By Richard Margetic - Dell’s social media guru

Social media is too hard, too scary or too ridiculous to waste time on. I hear these sentiments constantly from business owners of all ages. Of course, prolific users of social media probably find these attitudes archaic. But they are real – and more common that you’d expect.

For example, I recently met a business owner who runs a small nutrition practice. He told me that he studied Facebook for six months – researching what it does and how it works – before finally registering for an account. Six months! Seriously, Facebook is not akin to nuclear physics. It doesn’t require this level of study.

Similarly, I recently did a video interview with a business owner, profiling her work and products. At the end of the interview, she told me that she didn’t want it on YouTube. I was perplexed. She was happy for us to film, she saw us set up the cameras. I wondered if I had unwittingly offended her or if she was unhappy with the interview. It turns out that she thought the interview was just fine. “I just don’t want it on YouTube.”

Still confused, I asked if she cared if the video was uploaded to Vimeo, or Blip.TV or any of the other video-sharing sites. “Oh yes, that’s fine, just not YouTube. I don’t want to be with the silly cat videos.”

Sin #1: Overcomplicating social media

The incidents above illustrate that there is a clear lack of understanding of what social media is and, more importantly, how powerfully it can impact your business. It’s a trend that social media expert Richard Margetic often sees as well. Margetic is director of Dell’s Global Social Media. “Small business owners are afraid of social media because of a lack of knowledge but also a lack of familiarity with social media tools,” says Margetic, who was in Sydney earlier this week. “This develops an element of insecurity. They don’t want to jeopardise their business.”

Margetic says small business owners are also scared by social media horror stories that range from “stupidity” to those that spawn legal issues. “If common sense ruled, then Twitter would make sense to them,” he says matter-of-factly.

To this end, Dell has produced an updated version of it’s free resource “Social Media Toolkit: A guide to how small and medium businesses can make the most out of social media.”

Sin #2: Broadcast versus conversation

Margetic says that many business owners confuse social media with traditional marketing. That is, while they may understand that it’s a different channel, they don’t grasp the fundamental tenet that social media is a conversation.

“People look at social media like it’s a broadcast mechanism,” says Margetic. “That’s the wrong way of looking at it. And that means they’re missing the opportunity that social media brings to the table.”

You can see examples of small business owners who merely use it to “shout out” sales, promotions, marketing campaigns and company information. Social media users eventually tire of this approach, preferring to engage with businesses that take the time to interact with followers or customers.

“The benefit of social media is that it’s not one-way messaging. It’s a dialogue – you engage in conversations. Too many companies just use it as a way to broadcast campaigns…and that happens far more often than it should.”

Sin #3: Spray and pray

Too often, I see small business owners plunge headfirst into social media, because they know they need to “be there”, without a clear idea of where to expend their energy. Instead, they end up with accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and every other social networking platform out there. But few get traction because their efforts are spread too thinly thus leaving little opportunity to interact or engage. The “one-way broadcast” approach strikes again.

Margetic discusses two pillars that small business owners need to be aware of in order to make the most out of social media: value to the customer and value of the business. “You need to play in the area where they intersect,” he says.

So what does that actually mean? Margetic points out that you first need to determine the value of the social media interaction to the customer. “Understand the reasons why people are motivated to engage socially,” he says. “There could be any number of reasons: to create meaningful relationships; to be heard; to have meaningful interactions with others, and so on. All those things are what bring value to the customers.

“The other side is the value these interactions bring to the business. You need to understand the elements that drive your business – that could be anything from conversions, or web traffic and so on.

“When you focus on where the customer value intersects with the business value … that’s the core of being successful in social media.”

Sin #4: Talk then listen

Again, this underpins the concept that the biggest mortal social media sin is the one-way broadcast. Margetic says: “A fundamental truth about engaging with anyone in any situation you’re not familiar with is that you don’t lead by talking,” he says. “The very first thing you need to do is listen.”

