Every significant new technology to reach the workplace has the same reactions. Some love it and propose it as the answer to everything (but you have to truly believe) and others see it as the thin end of the wedge and nothing but moral and financial ruin can come from it.

Right now the technology in the spotlight is Social Media (and Twitter in particular).

The BBC reported (on October 26th) a survey commissioned by an IT vendor that claimed “Staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year.”

“The popularity of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook has grown considerably over the last couple of years, however with it has come the temptation to visit such sites during office hours,” said Philip Wicks from Morse. “When it comes to an office environment the use of these sites is clearly becoming a productivity black hole.” It added that companies should think about protecting the reputation of their brand.

The £1.4bn was extrapolated from a survey of 1,460 office workers of whom 50% spent an average 40 minutes per week on ‘social’ sites during working hours. Is that a reasonable extrapolation, or is there another factor to consider? Is Social Media in business all cost and no return? And is that the only consideration for businesses?

Social Media covers so many areas of business and personal communications that it is difficult to put it into one box. In today’s increasingly devolved work environment with more people working in isolation it is the new office watercooler or coffee machine – a place where people meet and share thoughts and ideas in a relaxed way. The value of having far-flung ‘colleagues’ who are there with you in real time is difficult to quantify not to mention the expertise at your fingertips on so many topics and the discoveries that can be made daily from links and retweets.

In a Business context, however, I believe Social Media can fit into the category of early stage Marketing – awareness, market research, audience building and R&D – rather than as a selling tool. So what we might look at is the opportunity cost of Social Media versus other similar activities and against activities further down the pipeline.

Interest in what it might bring to a business in that context is clear. Recently I went to Like Minds a conference about ROI (Return on Investment) and Social Media, an event that had a real buzz about it. The speakers had come from the USA, from London and from much nearer to the venue in the centre of Exeter. There were equally well-travelled people in the audience.

There was a consensus on the importance of having good content and on developing conversations and also in the development of communication that engages people around their own interests rather than forcing them to move to the agenda of the communicator.

There was (and still is) much debate and not a little confusion about ROI. I thought Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder on Twitter) explained ROI very well. It is about cost reduction or profit increase set against the costs of achieving that result. To me, ROI is a much more global concept and is best viewed across departmental or Company performance rather than against one activity – such as Social Media. However, businesses only have a finite budget and Social Media, as Olivier suggested, needs to be funded out of one of the existing budgets in this area of Marketing.

Generally speaking, a business has goals for turnover and the sales that make that up come from a pipeline that converts contacts into prospects and prospects into sales, usually with considerable wastage as people qualify out. So, there should be, across all methods of acquiring them, a number of new potential clients that will deliver that turnover. How many new contacts are needed in each method of acquisition and over what timescale will be dependent on the ratio of potential clients to actual conversions and the average time taken to close the business with them.

How effective is Social Media in delivering good prospects into this process? Trey Pennington (@treypennington) at Likeminds talked about engaging people in conversation and then moving those people along a process that might lead to business. Time will tell how effective Social Media is at doing this, but it is something that businesses are, quite rightly, exploring. As they get more data, they will either move further into Social Media use or withdraw and try something else.

The approach of Social Media to Marketing is also developing in an interesting direction. Scott Gould (@scottgould), who marketed Like Minds exclusively using Social Media, in a blog post, talked about his approach to Like Minds. He described how he builds a platform around the people and gives them a place where they can talk. Whilst this is dangerously close to a ‘build it and they will come’ theory, it does seem to work and it is equally true about any communication. You need to know your audience and engage with them on their home ground both in terms of the content and context of the communication.

At the Cornwall Social Media Café (@csmc) the following week, Lloyd Davis (@lloyddavis), founder of the London Social Media Café (or Tuttle Club (#tuttle) as it is known) also talked about creating a platform, in this case a regular time and place where you can drop in and have coffee with likeminded people. The Tuttle club is a self-organising group with little or no agenda and no obligations placed on members. The concept is, however, developing into consulting where Lloyd takes the equivalent of a Tuttle meeting into a client and uses conversations to explore possibilities around a brief. The process of building such a group and developing outcroppings from it takes time but it is important in his view not to impose any expectations on the group.

Social Media gives businesses the opportunity to extend their Marketing reach in a way that may cause some concerns for the old school. Marketing has always been about having the right content and delivering it to audiences through multiple channels. Now, with Social Media, it is easier to strike up a conversation with your potential customers. Not only can those prospects talk back, they can also talk to each other. It is a conversation that you can’t easily control, but it is one that will take place regardless of whether you, as a business, choose to take part in it.

