This week I spoke at a conference about social media for the construction industry.
It was one of those gigs where you are given a topic to cover and you have to adhere to that brief.
My presentation was about Facebook and my remit was to examine the ways that Facebook could be used in the construction industry to drive brand recognition and revenue.
Basically, I had to talk about how the construction industry could use Facebook for 40 minutes.
My first thought was “Yikes! What am I going to say here?” (I know next to nothing about the construction industry).
As I started to research the topic and look for examples of how the construction industry is already using Facebook, my heart sank even lower; case studies of Facebook groups and pages in this industry are few and far between.
So, I took a step back and began to think about why the construction industry might want to consider Facebook as a marketing channel.
Quite frankly, the stats speak for themselves. Facebook has 19M active users in the UK and 44% of these are over 30 years of age.
That’s a massive amount of people and the demographic is hugely inclusive.
Even for a niche industry the potential audience is still bigger than you might find any other single network.
That convinced me that Facebook was certainly worth considering as a marketing channel for the construction industry but I still wasn’t convinced about Facebook’s value as a B2B comms. channel.
Again, I went back to basics and started to think about what Facebook offered.
The bottom line is that it lets businesses simply and easily create a presence which they can use to engage with an audience and create a dialogue with them (for free).
Also, Facebook forces people to be authentic – unlike other social spaces, when you create a profile in Facebook you use your real name. And when you create a business presence in Facebook, you use your personal profile to do this.
This actively supports B2B communication, which is about one-to-one relationships– Facebook offers businesses the opportunity to create connections with real people AS real people.
So far so good, but the next question was how could the construction industry engage with their audiences?
Like I said, I’m no expert on the construction industry (they build stuff, right?) but once I started to think about the kinds of reasons why someone might want to connect with a business, I realised that these apply to all industries.
Bingo, I had my presentation – and my core message.
Which is (in less than 140 characters, as is the current twend):
Facebook has lots of users and offers tools to help you reach them. Work out who you want to reach and what they want. Give it to them.
My summary slide here shows the variety of ways in which you can engage and give value to people on Facebook but why not check out my full presentation to see how you can put this in to practice?
At the end of my presentation (which, I am relieved to say, was well received), some of the companies I spoke to still had concerns about using Facebook in this way – it just isn’t seen as a viable tool for B2B marketing.
That’s OK. It’s not my job to sell Facebook to you.
What is important is that you are aware of its potential for business and its place in your social media toolkit so you can make an informed decision. And I really believe that this applies whatever business you are in!
Danielle Sheerin wrote this on 05.02.10 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Business, Events & conferences, Marketing, Social media, Social networks box
I’ve been trying to make my thoughts about how this social web revolution is affecting the very largest organisations a bit clearer.
I started with this optimistic pitch of a blog post about how the changes are irresistable.
Building on that, to try and make my feelings clearer still, I’ve tried to visualise and more succinctly express this sense in a presentation.
Here it is!
Please let me know what you think – I think this really matters…
Will McInnes wrote this on 03.02.10 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Enterprise 2.0 box
Last week saw the very first Social Impact Camp, which I was lucky enough to get myself along to.
It brought together people from all sorts of groups, from not-for-profit organisations like the Parent Pupil Partnership, regional government agency Social Enterprise London and social business consultants like Rob Greenland
Why? To begin to collaboratively work out how to better demonstrate and measure social impact – something wikipedia describes as: “In business and government policy, social impact refers to how the organisation’s actions affect the surrounding community”.
Started by Ben Matthews, founder of the amazing volunteer-led communications agency Bright One, it’s been inspired by Measurement Camp – the monthly meetup to discuss measurement and social media.
Social Impact Camp follows a similar format (brief presentations, breakout groups and general discussion) but also stems from a similar need.
Measurement Camp came about (kicked off by Will back in 2008) because those working in social media knew that what they were doing had value and an impact, but that there are ways to improve how success is tracked and measured – and that sharing knowledge is going to get benefit everyone.
