The ‘Online Community’ has been developed and launched to support ongoing customer and client engagement and develop insight into the needs of customers. Home customers will now have 24/7 online access to discussions with other customers, focus groups, polls, and surveys as well as direct access to feedback through the community.

The new virtual platform was launched in the latest Home Group newsletter with the article below:

“Online Community is an innovative approach to customer and client involvement and customer insight. The virtual community makes it easier for people to tell us what they think, discuss current and new initiatives within Home with other customers and to take part in surveys and polls about our services.

This is the first time that Home has utilised the power of social media with customers and clients and already you’re having an impact on what we do and the decisions we’re making.

Joining the community is easy. Follow the link from the Home Group website and register to join, answering a few short questions. You will be emailed your login details and you’re ready to begin.

Have a go and let us know what you think. You can also follow us on twitter @wearehomegroup.”
 

This year’s ‘Marketing: the art of‘ conference will give give you expert insights into how to dramatically improve your digital marketing strategy.

A number of keynote speakers will be there to inspire you throughout the day, and local marketing experts (including our MD, Mark Easby) will help you to explore how you can develop your own digital marketing strategies effectively to win new customers, build brand recognition and grow your business, in a series of interactive workshops.

The workshops will include:

• Web analytics: shaping online marketing strategy from analytics data
• Developing your social media strategy
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) explained: no jargon, just clear, actionable info and advice
• Rediscover email marketing: customer, content and… chaos?
• Conversion rate optimisation (CRO): turning website visitors into customers
• Developing your mobile marketing strategy
• Creating the marketing a-team
• Lights, camera, action, are you ready for your close up? Reputation management in the digital age

If you’re relatively new to digital marketing, there will also be a number of breakfast workshops on offer to get you started.

Whether you’re a digital marketing novice or you’re an experienced digital marketing professional, there will be workshops and keynote speakers relevant for you.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to find out the very latest in digital marketing and don’t get left behind!

The cost to attend is £120+VAT per person. To book or call Karen on:  0191 281 5777 or email:  businesslink@btob.co.uk.

For more information and a full programme, please go to www.marketingtheartof.com.

Please note that places are limited and are getting booked up quickly.

Tweeting, hash tags, mashable, SEO, tiny URLs – these are all terms that a few years ago didn’t even exist, yet today they play a fundamental part in organisations’ marketing strategies. Due to the popularity of this workshop in 2010, Service Network is repeating (and enhancing!) this event which will take you through the step by step process of developing a digital footprint for your business. A digital footprint is a collection of activities and behaviours recorded when an organisation interacts in a digital environment. It includes the recording of activities such as clicks on e-newsletters, visits to a web-page, tweets and Facebook updates.

Our MD, Mark Easby (@easbynow), will expertly guide you through the key areas you need to understand in today’s digital world:

1. Why you need to develop your digital footprint.
2. How to listen to the internet – how to find out where your audience is and what they are talking about.
3. How to join in – what choices you have to make, how to think strategically and why you have to be committed to the task.
4. What to do when your audience talks to you – you need to learn how to develop a conversation.
5. How to measure your channels.
6. How to stay ahead of the competition.

We are also delighted to be joined by Jayne Graham from work space finding service, Space on Tap who will share how they have used digital media channels to help increase their brand’s profile and recognition not only in the North East, but nationally too.

There will be an interactive discussion and panel Q&A session at the end of this event, giving you the chance to quiz our digital media experts.

After this event, you will have the confidence to go back into your business and start listening, engaging, interacting, recording, sharing and discussing digital information in a very human way. You will also come away with an understanding of how social media can work for your business and will be empowered with the energy to create a successful digital footprint for your organisation.

Can you get involved in this event?

We have an opportunity to showcase one more regional business at this event on 13th October by offering the platform for you to present your digital media success story to our audience and take part in the panel discussion. If you feel that your organisation has a good social media story to tell about how it has helped to propel your business to great heights, we’d love to hear from you.

To put your company forward for this event, please email Sarah Thackray at events@service-network.co.uk.

Cost:
Free to Service Network members and £45 + VAT for non members. Includes breakfast and refreshments.
To avoid a cancellation fee of £35 + VAT please inform the Service Network team in writing at least 48 hours before the event if you register but can no longer attend.

