Today, Nestlé has become the latest “how not to do social media” case study. Following a campaign by Greenpeace to put an end to the company’s unsustainable use of palm oil, a number of people have been changing their Facebook profile pictures to Greenpeace’s KitKat mock-up logo.
Nestlé’s response on Facebook? “Please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.”
Unsurprisingly, this censorship statement on the social network has caused a crescendo of backlash. But rather than try and diffuse mounting anger towards the brand, Nestlé’s sarcastic, dismissive responses have only served to inflame and enrage fans even more. Read more…
Louise wrote this on 19.03.10 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Mistakes, Social media, Social networks box
A couple of weeks ago I spent the day at LocalGovCamp, a barcamp-style unconference for people interested in how local government can capitalise on, and overcome the challenges of, the evolving online landscape.
Given some of our work with the public sector, and broader interest in helping government engage with people through social media, NixonMcInnes part-sponsored the event and I had the pleasure of going along to listen and join in some of the discussions.
Some of the highlights of the day for me…
Dave Briggs and others talked about how councils can absorb and learn from internet culture, turning the IT guys from the men (and women?) who say ‘No’ into the people who facilitate and deliver on cool and innovative ideas.
Much of this resonated with some of my experiences with the private sector, but the answer, according to Chris Caplain from Microsoft, is to draw them in to your projects, get them on board with what you’re doing and make their job more interesting in the process (I think the phrase he used was hug them, but I don’t think they’d like that).
Chris Taggart, founder of openlylocal.com, showed how he’s trying to change the way councils share local election data, helping local government fulfill their duty to make this information public, but make it more efficient by storing it in a central, publicly available database. The result is a brilliant resource that they and anyone else can manipulate as they want, ripe for mashups.
Co-design and collaboration came up a few times over the day, the idea of local government organisations tapping into the community of publicly-minded designers and developers (Kent County Council’s Transformed by you a particularly good example of this). It’s something I’m passionate about and builds on the great work done by organisations like Rewired State and their hackdays.
But, the biggest recurring theme for the day for me was how Councils can make the most of social media in the face of impending spending cuts.
Social technologies offer a wealth of opportunities to innovate but how can this be done in a cost-effective way? The public’s perception of how they should be talked to or with has changed – mass, one-way broadcasts are increasingly shunned and people expect a much more immediate and personal-response. It goes without saying that this sets a pretty scary precedent for a small comms team.
One of the answers discussed was to foster collaboration internally, opening up social media to anyone who’s interested and who could contribute. This spreads the load over a much wider set of people and allows those responsible for a particular service to pick up relevant issues. As a result, this also reduces the response time to the public.
The bottom line was that councils can’t afford to have social media on its list of threats and instead need to use it to help them deliver services better or deliver better services.
There are still a lot of questions to answer but given the calibre of discussion over the day, and obvious passion the people attending had for trying to achieve this, I’m confident that this is in hand.
Max St John wrote this on 16.03.10 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Democracy, Events & conferences, Social media box
After months of hard work, head-scratching, frantic coding and copious tea-drinking by a number of the team here, I’m over the moon to tell you that we’ve just launched a brand new site (I could have had a baby by now. Well, I sort of have, with multiple parentage).
Virgin Media Pioneers is a social networking and video blogging platform, and is a partnership between Virgin Media and Enterprise UK – the charity that aims to increase entrepreneurial behaviour across Britain.
It’s the core of a programme that’s going to equip young, budding entrepreneurs – Pioneers – with the skills, confidence, experience and network of contacts to help them make it on their own.
Anyone who joins the site can easily connect with entrepreneurial people like them, as well as get support and advice from established business experts. Pioneers upload video blogs and responses to share their experiences, talk about their business ideas, ask for help or simply celebrate success.
The site’s been built on a set of open source platforms and plugins, most notably WordPress, VideoPress and BuddyPress, which gave us a foundation to combine social and video features without coding everything from the ground up.
From day one we’ve worked in really close collaboration with both Enterprise UK and Virgin Media, running an agile methodology that’s proved massively successful.
Without going into too much detail, the biggest feature of this is that we – all of us, clients included – have met up every two weeks for nearly the past nine months, and at every point there’s been an opportunity to change the shape of what we’ve been doing.
When we discovered a new requirement, decided we didn’t like the way something worked or had a brand new insight into our target audience, we simply changed the priority of what we were working on next. It was an eye-opener, working on a large-scale build in this way, but one that’s been pivotal to the success of the development.
NixonMcInnes provided the skills and experience in designing and building the site, including user experience design, working to create a brand identity and undertaking usability testing to make sure that this is something that fits with the immediate needs and expectations of our first Pioneers.
