Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

With its focus firmly on the business community, LinkedIn is fast becoming one of the most important tools in the social media marketing mix of many companies, not only for B2B marketing, but also for recruitment purposes.  The unique value of LinkedIn comes from its focus on creating business networks, rather than enabling people to arrange their social lives.

Up-to-date profiles of a company and its key employees – especially senior managers – provide gateways to a company website, business blogs and other digital PR assets.  They also set out the brand values of a business and establish its credentials as an employer or business partner.

These passive virtues of a presence on LinkedIn are useful in establishing a brand’s presence in social media, but where a brand really comes to life is in the group discussions that take place on LinkedIn.  Companies or individuals can start groups to bring people together around a specific business sector, and within that they can start discussions about relevant business issues.

For a company building its brand reputation, the power of these discussions is that they provide the ideal forum in which to demonstrate that a business has its finger on the pulse of the latest trends and issues affecting a given business sector.  Furthermore, within those discussions it can showcase the knowledge, skills and experience that it possesses.

In short, these discussions bring brand values to life.  They enable a company to show that the image it projects through traditional or social media is, in fact, credible.  Getting the right people in a company to become involved in these discussions, share knowledge, answer questions and raise pertinent issues is an extremely powerful way of backing up the promises a brand makes about how it operates and what it can achieve.

LinkedIn has rapidly become one of the most powerful tools for B2B marketing and recruitment.  It allows brands to build a reputation on their skills and abilities, not just the slogans that appear in its advertising.

Fully engaging with LinkedIn is one of the best ways for a company to live up to the claims it makes for its brand.

There is no reason why internal recruitment shouldn’t fit into the same mould as external recruitment. And in the “external world” recruitment is done through a mixture of channels. Some are specific to job types or positions. Others are default fall back channels. And no successful HR department ignores any of them.

In the external recruitment model, HR departments are increasingly using social media channels to find and mould talent. And to give that talent time to prepare for a move into the company.

The drive may be candidate led or company led. With HR representatives and key department figures utilising social media groups to find candidates; and with candidates joining the groups that are most closely aligned with their perception of how their career might evolve.

Social media can be set up for use in the same way internally.  Here’s how it works.  By setting up social media networks for departments within the company, the HR department can encourage existing company employees to start defining their internal career paths.

Rather than internal recruitment being largely a matter of chance, social media allows candidates to get to know what goes on in other areas of the company – and to align themselves with the right people to move across at the right time (i.e. when a position becomes available). It can be seen that this leads to a higher degree of job satisfaction, a higher retention of talented staff members – and most importantly, a natural gravitation over time into the positions within the company that are best suited to the candidates in question.

The company attitude to internal social media recruitment is still sceptical – or rather, it’s still in a phase of being uncertain how to manage the idea that internal candidates may be working in one department but actively grooming another to take them on.

You have to think in big picture terms here. Internal recruitment has a self-selecting component to it, which you should not to ignore. That is to say, everyone in the company can see how a candidate works in his or her current department. If he or she wanes in enthusiasm and application, he or she clearly isn’t suited to any role in the company and so isn’t going to get the job he or she is grooming for.

The candidate in question won’t ultimately be leaving the company (assuming he or she is successful in his or her move) – and so a valuable espouser of company and brand values is retained.

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

There are many reasons why adding social media to your marketing mix is a good idea.  It allows a company to talk directly with existing and potential customers, which builds a brand in a way advertising in traditional media simply doesn’t allow.  It allows a business to act quickly in response to negative perceptions by having its finger firmly on the pulse of consumer opinion.

Another key advantage is that social media is the perfect platform on which to create brand ambassadors, who will spread the word on behalf of your business – and word of mouth recommendation is still the most powerful tool in marketing.  With the wealth of knowledge about customer demographics and opinions, social media is also a powerful tool in understanding what your target market wants.

Not least among the benefits of having a presence in social media is that fact that consumers increasingly expect brands to be active in this space, as more of their lives move into the digital space.

Nevertheless, while digital marketing is growing faster than advertising in traditional media, it has not taken over completely.  A truly successful marketing campaign will usually involve many different approaches – such as digital marketing, direct mail, TV and press campaigns – that work together.

The key is to build a social media marketing campaign that brings to life a brand identity that has been established using these many different tools.  Digital marketing will rarely function in isolation, and a company’s social media must be the interactive, personal face of the company values that have been built up using many different marketing tools.

