New Zealand firms have much to gain from tapping into social media, writes Helen Twose
Every weekend Gianpaolo Grazioli sells more than 2000 gelato icecreams and sorbets from his Queen St store, Giapo Gelato.
He has at least that number of people keeping up to date with the business through online social media connections.
Grazioli posts everything from daily updates on the flavours in store to video clips of happy customers slurping icecream.
An early adopter of social media technology, Grazioli was using Twitter before he opened his central Auckland business.
Now he sends out dozens of tweets daily from his mobile phone - messages of no more than 140 characters over the Twitter service - to his icecream fans, as well as running an instore YouTube channel, a Facebook profile and blog.
"It's word of mouth on steroids, and it only takes five seconds to do it," Grazioli says.
"Never have so many people had the opportunity to say something and be listened to. That's the power."
According to the latest figures available from Nielsen Panorama, which cover the third quarter of last year, nearly a million New Zealanders said they had looked at Facebook in the previous four weeks.
More than half a million had been on either Bebo or MySpace and 64,000 had followed Twitter over the same period.
It's a power that the big business end of town is also interested in harnessing.
Air New Zealand's general manager of marketing Steve Bayliss says the starting point for the airline was to understand what people were saying about it online.
He says you can either be a passive recipient of that conversation, be it good or bad, or choose to participate.
"Regardless of whether or not you are involved in social media, people are having a conversation about you anyway," Bayliss says.
Air New Zealand runs several Twitter accounts for its corporate and grabaseat marketing campaigns, but by far the most successful vehicle for the company is YouTube.
The seven videos on the airline's 'nothing to hide' YouTube channel have clocked up more that 11 million viewers.
Most have watched the TV commercial and in-flight safety video featuring body painted staff set to the tune of Gin Wigmore's Under My Skin, but bloopers and "the making of" clips have also been popular.
Bayliss says the campaign, which began life as a print ad, is like a small fire which gathers momentum.
"We think the days of the big brand ad, the $4 million production on TV, they are gone and gone forever. We talk a lot about the notion of lighting a lot of small fires and then watching the fires that people want to warm their hands beside, then throw petrol on the buggers. To some extent the online environment allows you to test ideas a lot more frequently," says Bayliss.
He says the beauty of the online medium is that content can be made cheaply, so if something isn't working, shrug your shoulders and move on.
Managing director of PR firm Acumen, Michael Dunlop, says Air New Zealand's use of social media is an extension of its successful online presence.
He sees social media as an outreach tool for those companies who have a large, hard to identify customer base that makes forming relationships difficult.
While the 30-year-old Acumen business is in the process of changing its own Facebook presence to focus on keeping in touch with former staff, Dunlop says social media plays into the hands of companies which don't have established one-to-one relationships with clients.
"Our business is not after thousands of clients, it's after a hundred clients, so the nature of our communications is far more targeted and built around relationships," Dunlop says.
Social media consultant Simon Young says companies with a large number of customers online, particularly if they are focused on the youth market or professionals aged 35 to 45 years old, should be looking closely at what is happening in the social media space.
Two companies with huge tech-literate customer bases are telcos Telecom and Vodafone.
While both are using many of the same social media channels, each has chosen a different approach to managing their interactions.
In the case of Vodafone, head of external communications Paul Brislen is the main social media voice of the company.
Brislen says its social media presence arose out of a need to get on top of a barrage of complaints sent to his personal email about the company's new billing system.
"If they're willing to write to me, maybe they're writing elsewhere as well," says Brislen. He got online and tried to head the problem off, spending most of his day answering questions on various online forums and blogs - "anywhere there was somebody asking a question or making a statement about us".
Vodafone now runs its own online forums. Aside from those, their Twitter account is the main line of communication directly to customers, primarily because it is an open platform which anyone can join, says Brislen.
Across town, a weekend "unconference" of Telecom staff and customers on a marae 18 months ago was the spur for kicking off Telecom into the social media world.
Up for discussion was how Telecom could better and more quickly engage in the online world, says Telecom's prototyping manager Neil Forster.
The 30 external participants questioned why a technology company like Telecom wasn't already there, boots and all.
After discovering more than half the staff at the "unconference" were active social media users, the company signed up for a Twitter account the following week.
Forster says it's an approach that has worked better than if it had gone down the traditional path of developing a business case, with associated power point presentations and involvement from various marketing and PR agencies.
Rather than have a role dedicated to social media within the marketing or communications team, Telecom has shoulder tapped staff across its consumer business to spend time talking to the online world.
Fortnightly catch-ups and Yammer, a free micro-blogging tool similar to Twitter but for internal communication, keep the Online Response Team (ORT) in touch.
