Inferno

This week I headed down to the rather stately Like Minds Club for an event as part of Social Media Week. The aim of the session to “discuss the changes that are happening in how brands communicate with their audiences and communities”.

The panel was diverse in age, geography and background, with ‘Social’ the thread linking them together.

Chris Moss of Famoss who has spent the last 25 years working on brands like Virgin Airways, Orange and now 118 118. Alastair Duncan of Spark 44, a global brand business. Jonathan Bean of MyNewsDesk, providing brands the opportunity to become content publishers. Steve Cobelli of Jaguar/Land Rover. Tom Messett, Head of Social at Nokia.

Each of the guys had differing opinions on the state of brand communications today. “Communications have been around for a long time in a different form, technology is enabling us more each day.” Al added “My child who is 5 is already a brand in her character. Individuals are brands in their own right.” Nothing new in that insight. However it is important to note the new power possessed by socially enabled and liberated customers of brands though. Today “it’s more about customer service and how to get your ‘people’ social. Your people are your brand. Treat your employees like customers and treat your customers like employees.”

I almost whooped in agreement as they talked about entrusting our employees with social. Embrace their ambition to get involved, but at the same time make sure they know that it’s easy to damage business. Educate them in the first instance, then inspire them – it’s good to have people who are interested in all departments.”

Interestingly people in the board room “generally don’t get it”. Chris said he knows of someone in a huge company who feels “the modern, open world is just a fad”, it’s not. There are other dangers out there too. Recently Sky News decided to deny their employees the right to Retweet non-Sky sources. Really? Now that’s no fun…is it? The extent of the silly decision comes to light when Rupert Murdoch himself has the nerve to ignore these so-called ‘guidelines’. And I agree, brands like Sky who are asserting control over their employees could create unnecessary bad feeling. Who wants to walk into a sweet shop and be force-fed only the nutty ones? I’m allergic Goddamnit!

On another point (Tom agreed) “there’s nothing worse than a tweet or a piece of communication that feels staged, we have to be confident enough in our brands to empower them and trust them.” So called brand police can get in the way and try to control tone etc. Again if we believe in the personality and attitudes of the company we work for, the rest will follow.

Chris believed that the era of ‘social networking’ (for brands) has moved on and actually the term ‘social connecting’ is more relevant. This is the hardest thing to do. There was an instance a few years back during his time working with Virgin Airways. They decided to put a 24 page questionnaire on their flights to gather feedback from customers. After receiving 20 replies on week one and 55 on week two, they were quickly receiving up to 2500 per week. Each one needing a hand-written response. At the time it was a lot of work but it made the customers feel exceptionally valued. Today we have much quicker avenues to our customer base but the principles remain the same.

Although the session went on a little long and points seemed to resurface on a couple of occasions, there were some really inspirational nuggets. The main points to note were:

A brand is the sum of its conversations.

We (brands) can turn passion and advocacy of customers into influence.

Start internally with your Social Media strategy, once employees are engaged they will naturally push your business on to customers.

Social Networking is better described as Social Connecting. What was once monologue (brand >>> customer) is now dialogue (brand <-> customer)

More posts to follow from the inspirational Social Media Week later in the week.