Take a breath, blog readers. The truth is… not everyone cares about social media. In fact, quite a large proportion of a brand’s customers probably don’t give a monkeys about Twitter. Yep, even after all the hype, some people just like World 1.0.
And good on them.
The frustration for brands, of course, is that the advocacy of those customers who choose to chat in their living rooms and pubs isn’t as visible as that on Twitter or social networks or blogs.
Sure, their word of mouth is incredibly influential within their offline communities – friends, family, colleagues, passers-by. Brands must learn to value, listen to and engage with real world WOM as much as they do online. But wouldn’t it be great if businesses could find a way to do both: encourage existing consumer conversation where it’s happening but also give it a life in social media?
Some people don’t want to get involved with these tools, and that’s fine – but many simply aren’t armed with the skills or confidence to make the most of social media even if they wanted to.
So for our award-winning STA Travel activity, we took the idea of ‘social media advocacy’ and turned it on its head. Check out our case study below to find out how we do it.
As part of our thank you clients birthday week, we’d like to give a special shout-out to those clients who took the leap ten years ago and invested in word of mouth long before Twitter was even a flicker in Jack Dorsey‘s eye.
It’s a great reminder that WOM is so much more than Facebook or YouTube.
Our CEO and MD Mike R and Mike D had developed an early version of WOMTrak, our proprietary listening and analysis software, and they built a specialist team of young analysts immersed in social platforms around that. WOMTrak has evolved massively, but from the start it was designed with the belief that conversation is useless without insight.
Any engagement came from those listening insights. There were fledgling forums and communities out there – mainly gamers and niche passion-based fan groups – that we reached out to. But with the online space still taking its first tentative steps into 2.0, much of our work also involved looking at how offline WOM could be mined and harnessed, and how and why it was starting to seep into this new peer-led online space.
As for the early adopters?
Tescos was one of the first, intrigued by what they could learn from customer conversation, as were Red Bull, KFC and Toshiba, for whom we developed a particularly successful reactive strategy for laptop owners with broken machines.
Nokia have been with us from the start – they instantly understood the importance of a WOM approach for a company that makes connecting people its philosophy – and we collaborated on many great early projects such as the Jealous Computers campaign.
Miele have worked with us for several years and really invested in the food, fashion and family communities that rely on their brand; Canon did the same in the creative and photographic communities; STA Travel weren’t far behind, determined to promote the voice of independent travellers. And a couple of years ago The V&A were setting an example to slow-evolving arts organisations with our Cold War Modern campaign.
Over the past ten years we’ve worked with fantastic brands, blue-chip and niche, across all industries – from Lloyds to LocateTV. But it also took real foresight and guts to be one of the first to engage in the raw landscape of on and offline WOM.
Hats off to the early birds. You helped kick-start an incredible industry.
In our warm and fuzzy social world, corporate has pretty much become a dirty word.
Scan social media on any given day and you’ll encounter a raft of articles called things like ‘how to become a business that cares’, ‘the latest social media fail’ and ‘dealing with detractors’ (yes, a few of them might be by us) that suggest brands are big, bad and struggling to engage with people on and offline.
But they’re what makes all this possible.
Someone has to finance social media, however much we like to think of it as a God-given free-for-all. The investmen from businesses and brands who truly believe that peer to peer conversation is the way forward is what keeps word of mouth innovating and developing to improve things for both consumers and companies.
In our experience, companies are filled with passionate, socially savvy folk who really want to put WOM at the heart of what they do. Yes, it can be damn hard to find a way to integrate that passion throughout a big business so that it brings measurable results, but it’s perfectly possible.
For all the evangelism of the consultants and agencies, the staff of these companies are the guys who are starting to execute people-focused tactics in their jobs every day.
The Sainsbury’s team sharing their passion at our freefrom dinner party
First and foremost, of course, thank you to ours; from Sainsbury’s to Nokia, Universal to P&G, STA Travel to SKINS, they show that industry and size of company is no discriminator when it comes to embracing WOM. All it takes is bravery and an intrinsic belief that consumers should be at the heart of everything they do.
But also thank you to allthose businesses out there who are putting the theory into practice and PROVING that this stuff works.
In our warm and fuzzy social world, corporate has pretty much become a dirty word.
