Service Network are hosting an event that 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.

Date: Thursday 21st October 2010
Time: 9:00am – 12:00pm

Location: Wynyard Park, Wynyard Avenue, Billingham, Tees Valley, TS22 5TB view map

Mark Easby of brand agency Better will expertly guide you through the key areas you need to understand in today’s digital world:

Why you need to develop your digital footprint.

How to listen to the internet – how to find out where your audience is and what they are talking about.

How to join in – what choices you have to make, how to think strategically and why you have to be committed to the task.

What to do when your audience talks to you – you need to learn how to develop a conversation.

How to measure your channels.

How to drive your audience to your database – how e-mail marketing, search engine optimisation, campaign planning and public relations all link in to your digital footprint.

How to stay ahead of the competition.

After this event, you will go back into your business and start listening, engaging, interacting, recording, sharing and discussing digital information in a very human way.  You will 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.

Better is an agency specialising in brand, design, marketing and social media campaigns.  Mark is heavily involved with clients ranging from start up businesses through to national brands.

Cost: Free to Service Network members, £35 + VAT to non members.

Please contact Sarah Willan on 0191 244 4031 or book online at http://www.service-network.co.uk/events/34

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.

Website: http://www.freshfayre.co.uk

Established over 20 years ago, Freshfayre is a rapidly growing delivered foodservice distributor offering a nationwide service from its central depot in Leeds and seven satellite depots across the country.

The company specialises mainly in chilled foods and offers both van sales and a standard telesales with a delivery service to a wide range of catering establishments including schools, universities, retailers & independent café and sandwich bars.

Project Details.

Website Design, Web Development, Bespoke CMS Development, SEO.

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As with any business in a recession charities need to be where their audience is or they run the risk of being left behind, and it’s clear some smaller charities are struggling to change lanes and adopt social media as a key part of their strategy. Some charities, however, have made the leap and have been reaping the rewards of new social opportunities.

Age Concern with partner Innocent Smooties developed ‘The Big Knit’. Started in 2003 the campaign has raised, to date, over £600k for older people in the colder winter months. The campaign now includes Flickr, YouTube and Blog channels which enable the people who’ve got behind the campaign to be part of the story. Clever widgets such as the ‘Hatometer’, which can be embedded into supporters blogs and websites, shows how many hats have been knitted so far.The founder of the Charity: Water, a not-for-profit dedicated to bringing clean water to impoverished villages in Africa, got an e-mail from Amanda Rose, a British woman who wanted to test the idea that Twitter, with its 30 million users, might be able to raise money. Twestivals were set up by local volunteers of Twitter users in 200 cities across the world who organised parties, concerts and gathering raising $250,000 in four days (check out http://newcastle.twestival.com for the North East Twestival). The Twestival ethos has been picked up by local Twitter users who have used the concept to raise money for local charities.

Macmillan Cancer Support What’s New? community was developed to build a support network around both the charity, cancer sufferers and their families. It shares information, provides a forum for people to share experiences, ask questions and connect with each other. They also use it to highlight events and campaigns, recruit volunteers and raise money.

The key is using the community around the charity to develop valuable social capital in a win, win scenario. The charity wins because it reaches a much wider audience with its message and hits its campaign target, the partner/sponsor wins because it leverages its brand in innovative positive ways to new audiences. The community wins because it gets behind a charity, has fun and raises much needed cash.

So, how can smaller charities and not-for-profits with far less resources use social media?

Firstly, it’s important to understand that pretty much everything a charity currently does to raise awareness, educate and raise money is transposable and can be given real power with some essential social media tools.

Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Flickr and YouTube are key tools for getting your message out there and getting people to follow, and be part of, charity activities. Each channel can be set up easily and provide a digital presence for the charity as well as offering separate pages for individual campaigns. Together they can significantly improve the overall visibility of the charity online and help develop a diverse support community around the charity. Having corporate sponsors of your social media channels also provides sponsorship opportunities that can generate revenue for the charity.

Twitter, the micro blogging platform, is superb at building a charity’s profile and that of the people who work within it. To get the most out of Twitter here’s a couple  things to consider before setting up a profile for your charity.

