As well as adding to what we’re doing, we’ve been taking some time to learn by talking to a lot of businesses, organisations and people about their use of social media, something that’s proving fascinating and very revealing. It’s certainly changed our ideas on not just what social media is but also where it’s going, the main finding of which we thought we’d share here on the blog. In true social media fashion then, here’s this month’s top three learnings about social media for businesses.

1. Social media is not new and it’s not all about Twitter and Facebook.

At the Dell B2B huddle someone asked Microsoft, Dell and Intel representatives what their most successful social media channels were. Blogs and Forums were the answers, oh and they’ve been doing it for the last decade or so. No mention of Facebook or Twitter, no follow your customers where ever they are approach, instead provide useful information and tools for your customers in a place where they can find and use them. It’s not new and it’s not rocket science.

2. This is here to stay, not being social now involves more risks than being social for most businesses.

This is not to say that all companies must have a forum or Facebook page, but it does mean that companies should and will benefit from having a social media strategy. The process we’re seeing is the listen, participate and build model. First listen to what is being said, then engage carefully on external sites where your customers are. Finally create a home for your conversations and customer engagement, a place where people can easily find you and interact with your brand and services. Not creating a hub will be the equivalent of not having a website; your brand, customer information and customer advocates will have no home in the social media landscape.

3. Customer facing staff are skilled at talking to customers, lets start there.

It’s easy to get carried away about transparency and the opportunity for everyone in a company to become client facing. However, the reality is quiet different. We socialites enjoy talking to and meeting people but that’s not the case for everyone. Way back in most people’s career decision there was a choice between being a people person or not, it’s important for social media advocates to remember that. Companies are making a big effort to adapt to social media, as are their staff but lets not ask the impossible. Starting with people who have customer facing skills is a more sure way to achieve results and promote social media uptake in business circles.

It was great timing then that last week we were invited to attend the Dell B2B Social Media Huddle, hosted at the Microsoft London offices in Victoria, a big thanks to the organisers, Neville Hobson, Kerry Bridge and our host Mel Carson for a very well put together and interesting day. It was a great opportunity for us to gain an insight into how leading companies such as Dell, Paypal and Microsoft are taking advantage of the many opportunities social media offers to engage with customers and empower staff. As a result they’re benefiting from lower customer service costs, increased sales and greater customer advocacy.

There were lots of takeaways from the day but one slide I particularly liked was by Benjamin Ellis which summarised the three ways in which businesses can start benefiting from social media now. It made me realise that while we as a business concentrate on making it easier to get and give help, the way in which we work with companies will be focused along three areas; build, buy or borrow.

With businesses and organisations struggling to understand social media, the opportunities and risks it conveys and the way in which they can start getting involved, I’m a great believer in keeping things simple and Benjamin’s three B’s do this perfectly. Faced with a client who wants to get started the way forward is simple, you can build, buy or borrow.

Build: This is a longer term option and involves creating community functionality on the client site so that the various stake holders can engage and interact, customers, staff and shareholders for example. At Cofacio we’re already in talks to deliver internal help engines for training purposes and external facing solutions for enhanced customer service.

Buy: This refers to supporting or even purchasing an existing community. We presently work with Legal & General and VeriQual on Cofacio.com in this way where they make it possible for our users to support charity projects.

Borrow: The quickest and cheapest route involves taking part in communities, so participation. We’ve just welcomed our first retailer to the site who is looking to help people out with advice on photography and cameras, they’re well aware that if they help people then they’ll be building up trust and goodwill and this will very quickly lead to new customers. We’ll be rolling out further developments soon for both businesses that want to help customers and organisations that would like people to help them on the site.

These then are our plans for how we can work with businesses to help make them more social but we’d love to hear what you think. Do you agree that businesses should be using social media to improve customer service for example or how do you think businesses can best empower their staff to enhance their brand and reputation?

Which reminds me, one of the most repeated phrases at the DellB2B Huddle was that it’s still early days for social media and that it’s just going to keep getting bigger. Now really is the time to get involved as it’s only going to get more difficult and expensive to join the party from here on in.

Joining the Cofacio team blends my values, experience, and aspirations. As a start-up, Cofacio can benefit from my legal and commercial background. I can certainly talk the business talk. But, I can develop my aspirations to work in projects that make a contribution to society. Darren and Sim are great people to work with, and they have completely different backgrounds to mine. We complement and respect each other. We have created a learning environment where working together for a common goal is a true pleasure. We have the most important thing as common ground, and that is our values and our sense of fairness and adding value to society (while having fun, learning, and of course running a profitable business model).

