One of the most interesting things about this revolution is that a small business can be as effective at social marketing as large businesses because of the very low costs. Are you seeing that smaller businesses or larger businesses are taking the lead on it and what are you seeing smaller businesses doing?
I think that there are a lot of great examples of smaller business working in the niche that perhaps they’re focused on. So there may be local businesses, there’s quite a few of them in the US at least that use channels like Twitter or create Facebook fan pages to engage their local audiences who are really passionate about their brand or go to that destination very often.
I think that when it comes to larger brands it gets a little bit trickier because obviously their workforce is more distributed, they have more rules to try and adhere to or at least fit in to and integration becomes a bigger issue as well because they’re doing all of these other things from a marketing or PR or direct marketing or events point of view and the question often is, how do we integrate social media into these things and how do we scale it?
So a lot of what we spend our time doing when we’re working with clients is to, yes do pilot programs and those are always important, but also to help brands figure out how that scales and how that increases so that they can do more than just that one small thing that influences that one small group.
Where is social media heading? If you can talk about its sort of position now and where you see it going?
I think one of the big things that we’re starting to see is this idea that our digital identities are becoming inseparable from our real life identities and more and more each one of us is starting to create these profiles and live to some degree online and whether that is from our point of view, there’s a lot of choice involved.
So whether that extends all the way through to something like what I might do where I publish a blog and I write a book and have my photos online, through to somebody else who may just have a very simple profile online but be reading content, organising it, saving it for themselves to go back and see. All of these things point to this inseparable connection between the content and the part of ourselves that we save online and how we live our lives on an ongoing basis.
I think that as technology continues to improve and we start to always have access to that profile, it becomes an even deeper part of ourselves because we can save all the restaurants we love for example and access them on our mobile device. I think that’s really powerful when it comes to this archiving of our own experience that we can reassess and reuse.
Any other trends for business? What are the new employment opportunities that are going to come out? I mean we’ve already got people now specialising in or beginning to specialise in social media. Are there any other new positions and jobs that will come out of this and ways that companies will restructure?
From an individual job point of view, there are probably quite a few jobs that we have yet to see evolve. So back in the early days of the internet, late 90s-early 2000s, the job that was growing hugely was this idea of information architecture, where people were taking all of this information and all of these content pieces that were out because brands were at that time launching websites because it was very exciting to do.
And the job of information architecture and usability came about because there was so much content online that really sucked and they needed somebody to organise it to make it more usable and more user-friendly and useful.
Now I think that what’s happening with social media is that it’s come to this similar point where there’s so much excitement and brands are launching a lot of different things and a lot of them suck! Now it’s a question of what’s our role going to be where somebody comes in and helps these brands to optimise what they’re already doing and get more value out of it and organise it in such a way that it becomes useful for people.
And that traditionally starts off as an outsourced function and then might be brought in-house as the internal people understand the position?
You know,there’s no single formula for it. I’ve seen it happen both ways. Sometimes somebody within an organisation kind of emerges in that role and they become the custodian of some of these activities and they evolve into that. And sometimes companies recognise that need and go to an outside group. It can happen either way.
What do you see as the issues around online reputation with social media? Larger businesses work very hard to build their reputation. How hard do you need to monitor your online reputation?
One of the things that we’re finding with more and more brands is that anyone can say anything online. There was a great quote that somebody shared during the event I was at, the iMedia Summit earlier this week, where someone said that trying to take something off the internet is like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool, that it’s already out and there’s not really that much that you can do about it.
To me that was a really interesting way of describing this fact that people have their opinions and you can post them online and from a reputation point of view. If you’re a brand and you’re going to have influence over your own reputation, then really what that means is you need to be participating, so that you’re describing and you’re demonstrating what your brand stands for before somebody else defines it for you. It’s sort of like claiming your URL before somebody else registers it.
So can I just ask too, how do you overcome the reticence of people in your company who are older and are very suspicious?
Well I think there’s a couple of ways. One is numbers, because the numbers are on social media’s side in terms of importance of visibility for search, in terms of number of people that are starting to use it.
There’s a statistical argument to be made around what competitors are doing and how they may be doing more than what you’re doing at the moment. And then I think the other thing is that there’s a lot of interest here from brands in cracking this code and from senior executives’ point of view for a lot of them, there’s a lot of career value involved in being the one that cracks that code. And so not to kind of play on the ego too much but the idea is that if you can be the visionary person that sees the value of this and cracks that code for the company and does something that does stand out, it’s a very good career move. I think that is, to some degree, what’s driving some of the social media efforts out there.
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