WebTrends Engage – Social Media with Justin Kistner
WebTrends Engage – Social Media with Justin Kistner
What a presentation on social media and developing strategies to raise brand reputation. This guy seriously knows his stuff – Justin Kistner of Webtrends – @justinkistner
I’ve tweeted like crazy whilst this guy was speaking! Justin was talking about how businesses are currently developing strategies for social media – having professional teams to monitor noise from twitter and other channels like Facebook, Digg and Stumbleupon. Some of the example figures he gave was amazing:
Starbucks – 11 channels and 6 staff to manage
Dell – 11 channels and over 22 staff
SAP – 10 channels and a 6 year old community
Best Buy – 9 channels and a whopping 1,400 people to manage.
Social Media isn’t here as a medium for raising brand awareness and those companies commitment of resource to this (especially Best Buy) is staggering. Justin also mentioned that WebTrends has run done some research into the adoption of social media in UK businesses and it is a very disappointing 2%. However, this is to be expected when a lot of businesses are still ‘tagging’ on web analytics to people’s day jobs rather than dedicate at least one full time resource.
Justin also went of to talk about Charlene Li (co-author of the social media bible – Groundswell) and Jeremiah Owyang, both ex-Forrester analysts who now set up their own shop – Altimeter Group. They did some research and were able to categorise businesses into the following four categories when talking about their social media adoption:
1. Mavens – High Activity and High Channels
2. Butterflies
3. Selectives
4. WallFlowers – Low Activity and Low Channels
(I wasn’t quick enough to write the definition for Butterflies or Selectives – so anyone from the WebTrends Engage conference that did get it please comment…..)
Unsurprisingly, the Mavens were the organisations that experienced the strongest financial benefits from social media. Clearly showing to me, yet again, that social media isn’t here for a tactical solution to raise brand awareness. Social Media is here to stay and in my humbled opinion is now (alongside analytics) an integral part of the marketing mix.
I wonder how many organisations are taking benefit from link gold mines such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious? Are they aware by building a network of ‘friends’ and having your links voted for you can eventually be classed as an authority and when submitting links to your own content you will become the ‘leader of the conversation’ and not a follower. What an accolade that would be: Leader of the conversation.
There was an interesting point made by a member of the Barclays Stockbrokers team saying that tweeting would require sign off from legal and yes I’m not surprised. However, if you’ve read Naked Conversation (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel) it clearly states that employees should be given the freedom to write what they want about an organisation because the organisation can learn from it -improve processes, improve the culture. Admitadly Scoble and Israel were talking about blogs however, twittering should be exactly the same.
Companies – give your staff the freedom to blog and tweet and learn from what is being said!
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Great post Miles. A few things to add:
Butterflies = extending your schema, they’re low activity, high channels (hence the flitting-between-different-points analogy).
Selectives = high activity, low channels.
Regarding Best Buy’s 1,400-strong Twitter resource, I think there’s a bit of caution needed here. If I understood correctly, it was implied that the high number results from the simple fact that the entire staff from one of their contact centres has been briefed about using the company Twitter account? This clearly isn’t the same as having dedicated social media resource (but arguably does show an admirable level of forward-thinking in openly getting everyone involved).
Agreed, a thoroughly thought-provoking presentation.
@Geoffoff
Geoffoff – Thanks for the update, obviously you can write quicker than me or I may have been taking photos at the time. Justin has just added a comment with a link to the slides. Enjoy
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Christian Howes, TS. TS said: @targetstone WebTrends Engage – Social Media with Justin Kistner http://bit.ly/SX7mK [...]
Thanks for the kind words. I uploaded my slide deck, which answers the question of what Butterflies and Selectives are described as
Justin – you’re more than welcome. Was thoroughly entertaining and enlightening to hear you speak. Putting up the photos tomorrow – 1am is a little late to start with 150 photos.
[...] Justin Kistner talks at Engage about Social Media Strategies var addthis_pub = ''; var addthis_language = 'en';var addthis_options = 'email, favorites, digg, delicious, myspace, google, facebook, reddit, live, more'; [...]
Dude, David Brake and I are coauthors of The Social Media Bible…
Come on by and connect!
Lon Safko