So far in this book we have looked at taking advantage of the direct communication with customers that’s possible with the electronic media. We’ve established that whole new business models are possible, whether you regard them as entirely new innovations or extensions of older ideas like the co-operative movement. (Note: an author will always and without fail tell you he’s seen a business model before. It’s what we do.)

In this chapter we’re going to look at some of the other innovations the electronic media are facilitating. First we’ll be going beyond the standard text and picture stuff that’s on everybody’s Twitter stream and using a bit of innovation to make it really immersive – second we’ll be looking at communities who may not be trading partners directly but who can make a powerful difference to your company – finding investors, finding employees. We’ll also have a look beyond the computer-based social media and have a play with the fact that people use more than one device.

First we’ll look at talking to your potential workforce. There will also be a glance at a brewery which used social media to raise capital, just as this book was going to press. Finally – and I’m not making this up – it’ll be back to the customer with a look at making a space monkey dance by singing to your phone. I have not been taking drugs.

In this chapter, then, you should pick up the following:

• A look at the different communities with whom you can engage
• Taking people by surprise
• Raising funds through social media
• Working with third parties
• A look at different ways in which clients can be made to engage beyond straight text – so games, videos, handsets.

Social Media for Explaining Stuff

I present at several social media conferences and seminars for business. For my first year one of my main theories was that as well as some excellent contacts and means of offering expertise and support to customers, there were – from the business point of view – some complete time wasters. People who only wanted to play games, chat to friends, whatever else they might want to do. Not that there’s anything wrong with playing games and hanging out with your friends, far from it. For businesses, though, these activities had nothing going for them unless you were in the area of games development.

I’ve had to moderate my view slightly. Sorry, did I say slightly? Let’s modify that and say that the activities of Marriott Hotels worldwide and its recruitment efforts, which involve explaining its business in some depth through a Facebook game, have forced me to change my views totally.

There’s a whole book to be written on gamification (he hinted). This is the process by which the trappings of games – earning badges and so forth – are added to non-game applications. So you can now get badges from Google for reading news stories on its site, for example. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that the human psyche is designed to rather enjoy games so if you can persuade your brain that you’re playing while you’re actually working, it’ll work a bit harder. The same principle applies to FourSquare, which is certainly a loyalty scheme but which more or less turns planet Earth into a game location and offers points or badges when you reach certain levels, locations, branches of Tesco.

With that in mind we’re going to look at the Marriott Hotel in Mumbai, India, and how the company has added an entirely new dimension to its recruitment process through social media.

The location is actually quite important. Dubai has particular social conditions. Tourists who go there are often fabulously rich and people who live nearby aren’t. This is what Dr David Kippen, head of social media engagement agency Evviva in Los Angeles, came across when he visited the premises.

He and his agency had been approached by the company to build its brand in China and India. Marriott was aware that its brand was understood primarily by Western travellers; it would be wrong to say it wasn’t known elsewhere but it wasn’t as strong as the company needed it to be. ‘We did focus groups, but we also spent a lot of time doing ethnography, going down into the heart of the house, dining with the staff, really trying to walk around and to the extent that you can, as an outsider, walk a mile in the shoes of the people we were learning about,’ he explains. He was staying at the JW Hotel in Mumbai. The location was spectacular, the U-shaped building allowed for a beach view from just about every room. So he asked the workers how they had come to find the place and to find out about the jobs they now occupied. They said, almost universally, that they had come to Mumbai having lived in a small village in order to better themselves. They added that they hadn’t known many people so they had ended up spending a lot of time on their computers or phones building up their social networks.

They were on Bebo (although this has faded), foreign language network Orkut, and of course Facebook. The next question was how long they spent doing this networking and the answer would be that they’d go to a Cybercafe and keep on the networks for hours. ‘I’d say well come on guys, you can’t convince me that you’re actually, actively networking for six or eight hours a day,’ says Dr Kippen. ‘What else are you doing? And they’d sheepishly admit to well, you know, I also like to play social games.’ Crucially he now had an idea of where his target client group actually was with its online social interactions. It is vital, particularly if you want people to understand concepts which are new, to take the information to them wherever they are already comfortable rather than try to push them onto your own preferred platform.