It was clear from this meetup that organisations working to create a positive social impact feel the same about what they’re doing.
Even though it was the first event, with a group of people who’d never met before, the discussion was lively, interesting and useful.
We talked about the challenges in aligning the reporting needs of your stakeholders with what actually indicates real-world success, how putting a set of metrics in place can risk inadvertently molding your activity to fit, and the problems in consistently measuring things like the changes in someone’s perception of their opportunities in life.
I went along partly because we’re working on a project where metrics for success are going to be based on social capital and social return on investment (which deserves a post in itself) and because it’s going to help bring new ways to measure value beyond the bottom line to the third sector and public sector clients we work with
If I took one thing away from the evening it’s that measuring this stuff is clearly complicated, straddling quantitative and qualitative, online, offline and the inner world of individuals, but that if we can better demonstrate the value and ongoing need for people, projects and organisatons that add value to the world around us, then we’ll generate even more support for them.
Can’t wait for the next one.
Max St John wrote this on 28.01.10 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Events & conferences, NixonMcInnes, measurement box
The NHS gets a rough ride – we rarely hear anything positive about it in the media and it’s already becoming a battleground for this year’s election. Whether it’s reports from the Care Quality Commission or shouty electioneering, we’re bombarded with ways the NHS needs to change.
But what about the people who use it – you and me – what do we think, how could this be used to make things better, leveraging the power of social media?
To an extent this is already starting to happen, and Liz Barclay’s Radio Four documentary NHS Punters Speak Out, looked into some really interesting issues around online, crowd-sourced feedback as an effective force for change in public services.
As a prime example, Patient Opinion uses the principles of ‘consumer’ led sites like Trip Advisor, simply asking people to ‘Tell their story’ of health care they’ve received, good and bad, as well as allowing those responsible for care to respond.
For and against
Opponents say that these sites are ‘at best a crude popularity contest, at worst, downright dangerous’, that they only attract people with an axe to grind, only represent the views of the ‘upwardly-mobile’, web-savvy and represent a small sample in comparison to paper and telephone-based surveys.
These arguments don’t seem to bear up under scrutiny. Just a quick glance over Patient Opinion shows plenty of stories of genuine gratitude (which is a breath of fresh air) and provides a more balanced picture than we usually get.
It’s also apparent that some service providers are not only monitoring and responding, but actually making changes as a result of this feedback – as in the case of one young mum whose criticism of the ante-natal care she received lead to increased resources.
Excluded vs inclusion
As for the assertion that these sites won’t represent those without ready access to the web and the skills to use it, Champion for Digital Inclusion, Martha-Lane Fox, argues that we simply turn the model on its head.
Rather than worry about those who may be excluded, she says we need to work on the number of people with computers, broadband and training, something that’s being addressed through the Digital Britain initiative, targeting socially excluded and economically deprived families.
And, even if you do believe that the proportion of people using online as a way to find information on goods and services is comparatively small (which I don’t), why would you choose to exclude them from your current feedback mechanisms, especially when they’re providing a way to publicly celebrate success and demonstrate improvements?
Futureproofing
There’s also the case for planning ahead – the current generation of young people are going to be using the internet as their main communication tool, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a travel company or a dentist’s surgery, if you’re not prepared, you’re not going to meet the needs of a network society.
The bottom line is that the NHS is a service and the people who use it are consumers – and the needs of those consumers are changing. Why not apply some of the same principles that we would to holidays or restaurants, to something that’s of vital importance to us and those we love?
Why stop here?
If we can successfully apply this to the NHS, why not other areas of public service – MyPolice (winner of the amazing Social Innovation Camp) are already doing this for our police services, but what about our schools, universities, public transport and all aspects of local government?
How about UserVoice for your local council (like Ideas for Seattle) or Get Satisfaction for your child’s school. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Thanks to Flickr bod j.reed for the fantastic image.
Max St John wrote this on 18.01.10 – 2 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes, Social media, User generated content box
According to Wikipedia (!), a couple of guys Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen defined Enterprise 2.0 as:
the use of “web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”.
