FreshNetworks Blog

‘Multichannel’ has become a ubiquitous term in retailing and there are sound business reasons for adopting an integrated multichannel strategy.

Not only does multichannel tie together the consumer’s off and online experience, but with real advantages like “click and collect”,(which allows the customer to check if a product is in stock, order it and receive it the same day before even leaving the house) multichannel can help bricks and mortar businesses improve how cost effective they are in terms of e-fulfilment, home delivery, returns etc.

So it comes as no suprise that Multichannel leader John Lewis has introduced wifi to their stores, making it easier for shoppers to price check and compare in-store.

And as social media is woven into the multichannel experience, the buying habits of ‘others like us’ is influencing consumer decision making. So it’s often the case that the savvy multichannel consumer is as knowledgeable as the store assistant, not just on comparable offers, but also the features, functionality and suitability of products on sale. US retailer Sears has combated this by equipping their staff with iPads to help their assistants meet the expectations of their product-aware customers.

Often held up as a pioneer of social commerce, Polyvore has been extremely successful in building a business based on creating an outfit or ‘look’ for others to purchase. This concept, until now,  has been for e-businesses only but  bricks and mortar retailers could use the concept to give a physical shopper access to choose from an expanded stock line, as well as helping the consumer match items they purchased in person to other items online.

Bricks and mortar shopping centre owner Westfield has actually taken this concept on board by developing a virtual mall. Westfield’s virtual mall gives online shoppers the experience of shopping in-store in an online environment. For instance, where you might buy several matching items from different retailers in a trip to a shopping centre or High Street, Westfield’s virtual mall allows you to look at and compare the goods of several retailers in an integrated, ecommerce shopping experience.

Retailers who ignore multichannel do so at their own peril as it is clearly a way to allow the  traditional bricks and mortar retailer to bring their customers the best of both the on and offline worlds.

Image by PhotoGraham via Flickr

Every brand with a Facebook page is at risk of a social media crisis. It could arise from any number of scenarios – from ostensibly innocuous customer complaints to a huge backlash against your perceived values. A brand’s Facebook wall is now often the first stop for anyone wanting to make their fury known, and if word of that fury spreads you may find yourself on the receiving-end of a seemingly endless barrage of complaints.

Knowing how and when to respond is essential and we would always recommend a detailed crisis management plan and escalation policy as a top priority to any company using social media. It is not always appropriate for you to respond to comments online and a good crisis management plan will clearly lay out when you should respond (and how) and when you shouldn’t.

However, in addition to what you do and how your brand responds, the best brands in social media often don’t have to respond at all. Their advocates do it for them. There are always some issues and queries that you will need to respond to (specific details of their account, complaints about your service) but in many cases having other customers to respond instead of you (or as well as you) can be even more powerful.

There can be a temptation to think that only the most lauded brands such as Apple or Gucci have strong advocates, but this is not true. Every brand has advocates, people who are loyal to your brand, products, people or services and will go out of their way to tell others about this. Identifying your advocates is one task, you then need to cultivate and build relationships with them online.

Here are three tips of how you can build relationships with advocates online:

1. Involve them in your product development processes

When we work with advocates for brands, the thing they most often discuss is ideas for the brand. Things they know don’t always work in the product. Ways the product could be improved. Things they have seen that competitors and substitutes do. Advocates are often the people who have the deepest knowledge of your product and want to talk to you about it. If you make it easy for them to do this and give them access to real decision makers at your brand you will build huge social credibility with them.

2. Let them try new products first

Advocates want to try your products and will tell others about them. Whilst giving out endless freebies is not a sustainable or sensible policy, giving samples of products (especially new products) to those who advocate your brand makes sense. They will give you instant and honest feedback, will feel rewarded by getting access to product before anybody else, and will help you to spread the message about your product before its launched.

3. Get to know them

Finally, but most importantly, you need to get to know your advocates. Spend time talking to them and getting to know them so that you can have a conversation with them on a human level. On a Facebook page that we run for pet owners we know the names of our advocates dogs, we chat to them about what their dogs have done at the weekend and know when it is their birthdays. Why? Because we’re genuinely interested in them as people and as dog owners and want to get to know them. If you are to make the most of your advocates you have to be genuinely interested in them and in their lives. This kind of honesty will be clear to them and will mean that you can have a real interaction with them on a human level.

The much-heralded Google+ Pages are here for brands, organisations and others. After the launch yesterday, everybody can now set up pages and brands have been rushing to grab their name. It’s certainly easy to do, and easy to start to add and curate content. But should it be part of your brand’s social media mix and if so how.

