This is a really interesting presentation on Digital PR, SEO and social media

Peter Wilkinson - Strategist and social media pioneer

Not really, no. Social media is a way of doing things, which applies to everything.  In the same way that understanding how to exercise well is good preparation for any sport you care to name, understanding how to use social media is the way that you prepare to advertise all customer driven businesses online.

When I say “customer driven” I mean businesses that have groups of customers coming to their premises and consuming their products.  Products in the case of a hotel are easy enough to define: atmosphere, cleanliness, comfort, customer service.

A hotel clearly has elements that define it from other business types – and in this at least social media for hotels becomes a special case, or rather social media for all hospitality environments becomes easy to define by the way in which hospitality businesses work.  When you run a hotel or a restaurant, people come and stay at your place (or come to eat at your place), they have (you hope) a great time and they go.  This is different from a shop, where people come in, buy something and leave – the hotel’s consumer consumes his or her products in the place in which they were bought.

Social media advertising for a hotel, like for any other business, revolves around people who use that business introducing it to their friends.  This is the whole point of using social networks to spread your brand.  People come to your hotel, you make them aware of your Facebook page or Twitter feed, and they sign up for it because their customer experience has made them want to show allegiance to you as an establishment.

People within the social networks of your new friends are now linked to your hotel despite the fact that they have never been there.  If you regularly update your status, upload video clips and generally get involved in the way that an everyday net user uses the social sphere, then you’ll attract the attention of your friends’ friends just by existing.  When they start to follow the links you post and the videos you make, they’ll think of adding you to their own social networks, which opens your hotel to even more potential visitors – and suddenly your hospitality brand has gone viral.

Clearly then the nature of the posts you make on your Facebook page, or in your Tweets, are vital to the success of your social media advertising campaign.  As a hotel, you have some clear advantages over other types of business, in that you can post free offers, half price stays and other rewards – stipulating that your potential rewardees must first click “like” or sign you up as a friend before they are eligible to take part in your offer.

A hotel can run all sorts of time specific campaigns to get their rooms busy and their restaurants booming: seasonal deals, out of season deals, you name it and hotels have been doing it for years.  Do it through a Facebook page and you’ll be able to ensure that every person who takes up an offer also becomes a fan.

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Thought Leader and Social Media Pioneer

Google goes into competition with twitter. http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/02/09/features-twitterkilling/

Very good choir singing Please Re Tweet Me…Very Good, but with a serious edge

Golf courses can use social media technology to enhance their fan and visitor experiences online, to spread the word about tournaments and upcoming events and also to raise the player experience at the course. Social media technology, which encourages participation, recommendations and clique behaviour, is perfect for participants in any sport – where the sport itself defines boundaries for a community, social media technology can be used to facilitate interaction within that community.

One of the key elements to any social media campaign is the mobile website. Golf courses would be well served by ensuring that their website has a version fully navigable on a mobile device – as this, of course, is where a large proportion of consumer social media activity takes place. As the mobile version of the site is often an essentially separate thing, background technology enabling the golf course to easily run both from a central location may be necessary.

Creation of micro sites for tournaments and leagues enables members and players to quickly access relevant areas – and also increases the course’s visibility on the web and in the social media stream. Furthermore, micro sites can be used in mobile marketing campaigns, to generate leads using text requests: essentially golf courses get to advertise date specific events and promotions directly to people who have asked for that advertising to be done. Consumers can be directed to visit promotions specific micro sites to get more information about events: and offered the option to share those events on social media platforms when they arrive.

Golf, like any outdoor sport, is weather affected. A golf course that can post early warnings about frost delay and other adverse playing conditions retains the loyalty of its members. While a course that can use social media to get people out and playing is able to maximise its use at all times.

So you’ve used socialmedia to generate a whole new fan base, with strategic monitoring of the Twitter chatter, the implementation of your own Facebook page and a well directed campaign to get your fans interacting with you in new and exciting ways. How does all that translate to the place you make your money – the sales desk?

You can now add a store to your Facebook page or MySpace page, allowing fans to browse your merchandise directly and click a button to put them in a cart. This kind of direct selling works when there is already a big fan base for your brand – not as a short cut to generating sales through a new area of the internet.

Socialmedia is more useful as a tool for your sales assistants to interact with your customers. A sales assistant can tweet news of special offers, for example (this works particularly well when the offer is time limited, because it drives a large wedge of fan based traffic to your site at a predictable time; and of course you can control the products on offer, which means you can prepare stock to match expected demand). Or you can encourage your customers to talk directly to people in your sales team by running socialmedia surgeries (advertised on your website and your fan pages), where they can ask questions about products and services.

If you use ecommerce facilities directly on your socialmedia fanpage, be prepared to bear the brunt of potentially poor publicity. In the inevitable occurrence (it happens to all of us, no matter how hard we try) that a buying experience for one customer is bad, they’ll be able to advertise it in seconds to the whole of their social network – which includes all the other fans linked to your Facebook or other social media page.

The way socialmedia works, in general, makes it more useful as a tool for creating a buzz around your brand, rather than for encouraging direct sales. If you do use it as a sales mechanism, be extra careful to polish your customer experience.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

One perspective on social media marketing ROI

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The full works

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Social media marketing is currently a big buzz word among marketers –whether it be small or big company. Social media marketing brings companies to a level ground and provides an enormous opportunity for the businesses to impress and get in touch with their prospective customers. Social media marketing is cost effective too; you will not have to invest the amount of money that would have gone into print or audio-visual ads. With so many benefits most businesses are looking for good profits from their social media promotions.  There are some companies which look to perform their social media campaigns in house, and these organisations are finding that social media marketing, whilst cost effective in print costs, is time consuming. Drainage of time can be ill afforded by companies in the current economic climate and in this specialised area of work they are finding that the learning curve is costing them time too. Many businesses spend 100s of hours and get no profits from their social media campaigns. This is the reason outsourcing of social media marketing is a popular choice among the company owners.

There are some essential benefits that the company owners gain by outsourcing their social media marketing to a company such as http://www.socialmediastrategy.org.uk/

• Costs are often hidden in your efforts to learn social media marketing.  These can be costs of time and costs of making mistakes which are only discovered later through experience.  Social media marketing is not all about Facebook and Twitter, there are many other platforms. To learn the marketing tactics for all other sites you will have to invest time to become an expert. By outsourcing social media marketing you will be enlisting a professional who has already invested time in learning the various applications and tools present at the social networking sites. Thus, you will be able to see results more quickly.
• At times businesses will have to put aside essential social media work if it encroaches on their main business purpose.  Some social media tasks are required on a daily basis and if not performed at that time are not capable of being revived at a later date. If the person given the task of executing the social media within the business is  not  exuberant about social media then there are high chances that they will take a long while in executing tasks  and thus you will have frustrating results with the social media campaign.

• So why not do the things you like and leave social media marketing to the professionals by outsourcing your social media to http://socialmediastrategy.org.uk/?
• By outsourcing the social media you can become more efficient and save time. Just think: one professional doing the work that could prove a time sap on your resources will perform the work effectively and efficiently, this has to be a sensible business proposition.

• You will be investing some money and expecting returns from social media marketing. In order to reap maximum benefits from social media marketing campaigns you should not only know the tools and applications, but also know about the proper way to attract attention. Keeping the social media profiles updated and interacting with users regularly are also other essential tasks of social media marketing. These are expert areas of work and Panther’s social media professionals can help attain maximum results with.

Create an emotional response to your marketing by using the right colours.  It’s very important to know which emotions or symbolisations will trigger your target audience to buy your product or service. The use of the right colours in your promotional materials – in your marketing brochures, your product packages, or on your web site – can actually increase your sales. When people see certain colours they can change their emotions or they can symbolise things related to the colours.

For example, if you’re selling a money-making product you should use blue and brown colours, as they represent money and strength. I recon that most new webmasters/website designers starting out develop decent sites, and they think about ways to tell people what they offer online, but maybe they fail to think about feelings in the marketing mix. Their offerings may be brilliant, or their products/services advanced and capable, but without the ability to generate emotions from their potential customers they fall short of their goals.

This is usually the result of little or no marketing understanding. I am sure you have heard of people or have your own story about spending hours in promotion or design, and working hard to drive traffic to the site, but have little or nothing to show for the efforts. What is even more aggravating is having people come back to your site from a bookmark, but still having no sales or affiliate program revenue. The good news is that there is probably quality in your content if they are returning. Obviously your content is good as it draws people back. And as we have heard that is what you want when it comes to website design. The reason they are not clicking on your programs, or buying your products/services is because you have not generated the feelings they need to make the purchase. You have not compelled them to buy or click on anything.

I bet many new website designers and webmasters get frustrated and give up. Some go out and spend needless money for results that they could have gotten on their own. All they had to do was sit down and think about things logically, and apply some common marketing sense to their problem. Ask yourself questions about the feelings you get from what you see on your own site. If you were a buyer, would you buy your products/services, or click on the affiliate links you have?

Learning marketing practices and principles will help you to weather the storm and create compelling sites that bring visitors back. With the stiff competition on the internet, you have to find ways to set yourself apart from the rest. Think of how many sites you have visited. Did the links actually lead to the things they promised, or was there some kind of “catch” before you could get what was promised? Wouldn’t you be more inclined to click links or make a purchase from a site that consistently delivered what it promised? It’s all about perception and what your visitors think about your site, and the messages you send them through the design, layout, and links. Remember the communications map we discussed. You need to apply this to all your communications.

Social Media Consultant

Emotions that add the most force to your sales or marketing

1. Achievement – How does your product/service contribute to the customer’s achievement or accomplishment of something notable in life? In this example, your product/service becomes part of the customer’s identity.

2. Pride of ownership – How does your product/service contribute to the pride someone would feel from ownership? When you pit pride against features or benefits, pride usually wins in the end.

3. Security – What kind of security does your product/service offer? This is a blanket emotion that includes money, love, acceptance, power and control. Do not emphasise it if you cannot offer it.

4. Self-improvement – How does your product/service appeal to a person’s self improvement needs? The internet was born from information relay ideas. Almost everyone uses self-improvement books, articles, or newsletters of some kind. Information is what keeps the internet moving, and content is king.

5. Status – How does your product/service contribute to the status your visitor achieves? Everyone knows that you can fly in second class because it is cheaper and more economical, but deep inside almost everyone would rather fly in first class. What is the “first class” of your product or service?

6. Style – How does your product/service fit your buyer’s style? Are your products/services the Ferrari of style, or are they the Reliant Robin? Keep in mind that their style needs can be real or imagined.

7. Conformity – Does your product/service fall into a conformity niche? People do not want to be alone. They flock together in groups. You have seen them throughout school, and surely have seen them in your adult life. Does your product or service command a group following? How would your product/service help to fulfil the need of community? Does peer pressure play a role in your product/service?

8. Ambition – How does your product/service help people to get more out of life? More out of life is a broad term and can be applied to money, love, security, power, or just about anything else you can think of. What is it that people want more of that your product or service can help them get more of?

9. Power – In what ways does your product/service offer a person more power? Power can be over something as simple as their own lives, time, or any number of other things. What ways can you come up with that will help people gain more control over things that they want more control over?

10. Love – This one is the grand daddy of them all. The more of these feelings you can incorporate into your design and information, the better chance you have of generating the emotions needed to compel a person to buy. Incorporating these 10 emotions into your design may help you produce better results.

If you’re looking for marketing jobs or social media jobs why not visit our job site dedicated to social media marketing jobs. http://www.socialmediamarketing.eu.com/job/

Businesses have always cared about what others think of them. Reputation and brand building are two pillars for the success of marketing. In the present times the promotions over the television or printed press have been replaced by the social media for business. Understanding the requirements of the business owners Panther Interactive Marketing Solutions have brought their new service that comprises of tracking the success of any social media campaign.

Panther Interactive Marketing Solutions has earned high repute for their value oriented social media training courses yet they offer many other critical services for the social media professionals. One such service is their Web and Social Media Monitoring. With the help of this service the business owners can stay up to date with what other social media visitors are thinking of their company. Panther Interactive also tracks various conversations going on in the forums and blogs regarding their client’s company. If there is any need for improvement in social media for business strategies then they will be the first to suggest them.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Twitter has become one of the top followed social media networks around, with over 300,000 new sign ups for the site everyday. Now, just think how much your business would grow if you had 300,000 new customers everyday! Yes, with a Twitter account and with a well designed Twitter marketing strategy you can make it big.

Twitter is basically a microblogging site that allows its users to write what they feel in the form of “tweets” that are no longer then 140 characters or even less. If used properly Twitter can fetch you significant profits, but if the strategies are not set properly you can get lost in the crowd quite quickly. One of the success stories of Twitter marketing was viewed by Dell computers who had an astounding sales of $6.5 million by marketing through Twitter. Thus many online marketers are using  Twitter marketing seriously to network and market their products, on the otherhand it has become a headache for may business owners, who are unaware of how to best leverage the benefits of Twitter. In this respect it has to be said, there are four main pillars for Twitter marketing success from the customers point of view. These factors are mentioned below:

• Communicating with Customers: Twitter is a great outbound messaging website, where the messages are bound by 140 character limit. When you get inbound messages in Twitter they are to the point and quick. This helps the easy monitoring and management of conversations. Twitter marketing also allows you to converse with  customers in real time and communicate with them. With the help of this facility you can clear any grievances of the customers in a very short time.

• Brand Exposure: Many people think that Twitter marketing is about what you say about your products or services to the other users. It not that simple! Brand exposure can only be built by what others say about your company and its services or products. If you are present online and engage in customer interactions, getting a fair amount of retweets, it can shed a better light on your marketing campaign than any other social media sites. If you look at the brand exposure features of social media sites in terms of good, okay and bad, then Twitter will definitely get a “good”.

• Getting Traffic to Site: With the increase of spam and noise within Twitter, there are many users leaving Twitter. But on the brighter side, though business owners may not get any direct traffic to their website, they can get fair amount of viral traffic with the proper implementation of the Twitter marketing strategies.

• SEO: According to the new paradigms of search engines, buzz is a key factor in deciding the ranking of any website. Twitter and Facebook popularity are given extra stress by the search engines. So with a good fan following in Twitter the chances of high page rank also improve.

Its no wonder then that so many businesses are using Twitter marketing so heavily for their overall business promotions. You can improve the chances of success with the use of social media training courses. Some of the critical components of Twitter marketing are discussed and taught as a part of these courses.

Social media has opened up huge opportunities for the business owners. Social media advertising UK can add to the revenues of any company significantly. But advertising can only yield good profits if it is done in the proper way, if done wrong it can lead to disaster. To get the most out of your social media ads it is important to consider the target audience. If you have a clear idea about the target audience you will be able to engage them to the product or service.  The tips given below will help you enormously in your quest to capture the online market:

1. Making the Decisions: There are a large number of social media channels where you can promote your products or services. It is important to choose a social media portal keeping in mind the target audience. Submit your website to the most suitable portal and get associated with the online forums related to your industry.

2. Fresh Advertising Ideas: Social media ads are different from the other forms of advertising seen. It requires a fresh set of ideas and the old mind set will not do. It is your business website where the conversations will begin and you need to control the conversation and participate to encourage others. Thus these ads should be written by a professional writer who has creative vision and understands your goals.

3. Set Goals: Like all other forms of advertising you have to plan before you leap. Set some objectives that you want to attain with the social media advertising campaign. Creating a strategy and then sticking to it is very important for social media success. If you want to improve conversion and sales of your website through social media promotions then your strategy would be different from building long term relationships and creating brand loyalty.

4. Deciding on Technologies: After you have set a goal and made strategies to attain it, next try and focus on the technologies available in the social media platform. Select the strategies that will help you attain the specific strategies. If you have problems on finalising the technology, it is a wise idea to think about the immediate impact.

5. Complimentary Strategies to Increase Indirect Sales: If you are looking for sales through conversion online then you should always have the complimentary strategy to target interested visitors, create  brand recognitions and what you will get with these is improved sales.

There is a huge market waiting for you and with the proper use of the social media advertising UK you can improve your business chances immensely.

Thought Leader and Social Media Pioneer

Interesting video on open ID

Peter’s profile http://bit.ly/69qjc2

Social media branding doesn’t just mean business branding to a customer face. One of the most important groups of people your brand needs to work for is your employee base.

Without employees that care, your brand is going to falter. You’ve heard the business-speak about everyone “singing from the same song sheet”? Well, what that means basically is that everyone who works in your company is committed to the same brand values – and more importantly, that everyone in your company believes in those brand values.

The most energetic brands are the ones driven by workers who believe in what they make, what they advertise and what they sell. Social media branding is done internally to bolster this by ensuring that your business branding works through and through. It’s like a stick of rock. Wherever you cut your company you want it to read with a single, unifying brand message.

Social media tools can be used to bring everyone in your company closer together – and to give the brand itself a voice that your workers identify with as much as your customers. Inside out social media branding creates brand evangelists within your own ranks – people who will, off their own back, conduct business branding exercises on your behalf simply because they believe in the message of your company.

To do this successfully your company needs to develop a message that unifies its employees. Think about how you could use social media tools to spread awareness of your commitment to the environment, for example, or to making high quality sustainable products. That’s the kind of social media branding message that can leave your employees actively wanting to spread the word about your company on their own time – and that means they’d do it naturally all the time they’re at work.

Social Media Consultant

Peter Wilkinson social media consultant explains.  The AIDA formula stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

The AIDA formula stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

It is an approach to understanding how advertising and selling supposedly works. The assumption is that the consumer passes through several steps in the influence process. First, Attention must be developed, to be followed by Interest, Desire, and finally Action as called for in the message. Another, but similar, scheme was developed by Lavidge and Steiner in 1961, later to be dubbed the AIDA: Hierarchy of Effects Model by Palda in 1966. This approach involves the hierarchy of effects: awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction, and finally purchase in that order. Note the similarity to the adoption process Now let me explain each of the point above.

1. Attention You need to write a killer title that stops your visitors and tells him: “read this article/copy right now”. For example, if you are trying to sell an ebook that helps athletes to run faster, your title could be: “4 Simple Tricks To Effortlessly And Naturally Always Be In Your State Of Peak Performance.” Do you think that a title like this one will work? The truth is that you won’t know until you split test this headline with a second one a finally find the winner.

2. Interest Now that you have got your visitor’s attention, be sure to write an interesting article on the topic. If you are not an expert in your niche market, you have two solutions. a. You can make a quick search about your topic on Google, and read whatever comes on the first and second page of results. b. Hire a ghostwriter to carry out the research for you and write the article on your behalf.

