Asda’s ORB – online reputation booth – is where head of social media Dominic Burch knows he will always learn something new about his business or customers

Building customer relationships is important for any business but in the retail industry it’s absolutely vital, and social media is the perfect tool. Customers are voicing their opinions across the social media channels – from Facebook to Twitter – and ignoring what they are saying means missing rich learnings and the opportunity to build closer relationships. It also risks brand damage given that customer complaints that were once made behind closed doors are now broadcast to the widest audience possible.

As one of the UK’s biggest retailers, owned by US giant Wal-Mart, supermarket giant Asda is today an active and effective social media communicator, yet only three years ago it didn’t even have its own Facebook page.

Speaking recently at the SMWF Asda’s head of social media Dominic Burch revealed that the company’s approach to social media had its roots in a no-nonsense approach and a limited budget that had forced it to be creative in the early days. So what can other businesses learn from Asda’s approach?

Tip 1 – Understand that social media is the new PR and you have to be reactive

Burch headed up Asda’s corporate communications team before moving to his role as head of social media earlier this year and previous to that was in the PR team at Asda for over a decade. In that time things have changed dramatically. Neither customer nor journalists now use businesses themselves as their first point of contact and instead often take to social media airwaves before verifying facts. Burch said businesses and brands had to accept and be aware of this fact and react accordingly.

Tip 2 – Communicate through all of the channels that best suit your customer

Asda already has a number of communication routes to reach its customers. As a media owner it broadcasts to more than 18.5 million customers a week through its instore radio channel Asda FM, whilst its monthly magazine is read by 5.5 million women. Facebook, said Burch, offered yet another channel to speak directly to customers, especially since half of its 18 million weekly customers spend an average of 15 minutes a day on Facebook. Whilst they are less active on other social media such as Twitter Asda still monitors them, said Burch.

Tip 3 – Be the genuine voice and get rid of the copycats

Burch admits Asda was late coming to Facebook and imposters had got their first. Before its debut there were 15 unofficial Facebook fan pages. “Most of them were well intentioned – our customers creating fan pages because there wasn’t a real one,” said Burch. “The problem was our customers were talking to people who they thought were us. Our customers already expected we were there.,” he said.

Tip 4 – Listen and understand before you engage

The whole point of social media is of course in the name – it’s a place for interaction. Yet many brands forget this and focus on being in broadcast mode rather than having a proper dialogue with customers, said Burch. He said Asda had learnt to listen to its customers and to be responsive rather than simply stick to its own agenda of what it wanted to talk about. “Only after we have understood do we seek to engage,” said Burch.

Tip 5 – Connect rather than just collect fans

Burch pointed out that actively engaging customers rather than just building numbers was fundamental for success. “What’s important for us is to connect to people that shop at Asda. 85% of our fans on Facebook are 25-35 year old mums who love Asda. I’m far more interested in connecting with those cheerleaders — the advocates of who we are and what we do — than having irrelevant fans,” said Burch.

Tip 6 – Drive engagement by listening to customers

Engaging customers in deciding product strategy is the modern day focus group on a much larger scale. He cited how Asda had asked its customers to vote on the colour flask it should stock as it only had shelf space for one option. “Customers in their thousands voted,” he said. Meanwhile a promotion for Asda’s Little Angels nappies that urged people to share a competition to win a year’s supply attracted sharing in its millions.

Tip 7 – To influence you need to engage with customers as an equal

Burch pointed out that many, even some within his own business, want to jump to the influence stage of the customer relationship process. “They see social media as being a cheap way to get to lots of people to sell them stuff,” he said. But customers, as in real life, don’t like being sold at. “People want to engage as an equal and on things that are relevant to them. If you jump to that influence stage you will either be talking to the wrong people about the wrong stuff or you will just turn them off,” he said. This means relevant, targeted content.

Tip 8 – Use social media to aggregate sentiment about your brand

Some brands are precious. Asda, said Burch, isn’t. “We sell baked beans,” he said. Allowing its customers to share their love of being able to put their own toppings on pizza in store, or that they believe Asda’s Smart Price chocolate rivals some of the biggest brands – both conversations the retailer realised its customers were having online — was key. “If customers want to talk about things like that we should celebrate that,” he said.

Tip 9 – Take social into your business

One of Asda’s key targets is to drive traffic through social media in it stores, said Burch. With instore Wi-Fi now in every store the retailer plans to get closer than ever to its customers and will be able to better see what its customers are doing on the back of the conversations it is having with them. “We are giving them a reason to take their phone out of their pocket and use it,” he said. This can involve everything from its Easter Bunny zapper campaign to encouraging customers sampling products to then like them, whilst instore, via social media.

