Understanding this concept is key to designing social media strategies. A strategy becomes social when it leverages the social aspect of life rather than uses a social network.

There are three primary social elements that we should be thinking about when we develop a social strategy.

1) Personalisation

A social strategy will look to customize a campaign with a personalized interface for the user that enhances their experience by highlighting what’s important to them.

The users identity then defines a large part of what their experience becomes. This is easily achieved by integrating with existing social networks, and by designing space on your online platforms for personalised content.

2) The reason to share

Viral campaigns become viral because they have something that people want to share. The trouble is that people don’t always share content in the same way all the time. People are more complex than that. Sharing is dependent on the content, the emotional context of consuming that content and so many other uncontrollable factors.

When designing for social, we should not ‘hope’ that people share content. We should design the strategy to encourage the sharing action.

I recently consulted a company who was showing me their ‘social’ application on Facebook. Yes, it was on Facebook. Well done. The app however never utilized, encouraged or designed any reason for people to share the content of the app. Therefore no-one will share it. There is no incentive to do so. A good example of an app that is ‘in social, but not social.

3) Connecting Community

Just because you have a community does not mean that people want to be a part of it. So many companies are pursuing the numbers game in social media strategy. I would suggest that this metric will only decrease your opportunity to connect with people and their communities.

Remember that a social strategy aims to connect your company or brand to the community of people who ‘like’ you. In other words, a focus on your community is important but needs to be balanced with a serious focus on connecting into the communities of your fans.

Sharing content often introduces you to your fans community but there needs to be a strategy design to connect their community to yours.

This is a complex idea. I am not suggesting that you need to own the community. I am suggesting that you need to find ways to influence it. Remember that the bigger the community the lower the engagement levels. Social works best in smaller, tighter and more interesting communities.

Connecting community has more to do with empowering ambassadors to build new communities than to add people to your database

Social media is about the people, well at least it should be. Approaching social media strategy with a “platform mentality” is like focusing our attention on the which bike we need to ride when we should be concentrating on our fitness levels to win the race.

Fitness in social media is the ability to understand our consumers. Social media allows us to engage, communicate, question and observe our customers.  This should give us a wealth of information to better understand our customers and better meet their needs. Regardless of the platform, their communication over these platforms should give us insight into their lives, their vales and their needs. Social media opens the door to understanding the new consumer, consumer 2.0. This is what a social media strategy should create, better customer understanding in order to win sales and loyalty.

The path to purchase is too complicated to suggest that social media can be an isolated sales channel on its own. What people see in social media circles often impacts their purchase decisions in a point of sale environment. Consumer opinion online can overpower your offline branding objectives and a physical experience of bad customer service will always impact sales negatively, whether experienced online or offline.

Social media cannot be strategised in isolation to other marketing channels and product design should not take place without researching customer opinion in social media channels. The complexity of social media as an industry is growing to the point that it’s starting to replicate the complexity of a human being. We use forums for formal discussion, search engines and wikipedias for research, micro-blogs for short everyday conversations and we even see business networks realising real return on investment for its users.

People are not social online because of Facebook, Facebook is social because of people.

The new consumer uses the Internet in their own way, the way that makes sense to them, that makes life easier for them. The new consumer does not use all of the Internet, only the parts that makes sense.

So our role as social media strategists is to leverage social media platforms to build communities of people online, in order to listen to, and engage with our ‘fans’. We should encourage those interested towards loyalty and listen to the entire community to learn what interests them. We should stop trying to connect with everyone, and start creating communities of value rather than size. We should start the conversation so that we show our openness to connect and we should be equipped with the ability make a real impact in our customers lives.

Who’s Who on Linkedin in South Africa

Linkedin in South Africa has seen a 83% increase in usership over the last 12 months with agriculture and goverment showing the biggest industry growth. The exciting news is the growth in business decision makers on Linkedin. The age category betwee 35 and 54 years has grown more than double and CEO presence on Linkedin grew 78%.

We hope you enjoy the infographic

Infographic created by DigitLab the social media agency

Copy the embed code to paste into your blog:

<img src=”http://www.digitlab.co.za/files/2011/09/Linkedin-Users-in-South-Africa.png” alt=”Linkedin in South Africa” width=”540″ height=”1026″ align=”center” /> Infographic created by DigitLab the <a href=”http://www.digitlab.co.za”>social media agency</a>

The execution is so simple. Life size banners that display supermarket brands with QR codes on each item. Scan the item and get them delivered to your door by the end of the day. The idea was sparked by the need to create more sales without opening more stores. After extensive research into the market Tesco was able to see the opportunity to utilise smart phone technology to increase its online sales potential.

The consumer will take to this idea because the technology is so simple (inSouth Korea at least) for them to use. The concept works becuase it relies on redundant QR code technology to execute it.It also works because it make an intangible internet experience tangible through the physical advert.