There is a strong imperative for companies to embrace social media, but it must be done thoughtfully, carefully and wisely.  If it is, then it not only becomes a powerful marketing tool in its own right, but through the ability it gives to companies to listen to their customers’ conversations and, in many cases, improve customer service, it also provides valuable information that can feed into and inform many other elements of the marketing mix.

When adding social media into a broader marketing strategy there is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Instead, it should be used to complement and improve existing PR and marketing campaigns.  Social media is the most powerful tool to create more value from the investment a company has already made in creating and spreading its brand identity.

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

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.  This is a logical and sensible way of thinking, but it can also be restrictive. It is the kind of thinking that can cause a company to miss a new opportunity that involves a new technology, or a new way of doing business.  All too often, unfortunately, it is the approach that senior management takes when considering new phenomena like social media as a component of a marketing strategy.

On the one hand, it may derive from senior managers being of a generation that has not grown up with social media, whereas younger generations cannot imagine life without social networks like Twitter and Facebook.  On the other hand, it could be hesitancy about a relatively new and still evolving method of marketing, which for some senior managers may still have to prove its worth. In other cases, it could be the fear of negative publicity rapidly building momentum in a forum that seems hard to control.

Such concerns may seem valid at first glance, and it is certainly true that using social media as a beneficial tool in a broader marketing strategy takes time, effort and focus.  But if a corporate presence on social media networks is well managed, the advantages can be huge.

Social media networks are evolving rapidly, mainly because they are so popular. They are the forum through which many people organise much of their lives and, therefore, give businesses an unprecedented opportunity to engage with customers on a personal and interactive basis. Traditional marketing rules still apply in this new space, but they must be applied in a different way.

When social media marketing is successful, it builds brand evangelists who spread positive recommendations through word of mouth, and brings a corporate brand to life. Social media interaction can give a company a human face, show it is listening to its customers, and disseminate news about product development quickly.  It also gives businesses a wealth of information about customers and their opinions, which means they can act swiftly to head of any negative opinions before they get out of control, and can spread positive news fast.

Concerns among senior management about social media may be driven by the best intentions, but by not embracing this exciting new marketing tool they could be missing a trick.

