Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Last week saw the conclusion to the third successful series of ‘Social Media Week’ in London which has gone from strength to strength since its inauguration in February, 2009 in the US. Chinwag played host to one of the last seminars of the week, The Firewall: The Social Business Revolution supported by Nokia on February 17^th at the Design Council in Covent Garden. The session moved at a swift pace as we heard from: Adrian Cockle, Head of Online, WWF UK; Euan Semple, Leading Consultant on Social Business; Anirban Saha, Global Head of Social Innovation and Intelligence, Nokia; Simon Morris, Director of EMEA Marketing, Adobe, Chaired by Will McInnes Managing Director, Nixon McInnes.

The central discussion point was how social businesses should look at the way people interact with digital experiences and how they can apply any insight gained to a variety of business processes.

In order to be a ‘social business’ social tools are required to help build your business and can help a huge organisation feel like a startup by bringing people together for example:

• The WWF uses an Intranet called Arena to help support peer to peer communication. Key features:
  • Provides survey applications to gauge opinions before and after their internal lunchtime debates.
  • Showcases thumbnail galleries, journey sharing tools, discussion forums
  • Includes a Google map highlighting 180 of their projects around the world so that staff can see the breadth of their work.

• Adobe Vibe is an internal made micoblog which allows users to post daily updates, tweets and issues with no restrictions. Key features:
  • Create groups and access the service on a mobile device.
  • Created to help employees become evangelists for the business and to reflect on daily learnings as well as to share relevant findings.
  • Encourages teams to give themselves credit for their successes by featuring their best customers.
  • Every team member can share their status via Vibe, without having to send weekly e-mail reports.

• Anirban Saha from Nokia introduced their recently launched ‘social visualizer’ multi- screen installation called Agora. Key benefits:
  • He noted that as Nokia has more than 100,000 employees and cover over 150 markets, they needed to encourage employees to take an interest in monitoring what people are saying about them as a business
  • Tells them how customers use their products and how the business is responding and innovating accordingly.
  • helps employees to be immersed in the customer experience

As the panel discussion analysed wider industry and business challenges it was highlighted that the world of work has become so professionalised that we’ve forgotten how to communicate. As such there needs to be a push towards encouraging social media literacy and training to help professionals become a customer service agent and a spokesperson for their business. Ultimately, in order to take part in the social business revolution, businesses everywhere must look to provide individuals with the power to connect, innovate, enable, empower and listen!

The British American Business’s http://www.babinc.org/ recent event, ‘Fixing Britain-the Business of Reshaping our Nation in 2012’, featured keynote speaker Lord Digby Jones, who over the course of the morning took some time to share the key points from his new book Fixing Britain  http://www.digbylordjones.com/fixing-britain.html

 After listening to months of news focusing on nothing but the doom and gloom of our struggling economy, it was refreshing to hear someone confidently speak about and celebrate the good qualities of UK businesses. In Digby Jones’s view London is one of the most attractive international financial centres, especially considering its political, financial and legal stability. We are also the 6th biggest manufacturing economy and home to one of the world’s most productive car plants – in Sunderland, managed by Nissan. The second biggest pharmaceutical company in the world, GSK, is also proudly British. For every Airbus which circumnavigates the globe, half of its parts including the Rolls Royce engine are made in….you guessed it, Britain!

Confidence tricks never go out of fashion and Digby Jones showed how displaying confidence can be a truly valuable commodity, which certainly helps to sell a new book or bargain for Britain at the trading table. He also answered a few questions on the state of the European economy relative to Asia’s and highlighted that Britain needs to better foster Asian trading relationships in order to remain competitive and harness our strengths. Warren Buffett once claimed, “when the tide goes out it shows the wrecks at the bottom of the sea” and in Britain’s case we are still fixing the social, political and corporate ‘wrecks’ which the recession has left us with.

Digby’s new book gives us some good reasons to celebrate what we are good at in Britain. In order to reshape our nation we can start by supporting British businesses, develop stronger trading relationships and use events like the Olympics and the Queen’s Jubilee to inject some much needs confidence into the economy.