FRANKthoughts

During the last six months we had the pleasure of having around 300 people join us for a two hour social strategy session followed by drinks at FOG. As the year comes to a close we would love all the people who attended to have the presentation handy and the people who missed out to have a taste of the action.

FRANkademy has three parts:
1. twitter for brands.
2. Blog networks eg. Nuffnang.
3. Social business strategy case study – Melbourne’s GPO.

So here it is. Please feel free to comment, suggest improvements, share and tweet if you find it useful.

The improved FRANkademy will be back next year. If you’d like to be notified please put your name + email here.

Thank you everyone. We had a blast.

Many brands are already using online to the max. A combined effort of search, content and social profiles can get your website noticed, talked about and shared. But maybe social media isn’t for everyone?

I believe this is what’s happening while you sit on the fence:

1. Your competitors are moving in and away – Are your competitors on twitter yet? It’s safe to say one of them is already using these tools. It means that they’re getting the following and attention that could have been yours. They’re also becoming more advanced, knowledgeable and familiar with future tools and marketing techniques making the gap between you even bigger.

2. No investment means no return – Do you own assets or are you paying rent? When no investment is made in the social space and all you do is pay for traffic the only return you see is the return you paid for. Social media is an asset. It GROWS in value. It means your money is invested rather than spent. Two years after starting this blog many of our new business prospects find us online without us paying a single dollar on search.

3. Missing out on word of mouth and traffic – Do you have an opinion about your industry? Do you have specific knowledge you can share that will help people? If the answer is yes then you have two options. Talk to people at bbq’s, networking events and elevators or choose to do the same thing online. Social media is conversation. It’s a place for you to demonstrate value, teach, help and foster an interaction between your customers. You’ll be surprised how powerful one post can be. Social sites are also the top traffic referring sites: 20% is the amount of loyal traffic Facebook brings in as a referring site, making it the most valuable source of traffic.

4. Spending resource and money – Research, customer service and product testing cost a lot of money. What if you can reduce this cost by 10%? How about using the resources you have in a way that saves time? Social media is a great research, testing and customer service tool. Take a look and discover what people are saying about your brand right now?

5. Internal communication, education and innovation suffers – How many of your employees are on social networks? How many of them are encouraged to talk about you online and have the tools to do so? It’s safe to say most of the people you work with have a presence on at least one social network. If you’re not in it you’re missing out on them communicating and sharing your brand with others. You’re also not providing self expression on the company blog or the opportunity to learn from others in the company. Innovation is a word that comes up a lot when talking about business advantage – when there is no place to communicate ideas and opinions in the company, it takes longer to innovate.

6. Missing out on talent – Every business needs to get young talent in. Most of them now communicate online and use these tools for work. If you don’t have a social media play you might be missing out on the best talent out there. The last three people employed by FRANkVizeum came from a social network/blog interaction. Our positions are usually posted on twitter and linkedin which makes the process of finding the right person a lot easier (and cheaper).

7. Not fishing for knowledge – The internet (i can’t believe i’m writing this but hey) is an ocean of knowledge. But you need to talk to the fisherman to catch the best fishes. Other people in social mediums are fishing constantly and if you’re not there you’re not enjoying the most up to date knowledge available. If you’d like to know more about social media and how to start a social business strategy you’re invited to RSVP for the last FRANkademy for 2009.

What do you think? Are these points valid? Do you have any other examples for the cost of inaction?

A big shout out to everyone who attended our fourth FRANkademy on Friday, for what was another very successful social media session.  Thanks to MCN, Hardie Grant Publishing, Yaffa Publishing (AdNews), Carat, iProspect, Keep Left PR, Propeller PR and Austereo for their input and participation.

A special thankyou also goes out to our friends at Nuffnang, for making the big trip from overseas!

The session covered off a broad range of topics, including:

An introduction to the size of the opportunity social media presents
The importance of having an integrated social media strategy and not ‘grabbing at the tools’
What is Twitter?  Who is using it well?
Blogging, Blog Networks and Nuffnang Australia case studies
FRANkVizeum’s approach to bought/owned/earned media – a working case study

For anyone who missed Friday’s session and would like to attend our September event, please RSVP here and we’ll look forward to seeing you!

Thankyou to everybody who attended our third FRANkademy session on Friday.  We really appreciated having an inquisitive audience, and the active discussion about an exciting area of communications strategy.

A recap on what we focused on in the session:

We started out by outlining the size of the opportunity social media brings; with its unique reach now higher than email.  We then introduced the bought, owned and earned media integrated approach to communications planning.  Bought – is media you can buy like TV airtime, radio, billboards, magazine space, online banners and so on. Owned includes assets of the business – logo, packaging, website, retail outlets.  Earned is the conversation you engage with your customers, the word of mouth you generate, customer feedback and comments etc.  Traditionally the first two have budgets, strategies and timelines.  But what about earned?  Shouldn’t everything be aligned?  We made the analogy that jumping at social media tools as solutions is like walking into the toolshed, grabbing a drill, a saw and a hammer, and trying to paint the back fence.  It doesn’t work!

We then moved on to two areas of interest in the social media space – Twitter and blogs.  We looked at how businesses are using Twitter to connect to their audience, harness the power of positive word of mouth, enhance customer service, build communities, and align their bought/owned/earned output. In our blog section we explained what value blogs and bloggers can offer brands through some contemporary case studies, and the best way brands can work with bloggers.  We presented guidelines employed by our own blog network Nuffnang , the biggest blog advertising network in Australia.

After the drinks break we went through a case study for Melbourne’s GPO. This showed FRANkVizeum’s focus on building a long term social media strategy, as opposed to a short term ‘campaign’, through the process of immersion.  This involves listening and learning, developing a strategy with budget and timeline, allocating resource to manage the brand community, and implementing the plan to agreed measurement metrics.  We ended by quoting Google analyst Avinash Kaushik – “Social media is like teen sex.  Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it is not better”.

Thanks again to our audience from TTF, Taboo, Full Circle, Austereo, MCN, Simply Energy, GoSwitch, Channel Ten, RMIT, and all other guests including Richard!

Now… has everybody done their homework?  Visited our Twitter account?  Looked at Twitter 101 For Business?  Played Brandwars?  If not, you can redeem yourselves by commenting on the blog post below, or contributing your own!  What was most interesting about the session?