Employee Engagement using the Interactive Intranet

The Interactive Intranet is an Intranet that has been enabled with web 2.0 tools in order to facilitate interactions between the organisation and its employees and communication and collaboration between the employees themselves.

It is important, as an organisation, to use the Interactive Intranet to engage with your employees rather than merely using it as a tool to communicate at them. By engaging with your employees, you enter into a meaningful conversation with them that is based on a deep understanding of their needs, interests and behaviours. This improves morale, motivation, productivity and loyalty.

The Interactive Intranet is a complex and fragmented environment that offers you multiple channels to create relationships with employees, for example in their communities of interest, forums, eNewsletters, blogs, on Twitter, Linked-in and more.

One of the ways that an Interactive Intranet facilitates this engagement is through the use of profiling. Employees throughout the organisation from the CEO, communication managers, personal assistants debtors clerks etc. should have profiles on the Intranet which they create with their photographs, contact details, qualifications, skills and experience.

These profiles should be, in some part visible to the entire organisation, in other parts visible only to those people who need to see it. For example, leave management on the profile needs only to be visible between the employee, her boss and the payroll team, whereas, when the employee is on leave, everyone needs to be able to see it so that they don’t make assumptions about what is getting done.

As employees work on specific projects, their profiles could be linked to these projects. Awards and commendations could also be featured on their profiles.

Employees should also be given the facility to blog and comment on other people’s blogs. These profiles are an important way for employees to build up their personal brands within the organisation, and for the organisation to understand the skill-sets and experience they have within the employee base.

Employees also need to be enabled to create or join communities of interest, for example a CRM forum, or an employment equity forum. Here they can share ideas and knowledge which improves their ability to do their job more effectively.

When communicating with employees you can segment your communication into groups such as “Frontline Staff”, “The Executive Team”, “Marketing” “The HR Payroll Team” etc. However with your employees’ profiles you can also use these to see the way they conduct their profiles, the projects they are involved in and the communities of interest they join. This makes the Interactive Intranet an extremely powerful tool for understanding your employees’ behaviour. This will give you a better idea of where to engage with them and what they’ll respond to.

Initially you will need to focus a lot of your energy on experimenting to understand exactly what works for your organisation and its employees. The important point to remember is that every interaction with your employees is an opportunity to learn more about them, to strengthen their relationship with the organisation make the most of each interaction.

You’ll need track the success of your campaigns and conversations to see which message employees are responding to. You also need to be tracking the employees’ routes through the Intranet once they’ve logged in so that you can understand their on-line behaviour, where do they go first, what is popular, where do they stop using the functions available to them, do they create communities of interest, collaborate on projects, search for skills, share documents, instant message etc. The use of business intelligence tools and analytics could surface some important employee behaviour patterns. You could develop a mood indicator to measure the state of your organisational culture

What is the content of employees’ public communication with the organisation? One of the most important words in online employee engagement is ‘relevancy.’ You need to understand their needs and interests so that you can target them with messages that are relevant to them in the work context within the time frames that they are thinking about what they are doing.

Armed with this information, you are able to filter employees through a conversion funnel that begins with communicating meaningfully with them and ends with a loyal, productive workforce aligned behind your brand.

Interactive Intranets give you the tools you need to understand your employees better so that you can constantly tweak your engagement process and address them with the right messages at the right time to deliver on your strategic mandate.

Kate Elphick

Digital Bridges

Configuring the Intranet to deliver on the organisational objectives

The Interactive Intranet is an Enterprise-wide web application which provides the underlying web based support to employees across the organisation. It is the digital manifestation of the business and should form the strategic backbone of everything the organisation does.

In order to ensure that the Interactive Intranet delivers on the organisation’s key business goals and strategies, there are some considerations for the business scoping of the Intranet.

Organisational Design

The Interactive Intranet should be configured in the same way as the organisation in order to deliver on the same business objectives.

Interactive Intranets extend beyond the boundaries of the traditional Internet with its content around the organisation, policies and procedures, employee ordering, general communication forums.

Great Interactive Intranets are also structured in a portal format that supports the unique organisational design of the enterprise, whether it is functional teams, matrixed reporting, teams, divisional structures etc. The related information, documentation, tools and applications for each function, reporting team, division related information and workflow are incorporated within these portals. For example, booking IT training in the IT portal, leave management on the HR Portal, cross divisional product development tools in the product teams.

Organisational Communication

It used to be that internal communication was centralised and hierarchical and from the desk of the CEO.

Modern web based communication is highly customised in order to ensure that it is relevant to each audience and doesn’t result in communication fatigue. This is achieved through audience segmentation.