3. Desire Now you want to speak to the readers emotions. You want to put him into the emotional state that will make him click the link in your box.  It’s not easy.

4. Action Naturally, this is where you want to lead the reader. You want him to click on the link and finally visit your website. Let’s try and put this in terms of web marketing and websites and bring in some marketing basics

**********

1. Attention In order to catch the prospects attention you must first get them to visit your web site. This can be accomplished by listing your web site in directories, taking out ads in trade magazines, using banner ads, and writing articles that contain links to your web site that prospects would find helpful in solving their business problems. Your web site must hold the prospects attention at the home page long enough to see what else your site has to offer. This can be accomplished by:

a. Create a very strong headline, one that explains exactly what benefits your product has to offer potential prospects. How about this for someone looking to design a new showroom for their business? “How To Design A New Showroom: A basic guide to creating efficient and profitable showrooms.” In order for you to create this headline you must know exactly who your prospects are, and what they needs and desires are.

b. Promise to give something at a discount or for free. Giving away free information or an accessory product that can help your client will get the attention of prospects. You should also explain or demonstrate how this discounted or free service can benefit your client with the solution that they are seeking. An example of this would be “before and after” photos. You should never promise to make a promise that you can’t keep.

c. Give real examples of how your product or service solved a problem for clients. Provide stories on your web site of how clients used your product or service and the benefits they gained by doing so.

2. Interest Once you gain your prospects attention, you must gain their interest. You can do this by:

a. Communicate with your prospects in a simple way. Use short simple sentences that are very clear in meaning and easy to read. Talk to your prospects as if they were sitting next to you.

b. After your headline, list any additional benefits. Prospects want to know as soon as possible all the benefits that they will be provided with. These additional benefits that you offer should be exactly what will aid your prospects. Explain in detail, and provide examples of how these benefits will help them.

c. Offer a guarantee. By offering a guarantee you are sharing some of the risk. Make sure your guarantee is clear to the prospects.

3. Desire Telling your prospects that you can solve their problems and satisfy their needs is not good enough you must prove that you can by:

a. Offer advice and tips. The advice and tips that you give should be backed up with examples of some of your past work. You should state the potential results of following your advice. You should provide your email address or feed back method so potential prospects can ask specific questions, and ask about specific concerns they may have.

b. Provide information that will help the prospects. Show your prospects where they can find articles, case studies, information on leading developments in their business area. By providing this information you will allow your client to have more consumer trust, and increase your own credibility.

c. Using testimonials: Testimonials can add credibility to the product. Testimonials should be used explaining exactly what was accomplished by using the product, it should not be vague.

4. Action You should always tell your prospects what to do, to assume that they will know can lead to lost sales opportunities. To make it easy for the prospects make sure you:

a. Provide an e-mail address, contact form or feedback mechanism. This allows the prospects an easy way to respond to offers, request more information, ask you a question, and respond with any concerns that they might have.

b. Protect the prospects information. You should always state that you are a secured server. Display “We are a Secured Server”. This ensures the prospects that their credit card number is kept confidential and encrypted before it is sent over the internet. This is extremely important today with the increase of identity theft.

c. List your street address, telephone or land number and fax number. This will provide clients with an alternative way of sending information as they may not feel it is safe if sent over the internet. This gives them the ability to phone, fax, email, or mail their personal information. d. Limited Time offers. Offer them a premium if they respond by a certain date, or special package deals that have been put together with the knowledge (research and planning) of what the prospects needs are.

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

To survive and thrive in the current competitive marketplace, you need to carefully consider your marketing strategies and the ROI they will give you. With the expansion of web technologies and social media reaching even the remotest parts of the globe, every business needs to have a social presence to ensure they stay in touch with their markets. Even when you promote your website online there are a huge number of competitors in the same niche and business area. Such is the situation only businesses with the best marketing strategies will survive. Social media marketing is the latest buzz word. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other online social media portals are overflowing with traffic and if you can catch the attention of even a minute fraction of the traffic to these sites, then you are sure to have good sales. This is the reason companies are looking to recruit professionals with experience of social media under their belt.  Companies are looking to get their staff trained and are looking for top social media training courses.

Demand for social media training is soaring with a plethora of companies offering courses at varying levels. Courses can be booked from fifty pound to thousands of pounds.  It is fair to say the need for research to find the best value for money is very important – open generic courses or in house focused courses.  Courses that are technology focused and those that are marketing focused.  Courses that show you how to set up social media and those that show you how to develop social media strategy, engage and deploy with your marketing mix to give you optimum return on investment.

Another important factor to consider for the choice of social media marketing training courses is that the trainer should understand your needs and be focused on the application of social media rather than technology and buzz for the sake of technology and buzz. The needs of every enterprise differs and your training provider should be a able to provide public and customised packages to meet your corporate needs.

Panther Interactive Marketing’s packages offer you this flexibility. Panther have been crafting and delivering social media and training courses across all sectors and markets for many years. They offer courses for individuals as well as corporate companies of every size. The training programme starts with social media set up and then progresses to social media marketing automation and networking, social media strategy and social media deployment.  These flag ship courses form the core of the training programme.  They are supported by short courses in specialist areas such as Facebook advertising and Twitter advertising.  Panther’s social media and digital marketing service packages include standard social media and SEO services, extended SEO services and enhanced social media services. There are training courses and service packages for every skill-set. All the social media training UK courses are delivered by experienced social media trainers.

Thought Leader and Social Media Pioneer

Map your Marketing Message – The communications Map

I have outlined below some of the basics about communications maps that we discussed today.

1. What is a message map? A message map is a communication tool that acts as a messaging framework and assists in the creation of simple, concise key messages around a specific topic area such as corporate messages, brand messages or issue messages. Using a hub-and-spokes architecture, message maps set out one central message which is supported by a number of key messages, which in turn are each evidenced by proof points (quantitative statements).

2. Why are message maps useful? Message maps give a quick, visual representation of key messages in a way that allows the messages and the interrelationships between them to be easily understood and remembered. This provides, at a glance, the hierarchy of key messages that is both memorable for spokespeople and meaningful to the audience.

3. Why are message maps important? To ensure key messages are communicated correctly and concisely in every communication opportunity, and to keep all company spokespeople ‘on message’.

4. When should message maps be used? Message maps can be used in every instance of communication about the topic area that they cover to ensure that key messages are communicated strategically in each communication opportunity. It can be used as a guide to ensure the correct messaging is used when preparing content such as product brochures, speeches and web site content.

5. Who should use message maps? Anyone who is communicating with an organisation’s stakeholders – customers, partners, suppliers, staff, etc. For example, a corporate message map can be used to develop answers to questions from customers, the media, shareholders, colleagues and just about any other stakeholder.

6. How do you use a message map? Message maps provide a flexible framework for messaging and, as such, can be used either starting from the central message and then working out to the supporting messages and proof points, or from one of the key supporting message areas or proof points back to the central message. The message map can also be used as a checklist to ensure that all relevant messages are included. For example, if giving a media interview on a company’s latest product it may be relevant to include information about the organisations high quality products and customer service but irrelevant to include information about the company being an employer of choice.

7. How often should a message map be updated? Once a message map is created and approved it still functions as a living document because it evolves as new proof points can be added or substituted for those in the original message map. New proof points or supporting key messages may need to be added if a new product or service offering is released, and if the organisation has any significant messaging or branding changes the central and key supporting messages may need to be re-examined.

8. Who should create a message map? The best way to create a message map is via a structured session in which each of the internal messaging stakeholders are represented with a PR or communications specialist facilitating the brainstorm session. This ensures that all aspects of the messaging are included and that there is ‘buy-in’ from all of the organisation’s different areas.

9. What should the messages emphasise? The messages should be phrased in a way that helps the organisation’s communicators organise their thoughts and answer questions in ways that focus on how what the organisation does benefits people, not just on what the organisation does. Additionally, the messages should emphasise the organisation’s unique differentiators – the areas in which it stands out from competitors.

10. How should you train spokespeople to use the media map? The message map can be used as part of spokespeople media training. During media training, spokespeople can be trained how to navigate the map during interviews and use examples strategically to emphasise the organisation’s key messages.

If you’re looking for marketing jobs or social media jobs why not visit our job site dedicated to social media marketing jobs. http://www.socialmediamarketing.eu.com/job/

Panther Interactive Marketing Solutions, one of the leading social media training courses providers in UK offers new upgraded social media promotion packages. Their latest course offerings are the Twitter marketing training courses. Twitter has come up as the biggest and best source of viral marketing. Businesses can earn significant profits with the proper implementation of the Twitter marketing strategies. Thus Panther Interactive Marketing Solutions has come with their own pocket friendly Twitter marketing training courses. With the help of these courses, Panther intends to cure the headaches experienced by businesses when they engage in Twitter marketing.

There are various packages for Twitter marketing training courses aimed at both B2B and B2C businesses. In the B2B package the participants can gather information about how to build company’s image amongst its competitors and partners.  Recognition within the specific industry is very important for the business growth and with the help of Panther’s Twitter marketing training courses  business owners can get easy solutions and new marketing strategies. The second package for Twitter marketing training courses is B2C. In this package company owners are taught the tricks of promoting their products and services amongst the huge number of prospective customers in Twitter. How to get retweets, testimonials and rapport building are some of the components discussed in this Twitter marketing training course.

Though there are many social media training courses providers in the UK Panther always remain a step ahead striving to make their social media training UK always up to date and relevant to today’s business environment.

For more information about the Twitter marketing training courses and other social media for business  courses visit: http://socialmediatraining-uk.co.uk/

About Panther Internet Marketing Solutions:  Panther Interactive Marketing Solutions is a UK based social media training and marketing services company known to offer latest media marketing courses. They are offering pocket friendly Twitter marketing training courses that help the businesses best utilise the advantages of Twitter.

Marketing Maverick on the Move Peter.uk.com

This is the channel for a weekly meet up with Peter Wilkinson, thought leader and slightly maverick marketer.  Join Peter every Friday for a discussion centered around social media and digital marketing thought leadership – Topics will range across the spectrum of social media and digital marketing – how a company can benefit from adopting a social / digital culture within its whole organisation as well as in its external marketing channels.  Always on the move Peter may be presenting from clients’ offices, cafes, stations or airports, but he will be on line and ready to discuss topics of interest every Friday at 11.00 am.

Peter said, “To be a thought leader you need to be a little bit of a maverick. You need to challenge the status quo and think outside of the box”.

“Challenging the norm and pushing the boundaries with innovative thinking and ideas is what this channel is about. At 11.00 every Friday you can join me for a fifteen minute presentation with question and answer session.”

Peter will also be taking part in the monthly webinar summit starting at 11.00 on 9 May 2013

Peter’s first summit presentation will be – Solving the social media riddle and integrating social media into B2B marketing – Is it about content strategy, brand management, good campaign planning with measurable lead generation and ROI or a broader company wide strategic approach?

There are some fundamental questions that need to be examined:

• Who owns social media in the organisation?
• Who leads the social media initiatives?
• Should B2B marketers be looking beyond their traditional frame of reference?
• Is social media a company wide strategy issue or a campaign level tool to be integrated into the communications mix?
• What does or should a truly integrated social media marketing strategy look like in a B2B company?

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Plenty of social media advice dished out to brands recently has been of the “join in the conversation” variety – and up to a point that’s a perfectly valid thing to suggest. Social media has provided an invaluable platform for brands to talk directly to their consumers, to foster friendships and relationships with them and to influence them to buy. Social media training courses, though, are pointing out that there’s a whole neglected area of the social media conversation – what’s being said about the brand.

Twitter training courses and Facebook training courses are now dishing out some new and extremely valuable advice. Don’t talk – listen. That’s where, say the social media training courses, the really valuable interface between customers, stake holders and brands lies: not in persuading people into new sorts of relationship with your company, but in sitting back and really listening to what they say.

It makes sense. Every brand that follows the new advice played out in Twitter training course and Facebook training courses is experiencing a paradigm shift in the way that they view their interaction with their market. Suddenly social media is less about finding another platform to do a flashy dance on, and say “everyone look at me” – instead it has become about finding a way to listen carefully and directly to the opinions that really matter. Those of your end user, about your product.

Careful tracking of social media chatter about brands, products and initiatives accounts for a whole new industry – bespoke gadgets designed to trawl chatter for references to your brand message. According to the latest social media training, that’s an excellent idea. Listen first and speak later: that’s the message. Are you receiving?

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

I’ve actually blogged about this before, but it’s a favourite topic of mine – two, actually, golf and social media marketing – so I’m going to post again with specific reference to raising your bookings.

Social media advertising is not like advertising in the common sense of the word. When you use the social media to advertise, you are more interested in raising awareness of who you are and what you do than you are of generating a direct sales action.

For a golf course, this kind of social media marketing translates to a consistent presence in the social networks of your existing members. Combine photo updates with Tweets to let all members know of free tee off spaces and special offers and you’ll see your attendance rise automatically. Any pair of your members who may have been half thinking about enjoying a round today, when they see your Tweet telling everyone there’s a tee space and the weather is great (particularly if you back up your claims with a photo), are more than likely going to make the call to play, tipped into doing so by your gentle reminder.

That’s the real distinction between social media advertising and direct marketing. Social media marketing is about gentle reminders rather than stentorian claims.

You can use the same technology to fuel all sorts of extra business – announce competitions for specific age groups, for example, or invite a golf pro to show his or her stuff and Tweet limited places to play with him or her on the course. Anything that feels exclusive is fodder for the social network – built, as it is, on exclusivity – so take advantage.

As I’ve noted in other posts, there is also a broader sense in which social media marketing develops extra bookings. All of your own fans will have hundreds of non-fans in their own social spheres. The interlinked nature of the social network means that all of those non-fans are exposed to your club – making them potential future attendees.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Corporate energy is what your brand uses to drive itself forward. Lacklustre staff and off colour performances in your company lead to an anaemic brand and an inefficient use of your capital investments. Twitter marketing and Facebook marketing can have a direct effect on your corporate energy, both inside and outside the lines of the company.

Indeed, one of the biggest effects that Twitter and Facebook can have on your corporate energy is by blurring those lines. As soon as your brand starts to market using Twitter and Facebook tactics – which precludes actual advertising and instead requires that you listen, talk and influence your consumer – then it starts acting like a person, which makes it less distinguishable from the consumers you are talking with.

As a result, your Twitter marketing and Facebook marketing puts your brand on a collision course with real opinions and real emotions. Any positive opinion and/or emotion expressed as a result of something your brand “does” online is actually an expression of approval given directly to an employee, who has listened and spoken on behalf of your brand. Ergo, the Twitter marketing and Facebook marketing campaign (as long as it’s a good one, backed up by a good brand) starts to bring direct validation to the people who are employed to spread your brand message.

Internally, social media tools and techniques can be used to break down the regimented structure of your office. You’ll start playing to everyone’s strengths no matter where in the organisation their official job title actually sits. That means making your workforce feel more empowered to really help the brand, by using skills that they’re already proud of. Employees who are engaging with your public because they are good at it automatically raise their game – and so your brand energy starts pumping again.

Thought Leader and Social Media Pioneer

Powerful words for emotional marketing

Peter Wilkinson – Strategist and social media pioneer

Power words for emotional marketinghttp://www.freereports.net/powerwords.html

Here is a handy list of power words to help you with creating ad copy. People on the internet, for the most part, will buy from you first based on emotion.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

You may be wondering how to create new sales opportunities through social media ads, or even whether it is truly possible through digital marketing. The fact is that many leading brands and businesses are using social media ads to generate additional revenue, but the secret is in understanding several key factors before even starting an advertising campaign.

The first thing that needs to be clearly understood is why you want an advertising campaign to run through social media platforms in the first place. Vague answers such as ‘because everyone else is’, or ‘to increase sales’ won’t do – it’s important with social media marketing to be highly specific in terms of what you want to see happen as a result.

This means identifying your target audience, and knowing exactly what they are looking for, how they are looking for it, what drives them to commit to placing orders and exactly what it is that you can offer them. Having specific digital marketing goals in mind such as increasing the number of sales of a specific service to a specific age group or group of people in a specific location within a predetermined time frame is the sort of objective you need to have in mind when approaching a new social media marketing advertising campaign.

Once you have identified these precise objectives it will then be easier to decide with your chosen social media advertising company which social media platforms to target, since some may offer you a better chance of reaching your intended audience more effectively, or through a more effective means. This may involve you developing an ad campaign based on specific demographic information, keywords or a combination of the two. It will be important to carry out research in order to make sure you know clearly who your direct digital marketing competitors are, what keywords are already being used, and whether you are best competing directly in the same way or developing a niche alternative which is targeted slightly differently.

All of these stages and processes are important, since it will do no good at all to simply jump into the first social media platform you come across, put together what seems like a decent ad, and then paying to have it distributed widely. Having specific, measurable objectives in mind is the only truly effective way of creating new sales opportunities through social media ads.

Social Media Christmas !! Have a Look and Enjoy!!

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Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Reputation management has always been a critical part of a brand. That’s why PR people exist. As social media takes over the world, though, with its instant and all pervasive effect, the whole idea of reputation management takes on a much more serious and immediate connotation. These days, a flippant tweet can ruin a career and bring the reputation of your brand crashing down – in seconds.

Digital PR, as it is known, is there to guide your brand’s reputation – and to go into battle for you when you need it. The instantaneous nature of the web and the ease with which it is updated means fertile ground for attacks on your brand by competitors – without decent digital brand or reputation management you can be left severely damaged by a mistake you didn’t even make.

There are laws protecting you against this kind of thing – but without the services of a company that knows how to get erroneous tweets and comments taken down in a hurry, your brand can suffer the horrors of an ever expanding mesh of incorrect, malicious information designed to move you out the path of your competition. As such the key attribute of your reputation management partner should be 24/7 reactivity to any problem that lands in your lap.

On the proactive side, a reputation manager will be able to steer your brand profile by listening to the buzz surrounding your products and your campaigns. This is where the age of social media really comes into its own. All product manufacturers dream of being able to test the waters and deliver something consumers really want. With reputation management leading the way, you can decode the chatter and do exactly that. After all, what you produce is key to your reputation too.

Viralheat Social media monitoring & analytics

Peter at Moscow conference

Have you ever been to a party and been cornered by a self-opinionated, self-centred bore? Take away the drink, the food on sticks and the bad music and you might as well be describing the experience of half the consumers in the world when they go on their social media streams. There’s something about the social media that lends itself to the worst kinds of interactions as well as the best – self-obsessed brands yelling about their new products all the time, the online equivalent of a noisy toddler in a theatre.

The thing is: there’s an art to communication. People who know how to talk and listen, to engage and interact properly, have a better time at parties than people who don’t. In the long term, they make friends and find themselves in a position to influence others.