I am looking forward to growing Cofacio as part of this team, and I am sure all those involved at whatever level will enjoy being a part of the team to whatever degree possible… and bringing value to the market, our partners, our members and users, and society overall.

Apart from developing the site we’re in lots of conversations regarding new initiatives and with the help of Stuart Witts we came up with the idea of a speed helping event for May or June. The exact format isn’t decided but for now what we’d like to do is get together 8-10 social media consultants and around 20 small businesses for an evening of rapid fire getting and giving help. It’s going to be a great opportunity for small business owners who are wondering about social media to get some first hand advice from some of the UK’s leading experts on the subject, before deciding whether to take the plunge and get further involved.

We as a company can speak from personal experience about the value participating in the Twitter community has delivered so we’re keen to see more small businesses benefiting from this new and exciting opportunity. The event will be free and if anyone would like to register their interest in taking part they can mail us at speedhelping@cofacio.com or tweet us on @cofacio. We’ll be posting more details shortly here on the Cofacio blog.

Photograph by Susan Porter

I saw a tweet the other day which said try saying No by default to help you focus on what’s important. It’s a fair point but it really goes against the grain for me. Sure there may be some unintended stuff along the way but at least there are consequences! For me that’s part of the adventure. Moreover, mix that Yes attitude with the power of social media and prepare yourself for a roller-coaster.

Take my band for example; Simon asked me if I’d like to learn the bass guitar and start a band to play at his 40th birthday. I leapt at the opportunity and now 5 years on we’re the proud owners of a Banksy original, so how you might ask has that happened. Well, when we started we played at a few outdoor events and I put the footage up on YouTube. In the meantime, and by complete coincidence, Banksy painted a picture with the same name as ours – Exit Through The Gift Shop. We thought nothing of it until he decided to make a film of the same name and contacted me on YouTube. He was very genuine and polite and wondered if we’d change our name. We considered it for a while, agreed and asked him to help us choose our new name. I think he quite got into the idea and picked a new name for us from a couple of alternatives and to thank us for being so accommodating then painted us a new backdrop for us to display at our gigs. True to his word he delivered us a stunning 8ft x 6ft canvas backdrop of the grim reaper driving a bumper car with our new name on it!

If you’d like to come and see it (well a copy) and find out our new name we’re unveiling it at the St Georges Day event ‘What England Means to Me’ this Friday at the Market Place in Brentford. Come along at about 6.30pm.

For those not fully familiar with social search it’s about harnessing user-generated information to help people find what they want, it’s not new online and is age old off-line where for most of us asking for people’s advice is second nature. Approaches vary and for simplicity we can briefly split them in to three separate areas. First there’s reordering or amending algorithmic search results with user input, example proponents of this are Sproose and more recently Zakta. Secondly, there’s the option to incorporate relevant updates, tweets or reviews into your search results, something Google and Bing announced recently. Thirdly there’s the ability to find people as opposed to pages who can help you find what you’re looking for, this is the approach that Aardvark and we at Cofacio have chosen to adopt. The three approaches are complimentary so while the first and second method help us define the ‘what’, the third approach might be seen more as identifying the ‘who’ we need to know

So what’s the big deal with social search? Well when Eric Schmidt claimed recently at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 that how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age”, in my opinion it’s not so much a sign of where he thinks things are going in the future but more a recognition that traditional search no longer works for an increasing amount of the web’s content, namely user generated information on Twitter and social networks. Finding stuff is one thing but where one search engine really wins over another is in relevancy, so while Google or Bing can incorporate tweets, updates and customer reviews, the problem they face, and as Schmidt points out, is how can they rank them, how can they break through the noise and make them relevant? It’s this problem that practitioners of social search are trying to resolve, and I would argue that it’s an area where we can take 3 key learnings from Twitter and tweeters.

1. It doesn’t all have to be about the quality of the search result

When Stephen Fry talks about Twitter being social and the almost inherent need people have to be social and interact with others, this is a very important lesson social search needs to take on board. Up to now the debate has focused on the quality of the results and while it’s important to look at which method produces the most relevant results, we shouldn’t forget that collaborative social search offers further benefits that go beyond simply finding an answer. Asking other people or searching jointly is social and can be fun, and by engaging with other people as we look for things opportunities arise for cooperation. Searching with other people also helps you think through problems in different ways and allows for distributed cognition which improves cognitive processing and concept formulation. Following this through, social search solutions need to think about how people want to interact when searching, it’s adding another layer on top of the standard search experience.