The employees can be segmented in a variety of different ways, by role, EXCO, Frontline, or by seniority, manager, supervisor, labourer or by function, marketing, HR IT, or by focus, product development, debt collection etc. The optimal segmentation is determined by the organisational requirements.

Each portal manager is responsible for his communication across the organisation. This can be managed using a series of wiki’s, blogs and instant messaging, for example when communicating software upgrades or changes in policies, or sharing the new corporate image guidelines.

Environmental Scanning as a function of creating competitive advantage

Employees need to be able to find sector specific news through RSS feeds, company news as well as industry trends and other useful information on the relevant Intranet portal. The employee needs to be able to “share” and comment on all relevant information with the right individuals on the Intranet. For example, if an industry trend is identified in employee wellness, the HR team should be able to “share” this and their views on it with the Line of Business managers and other HR teams across the organisation.

Collaboration and Knowledge Management

Interactive Intranets are more than “Facebook for Business”, they can be used to manage projects on wiki’s, collaborate on client service and capture the implicit knowledge of the employees through the conversations they have on-line.

Collaboration hinges on an environment that is motivating and inspiring and where people work together to help one another succeed. A key trait of high performing organisations is shared power and high involvement where participation, collaboration, and teamwork are the way of life. This is facilitated through open dialogue and project collaboration using wiki’s RSS feeds and blogs on the Intranet.

Employees must be encouraged to join collaboration forums where they share ideas, documents and knowledge around each project.

Employee Profiles

As far as the employees go, they each need an individual personalised profile, with both public and private sections.

On the public portion of the employee’s profile, the organisation should be able to see the employee’s contact details, skills, experience, projects, awards, education etc. This will help source internal skills more easily throughout the organisation, and enable employees to build their personal brand within the organisation.

On the private portion of the profile, personalised dashboards can be used to link the work that employees are doing to the macro-strategic position of the organisation in a very visual way. The vision of the organisation should be made explicit using tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, and the individual’s key performance areas linked to the organisational scorecard and visualised on the employees’ personal profiles.

Employees should also be able to manage their leave, pension and medical aid options through shared spaces with the HR or Finance division, depending how the organisation is configured.

A word of Caution

When building Enterprisewide Interactive Intranets, it is wise to question both the existing organisational design and the existing processes and workflow. If these are not conducive to delivering on the organisational strategy, then an Interactive Intranet will exacerbate the problem. At Digital Bridges we recommend that the Intranet form part of a larger strategic initiative which reviews the organisation’s direction, destination and how it is going to get there.

The opportunity

The Interactive Intranet is the perfect opportunity to connect with the job, the organisation and the employees, to gain commitment and grow the organisation. It needs to become a strategic asset to the organisation, because it is a key component to the modern organisation’s success.

Kate Elphick Digital Bridges www.digitalbridges.co.za

Knowledge Management on the Intranet

The success of organisations depends as much on their ability to manage knowledge as it does on the other competitive differentiators such as the strength of its brand, the skills of its employees and depth of customer relationships.

When a knowledge management strategy that delivers on specific business objectives is built into the Intranet, it makes an important contribution to realising organisational value.

Knowledge Management is more than the classification of all the documentation that resides on hard drives, Outlook inboxes and filing cabinets. It includes the strategies and processes of identifying, capturing, creating, surfacing and leveraging knowledge. Knowledge management also includes strategies to foster a culture of information sharing, collaboration and the implementation of tools that make it easier for employees to share what they learn and, in turn, to learn from each other.

In the past, Intranets have been information repositories, that were not appreciated nor used effectively by employees. Corporate Intranets are gaining new prominence in many organisations, and many companies are revisiting the opportunities provided by knowledge management.

As organisations recover from the economic downturn by consolidating their operations, revisiting their product roadmaps and positioning themselves as being more customer-centric, they will start looking to their company Intranets as the backbone for delivery on their business objectives and operational strategies.

Organisations are also discovering that investing in a robust, functioning Intranet is a resource intensive endeavour and that they must look for other benefits when making the business case for an enterprise-wide intranet.

KM initiatives are intellectual capital investments and should be aligned with specific, long-term business goals, as part of the Intranet Strategy.

Communities of interest are groups of people within the organisation who have common interests, work functions or strategic objectives. They share their insights, experiences, learning and knowledge amongst each other for mutual benefit. They are typically loosely structured, decentralised, fluid and built on personal relationships. Communities of Interest are perfectly positioned to support knowledge management projects.

