Pearls of wisdom

The impact and potential of social media on business is big news at the moment and something that most organisations are either embracing or developing policy on. However, the business case can appear slightly woolly if taken at face value. Scratch beneath the surface of social media potential and you will essentially find a host of business benefits, not too dissimilar from any marketing-based activity centred on communications with the marketplace and with existing customers.

The main advantage of social media over those other mechanisms is two-fold. Firstly, the costs are significantly lower when compared to other direct and targeted programmes and secondly, social media provides an instant two-way communication, allowing direct interaction with the marketplace. However, there are many benefits to the activity (set out below), followed by a short explanation of each.

 
The benefits of a robust social media strategy to business are:-
• Increase customer base
• Generate new leads
• Grow future business opportunity
• Drive sales
• Build awareness
• Create channels of direct customer communication
• Support PR & other tactical programmes
• Establish & promote thought leadership
• Educate customers
• Customer-source part of your product development
• Reach new channels and sectors of customers
• Improve internal communication

Increase customer base
Every business looks to increase its customer base. In order to do this, potential customers have to be able to find you and you have to engage them once this happens. By tapping into existing and future online networks with a positive message and proposition, the range and amounts of potential customers that will then have visibility of your brand proposition increases. You will find more of them and more potential customers will be exposed to your presence.

A social media strategy plans and then delivers the opportunity to interact with these groups in an engaging way that promotes interaction and leads to key buying opportunities, as and when the time is right for the potential customer. You customer base can then start to grow and continue growing into the future, providing your business keeps quality and delivery on or above expectation.

Generate new leads
By having a presence within the social media channels, you can create a sustainable and credible position when potential new customers enter your marketplace. This happens because the new potential customer has come to a conclusion that they need your type of product or service and the first place they look is their trusted network, which is increasingly social media based, as apposed to Google-searched. If they then find your message exists within their online community, they are likely to trust your product or services above others that are not.

Grow future business opportunity
Social media activity hangs around. Content is referenced, searchable and accessible in a myriad of ways. Social media outlets such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook, are so highly optimised with search-engines and other reference sites, that the amount of ‘Google-juice’ created by social media content essentially references with these link-providers within seconds of being published.

Therefore, anything you put into the ‘pot’ can be found in the future by potential new customers engaging social media channels to find a solution to their desire to purchase your type of product or service. If you are there they can find you. If you are not, they can’t.

Drive sales
This benefit converts potential customers into customers and expands engagement with your existing customers, so you can sell them more. For new business opportunities, it’s about being proactive. You need to foster the right sorts of followers, engage in a joined-up strategy across social media forums and provide a consistent coverage that can help to drive sales to you.

If you include your customers in this network and engage them within that forum, you are in the perfect position to communicate directly to them what else you can provide. What’s more, this is a soft sell in a trusted environment to a captive audience. Once you have the ear of a customer, they are more likely to listen.

Build awareness
The single most important thing that any marketing activity or programme can do to promote business is to build awareness. Social media can have an instant and measurable affect on this and provides the forum to target the brand building into the heart of your marketplace, in a defined and cost-effective way. Used in conjunction with other activities, businesses can build a following and build a piece of the pie.

Create channels of direct customer communication
Stay in touch with your customers using social media channels to keep them up-to-date with product and service offerings while receiving direct feedback on their user experience and how your service might be improved. You can also get the inside track on how your brand and proposition is received and how your organisation is perceived within the wider market using similar social media channels. So much can be gleaned from this type of data by being proactive and maintaining a positive contact sphere.

Support PR
The role of social media as part of a PR campaign roll-out is essentially to keep the story alive. Through these techniques it is possible to reach a targeted and defined number of people, ensuring that social media channels are made fully aware that the coverage has appeared.

Informing potential customers, existing customers, suppliers and target industries that your story has appeared in the trade press, a newspaper or on TV/radio and referencing the story as part of a wider, pro-active social media and PR campaign, can turn PR coverage into tangible lead generation, and ultimately, to new business. Online references to the story and targeted re-telling of the story can carry a longevity that the original coverage seldom does.