Perhaps it could be simpler, something like:
Enterprise 2.0 is the harnessing of social web platforms and behaviours to improve how the people in big organisations manage and communicate within themselves.
But I hope you get the gist (if you’re not already ahead of me on this :).
So to me, Enterprise 2.0 is utterly irresistable – it cannot be resisted. And it feels incredibly simple and right.
Not everyone sees it so simply. The trigger for writing this was a brief conversation on Twitter between Euan Semple and Alan Patrick, two solid smart thinkers and doers, that I joined in with. As you can see, Alan summarises his (and many others) reticence as:
“thats what I’m grappling with re E2.0 – given its all been known for so long, why will things change now?
Here’s the conversation (read it from the bottom up!):
You can see that my input is flippant, naive, lacking in proof. But it is bourne out of an unshakeable conviction I have, based on what I see everyday in our work with some of the biggest organisations in the UK.
They are changing towards an Enterprise 2.0 tinted-future (often whether they like it or not).
In my opinion no organisation can resist the influence of the social web as a driver of change upon its internal management, structure and communication, just as – regardless of the thickness of its skin or the stubborness of its culture – it cannot resist how the internet has evolved and disrupted its external environment and how it now needs to engage with the outside world.
Here’s why:
- People’s information and media consumption, behaviours and therefore expectations are rapidly evolving
- We all bring Social to work – people are both consumers/buyers and employees and don’t stop being themselves when they get to work
- Global competition is ever-fiercer
1. People’s information and media consumption, behaviours and therefore expectations are rapidly evolving
For a selection of loosely related mini-trends in how we’re all adjusting, see variously:
2. We all bring Social to work – people are both consumers/buyers and employees and don’t stop being themselves when they get to work
This distinction between inside the ‘enterprise’ and outside the organisations we work in is both useful and not useful. Yes, there are big, vital differences. But one of the constants is us, the people. (By the way, in my opinion the distinction between B2C and B2B is also helpful and (increasingly) not helpful – they are all people, just with different hats on and found in different decision-making settings – the family, the procurement team – but fundamentally people all, exposed to the same changing media landscape).
Increasingly the clients we work with at NixonMcInnes (who are pioneers in their organisations and industries) are finding their efforts welcomed internally in unexpected quarters, because the internal environment, the staff and people that make up their businesses, are catching up.
So businesses may find themselves turned inside out if they try to resist. It is happening – like it or not. Employees are choosing their hardware, publishing information outside of the firewall, formal control is melting away.
Although the definitions above, both the formal and my own plain English attempt, describe Enterprise 2.0 as about tools and stuff, the codeword ‘Enterprise 2.0′ actually means something much bigger and broader (and more exciting) to me.
The magical bit of Enterprise 2.0 is not the systems and platforms, but what they mean for the people, the organisational DNA, the culture.
3. Global competition is ever-fiercer
So combine the above two ingredients, and marinade them in an increasingly ruthlessly competitive global marketplace, and I think you’ve got change or die.
Thanks to the growing supply of competitors for many companies it’s getting harder and harder to win business – margins are being eroded by offshore lower cost alternatives, services are being commoditised by technology. The internet demands instaneous responses to market changes, news, customer service issues. This exacts Darwinian forces on the business community. How quickly an organisation can discover, understand and repond to these forces will determine its future.
To win, the modern Enterprise must act fast. To act fast, it needs to smooth and connect up the conduits and flows within itself. That’s what Enterprise 2.0 is to me.
See:
(As a side note, given this context and the persistence of the ‘how to measure social media’ meme, I wonder what’s the ROI on not dying?)
So that’s my opinion. It is happening. And it is utterly irresistable.
I’d always be interesting in thoughts and challenges to this in the comments (or elsewhere on the web!).