Collaborative environments such as enterprise Intranets force employees to be focused, thoughtful and careful in their contributions. Knowing that what is published may potentially be viewed by the whole organisation, or that other users may have the ability to rate the article, forces the participants to be more disciplined in their contributions. The collaborative, real-time feedback environments of a company Intranet encourage self-policing and more strategic information sharing. The downside is that it can also discourage participants from sharing any information whatsoever.

Well-planned Intranets make perfect platforms for knowledge management initiatives. But most Intranets aren’t deliberately planned; they start out as divisional efforts that are leveraged across the whole organisation. Many of these Intranets hold valuable information but are so decentralised and unstructured that they do not support the organisational requirements.

Knowledge management is becoming immensely important in today’s business environment. Teams that share knowledge perform better. By approaching knowledge management in a simple, tactical fashion where the emphasis is placed on the application of knowledge is the key. Identifying the organisation’s priorities, focussing the communities of Interest on these priorities and upgrading the Intranet to be a more of a knowledge platform will help develop a relevant, meaningful and beneficial knowledge management initiatives.

Kate Elphick Digital Bridges

Pulling the Levers

Websites and applications are becoming more mainstream as marketing tools. Marketers are starting to realise that the modern website is becoming the strategic backbone to all their marketing activities and requires extensive investment in terms of thinking and management.

A couple of years ago I went to Palo Alto to understand what was going on in leading edge the world of web 2.0. I interviewed a Ramesh from a company called PB Wiki, and he talked about “pulling the levers”; testing different combinations and variables to see which elicited the best response from their target audience, and optimised their web application’s usability.

With the modern web enabling our audiences to participate in our business world using the web, there is also a high level of risk if we get our digital marketing wrong. It is therefore important, not only to ensure that we get the right people to find our website, but also to have it optimised so that the target market’s behaviour is most beneficial to our company in terms of sales conversions, loyalty or even just ensuring that they get the information that they need.

In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment to determine which of multiple content variations performs better.

Multivariate testing is used in order to ascertain which content or creative variation produces the best improvement in the defined goals of a website, whether that be user registrations or successful completion of the buying process.

Dramatic increases can be seen through testing different processes, workflow, content, form layouts and even landing page images and background colours. However, not all elements produce the same increase in conversions, and by looking at the results from different tests, it is possible to identify those elements that consistently tend to produce the greatest increase in conversions.

Testing can be carried out on a dynamically generated website by setting up the server to display the different variations of the site in equal proportions to incoming visitors. Statistics on how each visitor went on to behave after seeing the content being tested are be gathered and analysed.

Multivariate testing allows website visitors to vote with their clicks for which content they prefer and will stand the most chance of them proceeding to a defined goal. The testing is transparent to the visitor with all commercial solutions capable of ensuring that each visitor is shown the same content on every visit.

Some websites benefit from constant optimisation as visitor response to creatives and layouts differ by time of day, week or even season.

Multivariate testing is currently an area of high growth in Internet marketing as it helps website owners to ensure that they are getting the most from the visitors arriving at their site. Areas such as search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising bring visitors to a site and have been extensively used by many organisations but multivariate testing allows internet marketers to ensure that visitors are being effectively serviced once they arrive at the site.

Kate Elphick – Digital Bridges

Can South African Banks regain their Reputations after the Economic Crisis?

The financial crisis of 2008 spawned not just a deep recession but a structurally different business environment globally. This restructured economic order, requires some new thinking, particularly for retail banks.

Many retail banks responded instinctively to the recession, without giving any thought to the aftermath of their actions, and there is a growing perception they have violated their ’social’ contract with their customers.

In the heady days of courtship, when banks are acquiring customers, they make promises of service and understanding to clients. They position themselves as suitable partners for the long term, especially when it came to buying the major assets in peoples’ lives, houses and cars. Customers commit themselves to the relationship by signing up for twenty year bonds.

Up until mid 2008 it was rational to assume that a customer who didn’t pay back a loan was unwilling to, or incapable of doing so in the very short term, through incompetence or poor planning. It was also perfectly reasonable for a bank to divorce a client that wasn’t committed to the mutually beneficial aspects of the relationship.

When the crisis loomed, many people were retrenched and entrepreneurs, who had been successfully trading for years, suddenly hit a brick wall, where money just stopped coming in regardless of what they did.

Banks responded in a pre-crisis manner, based on the  economic assumptions that non payers were the bad guys. They came down harshly on offenders, foreclosing, handing over to debt collection agencies who are used to dealing with recalcitrant bad guys, harassed and heckled already devastated clients, who’s only fault was not to have foreseen a recession when even the economists didn’t see it coming. Their way of helping customers was to offer quick sells of customer’s homes before handing them over to the courts. They reported gleefully of moving more inventory through the system.