So today’s unpalatable truth for your brand may be this: unless you are one of the few, you’re probably acting like the Ancient Mariner. Loud, self-opinionated and boring, your incessant wittering about this season’s shoes is driving everyone potty – and more importantly, it’s driving them away.

A conversation is an art form, a gentle play of give and take. Your consumer wants to take useful things away from his or her interaction with you. He or she wants to feel that he or she is contributing something, that he or she is being heard, and that he or she is valued for what he or she knows and represents.

The key point around which your branding worries should revolve lies right at the heart of this. It’s a question: how do you make something that doesn’t really exist, and certainly isn’t a real person, have meaningful relationships with actual human beings?

It is unfortunately a lot easier to point out what not to do than it is to understand how you should proceed. Don’t talk at your consumer. Don’t advertise. Don’t make everything about you.

So here’s a thought: with social media opening the gates for consumers to own and shape the brands they love, why not give them the opportunity to start the conversation? After all, it’s a lot easier to engage with someone when you listen and they lead. Social media surveys can impart relevant information about customers, which can be used over time to turn them into friends – for example, by developing product-relative services (like proprietary apps) designed to genuinely enhance your consumer’s experience of your brand.

Peter Wilkinson | Social media consultant, social media speaker and international trainer

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 31 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

Social media has completely redefined the way in which a brand lives. Reputation is earned, these days, and is no longer controlled by the powerful corporation in the ivory tower.

The news is littered with examples of companies whose poor practices, be they in terms of customer service or tax dealings or treatment of workers, come out in the social media wash. In the short term, the effect these tarnished reputations have seems minimal. Vodafone is still a huge company with millions of customers. Boots still gets the lion’s share of everyday pharmaceutical and cosmetic purchases.

The thing is, social media is a slow burning candle. They’re also a forum in which users wait to see how brands respond to revelations about their errors. By not coming out with huge apologies and showing all their consumers what they intend to do about (in the case of our examples) massive tax avoidance, Boots and Vodafone both drive a wedge between themselves and their markets which – over time – they may never manage to remove.

The point is, brands no longer own their own reputations – or rather, they are no longer able to blindly insist that their reputation is a when it is in fact b. A brand is in control of its reputation until the moment it decides to ignore the realities of that reputation – at which point the consumer, over time and in the public spaces of the social media, systematically destroys it.

It seems hard for us to imagine at the moment – we are all so used to the power of the corporation being unassailable. But the fact remains that the market is opening itself without reserve to the scrutiny of social media – not because it wants to but because it has to. Soon there will be no information genuinely unavailable to the consumer: and at that point, the brand that thinks it can create its own image is the brand doomed to die.

Nokia is a fine case in point, actually. The former mobile phone giant simply refused to acknowledge its slackening reputation, and woke up one day to discover that no-one cared about its phones anymore. In a last ditch effort, the company rebranded and got a foothold in the smartphone market, where it is now climbing laboriously back up to the top.

Nokia’s near death experience was created by its consumers, who walked away in droves while the company effectively convinced itself that they weren’t. Consumer opinion – that Nokia phones were outdated and boring – was in direct opposition to the company branding: that Nokia phones were still good. Reality prevailed. If everyone who used to buy your phones thinks they are now not worth having, then your branding (which clearly states that they are worth having) is wrong.

How long will it take for companies living in a branding dream world to wake up? To a large extent that depends on the architecture of the dream world in question. The broadest truth, though, is this: the brand no longer lives in a high castle. It’s come down to the people.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

Street level advertising is the most powerful in the world. When people you know and trust put the word in your ear, you listen. Expert opinions count double, minimum, for the aspiring user of a certain class of product – whether that product is a phone, or a camera, or a surfboard, or a pair of shoes. Wherever there are experts whose use of a type of thing causes others to want to be able to do the same, there is fruitful ground for targeted brand advocacy.

The thing is, the advocacy you get from these people can be a two edged sword if you don’t start it right. So paying someone to do a bunch of adverts for you may cause some sales interest and may have measurable ROI. Money wise. But if you are adopting the paradigm shift and starting to measure ROI in your own reputation, you could be spending your investment capital more wisely elsewhere.

What people want is to see unsolicited testimonial, or to see people actually using your branded products in ways that inspire them. So rather than paying for an advocate to toe the party line, you need to start thinking outside the box. In fact, you might want to think about throwing the box away and getting a whole new set of terms to play with.

Here’s an idea: use your own customer to advocate your brand, through doing something with the products you produce. This doesn’t mean getting lame quotes from people to put on posters or on your website. Because the ugly truth is: no one trusts what they read on the web, cause everyone knows how easy it is to post fake stuff or advertorial stuff anywhere you like. Therefore: a few quotes from highly satisfied “customers” just don’t cut it anymore, specially where all the quotes sound suspiciously like they have been written by the same person.

No – what we are talking here is a whole new way of using the power of people. A random example: if you make anything that is used to make things, so a camera (which takes pictures) or music software, anything like this – stop advertising in the traditional way and run a nationwide competition for people who own your product. The best photos, the best tunes – whatever it is your real, people on the street customers are making with the products your brand supplies. That way your target market sees you reaching out; it sees real people doing amazing things with your products; and it gets them thinking “I want to do that too.”

At the end of the day – who cares what car insurance Iggy Pop has, or whether Gary Lineker likes crisps? These people may be loved and liked, but they’re not us and we know it. Even if a sportsperson did eat burgers (which most of us doubt), we’d hardly be likely to consider them expert witnesses when we know they’re being paid to rhapsodise. So instead, why not concentrate on liberating the joy of people who actually choose to use your products?

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

The concept of the brand advocate is gaining strength and currency as forward-thinking businesses realise just how little trust reposes in their relationship with their consumers. That’s a truth we’ve always had hovering over us of course – but with the dawn of the age of social media it has become something we can no longer afford to ignore. The brand advocate is not employed by the company, nor yet is he or she in any way beholden to it. So when he or she opens his or her mouth in praise of the brand and its products – people listen.

Now, there are advocates and there are advocates. Someone you have never met, for example, who tells you in a pub about this or that great item, is less trustworthy than a friend. Because humans automatically trust people they know over people they don’t and we also impart a good deal of trustworthiness or otherwise to encounters according to the environment in which they occur.

So for example – if you have an encounter with brand advocacy on a commercial radio or TV channel, in the form of an advert featuring someone famous (Iggy Pop selling his rock and roll soul to the corporate devil is a perfect example of how not to do this), you’re less likely to trust the information you receive, than if an actual friend of yours was telling you the same thing in your house.

Companies have long experimented with what might be termed weak brand advocates – either famous people, who can be seen as selling out and therefore no longer trustworthy; or “people in the street”, clearly actors and actresses pretending to be real people with real opinions. We don’t really trust either because we know a company is paying them to do the work.

Obviously the companies doing the paying are working on the right lines, though. There is already, and has been for some time, a recognition out there that brands can’t talk directly to their target audiences and be fully accepted.

The above isn’t to say that a famous person can never help a brand spread its word. It simply says that doing so in an obviously paid and advertorial way isn’t very useful to anyone.

What people really want, when they take a recommendation, is an opinion. Preferably, they want the opinion of someone they see as qualified to hold it – an expert, in common parlance, and a person of influence in the language of the marketplace.

Professional products, for instance software packages aimed at business, will be spoken of with most authority by other professionals. Unsolicited advocacy on the part of a successful person in the right field amplifies the advocate message for a specific professional product – to the point where the marketplace as a whole starts to pay more attention to it.

Bizarrely, the most closely related marketing practice to this is sponsorship. When people who do a certain sport see the best people in the world at that sport using a specific brand of shoe, they go and buy the shoe. Amplified advocacy works in much the same way.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

A huge chunk of a brand’s consumer base is now connected to an endless world of information. He or she gets his or her information through the social media via a multitude of devices, ranging from a home computer to a TV package to a smartphone. Even some cameras are now connected directly to social media locations.

This has implications for branding that aren’t fully understood yet. Or rather the implication is clear – but the industry as a whole is reluctant to face up to its new responsibly, rather like someone who has just been told they are to become a father for the first time. The marketing and branding industry is going through a period of adjustment.

The truth it is trying to face is this: a multichannel consumer, always connected, means there’s nowhere left to hide. Price structures can be toppled at the touch of a button, even right at the point of purchase. A customer can look up prices for an item he or she is about to buy, put it down, and walk away – only to buy it somewhere else where he or she can get it cheaper.

This is one stop short of unfair, as far as the brand is concerned – specifically where that brand has traditionally occupied bricks and mortar locations, for which it must pay rent and upkeep. The price of running a store is reflected in the cost of items sold from those stores – and so purely online suppliers, backed up by 30 day no quibble refund policies, are in a position to take a huge chunk of brand business.

There are two ways to deal with this, and both involve paying attention to the best points of your branding.

The first way is to make your brand so exclusive that you can only buy your products directly from you. If your branding is strong enough this can work – though you tend to find it only works like this where you already exist in a luxury product or service segment, in which a raised price and exclusivity are part of the original brand proposition. Some upmarket department stores have incorporated this into their branding, as too have most luxury restaurants, hotels and car manufacturers.

The other option, ably exemplified by a range of modern brands, is to make your brand so cool that people would rather be seen shopping in your store, or buying from your site, than from third party distributors. Among the best exemplars of this kind of branding are (as ever) Apple – which has made its Apple Store such a hub of techno-cool that fans prefer to go there and spend more, than miss out on the experience by buying somewhere else; and Vibram, whose barefoot running shoes command a following so desperate to get the benefits of proprietary technology that they will pay much more to use the Vibram site and get the same product, than they will to use a third party distributor and worry that the product they get may be fake.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

What is a brand advocate? In simple terms, he or she is someone who espouses he values of your brand through choice, with no payment and no financial connection to your company. He or she is trusted by his or her peers. So when he or she chooses to evangelise on behalf of your brand, people listen.

The brand advocate is the ultimate goal of all modern branding. Modern branding is about making people so excited by the things you do that they just have to tell their friends. When they do, the interest you generate is better than the hit rate for any advert or marketing campaign.

From the start, we need to do away with old words (like “campaign”) that make us think in the wrong way. A campaign has direct, measurable results with a core goal – like getting everyone to buy your latest smartphone. Branding is more long term, and has results measured not in units sold but in the raised profile of your whole enterprise.

In a straitened financial universe, companies are understandably obsessed with the immediate retrieval of their bottom line. Understandably but misguidedly. Because real business success is long haul success – and that means accepting gradual increases in interest to build a genuinely loyal advocate base over time, rather than going for a quick hit and walking away.

Without wanting to descend too far into crudity, the analogy that probably fits best is one of relationships. One night – or a lasting marriage? Sometimes by holding back and really getting to know someone, you can develop a relationship that turns into the best thing that ever happened to either of you. If you are able to go slow and take the time to smell the roses, then the end result is one that has more strength and potency than any flash in the pan passion.

A brand advocate is someone who wants to stick with your business as it grows. Someone who gets genuinely excited about new product or service releases – and who will happily tell all of his or her friends about them too. He or she has the tools to go out into the world and create whole new niche markets for you. With the one implement that no amount of advertising or campaigning can every really create: word of mouth.

It’s every advertiser’s dream to have people whispering enthusiastically about a client’s product. When people talk to people, things happen.

Of course there’s a whole world of conversation happening digitally now, all the time. It’s collectively known as the social media, and it is – among other things – the index at which the brand marketing and word of the mouth are able to interact.

Social media can be used to create brand advocacy – but it takes time. Again; you can’t expect a marriage to blossom overnight. Rather, you have to (exactly as you would in a courtship) take the time to listen, to remember and to put the interests of someone else at the forefront of your actions. Do this properly and you may get hitched for life!

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

There’s a lot of talk in the marketing world about “emotion”; “truth”; and “trust”. But can brands really spark fire in the breasts of their consumers – or do people just like owning some things more than others?

It seems unlikely, for example, that someone would die for a smartphone – whereas one can readily imagine the same hypothetical consumer throwing himself or herself in front of a train to save a child. So we have to ask whether the words we are using are the right ones. In a spirit of honesty motivated by the increased transparency of the modern branding world, it’s time to redefine our terms and find out what we really mean to the people who buy into our propositions.

There are gradations of feeling. A person can still get passionate about something he or she is not hopelessly in love with. It is this feeling that motivates brand preferences – and it is this feeling that can be channelled to create brand advocates.

Why? Because the kind of feeling we are talking about here is something more complex than love. Love is unthinking and almost without choice. As the old adage tells us, you don’t get to choose your family and you don’t choose who you fall in love with. What you do pick, are your friends.

The two sayings alluded to above have a common thread: choice. Both identify how some relationships and feelings in our life, normally the most powerful and overriding ones, are instilled in us without any request on our part that they happen. We have no choice, we have no control.

The brand message is aimed at the other part of the emotions – the bit that lets us choose what we like and what we don’t. To understand it best it is first necessary to recall a time when we were younger.

Teenagers are living examples of self-branding. It is, then, little wonder that the most obvious and powerful branding is aimed at teenagers and young adults – who are striving to identify themselves with a range of likes and dislikes that – if we are completely honest – are often quite arbitrarily chosen. Indeed one of the prime criteria for teenage obsessions is often simple reaction against everyone else’s likes – if the parent’s generation really liked x then it is practically guaranteed that their children will, instead, like y.

Why? Because everyone wants to be their own person. They want evidence that they are capable of choosing for themselves, despite the truths inherent in the two sayings we looked at earlier. So they build a personality by finding things to like and things to dislike.

This is where branding steps in. Because really effective branding isn’t going for blind love at all. For someone to click that like button on a Facebook page, we’re not looking for blind adoration but conscious choice. So the brand isn’t trying to live in the heart like a lover or a brother. Instead, it wants to live in the mind.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

It’s a funny thing, branding. For decades, potentially for a whole century, businesses have sold to the public on the basis of a created persona – a feeling, if you like, which the customer is supposed to identify with. The brand develops itself as funky, or trendy, or reliable, or established and sophisticated – and the target market flocks under its banner accordingly.

So here’s the rub. In the social media age, if that branding is a lie then there’s nowhere to hide. The customer who buys into the branding, only to find that the proposition he or she thought was true is just advertising hoo-hah, is the customer who brings a world of bad publicity down on the head of the brand in question.

How a company responds to this unveiling can dictate the future success or failure of its brand. Apple, often wheeled out as an exemplar of great branding, is a case in point – on both sides of the coin.

Around six months ago, Apple started selling a new version of its iPad in the UK. This iPad was branded as “4G”. Which it was – if you lived in a country that had access to the 4G network – which the UK doesn’t. The branding was revealed to be misleading – and Apple, initially kicking, finally capitulated and offered a full refund to all customers in the UK who’d bought the product.

Expensive mistake or invaluable social media PR exercise? The truth is that instances like this are both – but well managed, they can buy PR capable of rescuing the brand from the flames. Over time, the value of such PR outstrips the financial outlay required to refund hundreds of customers the price of an iPad.

This is an archetype of something approaching good practice in the social media world. What it isn’t, yet, is ideal practice – which of course would be to brand truthfully and so not have to weather these PR storms. Bear in mind that Apple kicked and moaned for a few weeks before it adopted the hands-up stance. While its eventual capitulation earned it plaudits in the PR stakes, you have to suspect that over time attitudes like this aren’t going to be enough.

The truth of the matter is that the connectivity of our daily world leaves consumers with power at their fingertips. As yet it is a power they do not fully understand how to wield. But they will: and when they do, the brand whose proposition errs even slightly from its own reality is going to wish it hadn’t.

We are living in an age of real change. Marketing, which has always sought to positively spin mediocrity, or to make something that really ought to be taken for granted sound like a key selling point, is coming up against a glass wall, through which its every move can be seen and its every claim examined. Over time, the brand that really tells the truth will be the brand that rules the world.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

History is littered with examples of messages that collapsed because their owners couldn’t let go of them. Political ideas; campaign promises; and most frequently the ideas of brands. A brand comes along with a proposition, on which it hopes to sell its product or its service. People buy into the message. But when they interact with the product or service they have bought, they discover that it doesn’t express the brand’s message in a way they can understand.

This is a crucial point in the life cycle of any brand. For a proactive, responsive and ultimately successful brand, it’s the moment where initial concept becomes consumer reality – and where feedback can start being incorporated into the future branding of a product, a service or a company. For the “knee jerk” brand, which can’t accept when its message misfires or its product fails to deliver, it’s the beginning of the end.

Let’s stick with politics or a moment to expand our example. In the UK, politics has become more of a branding exercise than ever – a process that really started towards the end of the 1990s when “Blair’s Britain” and “New Labour” became slogans – buzzwords with a selling proposition. The response, over time, of the buying public – i.e. everyone who voted – was essentially customer feedback; the failure of the governing party to listen to that feedback (the second Iraq War) caused the reality of the brand message to diverge from the requirements of the people who thought they owned it – the party in question. So they were voted out and a new lot stepped in to take their place.

There’s a key phrase in that last paragraph, and that phrase is this: “the people who thought they owned it”. Because the real ownership of a brand lies with its public, its consumers – the people who ultimately choose whether or not they are going to espouse the virtues of a company or publically deride it for hypocrisy/lack of value/a failure to stick to its proposition.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. If you are a company, you can no longer create the kind of brand you think your target market will feel a connection with – and then not follow through on your promise. This means, if you say you will deliver unlimited broadband speeds, then that’s exactly what you have to do. If you don’t, your branding diverges. You carry on belting out a message that is essentially proven to be a lie; while your public shouts the truth from every social media treetop in the street.