These five questions should help you decide if you need a Google+ page for your brand, and how to make the most of one if you do.

1. Should you claim your name to build social credibility?

Vanity URLs (such as ones ending /freshnetworks) aren’t yet available for Google+, and multiple pages can be set up with the same name. This does mean that there is minimal benefit currently to claiming your name as part of a land-grab. However it does make it more important than ever that brands who are serious about using Google+ do it and do it quickly. You need to build social credibility. There is, currently, nothing to stop multiple pages being set up and others using the name you want to use. So the quicker you establish your presence on Google+ and establish the credibility of your brand and how you are using it, the better.

2. Have you got a clear reason for using Google+?

However, the danger with Google+ (and with many of the pages that have already been set up) is that they have been created with no obvious though of how they are to be used and what they do for the business. There is definitely a benefit to using Google+ as part of your social media mix but only if it is contributing towards your brands overall aims with social media.

• Are you looking to acquire customers? In which case could you be using Google+ to specifically reach new audience with content that they are interested in.
• Are you looking to generate online sales? In which case you could be using the rich media capabilities of Google+ to showcase products and link to ecommerce items.
• Are you looking to reward advocates? In which case you could use Circles to gather together your different advocates and share content exclusively with them.

Without a clear reason for using Google+, a business aim, you risk being one of the many many pages that are set up, share some photos and some content but never really start to perform for the brand.

3. Is your audience using Google+?

Google is yet to share much demographic data about who is using Google+, but services such as Social Statistics are sampling profiles to give some data about the types of people that are using the service. We can learn that the users in their sample are almost 70% male as well as finding the top users, posts and fastest growing pages. This kind of data is useful but we should be more intelligent in assessing if our audience is using Google+. One simple thing to do would be to search for your key brand, competitor and market terms and see who is saying what about them on Google+. Are the kind of conversations you want to be part of or lead there already? And who is talking? We should also bear in mind that the audience for Google+ is continuing to grow and change and probably become much more mainstream – bringing in more and more people over time. So if your audience isn’t currently using Google+ the chances are some of them will be in the near future.

4. Are you using the capabilities Google+ offers?

Any brand that uses Google+ in the same way they use Twitter or Facebook is failing to either make full use of its capabilities or to use it sensibly as part of your social media mix. As with any social media tool, you need to understand what role it plays in the mix of tools you use and the strengths and weaknesses of different tools. Google+ is currently very strong in rich media content (videos and images as well as the use of animated GIFS as you can see in the creative Burberry page). It is great for organising people into Circles and then treating these segments in different ways. It is also good for longer-form discussion and debate. In these three ways it offers brands more flexibility than Facebook. In other ways (organising events, integration with apps, short-form updates), Facebook and Twitter are probably stronger.

5. Can you maintain the page when you set it up?

The final consideration is very much an internal, governance question. If you set up a Google+ page for your brand will you have the content, time and resource to maintain it? The worst pages are those with some content that is posted for the first few days or weeks, and then silence. There is a real danger with many of the pages that brands are setting up right now that they just do not have the resources to maintain it.If there is real benefit to you and you have a clear audience to engage there, then you should be able to resource it by shifting your emphasis from other channels, or by sensible use of content and ideas across your social media marketing mix. If you don’t have time to maintain the page, or you can’t provide enough content for it, then you probably shouldn’t have set it up in the first place.

Socialbakers.com describes itself  as “the world’s fastest growing social media and digital analytics company” and claim “over 250,000 marketers as customers across all continents in over 60 countries”. We caught up with Katrina Wong, their VP of marketing to find out more about social media analytics and the future direction of one of the first companies in the world to have initial access to Facebook data.

FreshNetworks: So why do you think social media metrics are important for brands and businesses?

Katrina Wong:  Social media has completely revolutionised marketing. If you think back to the days before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., the information and feedback  a business got from its audience was via traditional market research and surveys. These were slow, costly processes. Now so much information about your target audience is available extremely fast and at your fingertips. You can get so much data and insight about your customers without much effort or work. That is super powerful.

FN: What does Socialbakers measure?

KW: We naturally look at the number of fans, number of followers, etc., but what we’re really focusing on is engagement – it’s so important to look deeper than at just the number of people on your page. It’s about what people are saying, how often are they saying it and drilling further into that.   It’s about how often people are visiting your page, how long are they staying there, how often are they saying things about your brand. It’s about the level and quality of feedback rather than being just about numbers; that’s how I think about the engagement metrics Socialbakers provides.