Margetic emphasises that this is particularly true for anyone new to social media or unsure of how to develop a social media strategy. “If you listen, you will get all the signals you need to understand what your customers are talking about. You’ll understand the nuances and determine how to involve people in conversation.”

Sin #5: Assuming it costs a lot a lot of money

Clearly, a company like Dell has a big budget to spend on social media strategy and implementation. However, Margetic points out that you don’t need big dollars to embrace social media. “There are a lot of free ways to monitor conversations – using tools ranging from Google Alerts to Hootsuite. There are a number to monitor your social media presence that don’t require a dollar investment. It just requires time.”

This is where I see many business owners fall down. Many assume that mastering social media takes far longer than it really does. I spoke to a business owner last week who told me: “I know I need to understand social media. I just haven’t had the time. I’m going to do that when I’m next on holidays – I’ll have two weeks when I can immerse myself in it full-time so I can do it properly.” Honestly, it’s not rocket science. It won’t take you two weeks to understand this. (Granted, if you have 10,000 employees and need to train them in how to use social media, it’s a different story).

My personal advice to people is: just get on it. Lurk and observe. It’s like going to a party. If you’re new to a crowd, you don’t hog the limelight as soon as you walk in the room. Watch, listen and at some point you’ll be comfortable enough to join into the conversation. When that happens, the rest occurs naturally.

Sin #6: Get your tech priorities right

Margetic says he believes that commerce and social media will become inextricably combined. He also realises that late adopters may feel the need to embrace a range of new technologies at once.

While the desire to become tech-savvy is positive, it’s important to prioritise your efforts. “It’s a lot better to socialise an ecommerce site than it is to commercialise a social site,” says Margetic.

In other words, if you’re not yet selling products/services online, do this first. Focus on ways to conduct sales online. This is typically a scalable and essential element to growing a business. Margetic says you then bring in the social element.

Sin #7: Ignoring visuals

Pinterest. Infographics. Instagram. Videos. And so on. Margetic predicts that the emphasis on shareable visual elements – like photos – will become more popular.

“Images provide you with the ability to communicate information quickly,” he says. “Because of a lack of time, people will increasingly need to get their message across quickly. They’ll focus on visual entities to do this.”

We live in a world where our short attention spans are only getting shorter. Mastering the art of conveying your message in a single image will become a valuable skill, particularly if people then feel compelled to share that image with their friends/followers. This is the new “word of mouth”.

Ultimately, if you commit one of these seven deadly sins, you might end up in purgatory. However, forgiveness can be right around the corner. The key is top remain authentic, sincere and, as Margetic points out, simply “use common sense”. Social media doesn’t have to be too hard, too scary or too ridiculous to waste time on. It can be a powerful tool to grow your business. It just depends on whether you want to see it that way.

Follow Valerie Khoo on Twitter @valeriekhoo

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/small-business/managing/blogs/enterprise/seven–deadly-sins-of-social-media-20130228-2f7ck.html#ixzz2MWLE3SIp

By Mark Atterby

Social Media continues to redefine how customers engage with organisations. Gartner predicts that by 2015, refusing to communicate by Social Media will be as damaging to a company’s reputation and customer service levels as ignoring an email or phone call is today. That means BPO providers must hire and train the right people to manage these evolving communication channels.

Michael Oates from Robert Bosch (Australia), comments, “There is no doubt Social Media is redefining the means by which we interact with our customers. What we are now witnessing is the customer taking control and redefining the rules of engagement. This rotation in power is seeing a real shift away from phone, email and face-to-face interactions”.

This doesn’t mean that these traditional channels will disappear, but, as Oates adds, “Whilst this form of contact is still important client organisations are increasingly interacting via tweets, Facebook, blogs and web chat – and customers expect client organisations to have the social media infrastructure to interact with them”.

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Getting it Right

Many BPO Providers have established or are ramping up their capabilities to integrate the various social media channels with their existing contact centre infrastructure and customer management processes. A portfolio of services and product offerings have been deployed in the last few of years. However, the range offerings on the market and the relative quality of the services being offered vary quite significantly.