He made a mental note of all of this and another strand of how this social network readiness could be useful occurred to him while he was in the hotel’s lounge. ‘I noticed that there were a group of people on the beach looking up at the hotel,’ he explains. He noticed one of the employees (or ‘associates’ to use Marriott’s own terminology) from his focus group so he asked her what these people were actually doing. ‘She said, dismissively, but not unkindly, oh they’re just curious about what goes on here. They have no idea.’

This, he realized, was inevitable. The local community had no conception of going on holiday to a hotel and having a waiter bring you a drink, having someone else clean your room and make your bed, having a conference hall for corporate events. It wasn’t part of their world, without any patronization intended there was just about no way they could be expected to understand what was going on. ‘I decided to go out and have a look and see the hotel as they saw it, and it was a real eye opener,’ he says. ‘It had past my attention because of how common it is in emerging markets, that when I came in the front of the hotel, I was greeted with you know, the bomb sniffing dog.’ That wasn’t all. He soon realized just how far apart these worlds were conceptually. Turn one way and you’re in paradise. Turn the other and see the hotel from the locals’ point of view and you’re confronting a fortress with armed guards and a blast wall.

Dr Kippen stresses, rightly, that this doesn’t reflect Marriott’s view or aspiration of where it should be as a brand or as a culture. ‘In every focus group I conducted, unbidden, the groups would respond back when I asked them why they liked Marriott, with what I came to learn was Mr Marriott’s second rule of service and that was, take care of the associate, the associate will take care of the guests and the guests will come back.’ Outside looked like a fortress because it was in an area where there had been terrorist attacks, simple as that.

He had found similar levels of cultural disparity on visiting the company’s premises in Thailand, too. So he knew the people outside didn’t understand what was going on inside, that they couldn’t work out why someone would pay all that for a cup of tea. He knew that they were very hot on social media and that they played a lot of games.

So Evviva created a hotel game that works on Facebook. Here’s a picture:

Source: www.facebook.com/marriottjobsandcareers page used with permission of Spreckly Partners Ltd. Facebook and the Facebook logo are trademarks of Facebook, Inc.

Developing the Game and Monitoring the Results

Marriott was unexpectedly positive about the idea of the game in the first instance and threw enough money at it so that Evviva had carte blanche to develop it. The idea was that people could enter the hotel online and find out about the tasks that had to be performed and why – just to get the feel of the inside of a hotel.

The idea that this would work chimed well with experience Dr Kippen had already gleaned working for the likes of IT companies and researching their job market. New candidates and employees might not have picked up much during their formal classes. ‘I may not have learned that much from my professors, they’d say, it was my class that taught me and one of the most important things I walked away with is a great email distribution list,’ he explains. ‘So as we all go out on the job market, we’re constantly emailing one another and saying, here’s what I’ve found, what do you know about this company, who do you know over at that company.’ This, although nobody called it that a decade or more ago, was essentially social networking so the backdrop was ready – the audience was known to be in the habit of going onto social networks; behaviours of previous generations suggested they’d welcome this sort of interaction and information through their computer screens.

Other factors were considered carefully, too. The target audience would welcome the notion of the game partly because of the brand behind it, both parties felt. ‘I think people have, perhaps naively, in emerging markets, a much greater trust that big brands don’t do bad things by and large,’ says Kippen, although there are some pretty high profile exceptions! ‘So the fact that it’s endorsed by a Marriott brand, I would imagine, probably means it’s just fine. I just wouldn’t expect there to be a lot of scepticism about that.’

This was reinforced by the minimum amount of information the game required. People considering doing something similar need to bear in mind how many games and apps on the Facebook site insist on the player handing over their name, phone number, and inside leg measurement. This game asked no more than the client would already have made available on their Facebook page. Trust was established by these two elements.

International Appeal

The game succeeded and not just in Mumbai. The themes – not knowing exactly what goes on in a hotel from the staff’s point of view, and wanting a job – aren’t just India-specific, they are completely international.

Kippen offers some statistics on the take-up, backed by a PR campaign drawing it to people’s attention. Some of the headline numbers are:

• Game played in 101 countries within three weeks of its launch – that’s 52% of the countries in the world.
• Biggest take up is in the US then the UK; after this Hungary, Brazil, France, and then Taiwan.
• Marriott careers page had 6400 fans when the game launched and within three weeks it had over 10,000.