At this point, who owns the brand? Whatever the misguided hypothetical company here might think, it isn’t them. They are in the exact same position as the government that went to war – sitting in an ivory tower congratulating themselves on doing what the customer wants, when in reality that customer is sharpening its collective knife and preparing to revolt.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 January 2013 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant,

Social Media Papers Written By Peter Wilkinson

A series of papers written by Peter, the UK’s leading social media consultant

What Part Does Social Media Play in Innovation and Leadership of the Innovation Process?
Peter presented this at the House of Lords in London	Buy Now or contact us
INDEX   Introduction   1.0 Trends 2.0 What part does social media play in innovation? 2.1 How do we create a culture of innovation in our enterprise? 2.2 To help people innovate we need a social innovation network. 2.3 PACT: Process, advocates, culture, and technology. 3.0 The role of leadership and social media in the innovation process. 3.1 Leadership role in the innovation process. 3.2 Social media opens the scope of innovation and maximises the impact of leadership in the process. 3.3 Benefits of combining leadership, social media and innovation. 4.0 Risks. 5.0 Measures and benefits. 6.0 Summary. Introduction The following paper reviews the use of social media in innovation and the leadership issues that need to be addressed to reap the rewards of a social business. The following are the areas that this paper briefly covers: - - The place of social media in the innovation process. - How social media impacts the research that drives the innovation process. - Leadership and social media within the innovation process. - How management should harness social media to manage the innovation process and risks. - Can using social media in the innovation process provide competitive advantage? - Will using social media in the innovation process reduce time to market? - Impacts on ROI and risk. - The impact of the above on the brand both inside and outside.   The main argument in this paper is that social media has become an enabler and enhancer of innovation inside companies. To take advantage of this the organisation needs to change its culture and way of working. New tools and a new mind set are required. The status quo in management thinking has had a paradigm shift and leaders need to re-think their approaches and style to change and adapt their culture so it can take advantage of this opportunity.   The innovation process needs to be hard-wired into the digital and social media communication channels. This will allow companies to use the insights, structured and unstructured data, which is held inside of the employee, consumer and stakeholder spheres. Not so long ago, when communication was glacial in its movement the whole thing was different. We now live in the social media age. The innovation process should be viewed as enterprise wide social innovation. The new culture needs to establish an open environment that welcomes ideas, collaboration, contribution and evaluation.   - How does this fit inside of corporate portfolio management? - What changes in leadership style and skills are required? - How is this managed and facilitated throughout the organisation together with 2nd and 3rd party corporate suppliers involved in the innovation and delivery of any products/services? - How is the process wrapped together to create new products, services, systems and procedures that can be capitalised on. - How is down side risk managed? - What are the real threats?   The major risk of not being adaptive, engaging and developing into an enterprise 2 social organisation is that your competitors will. They will create more organisational energy that will flow to the brand and drive stronger brand advocacy. They will have an energised, lively and engaged culture that is adaptive and will out-innovate you in all facets of their business. Their time to market will be reduced and they will benefit from reduced costs and better management of risk through closer team collaboration and communications……………………. **price is inclusive of VAT ***A PDF will be emailed to you when you have purchased
If you need social media training look at the Panther online training academy online social media training Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Social Media Papers Written By Peter Wilkinson

A series of papers written by Peter, the UK’s leading social media consultant

Social Media, Organisational Energy, Branding and Programme Management
Peter presented this paper at the Association of Project Management (APM) conference in London	Buy Now or contact us
INDEX. Introduction.   1.0 Social Media. 1.1 Social Media Definitions. 1.2 Social Media Overview. 2.0 Organisational Energy and Branding. 3.0 The Social Media Framework. 3.1 Social Media Strategy Relates to Investment, Value and Culture. 3.1.1 Investment. 3.1.2 Business Value. 3.1.3 Organisational Culture. 4.0 Phases of Socialisation within the Organisation. 4.1 Early Adopters. 4.2 Socially Tactical Organisations. 4.3 Socially Integrated Organisations. 4.4 Fully Socialised Culture and Organisation. 5.0 Leadership Phases in Socialising an Organisation. 5.1 Leadership in the Early Adopter Phase. 5.2 Leadership in the Socially Tactical Organisations. 5.3 Leadership in Socially Integrated and Socialised Organisations. 5.4 Programme Management. 5.4.1 A Day in the Life of a Programme Manager. 5.4.2 Setting Some Guidelines. 6.0 Management Needs to Change in the Socialised Organisation.   Introduction. The following are the accompanying notes of the presentation given to the Association of Project Management on 30 June 2011.  They review social media in the context of organisational energy, brand and programme management. Organisational energy is the degree to which a company’s employees engage in helping the company achieve its goals and the level at which they are willing to contribute their intellectual power, skills, emotions and passion to help the whole organisation to succeed. Organisational energy has two measurable dimensions: level and direction. A headless chicken has energy without direction. A punishment work team has direction without energy. The high energy organisation not only energises its people but also channels that energy purposefully towards results. The flow of energy travels from the organisation to the brand, turning the organisation’s brand into aLe Manscar.  Lots of power, energy and controlled direction, well most of the time!  The higher the organisational and brand energy, the more profit will result. Social media networks can act as the arteries that let the energy flow through the organisation.  They are the informal and formal channels that will feed and connect all the disparate parts of the culture to their common goals.  This however does not come without risks, which need to be understood and catered for, in the evolution of the social media systems within the organisation’s cultures.  There are many organisations that offer ‘their solution’, but it would be a perfect world if there was a one stop solution for every culture, with all that culture’s nuances and idiosyncrasies, let alone the myriad of different channels and cultures you will find in the markets and marketing channels.  The key to success here is, understanding the security zones and the spaces that need to be created.  From a totally secure, behind the fire wall, through a middle interactive space, to the totally public space.  Understanding the flow of data and how that data is managed through those spaces. There are a number of dangers. That organisations do not seize the day but their competitors do and social media gives their competitors a competitive advantage that overwhelms them. That organisations do not control the socialisation of their culture and social media overwhelms them, possibly disastrously. That for organisations to seize the day there are changes they need to make to themselves and their culture, that go beyond social media. That organisations do not understand that social media is not just about technology, communications, data flow and risk.  It goes far beyond these areas.  It needs to be encapsulated and considered in all transformational change programmes and may warrant a transformational change programme in its own right. That organisations do not consider how social media impacts the overall return on investment blueprint. A simple change programme is a good place to pilot and prove the potential of using social media to create a flow of energy. To achieve high productivity in an organisation, its management has to create a culture that engages its employees and engenders a high degree of interest in the success of the programmes and company initiatives. This high interest will generate a high level of engagement and passion for the company’s success, which in turn will generate high levels of organisational energy. If we start from the point where we agree that helping employees manage their energy, not their time will reduce employee stress and increase employee morale, we can see how a socialised organisation will bring significant rewards.  The socialised organisation needs a shift in the way leaders manage employees.  We need to view employees as human beings not simple resources to be managed in a project or programme.  We need to invest time in meeting their core needs so we can harvest more of their energy towards a directed goal or outcome.  People feel more energised, inspired and are able to cope with their personal and corporate pressures when they are emotionally looked after.  Communicating and engaging with them on a social level will play a big part of this process. By addressing what people feel within the organisation and how that is channelling through the informal networks within your culture, you can identify and manage the organisation’s energy. To manage energy it is necessary for us to discover where it comes from, what influences it, understand how to focus it, and find ways to release it with control and direction. In the socialised organisation the silo barriers have been removed.  The trust and transparency that has resulted from the openness, dynamically evolving processes and easy flow of communications enables a positive flow of energy into the organisation and brand. Organisational energy comes from four sources, each with an emotional and rational element – Connection, Content, Context and Climate. Use the social media channels to identify your organisation’s energy and, re-direct it for better performance.  The socialised organisation will use social media to break down the barriers, build cross silo teams and encourage innovation and collaboration outside of the formal organisational structure. Social media has, metaphorically, removed the corporate wall and the brand image is growing into a reflection of the people and culture of the company or organisation.  The brand energy is channelling from the energised organisational culture.  Markets and customers interacting with social media messages will re purpose the messages adding additional bits, that they wish to add, passing the message on to their herd or tribe within the internal and / or external markets.  In essence the markets and customers are now creating the brand and this is directly linked to the emotional energy flowing from the organisation. Every transformational programme needs to consider social media.  How it will help at a project and programme level and moreover how it may contribute to the organisation becoming a fully socialised culture. ………………….. **price is inclusive of VAT ***A PDF will be emailed to you when you have purchased
If you need social media training look at the Panther online training academy online social media training Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Peter at Moscow conference

Peter, a UK based social media consultant considers reciprocal learning and business training.  One of the most concrete ways to consolidate something you have just learned is to write about it, or to try to teach it to someone else. Either occupation requires that you arrange the information you have been given in a way that can make sense to a third person – and you can’t communicate effectively with a third person unless you fully understand what you are saying.

In terms of teaching staff and raising the level of overall knowledge enjoyed by the corporate animal, blogging has a two-way cut. Let’s say an employee has just watched an online video composed by another member of his or her organisation, which aims to train new workers on a specific aspect of the brand’s identity and business. Now let’s say he or she is requested, at the end of the video, to compose a blog for the corporate wiki describing what he or she has just learned and responding to it.

In the first instance, the act of composing this blog will force the employee to really engage with his or her subject matter. By asking him or her to make an active response, to say what he or she thinks after his or her learning session, the training team is also asking the new employee to get actively involved in thinking with the company.

During the composition of his or her blog, the knowledge doesn’t just go in, them – it gets thought about, turned over in the mind and finally conveyed as a synthesis of understanding and comment.

This is what we all do when we respond to news articles or other posts in our own social media streams. Well thought out comments (which tend to stand out from the crowd incidentally) become expansions of the themes initially raised by the media to which they are responding.

As such, the new employee’s blog may generate a ream of conversation, which helps further consolidate his or her learning – but which also strengthens the knowledge of other company employees. This happens when a more seasoned employee spots a slight error or responds to a fresh take. The more seasoned employee,  by using his or her larger store of corporate knowledge to build his or her response to the original blog, both enlarges the knowledge of the original blogger and forces him or herself (that is, the more seasoned employee) to evaluate and explain clearly his or her own store of information.

Furthermore, the blog and all its subsequent conversations and responses forms a kind of feedback for the training team. If the blog is woefully off base, it is clear that the training team must evaluate its own knowledge and find more coherent ways of communicating it. If it is bang on target, then the training team is able to self-monitor and know that it is currently working in the right way.

Social media is about more than just training, or just expressing opinions. It is about sharing the combined power of everyone’s knowledge to keep on learning and growing.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 December 2012 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant,

Peter Wilkinson Speaking at the HR Conference in London

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

 Peter Wilkinson Speaking at the IT Conference in Moscow

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Peter at Moscow conference

Peter, the UK’s leading social media consultant, explains: Using social media technology to develop internal learning is the new rock and roll, as far as corporate advancement is  concerned. If your brand wants to engage with its consumers properly, it is now pretty much accepted that it must first engage and enthuse its own employees. The way to do this is by empowering your workforce through knowledge – and the way to do that is to set up an internal social media group or page where employees may gather to crowd source the things they need to know.

To take the most obvious example of group learning and apply it to your own brand – Wikipedia is used by millions of people every day. It’s a collaborative effort that appears to enshrine a remarkable truth: people love to share their expertise so much, that they will do so for free and without lying. Yes, there are instances of false of fake pages on the site, but these are few and far between. In almost every case, the knowledge you get from this source is true to the best of everyone’s knowledge and belief. It fundamentally enhances the endeavour of anyone trying to get an understanding of a subject or enable themselves to work and think in a specific area with a solid grounding.

Creating internal wikis is an excellent way to promote learning and knowledge within your company. A wiki can be used for a variety of things – from blogging about currently important topics within your brand’s industry to storing resources for employees.

One of the biggest truths unveiled by the rise and use of wikis is that people will always take the trouble to learn provided they know where to look. The problem with learning at work historically is always that people were afraid to ask – when there’s a central wiki in place, they don’t need to. If everything any one could ever want to know about the operations of a brand and its company is in one place, then there’s no fear about looking stupid trying to find it. You go where you know you have to and you do the learning you know you need to.

Social media, of course, has unleashed another powerful learning agent into the workforce – the helpful expert. People aren’t just happy sharing their knowledge in predesigned chunks, as they would on a wiki entry. They’re also happy responding to discussions where their input would be very helpful.

In practice this can range from answering questions on a wiki forum, to becoming a sort of on call expert for a specific topic or knowledge area. In both cases, companies are benefitted by habits that people have been developing in their own social media use over the last five years. Facebook, for example, is full of people updating their statuses with questions and requests for help – which people who can, love to answer with genuine offers of assistance.

It’s all very heartening, really. At the heart of the social media learning experience is the extant knowledge of people just like us.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 December 2012 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Outsource Your Social Media

• To discuss the scope of your project and receive a quote please ring Peter on 07930330125 or email him on peter@peter.uk.com

Outsource your social media campaigns or use online and In-house social media training so you can run your own

For your interest, we are now offering an outsourced social media operative working exclusively on your account for a full man month or half a man month:  They would work in your business hours’ time frame, so global time frames can be accommodated.

•  Full man month (160 hours): £2500 + VAT per month
•  Half man month (80 hours): £1500 + VAT per month

You may use the resource for social media listening, managing the twitter streams or updating your Facebook and so on

There is no long term contract.  You buy a month or half month at a time on a rolling basis.

•  Just so you know, we can also offer you this service in blocks of ten hours a month, in your business time zone.  The blocks may also be used for SEO or PPC as well

The hourly rate is a little bit more, but it gives you total flexibility and you can start with just ten hours.

Then progress to twenty or thirty hours as you see the ROI coming back

 In House Social Media Training 

•  To discuss your requirement and to book a date please ring Peter on 07930330125 or email him on peter@peter.uk.com
  

Peter at Moscow conference

 Online Social Media Training

•  To set up your online training academy account or discuss terms for volume training seats please ring Peter on 07930330125 or email him on peter@peter.uk.com
  

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 November 2012 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

The C Level Manager needs to understand the implications of social media strategy in order to understand her or his place within an organisation. As brand management is altered to behave in a more social network-esque fashion (teams and segmented offices are becoming a thing of the past as social media style communication assembles “taskforces” to address immediate business issues), the whole leadership role of the C Level manager has suddenly been amplified.

Simply put: Peter, Social Media Consultant suggests that all leaders need to be continuously engaged in the social media conversation. That enables them to do two things: first, to keep a constant finger on the current pulse of customer and stake holder opinion about the performance of the company; and second, to ensure that their findings are used to influence the behaviour of our previously mentioned taskforces.

The upshot of the new social media strategy is that communication is becoming the most valuable tool in any business’ box of tricks. As a brand exposes itself daily to multiple social media streams, it becomes the job of leaders to find and encourage excellent communicators in every area of the company.

It’s no longer the case that team leaders and departmental managers do all the talking for the brand. From the customer’s point of view, it is now the brand that speaks. Social media strategy points out the good leadership in these circumstances is entirely dependent on the ongoing social media conversation – in effect, the C Level Manager should be completely involved in that conversation so he or she knows both what customers and stake holders are feeling about the brand; and how his or her staff are equipped to hold up the brand’s end of the chat.

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Peter, UK social media consultant speaks internationally on social media strategy, ‘The Social Company’ and company culture, driving innovation and company-customer collaboration through  social media, social media marketing  and social media in HR at conferences internationally from London to Moscow to Marbella.  Working at the highest level, I help leaders and companies understand how they should bring social media into their strategy and realise its potential.

Panther Social Media  offer a range of social media services from social media strategy development for external  and internal marketing, social media recruitment strategy for HR and full programme management of transformational programmes to bring social media into a company’s culture with appropriate governance.

Working with boards and chairman of large global corporations to small SME companies I bring an expert and practical perspective to developing a marketing mix for internal and external social media strategy | Social media branding | Social media marketing.

Our social media strategy | marketing services cover the full spectrum from senior board briefing and director mentoring through social media strategy development to the full range of tactical services necessary for executing an internal and external social media strategy.

I am founder of the LinkedIn group social media marketing UK #SMMUK. This is a vibrant and buzzing group for people who wish to find out more about social media strategy | marketing.

My Blog http://socialmediastrategy.org.uk/blog/

Specialities
Social Media Strategy | Internal and External

- SMM board briefing, coaching & International speaking
- Social Brand monitoring – Investigations – Reputation
- SMM Brand energy transformational programmes
- SMM into the marketing mix

Social media consultant
Digital marketing | Strategy
Digital public relations
Social media optimisation
Search engine marketing
Search engine optimisation
PPC and Social PPC
Message strategy
Communications strategy
Integrated communications
Strategic marketing management

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Peter at Moscow conference

Peter, the UK’s leading social media consultant, considers how you develop social media training so it is effective for the whole company.  The change to social media based learning, which in the long term is intended to create brand advocates not only of employees but of the consumers they serve, takes time. While the initial realisation – that using social media to share knowledge interdepartmentally makes a single learning animal out of a whole company – is immediate and inspiring, the mechanics of putting it properly to work can be confusing and time consuming.

The end result is worth it of course. Find the keys to a good transition and you have the ability to take your brand and turn it into the knowledge-filled, advocate-making being you want it to be.

The core of any successful transition is understanding where you want to end up. Let’s not forget that using social media based knowledge sharing to enhance the overall unity and sense of a brand is something of a paradigm shift. To make this shift without frightening your workforce or your consumer, you need a clear idea before you start of where the brand should be internally once the dust has settled.

Plenty of brands are making the move to educate their workforce using social media. Often this education takes the form of an internal training group or panel, whose role within the corporate structure is nothing more nor less than providing the training and knowledge needed by each person as and when that knowledge is required.

The mechanics of such a group are likely to be grounded in social media. The idea being that no one individual knows every answer to every problem that faces a brand, or every question raised during the course of a working day. A collection of individuals, however, linked by a shared ownership of a part of a social media presence, can represent the whole knowledge available to a company. By making this collection of individuals available permanently, a brand is able to treat its own workforce in the same way that public facing companies try to treat their customers – providing expert answers and help for every situation related to the use of or involvement with a series of products or services.

The actual transfer of knowledge is made more flexible by social media, which occupies a strange space between the public and the private, the formal and the informal. Thanks to a range of supported devices, ranging from small smartphones to desktop computers, social media learning can be conducted in a manner appropriate not only to subject but to context. Mobile devices may even aid on the job learning by effectively becoming a handheld tool with which employees on the move can interrogate the shared hive knowledge of the learning circle.

Group learning is what people do. When the internal and external components of a brand’s social media presence are connected, employees begin to learn from consumers and consumers start learning from employees. The archetype of this type of learning is the advice forum – where employees learn about issues currently affecting their brand from consumers, and consumers learn how to fix their problems from company experts.

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

Peter, the UK’s leading social media consultant, considers the benefits of developing a brand social culture internally.  When a business develops its social culture internally, it should start seeing tangible benefits in terms of employee’s drive, their behaviour and their desire to work on behalf of the company. Once these effects are seen the efficacy of the social media model of internal brand advocacy becomes clear. Unfortunately it is often the case that brand decision makers need to see the evidence before they make the call – and of course if they can’t see those effects before they make that call, nothing ever gets done.

So here are a few reasons to take the plunge and start thinking in terms of social media for developing an internal species of brand advocacy.

Once teams in side an organisation start to use social media to learn about their brand, their products and their services, you start a ball rolling. In loose terms the ball is defined as an organisational shot in the arm – a creation of a culture of knowledge sharing and interaction that can be sorely lacking in large companies.

