For one thing, there are three outlets very near our office, and their salmon and tuna sushi with extra ginger and wasabi makes my lunchtime just that bit lovelier.
For another, they have an inherently social style. Sure, their social media presence is poor. They run some Foursquare deals but they’re not on Facebook or Twitter, which is surprising considering their health-conscious, urban, new-media sort of patrons. But social media isn’t everything. What they do have is a charismatic founder; a strong, authentic and playful identity that permeates everything they do; talkative, helpful staff; and a great, constantly evolving product.
Even better, this is what I found on my tray when I treated myself to a noodle soup yesterday.
Swiftly reactive, personal, heartfelt and conversational. Now that’s what I call super-social CSR.
There are itsu evangelists out there crying out for engagement; harness the brand’s existing instincts to some kick-ass tools and on/offline tactics, and these sushi sellers have stellar social potential.
If you asked me to outline the perfect football match to go to as a spectator, then it would probably be Scotland playing Brazil 15 minutes walk from my house. So it’s funny that that’s exactly what happened on Sunday. Admittedly, in fantasy land Charlie Adam curls a free kick into the top left corner to seal a tight 3-2 victory in the 93rd minute but hey, 2-0 wasn’t exactly a disaster.
That all aside, holding a Scotland match in London is interesting. It’s interesting because it presents a whole new set of opportunities.
Me, in the Brazil end, looking at 35,000 Scotland fans…
By all accounts 35,000 tickets were sold by the Scottish Football Association for the game, with a whole kilt load more (myself included) picking up tickets locally. That’s a lot of Scots in one place at one time. A fact not missed by the News of The World who had shipped editions of the Scottish News of the World to N5 for the occasion. Complete with free Irn Bru.
But what else could have happened? A good chunk of the supporters I spoke to before, during and after the match were Scots born and bred, but a lot now lived down South. And a moment like this, for a weegie 10 years out of Glasgow stirs real emotion. At that moment I am a sitting duck for anything that cements that feeling.
Am I a big Dougie MacLean fan? Not really, but you could have quite easily persuaded me to buy a copy of Caledonia.
Do I have any need for additional financial products and services? Not really, but Scottish Widows could certainly have enticed me to consider what they have to offer based on name alone.
And of course, once I’m hooked, then I’m yearning to call home, to reconnect with my Caledonian brethren and to share my experience…
Emotion is such a key part of decision making that seeking out the pockets where emotions run high could well be the key to something clever, disruptive and even spectacular.
We’re all exposed to marketing messages in countless ways each day. But how many hit us at the right time? It’s feeling Scottish again, or feeling 18 again, or feeling in the first throes of love again; and it matters.
When was the last time you paid a compliment to a stranger?
Mine was when I sat opposite a beautiful coat for three hours on the way to Paris. I wanted that coat, and just plucked up courage to ask the wearer where she bought it as we rolled to Gare du Nord. As I feared, it was out of my reach – Chloe – purchased in Monte Carlo.
I wasn’t able to talk with much authority on their latest collection, so we talked about the glories of Monte Carlo instead. She looked as pleased as punch as she swept off the train. My fantasy of her ripping it from her back and flinging it my way in a ‘more money than sense’ fit of altruism was therefore short lived.
I also received a compliment of my own last week. I was in the supermarket near my home (sorry to bring you down to earth) when a shopper in the queue exclaimed that my perfume was gorgeous and what was it? It was one I hadn’t worn for a while, but as soon as she said it, everyone seemed to be nodding and smiling in agreement, from the checkout girl to the two year old toddler. Now it was my turn to be as pleased as punch (Bvlgari White Tea, since you ask), and guess what?
I’ve been wearing it ever since.
An exchange of this kind is powerful on two fronts: the requester takes away evidence of a product’s efficacy up close, while the recipient basks in the post-purchase glow of satisfaction that only a stranger can truly deliver. Friends and family are indeed very influential when making decisions about purchases, but what about after the fact? Who’s to say a friend isn’t being disingenuous in order to make us feel good (or dare I say it, insecure) about our choice?
No, the words of a stranger are by far the most powerful in this respect, and that is no doubt why the lady on the train will probably choose another Chloe coat and why I will make a beeline for the Bvlgari range next time I am in the airport (en route to Monte Carlo, no doubt).
So, our challenge is – can we encourage genuine compliment giving in order to encourage word of mouth for our clients?
Is it something we can influence honestly, or is it one area of conversation that is and always will remain the most powerful simply because we can’t?
When I say the phrase ‘social recruiting’, what do you think of?
