Interview: How to incorporate Social Media into the core of your business practice

Post first published on the Terrapinn Customer Love blog.

Yesterday I took a few minutes to catch up with Christer Holloman – author, award-winning social media champion and sought-after digital strategy advisor. Read on to learn more about how global businesses can win success by embracing social media.

Hi Christer, let’s start with a little bit about yourself and your background.

I make my living advising companies on digital strategies, developing digital revenue streams or new digital products. I’ve been contracting for big companies such as careerbuilder.com, which is the largest job site in the US, The Daily Mail, working particularly with the property portals they own, and most recently for The Times and The Sunday Times as their Head of Digital Product Development. Alongside that I’ve been running something called First Tuesday which is a network for technology start-ups and their investors. I’ve also been blogging for Sky News about technology trends for the last two and half years, and in January my book The Social Media MBA was published by Wiley.

Could you tell us a little bit about the central premise for The Social Media MBA?

Essentially it’s a collaboration between a number of thought leaders around the world, featuring case studies from the social media leaders at brands like Dell, GSK and Aviva. My main objective from the outset was to create a book that gave voice to perspectives from different continents, because it seems as though a lot of the buzz that you get around social media these days is very US focused. Trends around social media are emerging in other areas of the world too, particularly in places like South America, Asia and Africa. I was actually speaking at a conference in Lagos a month ago, the largest city in a country with a population of over 160 million people, and they are increasingly getting connected on mobile phones. Whilst they did skip the laptop trend, they get social media just as intuitively as we do. As more and more people get connected the opportunities are exploding. So I wanted to create a book that really reflected the global revolution of social media, as well as really target professionals who got social media, who are on the band wagon and really want to take it to the next step.

Would you say that people outside of the USA and Western Europe are using social media differently to us?

I think that the drivers are the same. It is inherently human to want to share stories and get feedback and listen in on conversations. That is what social media is so good at fulfilling. Similarly what is happening is that the technology is becoming a whole lot more available to people in emerging markets. The drivers are the same, but the platforms differ. They don’t, for example, use Twitter in China. I heard about this voice blogging company called Bubbly that is doing really well in India, think Twitter meets dictaphone. In Indian few people have internet connected computers at home but almost everyone has a mobile phone. This company tapped into the Bollywood culture, they recognised that users can’t follow a feed on a screen because they don’t have those sorts of devices, so they allow people to sign up to a subscription service which sends them a voicemail from a celebrity. Users pay about 40p per month, the service have over 2 million users of which 1.2 million are paying. The underlying fact here is that people in India are just as interested in ‘following’ celebrities as we are in the UK, the difference being that the platform, the technology, the brand name, the charging mechanism that facilitates that might be different.

Are western businesses still struggling to decide which platform to make use of?

I think people are quite satisfied with the notion that Facebook is the biggest and is good for B2C, that LinkedIn is really good for B2B and that Twitter sits somewhere in the middle. What rocks the boat is when new platforms come in and businesses don’t know how to respond to them. This has been evident with platforms like Google+. Businesses should be asking: What is it? What is it doing? What do we need to know about it? How can we leverage it? The majority of companies tend to let new platforms sit on the side and be ignored. It’s been a similar situation with Pinterest. The problem is that businesses have got it into their head that it is always only going to be Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which is clearly an incorrect strategy. They should have an emerging platform strategy that can be applied every time a new platform comes online, almost a blueprint which allows a team member to investigate its utility and how these match with wider business objectives. People seem to be afraid of experimenting and ignoring new things, which has to change because obviously innovation is not going to stop with Google+ and Pinterest.

Have you seen the customer change of the last couple of years?

Yes absolutely. I think it comes down to availability. People can find you so easily and they assume that you are going to respond to them right away. In the olden days you had to write a letter to customer service and therefore the company would be in charge of how it responds to you. This lengthy process would naturally put a lot of people off from complaining in the first place. We then moved on to call centres, but even then it was a process that required real effort and expenditure. Now though, posting a moan on Twitter is so easy to express thoughts and frustrations. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people have gotten more frustrated with service, it is just the technology has made it easier to make the voice heard.

Would you say then that the customer has taken control of the relationship?

I wouldn’t maybe go that far, but I would say that there is definitely more noise, and importantly more transparent noise, coming from customers. This is something that needs to be managed by companies.

Do you think that we are still going to see big mistakes being made by businesses on social media, in the same vein as United Breaks Guitars?

Yes, the human factor will always allow for mistakes to happen and it doesn’t help that a lot of marketing leaders have outsourced their social media management to the youngest member of their team.

Having said that, a communications director who doesn’t understand how social media works is also just as likely to make mistakes as an intern. A recent example of this is the McDonald’s ‘#MeetTheFarmer’ campaign a few months ago, this was a fully planned out marketing campaign with lots of people involved, however the hashtag was hijacked and became a PR disaster.

Why do some Communications Directors give responsibility for tweets to young people in the business?

I’ve met Marketing Directors who have said that they do not get social media. I think that these figures of authority should want to get their head around it however. It is not good enough to label yourself a technophobe. Communications Directors and Marketing Directors should not, in this day and age, be voicing those sorts of excuses about technology and communicating in the digital space. No one is too old to learn, it is more that they do not have the foresight to see the impact that this channel has on core elements of their job such as acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. I ultimately think that these people will phase themselves out, that they will be overrun or passed by by those who are more knowledgeable. The way that some try to get round this is to surround themselves with knowledgeable people, however surely the most senior person in the room needs to take ownership and feel 100% confident in what is going on.

What do you see as being the major themes for the next 12-24 months in terms of the relationship between customer and business?

I think that there are a couple of big challenges which are going to play out over the next year. The first is businesses recognising that social media is not just a marketing channel but is instead a form of communication that multiple departments should leverage, whether that be HR, customer service, or even product development via tools like crowd sourcing and feedback loops. So a big challenge is going to be persuading marketing to spread the social media knowledge across the organisation.

The second thing is going to be around analytics. Everyone is talking about how much data they capture from social media, the question is around what you do with that data. Lots of people are claiming that they can harvest and do all sorts of things with data, but I am yet to see any businesses doing ongoing, large-scale, clever things with the data they capture, and talk about it publically. What is McDonald’s doing with all the data they capture from social media? They haven’t told us. So the question remains, after you harvest and mine data, what then?

Those are both internally focused issues, how to manage social media etc. In terms of social media trends what we might be seeing more of is social media that happens through affinity rather than through your network. All my friends on Facebook are people who I went to School or University or worked with, so it is quite a limited group. I’m sure there is someone on Facebook who is more similar to me and who I could get more out of, but the problem is that I can’t see him. If I join a cycling club or a triathlon club, for example, I would meet a bunch of people who are more similar to me. So the question remains, how do you replicate the cycling club experience in a social context. How do you connect with like-minded individuals through a system based on something other than chance? There’s an interesting start-up company called state.it that helps you discover your opinions on a range of issues and create connections through that. So there are people working on it.

Finally Christer you are of course going to be speaking at our Loyalty World event later in the year, what is it that you are particularly looking forward to about the conference?

I’m looking forward to the networking that is going to happen before and around the event. The quality of attendees is really high and so it is going to be a great opportunity to exchange ideas and best practices.

You can also read about the common mistakes made by brands in the social media space.