took me up on and had me answer questions about influence and social media in general.

In February 2012, my friend and former client Raja Halabi (@rajahalabi) who has just completed a Sloan MSc in Leadership and Strategy at the London Business School introduced me to Sir Andrew Likierman, Dean of LBS. He in turn introduced me to Naufel Vilcassim, Professor of Marketing, who then arranged for me to present a guest lecture in the Advanced Marketing class run by Professor Nirmalya Kumar (@ProfKumar).

In parallel, the LBS Marketing Club asked me to present on social business as well, along with some tips on finding a job via social media.

You can see my presentations to the LBS students on my LBS lectures page (where I made my slides and references available), and if you jump to the 28:00 mark of the video below of my presentation to the Marketing Club, you will see the tips I provided on getting noticed via social media.

In February, I was in touch with David Gerzof Richard (@davidgerzof) via twitter about doing a Skype lecture with the #ESM class at Emerson college (@EmersonCollege). Below you can see the view the class had of the lecture I presented on the 11th of March (I was actually in San Francisco at the time).

@andrewgrill of @kred Skyping into #ESM from San Francisco twitter.com/GemmaSimko/sta…

— Gemma Simko (@GemmaSimko) March 11, 2013

This was my view of the class (note everyone has a laptop open).

Last week I gave a lecture again via Skype to the Social Media for Marketing Communications class (#ritsm) at Rochester Institute of Technology run by Mike Johansson (@mikejny) and Raj Murthy (@rajsmurthy), and again the class asked a bunch of really interesting questions.

Thanks to @andrewgrillof @kred for his time today in the #RIT #ritsm class. It’s a classy guy who takes time for these things. :-)

— Mike Johansson (@mikejny) March 28, 2013

What really surprised me in each case was the fact that many of my peers (both in the influence industry and the broader social media community) don’t make themselves available to help educate our digital CEOs of the future.

I have made it a personal mission to make myself available (feel free to contact me direct), to universities and colleges to talk about any aspect of social business and social media. I believe that it is the duty of those of us in fortunate positions in these fields to help educate those up and coming “digital CEOs”.

I cringe when I hear that my peers don’t return messages about requests for interviews and lectures – what is 30 or 60 minutes out of your day?

Most of the lectures delivered above have been conducted on Skype on my iPad from wherever I happened to be – enabling me to fit it in with my normal schedule.  In fact I actually learn more than I can ever tell the students, because they ask such great questions with a fresh pair of eyes.

Back in 2001, when I was CEO of commercial property website PropertyLook, I wrote and delivered a paper titled “Who will navigate today’s leaders through the e-commerce minefield?” which was a follow on from some research from the same year from AK Kearney on “the characteristics of eLeaders“.

Simply swapping out the word “e-commerce” for “Social Media”, both papers are still relevant in 2013. Those students I have been speaking to will be in executive leadership positions in 10 – 15 years time.  I want them to have all of the digital skills well before then, so that we don’t keep hearing about the “unaligned executives” problem highlighted in the recent Altimeter report on the “evolution of social business“.

In this report, they found that 48% of social business initiatives were being hampered because the executives making the decisions had no real concept of what social media was and why they should be using it.

One social strategist surveyed shared, “Many of our board members and executive leaders aren’t even on Facebook, so social media is foreign to them.” We found that in organizations where executives do not use social technologies, social media as a business tool is often limited in reach and understanding within the organization unless a business case is made.

My personal mantra has become “To get social, you need to be social.”

We can’t force executives to all of a sudden change their personality and jump on twitter.  Instead, executives need to understand the potential business benefits and then surround themselves with those that do get social, and can “translate” this into a business benefit.

I don’t believe that the change we need in senior executives will happen fast enough, and so this is why I am helping to educate the digital CEOs of the future one lecture at a time.

After much auditioning of mobile app makers (and not wanting to pay £1000′s to a developer just yet), I used the AppYet mobile app creator to quickly create a very professional looking mobile app from my RSS feed.

The app includes the ability to auto-download new content, and notify you in the notification area about new content, as well as change the layout and theme.

AppYet has recently upgraded the look and feel to v3.0 and it is a nice, professional looking app – something I am proud to promote my content with.

They have a simple to use interface (it actually takes longer to remove features you don’t want than to create the app), that will get your RSS feed into a mobile app in minutes.

Naturally, as the app builder is free, there is a catch and they insert ads into the app.  Thankfully though, they have an option to turn off the ads for 3 months at no charge, serve admob ads, or for $49 a year remove the ads completely.

Once the app is built, which takes about 20 seconds, they email you the .apk source file.

You can then download the file to your Android (you need to set permissions in your app settings to allow 3rd party downloads) to test.

The end goal though is to appear in the Google Play App Store, and for this you need to register as an Android developer. There is a one-time $25 fee to register, and the process is pretty straightforward.

