I have the utmost respect for Paul, but strongly disagree with his post. Titled “Social Media Overload”, he states that:

“for those using several [social media] services it’s becoming a tiresome chore”.

“For social media services the key measures of how much time users spend on the site is becoming a game of diminishing returns, people have only so much time in the day or so much inclination to spend a large chunk of their free time online.”

“Social media services are going to have to show some value for the investment in time and the privacy costs incurred by business users, it may well be that many just don’t offer a good enough deal.”

While I think it’s fair that small businesses may be facing some difficulty trying to justify spending time, money and resource on social media, I think it’s much less because “it’s a tiresome chore” – I think they’re just not clear about WHY they’re on social.

I’ve referenced this chart before, but it most clearly reveals just how powerful social media can be on purchase intent. With online reviews second only to word of mouth in purchase influence, there’s a huge opportunity for small business to use social media to build relationships with their customers, get feedback from advocates and detractors, hold special sales for their brand advocates, generate sales leads, manage their reputation, establish themselves as thought leaders, and the list goes on.

They just need to know what they want out of it. Then they need a strategy. Take Shoes of Prey, for example. A start-up business by Michael Fox, Jodie Fox, Mike Knapp and Mark Capps, their website 22Michaels is a “diary of [their] adventures, successes, failures and everything we learn as we attempt to start a business or two”, they have used social media to establish themselves as thought leaders in the space. Smart Company has voted them one of Australia’s 25 top business blogs for two years runing, one of Australia’s top 10 online retailers, 2010′s Hot 30 Under 30, and attended an online retail forum with the Australian government to showcase how smaller business can harness the internet.

Shoes of Prey is an e-retailer that sells custom-made shoes, and they have used their website to ask their consumers what they think of their latest online shoe designer, providing them with unique intelligence around purchase intent as a result of the designer, intent to purchase, ease-of-use and general feedback, which will (presumably)  be taken into consideration for future edits and improvements on the site.

Other small businesses can just look to the current landscape to work out what best practice looks like, what they need for their business, and how to get there. Australian examples include Appliances Online, which has one of the largest and most engaged Facebook pages nationally; Shoes of Prey; Big Brown Box – a retailer with a great Facebook page; 65 degrees – a Melbourne based cafe that has established itself as the 56th most influential food Twitterer in Australia; and more that crop up every day.

In the early days of social media, a cliched adage was that businesses should be on social media because “your customers are going to be talking about you anyway – don’t you at least want to know what they’re saying?” (Channelship has a great article that says pretty much the same thing, titled “If Brands Don’t Listen, Your Facebook Friends Will” by the legendary Brian Solis).

Social media has brought companies and customers closer than ever, and have broken down the walls of communication between the two entities. It’s made companies more approachable, vulnerable and accountable – and has empowered customers to be honest about their experiences, whether positive or negative. Social media allows businesses the “right of response”, allowing them to amplify their customers positive experiences, and solve their negative ones.

And let’s not forget the most obvious avenue for social media use by small business – customer service excellence.

Although Paul says that “people have only so much time in the day or so much inclination to spend a large chunk of their free time online… the value proposition becomes less compelling”, I think the main issue lies more with available resources for small business than a less compelling value proposition.

The case has been made for the value of social media – not to mention the added benefit of how social media marketing is a scaleable effort, depending on the available resources, both in time and money – now it’s just up to businesses to decide how they want to use it.

Don’t start up a Facebook page with weekly competitions and promising customer service support unless you have a community manager that can support that activity. Don’t set up a Twitter account encouraging customer feedback and asking engagement questions if you don’t have the resource available to respond to brand advocates and detractors. Don’t set up a corporate blog that gets updated once every other month.

Look at your business goals and come up with a strategy. Focus on the platforms you need to be on to achieve those goals, and plan on a timeline the tactics you’ll use to get there. Just like any other business marketing strategy, social media requires time, dedication and discipline – but this doesn’t mean that it needs to consume more resource than is allocated.

What do you think? Does social media have a place in your business – and where?

Lucie Snape, a digital strategist from Ogilvy 360 DI, started the program with a clear 4-point view of the road to developing an effective social strategy; Listen, Plan, Execute and Optimise. Lucie stressed the importance of mitigating risk with clear guidelines for employees and for community managers representing brands in the digital space.

It was good to be reminded that consistent content creation and playing by ‘the rules’ are necessities when executing a social strategy. Businesses still engage in social media without a predefining strategy which generally results in poor community management, incomplete social profiles and no active relationship building. That’s why a Playbook to underpin your strategy is a very important element of your social media tool kit.

Next up was Daniel Lodge, senior account executive at Radian6, who showed us ways social data is visualised using the Radian6 platform. For a first timer I imagine all the charts and graphs might be a bit overwhelming. It did however give a good overview of the product. It would have been good to see more detail around the engagement platform which is a wonderful feature of the Radian6 product which distinguishes it from its monitoring competitors.