What they effectively did was to kick their customers while they were down, and then grind them into the ground. Banks should have looked at this as a relationship-building opportunity and demonstrated that customer loyalty was not misplaced. Instead they alienated a captive audience, who though they might not have been happy, were unlikely to have migrated in droves away from their respective banks.

Had the banks taken a long term view on their client relationships and their financial position, they could have operationalised a single view of customer strategy and considered the customer as the complex entity he or she really is. This would have enabled them to rationalise their exposure to the customer’s risk and facilitated the renegotiation of the terms of their relationships so that the customer would retain their lifetime value to the bank, instead of squeezing them for the present value in a recession.

Take for example, a regularly paying bondholder who has been with the bank for ten years, he hits a problem in the global recession. Judging by his history and paying behaviour, he is likely to get back on his feet in the next twelve months and resume repaying any loans regularly. His house is still worth more than the bond, mitigating the risk that the bank will not be able to recoup its money in future. Surely it makes sense to arrange for a 12 month payment holiday and raise his interest rates by 2%, for the rest of the bond period, thus retaining his Life Time Value to the bank, rather than selling his house off at auction at 50% of its value, alienating the customer, even when he has been rehabilitated and incurring the cost of acquiring an unknown customer from another bank which has similarly disenfranchised their relationship?

The banks add insult to injury by managing their collection processes so badly, that once they have collected their debts in full (and some blood, just for good measure), their alienated and bruised customer keeps receiving SMS’s from the lawyers threatening judgements if they don’t pay up.

Many banks do not understand their customer’s footprint across their financial institutions. In fact some banks are set up on the Owner-Entrepreneur model, because in good times this facilitates the accountability and entrepreneurial behaviour that agile companies need to succeed.

In the past this was a risky practise because it meant that the bank would miss out of cross and up-sell opportunities. Today the risk is much higher. Many banks who noticed a change in consumer behaviour when the economy turned, panicked. They exacerbated the problem at every client interface, by freezing overdrafts and making them due immediately, or by freezing access bonds, so that the customers who could have made payments on most of the accounts or were at risk of falling marginally short on payments, (for example meeting 90% of their commitments to the bank) were tipped into the emotional and financial abyss of bankruptcy. Where they could have had the car repossessed and saved the house, they lost everything.

The banks did not consider that the inventory that they were “flushing” through their system, was the life and heart of their customer, their home, the place where they loved and celebrated, brought up children and created a lifetime of memories. Customers are not going to be so quick to forgive banks, the cost of acquisition and creating loyalty amongst customers has just escalated through the roof.

The breadth and depth of today’s reputational challenge is a consequence not just of the retail bank’s instinctive responses to the speed, severity and unexpectedness of recent economic events but also of underlying shifts in the importance of Web-based participatory media, or web 2.0.

The Modern Internet and the era of Social Media are promoting wider, faster scrutiny of banks and rendering traditional public-relations tools less effective in addressing reputational challenges.

It will be transparent, decisive action that builds strong reputations in the future. Doing so effectively means stepping up both the sophistication and the internal coordination of reputation efforts. Some companies, for example, not only use cutting-edge attitudinal-segmentation techniques to understand the concerns of customers better but also mobilise cross-functional teams to gather intelligence and respond quickly to far-flung reputational threats.

One key is to cut through organisational barriers that impede such efforts through committed senior leadership who have an opportunity to differentiate their companies by demonstrating real statesmanship. An energised, enlightened and empowered public will expect nothing else.

The proliferation of Web-based platforms, has given individuals and organisations new tools they use to subject banks to greater and faster scrutiny. This communication revolution also means that certain issues (such as poor customer service) can be picked up by “citizen journalists” or bloggers and generate outrage on a much larger scale.

As a result, what formerly were operational risks resulting from failed or inadequate processes, people, or systems now often manifest themselves as reputational risks whose costs far exceed those of the original missteps.

In this dispersed and multifaceted environment, banks must collect information about reputational threats across the organisation, analyse that information in sophisticated ways, and address problems by taking action to mitigate them. This requires significant collaboration, coordination, commitment and an ability to act quickly.

Many retail banks are structured around centralised corporate-affairs departments that can’t monitor or examine diverse reputational threats with sufficient sophistication. Moreover, traditional PR can’t deal with many concerns, which must often be addressed by changing business operations and conducting two-way conversations. Managers of business units such as home loans or credit cards, have a better position for spotting potential challenges but often fail to recognise their reputational significance. This is often an unintentioned consequence of remuneration systems designed by financial managers, not being aligned to marketing strategies. Internal communication about reputational risks may be inhibited by the absence of consistent methodologies for tracking and quantifying those risks. Accountability for managing problems is often blurred.

