By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer

Does your company pro-actively engage in social media? Or are you running behind the rest of pack wondering what all the fuss is about? The evolution of Social Media BPO has seen providers helping their clients to pro-actively engage in social media to raise brand awareness, improve service levels and generate sales.

In the past many organisations have either adopted a reactive approach to social media – “we’ll look at things when someone says something nasty about us”, have been highly resistant to it or have allocated it to the marketing department to look after. Many have struggled to understand the risks and opportunities associated with social media and lack plans on how to avert reputation mishaps or lost productivity. Many have avoided social media altogether, trying to avoid criticism in a public domain.

Chris Luxford, President of Aegis Services Australia, comments, “ When it comes to engagement with the customer we’re operating in a
multi-channel environment, whether that’s via telephony, email, the web and so on. Social Media, though it has its own challenges and benefits , is just a natural extension of that. “

“While social media provides a very powerful marketing channel, you would not hand off all email or telephony interactions with your customers to the marketing department. To successfully engage in and manage social media interactions you need to build a comprehensive plan and an enterprise wide set of guidelines and policies.”

Good social media policies are organisation-specific, but must take into consideration the form, substance, philosophy and culture of the organisation. To help them many organisations are turning to the services of organisation who understand their culture and ways of doing business – their BPO providers.

The Social Media BPO market is small but it is growing. According to the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Social Media Examiner thirty percent of social media marketers outsource at least some of their efforts, which is up from 14% for 2010 and 7% for 2009.

Research from the Everest Group highlights how over the past year or so, BPO providers have invested heavily in tools and capabilities needed to help their clients better understand consumer sentiments and behavior, as well as influencers’ thinking, and then achieve greater effectiveness in responding to this market feedback.

BPO providers are starting to deliver a broad range of services, from social media monitoring to business intelligence and analytics. They are actively engaging and managing social media interactions on behalf of their clients, helping them overcome many of the challenges and issues they’ve face with social media engagement.

Armed with an array of analytical tools, Social media allows customer service agents to respond directly to tweets or Facebook posts within minutes.As an example, Aegis Services offers something they call Intervention Analytics. “If someone has a bad social media situation or something dramatic with a competitor has occurred, we can conduct in-depth analytics in real time and provide immediate recommendations to the client why and how they should respond”, says Luxford.

As the BPO matures, and growth in traditional areas slows down, providers are looking for new opportunities for growth and ways to differentiate themselves. To this end Social Media and analytics have emerged as potential hot topic areas for BPO. Genpact recently announced its acquisition of EmPower Research, and Capgemini has forged a relationship with Attensity, both of which are social media monitoring and analytics firms.

Luxford believes, “Analytics is where the true value is. Big data analytics is a phenomenal opportunity for every organisation. I contend that while many organisations are using their data most aren’t using it effectively.”

“Big data analytics state that you don’t just use the information you get from your internal information systems. It also contends that you have to use data from external sources. Social media is a very good opportunity to bring in some external data to enable you to understand customer behaviour and create personalised interactions with them.”

The reasons for engaging in Social Media are compelling. Knowing what people are saying about your brand, you can take control of the conversation and improve service accordingly. As reluctance to engage with it fades, more and more organisations will turn to their BPO providers to help them manage their social media channels. Critical to the success of these ventures will be the analytical resources the
BPO provider can bring to the task. It’s the analytics where the true value will be created.

By Kirsty Simpson

Millions of Australians have ”friended” their favourite brand on Facebook or downloaded related apps or done product research online; the old-fashioned supermarket recipe cards have been updated with online video and other content; department stores are sponsoring fashion blogging.

The motivation of marketing and advertising remains the same – sell the product – but the way in which Australian companies craft and sell their message has been revolutionised with the ubiquity of the internet – at work, at home and on the move.

Weekend Business spoke to five leading marketing directors at some of Australia’s largest companies: Telstra, Commonwealth Bank, Coles, Unilever and Myer. And the men and women who control the purse strings behind the advertising and marketing dollar see a huge shift in the way they communicate with their customers.

