The Conversation Manager

Last week I was in a discussion with a senior marketer about privacy on social media. Lately the media is jumping on this story again. To be honest: I’m a little bit tired of it.

All these stories seem to claim Facebook and their privacy stuff. Of course, Facebook isn’t the nicest company in the world and of course they are often arrogant in the way they deal with rights of their consumers, but blaming them for everything is going too far for me.

There are two ways you can look at this discussion. First one is forcing governments and companies like Facebook to agree on some sort of new privacy arrangement. Second one is to learn to adapt to the current world where we live in. My feeling: we don’t have a choice but to go for the second option.

The world is clearly changing. We expect companies to be an open kitchen en to be as transparent as possible. Well, dear consumers, we need to be transparent as well. The same rules can be applied to everyone of us. If you don’t have anything to hide, then why should you be afraid of stuff being shared about you? I’m pretty sure that the new generation people (like my son Siebe who is 15 months old) will adapt to this situation. Last week I was teaching at a local business school (Ehsal) where I asked students if they had stress going out or drinking too much, knowing that there is something like Facebook around. Well, these guys don’t worry, because they create new rules. They have some sort of gentlemen’s agreement about what they share. The new generation will adapt to this open world while we are still trying to close it. Trying to stop it: it’s a fight you can never win.

With statements like this, you hear people think: "Yeah, but there are so many people who don’t find a job because of all the stuff they put on social media". I agree, it’s not really fun for these people, but it’s great for our economy. Because of this transparency, we can find great talent at an early stage. And you know, there have always been dumb people around and they won’t go away by some privacy law. You just make it easier to hide for these people.

Let us be clear: your personal reputation is your personal responsibility. Just as a company’s reputation is its own responsibility. Let’s take things forward and discuss how we should adapt to the new world and let’s stop fighting it.

Today's consumers are more empowered than ever before. Many case studies show they have the power to make or break our brands. The question is: how should we deal with the empowered consumer?

A relative new concept that leverages this reality is called 'group buying'. The idea is simple: consumers can ‘group together’ in order to get better deals/ discounts on products or services they like. Via so called ‘group buying sites’ companies can offer a limited deal to consumers. If enough people subscribe for it they get the deal. If not the deal is off.

At this stage, big players in the market include Groupon, LivingSocial & BuyWithMe. But there are many more come, as the market is growing very fast.

The strength of the ‘group buying’ - concept is that people are activated to find friends who are willing to subscribe to the deal, hence driving spontaneous word of mouth for the brand and the product/service in case. The incentive of getting a great deal creates a huge viral effect within their network. Basically, group buying sites use the power of social media to start natural marketing movements.

Benz recently experimented with the concept of group buying. They launched a campaign with 200 Smart cars on the Chinese group buying site Taobao, offering a 23% discount on the original price. They expected to sell these cars in 3 weeks. Instead, all 200 cars were sold in just three and a half hours, attracting over 300,000 visitors!

According to Mashable, group buying is changing the retail game. One thing is for sure, it’s already getting lots of business attention. Groupon is currenlty valued over $1.3 billion.

What are your thoughts on the group buying trend?

Follow me on Twitter via @dadovpeteghem 

A week after the Share your Honey conference, we had our #sharehoney workshop yesterday! Together with 15 people from different industries (B2B, FMCG, Retail …) we brainstormed the entire day about the implementation of conversation management in their companies. It was a blast!

I would like to share some of our key take aways, conclusions & questions we had after a day of very interactive & inspiring discussions. Feel free to add, comment or share these.

1. What do you want people to say about your brand: it’s a simple question, but so hard to make it concrete for brands/companies. The reflex is to start with the internal perspective rather than answering this very simple question. Most discussion about conversation management are about the how and the tools, but it’s impossible to answer those if you don’t know what the end goal is. Really, try this one at work: you’ll be surprised how difficult it is 
2. Certainty to see verses opportunity to see: letting go the ‘illusion of the big numbers’ remains a challenge. The typical question remains: should I pay attention to 2000 people because we have a penetration of 2 million people. To deal with this, we used the volume. For most companies 10% of the consumers are accountable for 90% of the volume. So, if your penetration is 2 million, the real activation potential is probably closer to 200.000. Getting this in the right perspective remains challenging.
3. Global versus local conversation management remains a challenge where we didn’t really find a concrete answer to, maybe some of you can share insights about this. 
4. Observe: JUST DO IT, still too many people are not actively using social media and are making decision about it. Let’s stop that for once and for all
5. It’s about people, not about technology: people talk to people. People are no silo’s, they talk through different media with each other. Believe it or not, but the ones who don’t use Facebook actually know people who are using it…strange isn’t it.
6. Joining the conversation can use some simple rule: Always be positive, learn to say thank you and sorry
7. Don’t solve everything online: it’s good to pull a discussion offline to really help someone further
8. It’s okay to give your organization a trial period. Decision about social media shouldn’t be overrated as well. So, if you don’t fully agree with each other: agree on a test period and re-valuate after a few weeks.
9. 5%-95% rule works: to move forward, be explicit about the situations in which you won’t react until consulting some other stakeholders in the company. In most cases, people agree on 95% of the cases, but don’t move because of 5% of the cases. Writing the 5% down helps to avoid this
10. Copy the existing business processes where possible: let’s not change everything because of social media, but find a way that social media can tap into everything
11. Real openness is a challenge, but metaphor works: which restaurant do you trust most, one with an open kitchen or one with a closed kitchen. Besides that: if you have an open kitchen you have external pressure to keep things clean and friendly.
12. Don’t feed the trolls: if people are bashing you without a reason, they probably had a bad childhood and we don’t need to give them further attention
13. Superstar Company: create a company with as many people as possible who are on social media to boost the openness and the visibility of your brand. In the end: they are the brand ambassadors and build the brand positioning.
14. We all have a pot of gold waiting for us: consumers who are functionally satisfied about our company are the growth potential. Find a way to activate them and the pot of gold will be yours.
15. There is no control, but many departments still have an illusion of control by blocking stuff. Convince them about the illusion and confront them with the brutal facts