Agencies putting job roles on Twitter? HR building relationships through LinkedIn and trawling blogs? Or even unscrupulous recruiters creating Foursquare ‘places’ near competitors advertising new jobs? All this and more was discussed a few weeks ago at the #trulondon Social Recruiting Unconference, and very interesting it was too.
But this just blows all that out of the water.
We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change. However, our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede.
We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.
For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws. We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.
Send questions, or a resume/cover letter/links to clips to my email address below. If you already have your dream job, please pass this along to someone whose skills you covet. Thanks.
Matthew Doig
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
This (which I found via the awesome FleetStreetBlues) has unsurprisingly spread like herpes through a newsroom, being retweeted and posted to Facebook pages and blogs by journalists worldwide. But what’s great is that that happened not because of some convoluted social strategy but because the copy itself is simply so ballsy, personal, disruptive and refreshing.
As Matthew Doig’s own surprise at the reaction attests, this was so successful because it so obviously authentic to his team’s style and attitude. That’s being social – being interesting, individual and honest.
If you achieve that, the platforms will largely take care of themselves.
Have you seen any other job ads that *really* made you talk?
Last week 1000heads was invited to attend the B2B edition of ‘Social Media Huddle’ hosted by Dell, Google and For Immediate Release [FIR].
The networking event – the third in its series – takes the unconference route in its execution, whereby guests can create their own sessions for others to attend on the day. I’ve been to a few events like this in the past and it can make for a really interesting day as you never quite know what to expect until you arrive.
The #dellb2b event (to give it its proper twitter name) however, had a very specific aim of ‘bringing together senior communications and marketing professionals to exchange and share experiences on B2B social media for their mutual benefit’. Nice.
The big draw in this instance was guest speaker and internationally recognised thought-leader in the social space, Brian Solis.
I’ve known Brian for a few years now but this is the first time I’ve heard him speak in the UK. A master of the soundbite, his talk was insightful and to the point. I’ll post the slides from the day in a second, but first – here’s a snapshot from my notes and tweets for the day [including key quotes from the man himself] -
Brian Solis James Whatley
“46% of B2B respondents said social media was perceived as irrelevant to their company”
“By not saying anything in social, you’re saying everything”
“B2B marketing spend will grow from $11m in 2009 to $54m in 2011”
“93% of business buyers believe all companies should have a social media presence”
So basically, what BS is saying is that, when it comes to B2B – believe it or not – you should apply the same rules of listening and engagement that you do to consumers – ie: You listen. You learn. You engage. You create.
“What is the ROI?”
“There is no ROI of social media programs.”
“However, there is definitely ROI for social media programs that are setup to do something”
Again. Not new. But a truism.
Some choice tweets?
All in all, plenty of food for thought there, raising a number of issues that we’ll come back to another day.
If you’d like to listen to the presentation yourself, Nevile Hobson has kindly posted the audio version and it may well make an interesting accompaniment to Brian’s slides, embedded below.
When talking with FMCG brands, I hear the same sentiment over and over.
Word of mouth is all very well for sexy or luxury brands – but why would anyone bother talking about products that are so everyday?
Our instinct is to assume that word of mouth has the biggest influence over the biggest purchases in our lives. We love to talk about our new car, because it defines us in such a visible way. We ask loads of opinions before splashing out on that expensive new tablet, because the stakes are so high. But do we really bother seeking out loo cleaner recommendations? Do we really evangelise about the awesomeness of our orange juice? Aren’t those transactions more private, daily, habitual – and rarely aired in public?
As is often the case with word of mouth, our instincts underestimate how inherently social a species we are.
Take beverages. The juice you swill in the morning, the soft drink you reach for with lunch, the tipple you sip after work – we are rarely aware of talking about our choices in these instances, let alone asking for advice. But research has shown that these low cost products fuel huge amounts of conversation on and offline. For example:
Consumers, on average, mention 7.2 beverage (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) brands to friends per week. These are two of the most common consumption categories to be recommended and to have recommendations requested
80% of consumers read other consumers’ reviews and feedback about food and beverage brands online
Beyond volume, another interesting discovery is that advertising triggers less word of mouth for beverages than other categories, making peer opinion more powerful:
Traditional advertising triggers 47% of general brand WOM – this falls to 38% for beverage brands
And most impactful of all, it seems that beverages drive the sort of WOM that results in recommendation and purchase more than any category:
40% of brand recommendations contains appeal to buy or try product – this rises to 53% for beverages
49% of consumers say a brand recommendation drives them to buy – this rises to 62% for beverages
In the words of Brad Fay, co-founder of WOM research group Keller Fay:
“Word of mouth, in beverages, sees a very strong linkage to purchase, even more so than we see in other categories. That’s why we think it would be worth the industry thinking about how word of mouth can stimulate the brand. These are people in effect saying they’re going to run out and buy the product.”