Oates comments, “As Social Media continues to evolve at such a rapid pace the range of services expands daily. Services range from Social Media monitoring to community management. Initially Social Media allowed companies to provide real time responses to posts, tweets etc. demonstrating to their customers they are actively listening”.

“However”, as Oates continues, “this ‘reactive’ approach has now shifted to where businesses need to ‘anticipate’ what their customers want and expect as well. Social Media provides businesses with enhanced visibility and access to their customer base. It allows a business to be forward focussed rather than studying historical statistics on perceived customer behaviour”.

Fundamental to the success of a BPO provider in this area to support their clients, will be their ability to hire and train the right staff to manage social media interactions. A good telephone agent isn’t necessarily a good social media agent. Elizabeth Herrell, VP for Constellation Research, commented recently, “Telephone agents don’t necessarily make good social media agents as they have very separate sets of skills. Some can certainly make the transition, but not all.”

“Customer communications has entered a new stage and companies need to quickly understand how to best support their customers. The way customers engage with companies is shifting from telephones and email to social and mobile apps”. [i]

Social Media agents need to be able to use sophisticated social network analysis or social mining software that allows them to drill down and respond quickly to events and customer interactions. They need to be more tech savvy and better-written communication skills compared to telephone agents, who need better language or speaking skills. They both need exceptional customer service skills, but the social media agent will need to greater support and empowerment as they may be involved in a conversation involving numerous people or communities of people

By Mike Pace

If you have been consciously or unconsciously playing Buzzword Bingo around the office, the term social business has probably been at the center of your board.  “We need to be a Social Business.” Or “I went to an event recently where everyone was talking about Social Business.”  Or even “People say we need to become a Social Business or die.”  While I agree, social business will be the next big business innovation (see more here ), you probably won’t die.  So what is Social Business and why is it important to your company, customer service, and the contact center?

I am a big fan of not reinventing the wheel.  My online friends over at SideraWorks have developed an excellent explanation of what is Social Business.

“Social Business is the creation of an organization that is optimized to benefit its entire ecosystem (customers, employees, owners, partners) by embedding collaboration, information sharing, and active engagement into its operations and culture. The result is a more responsive, adaptable, effective, and ultimately more successful company.”

Social Business is broader than social media; social media is just one of the tools of Social Business, just as your phone system is a tool of customer service.  As SideraWorks definition describes, Social Business is a way of working.  It can and should involve every level and department of your organization, your partners or vendors, your community, and your current and prospective customers.

Traditional work organizational models have siloed departments, working on their individual goals to hopefully achieve a greater sum for the sake of acquiring and retaining customers.  This model, generally, approaches internal and external customers as someone to talk at or to be spoken to.  People, whether internal to your organization or external, are tired of being spoken to.  For example, how do you feel when you see a corny commercial telling you to buy a diaper brands latest “innovation” in dry-lock protection?  Or how do you feel when a senior leader in your organization says there will be a process change without any understanding of why the old process is in place?  How many times have you worked with a partner or vendor and have an email chain when printed could circle the earth twice?

Social Business is inclusive, collaborative and open.  I believe people and relationships are every company’s most important and underutilized asset.  We now have the technological ability to act/work/socialize/create relationships like we do in “real life”.  By leveraging the relationships, new technology, and process, we can unleash the ultimate power – PEOPLE.  I love this quote from John Hagel III’s book The Power of Pull , “There are a lot more smarter people outside your organization, than inside it”.  It doesn’t mean your company or department doesn’t have smart people, it’s just that there are so many smart people outside of your immediate perspective.  What if you could leverage the power of the people in your contact center, and their vast networks to achieve more and faster?

Typically a contact center is one of the largest departments within an organization.  Each one of those agents has a network outside and within your organization.  Why not start the revolution from within?  Your senior leaders are always looking for ways for the contact center to become a “profit center”.  What if you could aid in both top and bottom line revenue and cost avoidance?  Just one example is recruiting.  Traditional recruiting primarily uses websites to pull in attractive potential hires, and often scoops up large volumes  of unqualified time wasters ( In so far as the applicants prove to be unsuitable) .  A pull model, it’s like the Death Star’s tractor beam sucking up everything from Millennium Falcons to space junk.  Social recruiting leverages the relationships of your associates to find potential hires matching your cultural fit.  And by having large numbers of separate people from separate departments, you also reach a more diversified candidate pool.

