FreshNetworks Blog

“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.

One sector that is really embracing social media is the travel and leisure industry. And it is an industry well suited to social media and online communities – people share an experience or situation and this provides a reason for them to connect and engage with each other (and with a brand). We have seen some great uses commercially from companies like Marriott and InterContinental and Expedia but social media really works well in the travel and leisure industry when it is used in real time. In the latest FreshNetworks Video, Matt Rhodes describes three areas where this works well:

1. For customer service – Social media is a great customer service tool – not only does it allow you to connect with and engage customers online, but it also means that when you solve one query you do so publicly for all to see and for all to share. This winter I was skiing in the French Alps this winter when snow back in the UK  caused a halt to most of the flights leaving Geneva for London. I knew that Easyjet were using Twitter, but rather than tweet them myself to ask if my flight was going I saw that somebody else already asked the question and I could see the response. Saving me from having to ask the question and Easyjet the hassle of having to respond to the same question multiple times.
2. For real time experience capture – Social media is quick and easy making it the perfect media for allowing people to express the way they are feeling in the moment, which does not always come through if you are writing a review after the experience has finished.
3. For real time information sharing – Holidays and stays don’t always got to plan and things change: the weather, the times, the traffic etc and so social media is great for being able to transmit information in real time.

See our video post on Social media in the travel and leisure industry below.

There are four types of brands online, and you can distinguish between them by listening to and analysing the conversations about the brands. This is an insightful takeaway from one of the most interesting presentations at the Social Media Marketing 2010 conference in London earlier in June. The presentation from web monitoring company Synthesio presented these four types of brand, showed the nature of conversations about them online and then showed some best practice examples of how such brands can engage online.

Given that we’re a social media agency, and we’ve just published our Social Media Monitoring 2010 review , we were interested by these four types of brand. We certainly recognise some and the types and the characteristics of them. The full presentation is at the bottom of this post, but Synthesio’s four types of brands online are:

1. The Boring Brand

The boring brand does not generate spontaneous interest in it – insurance, home cleaning products and some FMCG brands can typically fall into this category. Whilst there is an average level of buzz about the brand the conversations rarely express positive or negative sentiment, presence online tends to be low and there are few long conversations about the brand.

A great example of where a typically boring brand has been turned around is Compare the Meerkat. You can also often generate interest in these brands by focusing not on the product itself but on other elements of the experience, such as the Keep Britain Biking site for Devitt Insurance.

2. The Functional Brand

Functional brands go beyond the name or image of the brand, the products they represent have to deliver a certain level of service or experience – mobile phone companies or business hotels would be typical examples. These brands have a high volume of buzz, and a relatively high proportion of these are expressing positive or negative sentiment. They also have a high presence in social media, but the conversations still tend to be more descriptive than discursive. There are typically a lot of individual comments about the brand rather than long discussions and debates online.

3. The Exciting Brand

Exciting brands are ones that people desire and that signal much about consumers who buy them. Apple would be a typical brand in this type. These brands generate a lot of buzz, although much of it is neutral in nature (people discussing the brand rather than expressing an opinion either way). The brands have high presence in social media and also tend to attract discussions between people rather than just a lot of individual comments.

The best thing for such brands to do is to find a way to nurture this enthusiasm and these conversations. The best such brands will turn these volume of conversations into positive word of mouth and value for them.

4. The Vital Brand

Vital brands are ones that concern issues you really care about, concerns and needs that are important to you. Health and environmental brands are typically in this category. They attract a lot of buzz online, although this tends not to be overly positive or negative in sentiment. There is a high presence in social media and a very high proportion of comments are discussions between people online rather than just isolated comments.

Do you recognise your brand as being one of these four? Is this a good way of segmenting brands online based on discussions about them?

Four the last six months, and particularly since the real push on Foursquare at SXSW in March this year, we have seen a real increase in both people using and people innovating with Foursquare. At FreshNetworks we have been using the location-based social media tool with some of our clients – most notably the CatchAChoo London-wide treasure hunt for Jimmy Choo (which ended yesterday with the Jimmy Choo trainer being caught by @tjsaul at l’Atelier de Joël Robuchon). But in addition to how brands can use location-based tools there is also a lot of innovation in how the data being gathered by tools such as Foursquare can be used. Social media tools gather a lot of data that is valuable to businesses and can be used to provide a service back to users.

