FreshNetworks Blog

I wrote previously about how social media is changing travel, comparing a journey I have just taken traveling across the Balkans and Greece with a trip I took 15 years ago across Western Europe. The rise of social media has changed the way we travel. It has given us new opportunities to help plan our travel, and to help us whilst we are en route. It helps us choose hotels and restaurant, to see what others have experienced and to keep in touch and give real time reviews whilst we are travelling. And many travel and leisure companies are planning their social media strategy to help them capitalise on this change in consumer behaviour.

Having just returned from the trip, I can report that social media has helped to change how we travel whilst we are on holiday as well as in the planning phase. The use of reviews and forums to help choose locations is common to many of us. Using social media in real time as a travel assistant is less so.

Social media as a real time travel resource

We are very used to social media as a tool to help choose and plan travel. To help learn what others thought of particular hotels, restaurants or venues. And to learn about what there is to do and see in different destinations. But social media as a real-time travel resource is developing. Whilst away in Greece, I saw how this could work best. Using Twitter, I posted a picture on Twitter of where I was and what I was doing. A few minutes later I had a response recommending a place to eat – a place that was not touristy but full only of Greeks, and that I wouldn’t have found at all without this piece of advice.

Of course, it helped that my friend, @AJBradburn, works in the travel industry and has lived across Greece. But it did mean that I had perhaps the best meal of my trip thanks to advice I got in real time on Twitter. An experience I would not have had without social media.

How Foursquare could become the ultimate travel companion

Perhaps the most useful social media tool when I was Foursquare. And in an unexpected way.

I have often thought that the greatest value you can get from Foursquare is not in gaining Mayorships or points, but in leaving reviews and information around a town for others to pick up. Then, when I’m in a new town looking for a place to eat or drink, I could just switch on Foursquare and find somewhere to go based on the tips (or reviews) left by others).

When I was travelling I did this for the first time, with much success. Travelling in relatively less well-travelled places (including Bosnia and Serbia), I was surprised to find quite so much activity on Foursquare. But using it I was able to find bars and restaurants, read reviews and even find other information, including the passwords for various cafe wifi access, based on the tips left by other users. This was incredibly useful, and after benefiting from these tips I was even prompted to leave my own. Including for the bar that was recommended for me in Athens.

There is a real opportunity for Foursquare to become a valuable resource for travellers and for others looking for reviews of venues near where they are. This would be particularly useful for those visiting new places or new areas of town. When you want to find places near where you are and read reviews of them.

Of course this is not necessarily what Foursquare was designed to do and there are some changes that would help to make it more useful as a review site like this. Notably it would be good to improve the ability to search for venues. It would be great if I could search for venues before I visit a town and then favourite ones I want to try out. Then, when I’m on location, I could look at my favourites on a map and visit them.

Also, as Foursquare grows it will become important that I can filter tips. In a city such as Sarajevo there are not that many bars recommended on Foursquare. In London there will be hundreds (if not thousands). I will only be interested in certain reviews and those from certain reviewers – usually people that I consider to be ‘people like me’. An ability for Foursquare to learn what I like and what I do and then tailor recommendations based on this will add significant value to the service.

Of course, the first stage will be to encourage more people to leave tips. Foursquare is not about becoming Mayor of a local venue. It is about you sharing the best of what is in your town with others. And it is about you being able to tap into local knowledge when you are on location. Or it will be if it becomes and more user-friendly resource for this type of knowledge exchange.

Image courtesy of shutterstock

As I have a keen interest in social media for financial services I’ve been looking at the Accenture’s paper on “Achieving high performance in insurance through social media”.

It’s a great statement of intent by one of the major international consultancies, and another example that social media is now being embraced by more traditional corporate and business markets.

Accenture’s paper examines the trends in social media and highlights that insurers seeking high performance  should consider using social media within their customer, channel and workforce strategies. The paper also describes an approach for insurers to utilise social media to input into strategies for marketing, sales, services and recruitment.

With regards to inbound marketing, the useful statistic cited is that marketers who incorporate social media into their inbound marketing mix tend to spend 60% less per lead on average compared to traditional marketing methods.

