November 2012 This edition covers: • Future of Storytelling for Business • Social Customer Service • The Future of Elections
CORPORATE/CREATIVITY
FUTURE OF STORYTELLING FOR BUSINESS In this increasingly complex, visually driven and transmedia world, the ability to tell a compelling story - be that about a product, service, business or yourself - is of primal importance. What audiences want A recent study has revealed several possible futures for storytelling: ➔ Transmedia is more than media-shifting. 82% of participants wanted more mobile apps that would complement, not just replicate, their TV viewing experiences. ➔ The real world is a platform, too. When asked to develop a new way of interacting with stories, 52% of participants treated the real world as another “platform,” incorporating networked real-world objects, augmented reality, 3D projected environments, and other technologies that bridge the divide between digital and physical. ➔ Audiences crave more control. 79% suggested interactions that would allow them to alter a storyline by influencing a character’s decisions or by becoming a character themselves. ➔ Traditional notions of authorship are changing. The real-time, connected culture of the Web is converting storytelling to a more participatory art; 93% of participants expressed interest in submitting possible story ideas to producers and a whopping 2/3 said they’d be willing to help fund stories they’re interested in (e.g. on a platform like Kickstarter)
Dawn of the ‘imagesphere’ ➔ It’s clear that we’ve now entered a phase in which visual communication is supplanting the written word – what some call the dawn of the ‘imagesphere’. ➔ The digital landscape changes fast and pictures are one of the key catalysts. Flickr now houses more than 6 billion photos, Facebook members upload more than 300 million photos every single day, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. ➔ Businesses must learn to harness this compelling means of communication. This video shows how to use rich media to do that. Participation driven by purpose ➔ Much like we expect to see a moral at the end of a fairytale, we expect to find a purpose at the end of a website which is giving us a storytelling experience. Take a look at these creative examples of visual storytelling on the web. Embedding storytelling in business leadership ➔ Some of the most successful companies in the world use storytelling very deliberately as a leadership tool. ➔ At Nike, all the senior executives are designated corporate storytellers. ➔ Kimberly-Clark provides two-day seminars to teach its 13-step program for crafting stories. ➔ 3M banned bullet points and replaced them with a process of writing “strategic narratives”. ➔ P&G hired Hollywood movie directors to teach senior executives better leadership via storytelling. ➔ Some of the storytellers at Motorola belong to external improvisation or theatre groups to hone their story skills.
COMMUNICATIONS TAKEOUT
5 WAYS STORYTELLING CAN BOOST PARTICIPATION & PERFORMANCE (Forbes) 1. Sear your story in the minds with a surprise at the end 2. Leaders boost worker initiative, performance and morale with stories 3. Tell it so they want to re-tell it 4. Use C.A.R. (context, action, result) to drive your story further 5. Vivid characterisations are key to attracting opportunities in work and in life
THE FUTURE OF STORYTELLING PHASE ONE OF TWO (Latitude)
BRANDS/SOCIAL MEDIA
SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE The advent of social media has brought about a seismic shift in how customer services are delivered to consumers. Modern customer service is now social and the power is firmly in the hands of consumers to demand ever more timely responses from brands. Twitter power ➔ The immediacy of Twitter is highly attractive to consumers who want to make fast and efficient contact regarding a customer services query. A poll of 2,000 UK adults in April 2012 found that 36% had used a social media platform to contact a big company. 65% of those surveyed said they believed social media was a better way to communicate with companies than call centres. ➔ Last year Evolve 24 found that when a company responded to an enquiry via Twitter, this was welcomed by the customer. 86% stated that they loved to be contacted in this way and over 75% were also satisfied with the response they received. Speed is not the only answer ➔ Research by Brandwatch shows UK brands are ignoring priceless customer service feedback offered by consumers on Twitter and Facebook, opting simply to respond as quickly as possible to each complaint rather than learn valuable lessons from them. ➔ The study found that 50% of respondents actually complain because they want companies to learn from their mistakes. Only 17% stated they complain about a brand in order to embarrass it publicly.
