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

After the much-hyped Like Minds conference a couple of weeks ago several of our ‘heads, this one included, have launched themselves into March like it’s a whole new season.

Bounding around the world to different places, meeting new faces and reaching to brand new social spaces… it’s awesome.

Today however, isn’t about what we’ve got to say. Today is about what others have said.

Historically, 1000heads has been a bit bashful in celebrating the lovely things that people say about us and to an extent, we still are.

However, something appeared last week and we’d really like to say thank you.

Step forward The Brand Guardian, you’re up. We want to give a massive thank you to you for your kind, insightful and well-informed 1000heads write-up.

To quote:

“I had never heard of them before, I decided to check them out - and I am glad that I did. As ever, by a simple referral from a friend, I have discovered yet another business who make it THEIR business to help brands communicate with their customers, thereby forging and nurturing relationships with their existing (and potential) clients…

…they have nothing to hide, and aren’t afraid to stand up and say so…

…all I can say is “Big Up 1000Heads” we need to see more businesses put their ethics out there loud and clear to pave the way for a more open, transparent way of working.”

Really lovely, thank you. We’re going to run away now, before we start blushing…

The Social Media Reality Check focused on winnowing the effective and long-lasting from the myths and hype in the social space, but I don’t need to rehash the specific topics that we covered - from measurement to investment to authenticity - because the inimitable Joanne Jacobs live blogged the whole thing here. It’s worth a read, as the audience members brought up many of the key worries and challenges that brands face as social becomes a ‘must-do’. But before you click through, here’s a quick snapshot of the event:

Any questions or opinions on what I said? Fire away.

we have a conversation.

A nice example of this is the deck Nokia Head of Digital Arto Joensuu has just popped up on Slideshare; they created it last year but the thinking and articulation are still spot on.

It’s also worth checking out the conversation on Senior Marketing Manager Dan Goodall’s blog. His latest post on The Goodwill Hunters is particularly worth a read (and make sure to mine his links for some excellent further insights).

At Like Minds 2010 last weekend Dan and I also discussed the PESH model he created with Arto back in July as ‘a way of mapping out the different roles that brands need to fulfill from a digital marketing perspective.’

I really like it, although I agree with Arto that it works for a wider social context beyond digital, and I’d like to make a few tweaks myself.

First of all, you need Listening in there - right at the centre - as this drives the ways in which brands can add value to consumers. And I’d prioritise Help and Enable over Participate and Sell. Lots of brands are jumping into the social space to do a bit of Participation here and push a few Sales there - but unless they are either Helping or Enabling, they don’t earn the right to do either.

In which case PESH becomes HELPS, and looks something like this:

What do you think?

It’s great to be able to refine your own thinking with rather than despite a client. This is surely the way that companies and agencies must work going forwards to really benefit consumers.

Heads together, not worlds apart.

“This is the story of four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. Consequently, it wound up that Nobody told Anybody, so Everybody blamed Somebody.”

Recently, in a piece for Reputation Online, Steve Waddington from Speed Communications said that “corporate blogging is broken.”

..

..

While admitting this is indeed an over-statement, he still goes on to make some valid points as to why in the UK at least, corporate blogging has yet to take off.

Citing ownership, authenticity and human vs corporate communication as the three main reasons as to why, @wadds goes on to say that while these issues continue to throttle bloggging on a corporate level, there are some excellent examples out there of people doing it well.

I agree with Steve, there are some great examples of corporate blogs out there - you’re reading one right now - but what his post doesn’t do is explain how to address the issues that he raises.

Let’s try and do that shall we?

1) Ownership

Steve says:

“Should a blog be the pet project of a senior executive or fall within the communications or PR team, product marketing, customer relations or human resources? And legal will almost certainly want to get involved and pass judgement on blog posts and comments.”

We say:

It depends on your objective.

Time and time again when it comes to corporate blogging, brands just throw a single blog post up and expect it to change the world. I once actually had a conversation with someone (who shall remain nameless) where they said: “Well we had a MySpace, but it didn’t do anything. So we closed it.” - Amazing. This rule doesn’t just apply to corporate blogging, obviously. The same can be said for any business activity.

What is your goal? Paint a target, then go for it.

In this instance if your blog is to just put a human face onto some of your PR messages then this falls to your PR department. If you want to address a few customer service issues, then liaise with your customer service department. If it’s a combination of both, then speak to both.

As a side note, if it comes to your legal department, keep them in the loop the whole time. Work with them to develop a set of guidelines that you both agree on and stick to them.

It really isn’t rocket science.

2) Human communication vs corporate communication

Steve says:

“There are fundamental differences between how people communicate and how companies communicate – and very few corporate organisations have managed to bridge that gap.”

We say:

Agreed! Totally!

But how do we address this?

Once you’ve been through point 1 (setting your objectives and appointing ownership), your next step is to find the right voice. Seeking out and finding your very own brand evangelist/community manager might not be easy, but if you close your eyes and think hard you could probably come up with one maybe two people in your company that truly live and breathe your brand or product. If you can’t, then the chances are that it’s you.