"It's a group which organisationally doesn't formally exist. It's a group of people who do it through the passion for the company and the passion for connecting with customers and they're online already - they've got blogs, they've got their own Twitter accounts, they've got street cred in effect, rather than the PR people," says Forster.
A wider group of around 100 staff who are active online contribute to the ORT group, pointing to discussions about the company within the online communities they participate in.
The biggest test for the ORT team came during a major pre-Christmas outage of the XT mobile network.
From 8.30am, when Telecom first alerted customers to the network problem on Twitter, it sent out close to 100 messages updating the situation.
Those messages were not only seen by the 5000-odd people directly following Telecom on Twitter but many in their wider circle of contacts as those people "re-tweeted" the updates.
Forster says the Telecom team have yet to "score an own goal" in the social media environment. He says a couple of times a tweet hasn't been quite appropriate, but on the whole if people treat it like a conversation you'd have with someone in a coffee shop the tone will be about right.
At Vodafone, Brislen admits to tripping up when a campaign for a new netbook product used the Vodafone Twitter ID to promote a competition.
"They hated it, they absolutely hated it," he says.
Within half a day people began unsubscribing from the account and National Radio was running a story about the backlash.
Brislen says the problem was people were on the receiving end of a marketing pitch rather than participating in an online conversation.
The solution was to create a separate account for the campaign.
Brislen says the social media world is willing to forgive mistakes if you are willing to admit you made a blunder.
Forster agrees. "You'll find that people are a lot more forgiving in some of the conversations as long as you're open and honest with them. But don't do bullshit."
While it may not win people over, showing the human face of the company can diffuse animosity customers may feel towards the business, says Young.
Young, who runs social media consultancy #Sy alongside his wife, offers advice to companies seeking to connect with the online world.
"I think people will have an unlimited amount of anger towards a company or organisation, but they will always soften it a bit when they realise they are dealing with another human," he says.
Air New Zealand's Bayliss says people are willing to engage with corporates, but only on the proviso that the behaviour of the corporate is absolutely transparent.
He says it would have been a PR disaster to represent the company as having nothing to hide, then using models instead of its own staff in the campaign.
"If you've got something to hide then I think it is a scary step. The most important thing that has guided us is the notion that the centre of any idea spreading has to be honesty and integrity. You will get caught out in a nanosecond online if you even try to make, as you might have done in the past from an advertising perspective, statements of puffery. I think you've got to be really authentic, conversational and human in how you deal with folks," Bayliss says.
On a hot Auckland day yesterday, Grazioli was not doubt serving up his gelatos with iPhone at the ready, should he have something to say to his "Giaponians".
Meanwhile in the Twitter-verse, one of the interviewees had already tweeted to his many followers about this story running in today's paper.
It's certainly true - they're having a conversation about you out there, whether you like it or not. And as Grazioli says, if they're not talking about you, the next question is "why not?".
TOP TIPS ON SOCIAL NETWORKING
PAUL BRISLEN, VODAFONE
* Facebook: Vodafone New Zealand, 1176 fans.
* Twitter: 5500+ followers, 10,900 tweets.
* It's like learning a new language, step one: open mouth, step two: insert foot. You've got to be willing to make a few mistakes.
* As long as you're willing to engage with customers, customers are willing to engage with you.
GIANPAOLO GRAZIOLI, GIAPO GELATO
* Facebook: Giapo, 2300+ fans.
* Twitter: 900+ followers, 3900+ tweets.
* Be honest.
* Be personal.
* Listen.
SIMON YOUNG, #SY SOCIAL MEDIA CONSULTANCY
* Facebook: 956 friends.
* Twitter: 5700+ followers, 22,500+ tweets.
* Know what kind of company culture you want to have, because it all proceeds from that.
* Know what your customers are after, know what kind of relationship they want.
* Don't be afraid to experiment.
NEIL FORSTER, TELECOM
* Facebook: Telecom NZ, 787 members.
* Twitter: 4500+ followers, 2000+ tweets.
* Be honest.
* Don't be afraid.
* You already have people in your organisation who have this capability.
STEVE BAYLISS, GENERAL MANAGER MARKETING AIR NEW ZEALAND
* Facebook: 10,000+ fans.
* Twitter: Flyairnz, 10,000+ followers and 2000+ tweets; Grabaseat, 14,000+ followers and 4000+ tweets.
* Get some monitoring in place so you understand the conversations already occurring about you.
* As long as you act with authenticity and honesty consumers will forgive you the odd mistake along the journey and they'll give you honest feedback.
