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I’ve been given this crazy title to talk about, Engagement in the Real World, and it’s quite a fuzzy title, so I thought I’d come at it from a different angle. Last night I was watching one of those late night television shows, those compendium shows which seem to be running twenty-four, seven on Dave, Deja Vu. And it was looking at, the look back over the nineties, the two thousands. And I thought, my goodness, we’re almost at the end of 2009, where has the last ten years gone? Ten years ago I was back in Australia getting ready to watch the fireworks from Sydney harbor for the Millennium celebrations. Ten years ago I was working for Telstra trying to get people to understand that the Internet was a great thing. In fact, who here is old enough to remember this noise? Brings back some bad memories, doesn’t it? But just ten years ago. Shush. But just ten years ago we were hearing that noise and being frustrated because that meant that we were going online. I even remember doing a webcast, which probably four people watched in Australia, about why you would have ADSL and you’d be always on and always connected and why businesses would benefit. But a lot has changed in ten years. And even two years ago, if I had a problem with a brand or a service, I would tell my next door neighbor, I might write a letter to the editor and hope that it wouldn’t offend his or her publishers and they might print it. Today, and we’ve seen it now, I can tweet my dissatisfaction from where I am. I’ve been spending the last twelve months really talking about the value of mobile, and one of the benefits of mobile is, it’s available at the point of creative impulse, which also means, when I’m upset, I can tell everyone about it. When you’re on hold to a call center, no one hears you scream. When you scream on Twitter, everyone hears you scream. And that is absolutely fragmenting and turning a brand world upside-down. And many of you are here, either because you’re interested in social media or because someone has sent you because this social media stuff is really starting to influence the way we do business. The other problem we’ve got is that no one is going to University and doing a social media degree. I know that, because my local Starbucks barista, Laura, is doing her MBA and out of interest one day, I said, Laura, are you learning social media subjects. And she said, no. Not surprising. She has two years to go. So even when she graduates, she’s learning the old way of marketing and advertising. And last night, for a joke, I pulled out my old MBA marketing textbook. It’s about this thick, it was covered in dust, and I was looking at all the ways that you market and advertise to people. And for a brand, or an agency in some cases, marketing advertising is all about shouting and telling you why our product is better than the other one. And that is wrong. Social media interrupts that massively. And so you have to look at it in a different way. And we know that. So. I always show a cartoon by Hugh McCloud in my presentations. This is my favorite at the moment. You’re a social media specialist. Wow, I’m one too. And the thing that really upsets me is that everyone is saying they’re experts and no one can be an expert in this space, because no one has been taught it. And we’re only starting to experience it. People say social media is hard. Social media is real life. After the next two presentations we’ll go out and have a drink. You watch what happens. We’ll form into groups. People we know, we’ll gravitate towards. People we think we’d like to talk to, we’ll gravitate to, and we’ll form all these little groups. And some of us would like to influence our product or service on them, so we’ll go and seek them out and talk to them. This is the real world. And so, when a brand says, we’re going to start engaging and influencing, they’re not trained to do that. So, this is why it’s hard, and this is why a conference like this exist. The other advice I have is that, if someone is coming to sell you social media, check them out. Have they ever worked for a company of your size? And, have they ever held a role that you hold? The reason, being, is, you need people that feel your pain. This morning I was with a very large financial company. I should have said, also, I’m now working for a company called Visible Technologies, that do social media listening. So, I’m actually talking to brands about these problems. And this financial services company has some massive issues around compliance, what they can and cannot do. They keep running into the legal department. At Telstra, we call them the business prevention department. Sorry, if you’re here from legal. But they, their job is to make sure that people don’t get sued. And social media is a massive headache for internal compliance people, and people like first direct, because they have to go through all the hoops. So I feel your pain. But it’s important, if someone is going to help you through, that they also have to have felt the pain before. So it just annoys me sometimes that people that haven’t been through it are saying it’s just easy to throw up a Twitter page. Easy. Yes is it. But then you have to engage. And that’s where, we’re going to talk about that today. So, why