Corporate Eye

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Archives for March 2011

Thinking Socially: Convincing the CEO

gregory shumcheniaI invited Gregory Shumchenia of Modern Pigeon to write a guest post for us – do take a moment to visit his site.

Greg started out five years ago as a photographer and just began offering marketing and social media services. He loves the outdoors and will never eat canned tuna.

Over to you…

7 Tips for Convincing Senior Management to Go Social

Are you working for a company that has yet to embrace social media?

This can be especially painful if you see specific areas in which social media would plug in perfectly to your company’s strategies and goals. The resistance to change may be coming directly from the top, with your CEO, or it may be the head of marketing that can’t see the need for all that Facebooking and Twittering.

Whatever the case, here are 7 tips to help convince the powers that be to start thinking more socially, and a few suggestions on how to implement social media into your company’s existing departments.

Step 1: Show your boss the size and scalability of social media:

With over 500 million users on Facebook and over 300 million on Twitter, companies have an opportunity to reach more people and at a lower cost than ever before. Even LinkedIn, the more “professional” social network, is approaching 100 million members. These numbers can’t be denied. Not only does social media extend a company’s reach, but it also allows for a more targeted message. Geographic location, gender, age, and even movie preferences are all readily available through social networking for your company to utilize and help focus its efforts.

Step 2: Find their friends and business partners:

Without getting too intrusive, look around on a few social networks to find your boss’s friends and colleagues — people he respects. Maybe a bit of peer pressure will help enlighten your boss to the true popularity of social media.

Step 3: Find people talking about your brand or industry:

This is one of the more powerful tools. Show your boss that people are already online and actively discussing your specific brand, or at least your industry. It’s in the best interest of your company to be in a position to participate and hopefully influence that conversation — or at the very least be aware of and monitor it. Getting that kind of customer feedback, at virtually no cost and in real time, is invaluable information your company can use to alter it’s product/service or marketing tactics and ultimately improve the customer experience.

Step 4: Case studies & success stories:

Do a little online research for companies in your market, or close to it, that have had success implementing social media into their business. Keep your eye out for companies like Dell, Starbucks, Zappos, Ford… the list could go on and on. These are some big time companies having unbelievable success with social media — both in terms of increasing overall sales and providing crazy-good customer service.

Step 5: Take a look at your competition:

If your competition is somewhere, your customers probably are too. Do some more research into how your competition is using social media. Are they promoting coupons and discounts through Facebook and Twitter? Are they posting location-based ads using FourSquare and Where? Maybe they’re using Twitter to enhance their customer service system, and save money while doing it. This should be a no-brainer for your boss. Make it clear that without a social media presence, you’re losing these customers to competitors — and they’re using less money than you to get them. Furthermore, convince him or her that this ecosystem of customers is constantly growing and that your company is missing out.

Step 6: Social media is here to stay:

Much like telephone and email, social media is here to stay. It’s not just a fad that stops with Facebook, it’s a new communication tool. Refer back to point number one and how big social media has become — but stay away from any “too big to fail” rhetoric, we all know how that will go over. Just emphasize the fact that community and active engagement are what have been missing from advertising since its inception, but have always been something humans crave, so now that they’ve combined, it’s not likely to change — well, only in a positive direction.

Step 7: Show specifically what social media can do for your company:

This step is a bit of a broad one, and will probably take the most work for you to prepare for. The most important thing is to first look at your company’s existing objectives. Are you looking to increase sales? Reduce public relations costs? Increase customer satisfaction? Determine one or two of these objectives as being a good fit for social media and develop a few basic examples of strategies that work towards accomplishing those objectives. For example, if you’re looking to increase overall sales, one strategy would be to develop existing customers into repeat customers. You might notice this has nothing to do with social media yet. Well, that’s the point. These are things your company is (hopefully) already doing. Now you’ll show your boss how social media can plug into these existing strategies by offering customers a 10% off coupon on Twitter after making their first purchase. Get it? Companies have a tendency to set up social media goals like “get 10,000 Facebook fans in our first year” without focusing on how it actually helps their business’s goals. They might hit that 10,000 mark, but what does that mean? What did it do for them?