As a result, responses to reputational issues can be short term, ad hoc, and defensive, and therein lies a problem that companies must solve quickly: even as reputational challenges boost the importance of good PR, companies will struggle if they rely on PR alone, with little insight into the thinking and operational root causes of their reputational problems.

A logical starting point for companies seeking to raise their game is to put in place an effective early-warning system to make executives aware of reputational problems quickly. Most companies are quite good at tracking press mentions, and many are beginning to monitor the multitude of Web-based voices whose power is beginning to rival the mainstream media’s. However, doing these things effectively, while an important prerequisite for stepping up engagement with stakeholders, isn’t the toughest task facing organisations.

To prepare for and respond to reputational threats, we suggest that retail banks should emphasise these priorities.

• First, they need to assemble enough facts to gain a rich understanding of their customer base as it manifests itself across the entire organisation, not only their product preferences but also the psychographic profiles of segments of customers including propensity for risk, social media adoption and behaviours etc.

• Secondly, they must conduct a two way dialogue with their customer (segments).

Banks are still the heart of the South African economy. They pump the funds on which productive human enterprise depends. Banks must perform this role well, with all the diligence we would expect of any expert or custodian of an essential task.

They must refocus on those fundamentals that are unchanged by the financial crisis — their core purpose, customer needs, and capabilities — while recognising that profound market changes have occurred and will affect how these capabilities need to be delivered. Those leaders whose banks can respond to the times and enhance their capabilities will be to­morrow’s winners.

Kate Elphick – Digital Bridges

10 Considerations for starting a web-based business in South Africa

I am often approached by people with fabulous ideas for on-line businesses in South Africa. Many of the ideas are great and the demand should be phenomenal because they solve the structural problems in both our Macro and Micro economy, but South Africa is a capricious mistress when creating successful online businesses.

As with offline businesses, perhaps more so, you need to develop a strategy for the business. Setting up an online business goes beyond the idea and the development of an online application. You need to do some research; understand the technology opportunities, realise the investment implications, consider your revenue models, target markets, marketing, sales channels, creating competitive advantage, operations, scoping and application development etc.

Here is a check list for Innovators and Entrepreneurs when thinking about starting an on-line business in South Africa.

1. Understand the technology opportunities

Technologies are emerging every day, social media opportunities abound, mobile apps are prolific and any of these could contribute to the success or otherwise of your business. The use of technology may be determined by age, wealth levels, education or even the life-stage of your audience.

2. Investment

The cost of setting up an on-line business are minimal, for several thousand Rand a web developer can build you a website, a payment gateway will cost you some more, but the biggest cost in on-line businesses in South Africa is the cost of customer acquisition and service.

It’s easy in the US when you have ninety million Internet users to attain critical mass, why you could sell gold fish furniture on line and make a fortune.

3. Revenue Models

There are countless revenue models to choose from in South Africa, including the subscription model (which rarely works in SA), eCommerce, Advertising, Application Reseller, Data Aggregation and many more.

The revenue model depends on a variety of factors from your audience, your network, your product, geography etc.

It is also important to understand that while there have been some notable exceptions, most online businesses experience a very slow flat start, picking up incrementally until they reach a tipping point at which stage growth becomes exponential. This may take a number of years. Until you reach this growth phase, your investment will be bigger than your revenue, and so you had better be sure that you have alternative personal revenue streams

4. Target Markets

This includes market research into the current Internet psychographics and demographics in South Africa which are incredibly dynamic. Three years ago I started an on-line business for the township market. I threw everything at it and … nothing. All of a sudden, this year, after it is was all but forgotten, my market is sophisticated enough and has sufficient access to the web to start using it.

Business to Business markets react differently to Business to Consumer markets, niche audiences react differently to large generic audiences. How big are your target markets, where will you reach them, how networked are they, what does their risk profile look like?

5. Marketing

Your biggest investment in an on-line business is marketing. The investment may take the form of money, resources, people or time. You need to decide how you are going to create awareness, educate audiences, drive them to your site, persuade them to buy etc.

In the past we used to say that “Content is King”, today we believe that “Search is King”. Unless your audience can find you online you are dead in the water. You need to ensure that customers reach your application when they are looking for what you have to offer.

In order to keep people coming back to your online business, it is often a good idea to provide them with value beyond their expectations. One way to do this is to create “communities of common interest” where you let users network with each other around subjects that are relevant to your industry. If you sell travel online, let them talk to each other about destinations they have visited.

