FreshNetworks Blog

Hotels, tour operators and travel providers looking to cash in on winter sun and summer breaks for 2012 would do well to pay attention to the effectiveness of their social media strategy and how social media is having an impact on how their customers choose holidays.

A recent report from the World Travel Market, which surveyed more than 1,000 UK 2011 holidaymakers, found that:

• One third of holiday makers changed their hotel choice after consulting social media.

• One in ten people switched resorts after using social media.

• 7% of people who used social media to book their holiday decided to change location (country) while 5% decided to switch airline.

• 40% of UK holidaymakers use social media to help them when researching holidays.

• Almost nine out of ten (89%) see social media as a positive experience, with 23% using it more often in 2011 than in 2010.

• 66% of consumers said they did not access any websites via their mobile when researching their holiday.

From an industry perspective:

• Almost half of the travel industry 48% believe that social media will be more important than PPC by 2016.

• Only 15% feel social media is at a tipping point and will reduce in popularity.

• In combination, nearly half of the industry is using social media as a revenue stream or are looking to do so, at 22% and 27% respectively.

It’s likely that ratings and reviews on sites like Tripadvisor or other holiday booking portals are still playing an important role in the consumer decision making process.

However,  it’s important for the travel and tourism industry  to pay attention not just to how social media influences consumer choices, but also the impact it has on search – in terms of social search rather than just PPC or organic SEO -  particularly with the launch of Google+ branded pages.

During the last few weeks some of the FreshNetworks male folk (along with two extra supporters) have been sprouting facial hair in support of the men’s health charity, Movember.

Each year during November, men all over the the UK and around the world cease shaving their top lip with the aim of raising both funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

On Movember 1st, guys register at Movember.com with a clean-shaven face and then for the rest of the month “Mo Bros” (as they’re known) groom, trim and wax in an attempt to develop a ‘tache to rival these guys:

So far the FreshNetworks Movember team has raised a whopping £862.00. We’re know we can do better and with just 9 days to go we’re hoping to hit the £1,000 mark and beyond.

If you’d like to help us hit our target and donate to this valiant cause visit http://mobro.co/freshnetworks and give as little or as much as you can afford.

To help you dig deep here are a few fairly amusing pics from some of our Movember team:

Throughout November, Penhaligon’s will also be donating 20% of sales of their shaving products, both online and in their UK boutiques, directly to Movember. Penahaligon’s is an English perfume house, founded in the late 1860s by William Henry Penhaligon. Established as a purveyor of fine fragrances and luxury gifts.

Image courtesy of elliemaeink.blogspot.com

Who is your most valuable consumer?

The one who buys the most from you, the one who generates the most margins or the one who spends the most time in your stores?

Think the answer is “the ones who buy from you the most”? Well, think again…

According to Sudhir Holla, a consultant at Infosys, the answer to the above question has changed in the last couple of years, thanks to social media.

In his post on a Forbes, Holla claims that social media has altered the traditional controlled customer experience to one that is more similar to Multi-Level Marketing (or MLM).

Multi-Level Marketing is a marketing strategy in which the sales force is compensated not only for sales they personally generate, but also for the sales of others they recruit, creating a down line of distributors.

In social media terms, this means the consumer’s voice has the power to influence others, helping to generate sales further down the line. So even though a consumer may just be “just looking” or browsing for a service or product, the fact that social media enables that consumer to spread an opinion about these services or products could help to generate sales further down the line.

This fact is particularly prominent on Facebook where discussions have centered around the fact that friends of fan on Facebook constitute an important incremental audience on Facebook – 34 times larger, on average, for the top 100 brand pages than the fans themselves.

So how do you leverage this trend? Identify your key consumers based not on spend alone but also by those who exert the maximum positive influence among your sector, audience, market or region, or by those who are influential about convincing consumers to buy the products or services offered by you.

Today sees the US-based launch of Mashalot –  a site that has been termed as the “the first online marketplace embedded in social media”.

Launched in beta today in Minneapolis St Paul, the plan is to launch Mashalot nationally in early March 2012 at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

Fully integrated with Facebook, Mashalot helps businesses grow their fan base while allowing consumers to leverage their own social networks (Facebook in essence) to save money on products and services.

Aimed at businesses who want to cut their spend on advertising, or small businesses with limited advertising spend but a real need to drive word of mouth to build their customer base, Mashalot works by encouraging consumers (or “Mashers” as they are known) to use their social media influence to gain special pricing from participating Mashalot businesses.  ”Mega-Mashers” are those who gain followers and can greatly influence pricing and promotions within the Mashalot marketplace.

A transaction in the marketplace is called a “Mash”. Mashes can be created by a business transaction that drives specific promotions, or with a consumer-driven price request from an individual or group of Mashers. Mashers may also request a competitive “Mash Your Price” from non-participating businesses; the business will then be contacted by Mashalot who will try to negotiate the transaction.

The Mashalot platform also allows businesses to advertise and each  ad is available for five days. All promotions are pre-approved to meet Mashalot advertising guidelines. Businesses are charged no upfront fee to participate in Mashalot and revenue for the company is 100% commission-based.

Several Minneapolis-St Paul have already signed up to Mashalot, including restaurants, hotels and a local car dealership.

Having had a quick look around the site, it definitely still feels as though Mashalot is still in beta stage, as it’s quite sparse in terms of content and users. As a social commerce platform that claims to be fully integrated with Facebook’s social graph, while also using the group buying and influencers concept of other social media, it will be interesting to see if Mashalot can take off when rolled out nationally and then internationally.

Either way, Mashalot may be of interest, as a concept if nothing else,  for retailers who are trying to use multichannel effectively.

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.