In the space of just two or three years, there has been a tectonic shift in some of the country’s biggest marketing budgets towards online.
Andy Lark, the chief marketing officer for the Commonwealth Bank and a leading thinker in the field, estimates that 40-45 per cent of the bank’s advertising-marketing budget will have shifted to digital by the end of this year. At Telstra, 30-35 per cent of the budget has moved online. In the retail sector, Myer is doubling its spend each year, although from a low base.

Traditional advertising campaigns will continue to have an important place, particularly for mass market food retailers such as Coles, but the shift online is inevitable as consumers are now connected to the internet everywhere they go.

While the nation’s advertisers initially moved online more slowly than counterparts in Britain and the US, local online advertising spend is tipped to reach $3 billion this year, or more than 20 per cent of the total market. By 2015, it is forecast to rise to $4.13 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. This compares to a total advertising spend in Australia of $13.4 billion last year. A recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers report had online advertising overtaking free-to-air television and newspapers by late next year.

As Lark puts it: ”All roads lead to digital. The most important medium to us is digital because we have the most to learn [there] every single day.”

Megan Foster, from Myer: ”I’ve been around for a long time. These are not different challenges – it’s about where the consumer is at. But [the consumer] is consuming media differently. I’ve been in marketing for 20 years and this is the most amount of change I have seen. I am learning at a more rapid rate about marketing than [ever before].”

While most of the companies Weekend Business spoke to for this article declined to declare their total advertising and media spending, the researcher Nielsen tracks individual company advertising (although its figures include only display advertising, which makes up just a third of digital spending). It showed that on average, these companies’ spending on the two biggest categories declined dramatically. Spending on metropolitan television dropped 22.2 per cent in the year to November last year, to $105.5 million, and 15 per cent for metropolitan press to $84.5 million.

At the moment no independent group monitors all types of online spending, but Nielsen says the amount of money these companies spent on online display advertising rose 11 per cent to $16.3 million over the same period.

As Mark Buckman, the chief marketing officer at Telstra, says, last year was ”the year digital needed to disappear from marketers’ vernacular because there was significant enough penetration of digital technology and devices and channels for it just to become another part of the communication mix.

”So [the general trend is] a broad mix of media channels but a shift towards those more electronic channels as eyeballs have gone there. I don’t see that as a statement of the deterioration of traditional media – I think there is still a very strong role for broadcast television, for out of home, for newspapers even. But the pie’s the pie, and it’s not getting any bigger.”

What was clear is that social media has in some ways eroded the distinction between traditional ”advertising” and broader promotional and marketing activity. A few words on Facebook can dramatically boost an otherwise traditional promotion.

Andy Lark cited a recent push to attract more customers to open Commonwealth Bank savings accounts. The promotion involved offering one double cinema pass a month for 12 months. After promoting it on Facebook, the bank achieved its target of 4500 new customers within days, rather than the weeks it might have taken before the digital age.

As digital becomes mainstream, the key buzzwords are ”omni-channels” and ”integration”, which in laymen’s terms means that marketers must ensure their message is in complementary media and at the appropriate time, rather than the structured media schedules that saw everything begin with TV and end with a digital component such as the collection of data.

The manner in which that integration is achieved obviously depends on the product or service.

For Coles, its highly successful relationship with MasterChef is a case in point. When it began four years ago it was a television and product placement campaign; it now involves a substantial instore promotion and online recipe demonstrations. ”What’s different [today] is that obviously there’s a social media piece to that now. And then there’s using the Coles stores to reinforce the message and that’s massive – chefs in stores, fresh food. What started as a fairly one-dimensional relationship in the beginning has become richer and deeper across all sorts of platforms, across social, in the stores,” marketing boss Simon McDowell says.

”Recipes are a good example … If you look at feed the family under $10, with [celebrity chef] Curtis Stone. In the beginning it was Curtis talking on TV about how you can feed the family for under $10 and pick up a printed recipe card in the store. You still can today, but now as well as that you can see Curtis cooking every recipe in a video online at coles.com.au, on Facebook and on YouTube. We know, as an example, [that] our customers pick up about 2.5 million of those cards alone.