Tip 10 – Always be open to learn more

It’s easy for a big business to think it knows it all but Burch explained that Asda’s initial social media approach centred around the Orb – the Online Reputation Booth – a series of four screens in the company’s press office which monitored conversations and mentions of Asda and its rivals. “You can sit in front of those screens and you will learn something about Asda you didn’t know,” he said.

Effective use of social media means that same can be true of any business and those that ignore the opportunities of social media for fostering closer relationships with their customers do so at their peril.

Creating brand mascots on social media can be as powerful as creating much loved characters via traditional ad campaigns

The world of social marketing means that brands no longer have to be faceless organisations but can get closer than ever to customers. And what better way of doing that through the voice of your brand?

As ITV’s ‘who dunnit’ drama series Broadchurch concluded in the UK recently social media forums lit up with reaction about who the murderer had been. Central to the discussion was the character who had solved the murder – Detective Sergeant Alec Hardy played by Scottish actor David Tennant – who was commenting, in character, throughout. Engagement rocketed as a result.

The tactic of creating a central character to embody your brand (a mascot) has long been a successful marketing technique but extending that online helps further and extend engagement beyond the original ad campaign, so how do you get it right?

1)      Create a believable, representative character for your brand

In the case of Broadchurch @Alec_Hardy the work had already been done because viewers had experienced the character through the series but brands those that don’t already have a mascot can also develop their own brand figurehead by defining who their character is – how they think, what they do and what their role in life is. Brands already define their customers in this way. Now they need to define themselves in the same way.

2)      Pick the right name and avatar

As important as the character itself is the first impression you get from the name and avatar, so make sure both match the image you are trying to portray.  For sweet brand M&M’s the choice was obvious – the company’s chief chocolate office Ms Brown who not only has her own Twitter account @mmsbrown but also her own Facebook page.

3)      Give them a personality

Creating a character will fall flat on its face if it’s simply used as a voice of the brand without having a personality behind it. The character needs to be likeable or at least interesting and actually sound human if a customer is to engage with them. At lingerie retailer Boux Avenue Miss B x (she always finishes with a kiss) is the company’s brand voice, blogging and tweeting on the brand’s behalf. Though we never actually see her we know from her posts she is everything the brand embodies – girlie, excitable and fashion loving – exactly the customer base the brand wants to engage with.

4)      Speak and stay in character

This is one of the most important steps in creating a character for your brand because you must maintain the tone and voice of the character you have created. This is especially true if you have a number of people managing your social media community. Price comparison website Compare the Market has had runaway success with its meerkat mascot strategy  which has extended physically into a range of cuddly toys and online into the rather mad, but always in character, tweetings of @Aleksandr_Orlov. It certainly works as he has almost 60,000 followers.

5)      Be outrageous!

It may seem rather contradictory but the reality is that your brand ambassador doesn’t have to actually say much about your brand itself. On Twitter @betfairpoker is a brand character whose own Twitter resume says “Even as a child I rarely tweeted about Poker” and yet the character’s off the wall ramblings are enough to keep more than 26,000 followers intrigued with posts as crazy as this: “Caliban, the office pigeon, is dead. Like all birds, he died of a broken heart. I have scattered grain in his honour. Those eyes. That beak.”

Social marketing is about engagement. Engaging with a character rather than a faceless brand is as close as you can get – whether that character is real or not. And judging by the amount of spoof Twitter accounts for some of the UK’s best loved brands and companies if you don’t adopt and give your own brand character a voice you are missing a trick because you can be sure someone else will, so also ensure you have some way of letting your followers know you are the official one.

1) A new twist on the old

Of course mood boards to illustrate a marketing concept is nothing new for anyone in a traditional marketing department, but how to translate that into a useful and meaningful campaign that means something to their customer audience has always been the hard part. Now however marketers can not only push out their own versions of their mood boards but see the concepts, items and ideas that inspire their customers too – their own moodboards as it were.

2) Extended customer reach and learning

For brands looking for yet another channel to market themselves this offers huge opportunities to reach the customer – especially given they can do it by exploiting the emotive visuals that they spend thousands of pounds on rather than necessarily having to continuously come up with new creative.

3) Getting creative and competitive

Launching their own branded profiles is just the starting point for brands looking to increasingly interact through the medium. A number have developed promotional strategies around Pinterest which help to boost followers and repining, particularly by tapping into users’ competitive spirits.
In March last year airline BMI launched a Pinterest Lottery which encouraged users to repin a variety of images from boards it had created for a chance to win free flights.
Fashion retailer Lands End Canvas Pin It to Win It competition encouraged users to repin images from its site and the company later introduced a one click “Pin It” button on its product pages to allow users to share their fashion finds from Lands’ End Canvas onto their own Pinterest boards.