- Define “influence” (What do you want to say)
- Establish Your Angle (Who are you targeting)
- Make it Easy to Get Involved
- Do not use Twitter to BROADCAST your brand message
- Focus Beyond Tweets, send people to where they can join you or donate

Engage with people. Social capital, the good you generate by connecting with people and sharing knowledge, ideas and thoughts is at the heart of social media. The amount you give of yourself is comparable to what will come back to you when you need help promoting your charity, events or campaigns. Find out where you target audience is and connect with them.

Once you’ve connected, be active. Think about what your audience wants from you, what interests to them and talk about it. It should be a mix of information relating to the charities activities, events you’re organising, the people of the organisation  (The volunteers and staff etc.) getting on with the good work of the charity. Be opinionated, but don’t broadcast, it’s not about pushing your message down people’s throats.

Social media has the ability to reach people you’re not even aware of, who might be looking to contribute their time or donations to a charity like yours. If you’re campaigning make you messages to the point and desirable. The idea is to hook people (capture their interest and make them want to pass your message onto their friends) into your message and send them via a link to your website or micro site for the big hitting message, which charities have never had trouble coming up with!

Be personal. People like to talk to people, so give your staff the encouragement to talk about the charity’s good work on their own social platforms, educate them as to what is acceptable and preferable, and release them to drive your message to their friends, families and peers.

Taking donations online. Building donation widgets into your website, blogs and social media platforms is easy to do and offers charities the chance to gather donations when you’re talking about your cause or campaign. Facebook for instance accounts for 20% of JustGiving’s revenues, so getting on the right platforms can enable you to tap into valuable, sustainable new revenue streams.

JustGiving, Mgive, Everyclick, Myspace Impact are just a few of the corporate donation models available. Some are free, some charge a set up fee and a percentage of the donations it processes on your behalf, but all give you the opportunity to press for a donation at the point of impact, when people are feeling inspired or touched by what you are trying to achieve.

So, opportunity is still abundant in difficult times. Smaller charities with less resources can take a great deal from the execution of social media campaigns by other charities, which are well documented online. SlideShare, the online resource for presentations on every topic under the sun, lists over 1800 presentation regarding charities using social media. Start there and find ways to reach more people, publicise events and raise money.

The edges of our media space are expanding faster than our ability to make sense of them, of new technologies, of how people use them and of the shake out, that will mean some old media will fall by the wayside.

But this is an unravelling story seen from two very different perspectives. The user, swept along by the rush of the crowd to try new media, to make that media fit their lifestyle and the marketer, trying to position a brand where its’ target customer is.

We are at this juncture, living through exciting and yet worrying times because history repeatedly reminds us that the intervening years between the birth of something new and it being fully realised, is a path marked with successes and failures in equal measure.

It is our fear of failure that plays into the hands of those who make their living trying to predict the future we marketers so desperately want to know about.

A recent TimesOnline article has marketers raving about the simple insights of a young man, who whist on work experience wrote a short paper on how teenagers use media. According to him, teenagers (boys mainly) use their games console for conversations, not their mobiles, which incidentally is primarily used for text and music. They don’t read newspapers, preferring instead to get their news online and they don’t buy movies or music, seeing nothing wrong in pirate DVD’s and peer-to-peer downloads.

And what about teenage girls? I speak from experience here as I have a teenage daughter, who has Facebook, MSN and YouTube open simultaneously on her laptop and only uses her mobile or ipod for music / texting whenever she is on the move, and disconnected from her laptop.

What surprised me about this article wasn’t necessarily the insights it revealed, it was the reaction of people to these insights. It was like the volume had been turned up by this young man and for the first time these marketers could hear the authentic voice of a generation.

Who can really know where we’re going; the futurists, the edge dwellers and technology hipsters?

Egos and reputations are at stake, which makes people, who in their time gave us clarity and made sense of where we were, look further and further ahead, not for us this time but to cement their own reputations, their own place in history. They fixate on new worlds, where they can coin new phrases, name new movements and re-claim their place in media folklore. They change the language (For no other reason it seems than that’s what they feel the world expects of them) from social to collaborate to individual and so on.

I don’t have much time for them to be honest. As a user I’m loving living through the revolution and as a Marketer I’m busy trying to make sense of the changing world for our clients and helping them understand how their brand engages their customer across social media spaces.

And what will win through in the end. Which media will still be around when this revolution reaches it zenith? Well history also has a lesson to teach us about this too. New technology is only revealed in retrospect to be turning points in a revolution.

So we need to accept we’re as bound to get it wrong as we are to get it right, so move forward or be prepared to get left behind. Enjoy being part of history in the making, leave the future to the generations to come after us.