Sea change ➔ The trend is clearly for consumers to increasingly use their favourite social networks to make contact with brands and businesses. ➔ At the moment, these comments are all too often negative with corporations placing too much emphasis on speed of response and not the quality of the conversation and what they can learn from these interactions. ➔ However, there is a sea change taking place where customer service provision is being socialised. Those companies that understand these changes and put in place systems to manage these conversations will be the commercial winners. Engage and learn ➔ A recent study by B-M found that about 94% of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts distribute company news updates and announcements while 67% are at least partially serving a customer service function. What’s even more impressive is how much companies are engaging back with followers. ➔ 79% of corporate accounts attempt to engage on Twitter with retweets and @mentions and 70% of corporate Facebook pages are responding to comments on their walls and timelines. Become a conversation company In his new book Steven van Belleghem advises companies to become conversation companies. A conversation company is a very consumer oriented company, relying on the power of people and using social media as a perfect partner. The Conversation Company invests in 4 C's to optimize its conversation potential: customer experience, conversation management, content, collaboration.
COMMUNICATIONS TAKEOUT
5 DIMENSIONS OF DIGITAL CUSTOMER SUPPORT (16 EXPERTS DISCUSS) 1.
Offer speed & real value to customers
2.
Integration
3.
Culture of customer focus
4.
Customer communities
5.
Product performance
HOW TO MAKE YOUR COMPANY THINK LIKE A CUSTOMER (ACCENTURE)
TECHNOLOGY/PUBLIC AFFAIRS
THE FUTURE OF ELECTIONS With the recent cliff-hanger US Presidential elections still fresh in our minds, what does the future hold for elections, both in terms of how they will be held and what social media and predictive analytics can bring to the foretelling of electoral outcomes? No more paper ➔ In today’s modern era where most people have access to computers and telephones, it no longer makes sense to rely on a purely paperbased system of voting and record-keeping. ➔ E-Voting over the Internet utilizing a secure pin number already exists and has been adopted by various organizations without complaint. ➔ Such a system would eliminate the need for an elector to prove his or her identity, and possibly eliminate the need to show up at a polling station at all. ➔ In making voting more convenient it may even “enfranchise” more voters. The computer ate my vote ➔ Inevitably the technology behind such advances has been subject to intense scrutiny and criticism. Mobile is transforming political engagement In the US 88% of registered voters had a cell phone, 53% of those had smartphones. 10% of made a political contribution via text or mobile app and 37% of voters used their mobile phone for political information and discussion.
Social media knew who would win ➔ The 2012 US Presidential election has been called the "social-media election” ad nauseam. However, this infographic on Open-site.org shows that social-media networks are not only channels to get candidates’ messages out, but are also becoming predictors of election outcomes. ➔ Twitter developed tools that showed the social media activity around Barack Obama and Mitt Romney's campaigns. This Political Engagement Map measured the number of replies, retweets and favourites each of the candidates got on the social networks and allowed viewers to filter this information by state and by topic. ➔ Facebook teamed up with CNN to build this real-time visualisation of Facebook users' activity about the election. ➔ Salesforce Marketing Cloud developed a real-time interactive infographic to keep you abreast of political twitterings and election conversation as it happened. ➔ Another interactive tool on @TelegraphNews scraped social to predict the US Election winner and who would take which states. Educated guesses ➔ Quantitative historian Allan Lichtman ‘s “13 Keys” model has correctly predicted the popular vote outcome of every U. S. presidential election since 1984, including George H. W. Bush’s comeback from nearly 20% behind in the polls in 1988. Lichtman called the 2012 election for Obama nearly a year ago. ➔ US school children have also correctly called every single presidential election since 1964 via the Scholastic News election poll.
COMMUNICATIONS TAKEOUT
TWIPLOMACY With the US Presidential election, we saw social media having much more of an active influence on the outcome. It is now fully integrated within the news cycle and provides valuable insight we previously could not access. B-M’s ‘Twiplomacy’ is the first-ever global study of world leaders on Twitter. The study shows that almost two-thirds of world leaders have a Twitter account. However, almost half of world leader accounts don’t follow any of their peers.
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA WON THE US ELECTIONS 2012 CONTACT Elaine Cameron, Director Strategic Research & Trend Analysis, EMEA elaine.cameron@bm.com Don’t forget to follow: http://www.twitter.com/FUTUREPersp http://www.facebook.com/FUTUREPerspective
http://storify.com/FUTUREPersp