Event Registration:
Please contact Sarah Thackray on 0191 244 4031 or email events@service-network.co.uk

How transparent should companies be? There’s an argument that many brands aren’t getting it right.

Sometimes the amount of information released to it’s customers is more than they need or want whilst others hold too much to themselves. A glut, feast or famine, getting the balance and tone right is vitally important as Martin Thomas, author of Loose suggests, social media needs only three actions to work well: be human, be responsive and be open.A great post written by Amy Duff in Director Magazine explores the challenges faced by businesses and governments in this age of enlightened, connected consumers.Amazingly, some organisation struggle with this. A corporate tone of voice doesn’t inspire anyone, in fact it can feel like we’re being spoken at rather than engaged with. This is a legacy of a world that we wish no longer existed, when brands told you what they wanted you to know. Enough has been written about the demise of this kind of thinking and yet it still persists in the closed minds of some CEOs and MDs which unfortunately permeates throughout their organisations.

Spend some time listening to your audience and you may find there is a big disconnect there, but see this as an opportunity not a death knell.

Innovator and R & D companies argue that secrecy is valuable weapon. No one is suggesting you give away the crown jewels but the opportunity for opening the door to innovation and R & D to your consumer and internal teams is a 21st century necessity.

Taking risks in business, especially investing in innovation is calculated. Doing this without your audience’s input increases this risk many fold. Being in a space with your audience vastly reduces the cost of innovation and creates fresh insight that ensures you develop the products and services people want faster. This type of engagement also fits with the lifestyles and experiences of todays enlightened, connected consumers. The tools available are familiar to them, engagement takes place when and where they want it and organisations, for the first time, can get immediate unfiltered feedback. A contribution that directly influences their product and service design.

As Thomas says, “Show the world that you are real and that you care about what your audience thinks.”

Find out more about co-creation, online engagement and market research through private communities at www.bettercommunities.co.uk.

Stand out speakers for me this year (though to be fair everyone really delivered for me) were Gerd Leonhard from The Futures Agency, who Skyped in from Spain to open the conference, Erin McKean who spoke with real social conviction about Wordnik, Conrad Wolfram from Wolfram Research, who wowed us all with Wolfram Alpha (You could see developers in the audience coo over the two line app creation tool) and Steven Bathiche from Microsoft’s Applied Science Group, who gave us a glimpse into the future interactions between human beings and computers. Dan Lyons, made a timely dial in from Boston, the man seems to know everything that’s going on! And Heather Knight was the quintessential straight man to her robot.

Nancy Duarte from Duarte Design really shone for me. She helped us all think about how we present our content and reinforced this by dissecting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” address, pinpointing how he re-enforced the key messages in his speech. Check out how Nancy did this on YouTube, it’s well worth a watch.

What impressed most thinkers was the relaxed vibe of the conference. No one was pitching hard at each other, everyone was in learning mode and the chat between sessions was warm and engaging. Tom Scott, back for the third year I believe, delivered a great finale, everyone laughed and them made sure they checked the security settings in their social accounts!

I’m already looking forward to next year!

Check out some of our photo’s taken during the conference below.

Watch the video below in which Matt discusses how your social media channels, networks, content, and reputation can all influence search engine rankings.

“Yes we do use Twitter and Facebook links and rankings as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition to this we are also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or creator.”

We strongly advocate developing a vibrant social media engagement strategy around your website, which in turn can create a powerful digital footprint for your brand impacting directly on visibility and rankings.

Newcastle-based market research business Explain has joined forces with Teesside brand agency Better, to launch Better Communities. The Better Communities product is a bespoke private digital community backed up by specialist research software which allows companies with large customer bases to gain feedback and insight from their consumers.

The co-creation and engagement tool has already attracted interest from a number of blue chips from across Europe in several sectors including retail, manufacturing and utilities, and negotiations with a handful of multinational companies continue to progress.

A key target market for the product is large retail empires that may be looking to diversify into new areas and need to gauge opinions about the products and services they are developing.

