5 Reasons Your Business Should Not Be Using Social Media.
May 4, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
It’s fashionable to write these – ‘5 tips that will replace years of business experience and distal everything you need to know into less than 500 words’ – type blogs. They are often ‘retweeted’ by people who never read them, but like the headline because it somehow fits with something they think they should be saying.
It seems to be a formula that people consume easily though, so here are my 5 reasons why your business should not be using social media.
1. Because it’s new and cool.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there making social media pitches based purely on fashion. There’s a buzz out there. It’s new and improved. If you don’t have it, you are missing out. Every couple of years, something comes along that changes the way people behave. Just because something is covered by the media, does not mean that real people are using it as part of their everyday lives.
2. Because it’s massive. .
I guarantee you that if you have sat through a social media pitch, that you have been bombarded with figures like ‘If Facebook was a country, it would the 4th largest in the world’. The country with the 4th biggest population is Indonesia, yet my bet is that your business has no presence there. What’s more, you probably don’t have any plans to be in Indonesia any time soon. That’s because pure market size is not the only thing that matters to real businesses.
Last week there was a story about how Pepsico were going to use location service FourSquare for marketing purposes. The article reported that FourSquare has a million users. Let’s put that another way – there are about 308 Million people who don’t use FourSquare in the US alone.
3. Because your customers are interacting with each other on social media.
In 2008 there were an estimated 6.5 billion texts sent every month in the UK, but the vast majority were between individuals. There are very few companies (other than mobile networks) that have successfully used SMS text messaging for business.
Just because your customers and potential customers are talking to each other on social media is no guarantee that they want to interact with your business.
4. Because it’s cheap.
Anyone can set up a YouTube account. It doesn’t cost anything to create a Twitter feed or a Facebook page. Creating a LinkedIn Group takes minutes and you can blog away for free on all many of platforms.
Once it’s been set up, you can get an intern or an expert social media consultant to represent your brand assets the best way they see fit, despite in many cases not having any marketing or business credentials.
You’ve probably spent a lot of time and money to create your brand, why risk devaluing one of your most important business assets by cutting corners.
5. Because your competitors are doing it.
I’ve always had a dislike for consultants who think that their technology based model can be applied across industries and businesses without any need for modification. Look out for a social media pitch that tells you that you need to be on social media because there are others in your industry that are doing it. There are probably competitors of yours that do trade-shows or sponsorship or other outdoor advertising that you might not do. Me-too is never a reason to do anything.
1 Reason Your Business Should be Using Social Media.
There are many reasons why your business may benefit from using social media including; better customer service, increased brand awareness, targeted product positioning and understanding your customer’s requirements, but the number one, and only reason that your business should be using social media is…
Because it will deliver you revenue.
Social Media is just another weapon in your sales and marketing arsenal. It has a cost and it has a return. The only reason you should consider using social media for your business is if it is going to have a positive impact on the bottom line.
Value social media the same way you would value any other sales and marketing spend. What are your objectives? How do you know if you have succeeded?
If you are being told that engaging in the conversation is enough and hopefully over time it may lead to sales, then ask yourself how much of your marketing budget you are willing to invest in that hope.
If on the other hand, you are being told how social media can have an impact on key metrics within your business like; transaction frequency, basket value, margin, customer satisfaction and loyalty, market share, recall rate, cost per lead and return on investment, then evaluate those numbers against your current marketing options and make a business decision.
Social Media and Sport – Threats and Opportunities. Part 1.
May 3, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
The Sportbusiness New Media conference was held in Manchester on Wednesday. I was invited to speak on a panel entitled “Opportunities and Threats of Social Media.” The questions asked of the panel were slightly different from the brief, so the delegates present heard different answers to the ones below, but here are some of my considered thoughts on the issues raised.
Topic One – The positives and negatives of an organisation (brand, governing body or rights-holder) getting deeply involved in social media
The use of the phrase ‘Social Media’ means a lot of different things to different people. For many, it is a catch-all for a few well known sites like Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter. For others, the definition is broader and includes web 2.0 enabled blogs and some gaming applications.
