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Can online social networking replace traditional networking?

Posted: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:55:55 +0000

I was at a Dublin chamber networking meeting the other day and Sean Weafer (creates high trust advisors, leaders and teams) gave a talk on business networking. He said that business networking offline is going to become increasingly important because most countries will eventually ban cold calling. So it’s going to be more important than ever before to attend business networking events.

Even though I do a lot of consultancy around online social networking I still believe that turning up in person at networking events is extremely important. I probably network at these events much more than the average business. The perfect solution to networking is a combination of online and offline networking. You can’t just network online and expect to meet the perfect business partner, customer or employee and similarly you can’t just network offline due to the changing nature of how people like to communicate and the potential of reaching people you’ll never get to see in person.

Some of Sean’s excellent tips are listed below:

1. Wear your name badge on your right lapel to make it easier for people to see.

2. If you want to join a conversation of a group look for an open group where they have not closed off in a circle. This means they haven’t really formed as a group so if you ask them if they mind if you join they will say yes.

3. If there is a closed group that have formed in a circle wait until the group splits up, new members not welcome.

4. If you are talking with a person who is a clinger on(!) ask them if they want to go for a coffee. At this stage you may split up, if you don’t and they walk with you for a coffee find an open group on the way and ask ‘do you mind if we join you’ !

So work out a strategy for online and offline networking and work out how they will work along side each other. Linking up with someone online is never going to have the same effect of meeting somebody in person.

Is your networking strategy effective? What tips do you have that you want to share?
Social Media in the Enterprise – March 2010

Posted: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:43:33 +0000

I’m a guest blogger for the 2 day event on social media for the enterprise in the Olympia in London commencing on the 15th of March. It’s a great event with a fantastic line up and well worth a visit. If you’re an enterprise and want to understand how social media will effect how you do business then make sure to book your ticket.

The event covers social media strategies for the enterprise, CRM, enterprise bookmarking, Wikis, enterprise social software, knowledge management and internal community building.

There’s a lot of talk about social media marketing but social media and social business is so much more. There are many case studies that demonstrates how effective social networking and collaboration tools can be in the enterprise and for your customers. For example, Charles Schwab recently implemented a trial social networking platform amongst 10,000 of their traders and seen that by setting up this community and encouraging engagement the average number of trades went from 200 to over 350 with a resulting revenue increase of several million. They are now going to roll this out to all their customers.

The Bank of America implemented a social network platform to support their business customers and there was so much interaction their Google ranking went up significantly for terms they normally paid for with Google adwords. They were able to switch off Google Adwords for these keywords and saved several million dollars per year.

Registration and networking starts at 8 AM on March the 15th. If you’re heading along make sure to say hello, if you can’t make it I’ll be blogging throughout the event.
Will Television embrace the social world we live in?

Posted: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:34:15 +0000

Broadcasting advertisements on TV to potential consumers does not have the same impact as it used to. People now are smarter, don’t want the obtrusion of the advertisements and now also have the technology just to skip over them. So what are the TV stations going to do if advertisement revenue is going to continue to decline over the next few years?

A recent article in the Guardian in the UK shows that in the UK there is already more money spent online advertising as opposed to TV.

Another article talked about extending advertisements into TV programs, also known as product placement. As you can see from the article this didn’t go down very well! This movement to online advertising is going to continue to happen so TV stations need to wake up and decide if they want to be part of this social connected online world and embrace the changes required. The innovative, fast moving companies will survive in this world but there will also certainly be casualties.

In my own case the majority of time I now watch recorded material and with my sky+ box I skip over all the advertisements. This is typical of how many people are starting to watch TV. Even when I’m watching a live show I pause it for 10 or 15 minutes and then watch it so I can skip over the advertisements. How are TV stations going to survive without having advertisements? You seen in my previous post about Pepsi giving up on superbowl ads after spending 23 years advertising on TV during the superbowl. For TV stations it’s time to wake up and face the reality, pure advertisement revenue as we know it will not be a big growth area for them.