But why should insurers bother to take note of social media? Three main reasons are cited in the paper:

1. Social media helps customers pick through the high volume of information available online because they trust “people like me”, ie, other customers, to give honest, accurate information.
2. Social consumers use social networks as their core navigation and search tool rather than search engines or portals.
3. Social media is being used more and more by businesses as part of their overall strategy.

As the paper points out, “social media increasingly determines who customers trust” and Accenture highlight the  importance of establishing “Listening Posts”, or what we term social media monitoring,  so that insurers are aware of the online conversations that are happening around them. The paper also discusses the best “social media management framework”, or  social media strategy, for success, which consists of process, people, policies, and metrics.

It’s a considered and articulate paper that is probably targeted at large insurance businesses that need external help to establish their social media enterprise framework. It is notably absent of case studies, and while there are some interesting statistics in this well-researched paper, I suspect that key decision-makers in this industry will continue to look for more detailed ROI data to justify their budget spend.

I also feel the paper doesn’t really address the “hub-and-spoke” social media model as a means of being proactive in social media (i.e. a central social ‘hub’ that is part of the insurers website while also engaging with the social ‘spokes’,  like Twitter forums and blogs, where the other relevant influential conversations are taking place) .

What is interesting is that Accenture’s paper is less bullish in addressing the many positive benefits of a proactive social media programme, and that is probably as it should be given that it reflects the risk-averse culture of a cautious industry that is coming to terms with open customer dialog.

Image courtesy of David Armano

Facebook Places launched in the US last week laying claim to three major features:

1. It will allow users to share where they are with their friends.
2. It will allow users to see who is near them.
3. It will allow users to discover new places around them.

As a social media agency we’re always interested in what these developments could mean for marketers, so here are 5 ways in which marketers could potentially make use of Facebook Places:

1. Reach extension

Given that, by default, Places checkins will automatically go to a users profile and news stream (unless the privacy settings are adjusted) places can extend reach for marketers.

Not only will people be able to discover new areas or locations through Places itself but when people checkin from a venue they are broadcasting their presence at that spot to their entire Facebook network.

2. Advertising

As emarketer points out, Marketers want to reach consumers when they are close to making a purchase. Places will enable them to deliver a  targeted advert when consumers are at the point of decision.

This is very powerful as companies will be able to work out what consumers are interested in and deliver helpful advertising and compelling offers before consumers type a query into a search engine.

If ads can be pushed to people the moment they are engaged with something, rather than waiting until they take action and start a search, the ads become extremely powerful and can drive sales.

3. Location promotion

Yes this is a bit of an obvious one. But with around 1.5 million business pages on Facebook, businesses with an existing Facebook page can merge that page with their Places page by “claiming” it, or letting Facebook know that the business belongs to them.

Once it has been verified by Facebook, every time someone checks in from that location the business will inadvertently receive exposure from the check in.

4. Discounts and offers

Tom Bedecarre, CEO of AKQA, suggests that while Foursquare popularized the gaming aspect of checking in from physical venues (where people become “Mayors” for example), rewards could develop to become vouchers, coupons or some other type of discount  (eg, first 50 people to checkin at our coffee house get a free muffin).

With this in mind, Facebook Places could eventually be used as a way of distributing discounts and offers to people within a certain proximity. This would have the added bonus of putting an offer in front of someone when they’re in a place that allows for an immediate transaction.

5. Data

The data that you can collect on Places users and the number of times they checkin  could prove valuable in tracking customer activity, consumer personas and, indeed, competitor activity.

Also if people checkin to a certain venue or business and then leave any tips, advice or comments  then this information will be useful feedback for businesses.

It will be interesting to see how things develop with Facebook Places over the next few months, especially when it is eventually rolled out to other countries other than the USA.

Guest blog post written by Andrew Rayner, founder of internet marketing agency e-mphasis.

