Chevron – Corporate Marketing Linkedin Strategy Development

Jeordan Legon of Chevron, the energy company, recently presented their corporate social linkedin centred communication strategy. Chevron, have developed and currently run a strategic corporate marketing social campaign, whose main focus is the development of a community of energy leaders on LinkedIn, which uses Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.  The project has

Listening & Learning
Listened to conversations for 2 years

  • Identify key community support and facilitation channel
  • Linkedin is primary channel
  • Additional Facebook, Youtube and Twitter channels

Identify community member profiles

  • Leaders the energy industry
  • Energy industry knowledge experts
  • Energy industry business partners

Identify key goals for community

  • High levels of engagement
  • Repeat Visits
  • relevant online discussions about energy

Engage with community   
When engaging with the community Chevron, identified key areas to focus on:

  • Identify key individuals to invite to community
  • Identify key subject areas
  • Energy
  • Doing business with Chevron
  • Create community guidelines
  • Create, Manage and moderate community content

Integrate into other communication strategies
As a TRUSTED developed and engaged community Chevron can channel campaigns through the community to drive traffic back to websites, surveys, other conversations on other channels.

“we agree” http://bit.ly/oC5QVz

Grow and develop
As a trusted, community within their target audience, which is depicted in the
chart below:

Chevron now has an engaged community to drive their online communications
strategy.  They combine an internal team, who are responsible for the data to day management of the community, for educating other internal teams in their use and success of social channels and are in partnership with external teams:

  • Listening insight, reporting and tools
  • Linkedin as a community platform and insight partner
  • Communications to help with individual campaigns

To hear the full presentation and view the slides, click on the video below and review the slides at the bottom.

BlogWell San Francisco Case Study: Chevron, presented by Jeordan Legon

    US Universities accelerate their use of Social Media

    We are working with an education client and came across some interesting research from the University of Massachusetts, http://bit.ly/qfCSrB in August 2011, which demonstrates the adoption rates of one or more social media channels is almost 100%.  The chanels are used in 3 primary areas, student acquisition, on-going communication programs and gaining an insight into how students live today.  The graphs have been taken from the research report.

    The primary public social channels are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Linkedin with University hosted social tools including blogs, forums/messageboards, video blogs and podcasting.

    Social media is recognised by the universities as a key tool in the recruitment of students and also in gaining insight into the lives and online behaviour of potential, current and alumni students.

    To see the research in detail please click http://bit.ly/qfCSrB

    Do you have any examples of good university and higher education social media case studies to share?

      Social Commerce

      What is Social Commerce?
      In todays world social commerce is an online store on Facebook, as this is the largest social network with the most global brand and global user base.

      Who is experimenting in Social Commerce?
      We are seeing a number of  different consumer companies experiment with social as a new channel to both engage with customers on their purchase journey and provide them with a place to buy their product or service through the social channel, be that social networks like Facebook and Twitter or as an app for smartphones and tablets.

      Facebook & Twitter
      Facebook and Twitter are the primary social networks companies are experimenting with social commerce platforms.  Twitter was the first channel where brands gave consumers the opportunity to buy, not in the social network, but were directed straight to a point of purchase.  In 2008, Dell was one of the first companies to use Twitter in this way, communicating daily deals with a direct link to a page where they can purchase the product.  Dell reported revenues US$6.5m through this channel in the first 2 years.

      Facebook provides additional functionality through the ability to create a fully functioning e-commerce application on their site.  ASOS the UK based online fashion retailer, has taken advantage of this an in January 2011, launched  a fully functioning store on Facebook.  Their customer experience combines that of their store, with access to their full range of stock, plus the social aspects of Facebook, where you can share the clothes you are looking at and purchasing with friends.

      The travel industry is another area, where we are seeing the ability to book flights with Delta Airlines, hotel rooms with Hilton Hotels and a holiday with HolidayIQ.

      jwtintelligence, have published their social commerce research which discusses their observations and findings on social commerce, Facebook, consumers social and interest graphs.

      Social Commerce (July 2011)

       

        Selecting Social Media Monitoring Tools

        As many organisations embark on  social Listening and Insight projects, there are a number of areas to consider when selecting a social media monitoring tool and insight partners.

