We’ve been a keen supporter of Like Minds from its foundations in 2009. Over the years 1000heads has presented keynotes, hosted lunches and attended summits, and we will be running an immersion session at the 2012 conference in May. However, we realise that while a number of ‘heads are actively involved, not everyone gets the opportunity to add their minds to the Like Minds mix.
It happens all too often, in agencies and brands alike: the same old people get to globetrot their way around conferences, while everyone else has to make do with an ‘event debrief’ afterwards, back in the office.
We wanted to change that. It’s exactly those people who are too busy, or considered too junior to attend these events, who are likely to get the most out of them. Everyone in the agency has the right to have their voice publicly heard and to bring insight back to their teams.
So we decided to give someone different the opportunity to go to Like Minds this year and represent 1000heads as a true ‘challenger’.
Welcome to the ‘Like Minds Challenge’. Here’s how it worked:
1. Everyone in the agency was invited to identify something they thought needed to be challenged, changed or improved; a process we currently work to that needs improving, an approach that should be changed outright, or an opportunity we haven’t yet recognised
2. To enter they simply had to explain their challenge and set out their suggested solution – in whatever format they felt conveyed it best
The numbers and quality of the entries, which came in from every direction – client services and creative to insights and analysis – seriously impressed us. 1000heads was positively challenged on everything from its environmental approach and philosophy on team motivation, to the way it handles client briefs and its use of technology to deliver better internal communication.
After much deliberation we realise we had two winners on our hands, not one. Data manager Andy Stretton and senior account manager Meg Grogan come from two very different parts of 1000heads – analytics and client services – yet both showed great understanding and passion for our business, an ability to challenge our thinking, and the acuity to suggest practical solutions that could effect real change.
But it’s not just about winning. The 1000heads Like Minds Challenge leaves us with an enthused and engaged team and a whole series of ideas that warrant further exploration. Each entrant is working with a Like Minds Mentor from our senior team, so they have the support and guidance to make their suggestion actually happen.
In short, we want the spirit of this year’s conference – ‘Why What You Do Matters’ – to become a long term, living, breathing process within our organisation – not an elitist jolly or a rhetorical pose.
What are you doing to give your people an opportunity to challenge your organisation in a constructive way?
Or does a culture of openness and innovation mean too many opportunities to upset the equilibrium?
There, I’ve said it. Few of my colleagues or acquaintances would believe it. My job as Social Business Director at 1000heads demands some of the most ‘extroverted’ activities you can imagine – speaking at international conferences, running training programmes for clients, internal evangelism – activities that demand constant sociability and public gregariousness. And I love it. I absolutely love it.
But those who know me well also know that I regularly retreat into ‘Molly zone’, craving time alone to think and work. I will book out meeting rooms to escape open plan intrusion. After a long day of interaction, I will more often than not run away to spend time with a book rather than join others for beers.
How does this square with the ‘always on’ social approach that I am encouraging businesses to adopt? In a world – not to mention an industry – where collaborating and speaking out have become moral dictates, how do those of us who get our energy from within not only survive but thrive?
These are questions I’m fascinated with right now. I’m putting a lot of energy into helping clients create environments and strategies that nurture their introverts too. Being social is not the same thing as being an extrovert, but many companies are making exactly that equation, and as a result it’s the people who shout the loudest and longest, not those with the best ideas or execution, who are getting their voices heard.
I’m writing a longer piece on this for my social communications column in AdMap this month and I’m gathering as many perspectives as I can. So are you an introvert who struggles with social? Do you have ideas for how reaching out can be balanced with reaching in? Do you feel that your company culture is failing to value your unique contribution in creating a truly social environment, just because you do things differently?
As a regular at Pho in Soho, and as a social media addict, I was immediately interested in the Foursquare competition running at my local branch. It awards each month’s ‘mayor’ a free bowl of Pho noodle soup.
While angling for a free lunch (or at least a bowl of noodle soup), my colleagues and I asked about the deal. We were surprised when our waiter confessed that we’d never be in with a chance of winning, because the branch manager checked in religiously every day, cementing his position as location mayor. My Pho fetish would have to be fed daily to rival his check-ins.
Turning to Twitter I shared the negative experience, tweeting that in my view the promotion was far from fair or honest. In response, Pho Restaurant gave a defensive and rather rude answer, seemingly challenging me on my report of the experience.