FN: What do you think are the most important metrics to look at in terms of engagement?

KW: I think its really important to look at a mixture of fan numbers, likes, and comments on Facebook and be able to see that on a daily or even hourly basis. Are they liking AND commenting? Are they just fans who don’t interact? It’s important to look at the relationship between these 3 metrics.

FM: Without using the tool what do you think are the best ways to measure social media?

KW: That’s really the hard part.  Facebook and the other social media platforms hold so much data and without a tool like Socialbakers, you’re really left to your own devices. You could just look at the data yourself, you can spend days on end manually counting likes, comments, retweets or whatever. You can do it, but if you want to be efficient, I’d seriously suggest using a tool or a platform like ours.

FN: Can you tell us a little bit about how Socialbakers works?

KW: We have two products. The first product we built was for analytics. This allows you to access, sort and export data very easily. One huge advantage for Socialbakers is that not only can you access the data for your company’s social media channels, you can access the data of your competitors and literally compare like with like, right there on the screen or in a printed report. Being able to monitor your competitors is powerful for a business that wants to stay ahead.  Competitive insight is unique to Socialbakers.

The second product – what we call our Engagement Builder –  is for social media campaign management. On one hand, you can manage your communication from one place – like scheduling updates – and assign responsibilities to your team members. On the other hand, you can create customisable Facebook applications for your page to engage your audience.

FN: Obviously you cover Facebook but what other platforms do you cover too?

KW: Google plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. With regards to Twitter, we can show the number of followers.  We are looking at doing what we did for Facebook and adding that to our Twitter product — we’re working on this at the moment. We’re looking at country data, other location data, popularity on Twitter, etc.

We’re looking into how we can mine data from individual accounts as an aggregate for Twitter too. We’re hoping to replicate what we’ve done for Facebook on Twitter, as well as for all of the other social media platforms.

FN: Who do you see your main competitors to be?

KW: We get asked that a lot! We’re the only company to build a solution that interfaces with all the publicly available Facebook data rather than just interfacing with a subset of data. When I think about that, there’s no other company that does that.

FN: How far back does the data go in Socialbakers?

KW: The data goes back a few years, basically as long as we’ve been monitoring and we were monitoring very early on with Facebook.

FN: Aside from the platform developments you’ve already mentioned, what does the future hold for Socialbakers?

KW: From a product perspective, we have such a close relationship with Facebook that whenever they bring out something new, we’ll be able to develop something for it and usually the first to launch. Sometimes we’re one of four companies that they work with them in this way, so we’re definitely one of the first to know about something new.  We’re lucky we have history with them and this puts us in a really great position when it comes to Facebook and leading social media analytics.

Today I went to IBM and SugarCRM‘s “Get Social” social business and social crm roadshow.

Some of the key takeaways from the event include:

Social Business

Roy Lee, Marketing Director at IBM gave the following tips about social business:

• Social business should tie together processes and departments. The IBM definition of social business is a business that is engaging, transparent and nimble.

• Social media v social business – Lee believes that social media is about communication mostly  for marketing and PR. Social business, however, embraces social media but brings the tools and techniques inside an organisation, aligning goals across the organisation as a whole.

• When it comes to social business, Lee believes organisations have to set an AGENDA:

A – Align organisational goals and culture

G – Gain social trust

E – Engage through experience

N – Network  your business processes

D – Design for reputation and risk management

A – Analyse your data

• The most successful way to adopt social business is from the top down, via the senior executives and the board. Then you need to establish a digital council, community managers, a centre of excellence for continued learning and development, content management, guidelines and standards, reputation and risk management and metrics and measurements.

• Lee believes that social gaming is critically important for engaging and IBM themselves have 2 social games internally – “IBM Innovate”, which is a business process management game which involves sharing final scores both internally and externally, and “City One”, a city planning simulation game.

Social CRM

The key take home from Tom Schuster, VP and General Manager of SugarCRM Europe, session on getting started with  Social CRM was as follows:

1. Don’t know where to start with Social CRM? Start with the customer.
2. Next, choose and open source CRM system that allows you to keep up-to-date with changes online.
3. Ensure the CRM has a flexible Cloud infrastructure to allow easy data migration and alignment.
4. Integrate collaborative processes into gathering data and merge all existing data with new data that is gathered to give a holistic picture.
5. Allow users to connect to the CRM using their own tools and platforms.

While the session was very interesting, it didn’t offer any ground-breaking advice or case studies about  social business or social crm. However, it was good to see that social business is finally becoming a key objective for business leaders and owners on a global scale.