Datacom’s Roy Tan, divisional manager at Datacom, tied in on the strategy and technology sessions to talk about the actual execution. He showed us tactical ways to use social media and Radian6 optimise the customer experience.

All in all it was a great event to learn the basics of a social media strategy and how it can add to your marketing mix. The sessions from strategy to technology, ending with the execution were fitted logical flow and came together in a comprehensive story. I loved the examples, and the way Mark McWilliams from Datacom introduced each speaker and told a little case study story complementing each session. I observed attendees scribbling wildly during the sessions so I’m sure they all have learned a thing or two!

If you want to know more about the events please visit the Datacom website. If you want to know more about the sessions discussed you can also follow the speakers on Twitter.

@LucieSnape
@DanielLodge
@RoyTwTr

In case you missed it, a Twitterstorm erupted Down Under this afternoon over a customer service (I use that term loosely) email from clothing retailer GASP. You can get all the juicy details here:

Exhibit A: The Complaint Email

Exhibit B: The Response from GASP Online Customer Care

Outrage over the email quickly gained traction and GaspGate soon burst into the Twitterstream with the hashtag #GASPFAIL  in the top 5 most trending topics in Sydney, #GASP taking spot number two on the national list.

The GASP Facebook page was the scene of a brand massacre with people expressing their disgust at GASP’s treatment of their clientele and inviting a response, apology, anything….

Whilst this PR disaster unfolded, there was one noticeable guest who did not come to the party, GASP. The only official response from GASP came through deleting Facebook posts from their wall before finally doing away with their brand page altogether.  #GASPFAIL indeed.

Here are some of the comments before the masses were silenced:

Aside from investing in staff training and development, what could they have done to better to manage the crisis? Well, quite a lot.

Like all businesses operating in this brave new world of always on here are some of the crucial mistakes made by GASP this afternoon:

1. Removed complaints from the Facebook Page
2. Remained silent
3. Removed the Facebook page completely
4. Still silent…
5. Twitter, which is a more prominent feedback channel during a crisis, was going off, yet the Gasp Twitter Handle remains, yep, you guessed it…silent (and barren to boot).
6. Links are being circulated to personal Facebook accounts of GASP staff, showing rather unsavoury comments (whether related or not to the customer service email). This shows you just how far consumers will go if wronged.

So, what could they have done?

1. Not handle the customer complaint the way they did first and foremost. They wouldn’t  have this issue had they handled that situation more wisely.
2. Listen and monitor. Once the issue erupted, they should have set up social media listening immediately for brand mentions. This would have provided many insights on what was happening and how the issue was escalating; this in turn would have provided critical information that the PR and management team could have built a plan from. Had GASP been monitoring they would have seen a spike in mentions which would have alerted them to the impending brand massacre.
3. Have a crisis plan in place. When things go wrong it is crucial that there is a clear escalation process and employees know what to do. You have to act with speed before the problem escalates and gets out of control.
4. Admit you’ve made a mistake and rectify it. Don’t stick your head in the sand and pretend there isn’t an issue, address the issue and address it publicly using your social media channels.
5. Be authentic. Don’t throw a canned response or token apology and expect it to change sentiment, it won’t.
6. Never EVER remove negative feedback from your social channels.  It’s social media 101. As GASP has learned, your community does not appreciate being silenced.
7. Have a social media policy. If your employees are active in social and identify themselves as an employee of your business,  they should have clear guidelines on what is and is not appropriate in social media

Crises happen all the time and we know how quickly they escalate with user generated content and social media as the accelerant. A combination of planning, preparation and process is your best defence. Have you got a crisis plan in place?

By Lucie Snape (@LucieSnape)

View “#GASPFAIL” on Storify

What did this mean to me? Over time I’ve come to realize that getting lost in my imagination – something completely congruent to a young boy – is something that I’ve made sure I never grew out of as I’ve grown older.

For me, this idea of imagining and getting lost in your thoughts is crucial to developing a constantly evolving creative output. In an industry that lives and breathes from the formulation of ideas, the art of imagination seems one that we don’t nurture past the age of say fifteen. Sure, we want to be creative; we want to create innovative campaigns and brilliant creative concepts that will wow our clients. But, if we’re not taking the time to imagine, to go ‘off with the fairies’ then how are we delivering anything that the client can’t get from another agency?

This is best represented in a cunning trick that renowned UK hypnotist Derren Brown played on two unsuspecting ad men. He had two men ride in the same car on the way to a creative briefing and then presented them with the brief. They had a set amount of time to both come up with an idea. Due to Derren ensuring that the car they rode in on the way to the briefing stuck to a specific route, both men came up with almost identical ideas. They’d taken in particular symbols on their way to the briefing – architecture, other advertising, street signs and landmarks which informed their creative output and had them both create similar creative.