While there is no doubt that these platforms have a huge number of users, they are hyped a little by the media and those who work in the digital industry. Many sports organisations have reason to ask questions about the relative merit of different platforms, but I think that the time has come where the opportunities do outweigh the benefits.
To put this question into some historical perspective, rephrase the question to “what are the positives and negatives of getting a fax machine or a post box or publishing your switchboard number on your website.
According to figures presented by Comscore at the conference, Facebook is the largest site on mobile – bigger even than Google. This is no real surprise – mobile is a person to person communication media and Facebook is a person to person platform.
So to answer the question (something I was accused on Twitter of not doing on the panel)
Positives.
Social Media is another channel. Another touchpoint. Another mechanism to listen to and communicate with partners, customers and fans. At the very least, these mechanisms make it more convenient for your fans to receive your news and content.
The listening part is important. While some may focus on the negatives of being open to criticism (See Negatives) others see that the feedback channel is a great way to improve the product, to understand what works and what doesn’t and to adapt to that feedback. This is another way of saying that the voices are a diverse set of opinions that are perhaps more useful than the groupthink of old white males that usually make the decisions.
Social media provides an immediacy that other media cannot. This is not just what fans are saying, it is what they are saying now, and in many cases their location can also be determined. The insights from social profiles and monitoring of sentiment in conversations provide a level of demographic information that traditional registration forms can’t match.
Finally, there are demonstrable benefits of using Social Media for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Obviously the more times your team, club, organisation or sponsor is mentioned on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc with a link back to your site, the more highly it will score with Google, Bing and the like. This will become even more important as Google moves to include real-time results in it’s search mechanism.
Negatives.
Many of the negatives associated with Social Media are actually not problems with the technology. A lot of the negative perceptions of social media come from a misunderstanding about the true nature of who is using it and how it is used.
It is true that anything negative will be amplified and accelerated by Social Media. A larger group of people will be exposed to comments and if the correct procedures are not in place then this can get out of control quickly.
Many of the negatives associated with Social Media can be fixed with good business practises and policies, so here are some of the issues to consider.
The use of social media when done properly will require resources that may not exist in the organisation. There is no point in doing it for the sake of doing it, if you are going to engage in a conversation with your most important stakeholders via this mechanism, then you need to show them that you are committed and you take it seriously.
I disagree with the sentiment that you can “throw a rock out the window, hit a teenager and get them to run your social media programme.” Better to invest in training the people who understand your business, its products and culture to represent you and your brands online.
Social Media is two way. This scares a lot of businesses who are worried about criticism. Many sports organisations, particularly governing bodies have a tendency to be faceless bureaucrats, sitting behind gatekeepers and policy. But here’s the thing – people will use social media to criticise you and your policies whether you are there or not. You can’t stop it. You can’t control it. You can’t spin it. The best that you can hope for is that you can influence key people via participating to see your point of view.
Read Part 2 – Monetisation of Social Media for Sport
Pilote CEO to Present Social Media for Business Bootcamp.
September 29, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
Pilote Media are proud to annouce their Social Media for Buisness Bootcamp seminar to be held in London on the 14th of October 2009. Presented by Pilote CEO, David Fuller, the 3 hour session is designed to dispell myths about social media and show how platforms like Twitter, Facebook and even ‘old fashioned’ forums and bulletin boards can be powerful business tools.
David, who has worked for global branding giants like Unilever and pioneering social networks says:
It’s a shame that the media focus on the celebrity use of tools like Twitter. There are millions of serious business people in the world who are realising that these platforms are not ‘just for kids’, they are an evolution in the way a brand talks to its customers, suppliers and the wider world.