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

Social Media Papers Written By Peter Wilkinson

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

Engaging the Social Culture to Drive Brand Advocacy in the IT Sector
Peter presented this paper at a major IT conference in Moscow	Buy Now or contact us
Index Introduction 1.0 Key trends in social media – Social media is here to stay 1.1 Statistics and observations 1.2 Key findings from a recent 2011 Nielson US report 1.3 Russian statistics from TNS Digital Life 1.4 Other general Russian trends – General comments 2.0 The social media brand 3.0 Social media and channels to market 4.0 What should a brand look at when considering social media? 4.1 Brands need to make sure the basics are covered 4.2 Brands need to engage with customers through social media to drive the brand experience 4.3 Brands need to move towards a social media service centre culture 4.3.1 Service desks can improve communications with the use of social networks 4.3.2 Why brands should put a value on social networks 4.3.3 The road map for success – Solve problems with social media 4.4 Tech support goes social 4.4.1 Social PC repair 4.4.2 Risks of social service help desks 4.4.3 Tweet for help 4.4.4 Looking forward; what brands should consider 4.5 Social service call centre 5.0 The driving force needs to be brand advocacy 5.1 Key to developing brand advocacy is social media services provision. 5.2 There are some simple rules to follow 6.0 You need shoppers if you want shopping 6.1 Consider your structure and strategy – function and form 6.1.1 Social retailing goals 6.1.2 Social retailing strategies 6.1.3 Social retailing tactics 7.0 Understand the social shopper and put the customer at the centre of all decisions 7.1 Social media intelligence and business intelligence decision making 7.1.1 Social marketing analytics defined 7.1.2 Beyond listening— the path to integrating and acting upon social media data 8.0 Social customer relationship management 9.0 New merchandising strategies for retail growth – crowd sourcing strategies to attract customers 9.1 What is crowd sourcing? 9.2 What is real‐time merchandising? 9.3 Create digital habits for offline behaviour 10.0 Set goals, objectives and develop integrated strategies 11.0 Should companies in the IT sector be taking the lead? Surely they should, but where do they begin? 11.1 Social media starts at the top – establishing social media policy 11.1.1 Top executives lead social strategies 11.1.1.1 Step 1: Understand people 11.1.1.2 Step 2: Determine objectives 11.1.1.3 Step 3: Develop a strategy Appendix 1 Yahoo! use social media to drive brand advocacy Introduction This paper looks at how social media needs to be viewed and applied by brands with particular reference to the IT sector.  It will consider what organisations need to do to drive brand advocacy and how this requires a more holistic view of the social media organisation.  In particular the paper will focus on the use of the social media service desk as a driver of brand advocacy in the IT sector. Social media has significantly changed the way brands need to connect with their customers.  More and more companies are starting to realise the true value of social media; they are adapting and integrating this new form of communication into their culture. It is important to understand that for a successful social media strategy, the company has to have an internal culture that is ready to accept new ideas and promote learning from these new practices. How should brands use social media?  The obvious approach and best place to start, is; blogs, social networking tools, forums, and video to build brand awareness, which maintains an up-to-date dialog with the consumers.  This may be about new products, services and tech support.  This is a good platform to start from, as it gives a human face/personality, which starts to develop a relationship with the customer. The above social channels or paths form a holistic approach to communications with customers.  This holistic approach needs to be mirrored by the internal brand, with the top-level executives taking the time to give updates on what they are doing and company activity.  The social media brand is driven from the inside out. In order for companies/brands to engage from the inside out, they need to develop social digital platforms, allowing the company and its employees to share and discuss technology, tech-related products and services.  The employees need to be guided and encouraged to join relevant product and service discussion topics like computers, interface products, personal IT products, iPods, mobile devices and so on.  There needs to be clearly defined channels for social customer service. The marketing department needs to consider and understand how social media service can lead to brand advocacy and loyalty.  They need to put the loyalty strategies in place and ensure the team have the technology, processes and capability/training so they can engage and drive the strategy.  Management needs to ensure the team also have the time to make sure the social media assets, such as forums etc, are stimulating environments, where valuable conversations are developed and participants converted into brand advocates. At one level social media marketing is all about getting your customers and your potential customers interacting with your brand.  The following paper will detail this evolving relationship between social media marketing, brand recognition and customer-company interaction. The key question is ‘why invest in the use of social media’? If you allow your employees and other stakeholders in the value chain to build small groups on the fly, to work on a problem through social space, the resulting collaboration magnifies their ability to deliver innovative solutions.  What if you can engage the customer in the problem solving?  Where does this lead us in terms of brand engagement?……………….. Peter at Moscow conference **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

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,

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 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 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

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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/

Content marketing for the B2B market

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.

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.

There is a big misconception that the purpose of networking is selling. As a successful Networking Consultant, I know first hand that if you expect to achieve only sales when networking you will fail. Subsequently you will feel disappointed that networking does not work. You can however, achieve Lead Generation from Networking, if you network in the right way and incorporate building relationships and into your process.

Here is a useful three stage process to achieve lead generation.

1. Target Networking

You need to have a plan and a goal for every networking event. What do you what to achieve when networking. Who do you what to meet? Be specific and identify your target audience. Prepare your questions before hand.

2. Create/Build Relationships

Networking is not an overnight success. It is not always likely to make an immediate sale when you meet a new contact at a networking event. You are more likely to make a sale when you build a relationship first. Never forget that a new contact is not buying your services they are “buying you” so the more they learn about your character the better. You should continue to build relationships after the networking event by following-up.

3. Lead Generation

Before you can achieve lead generation, you first need to understand what is Lead Generation and what does it mean for my business? A Lead is person who has indicated interest in your business. To achieve a success lead generation you need to do your homework and ensure that every networking activity is a step to encourage your new contacts to become interested in my business.

Bio

BellaNetworking is a successful B2B Strategic Networking Consultant and runs popular networking event. BellaNetworking is also the first UK company to launch an iPhone App for networking. www.firstnetworkingapp.com

The next BellaNetworking Event, for 100% Networking will be held on 26th June 2012, 6.30pm at MIC Conference Centre Euston.  At this event you will also have the opportunity to attend our Exclusive Pre-Networking™ between 5.30pm-6.30pm for more info, call our events team on 0845 269 8036. Click link to register to attend http://26june2012.eventbrite.com

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!

Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker

The concept of energising a brand has been in vogue from the 1990’s. It refers to the way in which your customers perceive brand is moving and its purpose. Therefore, it can be considered that a company with a positive brand energy is one which is moving forward, being successful and connecting well with its customers.