Meanwhile, the product is also expected to be adopted by utilities firms which often need to research thoroughly into the likely impact of landmark decisions such as future price increases.

The partnership, which was launched earlier this month, is already developing a private community for Scottish Power Energy Networks, with Northumbria Water and a number of other national organisations in the pipeline.

David Shiel, managing director of Explain – which enables organisations to gain essential insight and intelligence on their target market and customers – said: “In the current climate, companies tell us they want better information without increasing budgets so it would seem the timing is right.

“Social media is now well established and such a powerful method of interaction that companies must embrace the opportunity for dialogue that is corporate, not just social.

“Having the confidence to let the consumer openly comment and choose who they want to buy from or use puts the power squarely in their hands and says that the provider wants their business and will take notice of what they say.”

The new system allows brands to discover information over the long term that could directly influence product and service design and marketing strategy and is estimated to help businesses save at least 20% of their research budget each year.

After being recruited into brand insight communities, members will then engage in a two-way exchange of information with the company and fellow members, responding to topics and suggesting topics for future debate.

The online platform also encourages collaboration through one-to-ones, focus groups, polls and questionnaires which are constantly monitored using Explain’s research software.

The system can analyse responses by demographic, geographic location or any single profile variable in real time, giving invaluable data on the likes, dislikes and preferences of customers.

It is likely to create around six jobs this year at Explain’s Tyneside headquarters and Better’s Stokesley office, where the product’s technical development and support will be managed.

Better’s managing director Mark Easby said: “‘Engaging consumers at every level, be that through social media touch points that generate buzz through to private online communities that provide a catalyst for mass collaboration, innovation in product and service design through co-creation is a game changer for brands.”

“Better has been heavily involved in social media from the outset and have long championed its inclusion within our clients’ communication strategies. We’ve seen how the space has been developing and see private online communities as a key tool for brands going forward. The conversation has been online for many years and now we’re harnessing that power within our private communities to drive loyalty, engagement, innovation and co-creation.”

“We are all excited about seeing the fruits of an intensive nine months of development during which both companies shared a considerable investment to make this digital platform a reality. It’s what the North East business community is built upon and we’re proud to be winning national clients and shouting about a product that has been designed, built and privately funded in the region.”

Explain employs 30 people at its offices on Leazes Park Road and in South Gosforth, Newcastle, and provides customer insight for some of the UK’s biggest companies.

Better is an award winning brand agency who work with it’s diverse range of clients to improve the way they talk to their audiences through its brand, design, marketing, social media, web and digital services.

The Better Communities website provides more information at www.bettercommunities.co.uk but to discuss further please contact David on 0191 2615261 or Mark on 0845 122 2611.

Stories are art, crafted to take the reader on a journey designed by the author to deliver a meaningful emotional experience. This seminar, and I recommend you seek out one of Robert’s London seminars if you have the chance, provided me with a rich learning experience that helps me in my desire to understand better the correlation between our emotions and values and the brands we buy.

I believe brands need to be storytellers. Using craft and structure to reveal the complex associations of values, benefits and features to their audiences using language they intrinsically understand and connect with. Their stories must tell the simple truth of their existence, helping their audience to see clearly their value, design and importantly create a platform for long term engagement.

It is in the storytelling therefore that some brands fail. They offer the same quality of service or product as successful brands, and yet they don’t translate this into their own success. They fail to capture the imagination of their audience and we must ask ourselves why?

In tough market conditions many brand owners are forced to treat their brands as commodities, pressured by the demand for sales and a focus from the boardroom on buying short term brand loyalty. This has two long term implications for the brand. Firstly it can turn a premium brand in to a value brand that is traded (which isn’t sustainable) rather than positioned, and secondly it makes the brand compete with other brands in the wallet and not in the minds of the audience.

Whilst audiences want brands to recognise and reward loyalty, we as brand owners need to inspire them too. If all we do is reflect and remind them that money is always the key driver in their life, we’re letting them down. The brand owner must focus beyond the effective management of their marketing budgets and simply trying to buy customer loyalty.

We must convince audiences that when value in the economy is shaky the values of the brand remain constant, offer tangible benefits and give them something to believe in and sometimes aspire towards having.