Pilote have developed the seminar for those in business who are still coming to terms with the variety of tools that are lumped together as social media. In David’s view:
I talk to a lot of people who don’t understand why business hasn’t adopted some of these practises more quickly, but in the main, these people are early adopters. For those who are head down in the day to day running of a business, especially in uncertain times, it is not always easy to get your head around the opportunities and implications of new ideas. One of the problems though, is that social media has been sold as technology and is therefore seen as the domain of the IT crowd. Actually, these tools are for marketing, PR and corporate communications professionals and more and more, those in business development.
David’s Social Media for Business Bootcamp will run on the 14th of October, 2009 in London. For more information visit the event page.
Sports Marketing & Social Media Networking Event In London.
June 18, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
Sports Marketing is a growing business. Social Media is a huge buzzword at the moment relating to sports marketing, but most of the discussion, at least that we are exposed to is happening in the USA.
We’ve decided to run an event. The premise is pretty simple - we’ve booked a room at a cool members club in London. All you have to do is register and show up. We want to get together people who are interested, people who are thinking about it and people who are doing it to share stories, work out what’s working and what’s not.
It doesn’t matter if you are an ad-agency, a PR agency, a sponsor, a team, rights holder or blogger. This is an opportunity to get together with like minded people, have a couple of drinks and get the low-down.
Check out the details at http://www.pilotemedia.com/thought-leadership/sm2-sports-marketing-free-social-media-networking-event/
Who is Managing Your Online Brand? Don’t Forget your Fans.
May 12, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
A couple of years ago I took part in a trade mission organised by the Motorsports Industry Association in the UK to visit the land of NASCAR. Standing in the garage area of Lowes Motor Speedway in Charlotte amongst a group of people who were used to the paddocks of F1, I realised that people in the business of sport often take their experiences for granted.
Between the garage area and the track, which was open to the public before the race, was an 8 foot chain-link fence. As our group casually ran our hands along the sponsor decals and listened to Jeff Gordon tell us how he thought the car would perform later, hundreds of fans pressed their faces through the chain-link fence, desperate to get a few inches closer to their heroes.
Our goal then was to convince NASCAR and others that fans treated the smallest piece of inside information from their sporting idols as gifts. We called it ‘pub-currency’ - the kind of thing you would tell your mates about while having a beer. Getting a text message from a driver or a photo that no-one else had via your PC desktop was something that sports-marketers wrote off as insignificant, but for fans, it was like standing in the garage or dressing room.
In 2009, the ability for sports stars to communicate ‘directly’ with fans is easier than ever. While some tools, like twitter, are still relatively niche, they are being used by savvy sports marketing people to give fans something they crave - frequent, direct interaction with heroes.
But that’s not all. Tools like blogs and twitter enable sponsors to develop long term relationships with consumers. The lesson we learned from NASCAR and later from Manchester United was that communication in the off-season was as important, if not more so, than news during an event.
So, I have declared my interests. I am passionate about using new and emerging technologies to enable brands to develop long term relationships with fans through sport. One of the reasons I set up yachtsponsorship.com was to communicate with promoters, teams and sponsors, the best practises from other sports and show they can be used with sailing to deliver real ROI.
The last couple of days, I have been researching how sailing as a sport uses these new technologies. The results vary massively, but in general there is a trick being missed, especially when there is nothing going on. During long distance races like the Vendee Globe, competitors were forced by race organisers and sponsors to blog daily, but now their websites are like time-capsules - as if the clock stopped a couple of days after the boat crossed the line. How can we build heroes in the sport if they go silent for months on end?
Here are some examples from the UK. Ben Ainslie, one of the most recognisable personalities in the sport, last updated his blog on the 13th of February. The last update on his facebook page was August 20, 2008. Alex Thomson, who is said to embrace new technologies last updated his blog on February 9, while his facebook page was updated on 10 December 2008 by an administrator.
Thank goodness for Paul Cayard. Paul is one of the sailors who writes regualarly and candidly - even when he is not neccesrily competing. This weekend, Paul was in Boston for the Volvo Ocean Race stopover. I know this because his blog tells me:
This event is really catching on with the mainstream public. It seems that anyone who gets a close up look at the event becomes hooked. There was a lot of non sailing public roaming through the race village this weekend and they immediately became intrigued. With the Race Village situated right down town, Volvo has really brought the event to the people.
