Speaking Engagements: A Preview of Social Media Week’s BankConnect Event

Social Media Week (SMW12) hits Toronto next week and Delvinia President Steve Mast is among the speakers at BankConnect, a panel discussion presented by ING Direct and XConnect (a project of thirdocean), about how banks are using social media, technology and other new media tools to connect with their customers and potential new markets.

The event, which takes place from 6-9 p.m. at the ING Direct Cafe on Wednesday, February 15, will  bring together industry executives to discuss a variety of issues around new media and banking.

Attendees will hear from financial industry insiders about banking in Canada, learn how banks are adjusting to and are impacted by changes caused by technology and industry trends, and have the opportunity to ask questions and give feedback to insiders in the financial industry.

In addition to Steve Mast, the BankConnect panel includes Daniel  Shain, founder of Finizi Corp.; Mark Nicholson, Head of Digital and Interactive at ING Direct; Andrew Jenkins, Head of Social Media Strategy at RBC; Debbie Dimoff, Vice President of Client Services at PwC; and Fahad Kamr, Founder of Stocial.com. The National Post‘s Matt Hartley will moderate the discussion.

In this video, Steve talks to Karim Kanji, co-founder and partner of thirdocean and XConnect, about the power and potential of social media in the banking industry and the challenges banks are facing in the areas of mobile technology and social media.

For more information about the event, or to register, please visit the BankConnect event page on the Social Media Week Toronto website.

Speaking Engagements: Join us at the CMA Analytics Conference

With the diversification of channels and advent of social media, consumers now have far more control of their environment and their interaction with companies and brands. Consumer engagement beyond traditional channels is no longer effective on its own. Consumers expect companies to know them and to provide solutions and services at key life stages.

On January 18, the Canadian Marketing Association hosts the CMA Analytics Conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. With the theme, Discover the customer behind the data, the conference will explore how analytics support customer engagement though the customer life cycle.

Delvinia CEO Adam Froman and Rupen Seoni, a vice president of Environics Analytics, will be among the day’s speakers.

Thanks to a new partnership that links the AskingCanadians™ survey from Delvinia to the PRIZM segmentation system from Environics Analytics, marketers now can analyze how specific segments of Canadian consumers use social media differently as they become more engaged with a brand. By correlating social media and mobile use to marketplace behaviour, marketers can learn more about the relationship that customers have with a company and its products—from first contemplating a purchase to buying it, reviewing it and telling their friends about it—to better retain their customers.

In their joint presentation, How New Media Use Changes During the Customer Life Cycle, Rupen and Adam will explore their new data integration to provide insights into the interplay between digital media and customer engagement. Based on new research conducted this past fall, they’ll examine which consumers turn into brand advocates based on their social media use. They’ll look at the impact of lifestyle on product engagement. And they’ll chart how the social and mobile media habits of consumers of different lifestyles change as they get to know products better.

During this session, participants will learn:

• The key points during the customer life cycle when media interaction is high—when they research a brand, buy it, review it and tell others about it—and ways to influence positive outcomes
• The lifestyle segments that are most active in engaging with companies and products and how their engagement changes in the buying cycle
• The best practices for understanding and measuring social media use at different stages in the customer life cycle
• Ways to harness the power of brand advocates during the customer life cycle for customer retention
• How viral marketing affects specific customer segments

The conference program also features sessions on customer engagement, geospatial intelligence, and using segmentation and predictive analytics to combat attrition.

Register today!

5 Steps for Brands to Meet the Needs of Social Shoppers

Earlier this week, Rosalina Lin-Allen, Delvinia’s Director of Client Strategy, hosted a complimentary webinar on the Canadian Social Shopper, sponsored by Tenzing.

Social networks have experienced explosive growth in the last few years. Today, social networking is the number one activity on the Internet, accounting for 23 per cent of user’s time spent online (source: Nielsen, September 2011). Consumers are using social networking sites and features in all aspects of their lives, including shopping.

Roz outlined the following five steps that retailers and brands can take to meet the needs of these social shoppers.

Step 1 – Listen

Understand how your target audience interacts with your category and brand on social media in their shopping process.

One example is to map out the customer journey and understand what the projected adoption will be. According to our survey in AskingCanadians™, 38.1 per cent of consumers follow or friended a brand on a social media page.

Step 2 – Define Strategy

Identify the sweet spot for your brand and category. Establish key performance indicators along the way. Taking Starbucks for example, they identified the most social component of their offerings – gift cards – and are selling them in the Facebook environment. Within that environment, consumers can select a Facebook friend and send them a gift card, which the recipient can redeem in store using the code that comes along with the card. Consumers can also include a personalized message. What Starbucks did well here was focusing on things that made sense in the social environment, complementing other customer touch points that they have.

Step 3 – Cultivate the Community

Before you can sell to consumers, you need to have a fan base and audience you can reach out to. While social commerce may be a couple of years away, start cultivating your community now.

Today, the top three reasons Canadian consumers engage with brands are to:

• learn about discounts and deals
• find out about the latest products and events
• get opinions/advice from other consumers.

It’s really about providing what they need balanced with what makes business sense. For example, deals and promotions should be used in a limited way. When overdone, it does not provide an upside to the business.

Step 4 – Experiment

Keep trying new things. We need to give credit to 1-800-Flowers for being the first one out on f-Commerce and for continuing to refine their f-Commerce model. While experimenting, get customer input. Social media is a forum for two-way dialogue and customers are expecting dialogue so tap into that knowledge base.

Step 5 – Measure

Measure against the key performance indicators you have set up. After all, you can’t improve upon what you can’t measure. Measure based on the sales funnel approach. When you look at the customer journey, you want to identify the trigger points where they will be using social media and keep them moving along the sales funnel. So research into engagement into conversion into advocacy and so forth.

Looking ahead

The future social shoppers are a lot more social network savvy than the mainstream consumers today. For example, 85 per cent of teenage girls use their friends and peers as a source of trend information and 45 per cent seek the opinion of those same groups when purchasing clothing or footwear (source: eMarketer, Nov 2010). And the average number of Facebook friends that average Canadians between 13-24 have is 330, that’s 50 per cent more than the average Canadian who has 225 friends (source: Facebook, June 2011). So as you can see they are a lot more active on social networks and their purchasing behaviour is very different and a lot more amplified by social network technology.

You can view the recorded Canadian Social Shopper webinar here.

Don’t miss the two other pre-recorded webinars from our three-part Canadian Shopper series:

Canadian Mobile Shopper Webinar: How retailers and brands should approach mobile shopping. WATCH NOW

Canadian Multichannel Shopper Webinar: How retailers or manufacturers should effectively engage their multichannel shoppers.  WATCH NOW

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