Once registered, you upload your .apk file emailed to you from AppYet, and then start to fill out the listing for your app.  The app store back end looks like this

It is fairly straightforward, the only trick is getting the app store graphic images sized exactly as per the submission guidelines eg 512 x 512 and 1024 x 512

To download the app, head to my app page. You can also search for “london calling” in the Google play app store from your device.

Because both the company and my friend are well known, I won’t go into specifics for obvious reasons.

When I was talking to my friend about the recruitment process, one question they asked him struck me.

Will you stop blogging when you join us?

When I was told this, I was initially quite surprised that a large company would openly ask a well known blogger to stop blogging as a condition of employment.

Luckily the company saw sense when he pushed back, and took that clause out of his letter of offer, and he continues to blog.

After I left our coffee catch-up, I reflected on this and looked at it from the company side.

While I would never work for a company that restricted what is essentially an extension of who I am, I can understand why the company might have started from this position.

In the first part of my review of the Altimeter report on the Evolution of Social Business, one key finding was that the delay in adoption of social and social business is due in many ways to the aprehension felt by senior executives at large firms.

Quoting from page 6 of the report, one of the key barriers is “unaligned executives”

Only 52% of companies surveyed agreed with the statement, “Top executives are informed, engaged, and aligned with our social strategy.”

We found that in organizations where executives do not use social technologies, social media as a business tool is often limited in reach and understanding within the organization unless a business case is made.

While some may see this as a criticism of executives, it is hard to lay the blame with people who have never used the tools that many of us take for granted.

What is a criticism though is that some executives don’t see the rapid rise of social business as a huge opportunity for the company.

A report published late last year by Capgemini – also covered in a previous post showed that those that adopt social business are up to 26% more profitable than their peers. This proves there is a real business benefit in adopting social business strategies.

I was also reading a recent interview from the Brunswick Group with Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts titled “The Democratic Republic of Burberry“.

In the interview, she talks about how she turned the executive decision making on its head.

Ahrendts recognized that Burberry employees, like its target customers, are young – 70 per cent of those who work at the company’s headquarters are under the age of 30. To capture this theme institutionally, Ahrendts created two linked bodies that, on the one hand, allow ideas to flourish and, on the other, follow through and turn the best of those ideas into brand-enhancing initiatives.

“We actually flipped the traditional hierarchy, and the way we communicated these councils showed the entire company that we were serious about being creatively led.”

Reading this gives me goosebumps. Here is a CEO that actually directs her board’s thinking from the strategy developed by a bunch of under 30s.

This is in stark contrast to the company that my friend works for, who nearly had to surrender his creative voice and thought leadership to work there.

I know which company I would want to work for if I had to choose.

The lesson from all of this is that companies need to embrace what is happening.

Those influential bloggers on staff can (and do) become their biggest advocates, and help them engage with this new, empowered and highly connected audience.

Many large companies don’t even know that that have influential bloggers on staff, and can probably greatly assist them as they transition to becoming a social business.

With the decision by Google to shut down Google Reader (which is used to read RSS feeds), and the other clues with the FeedBurner blog shutting down, AdSense for Feeds being discontinued, it is only a matter of time before FeedBurner gets the chop.

I have looked at the many alternatives, including an excellent review by friend and fellow blogger Neville Hobson about his move to FeedBlitz.

One of the most helpful articles to assist me with my decision on what to do was a post by Sarah Arrow who suggested a mix of alternatives

1. FeedBlitz – a paid service for RSS and email

2. Bring My Blog Visitors Back – a local RSS feed option

3. Aweber – a paid email service

The great thing about FeedBurner was that they took care of both the distribution of RSS feeds, and it also had a basic email service which distributed latest post via email and handled email subscriptions.

As any blogger would know, the 2 services that need looking after are the RSS feed, and the ability for readers to subscribe via email to updates.

After Reading Neville’s review, I looked at FeedBlitz. It is a paid service, with the pricing based on the number of email subscribers – with the RSS feed part thrown in for free.

Their pricing starts at $1.49/month but soon jumps to $10/month once you have more than 100 email subscribers.

The other issue with moving from one hosted RSS service to another, is that one day, FeedBlitz may also close down, or increase their prices or T&C to cause me to move again.

Thankfully, a year or so ago FeedBurner allowed you to use your own domain to point to the feed – so I chose feeds.londoncalling.co/andrewgrill – which then redirected via a CNAME to FeedBurner.

Moving away from FeedBurner has therefore been pretty painless – as I control the londoncalling.co domain – the old FeedBurner address now points to londoncalling.co/feed – a locally served version on my server hosted by the team at WebHostingBuzz.

Note: I am a WebHostingBuzz ambassador, so my hosting is provided as part of a sponsorship arrangement – read my review of their service.