One service that shows how Foursquare data can be used, and also raises again the privacy issues all users of such services should recognise, is Assisted Serendipity.

The tool is simple. It uses data from Foursquare – how many users have checked in to a particular location, and the gender of each user – to tell you when any location your interested in has a high ratio of males or females that you might be interested in meeting. Or as they put it:

[Assisted Serendipity] notifies you a soon as the male/female ratio turns in your favor at your favorite local hangouts. Using Foursquare’s check-in data, we monitor the venues you are interested in, and notify you as soon as the ratio “tips”. Meet new people through the power of location-based social networking.

So the  basic message is that you can use Foursquare people to find people you might want to meet and to identify the locations where the balance ‘is in your favour’. An interesting concept and an innovative use of social media data to help with offline dating (of a fashion). Of course the use of this tool depends wholly on increasing the volume of people who are checking into a location on Foursquare. Thinking of a busy bar on a Saturday night, unless a high proportion of those people are using Foursquare and have checked in it is unlikely that any assessment of the “male/female ratio” in that bar is going to be useful and help you make the decisions that the tool sets out to help with. But with more people using Foursquare its utility can only increase.

Perhaps more interesting are the lessons we can learn from Assisted Serendipity:

1. For brands – social media is a great engagement tool, but it is also a great data-collection tool. You shouldn’t underestimate what we can learn from what people tell us and how we behave, but also how we can use this data to provide a real service back to them. Foursquare allows people to check-in to locations and find places near them. But we can use the data they provide in a number of ways.
2. For users – we should all be aware of what data we are revealing when we use social media. The tools that are being developed are great and can add real value to some experiences. But they are not for everybody and not everybody wants to share information about their lives in these ways.

I for one am looking forward to watching if and how Assisted Serendipity grows and potentially our first Foursquare wedding. I don’t think we should be rushing out to buy hats just yet, though.

This is the fifth post in our Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series. In it we’ll be looking at the issue of duplication, one reason for some of the seemingly large differences between the seven leading social media monitoring tools under investigation – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos.

We saw from the first test in our review that the different tools produced markedly different volumes for the search terms we were using – all associated with Starbucks. The smallest number of conversations was found by Biz360 and the largest by Radian6 – over 11x the difference.

So which tools are reflecting better the conversations and discussions about Starbucks? Is bigger necessarily better? Are the tools with the largest number of conversations the best? We don’t think so.

The difference in volumes is striking. If you were using Radian6 you would get the impression that eleven times as many conversations were going on about Starbucks and related terms than if you were using Biz360. There are many reasons for this and bigger is not in this case necessarily better.

Think about the following: retweets, spam, signatures, adverts. Should these be counted in your study or not? Different tools treat them in different ways and so, as we saw with the issue of location, the actual number of conversations is not always as it seems.

Firstly, there’s the source of the conversation – who did is start with? Is there more than one conversation around the same topic or is someone copying it? Is this the same tweet that’s been retweeted or is it a new conversation? These distinctions are important. If a Tweet contains certain keywords it is often retweeted automatically many many times by ‘bots’ which search Twitter for these terms and automatically reposts them.

How do you deal with spam and adverts – taking blog posts titles or key terms from them and posting them on other sites. Should these be included or not in your counts of conversations? Are they real conversations if they are automatically taken from your site and used on others? Are they important to understand if they are being used in spam sites. Or indeed sites or an unsavoury nature (you know the ones I mean!)?

How many times should a comment in a forum thread be counted? If a comment is repeated in different places or on different pages should it be counted as a new conversation? Indeed if one person posts their comment on multiple sites to try to drive traffic or showcase their point of view should all of these instances be counted as a new conversation?

You need a social media monitoring tool that deals with these and other situations. The tools that identify the most conversations are often not the most useful or accurate. They may include a range of conversations that are irrelevant, spam or double-counted. Whereas any organisation looking to understand what people are saying about your brand online wants a more accurate portrayal of what is being said.

Bigger is not necessarily better and duplication is a serious issue that needs to be addressed in any social media monitoring.

Next…

More detail on these tests, and the results,  can be found in our final report which will be available to download on Friday 16th April. We’re also holding a free social media monitoring breakfast seminar on 15th April in London, where we’ll be presenting the findings of our report, as well as giving practical tips and advice about social media monitoring and the best way to analyse results. This event is now fully booked but you can follow the results live as they are announced on Twitter from 08.30 (London time) on Thursday by following #smm10.