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…analysis on social business, interactive media, games, e-democracy, poetry, food, passions

February 17, 2012 • 5:01 pm 0

Weekend reads: On social business maturity, content marketing, blogging and revolutions

I must admit that my heart skips a beat whenever interesting articles find their way to me. The end of the work week has brought some good catch on social business maturity, the crucial role of content marketing and engagement, and the ultimate ROI of social media, in particular, blogging — changing behaviours — , which in this case, contributed to a revolution.

The posts on engagement and content marketing describe exactly my recommendations to two clients of mine this week. Once you go social (and it’s no longer a question of if, but how), it’s a continuous effort. It’s not like advertising with a start and end date. It’s about feeding your network and engaging with them, which means, you must think in terms of increments, of addressing recognised needs or opportunities, but always, with the end goal of mind.

Anyhow, looking forward to reading these posts this weekend.  Hopefully I’ll be able to do that in between trying to teach my just-turned toddler to drink from a cup (even just drinking more would be a good acceptance criteria already), doing my taxes, and playing Skyrim (fingers crossed). Enjoy!

  • Content: The New Marketing Equation by Altimeter Group Network on SlideShare – This is a presentation of their latest report. I like this as it once again underscores how content marketing within the social business framework is NOT advertising. It’s not about one-off campaigns.  Real engagement needs continuous investment.  On their slideshare description: “Content marketing requires a shift in company culture, resources, budgets, partners and strategy. Rebalancing is critical to achieve these goals. The choice is whether to rebalance now, or later when the battle for attention may become even more difficult than it currently is.”
  • Jeremiah Owyang weighs in on the above report on his blog: Beyond Tools, Marketers Must Focus on Content
  • So does Brian Solis in a more elaborate post: Report: Content and the New Marketing Equation

Filed under: Digital worlds, e-democracy, Politics, Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, , , , , ,

September 12, 2011 • 11:35 pm 0

Links 12-09-11: Social business design must-reads

Brand Marketing Programs made Social By Design
How do you develop marketing programmes that are social by design? This framework articulates something I’ve been trying to do myself, and gave me a more structured approach in creating socially designed marketing programmes.

From traditional business to social business
A must read if you are serious about social business (and not just developing a strategy for social presence and increasing the number of likes.) Good examples of what it means to deliver value!

Filed under: Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, User experience, , ,

September 12, 2011 • 11:29 pm 0

Links 12-09-11: social media research

Nielsen: Social Media Report (U.S.) Q3 ’11- Really crucial to gain insights on how consumer segments use and share content. Some interesting findings:

  1. Over 2x as many 55-plussers visited social networks via mobile
  2. Top 3 categories of apps: games, weather, social networking. (Weather was an eye-opener for me)
  3. On slide 11: active social networkers are influential OFFLINE

A recent study (U.S.) on consumer interaction on Facebook – Interesting stats on engagement with brands.

 

Filed under: Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, , ,

July 28, 2011 • 6:12 pm 0

Some top issues in adopting social computing

Here’s another brilliant resource for social business thinking. Also quite useful in presentations. Your prospects or existing clients would also want to know, aside from the benefits of social business, the most voiced issues concerning social business adoption. A number of them might even be already struggling with these issues. In a nutshell, the 10 top issues with social computing in business are:

  1. Lack of social media literacy amongst workers.
  2. A perception that social tools won’t work well in a particular industry.
  3. Social software is still perceived as too risky to use for core business activities.
  4. Can’t get enough senior executives engaged with social tools.
  5. There is vapor lock between IT and the social computing initiative.
  6. Need to prove ROI before there will be support for social software.
  7. Security concerns are holding up pilot projects/adoption plans.
  8. The needs around community management have come as a surprise.
  9. Difficulties sustaining external engagement.
  10. Struggling to survive due to unexpected success.

Read the full version by one of my favourite and genuine social business experts, Dion Hinchcliffe @dhinchcliffe.

Filed under: Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, , ,

July 19, 2011 • 5:00 pm 0

Use service design to envision social business programmes

A lot of time and resources are spent on thinking of clever marketing / PR gimmicks, but less about harnessing the real potential of social for your business: making social a core part of your services and products.

How to integrate social into services and products? To quote Clay Shirky, give your customers “a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain.” Learn more from James Dellow in this well-written and insightful post ‘Using service design to envision socially integrated services and products‘.

Filed under: Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, , , , , ,

June 30, 2011 • 2:09 pm 1

Social Business Series 1: Social media behaviours around the world

[Note: Aside from blogging about the impact of social media in society, I also want to popularise the concept of Social Business. I’ve decided to post regularly about a series of topics related to ‘Social Business’, which will be a combination of curated information and reflections about my own experiences as a freelance Social Business Analyst / Strategist. I hope to explore the different aspects of Social Business and help you gain a better understanding on how to optimise social and network productivity in an organisation. In this post, I'd like to give an overview on social media behaviours and underscore the importance of knowing your target audience.]

Social business as a concept and framework is, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of the profound impact of social technologies on our culture, the way we communicate and the way we work. Secondly, it’s a recognition of the potential of social media and networks for consumer engagement, workforce engagement and change / operations management.  Last, but not the least, it is a framework for effecting genuine and holistic transformations in organisations.