Wrap up:

Well, there you have it. Hopefully your business is already using social media, but if they’ve missed the boat, or are currently sinking, I’m hoping these tips will help. How does your company or the one you work for view social media? If they’re not using it, what are their biggest arguments against it? If your company does use it, do you feel like it’s making a difference? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Thanks Greg!

2 out of 3 Americans Use Social Networking Sites

New statistics from eMarketer reveal that in 2011, 63.7% of American Internet users (147.8 million people) are using social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. By 2012, that number will increase to 66% and by 2013, it will hit 67%. According to these statistics, the days of double-digit user growth for social networking appear to be over.

Today, social networking reaches the vast majority of Internet users in the United States, and that number isn’t expected to decline anytime in the near future. That means your customers are using social networking, and your brand needs to be there, too. Of course, the most active users of social networking are still younger generations, but the days of social networking being a fad for young adults and teenagers are long gone. Today, users come from all generations and demographic groups.

In 2011, 90% of Internet users between the ages of 18-24 will use social networks, but older generations continue to become more active in their social networking use. The chart from eMarketer above provides a detailed age breakdown.

Not only do brands need to be present on social networking sites, but they also need to produce interesting and engaging content and conversations that are meaningful to their target audiences. As social networking users become more knowledgeable about the tools they’re using, their demands for useful content and experiences will also grow. If you’re not giving them a good reason to connect with, interact with, and talk about your brand, you won’t achieve the results you need from social networking.

Don’t just create a Facebook page and leave it at that. Instead, talk to your customers and learn what they’d like you to offer on that Facebook page. Create useful applications and content that is both interesting and helpful. You have to find ways to keep your target audience coming back for more.

Again, your customers are using social networks, so if you’re not trying to connect with them on those social networks where they’re already spending time, you’re missing a big opportunity to build relationships with them. If they were standing in front of you would you ignore them? No, you’d try to talk to them and connect with them. You should do the same thing via social networking.

Image: eMarketer

Brands Launch Tablet Optimized Websites

The current hot gadget is the iPad and other tablets are launching quickly to compete with the iPad. It makes sense that brands would want to revamp their websites so they work well on tablets, but brands like MTV and VH1 are leading a new redesign trend. Instead of simply moving website elements around so they look better on tablets, MTV and VH1 have completely redesigned their websites to take advantage of touch screens, smaller screens, and vibrant screens.

For example, the new MTV and VH1 tablet-optimized websites use less text than their traditional websites. While many brands are simply releasing apps for people to access their web content on smartphones and tablets, MTV and VH1 are betting that some people will want to use apps to access content and others will want to browse the Internet on those devices and consume content in a more traditional way.

The new MTV and VH1 tablet-optimized sites allow anyone with an iPad to view those sites through their tablet web browser function without opening a separate app. For casual visitors, this is a big benefit. While all functions on the full websites aren’t available on the iPad-optimized versions, there is a good variety and one can expect more features are coming.

Currently, the content on the iPad-optimized MTV and VH1 sites are heavy on video, as you might expect from both brands. In other words, the iPad-optimized sites are excellent representations of both brands. Already, Starbucks has signed on for a rich-media ad campaign.

While many companies are focusing on creating tablet apps to deliver their content on iPads and other tablet devices, MTV and VH1 are choosing to cover all their bases and offer great content to all types of visitors. As the tablet user base expands beyond tech-savvy early adopters, this sounds like a wise strategy.

What do you think? Should companies create branded tablet apps as well as tablet-optimized websites, or do you think apps are enough? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on this tablet trend.