Beverages are just one example, but it’s evident that word of mouth can be more, not less, influential for fast-moving, low-cost goods – and there are some great case studies of how FMCG companies are harnessing its potential.
We like rewarding our engaged communities.
We also like being first…
As some of you may know, Facebook made some pretty interesting changes to the structure of their fan pages recently. These included iframe support for tabs; the ability to “like” and comment on other pages as your own page; and notifications when people comment on your page.
However, something that really caught our collective eyes was the new page layout which boasted images along the top of the page, just like user profiles:
From a community management perspective, it was good to see that Facebook had foreseen potential spammer problems with this release. Rather than sourcing the images along the top from fan uploads, they instead displayed the most recent five images uploaded by the brand, in random order.
Of particular note here are the words ‘random order’.
The pictures change order each time the page is loaded, thus making it impossible to create a montage image using the pics (like some awesome user profiles out there today). Most brands either defaulted to their logos or threw up some boring product images.
Here at 1000heads, we have been lucky enough to work with Nokia on their global fan page nearly a year now and, with around 2.9m fans at our disposal, ‘boring product images’ didn’t quite cut it.
Instead we decided to use the random organisation of the images to our advantage. How? Well there’s a clue in the image above…
First we created a Nokia.ly URL tracking link to a hosted image of an awesome device, the Nokia N8
Second, we took that URL and split it up into five images to post on the Facebook page
Once the images were posted (and here’s a key point) we didn’t update about them straight away – instead, we just let them appear along the top of the page in a random order
This meant anyone landing on the page would see this random jumble of letters and wonder what they were for (a conversation trigger)
Some socially-savvy proportion of those people would figure it was a URL
The URL was just the beginning. Once cracked – this is what it links to:
Yes, that is a Nokia N8 with a screen full of binary code. For those willing to take the time to transcribe and translate it (no mean feat as you can’t copy and paste) there is the chance to win a brand new N8.
This is a simple activity we put together that kicked off on March 11th, the day after the new fan page structure was rolled out universally across all pages (an optional upgrade has been available since mid Feb) – we believe we have helped Nokia become the first brand in the world to use this new image functionality in such an interesting and engaging way.
We’re ready to stand corrected if you can find another example, of course.
For those that are interested in the ‘Why?’ – the aim of this activity was not to drive huge numbers but to instead reward optimism and curiosity. As a fan of any brand you have to be very engaged to actually visit a page like this (90% of interaction happens in newsfeeds) but to go the extra mile of figuring out the URL and then translating all that code, you have to be someone who is both curious about what Nokia is planning and confident that this journey will take you somewhere worth going.
Has it been a success? Well the competition is still open and the entries are coming in slowly but surely, not bad at all bearing in mind it has an extreme barrier to entry and has deliberately not been promoted too heavily.
For us this kind of experimentation is important. It’s easy to chase numbers on Facebook – focusing on acquiring fans or getting 1000s of likes on an update (and judging success accordingly) – and, while this is important, it is worth remembering that if you chase simplicity and always set low barriers to entry you will never really engage or interest people at a high level.
On Facebook (just like everywhere else in social) a balance is needed between broad engagement with low barriers to entry, and deep engagements focusing on quality, not quantity.
This is what our client, Saara Bergstrom, community manager at Nokia Global says about it:
“Facebook is a powerful way for us at Nokia to strengthen our relationship with our customers. We take pride in not only coming up with fun things to do with the community, like the ‘Hidden Nokia N8′picture puzzle, but also responding to each and every question coming through to our page and channelling the feedback we get further within Nokia. We work hand in hand together with our brilliant word of mouth agency 1000heads on the creative ideas and engagement, including the Hidden Nokia N8 puzzle.”
Thanks Saara!
It is a pleasure working with a client that allows us to experiment like this – someone who understands what it means to be first out the gate as well as the importance of broad and deep engagements.
By hiding these easter eggs across different social presences, we’re encouraging fans to look a bit harder at what their favourite brands are up to. From now on, they’ll be looking out for the next hidden code or URL, thus spending even more time absorbing and interacting with other key messages too.
This isn’t the first time we have hidden an easter egg like this on one of our client’s pages and it won’t be the last – so keep an eye out!
As for what the binary code in the image actually says…
Why not translate it and see?
