The Digital world allows business to connect with their customers more easily than ever before. Charlie Mullins discusses online feedback.

Digital world increases praise for business

As far as the networks and the internet is going and social gatherings on that. It's very important as word of mouth is what makes a successful business. What we are finding with the internet is we can get feedback from customers that is normally quite positive. Other customers can look at it. The fact that we can interchange all these ideas with people. I have had many people here today say they use the company. People are more inclined now to praise successful businesses. The culture's changing and people in bad times are more appreciative of good business and the more people that are prepared to write about them, especially with the simplicity things of the internet. So for us it has been a wonderful thing.  

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The age of big data is a new and exciting time for business. In this TV show John Halpin shares his thoughts and experiences of data.

The age of big data creates unknown territory

Big data is basically saying, it’s not just all about big brands and big systems and the back office of big head offices, it’s about social media and Facebook and online and Twitter and that’s all data. It’s about blogs.  It’s about, videos.  It’s about news. It’s all this information being captured somewhere.  How can you use that from a company perspective? And the answer is, we don’t really quite know.  It’s very new. Rather than get quite excited about big data and all this additional information and terabytes of new data going into organisations, and basically being quite pleased with yourself that you’ve actually got it.  To me, it’s just like well, there’s always been lots of data. I’ve been involved in lots of data for many years.  It’s how you have it and use it.  If I was going down the route of beginning, doing something in data, rather than get quite excited about big data and how it’s used and how it’s interact. First of all, understand your customers, know what they are, have the information on them.  Can you speak to them? There’s laws in this country about, speaking to customers.  You might have all the information, you’ve got to legally be able to speak to them and say, if your customers are a prospect, all that kind of thing. There’s regulation around the financial services, which is even tighter as well.  But big data is quite exciting in terms of a phrase I used before, is dealing with the fact. If I can prove something on the data that I have now, it helps me very much to go back to my directors or people who are on the budgets and say, “Right, to move us into the realms of big data and transactional behavioural information via social media, I’ll need some software to do that. I’ll need some money.  And the reason why I need money, because I’ve just proved something with you with the data I have already. The age of big data is another exciting aspect of the connected economy. We will continue to bring you expert insight into the impact of social media and digital innovations.

Social trends are a new issue for corporate businesses. John Halpin discusses how corporate organizations might become social and take advantage of our increasingly connected economy.

Social trends in business - The paradox

The real paradox for me are the interesting elements of that, how you link that into a business. And I don’t think anyone’s quite worked that one out in terms of social media conversations, it’s basically people speaking to each other about anything. So where does the big blue business come into that? Where does the brand advocacy come into that? You might see people twittering like, oh, I like Tesco Bank because this product’s great, it’s quite interesting. But does that mean they’re advocate, they’re loyal, can we sell them something else? How can we use that piece of information? I don’t quite know. And you don’t see a lot of advertising at all within the social media space because it’s peoples’ downtime. They’re not really in work, it’s that kind of thing. So I think a lot of organisations, they understand that it’s interesting, big data again, having this information, the linking it, using it. You can see some trends in there, you know. You have to be on the ball as well because they can spiral in terms of a viral, completely snowball in terms of if someone doesn’t like you and they tell a lot of other people they don’t like you. There’s going to be a lot of text coming in to say there’s thousands of people that have read that message. But how you use that in terms of sort of selling stuff or in terms of trade, I think it’s quite difficult. It just might be sort of a monitoring exercise and trying your best to interact with those customers. ______________________________________________________________________ Inside Finance TV will continue to follow ideas about social trends in business and we have more videos from John Halpin.

One business risk factor is consumer preference which, as Nigel Huddleston explains in this TV show, is affected by online recommendations.

Business risk and social media

We’ve definitely seen that recommendations do impact user behaviour. A survey that actually is about a year and half old now, showed that about 34% of UK users, for example, use social media to inform their decisions about travel purchases. And when they did that, many of them changed the hotel that they were going to book, 12% changed the airline, 12% changed the tour operator. Many changed the country they were going to visit. So it definitely has a meaningful impact on user behaviour. Find further expert discussion about business risk, plus more industry insights, on Inside Finance TV.