This example from Tesco paints a clear picture of the shifts that retailers are going to face in the future:

1. The retail industry can expect powerful competition from online sales channels. Especially if these channels are connecting with consumers in such tangible ways, like in subways while I wait for my train.
2. Brands are still important to consumers. Make sure you make those brands visible to the consumer. Note that there are still a number of juices to choose from displayed on the “shelf”.
3. Convenience is king! Make sure this new buying method fits into my life and don’t let me down. The delevery to my home is important because if I have to fetch the product then I may as well shop at you store – or somebody elses!
4. Shelf space is a concept that does not have to stay in stores or on a website.

I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did.

What was the catalyst that caught your attention and started your journey in marketing Deloitte with Social Media?

Within Deloitte of Tomorrow (Internal Innovation Program) we identified Digital as a trend about 3 years ago. Deloitte Digital is a service line that converts Deloitte intellectual property in applications and sells these applications as software as a service. The best example of this is the Deloitte Leadership Academy http://www.deloitte.la/welcome/. As part of the market testing and commercialisation of the Deloitte Digital business case a number of our clients and executives started asking for our advice on how to deal with “Social media”, we looked at the landscape and quickly determined that we needed to have our house view before advising our clients on their approach.

As a result we developed a strategy to address the 5 strategic objectives identified below:

• Reduce the cost of recruitment
• Reduce the time to develop Innovative solutions and new service offerings for DOT
• Increase the storage of intellectual knowledge capital within a central tool
• Reduce the cost of training
• Increase our Brand and Eminence in the market

As a result we agreed to embrace 9 social media platforms to address the above objectives. Key was determining where these platforms would complement our overarching strategy. As you can see Brand and Eminence was only one of the objectives.

We know, from you presentation at the Social Media World Forum (#SMWF), that you use Linkedin, twitter and email marketing. Are you involved in Facebook, if so, has this worked.

We are involved in Facebook which is mainly used from a engagement perspective for Graduate recruitment and our Alumni community. The platform is very effective for our Graduate recruitment team but is not the only mechanism that we use, it needs to be linked to other platforms if you want to maximise your return on investment.

What are your thoughts on Facebook as a business 2 business tool?

From a B2B perspective our recent survey on ITweb highlighted that Facebook is used for informal engagement and graduate recruitment. Based on our audience segmentation we use different tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog and various mobile applications to drive B2B engagement. With Paypal and other mobile payment solutions available in RSA we see Facebook more for B2C engagement.

Deloitte uses a customer communications preference facility that allows it customers to choose how Deloitte communicates to them. Is this an actively used facility by your clients? What are the top communication preferences for Deloitte customers at the moment?

I have provided the results of a recent poll conducted amongst subscribers to our newsletter and blog, connections on LinkedIn and followers on Twitter:

How does Deloitte use social media to enhance its CRM programs?

Social media is one of the mechanisms that allows an organisation to listen or engage in customer conversations around your brand and service delivery. Externally we use Linkedin, Twitter, our blog feedback and ORM tools to listen to what is being said about our service and brand. We then link these tools into our internal social media tools i.e. wiki’s and yammer to drive engagement from our staff in terms of customer solutions or issue resolution. To date we have used these very effectively to win work, raise eminence and highlight service delivery issues. That said if you are only monitoring social media channels you will be missing a large proportion of the conversation, the social platforms that are out there are only one facet of the landscape, face to face, e-mail, traditional media (TV, print and radio) and good old fashioned research are your other key elements of the solution that need to be in place to effectively manage a holistic CRM program.

Social Media experts often talk about complete transparency and honesty. How have you found marketing a corporate organisation in such an environment and would you agree with the experts. Are corporate organisations able to be as transparent and honest as the experts would deem necessary?

From a corporate brand perspective we have been able to be transparent. People are always looking for the next big news story and want the “insider scoop” realistically all corporations are bound by governance and client confidentially clauses and therefore certain information will not be communicated via the digital channels, this approach is no different to traditional media approaches. That said social media allows you to experience the brand through the various platforms allowing you as a 3rd party to gain greater insight into an organisations culture before you actually meet the organization in real life, why because the social media channels are real time and broadcast to wide audience as and when the news happens, no delays.

The panel consisted of:

Moderator: Michelle Atagana, Editor, memeburn
Garth Rhoda, General Manager Media, Habari Media Group
Siphelele Sixaso, Head of Marketing, SAfm
Bellinder Carreira, Senior Manager Digital and Direct Marketing, Standard Bank

As you can see this is a great panel of experts so the insight gathered here should carry some clout. There were two main insights that were gleamed from the discussion.

Can social media attract customers

The short answer is yes, but the general consensus was that you should not look to social media purely for acquisition. This is simply because each company will engage with customers in different ways, this is a natural progression. Brands have an opportunity to meet consumers in a social environment through Facebook but Standard Bank have found Twitter to be more useful as part of their business processes like customer support.