Even the largest and most influential international brands get tired of their looks over time. Continuing with the same brand image gives a sense of monotony to customers. They feel a company is stagnant. This is why businesses re-launch themselves with a new logo, slogan, graphics or entirely new marketing campaign. This move by businesses can be termed as a bid to “energise their brand”.

In the present era things move quickly and whilst Law Firms are excellent at keeping up to date with changes in the Law many fall short of keeping their brand updated and fresh

Energising brand on social media is essential. Marketers use popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest and, for businesses LinkedIn. Social media allows individuals and businesses to connect with each other and for businesses to promote their services in ways they might not have been able to previously. Social media engagements on all these sites are effectively word-of-the-mouth sales. With a fresh look and feel companies can generate enthusiasm and increase their client base. Word-of-the-mouth sales are important for any business as it is:

• Believable
• Self Enforcing
• Self spreading

As a business owner every change you make should move the brand forward. You can instil energy into the brand by challenging yourself and employees. These challenges can be made in terms of results, pricing or other legal aspects. What it means for organisational energy is: refreshing certain aspects of brand on social media that helps in getting working staff more motivated and focused on the goals.

Better results in turn will lead to more word-of-the-mouth sales. If clients like the help they get from your legal firm they will be vocal on the social media sites. They will refer others and provide testimonials. When looking for legal advice people trust tried and tested sources. It is here that you hold an edge over other competitors.

So, energising brand can be put in simple terms as “refreshing yourself and your business through social media and using the positive force of your organisation (and energy) to increase and improve your brand”. What this means it that by employing social media for marketing and advertising you can improve the positivity of your brand image and dramatically improve the way that customers see your legal brand and your company. It provides an added impetus for your staff to work harder and provide better results.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Depending on who you talk to, social media advertising may already be challenging PPC. And in truth there are two basic answers to my question, one that endorses this view and one that uses it to take your PPC advertising in a different direction.

Social media advertising uses detailed social media graph information to target specific adverts at a receptive demographic. You will have seen the results every time your Facebook page loads with a bunch of highly relevant ad streams on it. Facebook sells your demographic information to companies, who can then buy the opportunity to show you adverts you really like.

PPC can’t compete with this, for the fairly obvious reason that the people who use Google as a search engine are not segmented into demographic enclaves. You pay for clicks, anyone searching for terms with your keywords in them will see your ad. And unless you have optimised that ad very, very carefully, you are unlikely to always be showing it to people guaranteed to take action as a result of it.

Social media advertising, on the other hand, carries the cachet of exclusivity. Because social media works by only letting people into your circle if you allow them, then you act differently when you’re using social media sites and streams. In plain English: you sort of assume, because the targeted ad is in there with you, that you’ve invited it.

The basic conceptual difference between Google PPC and a social media ad, then, is this:

You think like you’ve already endorsed a social media ad.

You treat a Google PPC ad with suspicion. It’s trying to sell you something.

Obviously the irony here is that both types of ad are trying to sell you something – and in a way the social media ad is more invasive because it’s come into your enclosed social media world without your explicit permission. In truth you have given it permission by signing up to the site – but you haven’t asked to be advertised to even if you feel like you chose the ads that you are seeing.

Conversely, how many times have you deliberately avoided a PPC ad because you knew it had paid to be there? I do it all the time. I routinely ignore sponsored links in favour of the main page, simply because I know they’re sponsored.

Mind you I am not indicative of everyone else in the world. And clearly some people do click on PPC ads otherwise no-one would use them at all.

The bottom line – the net is full of potential customers, so every advertising stream is a valid one. But social media advertising tends to narrow down your catchment area into just the people really really likely to want to follow your call to action.

Technically its should be possible for you to use information collected in the social demographics of your followers and social media ad respondents, to fine tune your PPC optimisation so you’ll get better ROI there as well.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

How much money do you spend on social media marketing? How much do you spend on Google SEO? How much do you spend on print advertising?

The marketing mix for every brand is different according to the demographics of its core audience. If your audience reads a lot of magazines and doesn’t use the net much, then social media marketing fits hardly at all into your marketing cocktail. If, on the other hand, you’re targeting younger professional spenders, or school leavers, then social media presence is one of the most important things your brand can achieve.

