Breaking down ‘The 3 C’s’

Social media for business

What are The 3C’s?

Start with best practice

If you’ve not read our white paper, Best Practice: Social Media for Business, then it makes a good introduction to this one, so it’s worth taking a few moments to read through the paper, which can be found here.

It covers some of the key principles, on which this paper is then based:

• Converse, don’t shout– social media is not all ‘me, me, me’.

• It’s not all about you; follow the 80/20 rule – only 20% of your social media output should be about your company.

• Decide why you want to use social media, you need a strategy, then…

• Remember why you’re using social media, stick to your strategy.

• Create content and share content, but most of all, create content that people will want to share

Social media is a fantastic place to talk to customers

However, social networks weren’t originally set up to be marketplaces, and it’s important to remember that many users see them as a private space. This applies particularly to Facebook users, whose pages frequently contain far more immediately personal data than a Twitter feed. ‘Liking’ a brand or product on Facebook publishes an update on the user’s feed which can be seen by all their contacts. So getting a user to ‘like’ a brand is tantamount to asking for a public personal recommendation to all of their friends, family and colleagues. In the world of B2B marketing, there’s a potential barrier between potential customers’ personal space and the businesses with which they work. Many would suggest users would be reticent to promote the businesses they work with/for in their private life. With this in mind, you might be asking yourself;

‘How can we connect with people using social media, without upsetting anyone and still make any kind of impact?’

You may even be wondering, with so many toes to tread on and seemingly only a small percentage of users actively engaging with brands on social media, ‘What’s the point?’. As such, many companies elect to simply ignore social media, because ‘If we don’t engage social media, there’s no risk to us’. Increasingly though, the opposite is true.

Omobono, being the visual bunch that we are, produced the graphic at the start of this document outlining how we see the relationship between businesses and their customers and the role we feel social media can play for business brands.

Breaking down The 3 C’s

At Omobono we both practice and preach what we call ‘The 3 C’s’: Content (Curate others or create your own), Conversation (Engaging, not controlling) and Connections (Because we know that relationships drive business).

Content – yours, mine, ours

Content is king.

The first thing to understand when approaching social media as a business is the importance of good content. Whether original or curated from other sources, publishing via social media is not possible without content. A good example of a large corporation creating engaging business content comes from Sage, a market leading software and service provider employing more than 13,400 staff worldwide. The Sage Blog, created centrally by the marketing staff and also by employees at all levels, discusses a variety of business, lifestyle and leisure topics. Recent staff posts include discussion of Leadership and Gender, written by Sage’s Legal Director, The X Factor (in strictly business terms!) by a software employee and the daily life of working mothers by a HR and Payroll employee. All make engaging reading and effectively draw readers in to other more business-focused content on the blog promoting different Sage services and the business knowledge, for which they are famed.

Social media is a two way street

Social media works for business in two ways; firstly allowing a business to ‘listen’ to consumers’ opinions and secondly for companies to voice their own opinions, even affording the same opportunity to individual staff. As such, corporate blogs and social media channels often miss the point and are often just used as an outlet for product, hiring and service announcements, publicity of awards and generally ‘shouting into the ether’ rather than engaging their audience; completely missing the point of what should be a hugely valuable asset.

Blogs are indexed by search engines, meaning that any content you publish can create a new way for somebody to find your company online.

Content drives search

The content you create, particularly on company blogs, is indexed by search engines, meaning that any content you publish creates a new way for somebody to find your company online. Obviously this means there’s a benefit to publishing the aforementioned promotional content, but this is not necessarily the content that returning users and the people you want to work with are interested to read. Instead, a mixture of engaging content, from a number of sources, across a number of topics, is the correct approach. Most experts preach the 80/20 rule with only 20% of content actively promoting the business.