You are a human being.

Guess what? So is the person you’re thinking of. Admittedly this is a very simple way of looking at things, but by truly embracing and trusting in your community manager, you will find your voice. Talk to each other, compare notes. Embrace social communications and don’t be afraid of people.

3) Authenticity

Steve says:

“Finally there is the issue of the generation of authentic content. It’s the only way to attract and stimulate an audience yet organisations see it as time consuming and requiring the constant input of senior management.”

We say:

If you stick to the points above, this third and final point should not be an issue. At 1000heads we talk about the anthropomorphism of brands and the importance of PEOPLE being able to talk to PEOPLE. There are people behind the brand, just like there are brands behind products.

Trust in your people, trust in yourself and most of all, remember that you are a human being.

Keep it real.
Keep it simple.
Keep it honest.

In summary; know your objective, be a human being and ultimately, use your corporate blog to delight and excite the people that matter most to your business. With any problem the first half of the battle is identifying what needs fixing. The next step is the how.

Hopefully we’ve gone some way to help out in that respect.

Please, leave a comment if you have any questions or opinions.
We’d love to help.

How do we change that?

Listening.

Photo credit: The fantastic Paul Clarke

Listening was a key theme at Friday’s Likeminds conference and nearly every keynote touched upon its importance.

“Listen, listen and listen again.”

Here at 1000heads we have two main streams of work; word of mouth activation and word of mouth tracking & monitoring. The former is what you’ll probably read about here the most. The different ways we help our clients spread the word range from helping brands make their consumers feel special to building long-lasting relationships between people and brands who love each other.

What we don’t tend to talk about is what drives this activation.

That’s where our word of mouth tracking comes into it. ‘WOMTrak‘ is a whole suite of products originally designed to provide insights and analysis to inform our ongoing activation ideas. Like I said to a number of people at Likeminds on Friday, there really is no point coming up with an amazing idea if you have no information or insights to base it on.

With all of our clients, old or new, we always advise a period of listening first. Obviously with some of our more long standing accounts, this system is already in place; constantly defining and refining our creative as well as our engagement strategies moving forward. Building in reactive and creative strategies that we can execute on a six-pence.

It’s a fantastic resource to have.

Coming back from both the Likeminds conference and the subsequent summit at Bovey Castle, I feel inspired and invigorated. Each and every practitioner we met spoke of the importance of listening first, then engaging. Be that through using something as simple as a Google Alert or a fully fledged monitoring program from a specialist system like WOMTrak; make sure you listen.

Listening will provide a mean of what your people already think of you. Once you have that, you can start researching and discovering insights… and once you have that, you can start educating your staff and your stakeholders about why this is important. Sell that in and you’re on course to begin creating informed strategies that provide useful, engaging content that will not only improve your bottom line but ultimately, improve the experience of your end user.

So remember, when it comes to WOM, if you do only one thing -

LISTEN.

At Friday’s conference, James was part of a panel discussing the controversial ‘How can dying business models innovate through people-to-people?’ and I joined Chris Brogan, Trey Pennington, Kate Day and Kristian Carter to debate ‘Where are the forward thinking organisations going next?’

James on the far left. Photo via Britt_W @ Flickr

Me gabbing. Photo via Ben Ellis @Flickr

Friday’s six excellent keynote speakers (Jon Akwue, John Bell, Jo Jacobs, Olivier Blanchard, Yann Gourvennec and Chris Brogan) each had a unique perspective on the challenges and possibilities of social tools and approaches, but one phrase really stood out for me - permission to act.

One of the themes across the presentations, panels and audience discussions was social media policies: how to regulate, guide or support employees’ use of the space so it becomes an asset and not a liability.

Now, I’ve crafted a few fairly detailed policies for our clients in my time, and I’ve written before about the need for basic regulations and protective processes. But as the conversation developed I discovered that I feel more strongly than I had previously suspected that policies simply don’t work. No-one reads them, and even worse, they exempt people from feeling that they have to think and make judgement calls for themselves.

John Bell’s emphasis on training (Ogilvy employ an admirable judo-belt rating system) really hit a chord. Experience is so much more effective than explanation. And Olivier Blanchard emphasised how businesses must empower every department to have their own training and evaluation programme so the strategy and execution is custom-fit and sits in the context of a close, evolving team.

It all reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s adage ‘fail better.’ We need to allow employees the freedom to act, and yes, sometimes fail, in the space. A twenty-page policy won’t help. What will is provision of a framework whereby those failures are shared and discussed, so they can become valuable drivers of change and growth.

James blogs with a view from Bovey Castle via Flickr

On the Saturday James and I headed to the beautiful Bovey Castle for the Like Minds Summit, an intense and intensely rewarding two days with nine social opinion leaders from both agencies and brands. I can’t tell you much about it here (and that is very hard for me to do!) because a forthcoming white paper will be distilling the discoveries and best practices we thrashed out over scones., but you can get a sense of the atmosphere from this interview with me Trey filmed on Sunday. More to come as soon as we can share.