‘The question is going to be, over time, to what extent is this a brand driver, to what extent is it just about a fun and playable game and how does it play out in employment over the longer term,’ says Kippen.

Over 6000 people played it within the first few weeks and all of them would have finished on a page that said ‘Now try it for real’ and invited them to apply. The brand is being extended and the range of people who understand the processes their new jobs will involve has expanded because social media has enabled game playing to become part of a process in which it previously had no place. It’s reached out to entirely new people and is going to have a wider choice of employee as a result.

The Colour of Money

It should of course save the business a great deal of money. Recruitment takes a lot of time, agencies charge a lot of money, and a lot of them have a pretty scattergun approach to sending CVs out. This idea is different; it targets a specific demographic and takes the explanation of the job environment to their computers. The principle should be transferrable to any work setting – perhaps you’re in catering and could have a game exploring different areas of the kitchen, or perhaps you run an editorial office and a game could explain the different parts of writing, editing, page layout, and so forth?

There are other innovative approaches to social media. Why muck about with games, you might ask – why not just ask interested people for some money? This is what one company did when it wanted £2.2m for expansion – it just told its customers it wanted some cash and they handed it over.

There are a number of ways of getting finance if you want to expand your business:

• Use your own money
• Ask the bank, but finances have been tight for years now
• Approach an external investor.

Scottish microbrewery Brewdog went a step away from the third of those ideas and invited its customers and social media fans to become shareholders. It launched the promotion – called ‘Equity for Punks’ to go with its punk-themed packaging – first in 2009 and then repeated it in 2011 when it needed funds to build and open a second brewery. The idea was simple: after consulting with all of its legal and accounting professionals the company issued small amounts of shares to very small investors, so you could buy (for example) four shares for £85. You could buy over the Internet with no need to arrange a broker or other intermediary.

Co-founder James Watt, speaking at the launch of the second of these rounds of funding, confirmed that people would be able to trade shares after an initial period of over one year and then the business would float on the Alternative Investments Market (in other words these are legitimate, ordinary shares) but he stressed that it was the social nature of the offering that was causing the most interest. ‘We think it’s a totally new and innovative way of raising capital,’ he said. ‘People who like what we do, who drink the beers, can have an ownership stake in our business. As well as finance for the strong growth we need for the company we also get to build a culture and a community.’

What was really striking about the idea was the importance of social media in both the initial offering in 2009 and the 2011 version. ‘One of the big things we learned in 2009 was the importance of that culture and community. In 2009 we had more traditional press coverage where we were able to comment on financials and statistics in more depth but that didn’t really affect [the community members] very much. What really affected them was things like Facebook, like YouTube, like Vimeo.’ The company told everyone about the offer on its Facebook page and Tweeted the life out of it, both as individuals and on the company’s account. The result was 3000 hits on the website, 10,000 members (or fans as they were called at the time) on the Facebook page. ‘We see those as the kind of people who are going to invest, the people who are online and who know and like what we’re doing.’

The success of the scheme in 2011 was considerable. It raised £500K in two days – £300K of which was in the coffers by the end of the first morning of the offer. Watt believes this is a very up-to-date way of raising money from a community which is already engaged – and which, let’s be honest (and this is my input, not something he says) has been watching TV shows about starting businesses and getting involved for several years by now.

This could help the businesses of a large number of readers of this book, but do have a look at the ‘Diving In’ chapter to see the help on offer from Crowd Cube. There will need to be professional advisors on hand of course. An accountant would have to issue the shares, the certification would need to be properly done, and it would all need to be watertight legally. You knew that. Take a look at the box on Doctor Who to see how similar ideas have gone wrong in the past.

It’s a long time ago, possibly a more naïve time when it comes to the difficulty of setting up and funding a business. But it’s a telling story about the practicalities and legalities of group funding – it needs to be watertight.

Customers: It’s Not Just About Text

Don’t forget that customers can be engaged in different ways. Customers can be harnessed for inexpensive market research of course but they can also be made to interact in different ways and you can hold their attention for longer. And a more entertaining and immersive experience is likely to lead to more engagement and that’s when they spend more money.