This brings me to the reason for choosing to locally host my RSS feed instead of with a 3rd party.

I decided to enhance my local feed with a paid plugin called Bring My Blog Visitors Back which adds some interactivity to the feed, while still allowing me to host on my server, and have full control over the feed. This means that I have control over caching, server downtime, DNS, speed and the like without having to outsource this to a 3rd party.

The final piece of the transition was to find a home for my email subscribers.

I did consider a locally hosted option such as the Subscribe2 WordPress plugin , however this is a very basic email solution and does not give me information on who has opened the email or bounce and subscriber management etc.

I decided to go with MailChimp, and their “free forever” option. This is a good choice if you have under 2,000 email subscribers, and send less than 12,000 emails per month.

As it is a free service, you do have the “powered by MailChimp” message on every email, which I think is a small price to pay, and it also sends a message to those subscribing to my blog via email that I am using a professional platform to send emails, and their unsubscribe preferences will be honoured.

Hopefully I won’t have to worry about another service closing down for quite some time.

Many ask me “what is the difference?”, and “why should I care?”.

I hope to answer both these questions in this post.

What is the difference between social media & social business?

I think in 2013, there are few people left in the business world that need to have “social media” explained to them. I am sure that everyone knows that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like are here to stay, and have disrupted pretty much every business on the planet.

When it comes to defining social business, I have chosen to use a definition produced by Charlene Li and Brian Solis from Altimeter Group. In a recent report on Social Business, they have defined social business as

The deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.

This definition I believe is a strong one, and it also helps differentiate social business from social media, and helps drive the discussion towards business impact and away from social as just another PR, customer service or marketing channel.

To take the analogy further, consider a Broadway Show (or West End Play depending on where you live in the world).

In this analogy, social media is the front of house. It is what we actually see when we go to a show. It is the ticket and program sellers in the foyer, the ushers that show us to our seats, the performers on the stage and even the other people in the audience.

Along the course of our evening at the show, we interact with all of these people at some stage (we even interact with those performing on stage, by clapping them at the good bits).

At each stage, we are seeing the very best the theatre has to offer, dressed to impress and everything looks immaculate. If something is out of place, we would notice.

Contrast this to what is happening behind the scenes.

Backstage, there are a great deal more people we will never see or interact with, and they will probably never interact with us directly either.

The crew is normally dressed entirely in black, so that we won’t see them, and they communicate with each other (but not us) via headsets, ensuring the whole performance runs like clockwork.

If you have ever been involved in a show, or been invited backstage afterwards, the first thing that strikes you is that it is not as “pretty” as the front of house operation – and it does not have to as the back of house (think back office in business language) is not meant for prime time.

You can also hear me explaining this analogy on the Tonya Hall Radio Show listen here

So by now you’re asking yourself – what does a Broadway show have to do with social media/business?

Well the front of house is just like social media – everyone can see everyone else, and it is the most “public” part of the performance – everything is on show so needs to look just right, or we will complain.

The back of house is like social business. This is the part we never see. The organisation needs to communicate with each other to literally “keep the show on the road”, and they use information and signals from everything happening on stage, which is in full view of paying customers to fine tune what is happening in real time.

If the person in charge of lighting at the show was not watching every actor’s movement, then they would miss the cue to change the scene, and the audience would pick up something was wrong.

Returning to the Altimeter definition of social business from above:

The deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.

Translating into the theatre analogy, everything that is going on front of house is integrated, processed and shared with the back of house team to ensure the product being delivered on stage is of the highest quality available.

As we all know, even before social media existed, reviews on opening night can make or break a show.

Becoming a social business is NOT just all about having a Twitter feed and a Facebook page – it is so much more.

As can be seen from this graphic from the Altimeter report, a true social business uses social methodology in every aspect of the company (click to enlarge).

Marketing & communications: support product development with real-time feedback and crowdsourcing ideas from customers & employees

Customer experience: social support provided by customers on forums and social channels as well as by employees

Sales: Connects through the consideration process – and between transactions

Finance: Internal social networks provide context for discussions around things as diverse as expenses and budgeting

HR: Used for Recruitment, and also performance management leverages enterprise social networks to track achievements and reward teamwork

IT: Create social as a platform – integrate everything into a single customer database powered by social signals and power the employee CRM system

Supply chain: Use social intelligence to power predictive analysis around supply chains

So next time you are at a Broadway or West End show, think about all of the things that you can’t see happening, and see how you can apply all of the amazing insights provided by social media to turn your organisation into a social business.

After 5 years I’ve decided it is time to give LondonCalling.co a fresh new look, and a responsive and mobile friendly theme.

After many auditions, I have chosen the very clean Slate WordPress theme from Okay Themes, written by Mike McAlister.

The theme is “responsive” in that it will adapt for any screen size, including mobile.