Will McInnes wrote this on 12.01.10 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Employee engagement, Enterprise 2.0, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Strategy box
While idly experimenting with the newfangled, real-time Twitter Streaming API yesterday, I decided to have a little bit of fun, to try and make life a little more interesting! In the interests of innovation and openness, I thought I would take some time out to share these experiments with you…
Read more…
Steve wrote this on 07.01.10 – 7 comments
It's filed in the Development, Funny, twitter box
Fig 1: Ross, excited.
There is a ton of cool stuff flying around at the moment, and rather than attempt some kind of comprehensive mega-list, here is a snapshot of why I think 2010 will rock. Read more…
Ross wrote this on 06.01.10 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Industry news, Interesting, NixonMcInnes, future box
For a few days before Christmas, deep within the NixonMcInnes Skunkworks, a band of elves were busy developing something special based upon some newly released Wordpress functionality. Behold, our new plugin, Sentimeter!
Read more…
Edward wrote this on 04.01.10 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Development, Free things, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Web analytics, Web technology, measurement, wordpress box
As the self-appointed Christmas king of NixonMcInnes, I wanted to let you know what we’re doing over the festive break. As a team, we’re largely taking some well-earned holiday after what has been a brilliant year; moving offices, hiring several new team members and working with super clients. 2010 is going to be an even bigger year for us, and the industry as a whole as more and more people wake up to power of digital and the implications of living in a networked world. As an agency we’re keen to remain at the forefront of innovation, bringing cool stuff to our clients and keeping ourselves excited by never becoming complacent, and a proper mulled-wine fueled break will enable us to hit the ground running in January.
Read more…
Ross wrote this on 22.12.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Funny, NixonMcInnes, Off topic box
Hello dear reader,
Please forgive me: I’ve been doing quite a bit of job ad-type writing this morning, and feel the need to break into a unperfect storm of bullet pointed facts.
Let’s see how it goes shall we? You’re probably not even reading this bit now are you – you’ve already skipped the bullet points with yer fancy-fast internet browsy reading skillz.
- And….GO!
- Whatever it is, NixonMcInnes is different
- Some people think we are an ‘online PR agency’
- Some people think we are a web design and build agency
- We actually think we’re multi-disciplinary
- We have 5 practice areas: Strategy, Communications, Research, Design & Build and Culture
- The labels for each practice will evolve, but this is our plan for now…
- Practice areas combine and overlap – our clients benefit from both depth (an out and out PR expert, or a down ‘n’ dirty Brand professional, or a very clever technologist) *and* breadth
- Our Research practice is valued by our clients and by our own team – it’s amazing working from original and substantial insights
- It’s also blooming exciting – how Market Research is evolving and reconsidering itself in the light of the social web
- We don’t wait for traditional marketing services industries to reinvent themselves – we try to just get on with it
- So we’re looking for a proper clever, ambitious leader to join our Senior team and head up the research practice.
- Job ad here (and here, and here)
Here’s some other blurbage I wrote earlier:
Rise up and become part of the changing face of the market research and wider marketing services world!
This is a rare opportunity to join our unique multi-disciplinary consultancy working with some of the biggest, most significant brands in the world. Our Mission is to help these companies engage in more meaningful and useful ways with their customers by harnessing the rapidly evolving social web.
We are expanding and creating a new board-level role to build and head-up our Research Practice. The successful candidate will stretch themselves amongst our open, democratic company culture and smart diverse team based in Brighton the digital media hub of the UK.
The overall purpose of the role is to continue to build our unique and profitable professional research practice by:
- Leading the way in discovering how to blend digital social media and research.
- Selling in and then profitably delivering measurable business value to clients.
- Providing research insights that help clients understand their challenges and address them both tactically, and by building wider programmes that solve their problems.
- Nurturing and growing our relationships with a small number of clients.
To apply, read this bit and follow the instructions.
One other thing, out of respect for the people we meet and our colleagues we take hiring seriously and try to be really rigorous with our hiring. There will be effort on both sides – just to be clear from the off.
No agencies, thank you.
Will McInnes wrote this on 03.12.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Brighton, Recruitment box