Good content establishes thought leadership

Social media represents an incredible outlet for business, offering companies the opportunity to establish a position of thought-leadership by sharing the considerable expertise that resides within an organisation. A mixture of content discussing the relevance of current affairs to your business, innovations in relevant business fields, staff experiences, opinion pieces and, within reason, almost anything that makes good reading, are all excellent places to start and can often times lead to publicity for your business. Traditional PR has shown that industry leaders commenting on relevant current affairs is a popular news format, so creating timely content on a public blog and sharing via social media and your PR agency can lead to unforeseen benefits. Omobono’s own blogging and social media activity has led to one of our directors appearing on Radio 4’s You & Yours and publicity in The Daily Telegraph.

Good content is key to social media success, whether for use across public social networks or sharing news with contacts and employees through LinkedIn.

Regularity is key

However, content creation is time consuming, making it unsustainable as the only source of social media activity for a business. Additionally, as covered in our previous paper on social media best practice, the 80/20 rule of social media communication comes into play when creating original content. In order to be truly successful, curation comes into play, the practice of sharing relevant third party content to further perpetuate a position of thought leadership and understanding. Regular content is the key to successful social media activity in business. Whether content is original or curated from other relevant channels, it should be as regular as possible, correctly referenced (don’t steal it!) and remain on topic.

More importantly than anything else, deliver what you promise, stay mostly on topic, but don’t forget; we’re all human! The audience on the other end of your social media activity wake up in the morning and go to sleep at the end of the day as people, not executives. Creating content that engages the reader will bring far more success in the long run.

Conversation – not control

Conversation should be the real objective of all social media activity – it is the way a company can engage with customers – but what does it mean, and how do you achieve it?

Conversation is content

As we have seen, content can be industry news, current affairs, public opinion or popular culture – all potential sources. Content can be curated, share the load by utilizing links to content ‘farmed’ from relevant sources as a basis for discussion, engaging followers and saving your company from the need to create fresh content on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis.

Conversation is connection

Passing information to customers, potential customers and business partners through social delivery platforms, or listening to comments and suggestions and accepting criticism from your audience.

It’s important to understand the circular way in which ‘The 3 C’s’ work. Conversation ties directly back to content and connection and each comes directly back to the others, none works well alone. It’s impossible to have a connection with your followers without conversation, just as it’s impossible to have a conversation with your followers without content. Equally, you won’t have many connections without any conversation.

Most importantly, conversation is… conversation

No one can dictate an outside and correct approach to the conversation a business will have on social media, just as no social media strategy can dictate what will come up. However, a robust social media strategy can shape the approach to conversation, which should include dialogue with customers, managing any criticism with acknowledgement and a response; don’t delete! Listening to customers will help to shape product and service development.

Insight into customer behaviour and understanding the person behind the keyboard will allow a business to engage more effectively with a customer.

Whether potential, present, past or angry, conversation with customers can have a strong impact on future sales leads and company perception.

An excellent example of a company using social media to develop conversation as a B2B promotional tool comes from sports statistics company Opta. Opta have built a social media following of more than 100,000 Twitter followers across a plethora of accounts, 60,000+ on the most popular account @optajoe. They have been able to successfully leverage social media conversation into popularity with sports fans leading to firstly trust and then business deals with leading news and media outlets.

Regular conversation with fans providing data and statistics on request has catapulted them into the public eye as the most trusted source for fans to read sports data, causing media outlets to rethink their current providers and fans to question any news source not already utilizing Opta data in their reports. This is particularly interesting, as they have engineered B2B success through a predominately B2C approach to social media, communicating directly with the end customer in front of the middle-man.

Connection

So, you’ve decided you want to engage with Social Media. Now it’s important to think about the person behind the keyboard – your customers and those within your business. As we’ve touched on above, the important thing to remember is that content that engages us as humans is what people find most interesting.

Relationships drive your business

Customers like to deal with real people. Whether through email, call centre support or a sales team, even when ending a relationship with a company, it’s the human connection that makes a difference. Common sense tells us that customers choosing to interact with a business on the web are therefore going to appreciate similar human interaction online. This is applicable for a business in two ways, firstly a potential customer researching a business will appreciate a business communicating with personality. Secondly, when creating a personal relationship with a potential customer online, personality shines through.

Connections can be with people

Be open about who you are and let the people managing your accounts have a name and a face. Let customers have access to real people, and encourage social media managers to refer customers on to real people within the organization through social media. A good example of this comes from Microsoft.