Establish & promote thought leadership
In order to be a great, modern business leader, organisations need to share ideas, promote innovation and establish an open, transparent and proactive approach to future business development. Social media by its very nature is a great fit for this type of application and can be used to engage and inspire the marketplace, while underpinning stature and leadership. Combined with the brand building and penetration of key messages, social media can help to construct bigger reputations and deliver growth.

Educate customers
Most businesses are multi-layered in their offering. Some choose a lead service, product or proposition, cross-selling into other areas once a customer is established; while others use a variety of messages within different sectors to escalate a range of services in a more targeted way.  Social media can support both strategies with tactical communications that engage customers and inform them of other ways in which you can help them to achieve their goals. It can also be used to educate the marketplace on wider issues affecting the sectors in which you trade and help to support your core messages, keeping you central in the minds of your customers.

Customer-source part of your product development
As a direct result of engagement with your customers and the education of the wider market, social media channels can help to drive the future direction of your business and provide a ready-made focus group, test bed and sounding board that can help to steer product development. Opening this type of communication can help to uncover opportunity, develop supportive programmes and identify the boundaries of your current proposition, giving you a route for future investigative work.

Reach new channels and sectors of customers
As an alternative to expensive market research programmes and even more expensive product or service launches into new sectors or areas, social media can provide the opportunity to test the water and see how your proposition is received in a market or sector that you haven’t serviced before. As social media channels are easily accessible and can provide cost-effective results, using them to ‘marketeer’ can create data upon which decisions can be made. If a market isn’t right, it’s a cheap way of finding out. If it is right, you have made an instant start in building a reputation within that market.

Improve internal communication
No matter what the size of your organisation, social media can help to improve the way that you communicate to your staff and colleagues internally and can provide an empowered platform for your people to communicate is a positive way about your business to their networks and followers. By setting open policies and guidelines to encourage responsible social media usage within your organisation, you will help to keep morale high, help to encourage feedback and promote the investment of energy and trust in your brand message from the very people, your staff and colleagues, who need to believe the most.

Over the years, we have been involved in many website builds, e-communication campaigns and many more website pitches. In fact, before I was a Company WiseGuy and just a lowly technology journalist, I contributed to the very first Internet Magazine (called Internet & Comms Today, Published by Paragon Publishing circa 1994), back when the Internet was just beginning to become more commercial and text-only user-groups and BBS boards made up the majority of the online community and email was only just becoming used outside of technology and the media as means of communications.

Since then we’ve progressed a great deal; businesses embracing the brave new online world, html websites, content management systems, e-commerce websites, through the DOTCOM boom and beyond the bubble, to arrive in the very exciting world of social media and online social networking.

During this time and in what is now over 16 years that I have been utilising the Internet, seeing it grow from new media to THE media, it strikes me as bizarre that a large amount of people in business who want to utilise its power, still don’t understand some basic principles of the technology and the elements and efforts that go into creating good web content.

I can break the most common misconceptions that I come across with clients and new business opportunities down into 5 categories…

1) Basic Technical
Not knowing the difference between a domain name and web hosting or a website build and a hosting fee. Favourites in this category also include the difference between an email and an e-newsletter campaign that needs to be compliant with data protection rules and of course the most niggling one, which usually goes along the lines of “Our website and email are not working!” and 99 times out of 100, ‘no’ websites are working as the clients local Internet service provider is having a fault… so the difference between us and BT is always a cause for confusion.

2) I need to rank high in Google
Perhaps you do, but actually, what if you’re a local business who only operates in a 10 mile radius? Why do you want to spend all that money on Search Engine Optimisation? Another misconception is that ranking higher in Google will lead to more business… Not necessarily… It will lead to a lot more enquiries for sure; and if you’re selling a product or service it will attract a lot more people who are buying on price, but a high ranking site in Google in not the only way to grow your business online. If your business is dependant on website traffic and e-commerce sales, then yes, SEO needs to be central to your online strategy, but don’t just assume that it’s the answer to every type of business growth for every type of business – horses for courses…

3) A Content Management System is essential – We must be in control!
The wisest and most serious companies do request a CMS as part of their website build, so that they can update it on a regular basis moving forward, to engage with their marketplace, customers and potential customers in a much more effective way.