The phrase “Multi-channel” has been a buzz word for some time now in the retail sector and this has led to 3 main changes in the market:

1. With e-commerce capabilities accessible to even the tiniest of single-store independent retailers, the ability to shop across different channels has become almost universal.
2. The consumer has became more confident shopping across channels (e.g. researching online and then purchasing in store,  or reserving online and then collecting in store) and is becoming increasingly demanding about their online  shopping experience.
3. The use of social media means that consumers are no longer relying on the brand’s own marketing messages to make key purchasing decisions – they are looking to “people like them” (ie, other customers) to help make decisions.

Typically retailers have been working on a multi-channel strategy that ensures customers who already shop with them get the expected brand experience at every touch point. There has been little regard for those who have not yet committed to any one specific retailer or store. So what is the best way to capture these prospective customers?

The answer is to apply  multi-channel retail thinking to search and social media marketing. This means providing access to all channels from the moment when consumers start searching for products and services online, enabling the retailer to present a comprehensive search result to consumers that satisfies their exact requirements.

And with the consumer leading the purchasing decisions of their peers and influencing purchases through social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and product ratings and reviews, retailers need to ensure they also tap into the social media as part of their multichannel strategy.

One approach to this could be to use Google Places Optimisation (GPO). GPO works for retailers because it returns results for location based searches. In excess of 43% of all Google searches return a local result and so the opportunity for businesses with multiple locations is phenomenal.

GPO also provides a great opportunity for multi-channel retailers as it can link to a retailers transactional website, and if that website allows it, the complete customer journey, from search to basket, can be tracked. It can also provide all other relevant information to the customer, including contact details, opening hours and even information like parking facilities or food outlets. Google Places will also contain that all-important consumer review and feedback information – a vital feature of the consumer decision making process in the age of social shopping.

Effective GPO will not only save SEO and PPC costs, but will also deliver more relevant impressions and enable retailers to leverage social media more effectively. And as most consumers searching the web for a product or service are often not brand loyal (yet), they do not have a destination store in mind. But by using GPO as part of your multichannel search strategy you will put all routes to market in front of shoppers who are actively looking to buy.

As social media is still regarded as a new form of marketing and engagement, lots of companies seem to be more comfortable “trying out” social media as a one-off campaign.

Social media campaigns are an attractive proposition as they can generate a lot of buzz and excitement and are usually the basis for a lot of the social media case studies you will find on the web.

Even though we’re a social media agency, here at FreshNetworks we don’t just focus on campaign work; we also look at long-term engagement through a sustainable social media strategy.

In our experience, social media campaigns are perfect for raising awareness on a short-term basis. They’re also a great way of getting exposure for brands, companies or products that might not be that well known, or have fallen from favour in some way.

Campaign work is high impact but due to the cost and resource involved it’s not good for driving value over a long period of time.That’s not to say that campaigns should be disregarded completely. In fact, they are very effective when used alongside a sustainable engagement strategy.

Campaigns generate the high level of buzz that brands so desire. However, if there is a long-term strategy for engaging with the people who have come across your brand or product as a result of the campaign then the impact won’t drop off once the campaign has finished. Using campaigns as part of a wider social media strategy will help you build awareness and drive value over a longer period of time.

In order for a sustainable engagement strategy to succeed it must be set up with the needs of both the company and the user in mind. The reason why single, one-off social media campaigns are often favoured by brands is that engaging with people on a long-term basis takes time and effort. You need to build up relationships and develop trust with your audience. However, it’s worth the time and effort as ultimately the people you engage with will become a valuable asset to your company.

The video below from Richard gives a brief summary about our approach to social media campaigns and sustainable engagement:

Image courtesy of Todd Barnard

As a social media agency we’re always interested in what makes people interact and engage with brands online.

We’ve already written about why people follow the UK’s top brand on Twitter, and a recent report from ExactTarget builds on this analysis  further by revealing why people follow companies on the popular microblogging site.

Here are the top 5 reasons why people follow brands on Twitter:

1. To get updates on future products

38% of respondents said that they use Twitter to get updates on future products or new product developments.

From a brand’s perspective, this shows that Twitter is a useful PR tool for creating buzz around a new product launch. It would also work well for innovative companies who continuously update their offering or for FMCG businesses where new products are frequently launched.