Business growth strategy at Google involves developing social platforms alongside existing search functions. Nigel Huddleston explains:

Business growth strategy from Nigel Huddleston

We know that social is really important in travel. We can see from user behaviour that people do actually listen to and act upon the recommendations of people they in particular trust, but even people that they don’t know. So social’s huge, you know, people are actually changing hotels that they choose, they’re even changing which country they’re going to go on holiday based on these kind of social recommendations. So Google’s investing very heavily in it at the moment with Google Plus. But one of the key things there is, it’s not just a standalone, we’re trying to amalgamate it and bring it together with search, so it’s bringing together search and social in a really powerful way. There is more expert discussion about business growth strategy on Inside Finance TV.    

I don’t think it’s way too complex, I think it’s way too fast. You know, I was talking to a senior partner from an accounting firm now long since retired who was reminiscing about how he used to get instructions by letter. And you know, you’d get round to implementing them, whereas of course now it’s, you know, microseconds basically and it’s Twitter and it’s email and it’s everything, so it’s instant. The trouble is that because people can communicate instantly, they expect instant replies. And I think we’re in danger of doing everything too fast and not doing everything sensibly. You know, I think the hardest thing in business now is to find time to think, find time to stand back and give yourself space and not to react immediately, not to follow the crowd, just to stay calm and so, you know, most of what happens can be ignored. And that’s a very courageous thing to do, but I think that’s probably the most sensible thing that most people can do. Most news is noise, ignore it.

Seamus Gillen FCIS, Policy Director, ICSA on how 24/7 media environment brings more accountability

The role of technology, the role of social media is very important.  We’re living in 24/7 environment, we need to encourage organisations to understand that accountability is now driven by 24/7 agenda and as social media is always on and that organisations are living in a goldfish bowl of public opinion and public scrutiny And that is a big challenge actually, helping organisations to realise that their positioning and their credibility in society, and their success as an organisation or as a business is dependent upon managing stakeholder expectations.  Which is why I go back to governance as one of the principle drivers of that, because if you’re well run and you are managing stakeholder expectations of how you run as a company or as an organisation, you’re going to enjoy levels of support which will always feed through social media, currents and trends and issues and crises or whatever. So organisations need to be clear about what they stand for.  They need to deliver against what people expect of them and then they can begin to manage the whole technological revolution and the social media revolution which is concentrating, public opinion and commentary on how they’re doing.

Anthony Hilton, Financial Editor, The London Evening Standard, on why social media should be ignored

There are times when you do have to react quickly clearly.  Social media’s a difficult one.

I mean 99% of stuff on Twitter you could … has been dismissed as complete garbage.  And so the entire range of vaguely interesting through to useful is sandwiched in that one percent at the top

Companies are mentioned, you know, companies used to be discussed in pubs all the time, and they didn’t know about it so they took no notice.

And most of the stuff on social media, I mean a million people will read it and a million people will forget it thereafter.  So there’s a tiny amount of stuff, a tiny, tiny amount that actually will go viral and could damage a company.  Now, how you spot that and know how to react to it, I’m afraid I don’t have the answer

But I think most of it could be ignored.  And I despair of companies that spend their time endlessly monitoring social media in case something pops up.  They ought to have something better to do with their lives, you know, get a life.

Graeme Codrington, Futurist, TomorrowToday on social media marketing tools.

According to Graeme Codrington, the popularity of social media marketing tools are best understood as customer behaviors rather than new marketing channels. Yet businesses, focussed on their traditional internal processes and org charts want to treat social media marketing tools as channels. Facebook is not even a channel, it’s actually a behaviour. And companies don’t understand this. Yet companies are trying to treat Facebook like a channel, they’re trying to work out how do you do marketing? How do you do recruitment through this social media space? I mean I say Facebook, but Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the others are going to be in the same category. They are behaviours that have simply found technologies to make them happen. And that means that companies really need to adjust their attitudes. This is what we call "beyond the hype". You know, we need to go beyond the hype of the 13 million so-called social media experts listed on Google, who will come in and tell you how you can increase sales and how you can increase staff retention. Maybe you can do those things. But on a long-term basis something else is going on in social media. It’s about building communities. It’s about engaging, interacting, involving people in conversations. It’s about connection. And these are not things that you then use in your marketing team or your HR strategy. These are ways of living, ways of engaging, and that’s the mind set shift, that needs to take place. These are not technologies, these are behaviours and we need to adjust our behaviour and attitude to match the technologies that are available. For more on social media marketing tools and how they impact on business check out all Graeme Codrington's videos here