Perhaps the waiter got it wrong and the manager really wasn’t trying to win the free soup, but regardless, instead of apologising and offering to find out more about the promotion, the response was defensive and disinterested -a classic case of bad customer service.
In contrast, when I tweeted about a negative experience I had in Tesco, the concerned and helpful tone of its practical response immediately turned a negative into a positive.
Time and again research and experience shows that something negative (or sometimes simply unusual) gets us talking, but this fundamental rule of customer services seems to be forgotten as often as it’s remembered.
This is not rocket science. And this is not about ‘knowing how to do social media.’ This is simple business sense. Face to face or via social media, a brand is really only the people who represent it, with all the complex emotions that drive their own behaviour. As we’ve discussed before, it’s important for brands to embrace their humanity. But to make sure the rough never gets served up with the smooth, the right checks and balances are vital.
Truth is, we don’t want brands to be ‘human.’ We want them to be great brands – more patient, courteous, helpful and charming than most people ever bother to be. Yes, it’s important for brands to find a personal way to communicate – but however ‘social’ the media, they need to be professional, too.
At 1000heads we pride ourselves on authentic communication. We never tell audiences what to say when they take to social channels. And we’re immensely proud of our ethical stance. But it’s amazing how often a client will expect us to do precisely that: to control what is being said.
This is old-style reputation management. It comes from the PR discipline, where the whole raison d’etre involves controlling corporate messaging and ensuring that slogans and ideas are repeated, and parroted back by the throng. And because recall of brand messages has been a focus of market research, the perception among clients is that controlling the message should be a priority.
What such businesses fail to understand is that classical PR messages are no longer in control. Conversations happening online are not abiding by messaging guidelines, and this is a *good thing*. Audiences are interacting with brands on the basis of authentic experiences and impressions, not in accordance with a script, thus the information they share is a useful source of research on brand understanding and engagement. The response may not always be the desired one, as we’ve talked about before, but it’s all part of the process.
In the Social Age, reputation management is a matter of listening and responding to interactions, not a matter of controlling conversations. And the scale of responses varies from taking part in conversations, to knowledge aggregation, influencer engagement, problem solving, product optimisation, and supply chain monitoring. It’s not just for externally facing operations either. Social reputation management can involve learning from a firm’s own employee and service relationships.
From a PR perspective this is a revolution; no longer is the act of brand management a broadcast function. It’s not entirely reactive either. It’s more facilitative, and as such, requires sophisticated strategic thinking. Creative scenarios need to be established that will generate data that can inform how a business should develop. It’s not about controlling conversations, but rather about providing a safe, supportive space in which questions may be posed, suggestions can be made, and ideas can be cultivated. As a function, social brand reputation management bears a closer resemblance to objective audience research than traditional PR or advertising. But as such, the return on investment for social business reputation management is potentially much higher than old-style message control, because the output of interactions is designed to improve business processes, and to develop more genuinely constructive and mutually beneficial relationships. While all businesses have to sell their products to stay in business, they are more likely to achieve this end if all stakeholders are engaged, having an interest in the production process. Rather than “customer loyalty”, social reputation management generates audience investment.
As social business professionals, it’s our job to uphold this distinction and to educate our clients about the differences between old-style corporate message control and social reputation management. It can be easy to slip, quietly, into old-style PR in our dealings with clients, just to keep them happy. But that way be dragons. Authenticity requires trust. And any kind of messaging control involves artifice.
Augmented Reality apps aren’t new, but while playing around with Aurasma I started thinking about how I, as a consumer, am able to express my feelings about a brand.
I’ve never used AR before, so I started simple, creating a rudimentary example that exemplifies how I can, at the simplest level, say what I think about Marmite.
This love/hate example neatly fits in with the brand ethos of Marmite, which prides itself on the intense emotional response people have to its taste. But for any other brand there’s no doubt that a virtual sign shouting out ‘I hate’ whenever you point your phone at its label, could be seen as a problem. Brand vandalism, if you will.
Obviously, one of the glorious things about social media is that we can publicly comment on (and subvert) a brand however we see fit (as long as we’re not breaking any laws, that is). But we’ve seen how uncomfortable this has made brands in the past.