”If you go back two years, the electronic version of the feed the family campaign wasn’t there apart from a TV advertisement, and now you have all of this.”

As traditional companies experiment with the huge variety of advertising and promotions available online – new apps, games, blogging and other new approaches – for Australia’s leading marketers, it was important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

”I see people who must be spending millions of dollars in the space and the way they are telling that story has zero cut-through. And they are spending millions! They must be wasting their money. You have to get the cut-through and the branding,” McDowell says.

While no one would proffer an example of a poorly executed online strategy, one frequently cited elsewhere is PepsiCo’s experiment in 2010 to move up to half of its US advertising spend into social media, turning its back what is normally considered the most attractive media opportunity of the year, the Super Bowl and its 111 million viewers. (Advertisers last year paid $3 million for a 30-second slot.) By March 2011, The Wall Street Journal was reporting sales of Pepsi and Diet Pepsi had fallen 5 per cent.

Beyond the pitfalls of new media strategies and ignoring the unchanged basics of marketing, social media is also shifting the power relationship between buyer and seller. Social media is now regularly used and as a space to praise, recommend – or condemn – products or service. More than two-thirds of Facebook users post remarks about products and companies each month, a Nielsen report found recently. And 60 per cent ”liked” a company due to a friend’s post in the last month, while 51 per of Facebook users and 67 per cent of Twitter users said they w ere more likely to buy since becoming a fan or a follower.

”Now suddenly we are having to manage other people transmitting stuff about us, and that’s not something we are used to because we have traditionally controlled all the communications channels,” Lark told a marketing conference recently.

”The power has shifted. This is a really big idea that most marketers are still struggling with. We are entering the transparent age, where there are no secrets.”

Read more: Sydney Morning Herald

The Employer Branding Conference, an annual event where extraordinary employer and employee brand experts, HR and career professionals come together for learning, peer interaction, and inspirational seminars, begins at 11:00 a.m. on May 10th and features Jenny DeVaughn, Manager Social Media at Waste Management, Dan Black, Americas Director Campus Recruiting at Ernst & Young, Brian Rolfes, Partner, Director of Global Recruiting at McKinsey & Co. and Victoria Berger-Ross, Senior Vice President, Global Human Resources at Tiffany & Co., among others. Presentation topics include best practices for social media, employer branding, and employee engagement.

For more information about the CEO Panel visit: http://employerbrandingconference.com/speakers

This month in the IBM® Social Business Xchange information series IBM are offering two related resources, a White Paper on Measuring Social Software,
and a video case study featuring the AFL: Become a Social Business

Social media is often touted as being free. While many of the tools such as Facebook and Twitter are free, social media is time and labor intensive. The cost of devising and implementing a successful social media strategy that gets results is anything but free.

Social Ally, a new social media support service led by Sally Falkow and Chris Abraham, has released figures that show what social media can actually cost. Social media is fast becoming more than just a part of the marketing and PR mix.

Companies are realizing they need to integrate social engagement into employee relations, hiring, customer service, risk management and product development. This means hiring social media savvy people in many roles across the organization, or putting a dedicated social media team in place to manage the integration.

To plan and effectively implement a social media strategy would require the services of a social media strategist. Most social media strategy consultants charge between $100 and $300 an hour.

If one were hired full time a company would probably have to pay between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. A community manager will cost between $50,000 and $75,000 a year. EConsultancy Social Media Salary Guide in the top 20 US markets Successful engagement across the organization means staff have to be trained. An in-house social media manual and online training course would be around $10,000 and hiring a trainer for on-site workshops will cost anywhere from $1500 – $10,000 a day, depending on who is hired.

Companies could be looking at $250K

Dashboard and monitoring tools could be another $30,000 – $80,000 a year.

Technology costs — blogs, mini sites, video equipment, custom Facebook tabs and apps, online newsroom and mobile apps could be anywhere from as little as $5,000 to as much as $100,000. Take it all into account and a company could be looking at a quarter of a million dollars a year!