Usability testing with people who were actually going to be using the site was particularly interesting and vindicated our choice of agile as a methodology, as well as the other decisions we’d made along the way; all feedback we gathered was overwhelmingly positive and even after months of development, I only came away with a few minor changes to make.
This is only the start though – the first release of the site is going to build and evolve over time to include new features and functions, based on the needs of the people who use it, using feedback and research.
Why am I so excited? OK, there’s a degree of self-satisfaction and pride in what we’ve all produced, but it’s more than that – as other people have pointed out, in the recession young people were some of the hardest hit – and this is one opportunity for those people to move towards turning their own ideas into a career. As a result, it’s also supporting independent business in the UK, in which social enterprise is beginning to feature more (from my recent experience, anyway).
It’s been an amazing experience, working with some brilliant people (not just Steve, Josh, Matt, Jenni and Telmo) and I can’t wait to watch more people join the site, follow their journey and build on what we’ve all started.
Max St John wrote this on 10.03.10 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Design, NixonMcInnes, Social networks, User experience, Web technology, wordpress box
Creating scenarios based on limited, but specific information. Generating ideas or solutions quickly. Listening closely to other people. Accepting what you’re given. Making sure you don’t deny people their voice or views. These are all aspects of improvised comedy, something that I’ve recently found out that I have a real and genuine passion for.
How did this come about? A little under a year ago I decided to enrol on the The Maydays beginners improvised comedy course ‘just to give it a try for a giggle’. It’s not stand up – it’s improvising and creating scenes on the spot, with a limited input from the audience (if any). I’ve got so sucked into this wonderful art that I am now half way through my fourth course, six live shows down and planning on starting a 10 week improvised singing course in April. It’s provided me with an amazing forum to unleash my creative side and has also provided me with a set of invaluable skills that are not only good on stage, but also in business.
Drawing on my own experiences, there’s four things I’d like to share with you about how my improvised comedy transfers to the workplace in my life.
Confidence.
My confidence has increased massively. I can think of a key example of how this shows. Some time back I was called at short notice to attend what was meant to be an informal meeting with two client contacts in a government department. Upon arrival, I was alerted that the format had changed, and we had 10 people present, from different areas of the government and department of health and that I was expected to lead the meeting from the perspective of the site build. Two years ago, I would have struggled and had a fair bout of nerves trying to present ‘on demand’ to this group of people, however I felt confident, took a deep breath and the meeting was a great success with a wonderfull project being spawned afterwards. I put this down to the many situations posed to me in improv where I have had to ‘jump in the deep end’ either on stage or with people I do not know and had to be confident in my surroundings to be able to perform to the best of my ability.
Creativity.
Improv has inspired and rejuvenated the creative aspect of my mind and has it bubbling like it hasn’t for a long time. I’m much more confident in putting forward ideas for pitch materials, attending brainstorms and getting actively involved. I find I’m thinking differently about how I might present and run workshop style sessions. It’s generally made me think more creatively and made me want to get involved in the more creative activities that happen around me in and around work.
Listening & Trust.
Improv forces you to listen very carefully and trust what you are given. You’re given a set of specific words, themes, locations or circumstances (much like a problem a client may have) and you are forced to respond in a way that acknowledges and builds on the inputs you’ve been given, not reject them. If someone needs a sock, there’s no point giving them a shoe. I know in myself and in my day to day work that I am consciously trying to listen to people more, respond more appropriately, and trust what I’m told, as opposed to responding in an ad hoc or generic manner.
Teamwork and interpersonal skills.
Improv definitely grows your interpersonal skills and builds your ability to function as part of a team. In improv, we refer to this as the ‘group mind’ – which is the idea that if you are closely aligned with the people around you, you will inherently and sub-consciously strive to achieve the same goal. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how massively beneficial this is in the day to day workings in a busy agency!
So there it is – my four key takings from Impovised Comedy and how it can benefit you in your working life (and your personal life?). If you think this is cool, and want to learn more about the awesomeness that is improv, there’s a few places online I reccomend:
- Check out Peter Day’s ‘‘What can business leaders learn from rock musicians and improvisational comedians?’ Radio 4 show. There’s some fascinating insights in there and I highly recommend that people have a listen. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p944k
- Contact The Maydays – they run business workshops as well as general improvised comedy courses
- Ping me a question, via email or twitter or come to one of my improv gigs (also listed on my twitter account)
I’d be keen to hear if anyone out there has any experience of improv, or has an ‘extra curricular’ passion that whilst not immediately obvious, benefits the work they do on a day to day basis?
I look forward to hearing from you!
Matt
Matt wrote this on 22.02.10 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Brighton, Business, Funny, Interesting, NixonMcInnes box
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 – 2 comments
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 – 5 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 – 3 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 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Employee engagement, Enterprise 2.0, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Strategy box