Actually achieving a good social media presence is rather difficult, particularly for companies that have been used to dictating public opinion with advertising campaigns. Because social media works back to front, from a traditionalist’s viewpoint – the customers tell you what they think and you adapt your branding to accommodate their views.

Clearly there’s a very finely honed balancing act at work here. If you adapt your brand too drastically, it stops being your brand. For example, if you sell beer and lots of people who don’t like beer start complaining about you in the social media, then selling fizzy pop instead isn’t adapting your brand according to your social media reputation – it’s changing your business completely.

If, on the other hand, your target audience is unhappy with your social brand, you have to do something about it. This is the whole point of social branding and reputation management. You start with an intended effect, develop your brand personality (the way your brand is expressed, effectively, in social media streams) accordingly and then manipulate the end product according to the majority reaction from your core audience.

Our beer-haters example isn’t entirely fatuous: when you deal with the public eye to eye, as you do on a social media platform, then you have to expect some genuinely malicious publicity to come your way. The key to success in the social media is what you do with it when it happens.

An unanswered comment never looks very good – it shows you have no faith in your brand, or no ammunition with which to defend yourself. And taking down untrue claims about your brand just looks like capitulation. So how, in a world where your reputation can plummet in a heartbeat, do you control the social media terrorist?

As with most potential bullies, the best way to deal with a social media hater is to be honest. You can politely refute a comment of this nature, but that still looks a bit weak. What I’d suggest is that you ask the “complainer” to cite specific examples illustrating his or her point so you can rectify the situation in a satisfactory manner. That way you’ll stay strong and your brand reputation will remain good.

Ultimately, social media is a pervasive tool for a massive proportion of young and young to middle aged consumers. It’s a culture you can’t afford to ignore if you want to define and capture the market share appropriate to your service or your product.

B2B Marketing article on LinkedIn advertising – a worthwhile read http://www.b2bmarketing.net/knowledgebank/social-media-marketing/best-practice/how-get-most-out-linkedin-advertising#

YouTube is one of the most used elements of the social media landscape. It has an average number two ranking in end user search engine traffic.  Yet most golf courses don’t seem to know what to do with it.

YouTube is the perfect platform for your promotional video; for a course introduction; and for a hole by hole tutorial of your establishment.  You can also encourage your resident professionals to post video tutorials of their own: basic swing techniques and corrections; putting practice.

It isn’t just YouTube that contains promotional gold for your course.

Facebook isn’t about sales, it’s about socialising.  It’s also about 750 million users and rising. That’s a potential catchment area no one can afford to ignore.  Create a page for your golf course and encourage your professionals to create pages too, linking themselves to you.

Advertise your Facebook page at your course; on your website; on your invoices and membership documents.  Encourage your members to befriend their instructors and encourage those instructors to interact daily with your members in a genuine and interesting way.

Start a blog – or rather ensure that professionals in your employ are blogging regularly and well.  People aren’t interested in blogs “written” by corporations or corporate entities, which either pump out undiluted sales guff or talk in a rather circumspect way about – you guessed it – products they sell.  Golf courses are populated by golfers, who want to learn from better golfers.  Get your pros blogging and their followers become, by default, aficionados of your establishment.

LinkedIn is a great place for golf courses to get involved in the social media.  Business to business communication is growing exponentially through LinkedIn, which has updated its marketing tools to allow you to target adverts on an individual or business wide level.  Start networking with fellow golf professionals and research ways to get targeted adverts for corporate golf days out to businesses in your local area.

Don’t forget to use the social media to power your business as well as to advertise it.  Using LinkedIn and Twitter to develop alliances and engage in “Tweetings” gives you the ability to approach and cement fruitful contacts on the spot, no matter where you are physically located at the time.  LinkedIn in particular carries the ability to get third party introductions happening, so you can grow your circle of connections proactively.

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Make your social media presence about immediate involvement and watch your membership cement itself.  That’s the message for golf clubs in the wake of a recent initiative by the PGA Championship, which used multiple social media platforms to help its site visitors get the most from the PGA experience.

Viewers logged into the PGA website were able to watch live video streaming and respond to events using their preferred social media platform (because they’d logged in using their Facebook page, or their Twitter account).  The aggregated Tweets and comments appeared for all to see and respond to: creating an instantaneous social media event around a single company (PGA).

The platform created for the duration of this event allowed the PGA to advertise through multiple streams, while collecting intensely valuable data from every user – demographic information, duration of stay online, response to advertising.

