Social Media Benchmark Results and Twitter Chat

This morning my colleague Rachel James and I took part in the Social Media Benchmark wavecast, where the Chartered Institute of Marketing shared the results from wave two of the Social Media Benchmark survey. A few lucky marketers excused themselves from the office that morning and attended the event at the Bloomberg offices, but the event was streamed live for everyone else (including us).

Manus Cranny from Bloomberg moderated the event, whilst Thomas Brown, the Head of Insights for CIM, presented the survey results and invited a handful of high-class marketers to share their thoughts on social media today. The speakers were:

• Matt Atkinson, Group Marketing & Chief Digital Officer, Tesco
• Karim Klaus Emara, Global Director, Business Development and Marketing, Clifford Chance
• Philippa Snare, CMO UK, Microsoft
• Erin Nelson, CMO, Bazaarvoice
• Tara Beard-Knowland, Director, Ipsos ASI

We both found the insights very helpful, so we’ve put together a list of the most interesting  ! Please find below, a list of the points we think are the most interesting and important and that we should all take on board.

• People don’t trust brands they trust people. So we must bring our personalities and our characters into our social media activity.

Related to the above point, people don’t trust companies they trust their peers– you can scream how great your company is but no-one will believe it until they hear it from someone like them etc. Recognise this shift in consumer power, accept it and go with it.

• 94% of people want to share their opinions with people because they want to help them make better decisions – this is better explained using an example: You have a terrible holiday with Thomas Cook, you’re part of a holiday makers forum in which someone posts ‘I’m about to book a holiday with Thomas Cook’ your instinct NOOOOOOOoooo don’t do it blah blah blah. This can work in your favour – try and bring this angle to your discussions.

• Interest graphs are more important that social graphs – basically data is more valuable to the consumer from people who are like them rather than from people they like. Again (back to the holiday example) if you are a mum of two and you’re researching next years’ summer holiday, you will want to receive recommendations from other mothers of two, not from couples or 16 year olds.

• Consumer data is powerful –> use it to learn where you can improve in customer service, product development, marketing, sales

• Understand what people want! Social media gives you the ability to act on insights, you can get to know your clients and consumers and you can respond accordingly. Don’t guess what the people want, ask them!

• Create an environment in which social media is owned across the entire business – ok so this will be hard! But at lease prove it (social media) works and then others will follow. A barrier we will definitely come up against is pressure from management.

• Don’t control the conversations, it’s not normal, its not natural and people will notice it. Just let them flow and contribute as you would to a friend rather than constantly shoving your products in their faces.

• Immediacy is what people look to social media for, they want to communicate NOW, they want responses NOW so utilise this and let people in, if you can’t give a response explain why on an honest personal level: ‘Thanks for the post John, that’s great. I have a meeting to prepare for right now so I’m going to give this some thought and respond to your points fully later on’ They’ll appreciate this, they’ll feel like they know you better and therefore trust you a little more.

• Social media isn’t going to come naturally to your work if it isn’t part of your natural behaviour at home. Play with a personal Twitter account to try out all the features, you’ll become more comfortable with it and learn how it works/how to make it work for you. Make sure your Linkedin bio is updated or no one will take you seriously. If you’re not using social media already – then you’ve not fully bought into the idea.

• Barriers associated with social media:

Management pressure – They want quick results and they are hard to deliver. There is also an insecurity surrounding measuring the social media stats we don’t know how to do it or what to measure yet

Budgeting – purchasing of new resources, training staff in social media and hiring new staff, remember management are being asked to allocate a big chunk of budget to something that they don’t yet consider stable its all scary when its so new.

• B2B organisations are more about experimentation right now, whereas B2C have a clear purpose: their customers are there, so they should be too.

The event concluded with a panel discussion with all the speakers and questions from the audience. The information shared during the event was very interesting, with a few eye-opening remarks (thanks Erin Nelson). We hope you’ve found this useful, what’s the one thing you will implement within your business?

By the way, the full Twitter #SMbenchmark conversation is on Storify all nicely organised and the wavecast was recorded and can be accessed here.