Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons and the Twitter Glitch

I love food. I'm a hopeless glutton foodie - I'll save up to eat at very poncy restaurants just so I can have my tastebuds tickled with divine ephemera (the ponciness may have rubbed off). I tend to fall in love with specific places and go back time and again. One of my all-time favourites is Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons in Oxfordshire; I was once in reception checking out after a sublime day and night for a birthday when my wife got into conversation with chef patron Raymond Blanc and we ended up staying for a second night's feasting.

I also love brands. I'm a brand marketer at heart, and for seventeen years I've expressed that through digital. I quite naturally follow Le Manoir on Twitter. In my daily twitterfeed Le Manoir constitutes a very minor part - my feed is full of marketing and digital industry stuff that's important to me. But every time I see Le Manoir's logo on a passing tweet it subliminally reminds me that I'm hungry and might well like to pop over to Oxfordshire soon.

Today they changed their avatar. It's suddenly absolutely tiny. I dropped them a tweet to say I couldn't read it any more. I got the short and I have to say teensy bit snotty riposte that it "conforms to the brand's guidelines, sorry to disappoint you". Well, it may well conform to your brand guidelines, but the point is it doesn't work. You've removed one of the main reasons for maintaining a corporate Twitter feed: free advertising to people who are predisposed to you. If you take away your brand awareness, then what, may I ask, are you doing it for? If it ain't advertising - as you so adroitly point out, you've done it because it conforms to brand guidelines - then it's corporate waste.

Much as I love the food, advertised for free by Messrs. Michelin and by those foodies and gourmands (myself included) who rave about it (though Le Manoir is probably 50% about the stunning location and gardens and 50% about the grub), your approach to actively generating brand exposure could do with a little more care. The excuse that I may not be able to read it but it doesn't matter because it fits the brand guidelines is naïve and silly. Get an extension to your guidelines so you can carry on doing marketing properly - or break the rules a bit. Live a little. But make yourselves invisible and your presence on Twitter will slowly and inexcusably fade from memory.

Making social media pay

There’s an apparent conflict between the pragmatic and the desirable. Marketers necessarily want to be able to justify every penny they spend on marketing - especially in a recession - so there's a strong emphasis on the accountable. And then there's social media.

Everyone’s talking about the importance of social media, including channels like Facebook, Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn. The buzz has been incredible. Clearly when movies are being made about the kids who got the movement going, making billions in just six years, that buzz becomes tantalising for brands. And of course nobody wants to play catch-up, no-one wants to be the one who gets the dregs of the success that a new and revenue-generating marketing channel brings with it. Arriving just before everyone else leaves the party is low risk but delivers a very low return.

So how can you reconcile the two things, this requirement for measurable return on marketing investment, and the need to catch the wave?

This is the thinking that led Underwired, already the UK’s leading eCRM specialist agency, to try and bridge the gap between CRM, which is utterly auditable, and social media, which isn’t. To go back to the party metaphor, eCRM is like the bit where you know exactly who you’re inviting to the party and why. Social is the bit after you’ve taken their coat and they’ve entered the room. Once they are in there, all you can do is measure the noise levels (and in fact that's what Buzz Tracking or Sentiment Analysis tools do).

The new Social CRM tool that Underwired has developed actually bridges the gap. It allows you to track an individual into, say, a Facebook environment (with standard functions including Like, Share, Comment, Upload content, watch a video) and see exactly what they do. You can tell if, responding to a call to action in an email campaign, John visits your page, Likes it, comments on it, only watched half the video but sitll shares it with his facebook friends. You can then append that data back to your database, which means that you can create sub-segments of people who respond in a certain way when presented with specific calls to action, offers, promotions or choices.

From a marketing perspective it provides you with a way to further segment your customers. You can assign advocacy scores (even types of advocacy) and use that to inform future campaigns just targeting people who share your content with their friends - real fan marketing. But more importantly, it gives you the means to extend attribution into social channels. And if you can identify precisely which routes your sales came from, without having a big grey area where you’ve temporarily lost control of your customer, it means you can improve your marketing at every single step of the customer journey. Finally, it means you can assign a real value to social media - though of course while it means you can dive in with confidence, you do still of course have to dive in.

A draft to illustrate an idea by @stevecunningham

So what is #vistagenow?

#vistagenow is a proposed Twitter hashtag that Vistage members can use to propagate an urgent business issue they would like other members on Twitter to address straight away. This may be useful tactically (just before a critical meeting) or strategically (needing a wide range of views to help inform corporate decision-making).

Replies may be short, but will likely include pointers to websites or Vistage View resources that may help. If you want to deepen the discussion, you can start a new topic in the Vistage View forums, but you should also share the link on Twitter using the hashtag so that Vistage members can find out what happened next!