Social Media technology will continue to develop. It is by no means certain that the current tools will be the long term winners. Just look at how Google rose to dominate search (and many other areas) for an example of how a new player can sideline earlier technologies. What is certain is that businesses will need to understand how those tools will translate into business practice. Treating Social Media as a passing fad will not work. Finding ways to handle and outweigh the costs and achieve competitive advantage will be.

I won’t win friends in either camp with this position, I’m sure. Social Media is just another new approach that businesses must embrace and embed in their business practices. When we stop putting it in capitals, we will have understood it and begun to harness it effectively.

As delivered to Business League Falmouth today.

This has been a busy week and an interesting journey into the world of Social Media. I was glad to hear a consensus on the importance of having good content and on developing conversations and also in the development of communication that engages people around their own interests rather than forcing them to move to the agenda of the communicator.

On Friday, I went to Like Minds (#likeminds), a conference (or maybe an unconference) about ROI and Social Media. Social Media has a buzz about it and the event was at capacity (around 200). The speakers had come from the US, from London and from much nearer to the venue in the centre of Exeter. There were equally well-travelled people in the audience.

In the aftermath, there is much debate and not a little confusion about ROI. I thought Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) explained ROI very well. It is about cost reduction or profit increase set against the costs of achieving that result. To me, ROI is a much more global concept and is best viewed across departmental or Company performance rather than against one activity.

Social Media covers so many areas of business and personal communications that it is difficult to put it into one box. The value of having ‘colleagues’ who are there with you in real time is difficult to quantify when working in isolation in today’s increasingly devolved work environment not to mention the resource at your fingertips on so many topics and the discoveries that can be made daily from links and retweets.

In a Business context, I believe Social Media comes into the catergory of early stage Marketing – awareness, market research, audience building and R&D – rather than a selling tool. So what we might look at is the Opportunity Cost of Social Media versus other similar activities and against activities further down the pipeline. As an example, Frank Furness talks about having to do cold calls as being the cost of not asking for enough referrals. So Social Media, as Olivier suggested needs to be funded out of one of the existing buckets in this area of Marketing.

In a commercial context, a business has goals for turnover and the sales that make that up come from a pipeline that converts, usually with considerable wastage as people qualify out, contacts into prospects and prospects into sales. So, there should be, across all methods of acquiring, a number of new potential clients that will deliver that turnover. How many new contacts are needed in each method of acquisition and over what timescale will be dependent on the ratio of potential clients to actual conversions and the average time taken to close the business with them.

How effective is Social Media in delivering good prospects into this process? Trey Pennington (@treypennington) at Likeminds talked about engaging people in conversation and then moving those people along a process that might lead to business. Time will tell how effective Social Media is at doing this, but it is something that businesses are, quite rightly, exploring. As they get more data, they will either move further into Social Media use or withdraw and try something else.

For some businesses, the concept of Opportunity Cost is irrelevant anyway as Social Media champions in their businesses are extending their hours to add in their activity rather than doing it in salaried hours and for those of us in self-employment, it is just another unpaid task that we fit in if we believe that Social Media works for us.

Scott Gould (@scottgould), in a blog post, talked about his approach to Like Minds. He described how he builds a platform around the people and gives them a place they can talk. Whilst this is dangerously close to a ‘build it and they will come’ theory, it does seem to work and it is equally true about any communication. You need to know your audience and engage with them on their home ground both in terms of the content and context of the communication.

At Cornwall Social Media Café (@csmc) last night, Lloyd Davis (@lloyddavis), founder of the London Social Media Café (or Tuttle Club (#tuttle) as it is known) also talked about creating a platform, in this case a regular time and place where you can drop in and have coffee with likeminded people. The Tuttle club is a self-organising group with little or no agenda and no obligations placed on members. The concept is, however, developing into consulting where Lloyd takes the equivalent of a Tuttle meeting into a client and uses conversations to explore possibilities around a brief. The process of building such a group and developing outcroppings from it takes time but it is important in his view not to impose any expectations on the group.

I gave a presentation to my Breakfast Networking Group today on the two ‘old cons’ of Marketing – content and context – and the ‘newer con’ of equal importance – conversation. It came from my thinking over years and was informed by many of the things I learned or confirmed this week. I’ve covered some of the ground here and more will develop in later posts.

In that model, I see Social Media (of all types) as part of the Conversation and as just one of the Contexts for delivering your Content to your audience. Content needs to be consistent, effective and engaging and this requires stories. Stories connect with us at a deep level and we learn and are influenced by them all of the time.

All of that is a little undigested and I expect that the learning of the next and subsequent weeks will continue to develop and refine my thinking.