Take the Old Spice publicity campaign from 2010. Old Spice was a successful aftershave from a couple of generations ago which has made a comeback. The campaign with which the company scored such a hit was from ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. The brand hired actor Isaiah Mustafa who recorded an ordinary advert but also hundreds – literally – of personalized responses to viewers’ questions. These were incorporated into YouTube videos. Of course the answers were as daft as anything and very Old Spice oriented: think of gadget website Gizmodo’s question ‘Dear Old Spice, will anything surpass the loofa as the predominant body wash application technology’ and an answer like ‘Good question, Gizmodo, my preferred method of Old Spice body wash application is a live wolverine. They are terribly unruly but their fur permits the ideal mix of lather and exfoliation. I’ve also found that live puffer fish and decommissioned hand grenades work’ and you get the idea.

As entertainment it was great. As a personalized service, with (I stress) literally hundreds of personalized and well-scripted humorous responses, it was engagement with a previously dated brand on a scale not seen before. It’s difficult to imagine it being surpassed any time soon.

Sales went up. Equally importantly for manufacturer P&G, the campaign ran in July which meant that by the time the Christmas shopping season kicked in the brand was seen as amusing and ironic as well as up to date and capable of engaging, rather than that pong your dad used to wear before blokes discovered deodorant and therefore needed more subtle scents.

This was genius and looking at the comments on YouTube it was very well received. Of course it costs a lot to put something like this on YouTube and to personalize the whole thing. But it does illustrate that different sorts of engagement are possible.

Honda Gets Appy

Nowadays many customers have more than one device with them. Arguably you can deal with the multi-screen customer as a community all by themselves. Whether Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, or other network based, the participant has had one window into the social media life of the company he or she is contacting.

So what if you had an app – one of those little programs that sits on an iPhone, or Android phone, or some other mobile device, which takes advantage of the fact that most people have more than one gadget for their social interactions? This is what Honda did specifically for the launch of its Jazz car in early 2011, with a nifty little piece of entertainment that allowed a character to hop from screen to screen, device to device.

Image used with permission of Agency Brazil.

The video, also available on YouTube, used audio recognition technology to sync the app with the advert’s soundtrack and allow the viewer to interact with it in real time. You were able to download and play with characters from the ad as well, such as:

• A puppy which would chase its tail in different directions when you tickled it on a touch sensitive screen
• A space monkey that would dance and throw some crazy moves (Honda said) when people sang to it on the phone
• An evolving pet with a big tail which would change species when you shook your phone
• A playable on-screen drum kit
• A plane that would lift off when you tapped its propeller.

There were others too, and you were able to collect them on your devices and then send them from your iPhone to your iPod to your iPad.

Martin Moll, Honda’s head of marketing in the UK, explains that like the Marriott/Facebook example, the scheme was launched with an agency, Wieden + Kennedy, to allow people to interact with characters in an advertisement in a different way. ‘We wanted to increase engagement – Honda and W+K recognized that people have a growing tendency towards consuming media across multiple screens, and this idea is in keeping with that,’ he says. ‘The app and advert were designed to make it challenging to capture all of the characters in one go, in order to drive people online where they could view the advert in full. Our strategy was to create engagement rather than just one-way communication and demonstrate a warm, playful nature, with the ultimate aim of entering into a two way dialogue with our audience.’

Publicizing the app was an important element of its success – no business should ever overlook the importance of the offline side of getting their engagements in front of the target customer. PR agency Agency Brazil got it mentions in blogs and other creative outlets while W + K made certain it chimed with the TV advertising as well as Honda’s social video resources, where viewers could try and ‘catch’ the characters again.

‘The campaign was successful in that the online video amassed more than 200,000 views. Honda’s UK web traffic is also up 15 per cent since last year (2010), and although this is not directly attributable to the campaign, it has certainly made a strong contribution, says Moll. ‘Thanks to the campaign, we’ve maintained significant interest in the Honda Jazz, and successfully kept a broader, younger audience engaged – an important part of our long-term strategy.’

The campaign effectively married up an objective of attracting younger people and their desire – as in the Marriott example – to do more than sit and watch an advert passively or just a text-based screen. You may find that your own business lends itself to some sort of interactive, fun app given the right agency – and do have another look at the box on finding the right agency for your business.