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.

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.

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.

Apologies for not blogging more but we’ve been flat out this week listening to feedback from people and making changes. Thanks especially to Yannick, Manu, Simon, Derek, and Aneel for their ideas and encouragement.

Saying that, it’s not been all work and we did manage to get out of the office this Tuesday to attend a Business Scene event on Social Media, a worthy substitute for a night in watching the opening matches of the Champions League and well worth the trek across London on a rainy wet evening. The people attending were a varied business crowd, all very pleasant though different to the people at our last event which was the DConstruct web developers conference in Brighton. There’s a blog post coming soon on that event but it was pretty blue sky stuff so please bear with us while we try to understand it.

The talk at Business Scene was given by Nick Tadd, a self confessed web enthusiast who very successfully spelt out the opportunities for businesses that social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and dare I say Cofacio offer. In the same way that individuals can manage and enhance their personal relationships via social media, so too can companies and organisations enhance their customer relationships. It’s about having a two way discussion, slightly different to more traditional marketing which has been more of a monologue. With social media the rule is that people buy people and conversations lead to clients.

After the event came the traditional hour of meeting and greeting. Now I for one was thinking of getting home to see the end of the football and putting my feet up so the idea of networking was not something I was really enamoured with, which is when the event organisers added a twist to the proceedings. It was suggested that each person write down three things about themselves, two of which were true and one of which was a lie, and that we then tried to meet as many people as possible and identify as many lies or truths as we could.

What resulted was the noisiest and most fun networking session I’ve experienced and probably one of the most productive. People noticeably relaxed as they revealed more about themselves and tried to guess the truth about the other person. It was a great example of how people enjoy discussing and talking about their interests, and a great example of how socialising for fun can be just as beneficial for discovering new opportunities, ideas and people.

Recently we’re often asked what Cofacio is going to give people and what’s in it for the user, to which we answer that conversation with others looking for the same can lead to knowledge sharing, new ideas and new opportunities. However, we shouldn’t forget that socialising with like minded people is fun, it’s something that we inherently enjoy and ultimately need if we like to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. For us then, Cofacio is as much about people having fun as about them finding what they’re looking for, we hope you agree.

]]> http://cofacio.com/blog/2009/09/networking-for-fun/feed/ 1 http://cofacio.com/blog/2009/08/not-in-the-know/ http://cofacio.com/blog/2009/08/not-in-the-know/#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:31:55 +0000 sim http://cofacio.com/blog/?p=10 There’s no time like the present so I’m writing my first blog entry as I sit in Barajas Airport, Madrid. I’m waiting for my flight which should have left at 7.40 but is now scheduled for 11.35. Only a 4 hour delay but hey it’s August so I should count myself lucky shouldn’t I?

I’m not sure why the flight’s been delayed but I’m in good company because neither do the airline’s office staff and I’m fairly sure that if I asked one of my fellow passengers they wouldn’t know either, but then I can’t ask them because I don’t know who they are either. Someone knows what went wrong with the plane but I don’t know them and I don’t know anyone that does, so I’m not in the know which leads us to Cofacio and the reason we created it.

Cofacio is designed to bring people together and promote cooperation through the use of social media. We want Cofacio to help people to be in the know by connecting them with the people and organisations around them. The great thing is that this is already happening. Were the airline I’m flying with to follow the example of the Piccadilly Line on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tubepiccadil (instead of charging for an information text service) then they’d have been a better flow of information and everyone right know would be a lot happier. It’s a great example of how sharing even the simplest information at very little cost to oneself can make a real difference for many others, why leave others in the dark if you have the the ability to help them?

We know that social media is making it possible for people to share information and collaborate on a scale, and with an ease, never experienced before. We believe we are at the beginning of a period of change in how people, companies and organisations share information, interact and cooperate. We plan to be part of that change and we invite you to join us.