"UGC The Audience Delivers" as presented at NXNE

Toronto, Ontario - July 5th - Founder and Chief Creative Officer Steve Hulford spoke at the NXNE Conference in Toronto in June. His presentation was called "User Generated Content: The Audience Delivers". Here is the contents of that presentation:

"Users creating and sharing their creative content, is an extremely popular activity. While ‘User Generated Content’ or UGC has been with us since the days of home movies, thanks to Youtube and Facebook it easier than ever to get involved. Almost everyone is snapping pictures, recording videos and sharing them online. Find out how you can engage your audience and tap into the UGC pipeline. This discussion will include real experience from the trenches, including UGC best practises, how to maximize submissions, how to increase site traffic and time spent on site, methods to curate and get the most from UGC and more. We will also explore some case studies of top UGC programs that show the diversity of options and potential of this powerful channel."

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Social Media for Business

May 27, 2010 – Toronto, ON | We hear a lot about social media every day in blog posts, Twitter, traditional media and the like. It’s “the” method of communication for many people, surpassing speaking on the phone, even if it’s mobile. It has become an accepted, effective and growing method of marketing and interacting with customers. So what about within your business?

Historically, technology was developed in the business world, government or academia first, and then later adapted for consumer opportunities. Examples include the desktop computer, email and the Internet itself. Today, what we’re often seeing is the opposite, with consumer products later finding business application, such as desktop search, podcasts, broadband video and mobile applications.

It’s also normal to see consumer software used by employees in the workplace before being formally adopted by IT departments. Want your people to be more productive and lower IT costs at the same time? Find out what your employees like to use and involve them in determining what tools the business can benefit from. Like it or not, changes are occurring in how people think, learn, process information, communicate and collaborate.

Social media is now becoming more widely accepted within businesses to enable people to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge in a more productive manner. LinkedIn and Twitter are two public sites that can be used effectively for specific business purposes such as recruitment or customer support. While management often debates the pros and cons of allowing employees access to popular, public social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, they are starting to see the value of these types of tools and functionality within the organization. You can now have functionality similar to the public social networks inside your organization – to share information in a safe and controlled environment, without the worry of exposing sensitive corporate information to others outside the company.

A few factors contribute to the value social media can play for business. Humans are social and visual creatures by nature. There is a strong move online toward images and video, for management communications, product information, presentations, blog posts and training (see Video Opportunities article for more examples). We are continuing to see communication go towards shorter, searchable and contextual “sound bites”.

Social media can aid in one other business challenge. The loss of corporate knowledge is a growing issue, with an aging population and significant numbers close to retirement, regular employee turnover and the high cost of training new people. When people leave your business, they walk out the door with some of your most valuable assets: applied knowledge and experience. Making it easier for people to share knowledge in a safe and controlled manner and wrapping social activities such as commenting, rating and tagging around online information and dialogues, helps draw out this experience and convert it from individual to organizational value. Capturing just a small percentage of this day-to-day experience and making it searchable within your organization unlocks a knowledge base that was previously inaccessible.

Your younger employees expect to have tools in the workplace that they already use daily. Providing similar, easy-to-use tools within the organization helps break down the traditional cultural resistance to knowledge sharing that many businesses struggle with.

“Social business” opportunities to share what’s important and interesting include:

1. management communications;
2. a central place to aggregate, manage, access and repurpose all presentations;
3. innovation tools;
4. competitor information;
5. profiles with documents authored, recent work experience, speaking engagements, areas of interest and blogs; and
6. online, just-in-time and distance training.

Through the use of video and interactive applications, you help attract, engage, interact and retain your people. You also reduce the time of onboarding, making employees more valuable, more quickly.

Additional benefits of making your business social are:

1. unleashing creativity and innovation;
2. reducing time to market;
3. increasing productivity through quicker access to knowledge;
4. increasing revenue by delivering broader value to more customers;
5. significantly reducing email messages; and
6. improving overall employee engagement.

By building true organizational knowledge, these tools help strengthen brand and corporate loyalty within an organization, thereby increasing external brand value.

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How Social Media Drives Value Creation

Toronto, On | March 31st, 2010. Value is an expression of the worth of something. There are many different ways people assess a value. For example, Neoral is a drug used for patients that have recently received an organ transplant. If you were a patient that just underwent a transplant the value placed on this product would be quite significant. However, if you are fortunate enough to still have all your original parts, it could be argued that the value of this product, to that individual, is somewhat negligible.

Not surprisingly the “value” discussion surrounding social media is currently a very hot topic. Social media marketers and traditional marketers are both obsessed with finding ways to drive interest and traffic using this new medium. However, where many marketers are falling short is in articulating how these efforts are creating value to the organization. As a result, many initial attempts in social media are being met with a feeling of being prescribed Neoral in the absence of a new organ!

Although social media may be a new marketing channel, it does not follow that traditional business methods of analyzing and measuring value creation have changed. To the contrary, in order to be successful and win repeat business it is becoming increasingly critical that empirical measurements of value be demonstrated to your clients.

There is no shortage of discussion around social media and value measurements. Interestingly, they almost always focus on revenues. In actuality, revenues only represent one element of how value is measured; equally important are the costs and the discount rate. Let me explain this further. From a financial standpoint the value of a business comes down to the net present value of future cash flows, discounted at a rate of return which reflects the risk of the business. Cash flows for this purpose basically mean profits.

For this blog post, let’s focus on the expense side (costs). I will follow up with a post on how social media can lower your discount rate to produce more value. The bottom line in social media marketing is if done properly, the cost of investing in this form of marketing is significantly lower than traditional forms of media with greater results.

Let me substantiate this with an example. Recently, we ran a campaign for an international consumer brand. The campaign had a traditional media spend and a social media spend all driving traffic to a website for a contest. The cost of the traditional media spend was ≈ 150 K. The cost of the social media spend was included in the overall contest site which was ≈ 30 K. When the final results were tallied the social media initiative drove 25% of the traffic/registrations, and the traditional media budget 20%. Not only were the costs dramatically lower, the results were also considerably better, thereby enhancing the business value creation for this client.

The internet and social media in particular have the ability to drastically enhance operating margins in an organization. Savvy marketers that are aware of the proper software tools can develop purposeful campaigns at a fraction of the cost. Thus, driving greatly improved operating margins for their business. I think it is important to always remember that at the end of the day the marketer’s job is all about augmenting their companies’ cash flow. It is our job to help them understand by how much!

Ron Watson

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