Cayard has the best interests of the sport in mind finishing with:
I was speaking to a British sports marketing executive who was visiting the race for the first time, a guy who ran the marketing for Honda in Formula One previously, and he said that the Volvo is truly a top level sports marketing property. It was impressive to see the new faces, from other areas of sport, gravitating to the event.
I’m not sure if Honda F1 is the best example of sports marketing in recent years, but it’s good to know that finally the message is getting out there - that sailing at its best provides a great platform for sponsors.
Not all sailors have time to sit down and write blogs the length of Paul Cayard’s, but there is little or no excuse not to be able to shoot off 140 characters every so often.
Dee Caffari has joined twitter in the last couple of days, but the star of the Round Britain twitter comms so far is Johanna Payton, a journalist who is accompanying Dee on the journey. Maybe, just maybe it’s because Jo is new to the sport and has no preconceptions about what fans might find interesting. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t have to walk a corporate sponsor tightrope.
Perhaps the problem comes down to a question of demarcation. Who’s responsibility is it to develop and maintain a consistent online presence? Is it a PR job or is it up to the competitors themselves to manage their personal brands and get to grips with communicating with their fans? Should the marketing teams of sponsors be involved or are they they ones blocking uptake based on corporate ‘brand-police’ practises?
Several PR agencies that I have spoken to in recent days have told me that they have the tools in-house to provide these services to their clients. One referred me to a brand that they were managing a twitter account for - it has 30 followers! Others have said that they believe it is something that the competitors manage on their own.
The growing online presence of fans hungry for content shows that there is latent demand from fans for more interaction - and it’s not that hard. If you can find time to blog while sailing about in the southern ocean, you can find time to communicate when you are off the water.
Here’s the ad - I have worked with sports properties such as NASCAR, MotoGP and Manchester United as well as individual athletes to develop long term relationships with fans. These relationships are hugely important to deliver additional ROI for sponsors as well as maintaining the health of a sport. If the fans go away or stop watching, then the sponsors will follow. If you want to use some of these new tools to attract or retain sponsors or even just sure up a fan-base get in touch via Pilote Media.
A Tale of Two PR Companies. Sports Marketing PR 2.0
March 5, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
IT technology was supposed to make things easier. ‘Work smarter not harder’ is the slogan for the information age. But just as you think you have understood it - how to make the most of email, how to measure click-throughs and page impressions, the geeks invent a new thing. Or they rename an old thing and make everyone else seem foolish. How many of these terms do you understand: Web 2.0, RSS, twitter, UGC, personal media…
The latest buzzword is ‘Social Media’. Ask 10 people what social media is and you will probably get 10 different answers. The term ’social media’ is misunderstood by many. From nowhere, social media consultants have appeared selling their opinions on reputation management and sentiment engineering. Whatever you call it, the technologies that allow huge numbers of people to create, publish, share and comment upon content (images, text, video, audio, gps co-ordinates), are important for sports marketing and PR.
One of the services receiving a lot of interest at the moment is Twitter. While on the surface the functionality seems simple, almost banal, the power of millions of people saying what they are doing, feeling, thinking at any one point in time should not be underestimated.
Let’s compare two examples. Imagine a sports entity; a pro-sailor, a team, an event organiser with a large company as a sponsor. This entity also has a traditional PR company working to maximise the ‘coverage’ of news and activities and in turn help the sponsor achieve their goals of exposure or association or some other objective.
Example One - the Traditionalists.
In example one, the traditional PR company is measured on more old-fashioned metrics like column inches, television screen time, radio brand mentions. Even in 2009, there are PR companies that believe that national newspaper coverage alone is enough to determine the success or failure of a campaign. There might be historic reasons for this. News used to be determined by powerful editors and specialist journalists. Developing relationships with these people determined whether your story was featured or not.