A FLEDGLING digital agency in Stokesley has pledged to remain a local company for local people as it expands from its base in the Tees Valley.

Established last year, Better Brand Agency (BBA) is looking to hit £1m turnover in three years. Run by industry brand expert Declan Metcalfe and Teesside graduates Mark Easby and Peter Jones, the firm specialises in brand, marketing and social media campaigns and works with clients across the North-east and Yorkshire.
Managing director Mark Easby said the company was firmly behind the Digital City project, a 25-year game plan to position Tees Valley as a world-class digital super-cluster to rival others across the globe.

He said: “I hate to see local graduates get on a train to London or Manchester when they finish their degree. I would like to see graduates from outside the area come to Tees Valley.”

He said he would consider opening satellite offices in other parts of the country but “we will manage projects from Tees Valley”. The trio formed the company after their bid to buy out their former employer, Middlesbrough agency Calm Asylum, had foundered.

See Interview of the Week with Mark Easby in www.nebusiness.co.uk next Tuesday.

 

Social Media Funnel

I’ve seen lots of social media maps, some good some not so good.

The problem is they sit there in lofty isolation, a sea of mostly unfamiliar names and quirky identities.  They are a secret cypher known only to social media cool kids it seems. These maps are not connected to the real world (The one in which hard pressed marketing professionals are fighting hard for their budgets and their jobs) in any recognisable way. We’re missing an opportunity here and, if we’re honest, being a little bit condescending to boot. Another thing, social media buzz words are such a crock! Real people don’t talk like that!

So here’s something all marketing and sales professionals understand, ‘The Funnel’. Everyone, more or less goes through the same process of Awareness (I have a need), Consideration (Evaluate the alternatives), Preference (The sum of looking and listening to arrive at a decision) and finally Action (Satisfying the need).

I though it might be useful therefore to visualise how a number of social media channels working together (The list isn’t exhaustive by the way) can help sign post people through the funnel to some meaningful action connected to your brand, product or service.

Of course there is always a note of caution. Social media channels have to be aligned to target audience, and that means you have to get inside the minds and lives of the audience and build the right channels. The “If you build it they will come” attitude to building social media channels wont work and will more likely damage your brand.

WHAT’S all the buzz around social media?

The explosion that is social media came about due to the convergence of three forces: people, technology and economics. People wanted to talk, and technology caught up to the extent that it became possible to connect to friends in real time using a multitude of devices. These are made affordable because the infrastructure is now in place making it easily accessible to the vast majority.

The easiest way to think of social media, I believe, is as a conversation that millions of people are having, one that’s growing louder as more and more voices join in. And guess what the topics are: they are talking about you, your brand, your product and your services.

This is no flash in the pan either; it’s a sea change that businesses have to get to grips with.

At no point so far have you seen it referred to here as a sales channel, but it can be. Companies, Dell for instance, have successfully developed a sales channel that uses social media channels to tap into its consumer base. Don’t rush to the phone and call your digital agency and ask for one just yet though. Dell spent years building trust and putting real people in the firing line to take on customer issues, being visible and saying, “Hey, we’re here and we’re listening.”

We are a discerning bunch who regularly use social media. We like to be informed, entertained but not, I repeat not, overtly sold too. The number of companies I see tweeting “I’m thinking up great ideas to promote my online store at www……….” Please, show me some respect, some originality, some idea that you know who I am and what I like.

I advise people to listen, listen, listen before they engage with social media. Discover where your customers are online. What tools do they use? Are they creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators or inactive in social media? Without this understanding you could invest time and energy in creating a forum and discover that your customers are predominately spectators who like to read but not contribute to online conversations.

Clever businesses are developing listening strategies that harvest feedback and provide fresh insights into what their target audience is thinking. They are talking with their audience, taking down the corporate wall and getting closer to the people who buy their products and use their services.

It is these companies, the ones taking social media seriously as a tool – opposed to a frivolous distraction their employees spend too long using – that will reap the benefits.

——- ENDS ——-

Declan Metcalfe is marketing director of Stokesley-based Better Brand Agency (www.betterbrandagency.com).

For more information about our Brand Graphic Design and Creative, Marketing, Social Media and Social Networking,  Web and Digital services please Contact the Better team.

