How can you be more communication savvy?

Andrea Harper

The success of any firm, large or small, is based on relationships and the key to any relationship is communication. Even organisational systems, processes and guidelines are ineffective without effective communication. However, numerous employee surveys highlight communication issues as top of the list when it comes to employee complaints writes Andrea Harper, Senior Lecturer in Business Management.

Research in this area also highlights the link between poor communication management and motivation, satisfaction, recognition and the bottom line – profit and success. Therefore, communication and how it is valued and managed can be viewed as an enabler or a disabler; it can be the means to both motivate and demotivate staff, to produce satisfied or dissatisfied staff.

 

The big question business owners and managers need to ask themselves, is: ‘Do we disable or enable our staff to help make our organisation successful?’

One of the main problems of communication in the workplace is that communication is all too often not managed. Organisational communication, in many firms, tends to be an unconscious concept – yet human resources, marketing, finance and operations are all managed consciously.

They are all important functions in an organisation and time, effort and resources are used to ensure they function effectively. The process of communication in the workplace, however, is often left to its own devises; communication just ‘happens’, it ‘doesn’t need to be managed’.

Therefore, in order to create a more successful business, communication in the workplace needs to be managed consciously. Communication needs to take its place in the hierarchy of organisational functions and processes; it should no longer be the Cinderella of organisational life. Therefore, it needs to be made a central part of organisational strategy and be viewed as pivotal in not only getting things done but getting things done successfully.

How can you be more communication savvy?

1. Recognition

Managers, not just top management, but all managers need to see communication for what it is – an enabler, it’s not just a tool to be wheeled out from time to time.

Communication as a concept/process should be embraced and needs to be recognised for its ability to unite a team by creating and maintaining openness; encouraging true involvement of  all       employees and facilitating cooperation.

Informed and motivated employees are ones who will take your organisation to a new level.

 

2. Conscious management of communication in the workplace

This should naturally follow on from managers’ recognition that communication or, more to the point, effective communication, is an enabler.

If its importance is recognised, managers will naturally start to manage the process consciously. Therefore, put it at the top of your agenda, build strong relationships and encourage your team to do likewise. Create more openness with your communications, e.g. think about the channels of communication you use, could you be more innovative in how you disseminate information?

 

Could you encourage two-way communication – not just to obtain feedback but to use your staff and their experience, knowledge and skills to get involved, to contribute more?

 

Employees need to believe that their contribution and ideas are welcome; they could make a difference. Managers should keep asking themselves have I shared ideas sufficiently? Have I included enough/the right people? Have I encouraged contributions? Who have I spoken to today? Did I persuade or did I tell? Has my communication been effective?

3. Lead from the front

When the management of communication starts to become effective, communication in the workplace starts to become effective. It breeds; it spreads. Openness and collaboration become the norm. Furthermore, if communication is valued and takes on a central role in manager’s lives, employees throughout the organisation will also start to embrace the centrality and importance of effective communication – helping to change attitudes.

 

 

4. Evaluate and learn

Review and evaluate are well-known manager mantras and many managers have the belief they are ‘good communicators’. The problem lies in the fact this belief isn’t necessarily held by their staff. What are staff saying about the organisation, about you, about the state of communication in your workplace? If you don’t know, find out. This is definitely good practice when an organisation has shifted to new thinking, new ways of doing things.

When all of these elements are pulled together, the organisation should start doing things differently. This will be demonstrated through employee motivation, satisfaction and organisational commitment. Stronger relationships with colleagues will ensue, employees will collaborate and cooperate more readily – they should feel more encouraged to challenge and get involved.

 

Andrea Harper is senior lecturer and Programme Leader in  Business Management at Warrington School of Management, University of Chester, Warrington (Padgate) Campus, WA2 0DB

You can find out more information about WSM by visiting our website. You can also follow us on Twitter 

 

Social Media: A key device in the business world

 

THE floatation of Twitter on the New York stock market and its pre-valuation at over $10bn indicates the high perceived value of social media. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others are now recognised as powerful devices of communication for businesses to reach their present and potential customer base.

Much of this is driven by the adoption of ‘smartphones’, now estimated in the UK at around 35 million users.  