A big heads up goes to Scott Gould and Drew Ellis for impeccably organising the whole thing. And now I’m looking forward to the really exciting stuff as we all continue the conversations started at Like Minds over the following weeks. Jump in…

What you see there is there the Fira in Barcelona where the congress takes place each year. Yes, the weather was that miserable.

What you don’t see however is the beautiful airport that all of us visitors to Spain’s fair city have to pass through.

A stunning airport, with a brand new terminal that opened just last year; it has a breathtaking design, look and feel but, being an airport, it also has all the features of your standard airport. Such as baggage pickup, passport control and of course - an arrivals lounge.

This fantastic piece of WOM from Opera Mini was used to illustrate to all and sundry that in fact *they* have the biggest mobile browser in the world. A smart move some might say, ‘PR stunt’ others have remarked…

Actually, this is a fantastic piece of WOM.

Every single Tech/Mobile Press/Blogger worth his/her salt was coming through Barcelona International last week and they definitely saw this (especially judging by some of the press they had).

It was the talk of the event on the show floor and at the after show parties. Opera, did well.

Steve Jobs, for those that live under a rock, works for Apple. Apple make the iPhone. Apple and the iPhone NEVER SHOW UP AT MWC. Ever.

This is fun, it’s different… aaaand it’s disruptive. Good work Opera.

We like.

Photo credits SomeWhatFrank, f0ff0 and omerka - creative commons, win.

If so, you might want to come along to the London School of Economics’s  panel discussion on Thursday 4th March, where I will be debating The Social Media Reality Check with Michael Pranikoff, Director of Emerging Media for PR Newswire, Tomas Gonsorcik, Head of Strategy for Interaction London, and Charlie Beckett, the Director of POLIS and LSE Chair.

Michael will be kicking off by introducing the latest PR Newswire research, and then we’ll each have 5 minutes to offer some basic thoughts before the discussion kicks in - a refreshingly conversation- not presentation- focused format. I’ll be putting my case for deflating this obsession with social media and focusing instead on where the real and virtual worlds intersect; but I’m really looking forward to being challenged and using the debate to craft some new ways of thinking about the space.

The event starts at 6pm at LSE’s New Academic Building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but it’s invitation only - so please email l.sozio@lse.ac.uk to book your place.

The session, entitled: New models for Social Networking: Can Advertising Support Growth? kicked off in earnest around 11:30 with representatives from Goojet, Do The Green Thing, Advent Partners and Google all taking part.

Image via @brendanquinn

That’s me over there on the far right. This panel session, the first of the day, was briefed as follows:

What does it mean to engage an audience? How do you use social networking sites to advertise your business? The advent of social media has dramatically altered how people interact with each other. We will explore what this means to traditional business models, and how companies have responded to these developments to reach new audiences.

And so on.. The theme itself wasn’t a new to me having recently presented on the subject (or something similar) at New Media Age but then again, what I had to say wasn’t to be the focus.

The session was about the panellists:

• Guillaume Decugis, CEO, Goojet
• Andy Hobsbawn, Co-founder, Green Thing
• Paul Fisher, Associate, Advent Venture Partners
• Stephen Webb, Head for Technology Clients, Google UK DSO

Having never moderated a panel before it was quite exciting to be taking charge of such an esteemed bunch of industry leaders. I had definitely seen a fair few sessions like this in my time - so I knew exactly what not to do. Believe it or not, it really is a fair old challenge; trying to balance not talking too much yourself with not letting the panellists get too wrapped in in their own respective agendas… as well as trying to keep the audience as engaged as possible. It can get tricky.

However, to all intents and purposes it seems I didn’t do a bad job, but - as I said before - this is about the panellists.

When asked if social networking could indeed support growth in the advertising sector, the panel were unanimous in their disagreement:

“Not in the current model…” said Paul, “..advertisers need to change tact..” agreed Andy “New businesses are out doing it for themselves…” finished Guillaume, who also went onto explain that the model of advertising in France is so utterly painful when it came to anything TV based - “Months of planning for a slot that you might not even want in three months time!”

Here are some more key quotes -

“Purposeful communities will be where the money can be found” - “Remember, volume doesn’t change the human experience” - “Who wants to pay for content today?” - “Interactions speak louder than words”- “an pages (a la Facebook) is more like relationship marketing than traditional campaign based advertising” - “If you can’t interrupt people anymore, then you will have to rely on the quality of your content to get attention” - “The internet isn’t a network of computers - it’s a network of people who happen to use computers”

Pleasingly, the overall theme of the 30mins we had taking questions was that brands and advertisers need to be MORE HUMAN in their approach to engaging with EVER SMARTER consumers who won’t just lap up the first thing that’s put in front of them.

Whether you’re a new mobile startup like Goojet or one of the largest corporations in the world, like Google it would seem contextual and conversational engagements are at the forefront of everyone’s minds.

Hat tip to the smart guys and girls at the LBS Tech Club for organising. You can read all of the output from the day over on the LBS live tweet page.

In the meantime - how are you being human in the way you engage?
You know consumers are getting smarter, right?