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January has seen a spate of people tweeting things they shouldn’t – from Diane Abbott to Ed Miliband in the UK to countless people working for brands across the world. We’ve also seen a renewed debate in the UK about how the professions should use social media – notably about teachers befriending their pupils on Facebook. One way that many organisations deal with this is to create social media guidelines but even more important than any guidelines you might right is the internal culture change needed to real to make yours a true social business.

Surveys in the UK last year consistently showed that between 35% and 40% of UK firms have no social media guidelines in place. And even for those firms that did, many employees claim that they do not know what they are. Guidelines are useful, but really they are just the starting point, something every firm should have in place. Much more useful than any social media guidelines is the cultural change you need across your business to really take advantage of the opportunities social can bring.

This change is broadly in two main areas: bringing your staff closer to your customers, and building your staff as your biggest advocates. Both of these are important tasks and done properly can start to have a real impact on your organisation.

1) Bringing your staff closer to your customers

In any organisation some employees are customer-facing and some are not; and only a few of those that are customer-facing really understand what a range of your customers are thinking. This often leads to a real gap in understanding between what your customers think about you, your brand and products, and what yous staff think that they think. Maybe your staff think that customers are more critical than they are. Or that some things are more important to them than they are. Or even that customers like you a lot more than they really do. There are always gaps in understanding, and social provides a way to close this gap.

At the simplest level, all organisations could benefit from using real-time comments and discussions as part of internal comms. Show what people are saying about your brand on screen around your office or on computer desktops will begin to connect people to conversations. Analysing this and showing positive and negative trends and the topics of conversation will being to let people understand the weight of discussion and opinion online.

You can go much further than this. Rather than just showing real-time information to staff you can start to really connect them to customers. Develop an advocate programme not just for the external benefits that they will bring but also to bring information into the business. Have a formal mentoring relationship where customer-advocates mentor your key staff gives them a real role in the business and allows you to use your most connected customers and contacts to support your business. On a broader level encouraging each employee to build their own networks and connections onine (be that through Twitter or through specialist forums and groups) will help them to be more involved and engaged and will help them to solve problems – giving them an extended team of people from which to source ideas and support.

Connecting your staff (be it passively or actively) will help them be more informed and help to focus your efforts on what really matters – the customer.

2) Building your staff as your biggest advocates

Your staff should already be your biggest advocates and you should be encouraging them to use social media to help them project this advocacy and support for your brand.

Many organisations develop comlpex and valuable advocacy programmes for customers and influencers online, but fail to develop similar programmes for their biggest advocates – their staff. Your staff care about the brand, and your products and are often emotionally involved in what you do and why you do it. Sharing this externally is valuable; getting them to share it even more so. Encourage your staff to build networks that are appropriate to them – if they work in product development they could build contacts through forums and groups with people who could help them. If they work in sales they could use Twitter as a way to build their own brand and reach out to people to fill the top of their sales funnel. And everybody across your business could connect with people using your products, in your industry or customers looking for help and advice.

You staff will be doing this already (whether you know it or not) and encouraging and training them to really use social tools will help their efforts benefit you more. Rather than them leaving a review on a product of yours saying it is great, imagine how much more powerful it would be if they went in and said “I was part of the team that worked on developing this product. We’re really proud of it and hope you like it too”. Encourage and enable them and make sure your guidelines are more about setting boundaries and providing support for this.

For many brands reach of your messaging and engagement is important. Your staff provide the single best vehicle to do this. Empowering, practically encouraging, your teams to all engage in social media will be good for their development and also good for you.

Social media use in the financial service industry is a tricky area given the issues around compliance with regulations and risk.

This is why I was interested to read that Wedbush Securities, a privately held financial services and investment firm based in USA,  has announced that they will give the “green light” for firm-wide adoption of social media.

With 100 offices across the United States, employees at Wedbush Securities are now free to craft their own networks and conversations,  and so can move away from “canned responses”.

It’s certainly a bold move – but one that I’m sure will be viewed closely by those in the financial sector. Handing over the brand’s reputation to the entire firm could be a very problematic move, but Wedbush Securities has clearly thought about their overarching social media strategy and are taking a variety of precautions:

• Staff will be trained on appropriate use of social media in a financial context, and have a social media policy to follow.
• Initially, the channels permitted will just be the “Big 3″ networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn).
• Staff will have to create separate, professional accounts for all their Wedbush activities.