Yes, many successful programs have been done for much less, but when calculating ROI it’s wise to look at the big picture and include all the hidden time and labor costs, in order to get the real cost of investment and see the actual return.

“These figures make outsourcing some of the social media support activities an attractive proposition,” says Falkow.

“Engagement and conversation has to be done by people in the company. That’s what social media is all about — conversations between the people in a company and their stakeholders. But engagement is the tip of the social media iceberg: 75% of the work is in the research, monitoring and content creation — and that can be outsourced.”

Social Ally is a group of experienced social media experts with a team of designers, developers, writers, researchers and analysts who are well-versed in social media support activities. With the right social media support team behind you it is possible to maintain successful results with a lean and mean in-house social media team and keep the costs down.

Where Smart Money Meets Smart People.
www.seventure.org
© 2012, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.

By Gareth Pritchard, CEO of BPeSA Western Cape

Over the past 12 months, social media has developed into the core of customer service as several of the world’s largest BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) operators were forced to evolve their business.

Traditional customer service has undergone a metamorphosis. This development, driven by changing consumer behaviour, sees customers chairing the conversation. Previously, the onus fell on customers to locate the relevant person to assist with their queries, but social media subverted this paradigm.

The BPO industry primarily focuses on optimising processes, and this is exactly what social media enables. Why phone a customer service line if you are going to be referred back and forth between three different people? Social media allows customer service agents to respond directly to tweets or Facebook posts within minutes. Hence, companies and customers save time and money.

According to Rohit Kapoor, Capgemini BPO Senior Director and Principal, a recent study revealed 86% of respondents indicated they preferred responses via social media platform.

As customer service providers it seems logical you would listen to your customers. Too many companies prefer to avoid social media, trying to avoid criticism in a public domain.

But, in every risk lies opportunity. Knowing what people are saying about your brand, you can take control of the conversation and improve service accordingly. If customers cannot find a platform to voice their complaints they will create their own, just ask Telkom or SAA.

Fagri Semaar, Teleperformance South Africa MD, says social media is a key component of the group’s global strategy and all call centres should look into integrating it. “As a company you need to be where your customers are and more importantly where your customers feel comfortable interacting. In South Africa, we have been a bit slow to react to this change, but in 2012 I am confident that we will see a marked change driven by the BPO operators.”

There are several local and international examples of companies using social media to improve customer service processes. In South Africa, some of the biggest local brands, including FNB and Vodacom, have built massive online followings.

Despite their relative success, internationally is where the business market has truly harnessed social media. The American Express Twitter account has to-date built a community of over 225 000 followers and has become the primary customer contact line.

Animesh Jain, BPO company 24×7 Customer Chief Delivery Officer, said in a recent interview that his company has realised the importance of an effective social media team in place, “We have hired over 1000 employees for social and interactive media careers in the past nine months. Careers in social media management offer candidates a unique opportunity to be part of reshaping the future of customer service as they learn to support emerging digital trends for Fortune 500 companies, using cutting-edge, predictive technology.”

Jain feels it is high time BPOs provide their customers with more just voice services. “A lot of challenges can be surpassed through social interaction on the web. There is huge opportunity in this area for companies like us,” he concludes.

The future of customer service is integrated convenience. Depending on the scale and nature of a problem, multiple channels will be used to ensure customers a positive experience.

Shifting operations will ensure the future contact centre agent will no longer be regarded as unskilled labour, but rather a specialised job function. Changing this sort of thinking will result in an increase in the number of businesses looking to outsource customer service to industry experts. By doing this they will be able to focus more on their core business.

Gareth Pritchard, BPeSA Western Cape CEO

Social media is often touted as being free. While many of the tools such as Facebook and Twitter are free, social media is time and labor intensive. The cost of devising and implementing a successful social media strategy that gets results is anything but free. Social Ally, a new social media support service led by Sally Falkow and Chris Abraham, has released figures that show what social media can actually cost.

Social media is fast becoming more than just a part of the marketing and PR mix. Companies are realizing they need to integrate social engagement into employee relations, hiring, customer service, risk management and product development. This means hiring social media savvy people in many roles across the organization, or putting a dedicated social media team in place to manage the integration.