We’ve entered the digital supplier – Best Social Media Optomisation Campaign category, so fingers crossed we get something. Anyone can vote in the awards so use you click and support us.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR US IN THE NORTH EAST DIGITAL AWARDS.

Why do we need a social media presence?

• Increase customer base.

• Build awareness.

• Establish thought leadership.

• Educate customers.

• Customer-source part of your product development to try new ideas.

• Reach new channels of customers.

• Improve internal communication.

Manage Objections. (Thanks to Pistachio Consulting for the following excellent arguments which I’ve used alongside my own thoughts)

Here are five objections (budget, audience size, loss of control, priorities and uncertainty) and ways you can address them:

Budget

Before committing to any budget expenditure adopt a listening strategy to help people understand where conversations are happening online and what topics around your brand and services are being discussed. Arm yourself with evidence that people (Customers) are talking about the services you provide and your company is missing out by not joining in.

Don’t limit yourself to a new “social media” budget, and don’t even remain within the confines of marketing, publicity and other outbound communications. Social tools can make substantive contributions across the organisation —HR, R&D, project management, customer service, administration, IT

Taking this idea one step further, be as clear as you can about the value or potential value social tools can contribute within each of these areas. What can be done less expensively or more profitably?

Audience Size

The audience value proposition just does NOT work the same way old school “tonnage based” advertising via expensive mainstream media buys always did. You’re not just trying to scoop up tons and tons and tons of eyeballs, hoping to extract actual business results out of some crap small percentage of those that you “reach.” Things can be more closely targeted and more tightly mapped onto fundamental metrics of business success. “Tons of eyeballs” metrics at their best are usually just proxies for “a hope of selling more.”Three takeaways about social media/social networking audience sizes:

It’s Social media and social networking audiences are growing fast.

Even small audiences that are well-targeted or influencers are quite valuable.

Off-platform benefits.You’re not always just trying to reach the direct audience. On Twitter in particular, we see massive applicability and advantages in SEO, market knowledge, word-of-mouth “passability”to others outside of the platform, and as a content-generation engine the pulls together flows of content that can be displayed and syndicated using widgets and other RSS-based tools.

If you want to get a handle on demographics you might try using a profile tool like the one developed by Forrester. You can at least see what percentage of your audience are likely to be Creators, Critics, Collectors, Spectators, Joiners or Inactive and therefore gauge where your company can engage with its audience.

Loss of Control

You can argue that they’ve already lost control. You can argue that they never even *had* control. Instead, underscore the increase in learning. Companies can learn an incredible about of information about their products, their customers unarticulated wants and needs, how to make it easier for customers to buy, how to serve customers better, and THAT’S just talking about the customers. This magnitude and value of learning is also available for the engineers, the researchers, the manufacturers —compare notes, parse problem-solving, crowdsource and figure out more, faster.

Priorities

Get laser focused on management’s existing business problems and pains. Apply the tools and opportunities you know about to the priorities they know they already have. Be very diagnostic in understanding and maturely articulating what could be achieved and how.

Uncertainty

Don’t forget, this stuff can be really SCARY. That’s okay. Encourage them to take a flexible stance, to start dipping their toes in, and to remain learning-focused whether or not they are ready to jump in whole hog.

Yes, ideally, the company should start to respond and manage its message contributions as soon as there are issues to respond to. But I don’t buy that they should not engage in formal listening until they’re ready to engage in formal responding. In many cases, the longer they listen first, the better their response skills will be.

If something major breaks, by all means address it, but it’s MORE important that the listening period not be delayed by fears over how the company can respond. It’s NOT okay to clap hands over eyes and ears just because the mouth – and corporate mind – need more time to prepare.

Why do all of this?

The relationship between you and the reader is one-to-one. In time it creates a bond of trust which over time they share with their peer groups and keeping your customers close to you in economically uncertainty times should be a priority for everyone.

Contact the Better team to discuss how we can support your Social Media project. Better Brand Agency is a brand agency offering brand, graphic design, marketing, social media and social networking, web and digital services based in Tees Valley, North East and North Yorkshire.

We have been working on some graphics and web buttons to help spread the word, and these will be online very soon. For more information the TyneTwestival please visit http://newcastle.twestival.com where you can buy tickets online, or follow @tynetwestival on Twitter.

Better Brand Agency is a brand agency offering brand, graphic design, marketing, social media and social networking, web and digital services based in Tees Valley, North East and North Yorkshire.