“But the majority of brands have to deal or die” is the answer from many brand owners but this simply isn’t true. Some brands, with very little money, have managed to engage their audience and developed deep emotional relationships that inform, entertain and differentiate.

They have become storytellers, that enable their audience to connect with the values of the brand and absorb meaning through the craft of their brand story.

So what are the components of an effective story:

1) Unlike stories that are fiction brands must tell the truth of their existence. Why do they exist in the world, to serve what purpose for their audience? Here the reason is all important. We want to create (A) because (B) needs it to enable them to do (C). A brand story, in its telling, should smoothly transport the audience from A to C, be utterly transparent and feel right. You know when your been strung a line, you feel it. It you don’t believe it, you can be sure your audience wont either!

2) Frame your story to reflect accurately (without dwelling on it) the pain in your audience’s life you wish to remove with your brand. I use the analogy of people reading horoscopes. Those people that believe them look for themselves in the writing of the horoscope.

If they recognise themselves or a character trait or a situation they are experiencing they instantly develop a deep bonds of trust with the writer because “They get me!” It shows your audience that you understand them intimately. Adversely, if you simply scratch the surface of understanding your audience how can you hope to translate learning into meaningful products or services?

3) Craft your message using all your learning about your audience to be instantly recognisable and understandable. You must speak the same language as your audience or risk them missing the point of your brand.

4) Take your audience with you on a journey that has a clear destination in mind. The characters of a story are all moving toward some desired outcome, every action either positive or negative will move them toward it. So too must your brand story, it must help your audience towards a deeper understanding of the values, benefits and features of your brand and not simply make un-connected statements regardless of them being true.

5) Entertain if possible but at the very least inform your audience so they can differentiate your brand from others. The example I always refer too is Blendtec. Their blender may not be a sexy brand but that didn’t stop them thinking about and translating the values and benefit of their blender into something that is both fun, entertaining and informative.

“Will it Blend” started life as a campaign and has grown into a community where the owner of the company asks the simple question, “Will it Blend?”. It being everything from industrial magnets to hockey pucks! Delivered through YouTube, short video’s of them attempting to blend a whole raft of objects entertains but subtly re-enforces the benefits of the brand that being that Blendtec blenders are very robust, dependable blenders.

Reflecting on the great depression of the 20s and 30s, audiences going to the movies actually grew. People found the money and went to the movies to escape the harsh reality of living and for the 90 minutes telling of a story found a world crafted for them by screenwriters, authors and play writers.

Audience’s today don’t want the constant reminder of the frugality’s of living. They need value of course but they also want to be told a story and believe in something. They want to know we care about them and not just the pound they carry around in their pocket.

We have on average (Dunbar Number) 150 social connections, so for me that represents 4650 potential social connections. There isn’t time to manage all these social connections effectively, we’d be mad to try but some people do and I’m seeing more people dump their profiles all together as they’ve hit social media burnout.

Social connections are important and valuable both to the individual and the communities they are part of. This has been well documented over the last two years and I won’t go over well trodden ground but I am concerned that people have begun to question the benefit of their social connections. This is on the back of feeling their commitment to keeping their social connections open has begun to affect their work and home life. There are lessons we can all learn to ensure we don’t find ourselves in a similar situation.

Chose to lose some social network platforms.

Dumping the social networks that you joined in a rush of enthusiasm but aren’t actually value social networks will free up your time to focus on the connections that really benefit each other. By value social networks I mean those social network that don’t feed you personally in terms of knowledge, learning and connections or you don’t feel contribute to the growth of the community.

Remove overlapping contacts.

If we stick to the principle of one person equals one connection, how many duplicate connections do you have with a person across your social networks? It’s easy to accept a friend and a follower, without giving it a second thought when we connect with them on other networks already. Consider how many people use Twitter to feed their Facebook profile or vice versa? If you follow people on both networks you’ll expose yourself to the same content twice.

Recognise what is social media noise and and then ignore it.

Remember when you were a kid traveling on holiday with your parents. You’d sit in the back of the car watching the cars coming in the other direction. Then you simply started to not see them. They were there, but you didn’t register them any more as they’d become part of the background noise.

