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.

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.

Image courtesy of Victor and Spoils

In the last month or so there’s been quite a lot of discussion about what agency models will look like in the future.

In the context of social media, here at FreshNetworks we have seen a shift over the last year. More and more niche agencies, with services such as SEO, PR, affiliate marketing or other digital disciplines, are reinventing themselves as “generalists”, offering social media alongside their former specialty.

Even large ad agencies are positioning themselves as “360″ or integrated agencies, using social media within their core services.

This is hardly surprising given the rise of social media. As it continues to develop, these agencies are starting to see both the opportunity and also perhaps the threat to their existence, considering that social impacts a wide range of channels.

For brands with small, internal teams, a one stop shop can seem like a more attractive option. However, in a recent interview in Marketing magazine, Keith Weed, CMO for Unilever said:

“the easiest thing would be to deal with one agency, which can lead and integrate, but, frankly, I will go for the best before the easiest”.

“Best” can mean lots of things, but to me the successful agency of the future will offer their clients a service that disrupts the norms with new and innovative uses for social media.

Take, for example, US agency Victor and Spoils. They are the world’s first creative agency built around crowdsourcing principles. They have reinvented the pitch process and are using social media and crowd sourcing to come up with creative concepts.

This video shows the Harley Davidson campaign that was chosen by Harley Davidson from over 100 ideas that Victor and Spoils crowdsourced through their existing online community of creatives.

How did they get the attention of Harley Davidson? Through a tweet of course ( see Victor and Spoils’  blog for more info). Could you imagine a large, integrated agency approaching a client in this way?

Sometimes on my way to the FreshNetworks office in Holborn my route takes me down a pleasant street called Lambs Conduit.

Recently I noticed a supermarket called simply “The People’s Supermarket”. So I did a little research and it turns out that  The People’s Supermarket is a social supermarket: “A supermarket for the people by the people”.

The People’s Supermarket stocks all natural food, much like the kind of thing you’d find at farmer’s markets. Obviously by shopping there you help support them but you can also become a member and pledge to work for a few hours each month to get a 10% discount at the till. This volunteer scheme helps to cut staff costs and the shop itself is fairly basic to reduce overheads further.

The People’s Supermarket is slightly different from your standard High Street multiple and their vision is being reported widely by the press and bloggers, including a four-part Channel 4 TV programme starting this Sunday.

What’s also interesting is how they are using social media to amplify their message.

When you arrive on The People’s Supermarket website you are immediately drawn in by a  blog about the shop volunteers, inculding photos of people taking part. It leads you to ask the question “why would I work for free at a supermarket?” You are engaged; you want to know more.

The social tools on the site  aren’t particularly radical – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and their blog. What is interesting though is the authenticity of  the conversations on these social channels. The People’s Supermarket is real; it is not a concept dreamed up by an expensive PR agency. Social media is very good at reflecting this fact. This is an area where many apparently well thought out social media strategies derail: when planning a concept ignores existing organisational culture.

There’s no danger of this for The People’s Supermarket. A shout out on Twitter for some volunteers for a shift the next day and within an hour a couple of people have responded. Their Facebook page has real activity too – not 2 weeks ago but half an hour ago. When they had a party last week to celebrate their six month anniversairy they promoted it on Facebook and then put lots of pictures on Flickr after the event – a great use of online-offline promotion.

The People’s Supermarket is extending its social footprint all the time and if they can maintain current levels of interest I think it will be a big success.