We have an ‘open door’ blogging policy for all staff here at 1000heads and today’s post is from Senior Strategy Executive, Ben Fox, he’s a talented chap and had this to say about a recent not-exactly-social retail experience – JW
Like many twenty-something males in the UK, I’ve always looked to Topman for fashion inspiration. The retail chain took around £1.8 billion in revenue last year and is a market leader because of their ability to influence (rather than simply follow the) trends; a trait that all brands aspire to. This ethos has always stuck in my memory and as a result Topman is front of mind when I want/need new clothes.
However, experience determines perception, and over the weekend I saw a different side to the retailer. I was in-store, browsing through the racks, when I saw the perfect T-shirt for a friend of mine. It was ideal and emblazoned across the front was “It’s all about me”; a running in-joke that we have together.
I took a photo on my phone to send it to him (so we could have a bit of a laugh and see if he wanted it) and to cut a long story short, I was promptly asked by a member of staff to delete the photograph I’d just snapped. I explained what was happening, and that I wanted to send it to a friend, but it didn’t seem to matter. I still don’t really understand why I couldn’t keep the photo, I was simply told to refer to the Topman ‘terms and conditions‘.
Being a disgruntled customer of the 21st century, I promptly tweeted:
Topman can make their own rules, of course. But are these restrictions rules stifling sales?
For a start, they’ve just shut down a direct product recommendation between two trusted peers – a big word of mouth no no. After that, there seemed to be an expectation placed upon the aforementioned peer to go home, remember the product, visit the website, find the product page and then send it on to his friend? Unlikely at best, inconvenient too.
OK, so, sticking to 1000heads’ blogging guidelines and turning this negative into a positive, I’d like to flip this whole policy on its head and create some kind of smartphone-based media sharing campaign for Topman. Without fleshing it out too much, it would basically aim to drive consumers in-store and encourage organic image sharing. I can imagine it being some kind of treasure hunt, using perhaps both Foursquare and Instagram, alongside Twitter and Facebook to push content out to the masses.
Just look at the number of tweets and shares that have driven the competition: 191 and 1175 respectively – that’s not bad at all. The Topman brand has fans that share their content and while it’s not officially related to image sharing, I can’t help the felling that – on the strength of the above - Topman is missing several opportunities to convert positive (and potentially negative) offline retail experiences into online activity.
The Land Rover competition is not inherently social. They’ve done a simple ‘stick a share badge on it’ job and let it go from there. Imagine if they’d actually tapped into something properly and, instead of shutting down P2P recommendation, embraced sharing of in-store content across multiple different platforms?
It could make for a very different story indeed.
To close, it’s worth saying that I still admire Topman, and will do, as long as they keep selling great products. I couldn’t imagine shopping on Oxford Street without visiting their flagship store. But when it comes to engendering positive word of mouth both online and off, they seem to have missed a beat.
On Wednesday afternoon, during the LikeMinds Social Media Week Social Commerce Immersive at which I was a panellist, there was a moment when moderator Andrew Gerrard mused “I wonder when the entire term ‘social media’ will become redundant. I wonder when it’ll just become ‘something that we do.’”
Amen.
Like me, many who read this will be coming to the end of a hugely busy and interesting Social Media Week. SMW is a strange time; I enjoy many of the awesome speakers – this year I found Mark Ellis, Ian Jindal and Iskandar Najmuddin particularly inspiring – but I also spend much of my time wishing (and often saying) that social media wasn’t treated as a coherent ‘discipline’, as the SMW concept implies. It seems I wasn’t alone.
Yes, it’s important to understand which online tools and platforms can form a useful part of a brand’s social arsenal. But ‘being social’ as a brand HAS to happen simultaneously on and offline. With – here we go again – 90% of WOM still occurring offline, a strategy that solely looks online socialising is frankly bizarre.
In that Social Commerce session, not one of the keynote speakers looked at how retailers can make shopping social offline and in store.
I’ve been doing Mobile Social Commerce for 15 odd years now – I just used to call it walking into different shops and buying stuff while talking to my mates.
I almost hope that one day Social Media Week will simply become Social Business Week. Firstly, this would imply that we need to look at social media in context with all the other ways a brand needs to be social. And secondly, it would remind us – as Tim did yesterday – that anyone can be social; the skill is how to make it bring real returns for companies.
The first in what I expect to become a series of blog posts from us ‘heads over the coming months. I’m going to kick it off with this effort from David & Goliath, USA
To highlight Universal Studio’s latest King Kong 3D attraction, D&G arranged for these huge footprints to be left in the sand on Santa Monica Beach, complete with a crushed lifeguard vehicle for added effect.
A bit stunty, yes. But imagine walking down to the beach to discover these one morning or, better yet, looking out of your sea-facing window to spot a whole trail of them walking up the coast.
What else could you do?
Send out ‘Giant ape sighted’ alerts to key voices in the area?