For now, however, it is time to turn this over for conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In a recent article, I wrote about the need for regular content in order to tell your story to the audiences that you need to inform and influence. We all know that writing regularly is very important but people often ask me – ‘how can you generate good content when you can’t think what to say?’

You may know that barren feeling when clarity is elusive and inspiration disappears. Even professional writers know it. Whether you call it ‘writers block’ or something else, there is no point waiting for it to be replaced by inspiration. It needs to be stimulated by one of a number of methods.

The first may seem obvious but it is effective. Read around the news and see if there are stories out there that fit with your content plan and would thus, with you own point of view applied, make a good article that will attract the interest of your target reader. If you read around the blogosphere or on article sites, you’ll see numerous examples where this has been done. Sometimes, though, even this approach fails to come up trumps. If it fails, then you may need to look deeper.

Your conscious mind is filled with the day-to-day issues and distractions of the urgent. It can also be full of reasons why what you are creating is just not good enough. You may have experienced the many false starts that trying to create through the conscious mind can bring. Your subconscious mind often knows what you want to say however, the difficulty is finding ways through the conscious and into the subconscious. Here are a few ways that work for me – you may have others that work for you.

Write into the topic and take it by surprise.
Start by just writing something, it doesn’t matter what. As you write, perhaps about the weather or the feeling of the pen in your hand, a line will begin to make some sense and then you are off. This is your subconscious taking over. The spine of an article, maybe the whole thing, flows simply behind it. At worst, you’ll have written something instead of sitting and fuming. At best, you’ll have the basis of your article.

Quieten the noise.
Meditation or relaxation can help. I listen to a Paul McKenna relaxation exercise and find that it relaxes and quietens my conscious mind sufficiently to be able to hear the answer coming from beyond conscious thought.

Step away from the paper or keyboard.

Talk into a recording machine.
Dictation machines are affordable and easy to use (and to transcribe). It is often easier to talk about something than it is to write about it especially if it is a subject close to your heart and one that you talk about frequently.

All of these approaches will result in raw material for an article. That material needs structuring and editing. I mind map the results, structure them into a story and edit the result until it makes sense and gives the message to the reader that you desire. More about that in a future blog.

Being unable to think of suitable content ideas is a common problem but it is too important to leave to inspiration. When inspiration deserts you, don’t just sit there, do something! The results may surprise you – and your readers.

Article first published in Fresh business Thinking on 10th September.

Marketing materials within business have a tendency to develop tactically over time. To support their activity, businesses develop brochures, leaflets, postcards and other printed material. Online it is a given that most businesses now have a website. Press Releases and articles are used to build business visibility and Social Media such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter are also being used by more and more businesses.

Often the responsibility for these different outputs is in different places and the business treats them as if they were separate entities, developed in isolation, often without coordination of message, of tone and of image.

The audience, however, is not fragmented. The same people will read the different messages coming through these uncoordinated channels. The result is that brand gets muddied and confused. Customers don’t buy if they don’t understand what the business is about. They ask, just what IS the story?

Despite all the many options for communicating with your audience, content is still a, maybe the, critical factor. It needs to be consistent, effective and it must contribute to building the right image. That image must also be one that will be sustained by the actions and behaviours of the business. Clearly, the potential for confusion is greater in larger businesses, but the problem exists even in the smallest. Even a single person business can manage to deliver mixed messages and, in my experience, many do.

Communication can be instantaneous and its reach is almost unlimited. Your message can be broadcast across the world in seconds. So it is worth investing time into putting some basics in place.

My first interest in developing content is to understand the audience(s) we will be talking to. Particularly, I want to establish -

What interests them and what do they know already?

This will determine the story we tell and the level at which we begin to tell the story. If we sell eggs, we can assume that people know that eggs are edible but do they already understand the benefits or do we need to remind them? Do they already have concerns about health benefits or about food safety? Do they need assurances and education in aspects of the benefits? This is where research pays dividends. It can be formal Market Research or it can be as informal talking to our customers on sales calls or listening in where they talk – online as well as face to face.

How do they talk?

Getting the tone of our communication right for the audience is important. The way in which we create the message for Guardian readers will differ from those who read Hello magazine or the Sun. It will also depend on our product or service – serious or frivolous, funeral services or sunshine holidays. The tone can vary from piece to piece and between channels but can seldom embrace opposites successfully.

What do we want them to know?

You may have a single message that you want to get across but it is more likely that there are several. It will help your clarity and that of the reader if you can express these messages as a story or several stories. Your readers will want to identify with a story, so the stories should be aimed to resonate with them. They should be consistent with what you can deliver and it is often best to under promise and over deliver. Whilst your story can be aspirational it is best not to let it stray into the realms of fantasy. Your customers do talk and they use the Social Media, too. Bad word of mouth travels fast and far, too.