2. To engage with the company or brand

32%  of respondents said they wanted to stay informed about the activities of a company or brand, with a further 20% stating they become  followers to interact with, share ideas and provide feedback about services or products.

From a brand’s point of view, this proves the value of Twitter as both a customer engagement and customer feedback tool.

3. To save money

Saving money seems to be another key motivator for people to follow brands on Twitter. 31% of respondents said that they follow a company to receive discounts and promotions. A similar percentage of people also hoped to get “insider” information about upcoming sales, discount events and free samples.

This means that businesses could use Twitter to feed out discount codes and coupons in order to encourage brand loyalty and drive sales.

4.  For entertainment

For 26% of the people surveyed, following brands on Twitter was simply for entertainment and no other reason.

With this in mind, perhaps brands and businesses need to evaluate the way they engage people through Twitter and include more fun, interactive content, like videos and pictures, rather than just a news and updates, in their Twitter stream.

5. To display loyalty

23% of people surveyed said they follow brands or companies to show support. In other words, it is to show their loyalty to others.

For a brand or business, this type of user could be a key influencer and, as a brand advocate, if you engage them in the right way they will help spread positive word-of-mouth about your products or services.

It would be interesting to know why you follow brands on Twitter.

Image via Wikipedia

I am about to embark on a trip alone across Europe overland – mainly by train. It’s almost 15 years since I last made a similar trip. Many things have changes over this period – I’m older, have travelled a lot more and am now more likely to stay in hotels than camp rough – but the biggest change is the way that social media is helping me do things I could never do back then. On that first trip, I had no mobile phone and not even an email address. Now I have many tools at my disposal to help plan and do more.

1. Planning the trip

Then: 15 years ago my only planning tool were two big books – a set of European train timetables that I had to pour over to check if I could get from one place to another, and a Western European guidebook. I couldn’t find out anything about the journeys I might take except for when the trains would be, and I risked falling into the trap of only going to places in the guidebook. I could only plan, not book, and I put my faith in some timetables and 0ne guidebook.

Now: I have bought some guidebooks – but only for cities that I am planning to spend a lot of time in. My main planning tools this time have been online – a mix of more traditional tools (including the fantastic European train directory at The Man in Seat Sixty-One) to reviews sites (such as Tripadvisor), individual forums and blogs about certain destinations and even Twitter and Flickr. I’ve been able to research the different options, discover places I would never have found about in guidebooks and even check things such as what the overnight trains I am getting look like, what people say about them on Twitter and use these user reviews and images to decide when I want to travel in a seat, when in a couchette and when it is worth paying extra for a sleeper compartment.

2. Keeping people informed

Then: Without a mobile phone or email address the only way I could keep people informed was by finding a public phone box and calling home. I had an unwritten agreement that I would call home every five days to let people know where I was. I had left a rough plan with them and that was it. I don’t know, but I imagine there were some worried moments when I missed my planned call as I had to choose between queuing for a phone at a station in Rome and jumping on the train that evening to Sicily (I chose the latter!).

Now: This is an area of real change. Not only do I have a plan that some people can see on TripIt, but social media and mobile internet means I can inform individuals but also anybody who is interested in what I am doing, seeing and experiencing. And where I am. Twitter will let me update people in real time, tell them where I am and even share photos of what I am doing and seeing (if you’re interested you can follow me @mattrhodes). Foursquare is a great tool to allow me to quickly and easily share exactly where I am – the hotel, restaurant, station or beach I am on. People back home will know what I am doing and will be able to share the experiences I am having.

3. Keeping myself entertained

Then: On long train journeys and overnight you need ways to keep yourself entertained and distracted. Back then I had a MiniDisc player and a set of compilations I’d put together before I went. I had some books and then had to rely on meeting people who knew of things to do and things that were on in the destinations I visited. Or I had to rely on myself stumbling upon them – which once found me in a hard rock festival in Hungary…

Now: I’m still taking a lot of books, but rather than making my own compilations I am taking Spotify – and am crowd-sourcing a playlist so I can hear things I wouldn’t normally listen to. If you want to add some tracks to my list find it here: Make Matt a holiday playlist. I can use Twitter to find out what is on in destinations and what people think of them.