Scan social media on any given day and you’ll encounter a raft of articles called things like ‘how to become a business that cares’, ‘the latest social media fail’ and ‘dealing with detractors’ (yes, a few of them might be by us) that suggest brands are big, bad and struggling to engage with people on and offline.
But they’re what makes all this possible.
Someone has to finance social media, however much we like to think of it as a God-given free-for-all. The investmen from businesses and brands who truly believe that peer to peer conversation is the way forward is what keeps word of mouth innovating and developing to improve things for both consumers and companies.
In our experience, companies are filled with passionate, socially savvy folk who really want to put WOM at the heart of what they do. Yes, it can be damn hard to find a way to integrate that passion throughout a big business so that it brings measurable results, but it’s perfectly possible.
For all the evangelism of the consultants and agencies, the staff of these companies are the guys who are starting to execute people-focused tactics in their jobs every day.
The Sainsbury’s team sharing their passion at our freefrom dinner party
First and foremost, of course, thank you to ours; from Sainsbury’s to Nokia, Universal to P&G, STA Travel to SKINS, they show that industry and size of company is no discriminator when it comes to embracing WOM. All it takes is bravery and an intrinsic belief that consumers should be at the heart of everything they do.
But also thank you to allthose businesses out there who are putting the theory into practice and PROVING that this stuff works.
In a thankfully well-soundproofed room in the Dominion Theatre, under the skilled moderation of well-known social media man-about-town Kevin May of Tnooz, Elliot Pritchard of P&O Cruises kicked off by discussing the company’s learnings from venturing into the viral space, with some successes but also some scepticism about the measurements and lasting effects. Daniel Kennedy then presented SKV Communications’ award-winning J’Aime La Tour viral for Blackpool, and Stu Howarth explained how KoKo Digital produce their viral games.
I was particularly impressed with Daniel, who admitted J’Aime La Tour was less effective as a massive-clicks viral success but fantastic as a WOM trigger – something that unsurprisingly pushed my buttons.
However, I admit that my own presentation, ‘Why WOM kick’s viral’s ass’, took a rather different view from the other panellists. There were lots of stats thrown around in the session around traffic, click-throughs and reach, and I wanted to bring some perspective to the datafest. What on earth do the numbers mean? Are they any indication of an emotional reaction, an increase in advocacy or a potential customer?
By highlighting that a biological virus’s purpose is basically to replicate itself, I suggested that true spreadability comes from people being inspired to create opinionated content themselves, rather than just reproducing yours. I used the case studies of our work for STA Travel and Tourism New South Wales to suggest a different way.
In a thankfully well-soundproofed room in the Dominion Theatre, under the skilled moderation of well-known social media man-about-town Kevin May of Tnooz, Elliot Pritchard of P&O Cruises kicked off by discussing the company’s learnings from venturing into the viral space, with some successes but also some scepticism about the measurements and lasting effects. Daniel Kennedy then presented SKV Communications’ award-winning J’Aime La Tour viral for Blackpool, and Stu Howarth explained how KoKo Digital produce their viral games.
I was particularly impressed with Daniel, who admitted J’Aime La Tour was less effective as a massive-clicks viral success but fantastic as a WOM trigger – something that unsurprisingly pushed my buttons.
However, I admit that my own presentation, ‘Why WOM kick’s viral’s ass’, took a rather different view from the other panellists. There were lots of stats thrown around in the session around traffic, click-throughs and reach, and I wanted to bring some perspective to the datafest. What on earth do the numbers mean? Are they any indication of an emotional reaction, an increase in advocacy or a potential customer?
By highlighting that a biological virus’s purpose is basically to replicate itself, I suggested that true spreadability comes from people being inspired to create opinionated content themselves, rather than just reproducing yours. I used the case studies of our work for STA Travel and Tourism New South Wales to suggest a different way.
We’re pretty excited. The World Traveller Internship will give two individuals free travel around the globe for three months, uncovering the lesser-seen beauty spots the world has to offer, adding their knowledge to the existing, passionate STA Travel community online and basically having a totally once-in-a-lifetime time. This is a sdeeply social scheme, with interns recording their trips via blog, video, photo and audio across a host of social media platforms – but it’s not exclusively for the web savvy, as we’ll be helping the winners make the most of all the best and latest tools out there.
Tempted?
Rules and requirements can be found on STA Travel’s World Traveller Internship pages and you can get a taster of the vague (details are under wraps until tomorrow) yet still impressive itinerary here.