It also has a bunch of neat widgets that you will see on the right hand side which allow me to present other posts, comments, my social presence and also my tweets.

It is a very flexible theme and I highly recommend Okay Themes – they are well written and good value – Slate cost me just $45.

I’d welcome any comments on the new look below – what do you think?

I spent a good hour somewhere over the Atlantic reviewing an excellent new report from from Altimeter group by Charlene Li and Brian Solis titled “The Evolution of Social Business”.

It is such a good report, and I believe will be the start of serious discussions at board level that I have decided to provide a comprehensive review over the next few posts.

The report was prepared with the assistance of 26 executives and social strategists at 15 companies about the development and success of their social strategies, as well as a quantitative study of 698 executives and social strategists about their social media efforts.

Of these respondents, 130 were at companies with more than 1,000 employees. The survey was conducted online during Q4 2012 by Altimeter Group.

As such, I believe it provides one of the most comprehensive views of social business maturity among medium to large firms I have seen.

So what exactly is social business?

One thing that Charlene and Brian are great at is providing a concise handle on what it is that we’re all talking about.

They have defined social business as

The deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.

This definition I believe is a strong one, and it also helps differentiate social business from social media, and helps drive the discussion towards business impact and away from social as just another PR, customer service or marketing channel.

As the report has asked a cross section of companies currently deeply engaged with social, the first part of the report is interesting in that it looks at where these companies think they are at the moment, and where the gaps are.

Figure 1 below from the report (click all images to enlarge) shows that most companies feel they have a fairly coherent social strategy.

Understandably, the areas that companies feel they have covered are:

Risk: 65% believe that risk management is understood by the business

Goals: 61% believe that their social strategy is connected to business goals & outcomes

Roles: 60% believe that roles & responsibilities around social are well defined

Engaged execs: 52% believe top execs are informed, engaged & aligned with social strategy

Roadmap: 52% believe the social strategy includes a roadmap for the next 1+ years

Customers: 48% believe they have a long term vision for how social media will improve customer relationships

Where the numbers start to fall off sharply are in the areas of metrics and training:

only 34% believe that there are clear metrics linking social activities with business outcomes

only 27% believe employees at all levels are aware and trained on how to/not to use social in their jobs as well as their personal lives.

The Altimeter report highlights that while the figures presented look promising, only 34% of companies surveyed felt their social strategy was connected to business outcomes.

This means that two thirds of the companies surveyed were active in social with no real link to business goals.

My view is that social strategies need to think beyond just the number of likes the can generate and instead how they can deliver on the business goals of the company. Only then will their social efforts be taken seriously by senior management and the funds and attention will flow from the c-suite.

One of the reasons why many boards and executive groups are not properly investing in social to become a social business is because they can’t see the link between their current social activities and real revenue and benefits to the business.

The report highlighted 3 main areas driving this disconnect:

1. Unaligned executives. Only 52% of companies surveyed agreed with the statement, “Top executives are informed, engaged, and aligned with our social strategy.” Despite the initial funding that created their positions, many social strategists we interviewed felt that without deep executive support, they didn’t have the validation, direction, and resources to move beyond tactical efforts.

The real reason I believe for the disconnect is that the executives who hold the purse strings don’t use let alone understand social media.

One social strategist surveyed shared, “Many of our board members and executive leaders aren’t even on Facebook, so social media is foreign to them.” We found that in organizations where executives do not use social technologies, social media as a business tool is often limited in reach and understanding within the organization unless a business case is made.

To get social, you need to be social. We can’t force executives to all of a sudden change their personality and jump on twitter.  Instead, executives need to understand the potential business benefits and then surround themselves with those that do get social, and can “translate” this into a business benefit.

2. Disparate, uncoordinated efforts. A the report points out, the allure of social media can spread quickly through an organization, with many different departments — and goals — competing for the attention of the same social customers.

Figure 2 below from the report shows that while most social media teams reside in Marketing or Corporate Communications, many of those organizations have at least one FTE in another department.

Organizationally, most companies have some sort of hub or “center of excellence” coordinating efforts, but 46.5% are still either highly centralized.

3. Incremental funding. One key finding in the report was that budget and resources impact the ability to experiment, learn, and adapt. As one executive commented, “There’s a lot of interest in social at [our company], but it’s still not a primary driver of business, and its budget is much lower than traditional channels.”

Figure 3 below shows that the full time equivalent (FTE) staff numbers for social in the firms surveyed is still quite low, pointing to the fact that because of unaligned executives, real funding has not been released to really grow social inside many of these companies.

I think you will age that this report is very comprehensive and thought provoking, and we’re only up to page 5 of the 23 page report.

In my next post, I will be looking at Altimeter’s recommendations for defining a social business strategy.

In the meantime, why not download the report – it is an excellent read.