4) Inspiration is key

Although contests help to drive footfall Pinterest also helps to inspire. Fashion brand Topman is using its Pinterest pages to post everything from its 2013 lookbooks and images from its fashion shows to its latest high profile openings. For would be dieters the daunting prospect of calorie controlled meals is dismissed by the mouthwatering food imagery on Weightwatchers Pinterest site.
Ikea meanwhile is using the site, amongst other methods, to share Ikea inspired DIY projects – both giving customers great new ideas for how to use their products and building on their customer base network.

5) Completing the customer picture – literally

Pinterest gives marketeers a wider scope and the chance to really get under a consumers’ skin to understand what drives and inspires them enabling them to not just market the product but also selling the whole concept and lifestyle that is behind that product too – a subtler but more effective tactic in winning longer term buy in.

6) A celebration of uniqueness

Pinterest requires brands to think laterally and to celebrate their uniqueness, but also to celebrate their customers – using the boards for a two way conversation with their customers in the same way as they should be doing on any other social network. Pinterest allows the personality and essence of a brand to literally ooze out onto the page.

7) A new voice amongst the noise

When a picture can say a thousand words then not having a story to tell through Pinterest means your voice and your brand won’t be heard amongst the noise of your competitors. Can you really afford to not have a Pinterest strategy?

We help our customers to become “Customer Companies”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwaZwm2dTCA

Some of the best connections and insights at conferences come after and between the talks, when you can have deeper conversations and share knowledge with your fellow attendees.  We are happy to be the sponsor of the space where these synergies can happen at Social Media World Forum.

We will also be on hand to answer any questions about how your company can become a Socially Engaged Enterprise and can turn insights into action and connections into customers for life with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or any of the salesforce.com products.

It’s always a good idea to plan a conference early in advance.  Share your attendance and reach out to fellow attendees on social channels to arrange meetings, so you can make the most of the event.  Here is a handy eBook that provides you even more tips on how to use Social Media to prepare for and enhance the conference experience: http://www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com/resources/ebooks/social-media-for-conferences-and-trade-shows/

Recently, the hot topic in the social world has been social media and TV. And for good reason; this year, social media activity during the Super Bowl was reportedly 3 times higher than in 2012 and, in February, Twitter bought TV analytics company BlueFin Labs, demonstrating that they are serious about TV and how it ties in with Twitter.

Dual screening – that is, using a smartphone, tablet or laptop whilst watching television – is now commonplace. According to Nielsen, in Q3 2011, 68% of tablet users and 63% of smartphone users said they use their mobile device several times a week or more whilst watching TV.

Twitter has found that during peak TV shows, almost 40% of tweets are related to TV, and that 60% of users have tweeted while watching TV at some time or another.

We at Brandwatch recently decided to take a look at those tweets to understand why people are using dual screens, how common it really is and which TV shows are taking advantage of the trend. We analysed  tweets about 50 top UK and US TV shows over the course of 2012 and found that viewers were 12 times more likely to tweet about TV shows during days when it was on air, compared to days when it was not broadcast.

Dual screening clearly presents an opportunity for both TV production companies and brands to engage with viewers on a deeper level than ever before. However, whilst some shows are gradually beginning to understand the potential of dual screening when it comes to advertising and engagement with audiences, many are still missing out on opportunities to capitalise on the trend. We found that less than half of the shows we looked at (43%) included an official hashtag on screen during broadcast, and that almost half (48%) seldom engaged with fans on Twitter.

Some shows are getting involved; The Voice, The Great British Bake Off and The Biggest Loser were particularly good at engaging with audiences during viewing, through the use of official hashtags and engagement with fans on Twitter. This pays off in terms of the numbers of followers of those accounts, and how engaged those followers are.

TV manufacturers are also seizing the opportunity, developing TVs with more interactivity and built-in ‘double screens’. Other technology is also being developed, such as the Dish Explorer iPad App, which acts as a second screen, allowing users to see popular and trending shows, and to join in with conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

TV is now more interactive than ever before, and the potential benefits to brands are huge. Some brands are already taking advantage of this, and this trend looks set to continue. For example, Yeo Valley’s rapping farmers ad drove traffic to the brand’s social media pages, in order to encourage newsletter sign-up. As a result, they saw a 15% uplift in sales, and a 71% increase in share of voice.

However brands need to think carefully about the type of content they are offering and their strategy. For example, sport and reality TV shows suit dual screening experiences very well, whereas dramas – were the viewer may be more involved in a more complex or involved plot – are less suited, making the likelihood of viewers engaging in a brand experience smaller. But with careful planning and well thought-out content, dual screening can mean more engaged viewers and, therefore, greater opportunities for brands to connect with them.