        • What is the business goal for the listening project?
        • What insight does the tool need to deliver to support the business goal?
        • What are the core areas of a Social Media Monitoring Tool which need to be considered?

        Understanding each of these areas provides the basis for the tool selection and insight partner process.

        Business Goals for Social Listening Projects.
        Social Listening and Insight projects have delivered business benefits across different teams within organisation, these include

        • on-going listening projects which monitor current
          conversations around companies, products, brands and their competitors
        • Individual insight projects which interrogate
          historical social data and current conversations which have identified

          • key influencers for key subjects
          • campaign messaging for online word of mouth campaigns
          • themes, topics and tone for website content strategies

        Through these projects, Insight, Innovation, Online Strategy, Content Strategist, New Product Development and PR teams have all delivered value to the business through social listening and insight projects.

        What insight does the tool need to Deliver?
        Social Tools support 2 forms of social listening, which provide reports and insight back to different teams across the business and can answer

        • on-going listening and monitoring, where individuals
          and in some companies, listening teams, listen for conversations about companies,
          products, brands, competitors and feed this information back to different areas
          within their business which include

          • PR
          • Customer service
          • Innovation
          • Marketing
          • Risk & compliance
          • Technical support
          • Individual retail stores/locations
          • individual social insight projects, which look to answer specific business
            • who are the key people talking about my business
            • what are the key subject areas my target customers are talking about
            • can I align my campaigns with key subject areas
            • what is the reach of an online campaign
            • other customer research and insight questions

         

        What are the core areas of Social Media Monitoring Tools which need to
        be considered during the selection process?
        There is a wide range of social tools currently available in the market whose core function is to track, monitor and collect social data, which can be used by the different teams within an organisation.

        Social Media Monitoring tools have 3 core functions

        • Collection of Social Data
        • Index and Store Social Data
        • Dashboard to interrogate and report on social data collected.

        Collection of Social Data
        The data collected is the individual conversations and contributions to online public forums, online communities, comments on news sites and blog posts, social networks, like twitter, Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn etc.  Each conversation identified has associated data which can also be collected relating to the individual contributor, which
        may include IP address, social network username and public profile information.

        Indexing and Storage or Social Data
        Each social media monitoring tool owns a social data warehouse; which is the social data they have collected and indexed for use by their dashboard and export to deliver reports and insights to clients.

        The social data is collected from a range of sources, which grows on a daily basis as the tools add more sources.  The availability of data relevant to your area of interest is an important aspect to consider when looking at tool vendors.  Areas to consider around data are:

        Volume of Social Data
        The size of the social data warehouse varies, between different social media monitoring tools and the historical data held varies from 1 week to 4 years, these are important areas to consider when evaluating a social media monitoring tools as is the ability to add in new social data sources for a specific country or industry.

        Geographic Spread
        Many Social Media Monitoring tools originated in the US, therefore the largest percentage of social data comes from US domestic websites, social networks, forums and blogs.  As the companies have moved into new international markets their volume of local market data has increased.  It is important to look at the volume of data from your local market and the ability of the tool to add in and develop the local market data set.

        Local Language
        SMM Tools have a growing volume of international language data sets, however the level of accuracy of the results depends on the international expertise within each vendor and their approach to indexing, storing, analysing and reporting on local languages.  It is important to run some local market tests for volume and relevance of local market social data.

        Social Media Monitoring Dashboard
        Each Social Media Monitoring Tool has a dashboard which has 4 main areas of functionality

        Setting up the search
        When evaluating tools it is important to look at the dashboard to establish how searches are setup, to understand what results are produced and how to filter and refine searches to narrow down the data set into one that can be used by the different teams within a business.

        Reporting on Findings
        Each SMM tool has a reporting dashboard which can be used to report on the findings of the searches carried out, be those on-going monitoring or deeper analysis of historical data sets.  It is important to look at the reporting capability of the dashboard and to understand what insight can be obtained from the data and how it can be reported to one or more areas of the business.

        Workflow
        Many SMM tools offer a workflow capability which enables the listening team to forward individual conversations to other individuals within the organisation for action or for integration to internal CRM systems.

        Data Export
        Data export is another feature which is available where selected data sets can be exported and used by other reporting tools and analytics tools.

        It is important to understand the key areas of Social Media Monitoring tools to ensure these are considered during the evaluation process.