What happens is this. Departments lose their boundaries and definitions. People with the right knowledge and skills from anywhere in the company are able to help the person or people in current need of knowledge, because they are the ones best placed to do so the quickest. So suddenly the organisation loses its old ways of keeping to departmental confines, and starts putting together teams on the fly – knowledge sharing teams of experts, created in immediate response to a current need.

This is how social media works. People use influence and knowledge in the proper combinations to deal with situations as they arise. Properly used, this means social media empowers large quantities of a workforce with only a few strokes –a much more responsive and fruitful way of doing things, and one that brings the whole company together in recognition of the combined power of its individual sources of knowledge.

A corollary of this is that social media suddenly gives the brand as a whole, or the company if you prefer, a much more powerful capability to learn. Social media has a corporation acting as a whole (which by the way is what “corporation” is supposed to mean) – and so it is able to learn as a whole, and use its knowledge as a whole. Simply put – social media makes companies learn better and quicker.

There’s a massive cost benefit at work here too. Because when employees are effectively teaching each other using an existing social media site or tool, then the company no longer has to pay for expensive training days or other initiatives. There’s even no time lost to training days – learning is done across the board, as it is required. Teaching is given by those most effectively placed to do so, without any special arrangements being made beforehand.

Social media turns a segmented and sometimes internally uncommunicative beast into a holistic animal – something that really works and responds to challenges as one. Bringing back, as noted, the true sense of the word corporation – one body made of many minds.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 November 2012 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Peter at Moscow conference

Peter, your UK social media consultant, considers why you should keep social media social.

There are two key facts with which a brand should be concerned:

1: There will always be occasions when the actions of the brand, as expressed through a delegate (an employee or a department) are not sufficiently satisfying to a customer; and

2: The best way to solve a problem is to talk about it.

In other words – when you engage your customers in solving the problems they encounter with your brand, that in itself becomes an act of brand advocacy. It also becomes a situation in which social media may be used to turn your apparently disgruntled consumer into a brand advocate.

Because social media is visible and immediate, it’s not just the consumer with a problem who can see how your brand handles the issue. Every consumer who is attached to your social media page gets to see how your customer services department deals with complaints.

So actively involving your consumer in the search to resolve his or her complaint successfully becomes a great way to show all your other consumers that your brand is responsive and interested – two of the key definitions of a brand about which people shout. You talk, you listen and you engage the customer in the whole process of finding a good solution to his or her problem – and that becomes a living advert for your brand in the eyes of everyone else who is looking.

In order for this kind of social media interaction to work properly, you need to be able to rely on your staff. That means proper training and most importantly it means access to the right kind of knowledge. In order for staff members to give efficient customer service in the visible arena of the social media, they must have the know-how to solve the customer’s problems and the authority to do so without recourse to anyone else.

This forestalls one of the most common complaints with modern customer services, which is that the consumer finds it impossible to receive a satisfactory answer to his or her problem. Often this is due to staff being trained to follow a customer services script, from which they find it impossible to deviate.

If staff are instead trained to embody the values of a brand and to use their initiative in delivering solutions to customer problems, two good things happen:

1: Your customers start getting effective, efficient customer service that is really designed to relate to their specific issue, and:

2: Your workforce feels a sense of self-worth and importance, which makes it more likely to feel the genuine affection for your brand that is required for true brand advocacy.

Remember, everyone can see your discussions on social media. When consumers see that your staff are acting fairly and smartly to bring about resolutions to the unfortunate occasions when things don’t work as planned, they will begin to talk about you in glowing terms. Of course, customer service is one of the greatest things you can get people evangelising about too. If your consumers start to advocate your brand on the strength of your customer service, then you have it made.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 November 2012 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant,

Peter, the UK’s leading social media consultant, reviews words that provoke an Emotional Response –  Marketing firms have an inside secret that helps them to write compelling content and advertisements. They know there are certain words with the English language that, when read, create an emotional response. The big names in marketing use those words every day to write compelling copy that increases the potential for higher sales volume.

Those words are words that conjure a specific positive thought, or pull on the emotional senses that each of us have. They make certain implications that give us warm fuzzes about the products or services we review, and the security needed to trust the company involved. Those words also add an urgency, another secret in marketing, which compel people to act before they “miss out” on something.

absolutely accurate advantage aggressive already amazing approved attractive authentic bargain beautiful better big bonus celebrate challenge colourful colossal commanding complete confidential convenient crammed delivered dependable direct discount easily effective electrify enchanting endorsed enormous essential everlasting excellent exciting exclusive expand experienced expert exquisite extraordinary extravagant famous fantastic fascinating foolproof force foremost fortune full gallant genuine gift gigantic golden greatest guaranteed helpful highest honour huge hypnotise immaculate immediately impressive improved incredible indescribable informative inspect instructive interesting invincible largest latest lavishly liberal lifetime limited limitless lowest magic magnificent magnify mammoth matchless maximum miracle noble noted odd outperforms outstanding overpower personalised pioneer popular powerful practical preferred private professional profitable proven quality quickly radiant rare recommended reduced refundable reliable remarkable revealing revolutionary scarce scorecard seasoned secrets security selected sensational simplified sizable skilled solid sparkle special spirit startling stimulate strange strong sturdy substantial successful superior surprise tempting terrific tested timeless tremendous turbocharged ultimate unconditional unearth unique unlimited unparalleled unprecedented unsurpassed unusual urgent useful valuable wealth weird wonderful wondrous you.

Incorporating these words into your content will help generate the emotions needed to move potential customers from potential to customers. You need to inform your visitors while also giving them adequate reasons to act upon your information.  By adding some of the words from above, you can add a time constraint to your offering that compels people to take advantage of it. Failure to add a time constraint can allow someone to bookmark your proposal and then forget about it. By adding a time constraint, you compel them to act now, not later. Why would you want to spend all that time in design to generate the emotions needed to compel a visitor to buy only to allow them to bookmark the site and forget about it? Implementing the emotional marketing strategies will set you well on your way to higher profits through increased sales volume.

It is little wonder that so many businesses look towards social media when they start to build and develop an international brand. For a start, social media in itself is an international medium, and it’s easy to transcend and break international boundaries without even realising what has been achieved. Therefore, with the right plans, considerations and strategies, there has never been a better time to build an international brand with the help of social media.

Peter, your UK based social media consultant suggests, when discussing how social media can help a legal social media brand become an international commodity, it is first essential to discuss and cement what exactly is meant by a brand, and furthermore what the benefits of becoming a brand and maintaining that image might mean to you and the prospects of your legal firm.

So, What is Branding?

Branding can be described as the personality which accompanies your product and your legal firm. Whether you choose to be known as high powered, customer focused or international and capable, it is this association which your customers will remember as they get to know your brand.

Branding is applicable to any number of businesses, including your legal firm and can have a remarkable difference on sales and profits.

Once a customer gets to know your brand, they will begin to trust your products and services more. For example, a retailer of confectionery might find that a customer who loves their biscuits and cakes is more likely to try a new product they offer simply because they know they can trust the company whose products they already enjoy.

Branding goes a little deeper than trust though and it is this perspective which can really help to improve the fortunes of your international legal practice. There is a psychological aspect to branding and as well as evoking feelings of trust, there can also be beliefs, attitudes, memories and certain perceptions (a feeling of power, victory or innocence) which become attached to a brand over time and become almost synonymous with your firm.

The Science Part

Although you might be aware of the points discussed above, there’s a strong chance that not many people, aside from marketing and branding professionals are aware of the science and theoretical considerations which are part of branding. The way that the public perceive your brand is split into two aspects. The experiential aspect consists of the physical sum of all the contact which the brand has with the customers and this is known as the “brand experience”. In short, the experience is the way that the action of the brand is perceived by its’ customers. The second aspect is the psychological aspect and is the way that the brand associated in terms of the public’s perception and expectations of a brand. This is known as the “brand image”.

If you want to make the brand of your legal firm work in your favour then it is necessary to concentrate on both aspects and give both an equal sense of importance.

A swift transition can be made from local brand to an international business entity using the power of social media. Legal firms can boost their brand image significantly with social media.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please go to buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for a modest monthly fee and we will not tie you into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Social Media Consultant

Peter, your UK based social media consultant considers the P and C in social media marketing. We’ve all heard about the four P’s of marketing.  Well hands up who hasn’t   Don’t worry no one can see.

Product

Price

Placement

Promotion

The four P’s were created mainly to describe the ideal “marketing mix”. The term “marketing mix” now used in every day marketing language was born in the early nineteen sixties.

I would argue the four P’s of marketing are mainly for product marketing.  Since most things these days have a service element we should be considering all marketing relevant to the seven P’s.  Okay a bit more up to date.  The seven P’s started life in 1981.  If you are marketing with any element of service and your marketing people are not considering this, worry!

So let’s take a look at another more contemporary framework for B2B marketing – the Four C’s. This framework is more up to date, and in my opinion, more applicable to a wider range of today’s marketing challenges.

The 4 C’s of B2B Marketing are:

•           Content – the creation of a steady stream of engaging content

•           Connection – connecting with the audience you wish to attract

•           Communication – communicating with them in an ongoing conversation (this is where socials media can play a big part.  It will not replace direct marketing and there will still be a need for visual communications (design) all-be-it possibly a declining role)

•           Conversion – and then converting them at the illusive moment of need

As B2B Marketing is arguably more of a distance event than a sprint in marketing – you  always need to concentrate your focus on  your 4 C’s focus  – creating the best content, finding and connecting with your target audience, sustaining the communications pattern until they are ready to convert – this way you have a fighting chance at making all your marketing efforts count toward one goal – Sales!

Okay, you are asking about the seven C’s.  I will talk about that and the five I’s another day

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Peter, your UK based social media consultant, considers how Google plus fits into the marketing mix.  There are two sides to one too –  (I previously blogged about if PPC was better than social advertising). Here it’s a more clear cut answer for the moment. Poor old Google had just got the Google Plus environment working really well too – and then Facebook went and developed a completely new way of presenting your brand online in the brand timeline. Oops.

The way Google Plus is supposed to fit into your marketing mix is like this – you encourage everyone to give you a plus one rating when they visit your site, or find some of your distributed content. And because Google Plus is effectively a social media network specifically for consumers, your ratings give you a pure and reliable recommendation in the eyes of potential customers.

As I say that’s how it is supposed to work. But if you take a look at how many people actually search for advice on marketing with Google Plus, in comparison to the same searches done for Facebook, or Twitter, you’ll see that hardly anyone seems to care. In January 2012, average local searches for marketing on Facebook or LinkedIn reached 110,000 and 60,000 respectively. And for Google Plus? 720.

The weird thing is, Google Plus has millions of users and took way less time than all the other major social media platforms to get there. Google Plus took less than 100 days to reach 50 million users, while Facebook took over 1,000.

So what’s going on?

Well, partly it seems there is a lack of confidence in the need for a Google Plus marketing strategy, when the wider social network marketing techniques are only just being understood. And in a way I can see why. Because Google Plus, for all its appearing to be a social media stream, is kind of a fake. It’s based entirely on commercial data so it isn’t a “real” social platform for real potential customers.

Think about it like this. How many of your customers are likely to create their own Google Plus page when they already have a Facebook page, whose “likes” and timeline events perform the same function as a Google Plus? Or to put it another way – what does Google Plus have that Facebook doesn’t? Or LinkedIn?

LinkedIn got successful because it specifically created a Facebook style environment for business. Facebook got successful because it managed to mimic the mechanics of actual social modern life on a computer. Twitter got successful because it allowed people to express themselves to the world.

Google Plus got famous because – oh wait, it didn’t. It has a lot of users, but who are they and what are they doing?

In theory, they’re ranking your content to help the search engine return better results when people enter search terms with your targeted phrases in them.

So here’s a place for Google Plus in your marketing mix. Treat it like a scoring system for the efficiency of your content.

UK Social Media Consultant, Peter, recommends the new LinkedIn site.  LinkedIn is the most successful business social network in the world. Its user base is in the hundreds of millions, and while it doesn’t share the extraordinary power of Facebook it does have something unique to bring to the marketing table. It’s properly targeted. Only business users use LinkedIn, which means everyone on it is potentially a target for some good marketing.

There is still huge discussion about the actual effectiveness of advertising on Facebook, which is after all a site people use to connect with each other rather than with brands. The most a Facebook advertising campaign can hope to achieve is brand endorsement – what might be termed third party marketing, where Facebook users start talking about their most recent purchases (as in “OMG new iPhone wow!”). This sort of brand evangelism is a valuable strand in the marketer’s bow, and shouldn’t be ignored in the battle to create long term web and social media presence for clients. In the immediate term, though, there is more action potential present in the new setup of the LinkedIn site.

Because every LinkedIn user has a directly business related interest, normally self-promotional, the site as a whole is a B2B marketer’s dream. Here in one place, interacting and forming alliances, are hundreds of millions of potential partners for the marketer’s clients: and because the site is all about developing businesses and developing careers, a huge number of those potential partners are actively looking for ways to take the next step forward.

One such way is to form a beneficial alliance. Another is to save money on necessary business services.

In both cases, B2B marketing using linked in is capable of lining up targets based on their pre-existing need to be linked with businesses beneficial to them, and knocking them down at will.

In the first case, that of the beneficial alliance, the truth is that the benefit works both ways. A social network, like any social grouping, has its alphas and betas, its gammas and its deltas. The core goal of much social media marketing is to get client sites and client companies aligned with the alphas. Search engines like authoritative websites, and give more credence to sites directly linked with them. Markets like successful businesses, and pay more attention to their subsidiaries and partners.

This type of B2B marketing is based less on direct advertising and more on strategising the groups and networks to which a client company belongs. The endgame is to make that company an influential LinkedIn user in its own right, thanks to its association with the more powerful business.

The bait? The skills contained within the client company.

Big businesses are big businesses because they know how to get skilful people to work for them. A really successful business is always looking for talent – and a young, up and coming business often has talent bursting out of every seam. Over time, then, a social network like LinkedIn can be used to make one company align with another for a chance to take advantage of its skill – while the other gets close to the first so it can take advantage of its size.

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Every B2B marketing campaign requires a clear pathway. UK Social Media Consultant, Peter, suggests that by working out your strategy and objectives before you begin, you will be able to deliver a much more efficient and effective service to client companies.

First, you need to be clear about the overall objective of the campaign. Understand what your client wishes to achieve, and to what extent that achievement can be made using the LinkedIn site. In most campaigns, if not all, social media marketing forms a part of a larger whole – it is a foolish company indeed that fails to attack all the angles in its B2B marketing solution.

Every step of your campaign has to be strategised. In other words whatever you do in your LinkedIn campaign, and in your B2B marketing campaign as a whole, ask yourself if that action furthers the overall strategy. If the answer is “no” – sit down, rethink and come up with a new approach. Doing things just because they can be done is a waste of time and a waste of client money.

Research your target audience.  You will find your target has  many strands. Find out how to reach the people your client company wants to reach. This is the baseline information from which you can grow your overall advertising strategy. The mixture of components you put together is dictated by the target audience – what they like, what they do and where they do it. There is, for example, no point in targeting a site or a medium the target audience doesn’t get involved with.

So your LinkedIn B2B marketing campaign, which fits into the wider campaign strategy, is kick-started by an identification of a target audience likely to use the LinkedIn platform. It is further refined by interrogating the social graph of that target audience. Where do these people work? What sort of level are they working at? What will interest them? You’re tracking them down, trying to define the keywords and target places most likely to bring your advertising to their attention.

What your advert says – your message – is central to its success. Again, you should start with your target market and work up. If you don’t understand what the target market will respond to, you won’t be guaranteed to be saying something they want to hear.

Even worse than that is not understanding the message. If you have no idea what you are saying, or why, then your advert doesn’t hold together and will not work. It is imperative that you comprehend your client’s message thoroughly – and how that message is supposed to play out with the target audience already identified.

At this point, you need to decide what strands of the new LinkedIn architecture are going to be useful in your campaign. LinkedIn now offers a combination of advertising opportunities, from targeting group levels and company names to using the professional social graph to dictate the kinds of people to whom the ad goes. Only some will be appropriate, so it is important to work out which ones.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 November 2012 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant

Do you remember your first day in your first few jobs? If you do, and if you are honest with yourself, there’s a fair bet that your overriding emotion was one of fear. Remember sitting there looking at the phone ringing on your desk, and wondering what on earth you would say to the questions you got once you picked it up? Or how about wandering disconsolately around a shop floor trying to remember the stuff your supervisor told you as your first customer query heaves into view.

The point is, there’s a binding problem across pretty much all industries, which affects the quality of their customer service. That problem is knowledge. When staff don’t know enough about products and services to answer customer questions, the staff feel disenfranchised and the customer feels downright aggrieved.

The modern business world, as anyone who’s worked in an office can attest to, is moving at a rate of knots. So fast, indeed, that training on the job is often substandard, resulting in a workforce that simply doesn’t have the knowledge behind it to do its job properly. As customer complaints escalate, or efficiency and sales falter, the business in question has to spend more time trying to patch up the holes with reactive responses – which means it has even less time to give its employees access to the knowledge they need in order to make the problem go away in the first place.

Social media consultant, Peter, suggests that social media is the ideal platform for remedying this. Businesses now use social media more than they use that intranet, often replacing the intranet with a social media page that all the staff are encouraged to get involved in.

This automatically unleashes the horsepower of social media in a productive fashion. All social media technology is geared towards sharing knowledge. By using the internal social media page properly, staff can get access to the knowledge they need when they need it. There’s no more waiting for the right moment to get a word with the line manager, who always looks harassed and busy. Instead, FAQ pages within the social network deal with the most common issues, while dedicated knowledge bases give live answers to more complicated problems.

The result? An informed workforce, which is a workforce better able to serve the brand’s customers.

When this happens, employee confidence increases and the feeling of job satisfaction takes a turn for the better. No one can be satisfied doing a job where they know they don’t know the answers to half the things they get asked, and where it is clear that customers are frequently unhappy with the service they receive. So the emancipation of knowledge sets up a situation where employees feel more kindly towards the brand – and this is the beginning of proper brand advocacy.

When an employee is confident and secure in his or her role, he or she is more likely to see the brand that role embodies as a friend. Which, in turn, means he or she will act in a way calculated to support that brand at all times.