are we here? A guy called Dave Edwards has this three sentence explanation of social media. And I want to read it out, because it, when I read it, I just read it three or four times. It absolutely solidifies what social media is and what the challenge is for all of you. Marketing sets the expectation. Marketing creates demand. Marketing helps the consumer differentiate why one choice is better than another choice. That’s a given. Operations delivers. That’s your customer service, that’s your outbound people. That’s the people in the trenches, at the front high street store. The people that engage with the public. I have yet to see a lot of negative tweets about that latest marketing campaign. Oh, the lighting was awful, the color fuchsia wasn’t used properly, but, boy oh boy, when you have a problem with Vodaphone, or O2, or BT, or your financial provider, you tweet about it. So what we see is that any gap between the two drives the conversation on the social web. And I think this sums up, where we are today with social media, perfectly. Because you’ve got all the brand promise, it’s fantastic. And the poor guys and girls in the front shop have to deal with all the problems. And that’s what we blog and tweet about. So, in a way, you actually want to spend more money here and enamoring your troops to be able to respond and engage. And that’s the hard part, because there are lots of people that make great TV, and I’m not suggesting we ever stop doing that, but we need to support the guys and the gals on the front line. And with social media it becomes a lot harder. It becomes a lot harder because you need to look at, sort of, four rules. And I look at them as: listen, learn, engage, and integrate. I went too fast there. Listening. Now, listening is hard for a brand, because they’ve not been trained to do it. It’s not a criticism But all those people like me, I’ve been through marketing courses, were trained to broadcast. And, if you put an ad on ITV during X-Factor, lots of people will see it. Maybe not the right people. Then they’re going to talk back to you. That is the hard part, because brands are not trained, yet, to properly respond. And that’s where we need to help each other do that. So we need, first of all, to listen. What are people saying about us? And we’ve talked today about monitoring tools and those sorts of things. Even simple free tools tell you what people are saying. And every time I show a client what’s being said about their brand online, one hundred percent of the time, they go, I didn’t know that. Or, that’s my staff, what are they tweeting about? When you start listening, it’s going to get ugly, because for the first time in a long time you’re going to hear comments that you normally get back through market research. [?] it’s a six week cycle. And I’ve got two minutes left. Which is great. Because I’ve got about two minutes left to go. So, listening is really hard. And, for example, I plug into one of our tools. Orange iPhone, yesterday, when the iPhone launched. Just a random selection. Someone said that no one was in the Apple iStore [?] and it was a PR failure. Someone said, how long will the queue be? Someone said, they’re going to switch. These are things that, to a brand, can be quite challenging, because people are now throwing bricks back at them and they don’t know how to handle that. So we need to learn, what are they saying, and why are they saying it. Did we muck up in the campaign? Did we let them down in customer service? Did we under-promise something that we should have done? And then, engaging. And that’s the hard part. But I liken it to, I liken it to, in fact what we’re showing here, just quickly, is influences. How do we find who to engage with? And the experiment is, when we have drinks out there, you will naturally find who the influences are, who you need to talk to to get your point of view across. That’s a natural reflection for human beings, but for brands, they don’t train to do that. It’s just like real life. This is a picture that could have been taken tonight. You’ll get in groups and circles and you’ll gravitate. You watch tonight how it happens. This is the real world. Social media is the real world, just there aren’t a lot of rules around that. So brands need to learn how to talk back and engage, and that is not easy, but if you get it right, the blogosphere, the twittersphere, will reward you. And that will tell you how great a job you’re doing. And I can give you hundreds of examples over drinks. The final thing is integrate. Social media will become part of every company’s DNA, just as email is. Two weeks ago, our corporate email was down for a day. It killed us. What do we do without our email? What I’m suggesting to clients now, is asking, can you give us your social media credentials. Can we tell you your Twitter name. And, if I know why you’re going to use it, I’ll give it to you. Two months later, and I ring to complain with Vodaphone, who are one of my suppliers, found, ah, that’s Andrew Grill, who’s also @andrewgrill, we’ve seen what he’s been saying. So, I think those that start to integrate what’s going on, with what you know about your customers already, will survive. And, guess what? That’s it. Thank you very much.

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