In 2009 Skittles turned its homepage into a live feed of consumer tweets, where any tweet featuring the word ‘skittles’ would be shown. But thanks to a lack of foresight (and appropriate language censors), chaos ensued.
Similarly, McDonald’s was hit during its ‘McStories’ campaign – when conversation about the brand was hijacked for the best part of a week, with a storm of complaints and vitriolic comment.
So are these sorts of AR apps about to make them terrified?
Well, perhaps. But in both these cases one could argue that the damage done to the brand was minimal. From a personal standpoint, if I’m craving a McFlurry on a sunny day, the likeliness of me being put off by a Twitter tag faux pas is frankly non-existent. But they do highlight a vitally important lesson; social means everyone can, and most probably will, have their say. Brands don’t get to choose who says what about them, whether online, in AR space, or in the real world. Social media and AR are simply new tools with which both brands, and their customers, can share their feelings.
What this does mean, however, is that brands that put themselves out there and encourage participation have to be ready for the consequences – and ready to respond to potentially controversial situations in an appropriate and positive way.
Beyond those instances where a person has a well-founded complaint, the majority of brand vandalism can be seen as silly, irreverent but also complimentary. If your brand excites and interests someone enough to generate an emotional response, even if it’s not on message, that should be welcomed and embraced.
Do the opposite by going on the offensive and you risk ‘doing a Nestle’, turning an opportunity to genuinely engage around an important issue into a potential PR disaster.
Ultimately, being part of the social environment means being part of the conversation. And just like in any conversation, confidence, humility, and not least a healthy dose of humanity, will prevail.
So don’t let the hijacking possibilities of AR put you off exploring an awesome new technology – just – like the proverbial Scouts, be prepared.
Influencers are the ultimate fans. They understand products often better than company representatives, and they accrue audiences based on the legitimacy and quality of the their advice, understanding and willingness to engage with like minds. And precisely because they are product users – rather than salesmen – they know the weaknesses, strengths and opportunities for product development.
In real terms, influencers are experts. They dedicate unpaid hours to research and sharing of news around a product or abrand, and they often have ideas about how to improve the experience of products – from manufacturing and delivery, to interaction design.
All these characteristics of influencers make them superb sources for learning about how to do business more effectively. More effective than traditional market research, influencer engagement represents the most cost effective means of accessing external research on products and brands.
Of course, thinking of influencers as mere research sources is also dangerous. Once a social strategy involving an influencer is established it’s essential to foster the relationship so that the influencer maintains his/her expertise, independence and authority. And they need to be valued for what they contribute to the firm.
So how do you go about facilitating learning from influencers?
The first stage in influencer engagement should be an exploration of how the influencer can share their expertise. While aninfluencer may be prolific in social media, they may not be as concise nor as comfortable communicating in alternative formats – say, for instance, on video or in live presentations. Or even if they claim to be comfortable, influencers may not have the natural skills in presenting either to the world or to business representatives in a credible manner. So it becomes the social facilitator’s role to establish the mechanisms that best suit influencers’ communication of expertise.
Once the range of communication styles has been established, social facilitators need to collate the knowledge of influencers, and distribute in a manner that suits the operational structure of a brand. A social facilitator needs to ensure that influencer expertiseabout vertical integration needs to go to manufacturing, logistics and/or distribution, while expertise about product experiences should go to product development and interaction design. They need to act as an arbiter, amediator who articulates and converts the value of influencer advice and understanding to the firm.
Sometimes this information and expertise needs structure, and sometimes it needs to break existing structures. Social facilitators should be prepared to break as much as they curate when it comes to influencer expertise. Only when processes and practices are challenged will any learning truly happen.
And finally, when learning from influencers is facilitated, it needs to be tested. It isn’t enough just to measure activity, either. Ideas that come from influencers should be able to be adapted beyond the scope of their advice. Testing such applied learning is best measured by changes in philosophy, and further influencer engagement. It’s a matter of making a business truly social, rather than separating business practice from audience interaction.
Influencers are not just another channel for selling ideas, campaigns and widgets. They are a catalyst for transforming business. And as the real impact of influencers begins to be freely acknowledged, it’s the social facilitators’ challenge to ensure that such transformation is for the better, and not merely decorative.
We’re currently doing some very exciting work with East Village. If you’ve not heard of it, East Village will become London’s newest neighbourhood after the world’s best athletes vacate the current premises after the 2012 Games. It will become a living, breathing community – providing homes for thousands of people and a long lasting legacy for East London.