“Radio was put on the map by the abdication of King Edward in 1936, 17 years later TV was put on the map by the coronation, and the Olympics is going to do for digital, what the coronation did for TV and the abdication did for radio. This is going to be the digital Olympics and it’s going to cause people to flock to the BBC’s digital output like never before.”
“We’ll be offering every minute of the games live and on demand with social media laced throughout this. We’ll be reporting on what the athletes are saying, we’ll be guiding the audience to the athletes, we’ll be reporting on what the organisers are saying, we’ll be carrying our content out there into the social media space, we’ll be listening to what our audience have to say about the Olympics and we’ll use what our audience say in our reporting.”
“Digital will be at the heart of what the BBC does around the Olympics, and social media will be at the heart of digital.”
Those quotes are taken from an interview I conducted on Monday with the Editor of the BBC Sport website, Lewis Wiltshire. It’s a fairly big ambition as you can no doubt understand.
However, from a broadcast (and interactive) perspective, the BBC are well ahead of the game. Which is a shame as the rest of the sporting world has a long way to go before they can even begin to match the Beeb’s innovative appetite for digital engagement. Allow me to explain -
As resident ‘sporty head’ here at 1000heads, it’s down to me to keep abreast of the latest and greatest developments across this particular category and the one thing that has always left me frustrated is that the ‘industry’ (if I can call it that) as a whole, seems to lag behind the rest of the commercial world when it comes to practically anything social media related.
But what Lewis’ quote above shows is that sports brands, bodies, athletes and personalities are all going to have to step up their social game pretty sharpish, or simply get left behind as the sporting digital revolution takes hold and flies past quicker than Usain Bolt running for his next bucket of nuggets.
With journalists now using quotes direct from athletes’ Twitter feeds, YouTube clips increasingly making it into sports reports, and sports stars also increasingly taking hold of their own content, companies with a vested interest in the biggest sporting event in the world need to have their social media and digital activations plans in place and planned in depth before the opening ceremony.
The dominating feature of sport and social media currently is that of an uncoordinated mess of tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook fan pages, blogs and foursquare check ins. What the industry needs is some strategy – some order to this madness.
From our perspective here at the ‘heads, this means effective social signposting (directing people to the right places), the streamlining of social presences and ensuring that the right content is in the right places.
All of these things (and many more) are going to be key in the upcoming months. Brands and sports bodies need to mould the habits of their fans and followers now so that once the games hit, they can make themselves heard above all the noise.
On Friday night I went, for the first time, to a particular Soho bar. The cocktails were good (even if I’m a bitter kind of guy – the drink that is) and the company was great, but I’m not going to talk about either. Today I want to muse on the two experiences that bookended that night. One walking in the front door, one that made us walk out…
At 1000heads we like things that drive conversation. Events, or items that trigger someone to share their thoughts. Walking into this bar there was a classic:
“Are you wearing a tie?” “Erm, no.” (I haven’t worn a tie outside a church for a good long while) “Great, you can go in then.”
A no tie policy. Now these aren’t unique, but they’re hardly common. Indeed none of our group had experienced one before and so, despite a nod towards pretentiousness, I knew this was something I’d mention over the weekend. And if the cocktails were decent, then it would be in a most positive light.
Conversation, good.
No entry for Angus…
So we enjoyed our drinks.
We discussed topics as diverse as wallet assembly, what Jack Bauer would get drunk on and the derivation of the word ‘trinkets’. We thought why not have another drink? And so two of our party went to the bar.
And then this happened…
“I need this seat” – a waitress approached “Oh, Sorry it’s taken.” “No, no I need it for one of my customers.”
There then followed a discussion, nay debate, on quite what she thought we were, the lack of grace in asking and suggestion that they become better stocked in chairs.
She didn’t get the seat. We kept the seat. But we left pretty soon afterwards for somewhere a little more interested in our custom.
Did I mention the tie over the weekend? No.
Did I mention the strange lack of service? Absolutely.
Conversation, bad.
The moral of the tale?
I’m all for something quirky. Something a bit different.
It draws me in, it makes me a little more interested than I otherwise might be. And then I talk, and then I share, and that might benefit you.
But I’d also like the minimum of service. I also want the product or service you’re selling me to be as expected. I don’t expect to have someone purloin a chair mid visit. Least not a staff member.
Yes it’s about fist impressions, but much more importantly, it’s about lasting impressions.
When was the last time you paid a compliment to a stranger?
But what Lewis’ quote above shows is that sports brands, bodies, athletes and personalities are all going to have to step up their social game pretty sharpish, or simply get left behind as the sporting digital revolution takes hold and flies past quicker than Usain Bolt running for 