So you can use social media to attract new customers but don’t be small minded or short sighted.

Have consumers changed

I have spoken about digital consumers at length on this blog so this topic interested me a lot.

Belinda suggests that the consumers have not changed and I agree with her. These consumers have only changed they way the can communicate with brands. They choose to use social media because they like using social media.

Sufiso Mazibuko, Habari Media Group, said something interesting. The smart brands understand that the customers are not new but that social media creates a higher level of immediacy in conversation between brands and consumers. This hit the nail on the head of this discussion. Your consumer has not changed that just use social media which has changed the way and possibly the rules of communication between brands and consumers.

What are the trends being used that are shifting the way the recruitment industry works? There are two obvious and high impact trends that have risen out of social media and online technology that are worth looking at:

Move Towards Headhunting

Wall Street Journal makes an interesting observation that social media has made headhunting easier and cheaper. Networking websites like Linkedin have opened the door to finding people based on expertise, experience and CV. We are able to see immediate recommendations of people we are thinking about hiring and can make more comprehensive decisions about people before starting the interview process.

On a global scale we see business looking to decrease their job board subscriptions and move towards using social technology like Facebook and Linkedin to find great employees. The general consensus being that jobs boards create too many unqualified leads that waste HR time. Social Media channels however, allow recruiter to check out potential candidates before the invitation is sent. Leaving the power of selection in the hands of the recruiter and not with the job seeker.

Search Tools vs Career Portals

Search based jobs websites

Google has successfully created a search culture. When we need something we search for it – usually in Google. The same happens in recruitment. We find that candidates will turn to Google before they turn to job and career portals, simply because thats what they know.

Search works differently to portals. Portals let people browse though positions and candidates available in the network. Search allows you to scour the internet for exactly what you are looking for without bias to a particular website. This is where Indeed comes in. A South African Jobs Search Engine that searches all job sites, classified and any other source it can find to produce a search result for exactly the job you are looking for, allowing you to apply for the position of your dreams quickly and easily.

The impact of search based tools vs directory tools online to find employment may very well change the way we promote our job openings. An easy example would be that we need to start considering our the Search Engine Optimisation of every single job post and there may even be opportunity in using advertising vehicles like Google Adwords to promote top positions.

Career Portals need to integrate with social technology

Jobs.co.za have recently started using the Linkedin API allowing candidates to update their profiles directly from their Linkedin Profile. They have also opened up the possibility “or its members to register, search for jobs, create job alerts, see who’s hiring and find useful career advice all directly from the Facebook page.” (Bizcommunity) All of this social media integration is simply in aid of making it simpler and easier to recruiters to find candidates.

This level of social media integration is the only way, I believe, that Jobs and Career portals can remain relevant in the recruitment industry. Although we are not seeing these portals opening up headhunting opportunities like Linkedin, this is still a step in the right direction.

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This year a few interesting developments may provide interesting insight into internet usage in South Africa.

Increased YouTube Interest

YouTube has moved up the ranks to fourth place showing an increased interest in video content on the internet.

I have especially noticed that the younger Generation Y see youtube as an integral way of learning and keeping in touch with whats popular. I also remember a conversation with a young Gen Y who shared the embarrassment she felt when she had not seen the YouTube Video that all her friends were talking about.

I believe that this interest in video content is something worth looking into as we try to communicate effectively online with South African consumers.

Business Networking sees growth

Last year, Linkedin didn’t make it onto the Top 20 Websites. This was almost the expected result as many people I had spoken to had never heard of Linkedin.

Business networking is taking off at a seriously fast pace with Linkedin now claiming the 12th position. I did some research on South Africa’s Linkedin Usership in 2010 and found about 600 000 business professionals using the business in South Africa. Say in touch with this blog as we will release the 2011 Linkedin stats soon.

2011 also see’s many companies beginning to use Linkedin as a recruitment tool. A top finance firm recently invested into Linkedin Recruitment and have already (within 3 months) received a 200% return on investment.

As social media technology becomes more mainstream we have started to see more businesses looking into harnessing this power to build its own Social Business network.

Amazon increases in South African Traffic

As the tablet market booms in South Africa I believe we will see more interest in Amazon as it has done a great job in making sure it is included on the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab and now kindle is also available on most computers. We cannot forget at this point that Amazon’s primary tool for accessing e-books is it’s own e-book reader – the kindle.

This, coupled with bar code scanner applications, could see the demise of many book stores. As it is now possible to scan a book ISBN number on my phone, search the internet for that ISBN and buy the book off amazon and have it downloaded to my kindle in less than 5mins. It would take me longer to buy the book from the cashier.

