Headstream – the social brand agency » Steve

3 principles for building social brands

Steve — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:52:01 +0000

For organisations to be successful in this new hyper-word-of-mouth world they will need to fully embrace the notion of a building a social brand.

A social brand is one that is able to stay true to three core principles; it actively listens, it has appropriate social behaviour and it builds win/win relationships with its stakeholders.

Active listening is required if the brand is to truly be part of the market conversations, being part of the conversation provides valuable insight and critical feedback. Without active listening, and appropriate responses, the brand is still operating in the pre-social media world of mass communication.

Appropriate social behaviour is the easiest to define, authentic, honest, transparent, human, but it’s the hardest to successfully implement. Ultimately it will come down to the organisations’ commitment to a social brand value system and a people strategy that is aligned to this.

Lastly, because social media is creating perfect markets the last principle this win/win relationships. This is about the value exchange, the value exchange between the brand and each of its stakeholder i.e. prospects, customers, employees, influencers, investors etc. This value can take different forms, so for customers it could be about the performance of the product, the quality of the customer support or the influence they may have over shaping the product development.

In reality the impending challenges to re-engineer an organisation in order to be able to successfully build a social brand is huge; aligning internal departments, processes and communication channels is just the tip of the iceberg.

The conclusion therefore, is that the only way an organisation can effectively meet these challenges will be if the board, and more specifically the CEO, genuinely understands this new social world, is committed to building a social brand, has a clear, effective strategy and strong leadership to make it happen.

There is certainly an opportunity for organisations to get a competitive edge by building social brands although the interesting question is how organisations will differentiate themselves in the future when all brands are social brands.

Posted via web from Steve Sponder’s Blog

Facebook Privacy Graphic: A Bewildering Tangle of Options

Steve — Thu, 13 May 2010 08:30:48 +0000

via nytimes.com

Posted via web from Saw this and thought of you…

Big boxes of social media

Steve — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:51:51 +0000

After watching the Web 2.0 hyper-juggernaut scream into town a few years back it has been interesting to see it delivering big boxes of social media filled with shiny new tactics including a bunch of social networks, a corporate blog, a few micro-blogging platforms, a suite of widgets and a packet of chicklets.

It’s unfortunate that there was no mention of which department to deliver it to and no instructions on how to use the tactics. As a result the box was mistakenly handed to the marketing department. Interestingly enough a similar story happened back in the late 90’s when the Web 1.0 hyper-juggernaut incorrectly delivered the website boxes to the IT department instead of the marketing dept, remember the issues that caused?

So, and in lieu of any instruction manual the marketing guys have been busy blending social media into the marketing mix; resulting in social networks being added to the media planning process, playing with corporate blogs, producing widgets and starting a Facebook groups. But they are simply applying existing marketing principles to these new media, that’s not their fault that’s the natural thing for them to do.

The other thing missing from the social media box was the sticker ‘Interactive - Handle with Care”, this means social media opens up a feedback-loop, encouraging a response, a comment and a conversation, something the marketing team have not been prepared for.

We’re now becoming aware the box should have been delivered to the CEO as we appreciate that the impact of social media is far, far broader than the marketing department; it touches every brand touch point, customer service, human resources and challenges the product development team to deliver the ultimate product.

The impending challenge for CEO’s to respond to this new world order, without the instruction manual, is huge; re-structuring and streamlining internal departments, processes and communication channels.

So, if you’re in the marketing department and see a big box labelled social media please pop it up to the CEO’s office, thanks.

Posted via web from Steve Sponder’s Blog

Are you actively listening?

Steve — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:35:28 +0000

Active Listening is one of the three core principles we have identified that organisations need in order to build Social Brands. We intentionally chose this descriptor because Active Listening is the intent to ‘listening for meaning’ which we felt better expressed the purpose of this activity as opposed to the generic ‘monitoring’ label that is often used. (See the Wikipedia entry for further definition.)

For us Active Listening is a term that incorporates seven discrete activities, typically layered one on top of the other, plus the advice, consultancy and strategy that ensures it’s being applied appropriately within an organisation.

1. Monitor – Ongoing monitoring of conversations via keyword searching is the most basic of these activities. This could be done by using one, or a combination of, paid for or free tools. Some of the free tools available provide platform or channel specific like Twitter Search and Google Blog Search, whilst others have a broader search net like Addictomatic and Socialmention. It is also possible to build a fairly comprehensive ‘monitoring system’ as explained by Chris Brogan’s excellent ‘Grow Bigger Ears‘ blog post.

2. Measure – Next you should be looking to identify some appropriate metrics, with these in place you are then into the activity of measuring. Hopefully those metrics will have some targets and will be linked to some business objectives – see point 3 of our ‘7 Steps Social Media Analytics Strategy‘. This activity

3. Track – Closely linked to measuring is tracking, where trends can be discovered over time. For example this could be tracking the sentiment around a brand, the number of comments on a blog post or the number of retweets. What we’re interested in here is tracking the velocity and acceleration of any changes as this will start to turn the data into information which we can respond to. Nathan Gilliatt provides further detail around tracking velocity and acceleration in his blog post ‘Derivatives in media measurement‘.