On Line Social Media Training

…….. Social media training to your PC, Pad or Phone where and when you want it

Be empowered to work as a brand advocate for your company

You and your employees will create a professional online presence that reflects positively on the employee and your company

You and your employees will know how to use social media safely and securely

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook training that is always up to date and ready

Consistency of training across the whole organisation

Number of videos per section:

LinkedIn Academy (39)

Profile 15
Networking 5
Interacting 8
Advanced 5
Useful Tools 5

Facebook Academy (20)

Privacy 15
Security 4
Useful Tools 1

Twitter Academy (15)

Basics 4
Best Practices 4
Privacy & Security 7

Total 74 video lessons

Please buy now to receive your activation code and url link for your personal on-line social media training within 3 hours.

**price is per month and  inclusive of VAT

***We will deliver activation codes and personal url within 3 hours for orders placed between 9am to 3pm UK time Monday to Friday.  Outside of these hours it will take longer

You can have access to the Whole Academy (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) for£120 per month and we will not tie you
into a contract.

You can buy now and go directly to the academy, see a demo or request a call back

If you buy before 30 November 2012 we will give you a promotional price of £96 per month

BUY NOW

Alternatively contact us to organise terms and receive a invoice  

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant,

Peter, UK social media consultant, discusses how brand advocacy is driven in successful businesses: There are several key drivers of brand advocacy. To understand the ways in which a company or client company can be made to better express its brand values throughout its ranks, it is important that we first understand how brand advocacy spreads within an environment.

Key aspect number one is knowledge. A brand advocate has to be an expert on the things a company produces or provides. In becoming an expert, he or she begins to feel that he or she has access to special information, which enthuses him or her to share this information with other people.

Social media may be used to implement this knowledge. By implementing it within every worker involved with a brand, you create an environment where people are proud and pleased to interact with customers because the number one factor that prevents good communication – a lack of proper knowledge – has been removed.

Key aspect number two is identity. To be aligned with a brand is to give it permission to become part of a personal identity. So clearly a brand’s values and personality must be made coherent, and attractive to the target markets. Stakeholders at every level, from management and shareholders through to consumers, must be made to feel that they will benefit from association with the brand, in the same way that many people enjoy being known to have interesting friends, or powerful contacts.

Key aspect number three is interactivity. This takes place in a variety of ways, but always has the idea of discourse at its heart. For a brand advocate to be born, he or she can’t just be talked at by a brand; she, or he, must feel engaged in a genuine give and take conversation. In other words – the brand must make the brand advocate feel that his or her views are important, that he or she has an active input into the way the brand works. The difference? Feeling like an active and important part of a family, rather than a parrot.

Key aspect number four is trust. Trust in this sense refers to the fact that the brand better do what it says it will otherwise all its brand advocates become disillusioned. You can’t advocate a company that dodges its tax responsibilities, for example, or one that purports to care about peace while it invests in landmines.

The fifth and most important piece of the puzzle, indeed the element that ties everything together, is the idea of belonging. People want to belong to a tribe of likeminded individuals. Social media works precisely because it taps into this primal urge. Brand advocacy is a corporate-driven expression of the same urge. At base level and in very simple terms – you are trying to get members of the public to feel they genuinely belong to the set of values your brand is supposed to represent.

This expresses itself most strongly in areas like extreme sports, where branding and lifestyle are inextricably entwined. The goal of all branding exercises, really, is to get as close to this tribalism as possible.

Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant,

Peter, leading UK Social Media Consultant explains: It is important for businesses to establish connections between the way their employers see their brand, and the way that the brand is projected to the consumer. In other words: for the brand to give the right impression to its end consumers it must first be espoused properly by its employees.

In essential terms, there are two brands in every brand. The first is the internal brand, sometimes referred to as the employer brand. This is the way the brand message of a business is actually espoused all the way down the food chain in a company’s organisational structure. It may be typified by its strength at the top and its weakness at the bottom.

As the old adage has it, the lower in the pecking order you are the less you care about the management of your company’s brand. This is clearly a problem for the employer brand, which has to be a mirror image of brand number two – which is the brand seen by the outside world.

This second brand, the consumer brand, really is a mirror image of the exact actual state of the employer brand – which is where some of the problems experienced by brand managers stem from. Because if the lower echelons of the army aren’t responding to, or don’t know, a brand message, then their interactions with the customers damage the consumer brand in the same way that they besmirch the brand in house.

A brand advocate isn’t simply a fan of the brand – an advocate is someone who actively believes in the brand’s message. The difference is not so subtle. Someone who wears a pair of branded sports shoes is merely a fan of those shoes. While a person who defends the actions of the company that makes those shoes is a brand advocate.

Clearly the more of these people working at the rock face of a brand’s involvement with its public, the better the consumer brand becomes. Because a brand evangelist, to use another term often associated with this kind of person, genuinely lives and breathes the ideals of the message. When he or she does, then the message is received loud, clear and undiluted by the consumer – and so the consumer brand begins not only to mirror the employer brand, but to replicate the ideal employer brand as cooked up in head office.

So the importance of internal brand messaging is clear. The employees of a company must believe in its brand before the brand itself has the legs to make it in the outside world.

So how do you get your employees on board with your brand?

One of the key ways is in management example. Managers at every level must be the brand message embodied. Like priests or other religious leaders, their function is as much ceremonial as it is practical. The way the managers act is an example to their employees. It must be free from hypocrisy and directly emblematic of the behavioural attributes the brand message demands from its workers.

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

The bar for B2B advertising has been raised, thanks to LinkedIn’s acceptance that lucrative avenues for cross-company marketing lie within its borders. As the business equivalent of Facebook, and the leading professional social network, LinkedIn is capable of offering enhanced ad targeting and thus a raised success rate per advertising pound.

LinkedIn’s user base has grown and grown – as of the end of 2011, there were more than 130 million users of the site. While this is not in the same league as the status achieved by Facebook, it has to be noted that LinkedIn has a much more focused approach. LinkedIn is for professionals and businesses – while Facebook is for everyone.

On these terms, LinkedIn has two massive advantages – making it one of the jewels in the B2B marketer’s crown.

First, pretty much every LinkedIn user is predisposed to engage with brand advertising – whether that’s on a personal or a corporate level. Any way that a brand can advertise itself as an advantageous connection for a LinkedIn user is going to stick. This is in direct contradiction to Facebook, where the advertising is done almost against the user’s will. Facebook users are out to share jokes and keep in touch, not to buy stuff. Whereas LinkedIn users are specifically there or find ways to enhance their careers or get more business.

Second, as LinkedIn is dedicated only to professional and business life, it automatically segments itself into intelligible groups – almost predefined marketing spaces, if you will. Generally speaking, this segmentation is done across two axes – one being the market sector in which a person or a brand operates; and the other being the type of role performed.

There is cross pollination between the two axes: for instance a managing director in the rubber industry may equally be interested in ads targeted at managing directors and at the rubber industry.

LinkedIn  enables finely tuned advertising to expectant audiences. It does this by using the same sorts of functions as Facebook – the ability to tag adverts for specific interests, job titles or groups for example. It also supports the same sort of active advertising as Facebook – click here for more information, click to follow, and so on. The difference being that a LinkedIn ad is far more likely to get a person to click on it to join a group or follow a company in which he or she has genuine  interest.

A quick scrutiny of Facebook’s ads brings up an interesting realisation. Most Facebook advertising is targeted towards leisure and relationships – the two key areas in which Facebook defines itself, and by which Facebook users understand their relationship with the site. This makes Facebook a poor tool for primary B2B advertising, though it may have its place as an element of a recruitment campaign for a “shop floor” style workforce.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, has a much more direct focus on businesses and brands. Plus, with no hostility to the idea of being advertised to (so long as those ads are well targeted), the LinkedIn user is effectively just waiting for the right stimulus.

Social Media Training for Business

Peter at Moscow conference

LinkedIn has changed its social functions to enable B2B marketers to get more detailed demographic information about its members. These enhanced social functions have been linked to greatly improved click through rates on LinkedIn adverts – as many as three or four times the rate they were before the change in the way the site is put together.

The basic change in LinkedIn’s functionality is that B2B marketers have much more say on how their ads are placed. Previously, the site ran a very broad-brushed advert hosting service – you could target your ads geographically, and you could target them by market sector. Which got them into the right arena – but nowhere near the right stand, or segment of a stand, or what the marketer is really looking for, which is the right seat.

There’s a useful analogy to be had here. Think of your whole business sector as a sports ground. On the field, the game being played is the apogee of success in your market. Every spectator on every seat is a potential ally. You want to find the best ally out of all the hundreds of thousands of people watching – get him or her out of her or his seat, and have him or her down to join the fray.

So, as noted, LinkedIn’s old advert-targeting structure  only lets you show the whole stadium of what you have to offer. Somewhere in that stadium, maybe ten or twenty people would be interested. The rest, not so much. So you effectively waste time and effort telling them things they have no interest in knowing.

LinkedIn’s new advert targeting structure lets you target groups, company names, even specific attributes of a professional social graph. Plus there’s a much wider selection of advertising types to choose from. You can sponsor groups, getting people involved in discussions that automatically place your brand name at the centre of hot topics in your particular industry. Or you can create high quality targeted ads with dynamic copy, to display directly to people who very precisely fit the criteria you have sketched out.

That’s like removing all the uninterested spectators from your hypothetical sports stadium and revealing only the ten or twenty people dotted around the ground who might be truly interested in what you have to say. Suddenly B2B marketing using LinkedIn doesn’t seem like so much of an uphill struggle.

This is where LinkedIn is getting its increased percentage of click throughs. By refining the targeting system, you ensure the most likely candidates are hit much more frequently.

Now you have the tools to reach a much more refined and receptive audience, the onus is on you to develop the advertising that gets them to bite. The hook must be baited with the same care and creativity that you expend on any advert. Just because everyone looking at your ads is now more likely to be interested in them, doesn’t mean you have an excuse for writing lazy copy. In fact the opposite is true. Because when everyone is looking, you have to make sure you’re doing it just right.

Peter Wilkinson | Social media consultant, social media speaker and international trainer

Peter at Moscow conference

LinkedIn recently changed its architecture, allowing more targeted B2B marketing in the hope of both LinkedIn and the businesses that use it – facilitating a more flexible and focused way of bringing complementary brands together. Where previously LinkedIn only supported geographical and industry focus, it has now added the ability to tag and target specific tags; group names or types; job titles and types; and the names of particular companies.

What this means for social media marketing is that you can aim a specific B2B marketing campaign at a very highly defined segment of the site’s users. In turn, then, this indicates that you can deliver more success for a client’s marketing money. By plumbing a more segmented and defined marketplace, your campaign meets only those people who are most likely to be affected by it. This is a different strategy to the LinkedIn marketing of the past where your B2B marketing strategy had to hit a wider audience – and therefore, while it had more people looking at it, it had a smaller percentage of action.

The actual changes present in the way LinkedIn works are as follows.

You can now use the professional social graph to specifically aim your marketing at LinkedIn users whose profile suggests a strong match. This is in direct contrast to the old method of B2B advertising on LinkedIn, in which the marketing consultant had to make more of an educated guess as to which business sectors or geographic areas an advert might work best in.

You can use this information to create and display standard ads, or what LinkedIn calls “content ads” – dynamic content packaged in a single advertising unit for immediate and recognisable effect.

To an extent, the ways in which B2B marketers now use LinkedIn is dependent on the creativity of their thinking. For example, a dynamic content ad in which a relevant company hosts a market-specific, pertinent discussion board, works as a tool for client businesses and raises the profile of the host company’s name.

Display ads also allow businesses to reach out to other businesses with hard calls to action – a prime example is seen in a screen shot of a major national energy supplier, offering a two thousand pound saving to clients with a bespoke “Quote Machine”.

So the mechanics of dedicated B2B ads on LinkedIn are the same, generally, as they would be anywhere. An advert is an advert. The difference, as is the case with all successful marketing, lies in the way that advert finds its way into the eyes and ears of the people it is most likely to work for.

With LinkedIn’s new architecture, the pegs on which to hang these ads have multiplied and got smaller. That means more direct targeting and more specific advertising – which in the long term equates to a better success rate for the client company. B2B marketing consultants are now able to devise much more subtle and effective campaigns on what is effectively the world’s number one networked locations for businesses and serious professionals.

Peter Wilkinson | Social media consultant, social media speaker and international trainer

Peter at Moscow conference

One of the key problems faced by larger businesses is that their individual employees have little idea what the company’s brand messages are. The issue is basically one of communication. If the high level management staff never have anything to do with the daily running of specific departments or offices, then the staff working in those offices might simply never receive proper indoctrination into the brand message they are supposed to uphold. Somewhere between management and ground level, the message dissipates and is lost.

This is most clearly illustrated when customers experience poor customer service. A very real problem for a number of larger companies (several phone companies are famously guilty of this, for instance), poor customer service happens when the brand message dilutes on its way down the food chain.

It is reasonable to suppose that no MD wants his or her brand to espouse a message that it doesn’t really care about the experience its customers have. Yet large corporations often do precisely this. The staff on the ground, those who deal directly with the customers, are not exposed to the brand’s core messages, and thus become poor or incompetent brand advocates.

Social media technology is now being used to change this. By using a social media style intranet, or by dispensing with the intranet altogether and using actual social media sites – for example a brand Facebook page – to convey in house communications, the brand is able to bring every employee into contact with the message makers: the people who deliver the edicts that set the tone of the company’s whole actions.

The internal brand advocate becomes essential to the overall customer perception of the brand. His or her advocacy is done by dint of his or her behaviour rather than by simply repeating that the brand in question is good. But he or she can only behave in a way that embodies the brand’s values he or she is daily exposed to media that keep him or her thinking in the right way.

The core goal of all brand management through social media is to get people thinking on-message. That means that the brand message becomes part of the daily mental architecture of their lives. In extreme cases you can even talk about people striving to mould themselves to a brand ideal. This is clear in examples from long-running successful ad campaigns, which make consumers want to act in a way that could be “endorsed” by the brand in question – for example the Livestrong line of Nike clothing, or the whole supermodern thing that Apple espouses.

How is this done, in house? By using social media to do more than just communicate when meetings are, or what the brand has done recently. Rather, the social media can be used in house to air employee grievances, so the brand can be seen to deal with them fairly and openly. Or the media may be used to encourage enhanced performance through competitions and prizes.

LinkedIn allows B2B marketers to perform a number of tricks to get hold of the information they need to better promote a client brand. Not all of these tricks are about targeted advertising in the traditional sense either. Like other social media outlets, LinkedIn is smarter than this. For instance, LinkedIn offers the opportunity for brands to target customers or partners with a range of interactive applications capable of helping the customer get a better brand experience. These aps range from sponsorship pages to questionnaires. The key, as ever, is to get the third party to engage with the client business. Questionnaires are an excellent way to do this. Short, snappy and relevant, a questionnaire can be aimed at getting brand-helpful information out of a third party – for example, which part of our branding excites you most, the colours or the logo? Or a questionnaire can be disguised – a single question designed to lead into targeted marketing. If, for instance, you asked whether a third party would be likely to use a specific machine in his or her business – then anyone who answers yes goes on a list to receive targeted marketing from you relevant to his or her industry sector. People who say no are unconsciously opting out of the next stage of an advertising campaign. The key with all B2B advertising is its ability to narrow a field of suspects – from a broadly targeted market for a brand message, to a pared-down selection of people more or less guaranteed to at least pay attention to what your client brand wants to say. By whittling away at the target market, you develop smaller numbers of people to advertise to – but bigger percentage chances of all those people hitting the call to action and clicking through to the landing page the client wants them to reach. LinkedIn can also be used to perform a long-game form of B2B marketing. In this model, the site is used as part of a recruitment drive (for example). It’s a long term recruitment drive designed not to fill immediate positions within a company but to foster the right talent to take that company on to the next chapter in its brand story. The sponsorship page may be useful here. By providing useful contacts and information to individuals whose professional social graph appears to match the kind of information you would embody in a future employee, your client can begin to groom LinkedIn users either for adoption by itself, or (if it’s a recruitment company for example) to be slipped into the right end user brand when the time comes. Again, the idea is to start with a fairly broad selection of people and whittle them down. So you begin by setting the parameters of the social and professional graph of the hypothetical ideal candidate. Then you set up a sponsorship page where the respondents can get contacts and ask questions of influential figures within the client company. The answers they give and the ways they interact allow you to knock out the ones who don’t quite fit, or who won’t be interested.

Peter at Moscow conference

Peter Wilkinson | Social media consultant, social media speaker and international trainer

Peter at Moscow conference

When a client’s brand requires a higher profile, or is out to get the attention of people and other brands that might represent a beneficial connection, LinkedIn can be a prime source of fruitful contacts. Redeveloped and rejigged, LinkedIn is now a subtle tool for B2B advertising – and if used in the right proportion with the rest of the marketing mix can be an ideal way to attract new talent or broaden the influence of a client’s company.

A word about the idea that LinkedIn must be used as part of a marketing mix.

It’s well known that successful B2B marketing, indeed successful marketing of any kind, requires multiple platforms to work properly. Partly this is a simple matter of conviction. No brand message carries the weight of true conviction if it is only found on one media stream. Targeted people and companies need to see the client company’s brand message in several places for the weight of the campaign to ring true.

One way that LinkedIn can work to bolster a brand message, is by offering dynamic content ads to its users. For instance, LinkedIn now enables users to put up follow company ads; recommendation ads; and join group ads. All have an element of social network use tied into them, and all are capable of gathering social information about the people and users that respond to them.

Essentially these dynamic ads allow you to get the person you advertise to, to click on a link, join a group or follow a company. Whatever the actual call to action, the effect is twofold. First, your ad viewer becomes an active follower of or connection to your company or brand; and second, the social graph of that ad viewer is now open for mining in stage two or three of your campaign.

Simply by clicking on the call to Acton in your dynamic LinkedIn ad, the user has registered interest in the things your client’s brand accomplishes. That means that the whole of his or her social graph is now tagged as one online construction of the kind of person who would be interested in the brand of a client. That, in turn, means that future campaigns may use this user’s social graph information to target and attract other fans, who resemble the original user in terms of what they have on their social graph.

Over time, collecting social graph information in this way allows a good B2B marketer to draw up new demographics for a client company – sometimes even discovering whole new strata of personality and business types to advertise to. For instance, if a number of people with similar professional social graphs all click on a follow link, or a join group link, as a result of a LinkedIn ad campaign – then it becomes reasonable to assume that you are looking at the demographic definition of one type of person your client should be advertising to with more vigour.

LinkedIn enables the B2B advertiser to find and define new groups of personality and market types for client brands to get involved with.

Peter at Moscow conference

LinkedIn and Facebook are often compared as sources of advertising exposure – particularly now that LinkedIn has developed its behind the scenes tools to make its own advertising more closely mirror Facebook’s. On LinkedIn now, it is possible to target your B2B advertising in a number of interesting ways – for example by using company names; job tittles; or by interrogating the social graph of the kind of person you are looking to entice to a client’s brand.