        Summary
        Social Media Monitoring can provide valuable insights to a business, which will help it understand more about their customers, help them find ways to engage and learn from them and gain a broader understanding of their position in the market.  It is therefore very important to understand the core strengths of each of the Social Media Monitoring Tools and evaluate them with your business goal in mind to ensure maximum value from using them within your business.

        It is very easy to buy SMM Tools, it is harder to demonstrate value to the business if you have not selected the best tool for the job.

        To get our whitepaper on selecting SMM tools or to find out more about how we can help you in the selecting and evaluating SMM tools, contact us on:

        Email:  Julie@purplespinnaker.com

        Call:  +44 7887 644 799

          Starbucks – a new loyalty model…..

          Since 2008, Starbucks have been experimenting with online consumer Social Engagement Initiatives and are both learning from their experience and also seeing valuable business benefit from these projects.

          Starbucks did not start out with a social engagement strategy, what they did start with was a small team led by Mathew Guiste and Alex Wheeler, who were given the freedom to test and try social projects and evaluate their impact on the business. Through this process, Starbucks now have a global engaged community who have access to the business through multiple social channels, which include the main Public Social Networks Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr as well as hosting their own customer community called mystarbucksidea.

          Through these initiatives Starbucks have gained the trust of their community and their permission to engage them in conversation, which enables Starbucks to gain valuable insight and feedback from their customers which can be used in the creation of new and development of existing product lines.

          Through mystarbucksidea, the Starbucks community, ideas are reviewed, prepared for launch and the launched. Over 100 ideas have gone through this process and have been launched, a list of them can be found here.

          In addition to mystarbucksidea, Starbucks can listen to their customer conversations both in their managed and owned communities, but also across all other public social networks and individual customer conversations. Starbucks can use this information to find out what their customers are talking about outand use this inconjunction with other insights to assist in developing marketing and business plans.

          During a consulting project with Alterian we carried out a study on conversations around 5 Starbucks Christmas flavours in the UK, Singpaore and Australia using AlterianSM2. The case study below, highlights Starbucks primary social media initiatives and the key findings from the Listening project in December 2010.


          Mathew Guiste talks bout Starbucks Social Media and Open Innovation initiatives.

            Should Retail Financial Services be on Facebook?

            Over the last few weeks, I have been talking about whether financial services companies should be on Facebook and if they are should they be engaging their customers on there?

            The reason I ask is that my understanding is that banks are not allowed to disclose any information about their customers – who they are, if they are a customer, what services they use or any personal or financial information. So, with this being the case, if they have a Facebook page and as a customer I engage with them and am identified in some way or the victim of financial fraud or some other crime – is the bank responsible?

            The argument may be that as I have a Facebook account and have voluntarily engaged with my bank on Facebook, and then I am making my customer status public. My concern is that under Facebook terms and conditions they own the data and can do with it what they choose – they state they do not identify individuals, but we know they have “made errors” and individual’s details have been passed to advertisers – more than once – so it is a problem.

            So, if my bank has a Facebook page, can I assume they have done the due diligence on the Terms and Conditions of what Facebook can do with my data and is it protected on the Fan/Like Page the way it would be with all other interactions with my bank?

            …but would love to hear from people in the financial services industry as to how they are going to protect their customers data on social networks like Facebook and what guidelines they are giving their teams working on social networks about protecting customer data.

              Kukutana at JWT

              Thank you to all who came along to our first central London Kukutana, and JWT who let us use the cafe/bar for the event.  We had a really good turn out and there was a lot of conversation going on until 8pm.

              The slides from last nights event are below and we will be updating you on the next event and the topic for discussion, look forward to seeing you at the next event.

              Kukutana @JWT London 19th April

              View more presentations from julie walker.

                Kukutana – Listening Online

                Thank you to Niall O’Malley of Immediate Future, http://bit.ly/90Hc3K, the online PR company and Barry Bridges from Intelligent Conversation, http://bit.ly/9srjnK who both came along and led a very interesting and inspirational conversation, leading to some lively debate at January’s kukutana. The group really appreciated the insight into social media monitoring, the case studies discussed and how they could start to listen and learn from online conversations.

                Nialls slides are below and there are some links on his last slide to a selection of tools for you to try.

                Niall O Malley Kukutana – Social Media Cafe

                View more presentations from julie walker.