To plan and effectively implement a social media strategy would require the services of a social media strategist. Most social media strategy consultants charge between $100 and $300 an hour. If one were hired full time a company would probably have to pay between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. A community manager will cost between $50,000 and $75,000 a year. EConsultancy Social Media Salary Guide in the top 20 US markets.

Successful engagement across the organization means staff has to be trained. An in-house social media manual and online training course would be around $10,000 and hiring a trainer for on-site workshops will cost anywhere from $1500 – $10,000 a day, depending on who is hired.

Dashboard and monitoring tools could be another $30,000 – $80,000 a year. Technology costs — blogs, mini sites, video equipment, custom Facebook tabs and apps, online newsroom and mobile apps could be anywhere from as little as $5,000 to as much as $100,000.

Take it all into account and a company could be looking at a quarter of a million dollars a year! Yes, many successful programs have been done for much less, but when calculating ROI it’s wise to look at the big picture and include all the hidden time and labor costs, in order to get the real cost of investment and see the actual return.

“These figures make outsourcing some of the social media support activities an attractive proposition,” says Falkow. “Engagement and conversation has to be done by people in the company. That’s what social media is all about — conversations between the people in a company and their stakeholders. But engagement is the tip of the social media iceberg: 75% of the work is in the research, monitoring and content creation — and that can be outsourced.”

Social Ally is a group of experienced social media experts with a team of designers, developers, writers, researchers and analysts who are well-versed in social media support activities. With the right social media support team behind you it is possible to maintain successful results with a lean and mean in-house social media team and keep the costs down.

About Social Ally The Social Ally team is led by Sally Falkow and Chris Abraham, who are both Digital PR and social media veterans. Sally Falkow, named PR Trainer of the Year for her social media and Digital PR classes, was one of the first Digital PR and social media evangelists in the US. She started her Digital PR consultancy in 2000. Chris Abraham, listed as the #3 social media influencer in the US in 2011, has been active in this field even longer. Chris has both technical and marketing/PR knowledge and is known for his innovative blogger outreach and social intelligence research. The outsource team is headed up by Jamella Santos who has been operating outsourcing operations for many years and has the process and project management systems down cold. To find out more about the Social Ally team and how we can support your social media efforts visit www.social-ally.com

Download the PDF:
https://socialally.basecamphq.com/projects/8675660/file/110618189/Version%202.pdf

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By: Lori Ann LaRocco
CNBC Sr. Talent Producer

With the U.S. economy slowly recovering, the President laid out his agenda to sparking job creation and incentivizing businesses to hire in this State of the Union Address. One of the ideas the President has recently spoken about is encouraging companies to hire domestically rather than send jobs overseas.

One of those companies heading the call for such job expansion is Iowa-based business process outsourcing (BPO) service company Caleris. Founder Rick Grewell explained how his cornhusker company is growing and fielding calls from around the world.

LL: We have been hearing a lot about the insourcing of jobs. You started your company with just 25 employees. How many employees do you have now as more companies are scaling down their workforce but still need that customer support?

SO: We now have 300 employees. That’s organic growth. No acquisitions. We have a very small sales force and we are growing more out of word of mouth than a sales campaign.

We approximately serve 70 companies. We specialize in technology companies, broadband products and providers and high end consumer electronics. High-end software products, between 80 percent of our business?

LL: How do you stay competitive with India?

SO: That’s kind the meat of it. It’s mainly labor arbitrage. While India may offer 70% savings and we offer 50% savings, the quality of the call is what wins over the customer. For example, the length of our call is 50% shorter and that 50% negates the price the savings India. First call resolution is higher as well. Based on this, our customer satisfaction is in the low 90′s while in India, the satisfaction rate is in the 50% range. That’s based on public surveys we have reviewed.

LL: Given the global economic landscape, is that providing an opportunity for your company to entice other countries to outsource to us?

SO: We support several Japanese and European suppliers. Between 8-10 companies overseas.

LL: You provide services for call centers, social media monitoring and back office support. What is growing the fastest?