I was reading a very interesting article sent to me by a business partner in Australia and it was about TV shows going social. In the article it talked about TV shows having to become more multidimensional. It’s no longer enough just to have a TV show and in the future shows will have a whole package that connects people together. An example is given about American Idol. With this show you have people online communicating and sharing information, there are record sales as a result, merchandise, concert tickets and much more. It’s not just about the TV show, it doesn’t stop at the TV show that’s just the starting point. People are interacting on youtube, facebook, twitter and many more social networks.

In the article Elizabeth Murdoch (daughter of Rubert Murdoch and Chief Executive of the Shine Group) talks about one of their shows called “biggest loser” is more about Wii exercise games, diet plans, fitness equipment, and a host of other things.

Typically advertising space is sold through Advertising/Media buying agencies. These agencies have been very slow to adopt the new socially connected world and I think it’s unlikely that most of them will ever ‘get it’. As Jason Falls (Great blogger on social media) points out in one of his articles advertising agencies really struggled with web 1.0 so how are they going to cope with web 2.0. Well unfortunately for a lot of them they won’t cope with it.

In a time where time spent on the internet is now passing out time spent on TV it’s time for TV companies to look at their revenue models and change them drastically. The fittest will survive…

What are your thoughts on this?
Pepsi says goodbye to the superbowl in favour of social media

Posted: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:23:03 +0000

The superbowl is the championship game in the national football league in the US, the premier American football league. Exclusive television broadcast rights rotate amongst 3 of the 4 major American television networks and because of its high viewership advertising time is the most expensive of the year. This year is only the second year in history that advertising prices have dropped at the superbowl. 30 second commercials are selling at a bargain price of $2.5 million dollars, that’s a drop of $500,000.

During the super bowl in the US you can get over 90,000,000 viewers on TV and Pepsi have been one of the big advertisers over the last few years, however, this year they’ve decided not to advertise.

So why would Pepsi decide not to advertise after advertising for more than 20 years in a row? social media is the answer. They have decided to put the $20 million dollar budget into social media cause marketing.

Their social media campaign is called Pepsi refresh. This site will allow people to vote for worthwhile local community projects and pepsi will pay towards them. Their grants range from $5,000 to $250,000.

The benefits of social media cause marketing are numerous including increased brand awareness, sales, customer loyalty, increased employee morale and much more.

Advertising revenue on TV will consistently go down over the next years and so will Newspaper advertising revenue. The whole advertising industry is going through significant change both online and offline and it’s going to be interesting to see how it pans out.

Do you think that Pepsi will benefit more with their social media campaign instead of an advertising campaign?
Ideas Campaign – Harnessing the power of the crowd

Posted: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:51:47 +0000

A good friend of mine, Neil o’Toole, sent me on an article in the Guardian which talks about a 1 million pound competition created by the Tories party for a company to come up with a product that will be used to collect ideas from the Public to solve “common problems”. This is great to see and we’ll see more of this in 2010. Too many people think that social media is all about social media marketing. Social media marketing is great for some companies for promoting your products and services but don’t forget about other elements of social media that are equally or more important.

In the example above the Tory party realise that if they just sit in an office coming up with ideas to improve how the economy is run they are not getting the benefit of input of millions of smart people that may have better ideas. So what they are setting up is a social network which will gather these ideas and they will implement the best of them.

On a smaller scale other businesses have followed this approach and have also been very successful. For example, Dell set up ideastorm where they are ask their customers to come up with ideas regarding how to improve their products. What is the impact of this? First of all they get better ideas, secondly they deliver what customers want and thirdly they reduce costs because they no longer need as big a product marketing team as before. So far they have generated over 12,000 ideas and implemented over 400 of them.

Or what about Starbucks who have an equivalent site for collecting ideas . How would you like your customers to tell you what they want? By the way, Starbucks also use social media marketing very well, for example on Facebook they have over 5,000,000 followers and most discussions are about starbucks coffee.

So I wish the Tories the best of luck and congratulate them on trying to harness the benefits of collaboration and using the wisdom of the crowd to improve how things are run in the UK. I hope that many countries and companies will follow suit as we go in to 2010. Happy new year by the way!!!