However, building a CMS-driven website and providing all of the training and updating tools to the client is a bit of a waste of time, money and effort, if no-one ever updates it!

It’s like buying a Ferrari just to sit in and never go anywhere. Updating is the most important part of a website strategy once it’s gone live; otherwise, your tuned engine will soon loose power and might not perform that well in the future if you do decide to turn it on and stoke it up.

We build 90% of our websites with CMS systems, but usually end up being the one’s that then update the website with new material, fresh content and engaging words & images that then drive the website forward.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about doing this for clients, all I’m saying is that, if you want a chauffeur you might buy a slightly different car to the one that you want to drive yourself.

4) Just build us a website – we’ll take care of the social media stuff
OK, a new and more common aspect of effective online marketing in social media. If you think that creating engaging blog articles, interesting forum or group threads and effective Twitter campaigns that inform and interact rather than annoy and bewilder is an easy thing to do, go ahead.

My word of warning is that the effort required to truly make social media work is not insubstantial and your time is usually much better employed running your business and delivering on your promises, rather than cultivating future business through followers, groups, forums and discussions.

We have specialists who spend all day just providing that service for clients and we are adding to our team all of the time, so take it from me; if it’s an important part of your marketing strategy, get expert help with your social media. That way, you will actually grow as the technology does and be best place to capitalise on the future opportunity.

5) Like for like quote?
This one constantly amazes me. As I said that the beginning of this article, we have been involved in many a website pitch and are often competing against other website suppliers, which is a normal and expectable situation to be in.

However, MOST specialist website designers and web agencies deliver technically great websites, sometimes arresting design and sometimes innovative functionality, but hardly any of them take time to understand your business and engage expert copywriters to form clear and concise content for your website or go to the trouble of arranging original photography for the imagery, that you then own and can be used to enhance the online brand and experience. No, usually they will ask the client for the words and suggest stock photography for the images.

When Cre8ive Wisdom quotes for a website build, it includes marketing-rich copy, written to engage visitors, not robots and fresh, original imagery and design that will set your website apart from the others in your marketplace.

So, when you get a website quotation next, make sure you understand who is providing the most important elements (text and images) before your engage an agency to develop your online presence, while you try to work out how best to communicate to your marketplace with well written words and brand-building visuals.

Over the past few months Cre8ive Wisdom has worked in partnership with our signage and large format print partner to developed a cost-effective graphic-wall system that saves money on your exhibition costs (no need for a shell scheme) but is also reusable and green!

We were first asked to look into the possibility of developing such a system by a client who was exhibiting at the Birmingham NEC, where their large 5 meter by 11.5 meter stand (costing over £12K in space rental alone for a 4 day event) also needed to have a wooden shell scheme constructed, essentially, giving the stand 3 walls. However, the quotation for this shell scheme, which most exhibitors simply accept as a cost, meant another £12K spend, doubling the exhibition budget in one fell swoop!

Add to that the fact that they would still have to spend money with us to design the stand and pay for the graphics printing and the costs started to mount up!

However, thinking outside of the box (or in this case, outside of the walls) we said… perhaps, you don’t need a shell scheme? Perhaps we can make the graphics themselves into the walls of the stand?

After a bit of research and development, testing and prodding; we established a system of linking pull-up banners in a seamless sequence, to create mobile, lightweight graphic walls, which could be used to form a stand and additionally be re-used in future exhibitions, hence lowering the costs of future events, saving on materials and no need for the wooden shell scheme… an altogether greener solution!

We then hit a brick wall known as health & safety. This sort of solution might not conform to EU exhibition health & safety rules, so, we had to negotiate, test, conceptualise and refine, in order to get the necessary approvals for this sort of graphic wall system. However, we pushed on, received the approvals (UK, Europe & Worldwide) and pushed on to the final stumbling block… cost.