Once again in South Africa, you are unlikely to get audience of a sufficient size to make these communities of interest self sustainable and dynamic enough to maintain your customers’ attention. You will need to manually manage these communities in order to ensure that there are sufficient members and that there is enough activity to keep it interesting. We often recommend the use of an Avatar whose job is to act as a “digital host” to your customers, creating blogs, starting discussion forums, and posting interesting articles etc.

6. Sales Channels

Sometimes, if you are lucky, the web is your only sales channel, but usually, when creating robust on-line businesses, you have to cross over into the real world. Sales channels can include online, high end strategic business development, direct face to face sales, partnership with complimentary services, channelling through organisational Intranets or sales through industry bodies, to name a few.

7. Creating Competitive Advantage

Strong branding is the key to online business success. Audiences must understand and relate to your value proposition. They must be willing and able to endorse you through their own (social or business) networks. They may need to interact directly with personality which is the brand through commenting, sharing, blogging etc.

8. Operations

Operational management goes beyond ensuring that the site is up and running, but could include product creation, storage and distribution networks or contract management etc. If your fulfilment doesn’t work in the real world, your online business is doomed to failure.

The modern web (web 2.0) requires that sites are dynamic, constantly evolving, changing and improving to meet customer requirements and to feature in the relevant search results. Content management is one of the most important ongoing operational considerations and a key factor in online business success.

9. Scoping

People adopt and use technologies if they find them useful, easy to use and they make them look good. Considerable energy must be expended in identifying how and exactly why people are doing business online with you. User Requirement Specification and Functional Specifications must be drawn up in order to ensure that you don’t alienate customers as soon as they start interacting with your application.

10. Development

I have deliberately left development to last. Development is like housekeeping, it is a hygiene factor. It will not make your site, but could very easily break your business. Choose your technology and your developer with care. I prefer to use local developers who are within “throttle range” so that I can actively monitor progress. I also like to have them on an SLA and a monthly retainer for the constant and inevitable improvements.

In conclusion, South Africa is ripe for Digital Entrepreneurs, we desperately need access to products and services which enable us to overcome infrastructure problems and to take advantage of the opportunities that the geographically and (almost) sociographically unfettered modern Internet provides.

It is not difficult to start a successful online business in South Africa, it is hard work which requires a lot of strategic thinking and investment, but it is well worth your while.

Kate Elphick – Digital Bridges

The Power of Avatars

With the modern Internet, content has taken on a whole new dimension. In the middle of a global financial meltdown, marketers are moving to digital channels because it offers highly targeted, trackable reach to specific audiences at great prices. Throw in the increasingly influential viral impact of social networking and you’ve got a communication channel that can save the company advertising spend in hard times.

But getting noticed is becoming an increasingly tough business and can only be achieved through dedication and great content.

In the 21st century content is consumed at such speed that enough is never enough. Even if your brand has great content that is sought after by readers, Internet users and twitterers, to keep feeding the beast can become an insurmountable challenge. While the user-generated content (UGC) phenomenon can lift the content pressure, in South Africa, we don’t have enough web users to make a niche site viable or sustainable in terms of good UGC.

In today’s social networking and user commentary environment, brands really need to live their image. Information can be consumed over multiple devices, and if you offer people information that actually adds value to their lives, they will be more receptive to your message, and therefore your brand.

What makes producing attractive digital content such an issue is the perceived conflict between digital and real worlds. Great digital content relies on being present and understanding real world communities.

If you want great content for your target audience, you need to understand that audience, you need an authentic presence in that community and you need to know how to speak to them in their language. If you have an authentic presence within a community you will know instinctively how to service it properly.

We recommend the use of an avatar who becomes the specialist and the thought leader for the community, in other words the personality of the brand. This avatar should be represented across the major social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter etc. so that it participates in the audience’s social networking environment.

Most importantly, the avatar needs to be managed by a dedicated employee or team, who are empowered to solve problems if they arise. This avatar then becomes the accessible face of your brand.

When we develop avatars for clients, we go through an exercise of determining what the ideal personality would be to service their customers, should she be a sassy sexy blond who services writers, or a conservative accountant who supports decision makers in the financial sector? Then we build the profile from there adding demographics and psychographics to the character and creating a content architecture, which is a framework of the main themes that the avatar will address in order to deliver on its business objectives.

Here is an example, if the main aim of the avatar is to position the company as “An Employer of Choice” then the avatar could be a fictitious senior HR manager, who is attractive, warm and friendly and approachable and who blogs and tweets etc. about employee engagement and what her company is doing for its employees. She will be creating content that the readers can comment on, and if she is skilful, she can start a very meaningful conversation to the company’s benefit, with the kind of employees they wish to attract.