SO: We’re best known for the call centers for tech support. But an area that is growing is social media monitoring. Someone needs to look at the social media uploads, images, words that are going up online.
Software can only do so much. You need a human being to monitor as well. Software can eliminate some things when it comes to photo image uploads. Software flags the image but it can’t replace a real human being.

LL: Social Media is still new, what are the emerging trends and what advice can you offer businesses in protecting their online branding and presence?

SO: Don’t assume all the uploads are legitimate. You need to monitor user generated images. Photo sharing sites are a great example. Ad agencies that have contests have to keep a close eye on the data and imagines on their sites. User generated content needs to be monitored because you can’t assume everything posted on there is on the up and up. It may be a small percentage that’s not, but you don’t want to have images on your site that will upset visitors or advertisers.

By Martin Conboy

Social media and collaboration is revolutionizing the way we collaborate. We know more about our friends, families, colleagues, customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, sporting associations and teams, fellow hobbyists and governments than ever before. This connectivity is self – perpetuating, as each new connection opens up a list of potential new contacts and information.

So says a new report about the future of work, “Preparing for the new normal: Social Media and collaboration technologies” commissioned by Optus a major Australian Telco.

The report goes on to say, “ The hype around social media may be distorting its evolution within business. Social platforms were born in the consumer world and business people can often find it hard to look past consumer uses (such as sharing a humorous video with friends) to see the collaborative potential of the underlying social media technology. This medium allows people to connect and share information globally, in real time and in a way that deeply engages the workforce.“

The report breaks the discussion about social media down into three areas.
• Web- based social media
• Social applications in the enterprise
• Information governance.

This week I attended an Optus roundtable discussion hosted by Robert Parcell, The MD of Optus’ Enterprise & Business group. As he unpacked the findings of the study he emphasized some key findings.

The research canvassed opinions from IT directors and HR directors in major corporations indicated that within the next 3 – 5 years there would be a significant increase in the use of employees personal devices that would be allowed to have access to enterprise networks. In Mr. Parcell’s opinion this would have the potential to encourage the proliferation of remote knowledge workers and people who may choose to work from home.

Mr. Parcell went on to explain that twice as many organisations will deploy customized mobile applications by 2015 than do so today. He cited an example of Optus’ “Smart Safe” (Optus Smart Safe is an online storage and backup service that gives you convenient access to your photos, music and documents any time) as the type of applications that companies will need to make workers more productive as they work and collaborate with colleagues from anywhere and at anytime.

As workers in the future may not always see each other in a physical sense the research indicated that information would be shared via internal discussion forums, blogs and wiki style portals. Although the report did not specifically address issues around outsourcing the inference is that by extension another layer of corporate governance will be required when an outsourcing strategy is deployed.

However, amongst all of this exciting new way of working with a mobile and flexible workforce there are a few challenges that will need to be addressed.

The research suggested that currently 50 percent of workers view flexible working hours as very important or essential with respect to recruitment and retention of staff, within five years this would blow out to 66 per cent.

There is no question that as we move through the demographic bubble and the baby boomers start to leave the work force, a more tech savvy, well educated and insistent workforce of Gen Y people will determine not only whom they will work for but also how they will work for them.

Currently only 21 per cent thought that it was very important or essential and were concerned about having a flexible working location, however that will accelerate to 46 per cent within 3 – 5 five years. So in short we will have 2/3 of the workforce wanting flexible working hours and ½ of the work force wanting to work from a location of their choice.

On top of this the report indicates that while only 10 per cent of the workforce want social media access in the work place today, however 30 per cent will demand in within 3- 5 years.

This is dramatic, after all what baby boomer manager who was not weaned on technology does not cast a jaundiced eye over a younger staff member who is using a social media platform at work. The question arises in the mind of the manager, “Is this work or play?”

As the manager is reaching for the indigestion and heartburn tablets, he starts to concern himself with other questions about security, malware and privacy. Mr. Parcell mused that some companies will not transition to this brave new world easily, as there are a lot of loose ends that need to be considered that may be beyond some manager’s ability to deploy.