These steps will simplify Wedbush’s ability to monitor the accounts, which will undoubtedly aid with compliance. Having separate accounts for personal and professional use means that staff can be clear who they are representing at any given time (although it pays to be prepared for mistakes such as tweeting from the wrong account).

Personally, I wonder if Google+ would have been a better choice than Facebook at this stage – while Facebook is of course the larger network, I would consider the social search benefits of Google+ and benefits of separating contacts into Circles to be better suited to a professional social networking. While the Wedbush Securities accounts will clearly be professional, presumably the accounts they interact with will be personal, and perhaps Facebook is not the environment where investment decisions are influenced.

However, as a starting point, Facebook certainly offers the largest audience and an already familiar interface for many, if not all, of the 1,000 Wedbush Securities employees.

They’re two of the most iconic department stores in New York, but just how well are Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys using social media? We used Social Bakers to take a look at these two US retail giants and see whether they are making the most of their brands online.

Despite being a mere ten minute walk down the street from each other, Barneys and Saks are already miles apart when it comes to Facebook fans. Whilst Saks has a healthy 288,000 fans, Barney’s has almost half with 162,000.

But as we all know, it’s not just about how many ‘likes’ you’ve got but what you do with them that counts. In the battle of the department stores, who is really engaging with their customers in social media?

If we take a look at the ‘talking about this’ numbers for the two pages, Barney’s has 3,610 whilst Saks has 3,607, despite the greater number of fans. This suggests that Barneys must have a well thought-out content strategy which engages its audience much more effectively than Saks.

So what is this content strategy and how could Saks learn from it?

Think about when you post your content

First of all, looking at the data from Social Bakers, Barneys gets its best rate of engagement between 8-9am in the morning, whereas Saks gets a good (but not as high) rate around lunchtime.

Barneys also has a nice increase in engagement at around 9pm, whereas engagement on the Saks page has generally tailed off by this time.

This suggests that Barneys are making the most of those pre- and post-work Facebookers by posting earlier in the morning and later in the day. As we all know, social media never sleeps, but it looks like Saks may not have got to grips with this fact as strongly as Barneys has. Even if your staff work 9-5, they should be using the right tools to ensure that the page is pushing out content at the best times for your audience.

Think about what type of content you post

Interestingly, it looks like Barneys almost exclusively post links on their Facebook page. They create a strong call-to-action by posting links to great items in their stores with short, punchy copy such as “Flirty. Feminine. Floral”. It invites the fan to read, agree and hit those ‘like’ buttons, leading to an engagement rate of 0.06% on links compared to Saks’ 0.03% rate.

In contrast, Saks Fifth Avenue posts more varied types of content. Their main focus appears to be photos which are often posted using their ‘Involver’ fanpage tool. These photos don’t appear very big on their timeline, but still seem to get their highest rate of engagement with content on the page with 0.06% of fans interacting with these. However, they still do not manage to outstrip Barneys with any types of content.

It may be that Saks need to look at how their audience is responding to their content. Community management requires constant analysis of how your posts are going down with your audience – if something works well, it makes sense to experiment with posting it more often. Similarly, if something is not working for your fans, it may be worth looking at changing your approach or posting more infrequently.

Keep it short and simple

It is worth taking a moment to look at Barneys’ impressive 0.14% engagement rate on their status updates. Both pages post status updates, so why are fans interacting with Barneys more than with Saks? Have a read of the following updates and think about which one you are more likely to like or comment on…

It’s important to remember that Facebook fans have a notoriously short attention spans, so instead of asking them to try and figure out the sentence and fill in multiple blanks, Saks should be asking more short, simple questions like the one from Barneys.

Here at FreshNetworks we’ve been keeping a close eye on the significance of Google+ for brands.  We were very excited about the arrival of Google+, and predicted, a back in July last year, that it would impact  social search:

…”Potentially, in the future, this could mean that the more popular pages from within your Circles could outrank those pages that are better optimised in the traditional sense of the word.”

The launch of Google’s new personalised search results display, known as ‘Search, plus Your World‘ means that this has indeed become reality, suggesting a presence on Google+ is something that brands should be considering now more than ever, especially as the network grew to 62 millions users by the end of 2011, with predictions for that figure to reach 400 million by the end of this year.