Social network noise is the same. We waste a huge amount of time reading stuff that neither requires our input or really warrants it. I skim read quite a lot of content taking time over a few posts, comments and messages. If I can’t answer quickly, I’ll go back to it later in the evening if I have time. Important note here, no one will suffer if you don’t respond or comment. The world and your life continues regardless.

Time to read, time to respond, time to leave it be.

Be regimented about when you log onto your social networks. During work time (Unless your business is online and driven by social networks) focus on work. Keep lunchtime for re-charging the batteries, read comments, posts and messages during your lunch break but leave answering them until later in the evening after you’ve spent time with your family, done chores and have an hour or two spare.

I tend to leave Twitter and Facebook until evening and sometime don’t look at them at all if I don’t have time. If you refresh Twitter and Facebook on your smart phone, laptop etc. every couple of minutes, you’re spending too much time on your social networks and it will impact on your home life. How many of you have heard “Do I have to post a message to your Facebook to get your attention?” Be conscious of the amount of time spent online.

It’s all in the mind.

Ever spent hours and hours thinking about what someone has written on their Facebook or Twitter profile, trying to decipher if a message has more then one meaning or if it is meant for you or not? I have.

A hard lesson, but a useful one is to never take a post personally, it’s not worth giving it mind space. Some people write deliberately cryptic messages designed to attract attention and comments. It’s about control and you could be surrendering your control if your respond to them. Take control back and remember, maybe not everyone you know on your social networks are a real friend.

Do you really need to join?

I get lots of invites from friends and contacts to join them on new social network platforms something which is only going to increase over time. Most of these are automated features of new platforms designed to grow participation quickly.

Ask yourself:

Do you really need to be on this social network platform?
Does it provide the same features and benefits as other networks you’re on?
Are the same people on that platform as are on your existing social networks?
Can you contribute your knowledge and expertise to that network, is it of value?
Can that network provide learning and useful contacts for you?

It’s import that you value the social interactions you have and feel your contribution to them adds value to that community and in doing so you gain learning from them. If you feel burdened by your social media connections I hope these ideas will help you maintain your interest without sacrificing your work or home life.

The social networking juice that powers a generation across sprawling vibrant communities has its feed forcibly cut off when the majority of company staff walk into work. All the potential of networked company communities, the opportunity for people to collaborate and and share knowledge is left at home and lost to the company.Is it fear of lost productivity to idle chatter, tighter budgets and a weakening of central control that drives businesses to produce restrictive policies on social media use at work? These are long held arguments against developing a social media strategy, and simply don’t hold water. Devolving central control works. Flat organisational structures dissolves barriers between teams, ideas are generated with the customer and new products and services can be brought online quicker than through the traditional gate process. Vibrant social communities support this open structure and in today’s rapidly changing economy, knowledge and innovation that drives the market can be at the heart of a company’s social community. Businesses have to let go of centralised control.

People who keep close to their customers by empowering their staff to engage directly with them across their internal and external comms channels, to solve problems and find solutions, know what the market’s needs are and can respond faster to changes. In flat organisations, decisions are pushed through faster because the ideas are fed directly into decision makers without having to go through limiting chains of command. It also means the creativity of staff is released, and ideas and innovation blossoms.

Companies who are slow to release the energy of their own staff could have serious repercussions for them when the next generation of employees, the tuned in Millennials who increasingly spend more of their time online being entertained, learning, researching, listening and talking to friends, enter the workplace.

Think of the possibilities of a socially networked business. The ability to nurture new ways of thinking and innovating together is already proving sustainable (Look at the human genome project) and businesses who are tuning onto the opportunity are setting the standard for a new social business model that puts customers inside their products/service development process. These businesses tap into the human processor at the core of it’s workforce and free peoples minds to dream and create better products and services.

The winners and losers in business are borne out by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams who suggest in their seminal book ‘Wikinomics’, when web properties are compared. The difference is the losers build websites, and the winners build vibrant communities i.e wiki beat britannica, Blogger beat CNN, Craigslist beat Monster and Googlemaps beat MapQuest. The losers build walled gardens the winners public squares.

Millennials will form over half the available workforce by 2014, and it is they who will set the bar for their employers.

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