The UM MENA Point of View

You can have a thousand friends on Facebook, and 10,000 Likes, but what do they mean? If you’re running a social media campaign for your brand, how do you convert “Likes” to sales, friends to customers? The whole idea behind setting up a successful brand page on Facebook, and of course getting ‘Likes’ is to truly engage with your best fans – your loyal followers, your brand believers. If you are able to identify – and cultivate – people out there who are genuinely interested in your products or services, they will in some way or another tell others about it. And, eventually, with the trickle down, and with friends trusting friends etc – your following increases – and your chances of selling and moving product gets better.

One way of genuinely engaging your target audience via social media include finding out what your target customers are interested in and then talking to  them about it. That’s “content marketing” and this emerging leader in the tools of the trade game is showing up as one of the strongest performing channels – a very close second to e-mail. Yes, brands that are becoming “content publishers” – providing engaging, interesting content are winning the game. When you find it difficult to hard sell – and social media is not for hard sell anyways – creating and publishing content is a great tool.

Content is a great trust tool. If you provide value addition via content, people get to trust your brand. They find your brand and everything they associate with it relevant to their space. They end up trusting your product, believing in it. You get to the top of the top-of-mind position.

Another way is to ask your customers, your target audience about what they really want from you as a brand, or from your product or your industry. When you ask your ‘audience’ what they want to hear, you’re playing their hits, they’ll listen without hesitation – because it’s theirs, not yours. It’s relevant, and meaningful. That’s engagement, not monologue. If you are able to talk to your audience about what their interests are – and then build (or revise) your profile, your benefits around that dialog, you’ve got a winning strategy.

Lead them to where they want to go, not where you think they should. Follow their interests, listen to them, see what they’re really clicking through to, and provide a destination, a result that they want to see, to experience. If you are offering information on a new feature on a camera, no point taking them to a home page. If you’re selling a low-interest car loan, don’t take them to the Financing section on your bank site – take them to a page on the loan and a form that they can apply on.

Hard sell is the last thing you should be doing on social media. Think about it, you don’t go over to a friend’s place for dinner and start selling him your golf set. Friends don’t like that. If you’ve really gotten into “social” media, please do be social. Engage them, tell them a story, provide some information, share a joke, show them an interesting video. You can sell the product downstream.

And, finally, social is about shared experiences. If they genuinely “Like” what you have for them, they’ll tell friends, and friends will tell their friends, and like that it rolls forward. Make what you say easily shareable. If it genuinely adds value, brings a smile to someone’s face, causes a positive reaction – they’ll share it. But it’s your job to make that process easy. Provide all the buttons, the links, the encouragement. And, of course, the right stuff.

At Innovations_Digital, a digital marketing agency in Dubai, we work closely with our clients to harness the power of social media. Innovations is part of UM – and provides digital content, social media, search and mobile specialized solutions for clients’ brands.

The lines haven’t just blurred, they’ve auto-erased. Media agencies worldwide are fast acquiring, hiring, renting, even, content creation talents or agencies to become a complete solutions provider for their clients. That’s the nature of how today’s consumer’s use and dependence on digital focused channels of communications have changed the way media planning agencies behave in the ecosystem. You cannot put your head in the sand (and there’s lots of it around here) and stay in a silo.

We don’t look at digital in isolation, because digital is part of every day life and can no longer be viewed (as is often done in this region) as a ‘by-the-way channel’. We provide strategic consulting and execution on how best to leverage digital for your brand’s communication; how to optimize digtal touch points, develop strategic engagement plans across all media, look at new areas like social networking, search, viral, mobile and web 3.0 for true integration. Our solutions include a 360° approach where we provide our clients with knowhow, expertise and final product including the development, design, programming and full content.

Over the past few weeks we have strengthened our digital content supply chain so to speak with our partnership and M&A of Innovations_Digital, a digital focused pure-play who are specialized in creating and producing multiple levels of communications solutions both in digital and analog flavors.

No matter what happens to Andy Murray and the great British hope, taking on defending champion Rafael Nadal – they’ll never look back on how social media is heralding in a new-ish era of ‘open’ tennis – making players and the tournament both easily accessible.

The opening serve or volley, if you will came from Andy Murray and Head. Murray, being Britain’s great hope, is being followed with huge interest as he bumps now into Rafa Nadal.

But it’s not just Andy. Wimbledon, the only remaining lawn (or grass) tennis grand slam has taken up social with aplomb. The official Facebook page does live feeds, and photos are being updated almost as they’re being clicked. There are just under 660,000 fans. The posts are interesting, and sometimes outside the box. I saw a post that linked to a evian promoted page on Wimbledon. Nice bit of code-sharing on that.