Google+ and the new school of linking

To briefly touch on a key factor of SEO, Google places weight on the quality and quantity of links that a page receives from other sites – which Google view as impartial endorsements and indicators of relevancy.

The importance of these links will not go away, but as sharing links is a key activity on social media, the average user is now effectively in the position of a publisher. In terms of relevancy, a display of recommendation from a person or entity that you trust or are interested in enough to follow on social media will have a strong boost, as an attention grabbing indicator and also as a sign that it is something you may well be interested in.

Will Google+ content be promoted above paid for advertising?

Just seeing the recommendations from your connections is not where it ends though as Google is aggressively promoting its Plus profiles and shares.

As Rand Fishkin, CEO of SeoMoz explains in his excellent video, certain elements of Google+ are receiving significant prominence on search results for users who are logged in – to the extent that, for certain terms, the avatars of influential brands or individuals are placed above the paid ads, which link you to information on “Learn how you could appear here too”

For example, when logged in to to Google+ and searching for “SEO”, well-known SEO experts Rand Fishkin and Danny Sullivan appear in my results even though I haven’t connected to them on Google+ (yet…) and also shows that within the results, 120 of them will be personal to me and my network:

How Google calls the shots

The recent changes have caused some controversy from the clear bias that Google+ is receiving over other networks such as Twitter and Facebook, which clearly are significant drivers of link-sharing and endorsement. While integration may take place further down the line, the current tension between the key networks and Google suggest that, for the time being, Google+ is the place to be.

While these changes are currently only applied to searchers logged into Google+ and using the US version on Google.com, all signs are pointing towards “social search” becoming the norm across all of Google’s domains, and one that brands (and individuals) need to prepare for.

A recent report has revealed that the majority of premium brands are failing to keep up-to-date with the opportunities presented by mobile marketing.

The latest L2 Prestige Mobile IQ report suggests that use of effective mobile marketing practices is currently surprisingly low amongst top brands.

The report looked at mobile applications, mobile sites, mobile marketing (including SMS) and overall innovation and integration, ranking brands included in the study on their Mobile IQ score.

L2 argues that over the next few years, the businesses which will thrive are those willing to engage with mobile marketing techniques. Brands need to develop and optimize powerful mobile commerce sites which are accessible from a range of devices.

According to Forrester’s report in 2011, m-commerce sales are set to quintuple over the next five years, resulting in $31 billion worth of sales by 2016.

However, despite this forecast, a shocking 16% of the brands in the L2 report are yet to produce any kind of mobile app or website. In fact, almost half of the brands studied were ranked as ‘feeble’, meaning that their investment in mobile to date is little if any.

The brands at the top are offering engaging mobile apps, fully optimized m-commerce sites and flashes of creative genius.

Here are the top 10:

These brands have managed to create some really effective mobile offerings which are often fully integrated into their rest of their offline marketing campaigns.

And those languishing at the bottom:

How are these brands letting themselves down with mobile?

The main reason these brands appear to be lagging behind is because they fail to utilise the unique platforms that m-commerce, iPhone and iPad apps offer.

1. Failures in M-commerce

Those languishing at the bottom of the list are there because they don’t capture the quality of their websites in their mobile experience. Generally, across every category measured, mobile sites consistently failed to replicate the features found on their main sites such as video and product search. Another significant issue they face is that they are directly hindering m-commerce by hosting websites in Adobe flash – which iOS does not support.

2. User experience problems on the iPhone

As the report suggests, the majority of the 70% of brands which have iPhone apps appear to consistently fail to make sure that the user experience is really excellent. Less than a third of these apps use the iPhone’s GPS software, 17% of apps utilise the notification system and even fewer use the phone’s camera and gyroscope capabilities.

L2 quotes ABI Research which reports that the iTunes Store ranking algorithm will begin taking into account qualitative information such as user reviews and frequency of usage. As such, there is little point having a promotional app with little functionality in order to simply maintain appearances. Brands need to invest in mobile apps which are valuable to the consumer and which garner great customer feedback.

What’s next?

• Brands need to invest in m-commerce now to take advantage of the increase in mobile usage.
• They need to create a seamless customer experience across a number of devices.
• Mobile apps need to provide real value and utilise the unique functionality of mobile devices.

By 2015, it is predicted that more users will access the Internet wirelessly via a mobile device than from a wired Ethernet connection. As consumers move their purchasing power from computer to mobile, brands cannot afford to be prudish about innovation in mobile marketing.