What do we want them to DO

Every piece of communication should have a purpose and that purpose is best served by signposting it within the communication. Depending on the piece, the action you want may be to prompt the reader to

What is possible will depend on the stage you have reached with the reader. Initial communication is about engaging and informing. At a subsequent stage, you may feel able to directly sell to them. Getting this wrong can turn your prospect off. It is always jarring to read a piece of informative writing with a hard sell paragraph at the end. If what you are doing is informing, don’t sell but don’t make it difficult for the reader to find out how to buy if they want to. Make sure it is always clear how to do business with you.

When you know what you want to say and to whom, you can select the best ways to deliver those messages. Most messages can be delivered across multiple channels. The more the reader chooses to interact with your content, the more you are creating permission to develop your conversation. So mix and match the delivery methods but ensure that the story and the tone are delivered consistently.

Some additional factors to consider -
People have different preferences for receiving information with the main preferences being visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (feelings). Delivering content through podcasts, videos and physical pieces of collateral and allowing the customer to choose will allow customers to exercise their preferences.

Choice in delivery method is also important. Do you deliver in print or online? Producing collateral in both forms and letting the customer choose is more likely to be to the customer’s liking. Making everything an online delivery may save cost but reduce income potential, too.

Some people want short communication (just the facts) whilst others will prefer a longer piece. If your short piece gives access to a longer version of the same story, again the customer chooses. This is one of the ways in which Twitter works best with 140 characters giving the essence of the story and linked content continuing it. Twitter can also create an interest by developing a series of messages that will ask the customer to buy in before a payoff is delivered.

Your collateral and content will define who you are in the eyes of your customers and potential customers. Do you want them to hear a confusing mixture of messages, styles and tone?

The choice is yours. Make it well.

—————————————————————

Andy Coote is a professional writer and publisher and co-author of A Friend in Every City (2006), a book about Social Networking and Business. As a commentator on leadership and networking, Andy provides content strategy, writing support and services for a number of Business Leaders. You can reach him at andy [at] bizwords [dot] co [dot] uk or view his website at www.bizwords.co.uk.

The September Virtual CEO Newsletter was published today on Fresh Business Thinking. It contains three articles by my friend and client Brian Chernett of The Academy for Chief Executives and one from me on Content Strategy. I’ll repost that article on here later, but for now here are the links to the articles -

Changing Lives Through Business

10/09/09
By Brian Chernett

Life Changing is a phrase heard several times a night on TV at the moment. It is usually related to ‘reality’ television programmes as far apart as X Factor and Dragon’s Den. It is also heard in Police accident reports as ‘life changing injuries’. It has become just another clichéd phrase but I did wonder if what we do in business could also be considered to be life changing? And if it isn’t, should it be?

Business is about satisfying market requirements. It is about meeting a need or want in away that satisfies the customer and makes profit for the supplying business. But is that all it…

read full article >

Focussing On Adding Value

10/09/09
By Brian Chernett

VAT is a chore that most businesses in the European Union (EU) have in common. When sitting down with your VAT, it is worth remembering that its name – Value Added Tax – implies a truth of business. We are all here to add some value to and with our product or service.

All businesses have processes. In most business processes, some steps have been carefully designed and some have just happened as the business changed its approach or as people came and went. Even where the process was designed from end to end, if time has passed, it is likely to have elements of redundancy within it.
read full article >

What’s Your Story?

10/09/09
By Andy Coote

Marketing materials within business have a tendency to develop tactically over time. To support their activity, businesses develop brochures, leaflets, postcards and other printed material. Online it is a given that most businesses now have a website. Press Releases and articles are used to build business visibility and Social Media such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter are also being used by more and more businesses.

Often the responsibility for these different outputs is in different places and the business treats them as if they were separate entities, developed in isolation, often without coordination of message, of tone and of image.

The audience, however, is not fragmented. …
read full article >

Recession – The End Of The Beginning?

10/09/09
By Brian Chernett

According to The Times on 29th August, “The slump in Britain’s economy was less severe between April and June than initially estimated, official figures showed, raising hopes than the recession could be over. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 0.7 per cent between April and June, less than the first estimates of a 0.8 per cent drop. The annual decline in GDP was revised up from 5.6 per cent to 5.5 per cent in the second quarter, but this still marked the biggest contraction in the economy since records began in 1955.”

Is this the end of the recession, the beginning of the end or, as Winston Churchill famously said, the end of the beginning …
read full article >