The benefits of a Social Business are almost countless, but just to name a few:

• Individual personal associate development
• Lower operational costs
• Stronger interdepartmental collaboration
• Faster innovation
• Improved customer satisfaction and trust
• Vision & culture sharing
• Employee satisfaction
• Brand reputation and awareness

Some great resources to learn more about Social Business:

SideraWorks – http://www.sideraworks.com

The Community Roundtable – http://community-roundtable.com

Edelman – http://www.edelman.com

Are people talking about Social Business in your immediate circles? Senior Management?

If you are not, what is holding you back?

PowerPoint Deck & links – here is a link to my presentation that will be similar to CCA presentation (embedded code)[m5]

Bio & speaking information at CCA event

Michael Pace (currently available for hire) was previously the Director of Customer Support & Community Management for Constant Contact & Capital One, and a leader in transforming the customer service world to exceed the needs of the customer, including this new social landscape.  He is considered one of the country’s leading speakers and writers on the topic of social media customer service, and has actually created scalable, high quality social support environments.  Active Board Member of the North East Contact Center Forum, New England’s largest call center community.  You can connect with Michael on Twitter @mpace101 and on LinkedIn.  Michael also writes a weekly blog at www.thepaceofservice.com about Customer Service, Social, Business Process Management, and People Leadership.

By Martin Conboy

Big Opportunity for BPO Companies

In more than a wagging the finger ruling the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has terrified the Australian marketing sector as companies face the prospect of being penalised for what the public post on their FaceBook sites.

The ACCC is cracking down hard on Companies that fail to remove false and misleading comments from their brands’ Facebook pages within 24 hours, they will face potential court action, the competition watchdog has warned.

The advertising industry’s regulator ruled last week that that everything, under advertising guidelines and consumer law, that appears on a brand’s Facebook page is deemed to be advertising included posted comments.

Sarah Court, ACCC commissioner said she expected companies that used Facebook to promote themselves to take down untrue or false comments within a day.

”If you are a big corporate player with lots of resources that’s putting a lot of effort into social media then it wouldn’t have to be too long. Perhaps 24 hours or less,” Ms Court said.

”A court would have to be satisfied that a big company had somehow become aware and ignored these false testimonials … If you knew about them and they worked to your advantage and [you] left them there, then I don’t think you could say, ‘it isn’t our fault and therefore it isn’t our responsibility’.”

In a shocked response some companies are now monitoring their FaceBook and other social media sites twice a day for user comments.

Technology Measurement and monitoring (social media monitoring tools) solutions are just tools. Insight comes from human analysts that understand how business works and know how to use these technology tools. They are helpful in solving client problems and automating some tedious tasks. Business is an eager user of a wide range of tools, but those that put their faith in technology to be the “silver bullet” will end up disappointed.

Natural language processing and text analytics are mature technologies and their benefits are well understood, but there are challenges. Automated sentiment analysis is difficult enough to get within tolerable margins of error (and sometimes even one error is enough to undo credibility in the eyes of an executive).

However, we are still some distance from a “magic algorithm” that can decide whether a website, or a blog post, matters or not. For the ultimate analysis, basic human judgment is still required to analyse the various threads.

It’s still extremely difficult for machine intelligence to identify the most important sites of conversation on a given topic

I.e. A machine cannot understand the difference between ‘My bank sucks’ and ‘MY BANK SUCKS’ or my ‘bank sux’. Not with standing that many bloggers cannot spell further complicates the issue. The interaction and commentary on a social networking site is often not logical or rational. A lot of slang is used, and is therefore beyond the capabilities of a software program to understand.  Furthermore, software can’t distinguish sarcasm, neutral feedback or irony.

