Carvill on Marketing

We’ve heard and talked about ‘web 2.0’ for a few years now – and the latest tranche of buzzwords appearing on the web now focus around ‘social enterprise 2.0’  or often just ‘Enterprise 2.0’.

Call it what you will – effectively, the sentiment is about how businesses are embracing ‘social media’ platforms and social interactions with customers, (think intelligent and continuous CRM) to enhance their entire business processes. 

From customer experience, through to internal marketing – ‘Enterprise 2.0’ is the description of a truly end-to-end digital experience.

Reading a recent case study about the impact of Enterprise 2.0 – the CEO of Burberry, Angela Ahrendts, when explaining their customer-centric vision, says it all really:

Many of us will recall the smart snippet from the strict school teacher or austere Aunt; 'Two ears, two eyes and one mouth - so use them accordingly!'. And I have to say, in the world of social media, this couldn't be more applicable.

Just last week I met with a business who were very pround of the fact that they had acquired over 2000 followers on Twitter. When I enquired a little further into their social media activity, I was surprised to learn that not only were they not tracking their own brands and company name, but they weren't actually doing any 'active' listening at all. 

Apart from @mentions (where someone mentions your Twitter name directly and you are then alerted to this) - they were not 'listening' in. Therefore, the majority of their Twitter activity wasn't actually 'conversation' but rather just pushing out links.  

With conversational marketing, it's far better to respond than merely to be pushing out potentially irrelevant messaging. So many organisations push traditional promotional messages down these highly conversational social platforms. It can get to look a bit spammy - so heed the advice in this short video blog.

 So the greatly anticipated ‘Timeline’ is here folks, get ready to see a barrage of negative status updates from your many Facebook friends complaining about the hefty change.

The Facebook Timeline will be featuring on your profile whether you would like it to or not and the social media gods are giving us just 7 days to preview your profile before it goes live – giving you some very much needed time to clean up your profile. 

How the timeline works is like this:

 Following on from the blog post I shared last week. As part of our 2012 social media content strategy at Carvill Creative, we're taking key points from our blogs and creating video blogs.

Most organisations are keen to jump into social media without really thinking through the purpose of their activity. Having trained around 720 people during 2011, in the intro session, when I ask delegates what they're doing with social channels already - a common response is, "Well we set up Twitter and Facebook, but we're not really sure what do to with it - so we don't really use it".  

In this video blog I cover off the key planning stages that all organisations should be considering - before they engage.

Enjoy...

There's no doubt about it - 2012 looks like the year of the Tipping Point for businesses seriously looking to engage with social media in the UK.

I'm not saying that we are anywhere near mainstream adoption, but the 'it's just a fad' response is fast becoming a distant memory for organisations of all sectors, shapes and sizes.

However, how organisations go about adoption is key.