This is exactly what Facebook does – only with Facebook, the thrust of the targeting is far broader. For example, someone who “likes” certain links or content on Facebook has that action logged in their social graph. When companies come to Facebook looking for fruitful advertising space, they buy the information that connects them with people whose social graph suggests they will be predisposed to like the brand in question.

Effectively, social media advertising of this nature metricises everything about a human’s likes, dislikes and hence his or her probable interest in a specific advert or campaign.

But here’s the thing: there’s still a debate going on about whether the ads on Facebook work in terms of a final action event – that is, someone sees the ad, clicks on it and ends up buying something. This is because Facebook is what it is – a social site, where people chatter away and post silly videos of their cats playing pianos. In other words: the average Facebook user, be he or she never so susceptible in the normal world, is not usually in a buying frame of mind when he or she is using Facebook.

That said, the Facebook user whose friend writes an apparently off the cuff glowing review of some product or brand might be likely to go and check out that product or brand as a result of the link. So Facebook advertising is perhaps not as effective as it might seem – but using traditional organic social media marketing techniques on Facebook can lead to some action events.

The major difference between Facebook and LinkedIn is that LinkedIn is not a social site. It’s a social network, but that’s different. “Social network” is simply a phrase, which describes an interconnected web of Internet users who access a common portal and validate their interrelationships with friending.

On Facebook the primary motivation for use is play. On LinkedIn, it’s business. Companies use LinkedIn to get close to beneficial partners and potential new talent. Individuals use it to get ahead on their career path.

So everyone using LinkedIn is in a “buying” state of mind. That is, everyone has something to sell, or wants something. So B2B advertising on LinkedIn, using the same targeting techniques as advertising on Facebook, is much more likely to generate a final action event than the same sort of advertising on a purely “fun” social site.

In other words: LinkedIn advertising, while on a purely numbers level reaching fewer people, is potentially more effective than Facebook advertising for a well-rounded B2B campaign.

Peter at Moscow conference

LinkedIn has become a valuable string in the marketing manager’s bow. Since the site added more flexibility and functionality to the way it lets advertisers find their core markets, it has allowed B2B marketing consultants the space in which, and the platform from which, to deliver a range of targeted programmes across a variety of media.

It is important to remember that LinkedIn B2B marketing is not, on its own, enough to corner the market. For a promotion to work properly it must attack multiple social networks and raise the profile of a brand or message on several streams of digital and hard copy consciousness at once.

The fundamental idea behind all marketing hasn’t changed – and so B2B marketing using (among other things) LinkedIn is still basically an effort to own a message and get influential third parties to evangelise it on your behalf.

The message becomes synonymous with the brand. This can either be a “genuine” brand – that is, a whole company with an ethos and personality designed to appeal to its target market; or a personal brand – in this case a message sent out by a single person hoping to align himself or herself with the right figures of influence in the business social network.

LinkedIn has developed a much higher click through rate on B2B advertising since it changed the way you could target your message. Previously, LinkedIn supported only very basic targeting, through market sector and geographical location. Now, like Facebook, LinkedIn is able to support a variety of tag-based advert targeting functions; including the ability to search for likely candidates for your advert by job title and even the name of the company in which they work.

So for example, a headhunting campaign to find top class sales managers could use LinkedIn to make the staff in a single influential company aware of a client business. By targeting all marketing managers within a company with the right ad campaign, a client company can pave the way either for direct contact (often suitable for high placed positions within the corporate sales structure) or advertising jobs to midrange managers and assistant executives.

The key commonality here is that LinkedIn is used (in this example, anyway) to prepare the minds of likely candidates for an extremely targeted phase of a recruitment campaign. Indeed, with dynamic ad content now supported on LinkedIn it is even possible to generate an active shortlist of names, by including a call to action in the initial brand presence. Anyone who clicks through is automatically logged as a prime target for the next phase of recruitment – and so the client ends up maximising the effect of his or her marketing spend by only advertising, in the second round of his or her campaign, to people who have already expressed an interest in the brand.

LinkedIn can be used in a variety of tailored ways to form the bedrock of, or an adjunct to, a successful B2B marketing campaign. The ways in which it is used precisely are dictated by the needs of the moment.

Peter at Moscow conference

Now LinkedIn has upped its game and delivered a much more refined business social graph for B2B marketers to take advantage of, the content of your adverts has become more important than ever. With a much higher percentage of potential interest devolving from every advertising instance, the slightest slip in your copy or the way your ad is targeted can have dire consequences for the success percentages of a campaign.

First, a checklist. You will notice that the gold standard of online advertising remains the same:

• Be direct. No wasted words, no bloated headlines. Punch hard, fast and be impressive.
• Define your target market before you begin. Focus on it.
• Understand when to advertise. Take advantage of current trends and industry news.
• Make it easy for the target to follow a call for action. Put the hyperlink right there and make it obvious.
• Constantly interrogate the stats of your campaign to make sure it is working. Tweak it if it isn’t.

As the feller said, “it really is that simple”.

A LinkedIn advert works very much like a Google AdWords ad – only you have the added options to include graphics and dynamic content. Insofar as the textual element of your campaign goes, though, it’s same same but different.

You get 25 characters for your shout line, plus 75 characters for the main body of the ad. You get one photo and a guaranteed full appearance for your ad on the LinkedIn sidebar, photo and everything. You can also have the ad pop up as text only on the top of the relevant page.

So yet again the basic rules of advertising apply. Less is more. Use one word instead of four. Focus on a single element of your business and sell it hard.

Advertisers could learn an awful lot from haiku. Which, if you didn’t know already, is an ancient Japanese poetry form in which the writer is restricted to a specific number of syllables per line. In pure form, the haiku must also contain specific image types: something that places the poem geographically; something that places it in time; and one emotion.

Sound familiar? It should. That’s how you sell a product or a service to a willing member of a target audience.

Once again we come back to the concept of targeting. This is the key to every advert you will ever create. If your target audience is poorly defined, you have no rule by which to edit your advert. Remember, you have only 75 characters. So every letter counts.

If you have researched your target audience thoroughly, if you know why your business should be aligned with them, then you should also know what it is your business has to say to them. What message you have that would make a target member of LinkedIn stop doing what he or she is involved in and pay attention. The rule, once more, is simple: check every word in your ad against your concept of the target. If any word or emotion doesn’t fit – kill it and start again. Only the best will do in a truly targeted environment.

Driving the brand advocacy of learning, Peter Wilkinson explains how social media can be used to help establish a brand for your learning function and then encourage people to become its advocates  Published as a feature article in the Training Journal TJ http://www.trainingjournal.com   For up to the minute leading edge information about training, leadership and HR

Please click link below in red to see article

Driving the brand advocacy of learning

Driving the brand advocacy of learning

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | Social Media Speaker | SMM Agency Owner

Social Media Training and Mentoring

Our training is split into three areas. Social media strategy training, social media marketing training and leadership training for creating a social media culture where the benefits of social media can be harnessed to drive innovation, improve teamwork and reduce costs across the whole company.

Half day social media  training and mentoring
Half day bespoke training and mentoring session	….We have trained and mentored support staff to Global Chairmen of world class corporations
Half day one 2 one coaching or group session at the client’s premises………..half day bespoke training and mentoring session….We have trained and mentored support staff to Global Chairmen of world class corporations Focused on your social media needs – We have trained and mentored support staff to Global Chairmen of world class corporations. Social media training and mentoring at any level to match your requirements. Move forward with social media marketing training that is focused on your business, your needs, your industry and developing the skill sets you specifically need.
Social media Basics
Just starting out in social media….more details
One day one 2 one coaching or group session at the client’s premisesSetting up the basic tools of social media – Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Blogs. Using free social media monitoring tools to listen to and research your customers and markets. Develop a game plan to make social media profitable for your business Social media for impact.
Social media strategy
Developing social media strategy….more details
One day one 2 one coaching or group session at the client’s premises ……… Developing social media strategy inside of your marketing mix Understanding the place of social media in your specific marketing mix. Social media listening, monitoring and research. Developing social media strategy for Social | Local | Mobile Control, matrices and management of the
Social media marketing
Creating and managing the campaigns and communities….more details
One day one 2 one coaching or group session at the client’s premises……..Creating and managing the campaigns and communities Developing the social media campaign tactics. Set up of social media assets and platforms. Creation of cross platform social media advertising. Creation, management of the communities. Control, matrices and management of the campaigns and tactics.
Leadership for developing a social media culture
Creating a leadership approach for developing a social media culture
One day one 2 one coaching or group session at the clients premises……Creating a leadership approach for developing a social media culture Leadership in a social media environment. The different stages in a social media culture development. The different leadership styles that are required for each phase. Innovation, diversity and leadership in the ‘social company’ social media culture.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Chief Executive Officers, company boards and senior management need to up skill their social media.  Not only for developing and managing their own personal brand, but also for showing leadership in this important area. Peter Wilkinson, international speaker and social media trainer guides senior manages helping them develop a robust personal social media brand  and strategy so they can show leadership in their organisation.  ’The Social Company’ and company culture  are providing companies with a means to develop competitive advantage.  Using social media to drive innovation and company-customer collaboration is key.  Peter runs board briefing sessions to full engagement programmes for senior directors.

I have trained, given key note presentations and presented papers I have written on social media strategy, widely, from London to Moscow to Marbella.  The most resent speaking assignment being in the ‘House of Lords’ where I spoke on ‘social media leadership, and innovation’.

Peter is also Managing Director of Panther Social Media.  Panther  provide services for social media strategy development, social media marketing deployment and  programme management of transformational programmes to embed social media into a company’s culture with appropriate governance.

Peter has worked with boards and chairman of large global corporations to small SME companies. He brings an expert and practical perspective to developing a marketing mix for internal and external social media strategy and marketing.

Panther’s social media strategy and social media marketing services cover the full spectrum from senior board briefing and director training / mentoring sessions to a comprehensive set of social media services. Helping with the development of strategy to the full range of tactical services necessary for executing internal and external social media campaigns, you can tap into a wealth of skills at Panther.

Panther’s team have created a marketing Jobs portal http://www.socialmediamarketing.eu.com   This is supporting marketing freelancers and job seekers so they can find contracts, jobs and help.  Peter founded and with his team manage the  LinkedIn group ‘Social Media Marketing UK’, which is a vibrant buzzing group focused on the UK market

For up to the minute information on social media strategy and social media marketing please visit my Blog http://socialmediastrategy.org.uk/blog/

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Specialities
Social Media Strategy | Internal and External

- SMM board briefing, coaching & International speaking
- Social Brand monitoring – Investigations – Reputation
- SMM Brand energy transformational programmes
- SMM into the marketing mix

Social media consultant
Digital marketing | Strategy
Digital public relations
Social media optimisation
Search engine marketing
Search engine optimisation
PPC and Social PPC
Message strategy
Communications strategy
Integrated communications
Strategic marketing management

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Social media trainer and mentor, Peter Wilkinson, helps CEO, directors and boards develop their social media strategy. ‘The Social Company’ and company culture  are providing companies with a means to develop competitive advantage.  Using social media to drive innovation and company-customer collaboration is key.  Peter runs board briefing sessions to full engagement programmes for senior directors.

I have trained, given key note presentations and presented papers I have written on social media, widely, from London to Moscow to Marbella.  The most resent speaking assignment being in the ‘House of Lords’ where I spoke on ‘social media leadership, innovation and engaging your customers’.

Peter is also Managing Director of Panther Social Media.  Panther  offer a range of social media services from social media strategy development for external  and internal marketing, social media recruitment strategy for HR and full programme management of transformational programmes to bring social media into a company’s culture with appropriate governance.

Working with boards and chairman of large global corporations to small SME companies I bring an expert and practical perspective to developing a marketing mix for internal and external social media strategy | Social media branding | Social media marketing.

Our social media strategy | marketing services cover the full spectrum from senior board briefing and director mentoring through social media strategy development to the full range of tactical services necessary for executing an internal and external social media strategy.

To support marketing people, Panther have created a marketing Jobs portal http://www.socialmediamarketing.eu.com   Here marketing freelancers and job seekers can find a wealth of contracts, jobs and help.  You can also find regular updates from Peter and his team in their LinkedIn group ‘Social Media Marketing UK’, which is a vibrant buzzing group focused on the UK market

For up to the minute information on social media strategy and social media marketing please visit my Blog http://socialmediastrategy.org.uk/blog/

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Specialities
Social Media Strategy | Internal and External

- SMM board briefing, coaching & International speaking
- Social Brand monitoring – Investigations – Reputation
- SMM Brand energy transformational programmes
- SMM into the marketing mix

Social media consultant
Digital marketing | Strategy
Digital public relations
Social media optimisation
Search engine marketing
Search engine optimisation
PPC and Social PPC
Message strategy
Communications strategy
Integrated communications
Strategic marketing management

Peter at Moscow conference

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker – Marbella conference

I am passionate about social media and what it can bring to the organisation.  Not just the external marketing side of social media strategy but also the way it can be used inside the organisation to engage the culture and fire up organisational energy which in turn will invigorate the brand energy.

I speak on these topics at home in the UK at events and functions such as the APM conference and at the House of Lords as well as at major international conferences.

I am a social media marketing professional, Chartered Marketer, Registered MSP® Practitioner and Managing Director of Panther Interactive Marketing a social media marketing agency specialising in internal and external strategy | marketing for social media branding. http://www.socialmediastrategy.org.uk. I am an international speaker on social media strategy | marketing and have worked with boards and chairman of large global corporations to small SME companies.

Panther was founded in 1994 & has clients across the EU. Panther Interactive Marketing specialises in social media, social media marketing and social media networking as well as more traditional marketing methods. We help clients blend their social media into their overall marketing mix. Panther’s team help businesses grow in the UK and internationally with measurable ROI.

Our social media strategy | marketing services cover the full spectrum from senior board briefing and director mentoring through social media strategy development to the full range of tactical services necessary for executing an internal and external social media strategy.

I am founder of the LinkedIn group social media marketing UK #SMMUK. This is a vibrant and buzzing group for people who wish to find out more about social media strategy | marketing.

Panther also run a UK focused Social media | Marketing | Web ‘monster job board’ which is packed with social media, marketing and digital marketing jobs

http://www.socialmediamarketing.eu.com/job

http://www.marketingjobsuk.uk.com/

http://www.digitalmarketingjobs.org.uk

http://www.digitalmediajobs.org.uk

http://www.socialmediajobs.uk.com

My Blog http://socialmediastrategy.org.uk/blog/

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Social media has become a primary source of information on a variety of topics. Customers want to interact with services and support and get information from the help desks. If you want to understand the way brands or companies are interacting, delivering service and maintaining a brand experience then the key is social media analysis, which is derived from a social media intelligence system.

As a marketer you need to monitor constantly the social media channels and identify the opportunities for new engagement.  Analyse the social media intelligence to gain an insight into what customers, consumers and competitors want. Such an analysis also provides a sneak peek into latest industry trends. With an overall analysis you will be able to fine tune your social media strategy involving engagement tactics and service delivery.

Let us take an IT service help desk for example. The listening, monitoring and intelligence analysis forms an opportunity for such a company. The opportunity is passed onto internal stakeholders (customer service, marketing, sales and product development) for prompt action.

When someone puts a positive comment about your brand in social media, it can be used for building PR. There is also need to identify the peer influencer and brand advocates. There should be a deeper relationship built with such people. If there is a bad comment posted in social media then prompt action should be taken before the situation mushrooms out of control. Replies should be appropriate. Aggressive replies against a negative comment are not looked on lightly. You should stay polite and define the measures taken to overcome the problem.

The insights, analysis and opportunities can be key inputs for measuring the success of any social media strategy. There are some simple rules to turn followers into brand advocates.

You can transform followers into brand advocates by giving them compelling content and regular engagement. Brands should create their content and engagement strategies after listening to what consumers are saying about their product or brand. This listening should be analysed and converted into understanding of the data; then present it to the management. Such data will help single out the trends from other sporadic incidents.

There should be a well worth strategy in place that attracts the consumers to follow a brand via leading social networks. Marketers should engage with consumers and foster relationships. This will in turn lead to peer influencing. Once you have recognised a bunch of brand advocates and peer influencers the next step is to deal with them at a more personal level and increase their loyalty.

Consumer generated advocacy on social media is the fastest way to win the trust of users. But it can be the fastest route to lose favour too if the trust is violated. So engagements should be planned and not random.

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Social intelligence performs some important functions: it pulls social media, processes the data and provides customer insights upon which actions can be taken.  Listening on social media performs a primary task of gaining insights about customers from an abundance of social media data.  As much important information is derived from social media data, a wide variety of business functions beyond PR and marketing are serviced. Some of the business functions met by social intelligence are mentioned below.

Reputation Management: PR and Marketing teams can track the mentions of their brand, products, employees, etc. within the social media sites.  Experts are able to see how the general public feels about them and use these as alerts for any potential crisis.  Brands use various social media applications to keep up with plethora of online discussions.

Brand Protection: Legal teams and marketers can monitor social media discussions for copyright infringement, product knockoffs, legal threats and other needs.  Many brands are using social media to manage potential logo and brand name infringements on the online channels.

Competitor Research: Marketers are also using social intelligence to track mentions of competitor’s brands and products.  By tracking competitor’s marketers can gain insights: how people feel about their competitors and business opportunities it presents.

Market Research: Market research teams can answer questions about their brand, product or services by listening to the social media buzz.   Market research through social media is a cheaper and quicker process but it does have its own risks. There is question on data validity of the data.

Ad Targeting: Marketers can search through various online discussions and find where their potential customer base is spending their time. It will allow businesses to target specific and probable sites for displaying ads.

Marketing Message: By using data gathered in online discussions marketers can understand how their customers talk about products.  Points made showing their satisfaction and dissatisfaction can be used in copy for marketing campaigns.

Measuring the Campaign: Marketers can use various metrics within social networks to test success of their marketing campaign. If the buzz is unfavourable then they can address this and review their strategies quickly and come up with new concepts.

Building Influencers: Marketing and PR professionals try to use social media metrics to measure an individual’s level of influence and potential for word of mouth sales.  They pay special attention to such individuals and make sure there are many positive mentions about their brand or products/services in social networks. It brings a positive influence on the marketing campaign.

Lead Generation: Sales teams and marketing professionals can monitor social media platforms regularly to find potential customers based on online conversations and content interests. They can track the engagement of individuals and track sales leads.

