FreshNetworks Blog

Adam Leyland’s description of new Tesco boss Philip Clarke’s use of Twitter in The Grocer this week made for an interesting read.

On 18th March Philip Clarke tweeted:  “in a social media and social commerce meeting”.

Good to hear that social media is on the radar of Britain’s top grocery boss.

However, the article then goes on to suggest that Philip Clarke’s Twitter silence last week was due to him grappling with a PR disaster at Tesco as their buy one get it free plus cash (BOGIFPC) “Double the Difference” campaign went into meltdown.

Using social media, consumers found they could exploit a huge loophole in the campaign by buying certain products at Tesco that were priced cheaper elsewhere and could actually make a cash profit. Pre-social media times, the effort to price check thousands of product lines simply wouldn’t have been worth the effort and this campaign would probably have been fine.

But social media is part of our daily lives. So when a simple site was created – www.pricechecklogicalinternetsolutions.com- allowing consumers to easily check which products they could buy and make a profit on, they used it in their thousands. As word spread on consumer forums and sites like Moneysavingexpert, Tesco were forced to pull the offer and face an inevitable furore on their Facebook page and elsewhere.

Tesco aren’t the first big brand to get caught like this and there are now lots of well documented case studies about how customers leveraging social media can force brands into taking action they would rather not have to.

While this was quite an unfortunate thing to happen to Tesco, what it would be interesting to know is if during the meeting about social media that Philip Clarke attended,  did  someone (like Tesco’s social media agency) not point out this could happen? Were they not briefed properly about future offline campaigns and how they could be impacted by the online world? We will never know for sure.

One thing’s for certain – unless agencies stop advising their clients that social media is just a channel, without looking at the wider business or brand strategy and  how social media can impact this strategy, situations like what happened at Tesco will happen again and again.

Social media has to inform and be informed by all other business initiatives; it does not happen in a vacuum and will ultimately fail if it does.

Today I attended eConsultancy’s ‘Facebook Innovation Briefing’, with Christian Gladwell from Human-Digital. Christian’s talk focused on three key areas about the commercial use of  Facebook:

1. Ensuring that Facebook is the right platform for your brand

Facebook  will often not be the correct platform for a brand’s strategy. The first question a brand should be asking itself about Facebook is ‘Does Facebook meet our business needs?’

Having a pretty Facebook page is nice. It’s better, and indeed an ego boost,  when it has several thousand fans. But if it’s not delivering against business needs, however, then it’s simply a pretty useless online channel.

Brands should, instead, use Facebook as part of their overall digital (or integrated) campaign strategy. They should be looking at Facebook as a useful tool for:

• Channeling content
• Communicating brand voice
• Organic distribution
• Fostering the right kinds of relationships with customers or consumers

The types of brands who can benefit most from this approach are megabrands (like Coca Cola), challenger brands, charities and those who have genius, creative, social ideas.

2. Measurement and Analysis

Facebook offers an unparalleled opportunity for online market research, especially for bigger brands. While the numbers are important, knowing how to use the numbers and feed back into overall strategy is even more important. We should use Facebook as a tool for tracking the behavioural patterns of consumers and we should be looking at innovative ways of doing it.

Aside from the metrics Facebook Insights offers us, advertising on Facebook provides a great way for targeted research. It allows us to engage consumers, measure the success of above-the-line advertising and, crucially, it allows us to measure that engagement. If that engagement ends in a conversion, even better. Experimenting with your Facebook advertising plan is key to your analytical success.

Going forward, Questions and Places will give brands the opportunity to obtain better, more accurate data. We’ve already discussed the impact Questions can have on your brand and Places could develop into a key way to pull customers from the streets into stores with coupon schemes, rewards and adverts targeted at individuals. Depending on the data available, brands could start to use it as part of their in-store strategy.

3. The future direction of Facebook

Forward-thinking brands will be looking to strategies that work and using Facebook in an innovative way will be pointless if it doesn’t deliver value. F-commerce (e-commerce on Facebook) is on the cusp of taking off and some airlines like the US carrier, Delta Airlines, have started to sell tickets via Facebook.