The same techniques can be used to unlock value from your own social media peer reviews: and to expand your potential membership into the bargain.  The aggregate stream of data pushed through your social media community is a mine of demographic information, which you can use to identify potential areas for targeted advertising on social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

The subject of the comments given by your existing social media peer group in itself contains plenty of helpful advice.  Make sure you listen to your followers and fans when they suggest new ways for your golf course to reach out and touch someone in the social sphere.  Listen to other golf businesses in your area too, and forge links with them to provide platforms like the one created by the PGA and its advertisers during the championships.

That’s the power of the social network. If you meld your social circle with the followers of a local golf store you have a whole new pool of potential members to draw on.

The practice of profiling individuals based on their social networking habits is growing quickly – so fast it already has a name.  It’s called social colonisation, and you can use it to identify potential new members from activity on your site or the sites of your business allies . The key, as ever, lies in enhancing the golf experience of the fans that you have access to.  A combined access event like the one hosted by the PGA could hold membership gold for you.

Social Media Consultant and International trainer

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

The legal profession is apparently considering the impacts of the recession on its business – in which case the first thing the average solicitors firm might want to consider is that social media advertising and marketing is potentially extremely cost effective.

There are two ways to do social media for law – you can pay for advertising, for example with a LinkedIn campaign that allows you to buy clicks or impressions on targeted ad content; or you can generate a free of charge ad campaign by simply using the tools at hand plus a lot of spade work and a little common sense.

Paying for social media advertising is a lot like Pay Per Click advertising on mainstream web pages – but with the added benefit that you get to use the social graph to target the people for whom your advertisements show.  In other words, you guarantee that every time your ad displays it is going to places that represent a real chance of business.  And like a Pay Per Click campaign in traditional net spaces, you can set your budget so your spend is never overshooting.

Using paid social media advertising spaces requires clever time budgeting.  You need to be sure that your message is reaching people at times when they are most likely to be looking at the social media site that you are using as an advertising vehicle.  You also need to understand that there will be competition for these slots, with the higher bidding solicitors firms taking the ad spots for the most popular times of day.

Research is key – just as it is in traditional advertising and marketing.  You need to find your market before you sell to it: making sure that you are targeting the right businesses, the right individuals and the right sectors with the right language.

That’s right: language is still key in the advertising world.  Speak in terms that your target market understands.  Use the simplest, cleanest, clearest language you can for maximum message and minimum fuzz.  Avoid buzz words unless you absolutely have to use them – they don’t mean anything and they are often seen as evidence of someone who has to hide behind them to conceal the fact that he or she doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.

That said, using fashionable technology can give a real boost to your advertising and social media presence – provided you use it where it is best to use.  Video, for example, is an ideal way to get your solicitors “out there” with your clients in a non threatening, quick and informative manner.  Have a professionally directed, short (that’s important) video made for each of your team members and post the video on their social network pages.  That way potential clients can get a flavour of who they are and what they are like while still engaged with your page and your advertising choices.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

How is social media going to fit into your company?  Does it sit in marketing.  Maybe it sits in public relations or in customer service.  I would suggest this is a culture issue and will be different in each company.  You will also need agencies to help, but you will not be able to outsource all the social media.

What is your process for developing social media strategy?  In my opinion, the best answer is to understand the way social media fits in your company.  How it will be resourced.  Then research your target markets, both internal and external. Know them well, understand them and be part of them. Immerse yourselves in the cultures of their online communities or set objectives to create communities for them to be part of.

Set your objectives. Have a clear understanding of what social media is going to do to your whole company and your marketing campaign. Social media is stronger if it’s integrated more holistically into the company and the campaign.

Set the metrics that will be used to track the success of social media strategies and tactical campaigns. These metrics need to feed off harvested data.  The important issue is they need to be translated into meaningful insights.

Create a plan!  Hopefully this goes without saying! You need to be able to layout a clear plan on where your social media efforts will head and how it affects your whole marketing strategy. Both the internal marketing strategy and the external marketing strategy need to be considered holistically and in detail.  There needs to be integration.  Nevertheless, the plan should be flexible enough to sway to how the target market is responding.

Identify the technology to be used (Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter? Etc.  There are many tools and this is where you need a training course or consultant to help. The technology to be used should always be put last in the strategy. Remember technology is only an enabler.  The principles are the foundation.  If you allow yourself to be blinded by techno babble and cool/sexy technology you may regret it later.