Global social media behaviours 2010/2011

Global state of social networking

Know thy customer
The holy grail of social media is – surprise, surprise – not media but social. By social I mean people and the networks they participate in. Before an organisation should even attempt to create a social media campaign or set up account profiles across social web, it should first be clear about its audience and their socialgraphics. This means having an in-depth knowledge of what people do online, where they converge, what they talk about, who they talk to and trust, and how they connect with each other. These are fertile grounds for consumer/user insights, which are fundamental in any online business. If there’s anything that best practices in online and social business have taught us, it’s this: don’t cut corners in project activities aimed at attaining a real understanding of the local market.

But since digital and social technologies are helping us live in increasingly proximity with each other, we must  also complement local knowledge with a global perspective on how consumers use social technologies.

To get you started thinking about Social Business, above are two very relevant infographics on global use and adoption of the social web. The first is a 2011 global snapshot of social media activities in Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific (using the GlobalWebIndex, Comscore and Nielsen). I got this from Michael Brito‘s brilliant blog for his book, “Smart Business,  Social Business”.  (More details in the later part of this post.) The second is from GlobalWebIndex that visualises the global state of social networking in 2011.

While you would naturally have to conduct more local and group-specific research on your target customer’s social and online behaviour, global statistics always come in handy for comparative analysis or as a springboard for deeper investigation. Always be on the look-out for information that shows interesting trends in social network growth, adoption, and engagement that can reveal insights on customers’ relationships and their ever-evolving user behaviour.
Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: campaigns, Digital worlds, Ideas, Philippines, Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, User experience, , , , , ,

February 18, 2011 • 2:51 am 0

“Social business design means humanising the enterprise”

Social business design is about humanising the enterprise by creating structures that have both intimacy and scale: doing the right things (effectiveness) and encouraging positive behaviour and talent. How do we create this new ‘business operating system’? Lee Bryant of Headshift gives us some basic pointers and insights.

Filed under: Digital worlds, Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, , , , ,

December 12, 2010 • 6:26 pm 0

Social Business Forecast: 2011 The Year of Integration (Jeremiah Owyang’s LeWeb Keynote)

Where is social business headed in 2011? Altimeter Group’s research reveals that corporations will focus on integration, staffing, advertising, and measurement. Get the details in Jeremiah Owyang’s Le Web Keynote presentation, shared under Open Research.

Excerpt from web-strategist.com:

How You Should Invest in 2011: Scalable Programs
1:1 dialog with customers does not scale –you can not hire enough community managers to keep up with the growing number of customer voices, as a result, we recommend that corporations focus on the following six areas of investment for 2011

  1. Hire correctly (Gurus/Ninjas/Samurai need not apply) and properly train for scale
  2. Integrate social media on the corporate website, then aggregate and curate
  3. Invest in advertising that leverages social graph
  4. Build an unpaid army of advocates –get your customers to do the work for you
  5. Invest in scalable systems like SCRM and SMMS
  6. Learn to measure using the ROI Pyramid

Filed under: Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, , , , ,

November 24, 2010 • 5:40 pm 3

Case study: Philippines tourism rebranding could have harnessed the wisdom of crowds

In brief: The short-lived Philippines tourism rebrand sorely lacked social touchpoints. Such a high-engagement brand should’ve leveraged public participation by strategically integrating the role of online influencers and social media in the whole project cycle. The Department of Tourism and its ad agency seemed to have forgotten that we’re “…living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organisations.” The public is now not only their stakeholders, but also co-creators.

Beauty turned ugly in just a few hours after the Philippines’ Department of Tourism (DOT) launched its rebranded tourism campaign. The new (and now recently scrapped) DOT slogan, ‘Pilipinas Kay Ganda’ (Philippines, so beautiful!) started a firestorm of criticism shortly after the launch.  It’s a case that once again reveals the clout of social networks in the Philippines (and overall) and argues for the urgent need of a new way of working. It also shines a light on the significance of online influencers.

Performance artist and activist Carlos Celdran and other online influencers gave the new slogan a failing mark on their Twitter and Facebook pages. Netizens were also quick to point out the striking similarity of the logo to that of Poland’s tourism logo. And then there was the URL blooper: instead of landing in ‘beautifulpilipinas.com’, visitors might end up going to a porn site ‘beautifulfilipinas.com’.

I won’t dive into the advertising issues (merits and demerits of the rebrand itself, the much-maligned logo and slogan, bad copy); a lot have blogged about this already. Nor will I delve into the greater problems ailing DOT and the Philippines tourism industry in general.

What I want to spotlight is the social perspective. Government and advertising agencies alike need to acknowledge the fact that social technologies are fundamentally changing the way we work, and should begin working with a public that has been transformed from mere consumers into stakeholders and co-creators.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: campaigns, Ideas, Philippines, Social / online media analysis, social business, Strategy, , , , , , , , ,

November 22, 2010 • 10:21 pm 0

Do you have a strategy for being a social strategist?

This is an Open Research study by the Altimeter Group. Please share and give attribution.

This is such a useful and thought-provoking study for social strategists / analysts — whether or not you’re working with an enterprise. Do you find yourself being ‘grounded to social media help desk’ or do you wish to attain ‘escape velocity’ and lead efforts in building ‘scalable social business programs’? This presentation gives you the back story, the future of a social strategist career and the ways you can reach escape velocity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: social business, Strategy, , ,

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analyst, poet, dream-dweller. a.k.a. 'delunna'

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