Generally we recommend that the avatar be a cartoon character. Audiences are not stupid and they will immediately recognise a fake blog that is being run by the marketing team. However, if the avatar is a cartoon character the audience will understand that you are not trying to trick them, but rather making a concerted effort to engage them.

Avatars represent a serious and strategic business opportunity for companies to interact and relate to their audiences in a way they never have before.

Kate Elphick

Creating Productive Work Environments using Enterprise 2.0

Intranets are not known for their dynamism, employees do not gleefully consult them when they get into work, but all that is set to change with the advent of the Interactive Intranet

An Intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet technologies to share any part of an organisation’s information or operational systems with its employees. In the past Intranets were created as a form of hierarchical communication between the organisation and its employees, but with the advances in the web, modern Intranets are becoming dynamic communication systems for organisations and their employees to engage and collaborate with each other. This has important implications for the business.

The Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is a term used to denote the balance of the rewards and benefits that are received by employees in return for their performance at the workplace. Personal job satisfaction is increasingly becoming a major factor where financial factors were key motivators in the past. EVP is critical to attracting, retaining and engaging the right people. This is where the power of the modern web comes in, in creating Interactive Intranets that foster job satisfaction and productivity.

Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor theory of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation distinguishes between: Motivators; (e.g. challenging work, recognition, responsibility) which give positive satisfaction, and Hygiene factors; (e.g. status, job security, salary and fringe benefits) that do not motivate if present, but, if absent, result in demotivation.

The factors that motivate people can change over their lifetime, but “respect for me as a person” is one of the top motivating factors at any stage of life. Interactive Intranets enable employees to profile themselves and build their personal brands within the organisation. Knowledge Workers, are motivated if they feel they are seen and heard and recognised for making a contribution. They require ongoing accurate informative feedback for performance management.

When organisations recognise that the Intranet is the strategic backbone to their business, then they can use individual employee profiling, linked to their performance metrics to manage, recognise and communicate with knowledge workers more effectively.

World-of-Mouth and eMarketing

The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing, one of which being lower costs and greater ability to engage with a global audience. The interactive nature of eMarketing, both in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium. eMarketing refers to digital media such as the Internet, e-mail, wireless media, the management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management systems.
It also refers to the placement of media along different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing and Web 2.0 strategies.
Word-of-mouth (WOM) principles play an important role in eMarketing. People no longer need to wait to meet someone in person to discuss a book they’ve read or an event they attended. Today they simply generate content in their social networks letting everyone know their views. For live events, people broadcast themselves via Twitter for real-time content generation not to mention the interaction as others tweet, retweet, comment, like, or post reactions.
The traditional push communication techniques are becoming less effective while still costly. We have transitioned into a media environment meant to be about conversations where the media and its message represent the starting point for the generation of meaning in social media. Digital media has relinquished the control to audience.
If you’re actively using eMarketing, you have a higher chance of being heard, connected and engaged when you’re part of the WOM network. eMarketing should be used to manage reputation and generate awareness. Brands should care about what people are saying and how they are saying it. They must actively listen and participate in order to humanise the relationship through interactions and manage their reputations.
Whether you’re a blogger, a marketer, or an entrepreneur your opinion counts and can be contagious. It’s now possible and easy to circulate your message via the new digital channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube. The key is to facilitate effective word-of-mouth campaign through these communities.
Each time you’re able to influence experts, opinion leaders, or people with authority you’ll instantaneously gain a little more credibility and access to their fan base. Then the collective minds with shared visions will continue to spread your message forming the viral wave pushing all the way.
If you want to attract relevant audience to your branded social network, you must do more than just spam visitors with self-promoting ads. You need to offer compelling value that keeps your audience engaged as well as perpetuating the interaction. The more interactivity a social network platform allows their users to have, the more engaged users will be which often leads to a greater chance of influencing the network effectively. This is why blogs are still amongst the most influential social media because they encourage bloggers to interact with their audience in a simple and easy fashion.
Although eMarketing is complex, it is critical to the future of any organisation

Kate Elphick Digital Bridges

Mitigating the economic downturn by unlocking the power of the web

Web 2.0 offers an unparalleled opportunity for businesses to compete and thrive in a time of mounting economic difficulty – yet incredibly many have little idea of what 2.0 means. Far too often, it is dismissed as a buzzword – but it could hold the key to the survival of many businesses as the slowdown kicks in.

Today businesses are challenged by a global slowdown in the economy, rising inflation, severe talent shortages, cheap imports from the East, the rise of the knowledge worker and a new tech savvy generation Y entering the economic landscape. Also, for the first time, user driven web 2.0 technologies are changing the balance of power between the corporate and its stakeholders, be they consumers, employees or the public.