Well, if we said that we delivered our graphic wall system for the same price as the shell scheme stand, you’d be impressed, because the system is reusable and, even if you did want to change the odd graphic here and their, completely modular and cost effective. The saving on future events makes it a no brainer!

However, if we said that we delivered our graphic wall system, installed it onsite and trained a client team on assembly so that they could do it themselves in the future AND saved them 20% off the cost of a shell scheme PLUS saved them the additional costs of printed graphics to adorn the shell scheme walls, you would think… well, we’ll use Cre8ive Wisdom in the future, as we’ll not only save money, but also create a bigger ROI and a bigger visual impact.

If you thought that, you’d be right!

Call us on 01202 585508 to discuss your next exhibition and also how we might be able to help you with our special graphic wall system, as well as pre, during and post event PR, social media support, branding support and strategic marketing expertise!

PS – We have tried and tested the system in the UK and in a show in Germany already this year. We have 3 more exhibitions in the UK and one in Las Vegas to deliver later this year and on each occasion; we are saving our clients money! Call us to find out how.

PPS - Our original client has re-used the graphic walls in their showroom and has also used a small selection of panels for a smaller exhibition recently. They plan to re-use the system again in September and are thrilled at the money they are saving from their annual exhibition budget.

A lot has been said recently about the powerful and brave new world of social media and its application for businesses. At Cre8ive Wisdom, we have utilised social media techniques (Facebook pages, Twitter campaigns, Linked-in engagement, Blogging, original content on ‘non-client’ websites etc) as a support to our publicity clients, with great results.The role of social media as part of a PR campaign roll-out is essentially to keep the story alive. Through these techniques we can ensure that a greater number of people are made aware that the coverage has appeared, than the number that actually saw the coverage first-hand.For instance, we recently arranged a story for a client that appeared in The Telegraph newspaper.Obviously, the client was happy, and the coverage certainly had a short-term kudos value to it. However, it was only through the support elements of telling their potential customers, existing customers, suppliers and target industries that the story had appeared in the newspaper and referencing the story as part of a wider, pro-active social media and PR campaign, that the ‘coverage’ actually turned into tangible lead generation, and ultimately, to new business.

The coverage in the newspaper was an ‘ingredient’ in the campaign, but not the most important element of it. Social media not only allowed more people to be made aware of the coverage, (and the kudos), but also gave us the tools to get that message directly out to a much more closely defined targeted audience, than the ABC1 socio-economic mix that makes up average Telegraph readership.

Social media campaigns also create many measurable elements that the original coverage does not. In-bound direct website links from various sources, web pages, RSS feeds and enhanced searches create more traffic and SEO value. These links then stick around for a lot longer than the day or two that the newspaper might be read for; giving the campaign effort longevity online.

Social media also creates awareness that the original printed PR coverage can only provide to the people who buy and read it. This is because of the targeted nature of ‘followers & groups’. Providing they have been ‘cultivated’ properly in the first instance, the legacy of the campaign is to create future business, through brand recognition and core messaging.

Social media is also an aspect of PR; if the PR in question is public relations, rather than Press Relations (or proportional representation – but that’s a different thing all together!). Both businesses and consumers can be targeted directly with key PR messages, providing brand-building touch points and awareness, scoring interest and opportunity as the campaign progresses.

Social media also gives us the ability to engage an online social ‘network’, as it’s a two-way street (customers can talk to you!) and also allows potential customers to communicate to others in an open forum about your brand and/or offering. If these views are monitored, supported and challenged when necessary, additional value can be gained from the interaction.

Each piece of future coverage, then adds to the bigger picture, essentially gaining additional publicity about the fact that publicity has recently occurred! This then paves the way for a host of other direct online communications techniques which, eventually means that a World of direct contact and influence is but a click away and that the ‘printed media’ coverage that started the entire ball rolling, becomes redundant media; while new media becomes mainstream.