2. It doesn’t need to be behind registration, people will happily search for things on an open platform

When we first sat down to look at how people would share searches we assumed that people wouldn’t be prepared to search for things openly on the web, in my mind Twitter has proved this theory to be incorrect. There’s stuff people would be wise not to discuss in public but many of the things that we look for on an everyday basis we will happily share, what’s more, we’ll happily give advice in public as Twitter has also demonstrated. What this means for social search is that we are no longer limited to solutions that leverage the knowledge base of your network, but instead we can now look to leverage the knowledge of anyone on the web. Users are not used to, and shouldn’t need to, log in to perform a search, that’s the result we found when we launched a prototype of Cofacio back in April 2009. In a similar way, the way people search on Twitter would suggest that we don’t need to display lengthy profiles and give over personal information in order to interact with other people on simple topics such as which is the best fish and chip shop in London or which play is worth watching in the West End.

3. Ranking people or people’s comments requires a different approach to how you rank a web page

Choosing whose advice to take or who to listen to on a certain topic is something quite personal, every person will have their own criteria and method for doing this. Ranking people on the basis of the amount of other people who follow them, which is similar to ranking pages on the amount of other pages that link to them, seems overly simplistic. On Twitter I’d argue that it’s a person’s behaviour, what they tweet about, as well as our assessment of their credibility based on follower numbers and their reputation that’s important when deciding whether we should listen to their advice on a particular given subject. Social search then needs to come up with ways in which the community can recognize individuals as experts on specific areas by using both explicit and implicit ratings. Other people’s opinions are important but how that person behaves is also key. This recognition system would then guide users with regards who they should listen to without limiting their ability to judge for themselves.

Concluding, there is one thing that was said at the 140 conference in London which is key, Twitter is about people, and with the rise of social media the same can be said of the internet, it’s going to be more and more about people. The result is that search engines developed to find us information and products are no longer suitable tools for this growing social web. You cannot scrape people’s profiles as if they were goods on a shop shelf and you cannot rank people as more or less relevant as if they were information. In light of this, if search companies want to be useful in this new era of the people’s web they need to reinvent themselves to some extent, I would suggest that they need to think more about people’s behaviour online, and for me there’s no better place to start than with Twitter.

Recently we ran a survey to ask users how they’d describe Cofacio to their friends and were very pleased with both the response and what people said. Here are a selection of our favourites, if you’d like to add some more then please comment below.

How would you describe Cofacio to your friends?

• A clever search networking thingy

• Sticky search

• Get other people’s opinion on something rather than google’s thoughts

• A people search engine

• A knowledge website

• A good way to find out about things that you can’t find elsewhere on the internet

• A way to get answers to your questions that your friends may not know

• A site that puts you in contact with others looking for the same as you

• Somewhere to discuss search options and discuss what you are looking for

• As a search engine and as a tool to find others searching for similar things

• A place where you can find what you are looking for based on what major websites and other people with similar interests to yours say, creating a trusted network with time

Thanks to all those who took part and we hope these prove interesting reading, we certainly enjoyed seeing how other people describe Cofacio. Oh, and as a side note, Google is none to sure if in Family Fortunes the host said our survey says or our survey said, can anyone help us out on that?

Continuing this theme, several people have mentioned that they’d like to choose their own sock puppet avatar which is something we hadn’t considered. We think it’s a great idea and as a result we’d like to do a bit of crowdsourcing to help put the idea in practice so we’ve posted a ‘looking for ideas for Socky the puppet avatars’ on the site for people to respond to and comment on.

So far we’ve Socky and his girlfriend who is yet to be named and we’d like to add 6 more at this stage, 3 for hers and 3 for hims. Ideas to date are Father Xmas Socky in accordance with the festive season and Socky Fawkes though we think he might have gone up in smoke last week. As well as being able to see your Socky live on the site (we might even provide stats on which is most popular), we’ll be sending a real Socky to the people whose ideas we like most.

We’ve posted the question at the link below so please let us know your suggestions there. Thanks in advance and don’t forget to log in if you want the chance to receive your very own Socky for Christmas, postal strike permitting!

http://bit.ly/18oXxk