East Village is driven by three core values: more time, more space and more choice. We’ve used these as the inspiration behind our work, to develop engaging and interesting ways to evoke a sense of community, excitement and anticipation around East Village.
After an intense brainstorm late on a Friday afternoon, with the goal of encouraging people to talk about time, the team came up with a peach of an idea. We’d offer someone the chance to have their very own PA for a day.
Asking people on the East Village blog, London Living, just what they would do with ‘more time’, we awarded one lucky winner the services of yours truly for a whole day (absolutely free, I might add).
The aim here was to provide a personal and unique experience, giving the East Village brand a recognisable face and a human quality at the same time. Like a personalised random act of kindness, this was about us going that one step further for our client, and one leap further for our audience – and about taking something online, and making it happen offline.
I never really considered being ‘auctioned’ off as a prize to a member of the public as part of my first permanent career role, but I nonetheless looked forward to it with a lot of excitement (and a bit of trepidation).
It was with a nervous skip in my step that I went to meet Julia, an aspiring writer currently working in film, at 7am sharp (I know – an early start!) at the Shoreditch Grind, a lovely East London coffee house that sits next to the bustling roundabout by Old Street station.
It seemed Julia could not get over the novelty of the situation at hand; she’d clicked onto our blog, commented under a post, and now she had someone at her beck and call for the whole day. She thought it was a fantastic idea and said she’d dreamt of having a PA for years!
Having got thoroughly stuck into Julia’s mass of short stories, creative scripts and sonnets, editing and collating material as I went along, I spent the day organising her work into digestible prose. It definitely wasn’t light work!
Yet it was clear when the day came to a close that I’d really made Julia’s day that bit better. We know that 90% of recommendations come from face-to-face conversations. In this sense, Julia experienced the East Village ethos through a personal experience, and we amplified this message through proactive engagement with a member of our community.
It’s amazing what physical interaction can do, and Julia was full of praise for the concept and the execution.
I’d like to think Julia’s nascent opinion of East Village is now very much one of advocacy and that we’ve shown East Village is more than just London’s newest neighbourhood.
Last year, Abi Sawyer, Senior Producer for Future Media at the BBC World Service visited 1000heads to update us on how such a complex and public organisation was embracing social. Molly wrote a great blog post about the insights we gained into balancing transparency and public content with journalistic rigour.
So when I stumbled across the announcement of the World Service80th birthday celebrations, I was intrigued to learn that it would be inviting the public to see behind the scenes of some of its programmes. Another ‘head and I duly headed over to Bush House for a glimpse at the mechanics behind World Have Your Say.
As an editorial manager I was naturally interested in seeing how the editorial meeting panned out; particularly as the agenda for the programme on this special occasion was to be set by the its vast audience of listeners from across the globe. Taking our place amongst a select group of live participants, we were given headphones to listen to the calls coming in from around the world as the WHYS editorial team planned that evening’s broadcast.
The calls came in from regions as diverse as Indonesia, Tunisia and China. Topics ranged from McDonalds’ newly unveiled plans to open another 225-250 new outlets in China, to Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki offering asylum to Syria’s leader Bashar Assad, each suggestion resulting in an intensive debate amongst the team and audience as to its value and relevance to the global community.
With this international conversation unfolding from a collection of tweets, messages, emails and calls, it was a brilliant example of how the BBC uses social media as a supporting voice when creating a cohesive deconstruction of global opinion.
Steve Titherington, World Service commissioning editor, said: ‘We are turning Bush House inside out, showing who we are and what we do and asking what the world wants next from the BBC World Service’, while Peter Horrocks, director of Global News, added: ‘These are historic and changing times for the World Service. We want our audiences to be at the heart of both the commemoration of the past and conversation about the future.’
For me, this tied nicely into Nokia’s announcement at Mobile World Congress that it would be taking the new strategic direction of ‘co-creation’, with fans invited to collaborate with the company’s marketing team to create more interest around the brand. In short, both the BBC and Nokia have recognised that involving their audiences increases trust in their brand and encourages more emotional attachment, as well as resulting in richer and more valuable content. In turn this creates advocacy, whereby fans want to share the work or concept they helped to create, and ultimately helps brands to take a real step towards being an integrally social business.