This could prove to be a boom for the BPO sector as companies race to have agents trained to help support major brands efforts to protect themselves from harm.

FooBoo has developed a Social Media Monitioring (SML) and listening service which is a combination of machine (Quantitative Automated Analytics) and human intelligence (Qualitative Contextual Reporting on most impactful conversations) that allows organisations the ability to “listen-in” on consumers in their native space.

Technology measurement in and of itself returns a high volume of JUNK that takes a long time to sift through to get to the golden nuggets. (longer than 24 hours in a lot of cases) Thus the need for human agents that can not only distinguish between keywords, influence, and sentiment but also find blogs that breach the ACCC guidelines.

FooBoo’s SML service utilises the technology solution to quickly scan and search the web and the human agents that can segment and analyse the threads in an efficient and cost effective manner.

Related story

http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/storm-over-targets-trampy-fashion-sense-20120813-244xz.html

By Nathan Brumby

These days it’s less a case of social media for your business and more a case of social media in your business.

It could be that social networking in the business world will far outstrip the time we spend on social media. We will run team projects, talk to customers, collaborate, and make decisions as if we live in a permanent social universe. There will be no blur between life and work.

But this time, it will nurture, not crush us. The boom in social business software is clearly here, and the benefit for any company is obvious. Your teams communicate better with each other, silos are broken down, and your customers are more directly engaged via social tools that extend out to them.

For SMBs, social business will increase their agility and enable them to get to know their customers, allowing them to be more responsive, and scale up quickly by building a strong personable brand In this new age of micro-entrepreneurship, the art of winning business is driven by your ability to make your offering connect with people on the web.

That means your own staff must connect more efficiently with each other. Indeed, big bets are now being placed on that future. Microsoft has made its move, reportedly splurging $1 billion to buy Yammer, an enterprise social networking platform that allows employees to connect, collaborate and share ideas. Experts say they will tack it onto their Office, SharePoint, and Exchange mail software.

Businesses get social

Salesforce has also recently bought Buddy Media, which helps businesses run marketing and branding campaigns across social networks and other online destinations. And, software giant Oracle has just swallowed Collective Intent and Virtue, which will enable it to build a social relationship platform for businesses. As social has invaded our personal lives, so the corporate world follows.

This is not a technology story anymore, however. It’s about getting the most out of your human capital, and enabling the creative classes to get your business to innovate. After all, business is ultimately a people management challenge, and staff want to have a social system that makes it easier to get their tasks done. The challenge is to work out what you need to do to get a social business set up inside your company that benefits staff, and allows you to network better with current and new customers.

Products like Yammer allow organisations to offer staff Twitter and Facebook-like functionality in the workplace. They let employees set up profiles, blog, participate in forums and receive social stream updates about what their colleagues are doing.

The promise of these social tools is that they are more dynamic and creative than traditional tools, such as email. They can be integrated with other business applications.

Social and the cloud

The unique convergence of mobile devices, cloud computing and other technology platforms, is driving this revolution. They are also causing whole sectors to question what value they offer to their customers.

In her recent State of the Internet report, veteran US technology analyst Mary Meeker said the Internet is now changing everything we do. Meeker calls it “the re-imagining of everything.”

This is being driven by faster connectivity, new devices, and beautiful web user interfaces. That re-imagination, Meeker points out, has changed the way we write, store and share information, take and file our photos, access our music, and of course, communicate. So why shouldn’t this creative unleashing provided by new technology make our work functions more fun and fulfilling?

The corporate world is aiming to achieve that. Definitions of social business are numerous, and new phrases such as the social enterprise, or social customer, are filling column inches in analyst reports. This time, the hype seems real, and the trend enduring.

“The social business is alive with energy and big ideas. You might call it a Renaissance of the Information Age,” said Dachis Group, an early leader in the social business consulting space. “After decades of mechanistic, de-humanising, process-oriented management dogma, progressive organisations are waking up to the disturbing truth that they’ve squeezed all the creativity out of their business. When companies embrace organic, passionate, socially savvy activities, they bloom.”

