Wildfire Tech PR Blog – Business and Consumer Technology Public Relations

At Wildfire, we work closely with brands to guide them through the world of social media, to create an effective presence that really delivers results. But to the uninitiated, managing a public space to share information, engage with customers and increase brand recognition could sound incredibly complicated – or even worse, expensive!

But actually, when you break down the core elements of running an effective social media offering, it’s really quite straightforward and just needs time, planning and a long term commitment to keep up activity.

How do we know this?

One of our long term clients, set-top box manufacturer and digital giant Humax, has recently been recognised by Get Connected magazine as a shining example of how effective Facebook can be to handle consumer engagement correctly. As the columnist George Cole points out, “the best companies are doing what Humax has done, they are embracing the internet’s potential”

Check out our top five tips for using Facebook to engage your customers, or contact our team to find out how we can help you to devise a social media strategy that works for your business.

1. Post regular updates
2. Reply to criticism as well as praise – face things head on
3. Offer exclusive content to your fans – competitions, videos and savings
4. Keep it interesting – less corporate, more inviting
5. Take part in discussions, encourage your Facebook fans to become a community

Those of you that have read Forrester’s book Groundswell will recognise the process of splitting social media users into different segments depending on their activities. And if you are familiar with traditional PR, you’ll appreciate the process of identifying and targeting ‘influencers’ to effectively get your message out to a wide, but targeted audience.

Well, today, Gartner has made an attempt to meld these two ideas together with the announcement of its User Survey 2010. Gartner suggests that around one fifth of the social media users are ‘key influencers’ that in turn affect the decisions of 74% of the population.

Key influencers: salesmen, connectors and mavens

Gartner defines these influencers as: salesmen, connectors and mavens. The analyst firm also compares these roles very closely to similar roles that exist in an offline environment:

Salesmen have an ability to persuade people to purchase or act in a certain way. While users in this demographic aren’t actually commercial in their actions, they do have the ability to persuade others to take action.

Connectors can be split into two groups: heavy and light. They become the bridging function between two or more groups of people. They have lots of contacts in different niches and even in different social networks and can therefore make important connections between the two.

Mavens are experts in a certain field, giving advice and answering questions. They become almost guru like in the way people flock to them. They therefore become ‘trusted’ sources and can influence and persuade people to purchase in a certain way. Again, as with salesmen, their actions aren’t commercial, but still have an effect on purchasing decisions.

Gartner looked at 4,000 consumers in ten markets and identified six different roles in total. In addition to the three above, the firm also defines users as seekers – the ones asking for information, the self-sufficient – those who prefer to find answers themselves, and the unclassified – those who don’t fit any defined role.

How is this useful?

The key for marketers is to use these user profiles to identify certain influencers and their ‘type’, then create campaigns or content that meets their needs. Salesmen, for example, will need very different resources and content to connectors or mavens and different strategies will work better to inspire and engage with them.

The woes for of the trade publishing world continue today with Data Strategy the latest publication to bite the dust. The marketing title, edited by David Reed, which covered everything you’d possibly need to know about data, has been ditched by Centaur media (as its rivals Haymarket were happy to report today!)

The monthly title will be absorbed into sister title Marketing Week from September. This follows a similar move that occurred back in 2009 for another of Centaur’s marketing titles – Precision Marketing.

Centaur, the publisher of magazines and websites such as Marketing Week, NMA, Precision Marketing (RIP), Design Week and Mad.co.uk, has been in trouble for some time, so the demise of Data Strategy is hardly surprising. I have no doubt that much of the useful content from this title will shift online (although whether Marketing Week will be able to adapt itself to cover more data related news is yet to be seen), but it is still sad to see the back of a title that, although niche, was always worth a read.

Anyone want to place a bet on which title will be next?

We’ve been running a series of company-wide social media training sessions for a client of ours this week and it’s been amazing to see how receptive and energised the company’s employees have been.

Too often in PR, and also in marketing, we have a ‘them and us’ attitude. We take briefs from spokespeople and blend them into carefully worded press statements. We take products and give them snazzy slogans and endlines that we then push out to target audiences through advertising or DM.

But social media changes the game. Take these old traditional marketing mindsets into the social arena and you quickly get found out and, at best, ignored. We’ve discussed how, more than ever, agencies (of every creed) that are involved in social media, need to take a more supportive, guiding approach and I’ve seen this very clearly this week.

Moving away from the walled garden approach

Often, when we (as an audience) try and engage with businesses on social media channels, we want direct access to the brand; not a PR agency/manager or official spokesperson. Often, we don’t even want to talk to the CEO or managing director.

In many cases, we want to talk to the guys with the knowledge: the insiders. We want to talk to the product team that is working on the new features or functionality. We want to talk to customer services about our latest order. Or, we want to talk to a straight-talking sales rep that can help with our prospecting enquiries.

The companies that are beginning to excel in social communities are really getting this.

So its great to see that, given the chance and the freedom, employees are keen and eager to take up the social media baton and run with it.

It takes a brave company (so kudos to our client) to allow employees to do this and it takes a certain degree of planning, strategising and then monitoring (where we are happy to help out), to get this right.

But it is possible and it gives everyone involved a real buzz when it starts to come to fruition…

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I thought twice about publishing a post about Facebook’s 500 millionth user. On the one hand, it’s a landmark moment for the social media world, so I felt it was worth acknowledging. But, with the world’s media also covering the story, I didn’t want to merely add to the post after post that has already been written on the subject (and will be for weeks to come).

But then I picked up an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, which raised a slightly different, less positive side to this announcement.

It covers research from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, developed by the University of Michigan’s Business School. This year, the index has included Facebook in its regular consumer satisfaction overview and the results aren’t pretty for the web giant. Facebook came out with one of the lowest rankings of any company: 64 out of a possible 100. That puts Facebook in the bottom 5% of all private sector companies in the US.

Other social sites like Wikipedia and YouTube did considerably better with scores of 77 and 73 respectively.

So, despite these incredible growth figures, is the company in danger of alienating some of its most loyal fans?

To be fair to Facebook, they’ve taken the news on the chin with the company’s spokesman Jonny Thaw saying that although they hadn’t reviewed the methodology in detail, “clearly we have room to improve.” He continues: “Building a simple, useful service is the best way to earn and sustain the trust people put in us. That’s why we spend so much of our time and energy focused on improving the products we offer and introducing new ones. We look forward to the next survey.”

So congratulations to Facebook; I’m sure they won’t be resting on their laurels…

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