Social Media Lab Services

Could you use our help?

The Lab's services are focused upon these domains:

• Commissioned research
• Communication audits
• Strategy formation
• Design specification for social media environments
• Training
• Public and private seminars
• Organisational workshops and simulations

1. Experience Mining

Experience mining services offer a structured approach for discovering concealed communications capital inside organisational and business processes.

Once accessed and realised, this concealed communications capital can be utilised to ‘fuel’ structured and sustainable conversational marketing and communications programmes.

CONVERSATION BOX

"Yes, you're right, this page is seriously in need of hyperlinks to other pages which go into detail about the services.

And yes, it would be nice to have a glossary to explain all the new terms.

And how useful it would be to have a primer on how this all works.

But when you've got to choose between either getting a journal out there in order to bring people in who are currently conspicuous by their absense from the Social Media debate right now, or instead holding back in order to get more stuff onto the site at launch date..."

Peter Friedman, Editor, The Journal of Social Media

2. Corporate Voice Coaching

Corporate voice coaching services are designed to enable your organisation to make the transition from:

the current ‘broadcast’ style corporate voice:

• message based
• experience poor
• monolithic

to a ‘conversational’ corporate voice which is:

• realtime
• experience rich
• multi-dimensional.

3. Experience Sharing

Experience sharing services build upon the platform developed in Experience Mining and Corporate Voice Coaching to offer a safe and sustainable pathway to the world beyond the boundary of your organisation:

• Integrating conversational style communications with existing business and communications strategy
• Integrating conversational style communications into the production and management of day-to-day communications with online and offline audiences and customers

A more detailed description of these services follows:

1. EXPERIENCE MINING SERVICES

Experience mining is a structured approach for discovering a new kind of business and communications resource:

Concealed Communications Capital

Experience mining aims at accessing the concealed communications capital locked up inside your people and their social networks. This concealed communications capital consists of experience rich:

Organisational stories

about your products, your services, your people and the 'hidden life' of your organisation as well as

Communications champions

the networks of people who are enthusiastic and passionate about what they do, the experts, gurus and 'talkers' with social networks which regard them as informed conversational drivers

Organisational meta-narratives

which are the dominant topics, themes and conversational competencies

Once accessed and realised, this concealed communications capital can be utilised to ‘fuel’ structured and sustainable conversational marketing and communications programmes such as:

• blogs
• communities
• internet-based niche news services

In addition to providing the ‘communications capital’ to fuel conversational communications, experience mining may also yield stories which can be redeployed to:

• validate or qualify an existing business or marketing strategy
• fuel communications collateral developed for conventional channels
• provide the raw material for the creation of a completely new strategy , grounded in an organisation’s core conversational competencies and dominant stories

What do we audit?

Experience mining is an interview-based approach to auditing business processes for concealed communications capital.

Where are we looking?

• Business processes
• Work Experiences
• Product and service discovery processes
• Social networks
• Meetings and encounters
• Employee biographies
• Information networks
• Support networks
• Feedback channels

Experience mining outputs:

• Experience audit report
• Opportunity analysis
• Risk analysis
• Strategic recommendations

2.  CORPORATE VOICE COACHING

Corporate Voice Coaching comprises a structured series of seminars, workshops, organisational simulations and training modules.

CVC has been designed to enable your communications professionals make a safe and manageable transition from their current ‘broadcast’, message based, experience poor, monolithic corporate voice to one which is experience rich, multi-dimensional, and conversational.

Corporate Voice seminars

Presentations showing how the voice of traditional communications produces marketing backlashes, sales resistance and diminishing attention

Presentations demonstrating how social media professionals experiential communications’ offers opportunities to develop a more natural corporate voice.

Corporate Voice workshops

Interactive, intensive, multi-session experiences which introduce those involved in key communications roles to the principles and practices of transforming offline and online content from its current ‘broadcast’, message based, experience impoverished, monolithic style, into a form which is experience rich, multi-dimensional, and conversational.

Corporate Voice organizational simulations

Organisational simulations are customized which build upon the Experience Mining outputs to bring to life the risks and opportunities entailed by the transition to the era of social media and conversational communications.

Organisational simulations are ‘what-if’ scenarios realised as 'live' realtime events with actors and media simulations, ‘offstage’ organizational psychologists and key representatives from your organisation 

Corporate Voice simulations offer the opportunity for key management and staff to experience the reality of:

• Operating in a realtime conversational communications environment
• Gaining an appreciation of individual and group dynamics at realtime
• Using the conventional corporate voice in response to a range of ‘live’ scenarios
• Using the conversational voice in response to a range of ‘live scenarios’

Participants will have the opportunity to:

• ‘Stop’ and ‘replay’ the action
• Receive expert behavioural analysis
• Practise alternative ways of responding to stimuli under expert guidance

Learning opportunities

Corporate Voice simulations offer participants the opportunity to:

• Co-create the scenarios which will be enacted in the simulation
• Discover how conventional communications strategies and voice can backfire when deployed in a realtime social media environment
• Experience how different stakeholders respond to changes in corporate voice style
• Experience the different staff and management dynamics for which different voices create
• Experience PR and media dynamics set in train by a range of corporate voice techniques

Simulation Format

Corporate Voice simulations can be configured in diverse formats:

• Before a live audience of customers, staff or selected attendees
• Before a panel of experts, management, media 

Corporate voice simulations are conducted in partnership with the National Theatre and the Management School at the Institute of Family Therapy.

3. EXPERIENCE SHARING

Now that you have a new corporate voice to engage your customers and audiences in addition to a strucutred and sustainable program for communicating organisational experience in a way that integrates with your business and communications strategy, its time to enable frontline communications staff to develop their knowledge and skills to:

• Outreach to consumers, other stakeholders groups and the media
• Integrate conversational techniques with existing communications strategy and channels
• Build your own social media environments
• Handle crisis communications with confidence

Modules include:

Experience sharing with media and journalists

• Building inter-site relationships
• Selling in stories
• Journalist targeting
• Handling scoops and leaks

Experience sharing, niche news-casting and the art of story-creation

• Teaser design
• Story structure
• Story layout
• Prominence management

Experience sharing and crisis communications

• Building a conversational disclosure and ‘editorial’ policy
• Conversational rebuttal
• Conversational techniques for damage limitation
• Dealing with conversational critics and cynics

Experience sharing in many-to-many community environments

• Building a conversational community
• Building Inter community relationships
• Participating in other people’s communities

Experience sharing and the ‘new PR’

• Conversationalising your in-house PR
• Conversationalilsing the press-release
• Integrating your conversations with your PR agency
• Holding conversationalised events
• Conversationalising other people’s events
• Integrating offline events with the online world

Experience sharing and the blogosphere

• Integrating blogs with your online presence
• Corporate blogging policy formation: prescription not proscription
• Editorial process management
• Interacting with bloggers
• Joining the Metablogosphere
• Building conversational traffic

Experience sharing and online amplifiers

• Using Google News as a traffic and PR amplifier
• Using memetrackers

Experience sharing in a rich-media environment

• Creating a conversational radio station using Podcasting
• Creating a conversational TV station

Experience sharing and the conversationalised interface

• Conversational page-design
• Prominence management
• WAC
• 'Helpfulness’ permeation
• Commentation
• Knowledge Base design – building the ‘back end'

Experience sharing, sales and ROI

• Integrating selling with your conversations: “trust firewalls” and “safe juxtaposition”
• Online value building
• Conversational metrics

Experience sharing and the new business model

• Developing a conversational online/offline publication model
• The conversational subscription model