Engage with the local sasquatch believers/hunters?
Hide things in the actual prints themselves?
Building up to the event, plant reports of ape sightings?
We’re always trying to improve on things here at 1000heads. The ideas above lend themselves to this slide taken from a recent presentation I gave to New Media Age -
When social presence strategies are becoming the norm, what can you do that sets you out from the crowd? YouTube, Twitter, Facebook – these things are now mere housecleaning to any decent launch.
Do something cool. Do something different. Do something awesome.
This is James Whatley, reporting live from Santa Monica, USA.
(and the less we say about this video, the better)
Yep, a survey conducted by BIGresearch for the Retail Advertising & Marketing Association has confirmed what you probably already instinctively know: offline conversation about brands is still what prompts us to search for them online.
Morevoer, the study tells us that social media users are more influenced than non-users by in-person WOM; and that they even prefer giving as well as receiving recommendations and opinions face to face.
For us, it’s a no-brainer. It’s why we’re a word of mouth agency, not a social media agency.
It’s why the heart of every piece of work we do – from getting mobile opinion leaders face time with Nokia’s finest R&D folk at Helsinki’s Nokia OpenLabs, to co-creating a personally tailored banquet with social media allergy sufferers using Sainsbury’s FreeFrom range, to holding an exclusive swishing party with a bunch of online fashionistas for P&G – lies in real life human experience, with social media there as an engagement, collaboration and amplification tool.
Fostering some face to face WOM for Sainsbury’s
Social media is wonderful, but people are even better. If you want to learn how to build sustained conversations with them, give us a call – and then come and meet us. In person
I spotted this one before Christmas but only remembered it recently when I was tasked with finding broad new ways of engaging your man-on-the-street consumer with new and exciting methods.
AR – that’s Augmented Reality to you and me – has come a long way over the past few months, being used in various online campaigns as well as a number of mobile phone applications, both on the iPhone and Android.
However, this example from Hugo Boss, really does bring AR to the masses with an ease of participation so simple, a monkey could do it.
Take a look…
Here at 1000heads we talk a lot about Breadth vs Depth when it comes to levels of engagement. How we do reach as many people as possible while maintaining the option of deep level engagement to those that have the time and interest to cough up some real emotional investment.
Admittedly this isn’t the deepest of campaigns, but then again it doesn’t need to be.
What I love the most is that it takes a tangible real-world asset with digital components to drive real-world traffic to its offline store. In this case, the shop front to get your (personalised?) message – and then once there – it drives you inside to discover if you’ve won a money off coupon.
With the popularity of doing your shopping online showing no sign of waning, high street retailers need to consistently find innovative ways to increasein-store footfall.
Hats off to Hugo Boss. An instant success with instant word of mouth.
Don’t believe me? Watch the video again and see the crowds of people outside the store attracting the attention of passers-by…
Trust us – Re-inventing the shop front: it’s the next big thing.
The word of mouth industry suffers from semantic confusion, big time. Every niche agency and newly created ‘social’ department is trying to coin the language that will become the standard lexicon for WOM. The number of buzzwords floating around can create an unfortunate impression that word of mouth is all smoke and mirrors, hoodwinking brands into paying up with warm but distinctly fuzzy sounding concepts.
Language has always been important to us, not in a precious way, but because we like to be very clear about what we do. We do insist that we are called a ‘word of mouth’ and not a ‘social media’ company because we’re all about people, having conversations, in the world. That world we all live in includes both social media and the school gates. We don’t believe conversation is most often inspired by or restricted to the digital world, nor are many people most vocal online. Yes, we use new technologies in everything we do to listen to people, find out what they want, amplify their conversation and give it a long and healthy life, but we see the bigger picture.
People. Conversation. Leading to action for brands. Call it what you like, but don’t try and cram WOM into a digital corner.
When not spending our time educating clients on the importance of creating real world experiences for people to inspire word of mouth which is then translated through social media, some of us take holidays.
Last weekend was my turn and I ventured off to Brussels, where a few friends and I went to the Magritte Museum.
His Le Blanc Seing is breathtaking. As someone who always wanted to be an artist (but can barely draw a straight line) I was blown away by the pure technical skill, well before looking for any interpretation. Since coming back to England I have tried to find an image online that does the work justice. It just isn’t possible. You need to see it face-to-face to appreciate the detail. The colouring online seems feeble in comparison to the real deal. There is no place online either for an understanding of where this sits in his wider work.
I thought of all those brand managers out there who believe that seeding digital assets through social media will drive immersive word of mouth and advocacy, and I wanted to set them a challenge: just this week, this month, try and help people experience your brand in the real world, then encourage them to share their own opinions on that experience. Don’t try and get them excited about some shiny digital version of who you are or what you do. Have the bravery to give them the real deal, and see what they think.
Fostering some face to face WOM for Sainsbury’s