 

Events such as the Rugby League World Cup have highlighted how this media can be used to keep ‘a buzz’ going and maintain an information stream. With ‘retweets’ going throughout the world this has also helped to raise the profile of Warrington.

However, most businesses have a long way to go in using social media to build their brand and communicate effectively. Marketing has moved on and some firms have been left behind.

A 30 minute drive from Warrington (traffic permitting) will take you into Merseyside, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and well into the heart of Cheshire. This gives the 8000 businesses in Warrington a potential regional customer base of several million people.

 

It’s no wonder that the excitement over Twitter is so high on the world financial markets. How else could you communicate with so many people?

How can Social Media help your business? Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader tells us how in our four-part guide.

 

 

Professor Lawrence Bellamy is Associate Dean at the Warrington School of Management, University of Chester Warrington (Padgate) Campus.

Follow us on Twitter
@WSofManagement @ProfLawrenceB

 

Social Media: What is All the Fuss About? Final Stage

Stage Five: Evaluation

Many smaller businesses are interested in directly aligning their social media strategy with their sales funnel. Some of the core measurement metrics to do this are:

	Facebook	YouTube	Twitter	LinkedIn
Retention Rate
Sales Volume per Customer
Revenue per Customer
Customer service Costs per Customer

The metrics you use should be directly linked to your social media objectives. If you want to clearly to see an ROI and monetised conversion rates associated with social media channels the best way to do this is by linking Google Analytics (free software)  to your website and setting up conversion goals. Further discussion on this topic needs a whole new article! However, you can visit http://www.google.co.uk/analytics  for more information. If you are considering going down this route make sure that every social media campaign is tagged by using Google Analytics’ ‘URL Builder’.

Summary

Hopefully, this article has given you a general overview of social media and how it can be utilised effectively to help generate leads, aid customer retention and build brand awareness. This article has only just scraped the surface of this topic – there are so many different aspects to social media and its uses that it is impossible to cover everything in a few pages. Sometimes, businesses rush into using social media channels because they are free and easy to set up – don’t fall into this trap because you can damage your reputation more by not understanding the characteristics of the medium being used. It is also a time-consuming marketing tool, so be sure it’s right for your business before rushing in.

 

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester) @WSofManagement.

Social Media: What is All the Fuss About? Stage 3 & 4

Stage Three: What are Your Social Media Objectives?

Once you have matched your customer persona/s to targeted social media platforms you need to be clear on your social media objectives, which should directly align with your core business objectives. Social media tends to achieve three marketing goals:

·         Lead generation

·         Customer retention

·         Brand awareness

You also need to consider the 3 Ms of: Management, Monitoring and Measurement. Generally, marketers dedicate an average of 1 hour a day to social media activities and according to research by EML Wildfire (May 2012), the following business benefits have been experienced from the on-going use of social media:

31%        Customer engagement

30%        Loyalty

25%        Traffic to website

21%        Sales turnover (due to active use of social media)

Stage Four: Plan Your Campaign

Once you have decided what channels to use and have clear objectives, it’s time to consider your overall strategy and tactics. Example strategies include:

·         Generate product awareness with solicitors who deal with ligation cases

·         Generate product awareness with new mums

·         Increase lead conversions from the company website

·         Develop and promote content to help facilitate a prospects’ decision-making process

·         Reduce customer service calls by dealing with enquires via social media channels

Ideas for tactics should be gained from: researching case studies, attending a course or employing a digital/ PR consultant to help you.  Four key questions to ask yourself at this stage are:

1.       Does the tactical idea deliver on the strategy?

2.       How likely is the customer persona likely to respond to this tactic, compared to others?

3.       Does my business have the resources to implement this tactic (in-house or outsourced)?

4.       What are the critical success factors and main barriers to achieving these?

Social Media: What is all the Fuss About? Final Stage

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester).

Social Media: What is All the Fuss About? Stage 2

Stage Two: Research Social Media Platforms

Firstly, it’s worth setting the scene – according to OFCOM (August 2011), it took social media just four years to achieve 50% penetration of the UK population (in comparison, mobile phones took fifteen years to achieve this level of penetration).