Does this boggle your mind?

In a world where we’re constantly sharing media with each other, it should. The internet at large is simultaneously the biggest and the smallest environment in the world. We’re all sharing and we’re all viewing similar content and creatively, this is a harpoon in our side that can seriously impede any kind of unique creativity that was once enjoyed before the availability of the global orgy of content we currently indulge in.

If we’re all drinking from the same water fountain, singing from the same hymn sheet and sharing the Kool-Aid then this presents a problem if we want to keep our creative minds as sharp and unique as they can be.

What can we do?

We need to look out more windows. Stare into more space. Fantasise and internalize yet be open and obnoxious with our brainstorms. Never black-hat, but never settle for an idea you know deep down just isn’t creative. We need to get stupid with ideas before we get smart.

We need to be childish. And that doesn’t mean imagining what’s possible – it’s dreaming of the impossible and making it a reality.

Check out the Derren Brown video here

Below are some common questions which I’ve come across in conversations with clients, esp. those who are new to social media.

Q: Why is social media monitoring more expensive that our news monitoring service?
A: Compare the number of newspapers and magazines to the number of websites, blogs, forums, portals, pages on social networks; it requires much more time and effort to find the relevant info from the sea of data. Machine-generated results can only give you so much info and not insights. At the end of the day, you still need a human to analyze the data and provide you with the right advice to help move your business forward.

Q: What if we find negative comments / people complaining about my products / services? What should I do?
A: What if a customer called your hotline to file a complaint?  What would you do?  You would first understand the problem and then address it.  The reality is that you cannot make everyone happy, but you need to try.  What you can do is prioritize and address those that are most important or have significant impact on your brand’s reputation.

Q: I prefer to allocate money to run a campaign rather than a listening program.
A: You should invest in both, but listening should always come first and become a routine just like your news monitoring.  Listening not only serves as a monitoring tool, it can also provide great insights to brand perception and consumer sentiment (without paying for a focus group or a research house to conduct an audit). Most importantly, it can help you address an issue before it turns into a crisis.

So why do we need to listen?  Because everyone good conversation starts with listening.  And social media is all about good conversations and engagement with real people.

John lists three categories for evaluation with critical questions for each (full post here).

1) Enterprise Readiness

2) Local Market Readiness

3) Market Conditions

I’d offer up few specific points worth investigating for enterprises with priority markets in Asia:

1- Don’t Build in a Vacuum

The reality is enterprise readiness is not easy. It takes considerable organisational horsepower to build consensus on measurement, putting pen to paper on the brand playbook, leaping over the sales, marketing, pr silos. It’s messy and takes time.

Brands at the twilight of phase one – nearly but yet not complete – should already be activating and training local markets. This evaluation process is not liner. In fact, the leading enterprises I’ve worked with run this simultaneously with a built in feedback mechanism so the important lessons bound to pour out while building capacity at the local level are channeled back up to global.  Ready the enterprise while simultaneously building local capacity and both hub and spoke benefit.

We often subscribe to the multiple hub and spoke model for clients (it works for us at Ogilvy) and we’ve learned that those spokes need to flow both ways. See below for reference from the Altimeter Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist.

2- Two-way Hub and Spokes

Successful enterprises know that Asia is an exporter of ideas and creativity in social media. Show up at a brand or agency brainstorm in Ho Chi Minh City, talk to digital creatives in Beijing or ask your Taiwan team to give you a demo of their wildly popular BBS ingeniously run off of Telenet.

A UK or US-headquartered client cannot toss the enterprise social strategy and brand content to Hong Kong or Shanghai and expect a word -by-word translation.

This import model doesn’t work in social media because enterprises risk serious innovation leak if there’s not a pipeline in place designed to channel the creativity and ideas destined to come flowing back to global HQ.

Be warned: do not make the mistake of dividing your Asia social media efforts based on the number of Facebook fans by country (see below from Tom Crampton) or any other stat your Intern googled. Indonesia, as an example, is the second largest Facebook market in the world, and also home to a fascinating and jaw-dropping complex cultural and business environment that may consume resources at a faster rate than other markets.

3- Pilots to build local teams

The following are must-have stats that your local team can and should easily pull (riff off of John’s post) and the second list of questions will yield deeper insight when planning and evaluating long term engagement:

• Dominant social networks (local vs global socnet)
• Dominant search engine
• Mobile penetration
• Broadband penetration
• Trust in WOM
• Censorship Level in Social Media (reality of some Asian countries, particularly China and Vietnam)

In order to know where to focus your efforts long term, a pilot program in a carefully chosen market answers to deeper questions designed to assess local market readiness:

• Is the local market an influencer or grassroots driven web ecosystem? Hint: No market in Asia is a symmetric 50 /50 split
• Does that social media monitoring tool really work in Vietnamese, Bahasa Malaysia, etc?
• Does this global enterprise program need further tweaking to “fit” in China?
• Can we really get general consensus on measurement?
• Do we need a regional hub serving Asia for added support – a mini-hub in cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai that can serve as a single contact point for global HQ while coordinating 23 cities in Asia.

