Facebook Comes of Age?

Martin Thomas @crowdsurfing

A Market Matures

Gartner H

ype Cycle

46% of UK Facebook users have thought about leaving network & user numbers dropped by 100,000 May-Jun (Marketing, Jun 11)

A Market Matures

Gartner H

ype Cycle

10,000 new companies begin marketing with Facebook every day (Facebook, Jul 11)

Growing Specialisation

“as social networks mature the individual platforms are beginning to demonstrate their core strengths & UK consumers are increasingly differentiating them” YouGov (Jul 11)

Strength or Weakness?

A Market Matures

o New behaviour & expectations

Gartner H

ype Cycle

New Behaviour

“Amplifying the volume of moaning”

Supercharged Activism

New Internal Challenges

“Rude, smelly and stupid”

“Pikey skanks”

“Chavs” “Poor safety standards”

New Internal Communications Responsibilities

Even though posts were set to 'private', tribunal ruled that they could have been forwarded on and said the sacking was justified because Apple has a clear policy against employees making critical remarks regarding the brand.

Be honest, respectful, confidential, think of the community & stay in compliance. Apple places a huge value on their brand and their reputation and they expect employees to enhance, not besmirch it.

http://wp.me/p1xtr9-u60

New Expectations

“Customer service expectations are not set by what your competitors are doing but by anyone” General Manager, Customer Services, O2

Real Social Media Effect

Dramatizing institutions’ structural, operational & cultural weaknesses

Connected Consumer meets Disconnected CorporationConnected Consumer meets Disconnected Corporation

“Digital communications is a destabilizing force in a bureaucratic environment. And I am sitting right in the middle of a bureaucratic environment.’”Senior corporate communications director

“We’re not set up for this shit”UK CEO

Thriving by Loosening Up

o Operational & cultural traits of successful organisations

TrustingOpenAgileInformal Collaborative

Tight Thinkers Need Not Apply

o Organisations & people that struggle with this new worldHierarchicalBureaucraticProcess orientedDistrustful

A Market Matures

o New behaviour & expectationso Gimmicks to game changers

Gartner H

ype Cycle

Game Changers?

1. Community engagement

2. Transforming customer service

3. Social (F) commerce

4. Mobile/geo-targeting

Communities already exist

... think about how you can help that

community do what it wants to do.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder

& CEO of Facebook

1. Community Engagement

Harnessing new patterns of collective behaviour

Tapping into Collective Spirit

o Leveraging people’s willingness to shape service & product offers

70% of companies regularly create value through use of web-based communities (McKinsey)

The Power of Communities

Create Content

Solve Problems

Create Businesses

Contribute Ideas

80,000 ideas

Engaging a Community

2. Transforming Customer Service

o 50% of comments tend to be general questions/queries, 35% general feedback and only 15% complaints

o Take customer-specific queries offline for 1:1 attention

o Roughly 50% of general queries, are answered by other customers Need to learn to step back

3. F-Commerce

89% of people have not bought anything via Facebook and 44% don’t have any interest in doing so Havas/Lightspeed, July 11

4. Mobile/Geo-Targeting

Commercial Opportunity

500+ places 1 million check-ins 958,000 visits to the app

What’s Top What’s Nearby What’s Hot What Can I Buy

@crowdsurfing

Summary

o Organisational culture more important than technology

o Gamechangers have ability to transform organisations