Product Changes: Changes in existing products can be brought about after tracking the online discussions of customers.  They can use the insights of customers and unsolicited opinions for future product improvements.

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Customer relationship management is a key to success for most organisations, it provides businesses with much needed customer intelligence and other relevant data.  This data isused by businesses to maintain a good relationship with customers.  Using social media to maintain customer relationship activities can help improve company’s performance and tighten relations between brands and customers. Social customer relationship management can open up new opportunities for communication with clients outside the formal processes and build an online community.

For marketing and managing customer brand experience effectively there is a need to implement and manage relationships with a Social Customer Management System (SCRM).  Such a system would be an extension of the traditional CRM. It would encompass a social channels model and system.

Social media experts all around the world are watching the dimensions of change brought about in consumer behaviour by Facebook, Twitter and other leading social networks.  The brand dynamics have changed and there is an extra layer of complexity added to the company-customer relationship.  This layer of change spans across the entire company and not a selected few.

Traditional business intelligence architectures are holding back companies from fully realising the potentials of social customer relationship management. Companies would integrate business intelligence and social media intelligence system are seeing immense benefits.

The next level for social customer relationship management encompasses making changes to the system for getting real benefits to the brand or organisation.  Incorporate a real time link into customer relationship management system.  This link is SCRM. Brands or organisations should embrace this concept in earnest and develop strategies that create a good framework for expansion.

Leading companies such as HP and Dell are developing and deploying social media services that integrate social networks into their marketing strategy and overall mix of contact channels.  Such services offer them much deeper insights into their customers.  The social media strategies are integrated into a larger marketing strategy which is then supported by social media processes such as social media monitoring and intelligence gathering.  These can be analysed to provide both tactical and strategic inputs to ensure a high performance contact centre which drives brand advocacy.  Such initiatives can help organisations decrease time needed to market new products or services.  It will also mean that products or services are aligned with customer requirements.  Such an initiative will definitely provide brands with a competitive edge in the sector.

Most B2C companies are realising the importance of consumer-to-consumer interactions.  They are looking to build brand advocates and peer influencers to drive more business.  Business social media strategies are heavily inclined to improve brand experience in the social sphere.  There are powerful social media intelligence and SCRM systems available in the market helping businesses.  Such systems have a full set of tools and methodologies which help in rapid start-up and seamless broadening or deepening of social media strategies that will drive brand engagement, relationship building and brand advocacy.

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Social media has affected the time spent online.  Many IT companies are realising that user time on social networks is growing.  This is forcing the companies to go where customers are.

Companies necessarily need social media presence.  They are setting up marketing and support pages on Facebook and monitoring the feeds coming through Twitter.  These arrangements are helping IT companies interact with their customers and seek their support.  YouTube is not neglected either.  In this social media bandwagon YouTube has also come up as major player.  Marketers are posting various sorts of self-help videos on YouTube. IT brands are also making their bids to set up support communities which can be easily found by customers.

It should be made clear though: not every upset consumer complaining about a faulty product will receive superb services and help from the Twitter or Facebook business pages.  It has to be understood that social media support is still in its early stages.  But this feature will definitely help companies build a satisfactory brand experience and drive more brand advocates.

Some big IT brands such as AT&T, Microsoft and Dell are connecting with their customers and consumers using Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. Support issues for the customers and consumers are resolved on social networks by these leading names.  Social media channels and niche communities are becoming the hub of support and help for major IT companies.  Hewlett-Packard is using social media as a part of their support mix strategy to engage and impress customers.  HP is using social media combined with other traditional support channels such as phone support and online chat.

If you are a customer for these leading IT brands, you can ask a question related to your problem by posting it on the brand’s Facebook pages or even by tweeting about it.  A team would be scanning their brand’s Twitter profile, so a complaint posted in the page is sure to seek quick response from a company determined to protect its online reputation.

There is an elaborate support page for Dell on Facebook that contains key data such as setup guidelines, drivers, technical manuals and a help request form.  The Dell Cares support profile on Twitter has also attracted many followers for the company.  The social media listening command centre of Dell has support staff tracking all social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and blogs (through Google alerts).  There are 25,000 Dell related posts on the social media sites reported on an average.

One effective part of social media strategy could be utilisation of social media ambassadors.  These ambassadors could be employees within the company or some volunteers.  Social media ambassadors should minutely focus on Twitter, as it is the place for customers shouting out and venting their anger or dissatisfaction.

It is time to be a social golfer. Read how golf clubs are using social media marketing.

For the golf article, please visit http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1wg3v/GolfBusinessDevelopm/resources/index.htm and go to page 64.

Alternatively you can download the pdf here  Time to be a social golfer

Please also visit us on https://www.facebook.com/SocialMediaGolf

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Building brand awareness, authority and trust are very important for entrepreneurs, businesses and bloggers.  Whether you are selling services or products, people like to conduct business with people they know and trust.  Social media is a great platform to build trust, awareness and authority.  Taking active part in leading social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. builds awareness profits significantly.

There are some basics of social media marketing all businesses should learn and follow:-

Create a Facebook Fan page with basic company information.  On the wall of this business page you can add a shop or share a link leading to customised pages.  This allows users to view all ads and promotions running.  There should be a button in the page which allows the shopper to communicate with your local store and get answers to any technology related queries.  Shoppers should be able to browse through all promotions, offers, competitions and gifts.

For the Twitter business profile you should integrate it with your overall business cause. Integrate Twitter with your other marketing actions using short URLs.  You can tweet about blog updates, press releases, products, promotions and offers running at your store.  Tell visitors about new store locations and other incentives.  Such arrangements will let advocates and customers stay in touch with the company.  Many companies are thinking one step ahead; they are using Twitter as a customer service tool.  You can respond to happy and dissatisfied customers alike.  To utilise Twitter in this way you also need to listen to the social media buzz and create a social media intelligence strategy.

Visual communications through all the social media channels should be consistent.  They should be in line with your social brand footprint.  Styles, fonts and logos should be consistent across platforms as you would do for any printed media.  Use Pinterest to make a profile for your company. Display all the employees and URLs on this site.

Let your employees take an active part in social media promotions.  Your social media community should be channelling information to your social media intelligence system. It will deliver hot information to the service desks.  This information in turn can be used to enhance your marketing strategy.  You should allow the employees to interact with customers.  Employees should be encouraged to actively interact and build relationships with consumers, thus turning them into brand advocates.  If your employees are able to resolve the tech questions of customers, you can be certain they will visit the real or virtual store to pick up the product and overtime become your brand advocates.  Offering a certain level of personal touch will help bind the customers and the brand together.

Brands should focus on creating a community where customers can share, discuss ideas and vote on certain related issues.  You can offer some inventive ideas and advice on how they can improve their business.  This community should be regularly monitored to know what ideas are being discussed.  This knowledge will help brands in their bid to continually improve – adjust, develop and innovate with consumers at the core of the process.

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Social media marketing is the intelligence which is powering present day marketing.  All social networks are dominated by marketers keen on the promotional power of these networks.  Social media sites have opened a new world of chit-chat and sharing, which is now the obsession of everyone in the marketing profession.  Social media marketing analytics is the recent buzz among marketers.

Measuring social media can mean different things to different people.  Social media is not as simple as traditional marketing programmes such as advertising, direct mail or e-marketing. In social media marketing messages are dispersed from one individual to another.  Distribution of social media messages follow a non-linear path.  Such a complicated distribution pattern has led to differing opinion among experts about what social media is and what it can do.

Social media analytics can be generally defined as “the process that companies use to measure, analyse and explain the performance of their social media marketing initiatives relative to their business objectives.”  Analytics should focus on B2C and B2B marketing and how consumers are discussing brands among themselves.  The purpose of social media analytics is to allow marketers make informed decisions regarding their social media marketing initiatives. Analytics should offer a standard measurement which will allow businesses to assess their efforts and derive important data to help their management decisions.

Many businesses are using sophisticated business intelligence systems to manage complex data from their marketing processes.  Marketers need to be adaptive while modelling and implementing these systems.  Social media data sources present a new challenge for traditional business intelligence systems.  While the business intelligence systems are structured; social media data comes in semi-structured form.  Currently used systems are having problems analysing semi-structured and unstructured social media data. It is because data does not fit into the traditional data warehouse solution.

There are some issues in implementation of social media marketing analytics.  First of all, the way data is stored or the structure of content does not match with traditional models.  Much content is put into social media is unstructured and this needs to be analysed.  Such content may include PDFs, notes from phone conversations, letters, images, pictures, videos, etc.  Analysing such content using a content management or knowledge management systems can pose a challenge.  A large proportion of semi structured data is also put into social media. Documents, web pages, wikis and information presented in XML, etc. are examples of such semi structured data. If such unstructured customer data is neglected brands will be unable to realise vital customer insights.

Thus, the future of social media marketing analytics will depend upon business intelligence and social media intelligence.  These approaches should be flexible and timely enough to meet the changing business requirements.

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Recent research by e-Marketers has revealed that 46% of customers seek solution for their problems when they are engaged with a brand on social media.  39% of these customers then provide feedback about services and products of the company.  When companies can effectively resolve the complaints of their customers they will do more business. Customers also want their brands to be more social and interactive on social networks.

A study by American Express states: “brands resolving their customer complaints via popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have a 21% rise in their sales than companies handling such issues over telephone or written form”.  The report further reads “one out of five shoppers turn to social media to file any complaints before giving a call to the company”.

These stats are strong pointers to companies. If you are not offering social service help desk then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to earn new customers and more business.  Every communication with a lead or customer is a marketing opportunity, so even when you are communicating with the customers, solving their problems you are already into marketing. With regular support and value added services you will soon have a fair following on social networks. The new social media marketing mantra is making brand advocates and peer influencers. You can accumulate a host of favourable friends with planned strategies for social service help desk.

Basically there are three core areas for success in a social service help desk. Firstly, you have to ensure that you are an effective curator. While interacting with customers there will be new data flowing in.  These are important for sketching future marketing plans. Create and preserve all these collections of data while you are about it. Have a caring approach while dealing with customer’s problems.  Customer complaints must be met and solved in a planned manner. You will be getting good feedback from a host of customers. Make sure you choose the best feedback for display in social network pages. You will need an expert moderator to look over the materials and display the favourable ones.

Social service help desk should have an effective social search. There should be a specific strategy for natural language and text processing.  The individuals in your social service help desk should have expert knowledge about other assets such as forums and Wiki, etc. Companies also require industrial grade search tools and techniques.

When you are looking to get the most from your social service help desk some organisational changes may be called for. There should be some added incentives for customers when they are engaged with you.  Most companies are offering free coupons and Twitter only news to engage their customers. These exclusive incentives makes customers stay glued. There should be robust governance within the organisation, HR departments and corporate internal communications should be engaged for the overall success of social service help desk.

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Brand awareness is roughly described as the knowledge a person has regarding a certain trade item. Favourable brand experience leads to the fame of products and increases the chances of sale. When it comes to selecting among two good products a decision is often assisted by how well a certain company has portrayed itself to the community. Often the value of a product is based on people’s opinion. Taking an active part in social media networks improves the chances of making a favourable impression.

While planning for social media marketing you have to remember there is a vast amount  of data available on social media. There are options galore for marketing in social media and given this fact it is not wise to make on the spot decisions. Often marketers leaving their decisions to the last moment regret lack of planning.

Social media marketing thrives on word of mouth sales. Through social networks you can build trust and engage customers to give favourable recommendations thus leading to sales. If your customers like the experience of being engaged with your brand they will soon turn into brand advocates and recommend your brand to others in their circle of contacts. If you have customers and consumers praising your product will definitely influence others looking for similar products on Facebook or LinkedIn. It will significantly build on your brand authority.

Many marketers ask what is the value of marketing in LinkedIn? The special recommendations section in LinkedIn caters for B2B marketing needs. This can lead to word of the mouth sales across peer groups, thus reaching both personal and business connections. But the important question in this respect is: how to take recommendations and convert them into favourable brand experience?

Recommendations on LinkedIn can be further utilised into recommendation ads. Such ads are highly targetable and prove to be a useful marketing tool. With the help of cross social media platforms traffic more consumer focused areas can be directed to the LinkedIn company business pages.

Next, let us move forward to syndicate this content to various other social media platforms. There should be a proper syndication strategy implemented to reap these rewards. You can use the recommendation received in LinkedIn and syndicate this to other parts of the social sphere. Also comments and recommendations provided in other spaces (such as blogs and other social networks) can be pushed back to LinkedIn.

When consumers review the products or services and view the recommendations from their trusted peers (be it social or business) they are pushed into the consideration stage.

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

Key findings from the 2011 Nielsen US report should be taken note of.  This report suggests: social networks and blogs are dominating time spent online for Americans.  Social networks account for nearly 25% of the total time spent online.  Social media has grown rapidly with nearly 80% of active Internet users visiting prominent social networks and blogs.  Out of these 40% of social media users access social media content using their mobile phones.  Social networking applications are the third most used by smartphone users in the US.  These stats bring to the fore the importance of social local mobile marketing.

The trend for convergence of social networking, mobile shopping and local search helps consumers save time.  This trend also works well for businesses.  Businesses can benefit from social local mobile.  The availability of consumer data which can be gathered makes this concept a real winner.

To cash in on the trend you can create business pages in Facebook, Google + and other leading social networks.  There are mobile pages and additional mobile marketing tools available at these social networks.  Through business pages the consumers can connect with brands and interact with peers even on the go.  Frenzy for social media encourages consumers to stay online using mobile phones.  Leading social networks are working hard to make their pages suitable for a variety of smartphones.

A recent PWC survey brought out some interesting facts: more than 30% of people are using social media every day.  Social media is used by 32% of individual retailers or brands.  What it means is: social media users are using various social networks to research and follow businesses or brands that interest them.

Consumers place more value on recommendations from their peers or friends in their network.  Word of mouth marketing and advertising should be harnessed by brands to influence the purchase process.

Social local mobile helps businesses in their bid to create brand advocates and peer influencers.  Uninterrupted interactions between brands and consumers lead to firm relationships and trust. Consumers can follow their brand 24/7 wherever and whenever. It brings out a huge marketing opportunity for the businesses/brands.

As more people are leaving their laptops and computers behind for mobile devices, it’s time to optimise sites for multiple devices to capitalise on traffic.  A site which appears well on all devices can increase their brand engagement and product conversations.  The point here is to exploit the convergence of people looking for information, products or services.  These are sought using the smartphones and tablets; favourable social media presence can drive online orders.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Here’s a question: can you use social media to change the way your employees represent your brand?

The potential for social media to change attitudes towards brands from the outside is clear. I’ve blogged already about how you can turn poor customer service experiences into positive brand energy by conducting a resolution in the full view of everyone on your social media streams. But what about engineering the culture of your grand internally?

The first thing to say here is that there’s a different brand concept operating at a high level within your business than there is at lower levels. Executives and managing directors become executives and managing directors by espousing the values of your brand internally. “Footsoldier” type employees, though, have no more brand loyalty than they do loyalty to their old school or university.

In which case using the social media streams and their associated technology as a kind of internal reconditioning tool isn’t always going to work. You can use social media as a messaging tool, of course, and you can have the totems of brand culture posting exhortative messages every morning – but your average employee is as likely to feel put upon by this kind of behaviour as he or she is to feel more like an ambassador for your brand.

No, the core of brand ambassadorship is your customer – and it’s the relationship social media can build with your customer that is likely to develop a stronger internal sense of brand personality, community and responsibility.

Think back to your own experiences in customer service positions, or in lower level positions within your current industry. Where was the reward? Outside the pay check, the reward is when you get to make someone happy. A customer’s joy is a very effective method for energising even the most lackadaisical employee. Because of course half the reason for lackadaisicalness in the first place is that he employee doesn’t see any meaningful return on his or her actions. No-one smiles or says thank you anymore.

So connecting the customer to the employee through social media can force the employee into a position of brand ambassadorship that he or she has not had to display before. And that gives the potential for direct, rewarding contact with customers.

Also, as soon as your customer service employees are using the social media streams to communicate your brand message, they become your brand message. They have to. Because it’s all there written, archived for ever more. And visible written communication doesn’t go off message when you have higher level management monitoring to make sure it stays within company parameters.

There is one way internal social media technology can re-engineer a brand fidelity of course. Smile and say thanks. Remember – no-one does that anymore. So when you do you start to reclaim the hearts and minds of your employees for the brand message.

Corporate social media use is all about transparency. After a while, your employees will self-select – they’ll either get with the programme or they’ll realise there’s nowhere left to hide and they’ll quit.

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

With the evolution of technology, communications are changing dimensions too. For example your grandparents would have used the telephone, mum and dad used email and today’s era uses social media to meet their communication needs. Businesses have upgraded their communications models based on their clients’ needs.

There are various benefits of using social media to control your service help desk communications.  Social media provides a unified platform for free exchange of thoughts, discussions and problem solving.

Communities within social networks are able to take care of some basic issues for themselves. Communities discuss and solve problems sharing knowledge to  make short work of your help desk enquiries.

Implementation of social media as a help desk can also lead to reduced costs and time spent by customer service professionals. Social media help desks can also aid in bettering the range of services. Listen and understand any shortcomings of your products or services (from the customer’s point of view) and revise your provision according to your customers’ needs. Integrating social media as a part of your helpdesk will lead to higher brand engagement.

Though there are many benefits of adopting social media strategy, some companies remain reluctant. They still have doubts over social media for their organisation. Many businesses have a perception that employees may not use social media wisely and abuse the power of such a platform. Employees need to be educated, empowered, engaged and managed to make sure they do not abuse social media. Social media policies should correspond to the overall corporate policies.

Most business service desks still use email and instant messaging to communicate with their customers and employees within the organisation. Use of social network tools will expand the means of contacting clients and staff. It also provides greater opportunities for data capture, innovation and collaboration.

With the growing user base of Facebook, this social network could lead to active consumer engagements. With its 800 million users presently a service helpdesk as a Facebook page will not go unnoticed. If the page is regularly updated on the service problems and other product related issues, it is sure to attract the attention of the end user and improve the resolution of issues for customers.

ISP Plusnet can be regarded as a good example of service centre culture in social media. They have a professional constantly monitoring the Twitter feeds and updating it with new information on network maintenance. If there are queries lodged by users, service centre professionals set the expectations of the service provision and notify the users that the Twitter support service is now live. Notifications are also sent at the close of support services at the end of the day. There are telephone numbers provided for the users to contact and seek further support.

Such an arrangement allows users to solve their problems without having to call the service help desk. It leads to reduced queuing times and abandoned calls.

Social media engagement can create a favourable impression for users. Customers will be happy you adopted social media for service help desk!