As always Neville Hobson was good value. He showed us an advert for a marketing role at Best Buy which stated “250 Twitter followers” as a desirable quality for the preferred candidate – giving evidence of the pervading influence of the medium. He also explained how the term “Social Business” is now emerging as a new media term, as opposed to something ethical or environmental.

So why are marketers turning to social media? Well, it’s more accountable (it can be monitored and measured). It involves direct contact with customers – so you learn about them, and they get to know you. Social media also works well in popular new mediums, such as video. It’s also fuelling customer expectations for personal recommendations and reviews – so if you’re not engaging on those terms you’re almost certainly losing customers. And, of course, apart from your time, it’s generally free. No other form of marketing can boast that.

As a result 34% of companies are engaging in social media marketing (Forrester Research) and certain industries are completely dominated by social media channels. In the tech industry, for example, most of the top news sources are blogs. Neville also pointed out that the 3rd fastest growing service online is still YouTube, asking the questions “Are you using it for marketing?”

I also found Katy Howell’s session interesting – as she explained how she takes a client from “trying” social media marketing, to actually benefiting from it. She highlighted the case of Primark – which has 178,000 friends on Facebook. Obviously that sounds fantastic… until you realise that they’ve never posted anything to these members. They’ve never actually communicated with them. Where’s the benefit of that?

Katy doesn’t stand for that nonsense. In the case of Baileys (the syrupy liqueur), a client of hers, her goal was to get people to drink it at times other than Christmas. First off she researched her target market, discovering (weirdly in my view) that some and like it hot and some like it cold. She then focused on identifying truly active and influential people – the ones who are prepared to DO something – inviting these groups to start exchanging hot and cold recipes. Now, the interesting thing was that lots of Baileys’ “followers” and “friends” actually dropped out, meaning their stats went down. But that didn’t matter, because the ones who DID something managed to increase sales dramatically enough to make everybody happy.

Other interesting points I picked up from the morning session included Eaon Pritchard’s comment that the average Amazon page has 16 different ways of providing or viewing peer-to-peer recommendations. He also provided the most excellent example of a small business using Twitter, in the form of @albionovens – a bakery in Shoreditch which tweets when its pastries are baked (I kid you not!). I also liked Eaon’s assertion that social media cannot work alone – to work properly it needs both offline interaction and to be adopted throughout an organisation.

Ten years ago I was helping leading charities in the UK, including Christian Aid, YMCA, Woodland Trust, Epilepsy Action and Breast Cancer Care, to develop online communities. Since then the game has changed. It’s no longer about creating communities so much as finding your community in the social Web.

As with large businesses, the focus for charities and non-profits is shifting towards social media monitoring and engagement. The success of Twestival (”Twitter” + “Festival”) for the charity Water, shows how non-profits can use social media to successfully promote events and raise funds. But this is just the crude beginnings of something far more significant for the charity sector.

Search marketing (e.g. Google Adwords) now enables any organisation to attract “prospects”, i.e. people who have already self-selected themselves by the words they have used in their search. In social media – blogs, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, forums, YouTube etc. – people are engaging in conversations that are equally, if not more, revealing about their intentions, interests, desires and dislikes. In short: there is a lot more information out there that can lead charities to new supporters and activists than is currently being used. Just as big businesses are wising up to this opportunity, so too should charities.

US-based blogger Beth Kanter recently wrote a fascinating article about how, between 2007 and 2009, the American Red Cross has actively engaged in social media monitoring, with extremely positive results.

After hurricane Katrina, during which the Red Cross received a degree of criticism for their handling of the crisis, they hired a social media expert called Wendy Harman. Wendy set up a range of social media monitoring tools that would enable the organisation to track what people were saying about the organisation online. There are thousands of solutions on the market, ranging from free (e.g. Google Alerts) to paid (e.g. Visible Technology). She just picked the ones she felt would work best.

Her stated goals for the project were to:

• Listen to public opinion
• Correct misinformation
• Track conversation trends (in part to pre-empt crises)
• Identify influencers
• Build relationships

Over the course of two years Wendy made a great effort to shift the attitude of the organisation towards social media from one of suspicion and mistrust  (staff were not allowed to use social networks from work), to one where this new medium was embraced. In 2008 the American Red Cross lifted their ban on staff using social media and allowed them to actively engage online. It now has several thousand more highly committed online advocates.

In terms of direct results, the charity managed to recruit an army of supporters on Facebook (and now Twitter) who helped them to get $50k grant in 2007 and, more significantly, a $750k grant earlier this year. But the biggest benefit, according to Wendy Harman, is the change of culture within the organisation. This has been so successful that they have needed to set in place limits on when staff engage in conversations online – for example, they now only respond to blog posts where the blogger has achieved a certain Technorati ranking. This enables them to focus on the most influential posts and people.

I believe this case study shows the start of a significant change in the way non-profits engage online. Just today I read about a report that suggests many teenage suicides could be avoided through social media monitoring. By tracking conversations and seeing the signs early, we could actually save lives! How powerful is that? Obviously it’s ironic that it takes a global network to hear the voices of distressed children who may be living next door – but it’s also a huge opportunity. Leading charities should be at the forefront of this innovation and I look forward to living in a better world because of it.

Monitoring Social Media 09 a conference dedicated to social media monitoring, is taking place in London on 17th November.

Update: Apparently in the US 75% of charities monitor the internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their institution. Great blog post about it here.

BT Care on Twitter

BT has finally followed the inexorable shift towards realtime, responsive customer services and opened a BT Twitter account for customer services. BT Care asks vistors “Have a question? Follow us and let us help!” and it looks very much like that’s how it works.  Having only launched a few weeks ago, they already have 1800 followers and have made 7300 posts (although they evidently took Bank Holiday Monday off, since the last post was 19 hours ago).

Most of their posts are outreach interventions -”Hi, is there anything we can help you with?”, or responses to direct Tweets, like this one, “@BTCare I’ve done the usual checks and have reported the fault online. Am awaiting a call. Give them a nudge, ta”. There’s a constant stream of customers having their problems resolved more or less as they announce them. For anyone interested in social media monitoring and customer services, it makes quite compelling viewing.

I’m told they did a trial with a single Customer Services Twitterer, but they were soon subsumed under the weight of Tweets. They now have a team of ten Twitterers who actively monitor the Web for posts from frustrated BT customers. It looks like all hands on deck today.