For all those interested, here is the full list of the Top 20 websites in South Africa for 2011:

1) Google South Africa
2) Facebook
3) Google
4) Youtube
5) Yahoo
6) Wikipedia
7) Twitter
8) News24
9) Blogger
10) Gumtree
11) Linkedin
12) Standard Bank
13) FNB
14) Windows Live
15) ABSA
16) WordPress
17) IOL
18) Amazon
19) MSN
20) Microsoft Corporation

The findings were quite interesting and echoed many generalizations about generation Y.

In South Africa, Generation Y uses digital platforms for communication and prefer Facebook and BBM over any other communication tool. Email continues to lose its effectiveness as a communication vehicle with this generation.

Google is starting to lose search market share to Facebook as 50% of Gen Y chooses to use Facebook as a search engine over Google.

Although MXit is popular it’s loyalty is much lower (less than one hour a day) than Facebook (up to five hours per day).

When given the choice Gen Y chose the internet over magazines, their cellphone over the internet and tertiary education over their cell phone. They are also a healthy bunch of individuals choosing healthy food over junk food, restaurants over fast food and bottled water over fizzy drinks.

Here is a list of some of our findings

Use of the internet

• 85% have an email address, but only half check it more than once a month
• 99% use the internet – most about 2 hours a day
• They do not regard facebook as the internet
• 73% access the internet on their phone (even though over 90% have the internet at home)
• 11% watch webinars / webisodes (online seminars / online episodes)
• 91% use facebook; 30% use twitter
• 69% have a Mxit account – but most only check it for less than an hour a day
• 60% watch YouTube (funnies & music videos firstly and also instructional videos
• 50% use Google as a Search Engine – 50% use facebook

Use of Non-Digital Media

• 91% listen to the radio (during drive time) and all of those claim to listen to 5fm, but then also mention other stations – no loyalty
• 64% read books
• 42% read the newspaper
• 73% read magazines (Female – fashion & gossip (Heat Magazine and You Magazine), Male – sports and Men’s Health)
• 85% go to the cinema – primarily the evening show
• 64% watching DSTV (in the evening)

Facebook and Social Media

• They do not regard facebook as the internet
• 60% spend more than 5hrs a day on facebook
• 84% use facebook to send messages rather than email
• Prefer facebook over twitter
• 50% use facebook as a search engine (other 50% use Google)
• Watch on YouTube – Funny & Music Videos and then How To /Instructional videos
• Very few read blogs, 2 write their own
• 69% have a Mxit account – but most either don’t use it, or only check it for less than an hour a day
• Other social networks used – BBM & Skype

Choice

• Internet over magazines
• Healthy food over junk food
• Tertiary education over getting a job
• Own music over radio
• Medical aid over funeral policy
• Bottled water over fizzy drinks
• Restaurant over fast food
• Facebook over Mxit
• Cellphone over internet (100%)
• Tertiary education over cellphone
• Social media over emails (98%)

I believe that any campaign launched in the digital space should consider the digital lifestyle of the consumer they are targeting. Too often we end up targeting low technology users with high end smart phone applications. Yes that target market may own a smart phone but their digital lifestyle is such that the application may not engage the consumer.

TNS surveys have created a great framework to use called Digital Lifestyles. Take a read through the lifestyles and leave a comment letting me know which lifestyle best describes you.

INFLUENCERS

The internet is an integral part of my life. I’m young and a big mobile Internet user and generally access everywhere, all of the time. I’m a blogger, a passionate social networker with many social network friends. I’m also a big online shopper, even via my mobile. I want to make sure as many people as possible hear my online voice.

COMMUNICATORS

I just love talking and expressing myself, whether that’s face to face, on a fixed line, mobile or on social networking sites, instant messaging or just emailing people. I really want to express myself in the online world in the way that I can’t in the offline one. I tend to be a smart phone user and I’m connecting online from my mobile, at home, at work or at college.

KNOWLEDGE-SEEKERS

I use the internet to gain knowledge, information and to educate myself about the world. I’m not very interested in social networking but I do want to hear from like-minded people especially to help me make purchase decisions. I’m very interested in the latest thing.

NETWORKERS

The internet is important for me to establish and maintain relationships. I have a busy life whether it’s my profession or managing the home. I use things like social networking to keep in touch with people I wouldn’t have time to otherwise. I’m a big home internet home user and I’m very open to talking to brands and looking for promotions. That said I’m not really the kind of person to voice my opinions online.

ASPIRERS

I’m looking to create a personal space online. I’m very new to the Internet and I’m accessing via mobile and internet cafes but mostly from home. I’m not doing a great deal at the moment online but I’m desperate to do more of everything, especially from a mobile device.

FUNCTIONALS

The internet is a functional tool, I don’t want to express myself online. I like emailing, checking the news, sport & weather but also online shopping. I’m really not interested in anything new (like social networking )and I am worried about data privacy and security. I am older and have been using the internet for a long time.