Microsoft’s @microsofthelps twitter feed is managed by a team of customer services managers, each named on the page . Each of the team has a unique ID, which they use to sign off every tweet. A potential customer looking at the feed will not only see a company that’s engaging in social media for good, by providing a free support service, they’ll also see a company with thousands of employees engaging publicly with customers on a one-to-one basis. It takes some commitment but it is valuable promotion and will be looked upon very favourably by any customer engaged in the social media world, even one choosing not to actively follow your brand.

Connection means going beyond the obvious social networks

Connection, in business, can mean more than simply engaging ‘the big four’ networks. Bespoke solutions for businesses can include discussion forums and even customer-focused social networks as have recently been implemented by HSBC and American Express. HSBC’s community allows businesses to share knowledge, engage with each other and share problems with a like-minded audience. Amex’s ‘Open Forum’, which follows a similar principle, has enabled the company to position itself as thought leaders through the ‘resource’ element of the site.

Connections give you reach

Whilst ‘only’ 40% of US users actively follow a brand or company on Facebook, that 40% amounts to 45 million people in the USA alone.

40% of US users actively follow a brand or company on Facebook , some 45 million people in the US alone. The average Facebook user also has 130 friends , each of whom will see the ‘story’ published when a user begins following a brand. The number of potential customers a business can reach through social media is mind boggling and increasing by the day. Even the number of new accounts Facebook rejects is astounding, recently reported as more than 20,000 every day.

The aforementioned approach of building a bespoke community also comes back into the numbers argument; quality vs quantity. The impact of creating a collaborative business forum, perpetuated by one brand, which would serve to attract a far smaller but highly relevant audience, can be huge.

Cheap at the price?

In spite of the potential power of social media it can be a very low cost channel and, if for nothing else, can be used to gain enormous insight into your customer base. Simply monitoring on-going opinion of your brand, public reception of news, announcements and relevant industry innovations through social media can provide invaluable data and insight. Likewise, connecting with customers via social media costs only the resources you choose to dedicate to it. Expensive monitoring and CRM tools are an excellent way of managing activity surround large business accounts but are not necessary for a company just starting out, a combination of free tools can provide a very useful basis for social media activity.

Internal connections matter

It’s also important not to lose sight of the impact a campaign or message can have ‘inside the walls’ of a social network, i.e. outside of your tracking capabilities. Numerous different levels of privacy settings on Twitter and Facebook mean that it’s impossible to track where and how far your content and company name may be travelling outside of your immediate vision. There’s huge potential for recommendations, good customer service, company messages and news to spread without further input. The old customer service adage that ‘A customer will tell one person about a good customer service experience, but they will tell four if they experience a bad one.’ springs to mind here, except in 2011 bad customer service can instantly be shared with an entire network of contacts. You never know who might be talking privately about your business, so treat your customers well, both on and offline.

Content, Conversation, Connection

The simple activity of engaging in social media is potential promotion already. The more you put into it, the more you’ll get back.

While not all web users may elect to directly ‘follow’ or ‘like’ a brand, simply seeing a company’s page(s) and approach to social media may be a deciding factor in their decision to buy from or trust a business. The implied popularity of a brand amongst customers, i.e. the number of ‘likes’ or followers a particular brand has can be powerful. Numbers show a potential customer that they’re not alone and that customers value and respect a business or product.

It is easy to get too caught up in the numbers game though, and to forget that it’s quality, not quantity that’s important in the long run.

The underlying message of this white paper is that social media is not a forum for promotion. But that’s not quite true; it is. The simple activity of engaging in social media offers the potential for promotion and, like all things, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get back out. More accurately, the message is that the correct approach to social media for business is not to generate marketing messages day in, day out, but instead to engage customers, potential customers, complaints, partners, media, staff and the rest of the world-wide-web on a daily basis.

To put it simply, the 3 C’s can be whatever you want them to be, just please make sure it isn’t a press release. If you think we’ve hit the nail on the head, let us know, likewise, if you think we’ve lost the plot, you know where to find us…