4. Alert - In order to respond to a real-time online crisis, or opportunities for that matter, it is important to consider setting up your alerts. These alerts can be based on a volume threshold for some of the metrics that you’re tracking or be based on the mention of a specific phrase that you may be monitoring such as ‘Brand sucks’ or ‘Brand FAIL’.

5. Insights – Over time you are going to be building up a huge volume of data, all of which could provide a wealth of insights. Depending on how you’re collecting and holding this data will depend on how insightful and how easy it will be to mine. Currently we find that appending information manually to the data collected provides the best results. These insights could be applied right across the organisation from product development to customer service, from HR to marketing.

6. Disseminate – Obvious although not happening comprehensively enough from my experience, the output from all of the five active listening activities above need to get to the right person within the organisation at the right time.

7. Act - And lastly, to ensure that the listening has been Active Listening we need to ensure that the business responds to what has been heard either through immediate action or by informing future strategy.

So, this is our approach, what do you think and how are you doing things differently?

Posted via web from Steve Sponder’s Blog

Planning a Content Strategy

Steve — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:27:05 +0000

A core part of any social media strategy is the content element. Whether the brand is adopting various outposts or embarking on an influencer network programme a well thought out content strategy and plan is going to be important, in fact if the brand is doing both of these plus has a website, a comprehensive content strategy is critical.

To formulate a content strategy can be a difficult process partly due to the many considerations and partly due to the number of stakeholders. So, to help our clients we have a simple 9 step systematic process.

First off we suggest setting some principles, this allows for a healthy discussion around authenticity, transparency and humility as well as the clients views on engagement.

Next we get into the ‘Why’, clarifying objectives, linking them with appropriate metrics and if possible setting targets.

‘What’ comes next covering stage 3 Substance and stage 4 Sources. Substance focuses the mind on what topics, subjects and point of views the brand wants to have as well as considering the type of social currency value – entertainment, useful, monetary, information or personal value.

Sources looks at who is going to be creating or producing this content, from employees to agencies to crowd-sourcing.

Next we get into the ‘How’, who’s going to be managing the content, which social and digital channels will the content be going out thru, which formats are most appropriate and a schedule over an agreed time period.

Lastly, with active listening in place we are able to constantly review the conversational effect of our content against our objectives and the brand will be able to respond in accordance with their engagement policy.

Posted via web from Steve Sponder’s Blog

The convergence of film and gaming #yam

Steve — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:32:49 +0000

via film30.de

Posted via web from Saw this and thought of you…

Social Media accounts for 18% of search market #yammer

Steve — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:20:11 +0000

via briansolis.com

Posted via web from Saw this and thought of you…

The 5 types of social currency

Steve — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:56:18 +0000

The social web has created a hyper-word-of-mouth platform that has tipped the balance of power away from brands. As a result, brands are now beginning to realise that engagement is the new communications. In order for a brand to achieve engagement with its stakeholders, it needs to consider the value that their content will deliver, or to frame it from the recipients perspective – what’s in it for me.

If the content has high value then not only will the recipient be more likely to engage with it, but they will be more likely to engage in conversation with the brand, compelling them to pass-along the content to their friends because it has social currency.

I have identified 5 core types of social currency value; Useful, Entertainment, Monetary, Information and Personal.

Before giving some explanation and examples for each area, it is worth pointing out that they are all channel agnostic, so for example ‘events’ are particularly suited for entertainment. In fact, an event like Barcardi’s B-Live can in itself provide a rich stream of social currency for the digital channel e.g. twitter announcements, flickr photostreams and YouTube channels.

1) Useful value is more commonly referred to as brand utilities, so although Nike+ is held up as the ‘daddy’ of brand utilities, there are also a huge numbers of mobile apps that would qualify for this category.

2) Entertainment value is more commonly referred to as branded entertainment and it’s interesting to note that typically this is the approach that an ad campaign concept would take. The ultimate proof of social currency is when your content is being remix ed and parodied, as happened with the Cadbury’s gorilla campaign.

3) Monetary value is the social equivalent of the conventional sales promotion or PR activity. So it could be a simple voucher like the infamous Threshers’ discount voucher or a competition run in conjunction with an influential blogger.

4) Information value, in the form of knowledge and thought leadership, can be produced in various formats e.g. video interviews, slideshare presentations and blog posts (like this one ;). More superficial forms of information, like gossip and conspiracy, can also be adopted.

5) Personal value is a particularly interesting currency, as it often provides social currency that is extremely compelling. The global success of reality TV shows, such as Big Brother, and the talent shows such as Pop Idol and X-Factor demonstrate the importance of fame.

As the above Venn diagram suggests, there are opportunities to blend various currencies together and if done correctly, produce in a more potent piece of currency. An example of this would be a game (entertainment) which has a leaderboard (fame).

It is possible to capitalise on social currency that has already gained momentum by adopting the concept in your campaign – maybe we should call this meme-riding? T-mobile did this very successfully when they rode the flash-mobbing meme with their ‘Dance’ campaign.

Key to successfully producing high-value social currency is setting out with the right mind-set at the planning stage and get the right multi-disciplined team together to work on the social currency idea.

Posted via web from Steve Sponder’s Blog