It is easy to make assumptions, when it comes to social media usage. However, if you have a bit of time to do some research, it’s amazing how easy it is to access information that can be used for marketing planning. To speed up your decision making process, here are some key statistics:

Facebook

Econsultancy research has found that Facebook accounts for 47.86% of all social networking traffic in the UK. There are more than 30m Facebook users in this country, reaching nearly half of the population (49.9%).

From a business perspective, in the last year Facebook has increased its downstream to online retail sites by 12%. On top of this, 33% of social network users agree that they trust what they read on sites such as Facebook.

Most people are surprised to learn that there is a fairly even split between the age and gender of users (source: Facebook Insights):

Men                                      48.66%

Women                                51.34%

Age Demographics:

13 – 17 years old               13%

18 – 24 years old               24.5%

25 – 34 years old               25.5%

35 – 44 years old               17.5%

45+ years old                     19.5%

According to ComScore (Feb 2013), the median age of a UK Facebook user is 37.5 years.

Interestingly, to continue our ‘Laura Ashley’ theme, they have a Facebook Fan Page which has over 61,000 ‘Likes’ (https://www.facebook.com/lauraashleyofficial).

YouTube

The second largest UK social media site is the Google-owned video sharing platform, YouTube. This website accounts for 24.84% of traffic to social network sites (source: Experian Hitwise, March 2013).

According to Google’s official blog, YouTube users upload more than 48 hours of video every minute and they have 3 billion views a day (50% more than last year). Although watching videos is mainly seen as an entertainment activity, don’t underestimate the business benefits this platform can bring. Video can help improve your search rankings (SEO) and increase ecommerce conversion rates. Two examples of this can be found on Econsultancy’s website - equestrian sports supplier Ariat said that visits where a product video had been viewed showed a conversation rate 160% higher than visits without video views and U.S. shoe e-tailer Zappos found that sales increased by between 6% and 30% for items that included video product demonstrations.

Although these are both B2C companies, the biggest B2B success story from the use of video is Blendtec (the ‘will it blend?’ campaign). The company uploaded home-made product demonstration videos in 2006 and increased blender sales by 700% between 2006 – 2008.

YouTube’s user demographics can be found on ‘YouTube Insights for Audience’ and the majority of UK users are male (72.7%), aged 18-24 years old (40%).

Twitter

Although Twitter has 10m UK users, it only accounts for 1.63% of traffic to a social networking site (source: Econsultancy and Experian Hitwise). Like Facebook, the demographic spilt tends to be fairly even – 49% are Male and 51% are Female. Twitter users tend to be more well off than the rest of the population and use smartphone and tablet devices regularly (source: Ipsos Mori, July 2012). Age demographics are as follows:

15 – 24 years old               16%

25 – 34 years old               16%

35 – 44 years old               17%

45 – 54 years old               17%

55+ years old                     34%

There are mixed reviews regarding sales conversion rates linked to Twitter activity. It seems to be a very good brand raising tool (and useful for positioning individuals as experts) but not everyone is convinced of its direct sales benefits. A number of small fashion consumer brands have seen a direct increase in sales when product photos and discounts have been promoted via the micro-blogging network and in the B2B arena Dell claimed that $6.5m of its sales were generated via Twitter.

According to a U.S. survey of small business owners, conducted by the Wall Street Journal and Vistage International, the social media networking site with the most potential is LinkedIn – gaining 41% of all votes. One user - Ken Lopez who runs a legal consulting firm - has used LinkedIn to increase traffic to his website more than ten-fold in a year. He's using Twitter, but he explained to the Wall Street Journal that there's a big difference between the ROI he receives from Twitter and LinkedIn. "We will tweet 10-plus times a day, and we will put roughly the same number of posts on LinkedIn per day, yet we get dramatically different results."

Other Networks

Although we do not have the space to cover every social media platform available, the other key sites to note are: LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. They all have very different audience demographics, which can easily be found via online research. It’s also worth finding business case studies for each of these channels.

Social Media: What is all the Fuss About? Stages 3 & 4

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester) @WSofManagement.