Communication and sharing

The foundation of a social business is an internal social platform for communication. A plethora of technology companies have sprung up to meet that opportunity. The social business movement is being enabled by the new lean web, as exemplified by the stripped back design chic of online storage offerings such as Dropbox, and Asana, a workflow software provider aiming to change the way people collaborate.

We all found that social networking made it easier to connect with our universe of friends. It makes sense that now we can communicate instantly via online tools, the workspace would also adopt these ways of being. The biggest impediment to business efficiency is email. It drowns us, wastes our time, delays decision-making, and doesn’t meet our communication needs.

Consultancy Magnet 360 has defined a social business as one that uses networked platforms to connect people, processes and systems in order to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. Put simply, our work tasks and activities will flow to us like our social streams do.

As Magnet 360 point out, “traditionally, when businesspeople log into their tools and systems, they have to go find what they’re looking for. The social business lets important content and information find the user, based on their profile and preferences.

All about the conversation

In the social business world, individuals jump into conversations, communicate and swap ideas, creating an environment that is impossible to achieve via the static world of email. There is no latency, and social channels can create better interactions with customers and strategic allies.”

Furthermore, companies have spent large in previous generations to try and reach new customers and build a loyal audience. By creating social channels with those customers, businesses can get instant feedback, and improve their services.

This marks a shift away from old transactional systems that retain a distance between the company and its customer. Those days are in the past.

“By getting rid of outdated company policies and conservative hierarchy structures, a company can use social media tools to connect to its client base, bond its employees, and give its customers real people to talk to,” said Christoph Schmaltz, a consultant at Headshift, a unit of Dachis Group. Bottom line, people want to connect with other people, not companies.

The good news is that SMBs stand to win big, and grow faster than large monolithic organisations if they get it right. The lessons and behaviours on the consumer web are significant.

Many of us now use online news aggregation services to filter the information we want to get. We share and curate content on our personal social networks. We swap ideas and pose questions.

In the new attention economy, where everybody is shouting to get their message heard, we are now applying the same behaviour. We digest other people’s innovation and try to apply it to the way we present and sell our services. The web is the platform for us to disseminate our business message to new audiences and customers.

We are constantly redefining and fine tuning those messages and stories, and uploading fresh content to stay relevant and interesting. The only way to stay creative and stand out is to give social tools to your teams to allow that innovation to happen.

Source: Dynamic Business

Martin Conboy BPO speaking tour of the Philippines

27^th June  - Cebu ICT-BPO – www.cebuictandbpo.com

28^th June  - BPA/P      – 2:00 pm 107 Perea St. Legaspi Village Makati City

28^th June  - PSIA         - 5:30 pm Dusit Hotel Makati

29^th June  – Clark ICT – 9 am Benjamin Function Room, Hotel Stotsenberg,

Clark Freeport Zone, Pampanga

Group: National Outsourcing Association

Subject: Please assist the NOA by taking a quick 3 minute survey on UK-shoring
As part of on-going research for this year’s NOA flagship campaign, Outsourcing Works, we are asking all those involved with outsourcing to give their opinion on whether they think the UK can become the global strategic hub for outsourcing.

• Please participate in the National Outsourcing Association and sourcingfocus.com’s UK-shoring survey: Onshore or Offshore?

  The Outsourcing Debate.

Complete the 3 minute survey on this SurveyMonkey link: 

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DML7FT5

• Unisys announced the availability of its Mobility Solutions Suite of services.
  These services are designed to help organisations manage, secure and support mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets – as well as their applications – and lead to improved employee productivity and customer service.

• Resources sector pulling back on hiring in the face of shortages:

Employers in the resources sector are frustrated over relentless skills shortages and are slowing down their hiring activity as a result, says Manpower Group

• NBN Co is currently recruiting up to 90 new permanent employees a month

• Aegis Australia – which already manages the customer experience for a significant number of Australian companies – has launched a new social media solution that involves not only monitoring and analysis but also engaging consumers online, on behalf of an organisation.

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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