With so many languages, cultures and different web-climates, Asia warrants an extra level of attention and evaluation. Curious to know lessons learned from others as more and enterprises assess market readiness in social media.

During these past 3 historical weeks, I could not help but look at social media’s role in the revolution, especially for activists.  If, why and how did social media play a role?

It is evident to me that indeed social media has played multi-faceted roles at different stages of Egypt’s revolution (which I will detail in a future post).  Through this, an even greater underlying principle emerged:

Social media is built and designed to support social movements. The social media framework itself is a powerful underlying force that allows the momentum of movements to surge uncontrollably and organically.

A revolution, a movement, or any major social cause nourishes on unity, “people power,” advocacy, connectivity, grassroots mobilization, free expression and shared aspirations… all of which are inherently embedded within the social media skeleton and system. (Best example lies within Facebook). It is almost as if social media perfectly fits as a layer within a movement’s structure.  Here is a diagram to further illustrate this model, based on Facebook and Twitter as examples (click to enlarge):

The revolution did not happen because of social media, but social media is designed for revolutions.

Yes, revolutions successfully occured long before the internet, tv, radio or newspapers, but social media, unlike any other medium, is ideally structured for revolutions/causes, as illustrated in the above diagram.  It is now the first and last place for activists, because its capabilities are designed to allow activism to flourish.

With more time, interest and digital energy spent on social sites, social media is now a fundamental and integral component for today’s activist.  If anyone wants to challenge a status quo, energize and mobilize their network towards a cause…

• Where do you think they will go first?
• What will help them gather supporters and resources faster and more efficiently?
• What will allow them to connect, notify, and engage their base?
• What will help them easily organize events, rallies and get donations?
• What will help them recruit other activists and get their voices across?

This is exactly what the Egyptians net activists understood and exploited, especially around the shameless censorship of the Mubarak regime, which realized the power of social media and blocked the internet for some time during the revolution.  (My next blog post will focus on “the how,” recapping the creative social tactics of the Egyptian revolutionaries, along with the events on the ground and how social-based strategies leverage the momentum of the revolution).

At this very moment, desperate and freedom hungry activists in Algeria, Syria, and Yemen are following the Egyptian and Tunisian example and are not only getting to the streets but are also flocking to social media, in hopes of spawning similar revolutionary change in their countries.  The momentum continues.

What are your thoughts on this issue?

@hisom

As of last month, any page administrator can gain access to valuable information, such as the number of impressions & percentage of feedback (e.g. “Likes,” comments) for each post on their page. Facebook now counts users that see & engage with a brand’s posted content.

Let’s take a look behind the scenes of what an administrator can see (red box). This is a Facebook page I manage:

A free analytical dashboard within Facebook pages also allows administrators to see: demographic data (age & gender) or geographic data (country, city, language), engagement per post (as shown above), content consumption (videos, photos, posts..etc), review & discussion posts and much more. Such data provides valuable insights into consumer behavior, tendencies & interest.

Also, Facebook brand pages help facilitate purchase intent. A recent survey showed that 40% of Facebook users who fan brands do so to receive discounts & promotions (ExactTarget & CoTweet 2010).

Brands large or small can now make the most of their Facebook presence by….

• Learning more about their customers & prospects
• Gaining greater insight into which posts are attracting consumers, by understanding which content performs best
• Assisting their social media optimization efforts, while providing better chances to keep up with leading competitors

Are you optimizing your brand’s social posts? If so, how?

@hisom

Strategy Analytics insight showed that global tablet shipments reached over 4 million units in Q3 of 2010, with the iPad capturing 95% of global share.

Marketers are getting excited about the recent Nielson research findings, which indicated that:

· iPad owners are more likely to make ad-related purchases than owners of other mobile devices.
· iPad owners have nearly twice the positive response in ads with interactive features (than iPhone)

With Samsung launching its highly-anticipated Galaxy Tab next week, and other tablets rapidly entering the market (including Microsoft Windows 7, Nokia’s MeeGo, HP’s webOS &  BlackBerry’s Playbook) , it is time for brands to consider tablet specific strategies.

Here are key questions to help brands determine how to engage with the tablet revolution:

· Are the brand’s target audiences using tablets? If so, are there stats showing how they are engaging?
· Could the audience’s tablet usability habits align with what the brand can offer?
· Should brands consider tablet apps, ads or a website optimized for tablet viewing? Or all?
· How is the brand’s tablet strategies going to integrate with its offline & online efforts?
· What does the brand ultimately aim to achieve in terms of marketing AND business objectives?