If a big bad social media adventure sounds like your thing, join us at the STA Travel Victoria store tomorrow night, Tuesday 26th Jan from 7:30. It’s an open invite so if you’d like to know more, or are already in the process of planning your application, come along and get involved. – the more the merrier.
We’re pretty excited. The World Traveller Internship will give two individuals free travel around the globe for three months, uncovering the lesser-seen beauty spots the world has to offer, adding their knowledge to the existing, passionate STA Travel community online and basically having a totally once-in-a-lifetime time. This is a sdeeply social scheme, with interns recording their trips via blog, video, photo and audio across a host of social media platforms – but it’s not exclusively for the web savvy, as we’ll be helping the winners make the most of all the best and latest tools out there.
Tempted?
Rules and requirements can be found on STA Travel’s World Traveller Internship pages and you can get a taster of the vague (details are under wraps until tomorrow) yet still impressive itinerary here.
If a big bad social media adventure sounds like your thing, join us at the STA Travel Victoria store tomorrow night, Tuesday 26th Jan from 7:30. It’s an open invite so if you’d like to know more, or are already in the process of planning your application, come along and get involved. – the more the merrier.
We had a great half-hour braindump this morning when Twitter travelling legend Paul Smith, aka @twitchhiker, dropped into the 1000heads offices to discuss how he used social networking to send him across the world.
Paul with ‘heads Sam and Camilla – he claims the moustache is a temporary Movember aberration…
Paul’s been helping us create some podcasts for STAtravelbuzz, our social hub for the independent network of outspoken STA Travel customers and friends, so we invited him in to meet the rest of the crew and to share his story about applying the power of virtual networks to the real world. For those of you who’ve missed the features on Paul across the international press, on March 1st 2009 he attempted to travel as far round the world as he could in 30 days, relying purely on the goodwill of people on Twitter and raising money for charity: water on the side.
Starting from Gateshead and ending up in Stewart Island, New Zealand, Paul’s journey veered from dilapidated bedsits to Hollywood parties, and was facilitated by hordes of ordinary folk, with a little help from Stephen Fry and some switched-on companies. The whole project was a real testament to the fact that relationships built in social media have real emotional (and practical) value, and that the physical and virtual worlds are constantly interdependent, a theme very close to our own heart.
We’re planning plenty more drop-in sessions with interesting social pioneers, so let us know if you’re in the area and we’d love to hear your story – you’ll get free coffee, free biscuits, free wifi, a big welcome and a room full of friendly people ready to absorb your insights like sponges. And if you’d like us to come and share our own projects and ideas on your home ground, we’d be more than happy (custard creams permitting).
We’re delighted to announce that our longstanding client STA Travel has been awarded ‘best use of social media’ at the Travolution Awards 2009.
Celia Pronto of STA Travel collects her award from Ian Taylor, Editor of Travolution
Up against such competition as ‘Best Job in the World’ by Tourism Queensland and Tripadvisor Facebook apps, the judges -a committee of senior people involved in the online travel industry across operator, supplier and agency websites, search engines and technology companies – praised STA Travel for their particularly comprehensive, integrated and customer-led approach:
“Once again, STA Travel is a leading light in this area, ensuring that it engages people in as many of the relevant channels to its target audience as possible. Most importantly, customers engage with one another AND the brand.”
They couldn’t have put it better. We’ve been working with STA Travel for almost 2 years now to both help establish their brand voice in social media but also encourage lasting peer to peer advocacy with our STA Travelbuzz and STA Explorers initiatives. Last year the 1000heads/STA Travel team won the WOM UK/WARC Word of Mouth Marketing Awards for Best Targeting, so it’s great to now get acknowledgement from the travel industry too.
We’re pretty excited. The World Traveller Internship will give two individuals free travel around the globe for three months, uncovering the lesser-seen beauty spots the world has to offer, adding their knowledge to the existing, passionate STA Travel community online and basically having a totally once-in-a-lifetime time. This is a sdeeply social scheme, with interns recording their trips via blog, video, photo and audio across a host of social media platforms – but it’s not exclusively for the web savvy, as we’ll be helping the winners make the most of all the best and latest tools out there.
Celia Pronto of STA Travel collects her award from Ian Taylor, Editor of Travolution