We all think we know social. Facebook has been around for 6 years, Myspace is currently near dormant but planning a music-orientated comeback in 2012, Twitter and Linkedin are at the top of their field and numerous new niche social networks seem to open their cyber gates every week. Some are based around location, dating, gaming or brands, some are even more specific to social groups, but all consider themselves social networks.
Social networking has crept into our day-to-day lives and is now increasing its dominance into a socialization of the web and commerce. However the use of Social in business to customer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) capacities is still relatively new and while companies are jumping aboard the social bandwagon faster than you can say ‘Like’ how many of them are truly social?
A report recently conducted by Wildfire confirms that Social is growing fast in businesses, especially technology businesses, with 92% of companies in their report on Linkedin and 70% on Facebook. However, although presence on Social platforms has grown, engagement levels are still low. In short adopting social accounts without engagement does not make a company Social. For example, of companies looked at in the report that had a blog only 20% received engagement through comments.
Domino’s value their ROI from Facebook alone at £2.5m and 100, 000 active fans engage regularly with their brand of their own accord. Not bad huh. So how do Domino’s employ Social in a way that invokes high engagement and added value?
At recent conferences in London both Paul Francis and Nick Dutch from Domino’s UK outlined how they have been pushing Social into the centre of their company’s infrastructure, customer service, brand identity and technical department and how their innovative approach has had solid and strong conversion rate to profit. Nick and Paul outlined how businesses can have a successful B2C Social strategy in today’s environment by:
1. Using Social Media to address customer concerns and feedback in real-time. Social feels natural to many consumers already so provides an easy and informal platform for your brand to gain feedback and address customer service issues quickly.
2. Encouraging a dialogue between the Social Marketing team and technical department. Paul went as far to say that their Technical team often leads the marketing from a bottom-up model, informing future campaigns and reacting to technical feedback via Social platforms.
3. Reward your Facebook fans with exclusive deals, new releases etc and they will provide you with the perfect test bed for new products.
4. Socialise your main site. This is something Vexed helped Domino’s with by open sourcing their e-commerce site, which provides a vital link to social, while also simply making the ordering process easier. Most people remember their Facebook login, not specific logins for sites you’ve bought from, it just makes sense to utilise this.
5. Innovate. The Foursquare campaign Domino’s undertook with Vexed proved lucrative. Domino’s were one of the first company’s to try this platform for marketing and in Nick’s words for Domino’s “Foursquare and Facebook proved you can make Social a genuine commerce channel”.
6. And lastly, encourage fun. Its social after all, and if your fans get a kick out of making a robot outfit from your packaging and tweeting it, then so much the better, and sometimes it will be the best publicity you didn’t buy and inform your marketing campaigns.
The message is Social for B2C is not to be sidelined: you have to be confident you have the structure in place to deal with customer’s feedback swiftly and manage your brand’s identity in real-time.
Truly embraced Social can provide any business with incredible data, funny interesting and even business-saving information and add to profit. So maybe its time we all got to know our social networks a bit better.