The importance of Questions and Places will continue to grow while Facebook’s group-buying scheme will ensure that business can increase their ability to measure their success, while spending less for the privilege, with the potential for selling their products direct to the consumer.

However, once again, businesses will have to ensure that using Facebook for commerce is the right business decision as it will not suit all business models.

At a recent customer experience event I went to I watched a presentation from a well known global brand entitled “Stop delighting the customer”.

It was a good title for a presentation as it got everyone in the audience to sit up and take notice – surely businesses should  focus on delighting customers in order to develop loyalty?

The main point of the presentation was that satisfying your customers, instead of delighting them, will increase loyalty in a way that is financially sustainable for a business in the long run.

Many big brands are attempting to use social media as a tool to delight. They monitor Twitter streams and pay more attention to comments from those consumers who are connected to larger social networks, or have higher Klout or other social scoring metrics, and they attempt to delight them. And there is nothing wrong with this as enaging with influencers in the right way can be valuable to your brand or business.

However, consumers aren’t slow at catching on to this and as more and more people leverage this treatment it could come at a cost to the business.

Consumers could build networks to leverage against better services that they haven’t paid for. A free upgrade, a better room, or a reservation at a booked out restaurant perhaps.  Already some hotels offer preferential treatment to those guests with a high Klout score.

All these things come at a cost to the operating business, particularly if they don’t have an engagement strategy for harnessing influencers to benefit their brand. If that’s the case, they’re just giving away freebies and hoping for some kind of return.

So while targeting influencers is an important part of your social media strategy, it is important to think about embedding social media in a way that improves customer satisfaction as a whole in order to get the most value from your social media activity.

Last week I spent a few days at the Executive Customer Contact Exchange networking event and it was really interesting to hear why social media is firmly on the radar of the customer service and customer experience directors that were there.

What did surprise me somewhat though was that among the 20 or so sponsors attending, which included big names such as SAP and RightNow, FreshNetworks was the only specialist social media agency to attend the event.

Does this mean that most of the other social media and digital agencies are still focused purely on social media marketing or social PR? Perhaps. Either way, customer experience directors would do well to think about what Joseph Jaffe outlines in his brilliant book Flip The Funnel.

In Flip the Funnel, Jaffe highlights that the focus of most marketing spend is usually around new customer acquisition and that only 20% of marketing budgets are typically spent on retention. Yet, in many cases, 75% of revenues comes from existing customers.

Jaffe goes on to argue that instead of ending with the customer as in the traditional marketing funnel, the funnel should be flipped so that it begins with the customer.

To me, social media is the ideal way of putting the customer first. It’s also the perfect way of using existing customers to gain new ones.

If your prospective customers see you as being  proactive, responsive and accessible through the way you engage with your existing customers, surely this will help to convert them. What’s more, using social media in this way will help develop advocacy among existing customers, and if  they are happy with their experience they are one step closer to becoming your brand advocates.

Perhaps it’s time for customer experience teams to harness the power of existing customers in order to encourage acquisition of new ones. Thinking about retention may be the key to new customer acquistion through social media.

Interested in learning more about social media and the customer experience? Why not come to the European Customer World Experience 2011 from 24th – 26th May. Register for tickets here.

For the past few weeks I’ve been shopping for a new fridge (I’m moving house).

I was very much hoping for the convenience of reading over some online reviews and then making a purchase online. Instead, I found myself taking a trip to my nearest electrical retailer, with iPhone in hand, reading over product reviews on my phone while testing the products for real.

My online/offline shopping experience led me to think about how many other people approach shopping like this, and whether this kind of ‘dual experience’ shopping gives savvy high street retailers an advantage over others.

Experian and ResearchNow have just released a whitepaper based on survey of 2,000 UK Consumers.

In the survey, 10% of respondents reported that they use their mobile in-store to check the price of goods elsewhere before purchasing – a trend which Experian have dubbed “the Handset Haggler”.