Image: Apple.com

Corporate Eye Summary March 19, 2011

  • Launching a Career in Corporate Communications
    Today we have a guest post from Lauren Bailey offering advice for college students wanting to get started in corporate comms. Lauren Bailey is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about online colleges. She especially loves hearing back from her readers. Questions or comments can be sent to: blauren99 @gmail.com – though we’d […]


  • Half of U.K. Population is on Facebook
    Facebook reports that the social networking site is now used by 1 out of every 2 people in the U.K.  As eMarketer reports, 30 million of the 62.6 million people in the U.K. are now on the most popular social networking site in the world, Facebook. That’s up from 25.6 million in September 2010. If […]


  • Research Shows How Retail Brand Loyalty Programs Are Failing with Consumers
    Retail brand loyalty programs are created to accomplish a primary goal — to encourage repeat purchases that evolve into brand loyalty. Unfortunately, research from ACI Worldwide reports that retail brand loyalty programs have a long way to go before they reach that goal. According to the research survey, 62% of U.S. consumers join retail brand […]


  • Three tips to develop CSR Redwood
    Once in a while you come across a company name which is just sooooo apposite for their business you find it hard to believe some kind of legal name change hasn’t been involved. The best example of this I’ve ever come across dates back to my early childhood and travelling into Oxford on the Park […]


  • What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 41: Dealing With Shareholders’ Frequently Asked Questions
    In the old days, before the internet, investor relations departments operated with the telephone and paper based communications. (You remember getting letters with stamps on them, don’t you?) If you were a large corporation with a significant shareholder base, this meant that at certain times during the year, the volume of phone calls and letters […]


Launching a Career in Corporate Communications

Today we have a guest post from Lauren Bailey offering advice for college students wanting to get started in corporate comms.

Over to you, Lauren…

What College Students Need to Know About Launching a Career in Corporate Communications

Career LaunchCorporate communications is a specialty field highly sought after by numerous businesses today. It deals with all of the communication an organization makes internally and externally, blending coherency with the company’s goals and ethics. This ensures that every message being sent from the company to an audience is as accurate and positively reflective of the business as possible.

College students who desire to launch a career in corporate communications will find the field challenging and rewarding, but they should keep a few things in mind in order to secure a successful future in the field.

Most college students pursue corporate communications as a specialty during a public relations education. Public relations is a quickly growing field where students and graduates can flex their communications skills and knowledge. Public relations specialists in corporate communications may work with businesses as corporate communication officers, directors, managers, consultants, human resources, and marketing. In fact, employment opportunities for public relations specialists are expected to increase 24% during the 2008-18 decade, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.

Those who work in public relations have the primary objective of making sure that the image of their business or brand remains positive. They handle press releases, media contacts, public meetings, and other situations involving interacting with the public. This is why a specialization in corporate communications can be immensely beneficial. Thanks to recent business scandals, corporate communications has leapt back onto the radar for businesses across the country.

Competition for corporate communications positions is high, so college students may do well to go beyond the minimal requirement of a bachelor’s degree in the field and earn a master’s degree instead. A master’s degree in public relations and corporate communications may give recent graduates the nudge they need to stand out from other job seekers. Students should plan to take courses in communication law and ethics, media relationship maintenance, effective public writing, research and analysis skills, and strategy development. Most programs in both undergraduate and graduate studies also require students to complete a final real-world project in order to demonstrate their understanding of corporate communications and management.

Gaining plenty of in-field work experience is important as well for those looking to launch a career in corporate communications. A degree, even a graduate degree, is often not enough by itself to gain employment. Students can gain work experience by participating in part-time internships while in school, whereas graduate students may benefit from a full-time internship.

Networking is crucial as well. Most large companies do not advertise job openings for public relations positions, so it pays to make as many meaningful connections as possible to others in the industry. This way, if you make a good impression on someone, they may remember to contact you or recommend you for an unadvertised open public relations position. Go to your college’s career fairs to network, and stay in touch with your professors and fellow corporate communications classmates. You never know who may help you gain entry into the field.

Corporate communications is an exciting and prospering field. However, it can also be tough to break into due to the high level of competition for entry-level jobs. In order to stay ahead of the competition and catch the attention of employers, college students should study hard, consider earning a graduate degree in the field, participate in internships, and network with other professionals. With these tips in mind, students can almost guarantee that they will secure a successful career in corporate communications.

Thanks Lauren!

Agree? What advice would you offer to someone considering this as a career?

Lauren Bailey is a freelance writer at bestcollegesonline.com. She especially loves hearing back from her readers. Questions or comments can be sent to: blauren99 @gmail.com – though we’d love it if you commented below as well!