So what does this mean for the travel industry?

Social media is changing the way we travel. The way we plan, the way we book, the way we act when we are travelling and the way we report on it (in real-time and after the event). We are using review sites to book hotels and events. We are using Twitter and Flickr to find out what people really think of places we are going to or things we are going to do. We are using these same tools to report, often in real time, on what we are experiencing.

In this environment those in the travel industry need to take social media seriously, and find ways to make it work hard for them and their brand. They should be listening to what people are saying about them, their destinations and services and about their competitors. They should be identifying their advocates and dealing with those who are less positive about them online. They should use their experience and expertise to add real value to the discussions and debates in social media. And they should capitalise on the real-time discussions and reviews to showcase what people think of them, and also to start to service people in social media.

We’ve blogged before about how the travel industry can use social media and it is one of the industries where social media can make a real impact on a brand and a business. Right now, I am just grateful for the way social media has made planning and reporting on my travels much easier than 15 years ago – follow me to find out what I think of the places I visit!

Image courtesy of sudeep1106

You may have seen Cadbury’s new spots and stripes underwater advert. It’s the one that starts off a little like a high-resolution marine screen saver but then develops into something that resembles a mini film.

If you have watched it, did you know what it was advertising? Or did you have to follow the call-to-action at the end of the ad and visit the website URL to find out what the hell was going on?

This new campaign by Cadbury really seems to recognise something that we’ve said before -  social media doesn’t just take place online. Their advert is incomplete without referring you to their social media site (www.spotsvstripes.com). And this site would not stand alone and be as successful without the advert driving people to it.

As an official sponsor of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the thinking behind the current Cadbury campaign is to  split the nation into two teams, the spots and stripes, to compete in game play in the lead up to London 2012. All people need to do is join one of the teams by signing up on the website to begin scoring points for their chosen team.

Cadbury will encourage people to engage with the Spots v Stripes site through dedicated social media channels, like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, in combination with more traditional marketing methods  like TV and outdoor advertising in keeping with their online/offline theme. And while the site definitely plays on social gaming interaction, you can score points for offline games like running or crazy golf and can also download games from the site to play offline.

Perhaps the key sales driver for Cadbury from this whole campaign will be the introduction of a brand new product – the Challenge Bar. The Challenge Bar is a milk and white chocolate bar divided into three sections; one spotty, one stripy and one chunk in the middle which the Spot and the Stripe must play for.

The launch of this new chocolate bar will be supported by traditional offline marketing, but each Challenge Bar has one of 20 different games printed on the inside of the wrapper to get consumers playing for the “winners” chunk and driving people online to claim the points for their chosen team. The campaign will also see Cadbury touring the country in order to get the whole of the UK involved with both the Cadbury and olympic games, and, more than likely, promote the Challenge Bar.

Given that the campaign only launched last week, it remains to be seen whether this fully integrated offline and online  campaign will really take off. What is interesting to see though is that Cadbury has recognised that offline is converging with online – something that all digital marketers need to be aware of.

Read more of our Social Media Case Studies

“Have you checked us out on Facebook?” As I queued to pay at Abercrombie & Fitch in London over the weekend I kept hearing this phrase over and over again. In fact as everybody paid for their purchases the sales assistants asked them this very same question. Some may have found this annoying, some may have found it forced, and some may have found it distracting. But it is actually a sign that Abercrombie & Fitch is taking its social media strategy seriously. And a great example of just how to embed social media across your customer touchpoints and with all your staff.

Developing a social media strategy and how you will use the various channels and tools at your disposal to engage your customers is only the first step. Now you need to actually engage people. And to do that people need to know where you are.

There are many ways that you can grow your social media channels. And it is often best to start small with a process of thorough seeding. Identify a small group of people in your target audience that you can work with – they may be brand loyalists, people you interact with already or those you know would be keen to work with you. You can then work with these people to start to build content and engagement in social media. You can create a starting point from which you can grow. But once you have begun to seed the site, and you are ready to open it up to your whole customer base you will want ways to increase the number of people you are engaging and how regularly you engage them. The question then comes: how do we engage more people in social media?