Brandwatch will be speaking and exhibiting at this year’s #SMWF. To find out more please click here.

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This year, social media changed the way the world saw the Oscars. The celebrity world has always remained a mystery, with outsiders waiting eagerly to catch a glimpse of their favourite star on the red carpet.

But with the rise of social media, non-Oscar ticket holders were, for the first time, able to voice their opinions in the build up (who will win?), hear the personal views of the celebrities attending the ceremony (best dressed?), and share in goings-on at the glamorous after parties.

Even before the event, the general public had a voice in the conversation. Meltwater, the Global Media Intelligence Company, tracked billions of social media sources in the lead up, to see what the general buzz could reveal. Meltwater Buzz is a powerful suite of social media monitoring, engagement and publishing tools to help drive, manage and measure social activities and initiatives. Fascinatingly, 5 out of the 6 nominations tracked were successfully predicted in social media.

But what does it mean that social media can predict such outcomes? Firstly, the public voice is very much heard. Previously, where the average Joe might have shouted at the television, or shared his views among friends – he is able to share his views globally. Secondly, it could actually sway the end result. We have seen a correlation between rise in Social Media buzz surrounding a film and the footfall at the box office. It begs the question; Could Twitter have influenced the result of the Oscars by encouraging tweeters to view in the first place? Or helped sway the general opinion as positive or negative? In any case, it is clear that the power of Social Media can no longer be ignored by brands.

8.9 million Oscar related tweets were sent on the day of the event with a number of celebrities joining in and supplying running commentary via twitter including:

Samuel L. Jackson “Formally Avengeful!! pic.twitter.com/kgkFU7PRPK”

Jake Whetter “Can you spot Anne Hathaway? #Oscarspic.twitter.com/wP6sFCygTQ”

Mark Wahlberg “This is happening! http://yfrog.us/058w3smmohmwwvibcqgnujvqz …”

Jamie Foxx “Amazing show! Now it’s party time w@jimmykimmel #Oscars #AfterParty http://say.ly/lcx5fcs”

Ben Affeck shared a picture at the after party http://instagram.com/p/WJOwwBQ67l/

Even celebrities who weren’t present shared their views. Harry Styles tweeted “Jennifer Lawrence needs to win an Oscar tonight” which was retweeted 86,380 times. Rihanna tweeted “God is real #JHud #Oscars” about Jennifer Hudson. Steve Martin joked “Congrats to George Clooney’s hair, who won the night” and J-Lo told the world “EVERYBODY SHHHH!!! I’m about to sob!! #Barbra #thequeen #myidol #oscars”

Social media also comes with potential consequences. Publicly shared opinions can reach millions, against the wishes of the subject. Retaliating to Harry Styles, one user tweeted “Harry Styles made Jennifer Lawrence famous” and Anne Hathaway mightn’t have been so happy to see the trending #annehathawaysnipples during the awards.

But, for the general public, social media provided a detailed insight into this year’s Oscars and brought the mystery of the celebrity world a few steps closer to home.

To see how social media tracking could benefit you and your organisation, Meltwater will be exhibiting at stand 7 at #SMWF Europe on the 18th -19th March and demoing the newly designed and launched social media tracking tool Meltwater Buzz, so come over and see us for more information.

]]> http://www.socialmedia-forum.com/blog/2013/02/london/oscar-chatter-in-social-media-from-meltwater-infographic/feed/ 0 OscarsInfographic2013 http://www.socialmedia-forum.com/blog/2013/02/london/3229/ http://www.socialmedia-forum.com/blog/2013/02/london/3229/#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:36:55 +0000 Rachelsixdegs http://www.socialmedia-forum.com/blog/?p=3229 #SMWF will be returning to London in less than 4 weeks with an action packed agenda boasting over 50 of the world’s leading social brands, who will be delivering top notch insight and discussion on social marketing trends.

The stellar line-up includes representatives from Coca-Cola, Danone, World Bank, Carlsberg, New Look, BBC, Ford, ASDA, Staples, KLM, Disney, Channel 4, Twitter, Kellogg’s, giffgaff, Honda, American Express and many many more.   Check  out speaker matrix with the full line-up here.

To secure your space at #SMWF Europe please click here. (Be quick! The advance booking discount ends today, 22^nd Feb, at 11pm)

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Over 80% of marketers aren’t sure if social media is working for them. Fortunately, Adobe® Social, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, has the tools, data, insights, and expertise to crack the code of social. We’ll show you what’s working, how it’s working, and what you need to do to get even better results across all your social media investment.

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#SMWF Europe is taking place at the The Brewery, London on the 18th – 19th March, to find out more on how you can be a part of this year’s show please click here.