More recently this PR company has been forced to learn new methods of distributing the news - via email - usually in the form of a PDF, so that it can not be easily changed or manipulated. For these promoters, the only website mentions that are worth talking about are BBC.CO.UK or TheTimesOnline. Bloggers aren’t real media.
To this company, Social media is the devil. If taken to its end, social media makes a PR company redundant. If the talent can communicate directly with their fan base, what role is there for PR, or journalists, or editors for that matter.
While this is a hypothetical example of a PR company, it is a thinly disguised collection of behaviours that we see daily in the sports marketing industry. Not all are anti new technology; some just find it overwhelming and alien.
Example Two - The New World of PR.
In our second example, we imagine a PR company that understands how media is changing. While the traditional press and television is important, they understand that niche sports like sailing are more frequently being covered on other platforms. More importantly they understand the value of the network effect. Instead of all news going through a handful of gatekeepers, the content is free to appear wherever it lands. Some of the concepts in the new world are the same as the old world - things like reach, reputation and influence. But in the new world, these relationships are not as straightforward.
Much has been written about Stephen Fry’s 120,000 twitter followers. Obviously if Mr Fry twitters about something he raises its awareness and delivers thousands of ‘eyeballs’ to the story. You might then be tempted as a PR company in the new world to target Stephen Fry, but that would be to ignore the fact that Stephen Fry also follows other people. So imagine a person who has only 5 or 6 followers, but those 5 or 6 are followed by thousands.
PR company number two has spent time developing relationships, not just with traditional media, but with influential bloggers in their space. They understand that a small blog read by 100 people can be very powerful if those 100 people are an exact match to your target audience or they influence thousands of others.
PR company number two also understands that the new world is not a one-way broadcast. This is not a Sunday broadsheet that states - this is the news and there is no more. This is more like talkback radio. If the people disagree, they can say so. In public. With an audience.
PR company number two is asking questions like:
- When was the content published? Where? Who saw it?
- What was the sentiment of the authors? Were they in favour or against?
- How many times was the story reposted? Where? By whom?
- How long did the buzz last?
- What was the highest number of mentions on twitter per minute?
- Where do the people live who were twittering about the story?
- How many comments were attached? What was the sentiment of the comments?
- Was the story shared amongst friends via Facebook? ….
Obviously PR companies don’t work in a vacuum. They are representing brands and personalities that may not yet themselves understand the value of these new media. If a client tells you that their objective is to have a photo on the front page of the paper, do you sell them the benefits of bloggers? If you don’t someone else might.
All of this assumes that you want to communicate externally. Social media principals are just as important, perhaps more so, when communicating internally, but that’s a subject for another blog.
Pilote Media are offering Social Media Health Check for companies who want to learn more. The free 30 minute sessions can be held, in London, via phone or skype conference. The aim is to provide honest, down to earth advice without the jargon. For more information see http://www.pilotemedia.com/social-media/
SB:MKTG - Website Relaunch
January 24, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
The new SB:MKTG Site
Pilote Media was asked by Somerville Baddeley Marketing to create a website that was clean, easy to update and tapped into some of the emerging social media technologies available.
The new SB:MKTG site allows the company to quickly change copy through a simple Content Management System and also incorporates a blog that is already becoming an authoritative source of news from the powersport sponsorship marketplace.
Other social media type functionality includes:
- ShareThis integration - allowing visitors to republish information to sites like Facebook and Digg.
- Twitter Account Integration - automatic posting to twitter when the blog is updated.
- Blog to Email Integration - allows readers to sign up to the blog and get it in their inbox daily.
Denis Baddeley, Principal of SB:MKTG said:
Having worked with the team from Pilote Media in the past on big projects for the likes of NASCAR and MotoGP, we know that they understand emerging media better than anyone else. We wanted to be ahead of the curve without having to spend ages testing every web 2.0 plugin and widget ourselves. Pilote Media gave us the functionality that is relevant now with typical down to earth style…
The new SB:MKTG site can be found at http://www.sbmktg.net
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Dark Blue Book
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Getting Onto The Plane