You’re plan shouldn’t be limited by the technologies that are most used by your users. Look into smaller Social Networking Sites or forum, etc. Smaller ones are more focused and may prove more receptive to your message and participation.

Consider – how do you see social media as part of the whole marketing strategy?  Social media can be for Awareness, Engagement or Activation. You need to be able to give it a role in the company culture and whole marketing strategy to keep a focus on the objective.

We mentioned metrics above, but how do you measure success in social media? What are the tools that you use?  There are a lot of tools out there that are available. But what’s important is that you need to be able to translate the data you get from those tools into meaningful information.  Hay, the marketing process has not changed we just have more and better tools to help us!  This again is where you may need professional help and input

Do you have a website?  Stupid question, of course you do.  The issue is how it integrates into the marketing strategy in terms of social media.  Is it a boring catalogue site? I know you will not say it is, but is it in your customer’s eyes?  Never changing or changing only when budget permits.  Maybe it is a site that is pushing the corporate message.  Carefully crafted by the marketing department, which is now transparent due to the advent of social media.  It could be a ‘let me sell to you shop’ with a ‘must have’ blog that is guarded by the corporate communications department.   Or is it a thriving community with two way dialog and social buzz, with people sharing what they think and feel about you and your products.

If you would like more information on how to build your social media strategy to integrate with your organisation’s existing or evolving marketing strategy please follow me or contact me to discuss your requirements 07930 330125.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

The world of social media seems so connected and instantaneous that it is sometimes easy to forget that its presence spans the entire globe.  As a result, social media marketing campaigns are conducted on global information networks and cross borders.  This is partly where their value lies, as a company can reach out to a worldwide audience in a relatively simple way.  Yet it is also where their biggest challenges stem from.

Traditional advertising campaigns are carefully managed to appeal to the cultural difference of various markets.  Adverts and slogans that work well in one country may be wholly inappropriate for another, whether it is adjacent or on the other side of the world.  But social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Xing and LinkedIn make little attempt to distinguish between markets.  In fact, part of their fundamental proposition is to bring people together who may be separated by great distances, and who may reside in different countries.

While 40% of Twitter users live in theUS, for example, the remainder live in a whole spectrum of different countries, where values, traditions and cultural sensitivity all differ.  As a result, international social media strategies must address these issues if they are to be truly effective.

One central issue in a successful international social media strategy is to consider which social networks are popular in your target markets.  Though consolidation is happening, there are many options to choose from. In Brazil and India, for instance, Orkut is popular.  InChina, Facebook is currently banned.

Once the choice of network is made, it is a question of building a brand that will appeal to local markets through an international forum.  The challenge, therefore, is one of complexity, but with expert advice it is possible to navigate the many options and optimise a social media campaign that has appeal across borders.

The reward is that getting the strategy right enables a company to reach across the globe with simple tools, such as a 140-character tweet.  Therein lies great power to build a brand, link to business partners abroad, or bring together the many creative minds in a multi-national business.

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

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Maintaining a meaningful presence in social media takes some work, but it pays to remember that when a company makes regular posts on networks like Twitter and Facebook it is reaching out to many different stakeholders.  As well as a global audience of customers and business partners, social media provides instant communication with the press.

Journalists and editors are constantly looking for news stories, trends and opinions.  Increasingly, they monitor social media networks to find them because they provide a forum for up-to-date comments, views and corporate communications.  A simple post on Twitter can immediately be read by news-hungry writers looking for their next scoop.

Social media allows companies to bring their brand to life through a more personal and interactive relationship with other people on the networks.  Often, this kind of relationship is thought of in terms of reaching out to customers, but the same principles of personal interaction and responsiveness apply to the relationship companies build up with editors and journalists.  Reminding members of the press of a company’s latest developments can be just as important as keeping customers and business partners up to speed with the latest news.

It goes without saying that any communications put out through social media networks need to be carefully managed.  As an increasingly important showcase for brands and their values, posts need to be consistent in their content and in line with a company’s public image.  So, care is needed when reaching out to both customers and the press.  But, managed wisely, a social media marketing strategy can be highly effective.

Social media increasingly defines the public face of a company, and when dealing with the press this can be very important.  Writers can quickly build up an understanding of a brand and its values through social networks, which gives them a better understanding of a company’s strategy as well as the latest developments in its products and services.  In effect, social media is the new shop window, showcasing the brand and the corporate ethos as well as the products a company sells.