We are still at the beginning of this explosion of social media potential, which means that businesses who are not already exploiting this cost-effective route to market can still jump on-board. However, in this new mainstream media, things move very fast and with millions of new voices joining the Tweet arenas and online opinion forums every week, the window of opportunity to shout louder with your brand might well be creaking shut at some point in the not too distant future.

Here at Cre8ive Wisdom, we like to mix with the stars when we get the opportunity to!

Last month, Steph and Wendy interviewed celebrity chef Gary Rhodes at his popular restaurant Rhodes South, located in the grounds of the Harbour Hotel in Christchurch. Wendy’s photos looked great and will be published in the next edition Lloyds Living the Dream magazine along with Steph’s article.

In addition to this, the Cre8ive Wisdom team have also had several other celeb sightings recently! Steph met Barry McGuigan at Alexandra Palace when she went to see Audley Harrison vs. Michael Spott last month. Although she wasn’t able to get a photo, she did manage get his autograph!

Neil and Wendy went to see Derren Brown’s Enigma tour last weekend at the BIC and were able to meet Derren afterwards. Wendy got her photo taken with the British psychological illusionist, along with his autograph.Steph is off to see Derren this weekend, so we’ll see how she gets on too!

Here’s a round-up of news from some of our clients…
Leggett & Platt
Leggett & Platt (www.lpadjustables.eu) is the World’s largest manufacturer of adjustable beds. Their beds are designed with ultimate comfort, functionality and style in mind. All of which have all been extensively tested, to ensure the strongest and most durable product experience possible. Their range includes the Prodigy™, S-Cape™ and the Pro-Motion™.

Prodigy™ by Leggett & Platt is redefining the modern bedroom and the role that adjustable beds can play in enhancing the lifestyle of its users. Prodigy™ delivers the ultimate sleep system into the bedroom, utilising the latest technology and enhanced features to put the user in complete control. To read more about Leggett & Platt and the Prodigy™ adjustable bedvisit the following link… http://www.lpadjustables.eu/press/33

Conquip Industrial
Conquip Industrial (www.conquipindustrial.com) has recently returned after their successful attendance at Bauma 2010, the world’s largest trade fair for the building industry.

The show proved to be extremely successful, attracting thousands of visitors in its first few days. Additionally, Conquip has identified ‘new business’ and ‘expanded relationship’ opportunities a Bauma 2010 and is currently following up a host of partnering opportunities with organisations across Europe. These partners will be announced over the coming months… So watch this space!

To read more about Conquip’s attendance at Bauma, CLICK HERE

Home Gym UK
Home Gym UK supply high quality indoor exercise equipment across the UK, for hire and sale. Products include vibration trainers, treadmills and walkers, cross trainers and rowing machines! Please visit the HomeGymUK website to perfect solution to your exercise needs.

Southern comfort travel
Southern Comfort Travel (www.southerncomforttravel.co.uk) is an executive chauffeur driven service for corporate, business and private clients. Their versatile Mercedes Viano fleet provides the ultimate in comfortable and luxurious road travel, with the latest in-car and mobile office technology available for your travel convenience.  Our aim is to enable your travel experience to be more productive and pleasurable, whether travelling between meetings or to and from the airport. For more information CLICK HERE

Veterus Consulting
Veterus Consulting (www.veterusconsulting.com) provides specialist business continuity and resilience consultancy services to large public and private sector companies - helping them safeguard their brand and reputation by continuing to deliver their agreed products and services to customers regardless of disruptions and gain more repeat business and referrals that grows revenues and reduces the costs of new customer acquisition.

Their operational and strategic programme and risk management services help clients implement strategic change initiatives whilst reducing the uncertainties that accompany market-leading innovation and growth. Veterus Consulting now have their own Facebook Group. To learn more or join the group visit the Veterus Facebook Page

Bond Williams
Bond Williams (www.bondwilliams.co.uk), a Bournemouth-based professional recruitment specialist is now a new client of Cre8ive Wisdom! Cre8ive Wisdom will be supporting Bond Williams with specialist strategic marketing services, brand expansion, publicity, social media campaigns and direct communications support. To learn more or join the group visit the Bond Williams Facebook Page