CIM Marketing Seminar – Punch Above Your Weight

This event is FREE to School of Management Staff and Students

20^th November 2008 from 6pm – 8pm in Building 2, University of Southampton.

Punch Above Your Weight CASE STUDY SPECIAL on Web 2.0 marketing techniques

Marketing is about creating a good story that connects you with your customers, and telling it in the right places – especially on the Web. Now we present the case studies – an opportunity to discover the secrets of three successful online businesses.

Alan and Lisa will explain how they talked to several early adopter small companies during their current research programme who have become quite sophisticated in how they use online and Web 2.0 techniques to help them ‘punch above their weight’ and look more substantial to prospective clients and collaborators. Three ‘best practice’ early adopter companies will be discussed from the many that participated in the research programme.

Dr Alan Rae is Managing Partner of Ai Consultants, which researches how small companies use IT and the Internet. He develops training programmes for small companies or those who need to work with or sell to them. He is a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Marketing and sits on its Membership Group.

Dr Lisa Harris is Senior Lecturer in Marketing, a Chartered Marketer and Director of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. She is currently working with Alan on a number of follow-ups to the Punch Above Your Weight online marketing research programme.

You will need to register though as places are limited. Please contact Christopher Hopper by email: c.hopper@soton.ac.uk  and include your full name and University e-mail address.

Technorati Tags: Punch Above Your Weight,Alan Rae,Lisa Harris,CIM Seminar

The Beermat Entrepreneur

As part of Enterprise Week celebrations, Mike Southon, author of ‘The
Beermat Entrepreneur’ will be speaking at the University of Southampton
on the 19th November. The talk will be part of the two day ‘Enterprise
Boot Camp Challenge’, which is a collaboration between the Universities
of Southampton, Winchester, Southampton Solent, Bournemouth and
Portsmouth, sponsored by Business Link and the Hampshire Economic
Partnership. Twenty five students will be solving an ‘Apprentice’ style
challenge which will be revealed on the day by a global business.

Date: 19th November
Time: 5.30 for 6pm start
Venue: Hartley Brasserie, Staff Club

The talk will be followed by a buffet and opportunity to network with
staff from other universities, sponsors and enterprise contacts from the
region.

Mike Southon’s talk will be entitled “Something About The Beatles”

Everyone has a great business idea, whether they are looking to set up
their own company or would like to be more creative in their corporate
environment. Mike Southon uses The Beatles as an example of how to be
creative and entrepreneurial, and explains how to overcome the
challenges you will face along the way. The presentation is packed with
great music and practical learning points from Mike’s own twin careers
as a highly successful serial entrepreneur and professional musician,
all delivered with energy, style and humour.

Mike is one of the world’s top business speakers, a Fellow of The
Professional Speakers Association. Mike is a Visiting Fellow in
Innovation and Entrepreneurship at London South Bank University. He has
made frequent appearances on television and radio and has a weekly
column on entrepreneurship on Saturday in the Financial Times.

“Mike Southon is more than Quite Interesting. He spreads insight and
cheerfulness in equal measure, like an ambidextrous chef icing two cakes
at once.” John Lloyd, producer of Blackadder, Spitting Image, Not The
Nine O’Clock News and QI

We do hope you will be able to attend.
Please email: studententerprise@soton.ac.uk if you can come.

BA ‘gets’ social media

At the Future of Social Media Conference in London recently, one of the most interesting presentations was from Chris Davies of British Airways.

Chris described how the objective of BA’s recent social media campaign involving the Australian comedienne Pam Ann was to reach a new audience in a less formal tone of voice. The videos involved budding actors and actresses among BA staff who had to audition for a role alongside Pam Ann – as you can see in this example:

http://www.britishairwaysandpamann.com/?destId=full_feature

The marketing team faced a significant challenge in that Pam Ann was not felt to be an ‘appropriate personality’ to champion the very traditional BA brand, and so obtaining internal sign off was very difficult.

However, the campaign was successful and so is likely to be repeated – with over 1,200 links made to the video clips, and significant levels of positive WOM about the unexpected communication style from BA.

Chris’s learning points and recommendations for social media marketing:

• New ways of working may be required, for example sourcing business partners with specialist knowledge
• Get lots of advice from a range of sources before diving in
• Take care re legal issues around managing user generated content and mitigate the risks
• Develop a robust moderation policy
• Engage but don’t dictate the message
• Make it fun!

Technorati Tags: british airways,pam ann,social media marketing

Highlights from FOSM Conference

Last week I attended the Future of Social Media Conference in London. There were around 200 people at the event, mainly marketers from traditional organisations looking to update themselves developments in social media and how the tools could be effectively adopted by their businesses.

Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy was one of the speakers and he made a number of key points from his recent book “Personality Not Included”:

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is now the holy grail. For example, companies should be using a Twitter search to find out what is being said about their brand online, and monitoring comments on blogs, forums etc etc. Engagement with customers rather than impressions should be the measure of success.

Companies need to assess the quality of an online review (aka Ebay’s star system or, even the basic ‘was this review useful to you?’ question) in order to develop a system of ‘virtual trust metrics’ that contributors can rely on. A product or service rating of 4.3/5 appears to be more authentic than 5/5 – which looks to be contrived.

Suppliers have lost control of the message, because the number one influence on a customer’s purchase decision is now a personal recommendation. Recent research by Universal McCann showed that 8 out of the top 10 sources of trust are in fact word of mouth (4 from friends, 4 from strangers). In addition, you can’t choose who your spokespeople are (think John McCain and Paris Hilton….)

Another inspirational speaker was Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes. Will noted that the future is not evenly distributed – some companies are way ahead of the curve, others are way behind. Ford’s social media newsroom gives away unused professional product photos and shows that they ‘get it’ (see http://ford.digitalsnippets.com/ ) He called on audience participation to demonstrate the current disconnect between the numbers of people expecting to see ratings on a site they visit, while not providing it to others on their own sites….

Martin Verdon- Roe from Trip Advisor explained how his company now has 20 million reviews, up from 10 million a year ago. Major travel industry players such as Tui display both their own reviews and Trip Advisor’s on their website – but the independent Trip Advisor reviews are much greater in number. The next challenge for the company is the introduction of a Traveller Network, which works like a social network where people can sign up friends, and the system will show you reviews from your friends first when you input a particular destination query into the site. Keep an eye on Trip Advisor to see how this develops.

There was also a very interesting case study from British Airways which is worthy of a blog post of its very own….so watch this space!

All in all a very informative and entertaining day…with hardly a mention of the ‘recession’ word 🙂

Technorati Tags: FOSM,social media marketing