As the press turns to social media, so should the companies that want the press to notice them.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

The power of viral marketing has become much greater in recent years, with ads becoming internet phenomena and gaining a great deal of inexpensive publicity when videos are shared online. The ability to target specific customers groups by advertising on the right websites is also a huge advantage the internet provides.  Search engine optimisation, which boosts the presence of a company’s website in search engine results, has also become a powerful tool.

In general, the importance of digital advertising has grown rapidly, but within that there is one sector that is becoming particularly powerful – social media marketing.  Its value lies in its unique ability to enable businesses to engage with their customers in a more personal and interactive way than ever before.  This is why social media advertising is not just there supporting traditional campaigns or other digital advertising.  Increasingly, it is becoming the means through which companies create their identity in customers’ minds.

Social media enables companies to go beyond the passive nature of traditional advertising and become truly interactive.   It gives a company a real voice in the online world and enables it to not only listen to, but also participate in the conversations its customers are having online.   This kind of personal interaction is what customers want, and no other forms of advertising can achieve it.

B2C social media marketing has become the main driver of the marketing mix of many large consumer brands, and its importance is only likely to keep growing in the years ahead.   Consumers enjoy the fact that they can be heard in the social media space by the companies they buy from, and businesses can get a much better understanding of what their customers want.   Advertising can be targeted and more effective, but business can also limit negative publicity as well as promoting positive messages.

The direct, intimate and personal effects of conversations with consumers in the social media space are unrivalled by any other kind of advertising.   So, while the TV commercial and newspaper ads are still important, social media marketing is carving out a bigger role for itself every day.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Golf and social media are ideal bedfellows – and golf courses and clubs all over the country are realising that perfect fit! It’s not only golf, of course – any sport that relies on external conditions; has set times for play; and is performed in an ongoing league or as a one off championship, is ripe fodder for the social media technologies that now run many of our interactions online.

Everyone uses social media these days – even companies. So when golf courses started conversing directly with their members and players, it was really just an extension of a process that we’ve been observing across the board in our daily lives. Sign up for your club’s social media feed and you’ll get real time alerts about free tee times, perfect playing conditions and of course specific events: championship days, pro days and awards ceremonies for example.

The thing about the social network is, there are more people in it than just golfers, That’s true of everything of course, What I mean is, if your golf course is in your social network, then all your other non-golfer friends will be engaged with it at a remove of one. And when they see the flood of updates, photos, contests and social events coming through from the course, they may start to get interested.

For a golf course, this is a perfect example of influence – which as we all know is the new buzzword in the online marketing industry. Influencing potential customers to do stuff is the name of the social media advertising game – and the above example is exactly how to do it. For every fan you have, as a golf course, there are potentially hundreds of new converts to the game in that fan’s own social network.

It’s not difficult to maintain a strong social media presence once you get into the swing of it. Tee off with regular Twitter feeds and create a Facebook page. Your existing members are an instant fan base – and word will spread from there.

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

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.

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Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media

Despite the large amount of opportunities that social media has made available for online business owners, only the professional entrepreneurs appear to be applying their knowledge in online advertising, allowing them to reap the true benefits. It is for this reason that the novice business owners amongst us are beginning to prefer hiring the services of another company that have expertise in online advertising and digital marketing, to further excel the success of their business. Social Media Training and Coaching, which is a part of the Panther Interactive Marketing’s offering.  Panther is one of the most well-reputed service providers in this regard.

Panther Interactive Marketing provide various online advertising packages to influence your business’ Social Media marketing gains. Panther’s  packages include Standard Social media and SEO services, Enhanced Social Media Services and Extended SEO Services. Looking particularly at Standard Social Media and SEO, services include Social media mapping, social bookmarking, social media set up, Ad hoc copywriting, collection of client testimonials, regular updates, editing of text provided by the client, etc. In comparison, the Enhanced Social Media Services are more concerned with providing XML news feeds to the client website, providing the stakeholders with the latest and most update industry related news, driving traffic to the staff profiles, and also publishing newsletters to the customers both online and offline. Also, the Extended SEO Services offered by Panther Interactive Marketing have shown to help websites prosper and increase online presence. All online advertising packages of Panther Interactive Solutions are reasonably priced accordingly to the customer’s requirements.