Social Media - it's just common sense

Is social media the new dot com scam. I find it curious how a communication medium no older than a couple of years has acclaimed experts promising to solve world hunger, build the Internet and deliver a social media strategy in a day which will transform your organization.

From what I've seen getting social media up and going travels a well worn path of :

• developing a strategy
• removing the roadblocks or deadwood who refute change or evolution
• establishing some guidelines and processes to keep to the company safe and compliant
• recruiting in some motivated staff with a passion for customers service (and social media)
• purchasing a bit of affordable cloud technology to manage your communications

Naturally, you'll need a strategy with contributions from across your key business departments to outline how social media can add some value to your business. What's the challenge or opportunity you are responding to? Servicing, sales, brand development etc. It's not complicated, work through what your objectives are and commence from there in a systematic way.

Now the biggest headache will be your legal and compliance teams who generally speaking would prefer you don't speak to customers at all. Sadly this group of professionals haven't kept up with the times so their advice will be dated. So be prepared to challenge the norm and have hard conversations to inform our resident experts that their advice isn't relevant.

To navigate through the 'no police' get yourself a social media guideline and an accompanying set of process maps to explain how you will communicate responsibly. Also make sure you have some serious air cover from your executive sponsor otherwise the 'no police' will grind you to a slow death or meaningless deliverable.

Getting the right person won't be too hard. Head down to your call centre and find your brightest arts or communications graduate who loves to use social media and has some good sense. The actual process itself of running a social media won't be an unreasonable challenge for a talented individual with a thirst to learn. I'm sure if you look around your business you might know one or two of these people. Also, put in a basic structure with the social media team reporting through to a trusted set of hands and you are away.

From what I've seen social media requires a couple of basic attributes in your people to be successful. In no particular order they are:

• Common sense
• Willingness to be compliant and swim between the flags
• A love of social media and gadgets
• A passion for great customer service
• An ability to write using a down to earth and friendly style
• An ability to deal with the 'no police' and politely cut through the stupidity

The technology to manage your social communications is very mature and cheap. Check out Radian6 as an example to get a feel for how far your dollar can go. In short, these types of applications enable you to manage and monitor your social media.

So to the mystery of communicating. There's no mystery, use simple and honest language, plus own up when you make a blue. Like email don't say anything stupid. Common sense right.

So you've now got your social media team, an agreed scope, a set of processes, a few tools to help with managing your communications and the green light to proceed. From here the first step is to listen to what your customers are saying out there and to commence addressing either issues or alternatively reinforcing customer praise. Once you have this understood you can graduate onto communicating via the common social media channels of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Linkedin etc. Simply grow into your strategy, don't turn the tap on full.

So there you go, it isn't that hard, have a crack, put some controls around your processes and start having some great dialogue with your customers. It's a great opportunity to turnaround or reinforce the value of your business.

IBM are right - we need Smart Computers

I never quite got what IBM were on about with their 'Smarter Planet' concept until I began to think through what problems a smarter computer or digital channel could solve. My interpretation of a smarter computer, portal or system is really something which knows me and does the thinking for me. Sadly today there are not many digital experiences where this happens.

So here's the great modern day challenge, to build a digital experience which knows me and pro- actively solves for all of life's little challenges. Personally I often find that as a customer I'm working harder than the computer to find the answers. My expectation is that the computer does the heavy lifting bringing information to me in an easy to consume format. I guess a very basic version of this concept is the Amazon "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" service.

It's pretty odd, that despite the availability of powerful technology, we still request our customers to do a good amount of the work. In our busy and complex lives this seems reasonable.

In terms of the presentation of information in a smarter way, we have to acknowledge the data visualization trend. For so long we've laboured with consuming data in tables with the hope to pick through it all to find the answer. But now we are using smart visuals ie. graphs, charts, icons to better provide the answers. A basic concept I know but a great advancement for the everyday consumer. A great example of this concept can be seen at Mint ( a personal finance management tool) who use lots of visual tools to help consumers understand their spending behaviour. These guys in my opinion really get the 'smarter planet' concept, as the portal does the majority of the heavy lifting and answers are delivered to the customer in an easy to consume mode.

In my day job as a digital profession I concern myself greatly with making the lives of my customers' easier. I imagine their lives are like mine, over committed, time poor and working hard to be a parent, partner and provider. So the best thing I can do for that customer, is to deliver a smarter customer experience which works hard to both know them and deliver the required information in a consumable fashion, so they can live a better, less complex life. In some way I think I'm reproducing the trusted old bank manager, who knew me, gave me the sage advice and kindly reminded me when a payment was due. Those are the days I long for and a smarter computer can go a long way to bringing back the good old days.

Author's note: I've been in that past a beneficiary of IBM hospitality but I'm not employed by that business.

The value of great design

Have been giving a lot of thought to the value of great design in digital applications and its potential to fundamentally reposition your business.

From my dozen or so years in digital I have on the whole seen an under investment in design. And even when the investment has been appropriate the fight to secure the funds has been long and hard.

Interestingly as a society we value great design in other objects like cars, clothes, gadgets and the like, yet when it comes to digital experiences its under valued. Look around at the great many digital assets you consume. How many of them real inspire you?

So why do our sponsors love and appreciate design in objects a great Italian red sports car but when its come to digital there's a resistance to lay down the hard earn.

So here's the rub for digital leaders, we need to champion design and its tremendous ability to transform how our customers feel about our businesses. Somehow we as an industry of professionals need to undertake a mass course in influencing skills to get our sponsors to truly believe in the value of design.

My personal moment when I think I really got the value of design was when we were doing some usability testing with a panel of customers when I worked at GE Money. For one customer our efforts really struck a cord and for him the new portal we'd built fundamentally changed the way he thought about the product and business. Prior to that I never really appreciated how much design could change the emotional connection could have with a business.

Pretty much from that day moving forward I've become somewhat of a real zealot when it comes to design and the necessity to invest strongly in it.