Even 80-year old, traditional and highly regulated organisations such the BBC World Service are fundamentally changing and embracing social. If they can do it…
Wednesday heralded one of Social Media Week’s most exciting events: the Nokia Social Innovation Lab. Four young entrepreneurs gave inspiring presentations about how social tools have helped turn their business idea into reality. Each had a different, but equally fascinating story to tell.
Within the packed room, tensions were running high (and so was the air conditioning) as Becky Straw took to the podium. Despite having flown in from New York that very morning, she delivered a passionate and inspiring presentation about The Adventure Project, a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to provide jobs and dignity to people in developing countries.
She explained how social media is “absolutely integral” to her business, not just in terms of spreading the word, but even in the simple logistical task of keeping up with her team – her business partner, Jody Landers, lives more than 1,000 miles away in Iowa.
Social media also played a huge part in The Adventure Project’s “Coal for Christmas” mission. By selling special “festive” lumps of coal for $20 each, Becky and Jody helped provide more than 1,000 charcoal-efficient stoves for families in Africa and Haiti. Now that’s what I call ethical social media!
The second inspirational speaker was Jess Ratcliffe, founder of GaBoom, a video game swapping website.
GaBoom is essentially a social network for those who want to swap video or computer games. It acts as a middle man, matching users to a network of individuals with whom they can swap and trade their games. As Jess put it, social media is not just essential to GaBoom’s business model, it “is the business model”.
She is also a firm believer in social media being a “means to breaking down barriers” between individuals, using examples from her own experience to show how making connections on social networks can have tangible results in the physical world.
Tricia Bertero also spoke passionately about how the “spirit of conversation” prevalent in social media is crucial to the ongoing success of her start-up, TextPlus.
She told of how TextPlus has grown out of the observation that people are actively choosing texting over calling as their primary method of communication; it’s fast, easy and relatively discrete. From this simple insight into people’s behaviour, Tricia and her colleagues have created a booming business. Also, by conducting polls and monitoring usage, TextPlus has the ability to listen to its users and evolve to accommodate their preferences and needs. This is a shining example of how a business can be successfully social.
Being the last speaker up on stage was never going to stop award-winning “soultrepreneur” Andre Campbell, whose community project Enfuse Youth is all about empowering young people with the passion and drive to achieve their goals. His energetic and interactive speech was, for me, the highlight of the day.
Andre was very vocal about the need for businesses to tap into the youth market, calling young people “the most valuable resource in the world”. His passion and insight exemplified how innovation and participation can’t just be online, and that social encompasses both the real and the virtual worlds.
Although each of the four speakers were very different people, with very different backgrounds and very different visions, they were united by their passion for their business and their successful use of social (and not just social media) to promote it. And they each had their individual (social) success stories.
A couple of weeks ago, David Cameron announced the introduction of a Co-operatives Bill before the next election. The proposed bill will consolidate and simplify 17 different pieces of legislation, making it much easier for investors to start up and run a co-operative organisation.
The People’s Supermarket: run by the people, for the people
Why do I care?
Because I am always surprised by how little discussion occurs about the value of co-operatives in the social business sphere. When you’re looking to build robust new business models that are rooted in social participation and innovation, learning from co-operatives is a no-brainer.
A paper just published by leading economist and trend predictor Professor Noreena Hertz, Co-op Capitalism, suggests that co-operative business models will lead the capitalism of the future. “In the Co-op Capitalism era,” says Hertz, “the businesses that thrive will be those that acknowledge the power of collaboration, are able to engage in meaningful ways with their customers, workers and suppliers, are proficient in investing in long term relationships and embrace the ethos of co-creation and co-design.”
You don’t need me to point out the resonances that kind of talk has for the social media generation. You know all those social buzzwords – transparency, authenticity, community? Well, in a co-op, they’re pretty much baked in. Solutions for ‘social capitalism’ of exactly the type Hertz describes are the subject of popular recent books from Clay Shirky to Simon Mainwaring.
This doesn’t mean every social business has to go full-out co-op; but they can provide some pertinent strategies. At 1000heads we operate a profit share, and although the extra money is obviously fantastic, what the scheme says about how we work and what we value is just as important.
Will this be the year of the co-op? I wouldn’t be surprised.