There are many ways to do this. Initial seeding with brand loyalists will help to spread the word about what you are doing. Outreach marketing in other social networks – such as Twitter – and engaging with bloggers and relevant forums will help you reach new audiences. And you also have the options of advertising, running competitions and other more traditional ways of promoting what you are doing. Of course, your aim may not be to reach large numbers through social media. But if it is, the best way to do it is simpler that any of these: use every existing customer touchpoint.

We’ve written before about how social media does not just take place online, and the best way of growing and embedding social media is to fit it in to your existing processes and customer touchpoints. Rather than social media begin something that is separate to the other ways you engage and interact with customers, it should complement and add to it. You should examine every customer touchpoint and talk about social media where relevant and where possible. If you mail out envelopes to customers, you should put your social media channels on the back. If you include telephone and other contact details in marketing material, you should put your social media channels there too. And if your staff actually meet or speak to your customers you should talk about social media with them.

Abercrombie & Fitch get it right. There are a few moments at the till when the assistant is usually quiet – the customer is finding their money or waiting for their bank to authorise their credit card. It uses these moments to talk about their social media activity – and in particular a campaign they are currently running on Facebook. And with 1.5 million people liking them on Facebook, they are clearly doing something right.

So if you want to grow and engage more customers in social media the best way is to embed it into your existing processes. You currently have many customer touchpoints so make the most of them. And let social media complement what you already do rather than sitting on its own.

My name is Kristin Labisch and for the last couple of months I have been an intern here at social media agency FreshNetworks.

Before I started my social media internship I found it quite difficult to imagine the type of thing I would be doing. I really didn’t know how a social media agency functioned or the kind of work I would be given to do.

Most of my friends and family thought that my social media internship would involve doing just “Facebook stuff”, but I soon found that “Facebook stuff” doesn’t nearly describe what work at FreshNetworks is like.

Yes, there are 500 million people online on Facebook, but with  93% of the world not on Facebook I applied for the internship at FreshNetworks  to learn more about social media and how it can be used to help generate real value for businesses, rather than just how to use Facebook or Twitter. In fact one of the first things I learned is that whilst some brands will say ‘we want to be on Facebook’, that isn’t a social media strategy. And it usually isn’t the right answer for them.

I also saw the internship as a way to help me answer the many questions I found myself asking about social media. And actually, much of my internship has been spent working on these unsolved questions, as well as trying to work out what has not been asked yet by looking towards future developments in social media.

And this is why working at a social media agency like FreshNetworks was so appealing to me; everyone is always open to new ideas. Whilst they believe in taking an analytical approach to social media, there is no stiff or inflexible theoretical framework and each client is looked at on a case-by-case basis to assess their unique conditions, circumstances and strategic needs.

Because of this, work at FreshNetworks never gets monotonous. Every part of the team (and yes: this also includes the interns) is considered a valuable asset – an individual with their own ideas that will be welcomed at any time.

I know this is not a direct advert for FreshNetworks, so I will refrain from saying that I have never experienced a more welcoming and enjoyable working atmosphere with such an enthusiasm and passion for ideas. So I will put it another way: If you want to work with and learn about social media, have creative ideas and want to get to know creative minds, follow my lead and apply here for an internship. It’s not easy – it’s fast-paced and can get hectic, but the experience is rewarding and memorable.

Overall, my experience as an intern at FreshNetworks has shown me that there are endless opportunities for using social media both personally and for business. I can now describe to my family and friends how social media goes way beyond just “Facebook stuff” and can prove what a good social media strategy and the opportunities that some social media monitoring can bring to brands and businesses.

Fancy learning about social media with FreshNetworks?

At FreshNetworks we are always keen for Interns who want to learn about social media , shadow our teams and run their own projects for the business. If you would like to apply for a community management, marketing or social media strategy internship here at FreshNetworks please email your CV to interns@freshnetworks.com.