They’ve raised the roof so to speak at Wimbledon. With a £100 million roof over Centre Court, Wimbledon will not be held under the weather. And both the official tournament and players are playing it pretty big on social media, mixing tennis on the lawns, strawberries and cream with a healthy dose of facebook and twitter.

Real time online access is now the norm. And, yes, Andy Murray did kick off the Wimbledon-on-Social wave this year with that ‘intended-for-viral’ film for HEAD – the tennis brand that’s trying really hard to keep head above social water, competing with the big brands like adidas, nike, and the new rising ranker – Babolat. HEAD’s ‘Get Closer’ campaign was published on both Facebook and YouTube, aiming to get fans ‘closer’ and more interactive with Andy Murray.

The iPhone App is also a big hit, but overall it’s the Facebook and Twitter feeds and updates that are catching every one’s fancy. The iPhone App of course is not new this year. This is the third year it’s been available, but every year technology partners IBM are working on the app (yes, IBM) to make it both intuitive and useful for spectator and couch watcher alike. With video updates, lots of pics, ground maps, scores, schedules and news, it’s a handy tool for all fans of the purple and green.

Nadal, who’s up against Murray in the ‘really important and nearly the final’ semi-final is also huge on social media. The Spaniard has more than 7,361,073 likes on his Facebook page. That’s over seven million! So are many other players. Sharapova, grunt and all, with just under 5 million fans also has a pretty cool page – and some of her wall photos are rather intersting beyond the grass court. Roger Federer, who had yet another early exit this year at Wimbledon has over 8 million fans on Facebook, and 75,000 followers on his news tweet – but the tweet lines are cold, newsy and impersonal almost. Not very social.

Overall, social media is having a great year at Wimbledon. It has matured in a nice way, and increasingly sports tournaments, sponsors, players as well as fans are being able to genuinely benefit from it all.

posted from: http://www.innovationsdigital.com/index.php/2011/06/serving-social-media-at-wimbledon-this-year/

More and more brands are getting into Social Media these days here in the Middle East, and save for a few well organized ones, I’ve mostly seen fairly disjointed, unstructured, unplanned efforts. There seems to be a lack of social media policy. Which I just don’t understand. Companies have a marketing policy, a marketing budget, a plan, so why don’t they have a similar approach when it comes to drafting a simple, easy to follow, across-the-board social policy?

Brands are slowly getting to understand social. They’re genetically used to shouting, not listening, not participating, not paying attention – but rather preaching the corporate gospel from a soap box. And their agencies have helped them along, providing louder voices to shout at customers, at consumers, to make themselves heard.

First of all, no one really knows today, who owns the social space. So, there seems to be a free for all atmosphere. Whether having a simple guideline on what’s ok, what’s not for employee social behavior (when it comes to corporate tagged social), or a fully documented policy paper coming out of marketing / corporate communications, it is increasingly a requirement that there are certain standards that are followed. There ought to be a corporate language and tone of voice, (and I don’t mean language in the literal sense). There ought to be a common approach to the consumer, to the competition, to customer service, to beating the drum, or whatever is being done in the social sphere. Companies, brands, product divisions, agencies – all need to sing off a common song sheet, and this policy is crucial to maintaining an ‘identity’. And, it’s particularly relevant when an outsourced consultant or freelancer handles a company’s social voice. That voice needs to be one voice.

Social voice is usually an extension of company culture, and there needs to be a strategy behind voicing and sharing that culture whether proactively or in relation to social voice out there. This is about responsibility and self control. It’s about being able to judge crucially before a facebook update, a like, a tweet and a foursquare update (I’m at the F1 Super Deluxe Paddock Lounge’ tweet or foursquare update when the company has just announced a economy drive is plain stupid).

After all, one needs to understand that several people from one company are voicing on social, each one thinks differently, each one has a different sentiment, but those are personal. If one has opened up their personal space and tagged it with a corporate identity, than that sentiment needs to be in line with corporate sentiment, corporate vision and mission.

Having a clear cut policy is not difficult. One needs to have a clear cut understanding of objectives that the ‘company’ has. These may be different from personal objectives, and in that case, one needs to define the fine line and cross over to corporate territory and safeguard it. One needs to understand different departmental goals. Different product managers have different goals. The CEO may say something that is totally big picture, while the product buyer, the art director, the front desk person may say something totally out of sync. This is where a policy helps.

Most corporate driven social voice out there in this region seems driven by brand, and the peripheral, the conversations around the product, the benefit, the lifestyle driven ones are ignored. This is a no-no. Policy should cover peripheral social voice. Policy should cover short term vs long term. So, if I work at a automotive dealership, my tweets on speed cameras, for example, ideally come under policy, because, while they’re not about the new GT model on the showroom floor, they’re somehow inter related. That’s social. And that’s why we need to have someone draft broad guidelines, without stepping on our freedom of social speech.

Tom Roychoudhury, CIO, MCN