The last few years have seen the launch and successful rise of creative online businesses offering clients faster and cheaper solutions that they would have previously looked to traditional outlets for. Sector after sector is benefiting from the speed, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of online services, and increasingly, crowd-sourcing and collaboration enabling innovation in new categories and market sectors.

The initial reaction of many big businesses was to batten down the hatches and prepare themselves to ride out this “Facebook craze” which was wasting employees’ time.  Now, the recession looms large in the minds of marketers, the industry is experiencing a noticeable shift in attitudes towards web 2.0 and the new business models it enables.

The “network effect” is becoming ever more important in that for every additional member of a community; the greater the value to each of the community members, and this is fundamentally changing the business models. No longer are communities just “eyeballs” to be advertised to they are now dynamic and demanding sources of revenue.

Businesses are reaching out to online communities to deliver efficient, effective and economical solutions. Perhaps most notable is the range of industries that are embracing such alternatives. All evidence is pointing to web 2.0 being an even more remarkable opportunity than even the most fervent of supporters may have thought.

This is a fascinating time to be in marketing. As we grapple to find ways to do more with less, the smart decision makers are expanding their horizons to include more creative and resourceful solutions to their business challenges. In a broad sense, this means that digital and PR solutions are being implemented to a greater degree than ever before, even replacing some pricey traditional executions. From a sourcing standpoint, marketers are engaging with open-source models, where they’re finding increased return on their investment, as well as global input on their brand.

It will be interesting to see what kinds of businesses are born out of this increased willingness to explore non-traditional models. What other industries will change because necessity, does, in fact, breed creativity?

As businesses continue to adopt these tools, decision-makers looking to leapfrog the competition need to move fast. Web 2.0 tools are being adopted in companies across all industries, and any business which fails to recognise that runs the risk of being left behind.

Consumer Web 2.0 technology is a real force that is changing how business is getting done, and any company looking to improve performance should be taking a closer look at how it can benefit from driving business the Web 2.0 way.

Social media and networking sites provide the platform for companies to collaborate, share information and expertise and market their goods. In fact, all over the web, communities of like-minded firms are supporting each other with advice, swapping internet links and trading together.

The interactivity of Web 2.0 also allows an authentic and direct line of communication between a company and its customers – invaluable any time, but essential in the light of the challenging business environment.

The tools of Web 2.0 – blogging, podcasting, photo and video sharing – have been adopted by millions of consumers because they are simple and powerful communication methods. For that reason, they are ideal for businesses to use in their marketing strategies.

A company that is prepared to engage in an open, honest dialogue, whether it be through a blog or video, with its customers, is being sensible and shrewd. These days very few consumers are prepared to just listen to announcements and one-way broadcasts without being able to give their feedback.

However, there are still far too many companies which have not tapped into the rich potential arising from web 2.0 because they either are not aware of it or feel it is irrelevant or too complicated or they underestimate its power.

This reticence may be in part explained by existing attitudes to the internet generally. Many businesses are not seeing a measurable return from their websites or online marketing and sales.

There are good reasons for this. Running a website can be a costly, complex business that often requires the support of third parties to build, maintain and market. Many organisations regard their website as a brochure for the organisation and have not contextualised in the business strategy as a whole. Larger businesses to use paid search and display ads supported by a comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation strategy to ensure a good Google rating.

If we put the problems of traditional online marketing alongside the growing importance of the internet as a research and purchasing medium for consumers, it becomes apparent that we desperately need to find a better way to promote ourselves online. This is where Web 2.0 is vital.

To attract customers, it is necessary to participate in online “communities” relevant to your business. That also means engaging in an ongoing, meaningful dialogue with customers on interactive networking sites about products, prices and service.

The social web has changed the landscape of e-commerce forever. Audiences are fragmented and this means customers are harder to reach but they are surfing the web for information about goods in ever-growing numbers before buying. If these trends continue, then any company wishing to succeed has to embrace the interaction encapsulated by Web 2.0 to build strong, trusting relationships with its customers.

Businesses can benefit from the power of social networking precisely because the tools of Web 2.0 are well suited to the personal and conversational marketing style that already works to their benefit offline.

Firms large and small have started to take part in social networks and internet communities but the results are mixed. Some are successfully attracting customers and boosting the bottom line, others are not. Of greater concern is that most have not taken the plunge at all with many approaching the internet in general with apprehension.

These businesses should realise that Web 2.0 offers relevant and powerful tools for them to promote themselves and build an online brand. They should stop hiding – and start using it to their advantage.

Kate Elphick Digital Bridges