A ranking of the City’s most social savvy firms was released this morning and the results may very well surprise you. (They certainly surprised us.) Carnival, the embattled cruise ship line, Burberry, BP, Marks & Spencer and ARM Holdings scored in the top five of the FTSE 100 Social Media Index.

The ranking comes courtesy of digital corporate comms agency The Group who looked at the FTSE 100 Index and scored companies based on their commitment to social media communications. Primarily, they looked at the companies’ presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and with blogging.

The two brands that may surprise you the most are BP and Carnival. In the case of the former, the energy giant has really ramped up its social media investment in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon crisis. The report acknowledges BP’s heavy use of YouTube and Facebook and gives it kudos for consistent design across the channels. Carnival is a controversial choice as well. As we noted last month, Carnival is an extremely social savvy marketer, but it has handled poorly the Costa Concordia tragedy with a disjointed crisis outreach effort that is heavy on social, but confusing and inconsistent elsewhere.

Here are some of the interesting insights that come out of the ranking:

• Twitter has become the leading channel for digital corporate communications with more than 1 million people following corporate Twitter accounts, an increase of 418,395 (71%) since June 2011.
• The number of people using Facebook has also risen significantly; up by 4.7 million (25%) over the previous six months to June 2011, to more than 14 million fans overall. However demand for information from Facebook could be outstripping supply, with only 39 FTSE100 companies running an account (up just 2.5% since June).
• There are now 53 FTSE100 companies with an active YouTube channel, up 10% since June and these attracted 34.7 million video views, an increase of 11.6 million.
• The number of FTSE100 blog posts rose by 26% over the period. Although, across the sites hosted by The Group, blogs have proven to be the most engaging social media channel, just 16 FTSE100 companies run an active corporate blog.

Here’s the top ten league table (click to enlarge):

Attracting bright young recruits has been the focus of HR professionals at the world’s largest companies for well over a decade now. It’s been the subject of flashy magazine articles that look at Google’s free lunches and Apple’s compensation plans and the cool factor of working for Facebook (the impending mega IPO there helps). There’s also hope for smaller firms looking to stay competitive in the talent wars: using social media for internal communications.

According to a new study by APCO Worldwide and Gagen MacDonald, employees really, really LIKE employers who have implemented social tools to upgrade their internal comms. So much so that 58% said they would prefer to work for a company that uses ISM (internal social media) and 86% said they would gladly refer others to work for this company as well.

The study mentions that wikis, blogs and Facebook-like platforms are quickly challenging the intranet as the preferred communications platform, continuing a trend that began a few years ago on the enterprise side. One of the most interesting findings of the report is what aspect of ISM is most valued. Quality content – accurate, pertinent and timely information – still rules the day. The second most valued aspect is the feedback/dialogue/collaboration component.

Here’s the rest of the study, presented in infographic form:

We continue our series with crisis communications expert Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP during the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 and now a senior associate at Wixted Pope Nora Thompson. Chapman gives us his view on how digital media (and particularly social) have transformed crisis communications strategy.

The following points are questions Chapman typically fields during his instructional workshops and training. For part 1 of this discussion, please visit

What’s happening to the media these days?

They are being squeezed and reinvented. Traditional media – including the broadcast networks, wire services, and major dailies – still exert powerful influence with a vigilant public and with opinion leaders. Big name media outlets will cover a crisis and you need to be ready to manage the demands this will place on your communications team and executives. However, new and old media feed off each other. And corporate communicators should provide information to both, and to not think of ‘the traditional media’ as the only information channel to use. Communicators should be in the publishing business themselves, using different distribution channels to get their message out – Twitter, blogs, websites, emails, phone, Facebook. The key is integrating and managing the distribution process, which often takes coordination across corporate communications, marketing and IT departments.

Is your staff prepared to handle a fast-moving social media crisis? Join us on Feb. 29th for SMI’s instructional Social Media Crisis Communications and Reputation Management workshop in London. We’ll again be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP. His stories and lessons from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy will fascinate you!

How can we ensure our message is heard above the noise?

Reliable, accurate information is what’s needed during a crisis. People will gravitate to it wherever it is. Take Twitter hashtags (the # symbol used to mark particular discussion topics in a Tweet). The new challenge for communicators is: ‘Should your crisis plans include launching or using a hashtag around your incident/emergency? It’s almost certain one will be created, so why leave it to someone else?’

Timeliness, transparency and accuracy are what the world expects of organizations. Anything less, and they lose trust. Despite the pressures, communicators must champion openness and immediacy when an organization’s crisis management team is debating what to share and when.

Do we have to tell the world everything about our business during a crisis?

Here’s a common concern: ‘Our organization is transparent, but we have certain constraints – legal, regulatory, corporate culture.’ Transparency carries risks, but it is a real issue during a crisis. BP found itself live-broadcasting gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico with the now famous “spill-cam.” Just a few weeks later the world watched miners being rescued live on TV. One was deep under the sea, the other deep under ground. My fears went skyward when I saw a live webcam show one of the Fukushima units explode.

Organizations have to deal with the fact that millions carry around high definition cameras with them in their pockets. So, the world has very different expectations about being a witness to incidents, and internal organizational constraints to sharing or showing information sound like hollow excuses. What does this mean? The boundaries of what the world expects to see or hear about a business’ response to a crisis have been extended.

If the recent Costa Concordia tragedy or McDonald’s #McFail hijacking have taught us anything, it’s that even savvy digital marketers can still get swamped by the social media-fueled crisis. That’s why we’ve produced another helpful tool to help you and your social media team adroitly navigate the lurking corporate crisis.

Proper reputation management and crisis control begins with joined-up internal processes. You might have the fanciest monitoring software in place, but what good is it if the results aren’t shared or communicated to the proper people within an organization? And in a timely fashion. There’s just one problem: your team is picking up a lot of noise. How do you know what to prioritize, what to focus on, what to respond to? What to do? Read on.

In October, we published the Social Media Crisis Communications Decision Tree, a kind of corporate schematic to help you and your team think through and respond (or not!) to potentially reputation-damaging posts made by the public. Now we’re publishing  the Social Media Crisis Response Plan, a handy guide to help you better organize your internal processes and thinking to keep your brand from being the next big #Fail. Big thanks to crisis comms veteran Neil Chapman for his unique insights on this. (Click the image below to enlarge)

To download a PDF of the infographic click: Social Media Crisis Response Plan

Editor’s Note: we’re pleased to be bringing back our popular instructional workshop: Social Media Crisis Communications to be held in London on February 29. Again, we will be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP. He has some amazing stories and lessons to share from his experience with the Deepwater Horizon spill. It will be an interesting day dedicated to reputation management and crisis communications. Come join us!

If you’re like us you spend an increasing amount of time trying to keep up with all the news bursts, surveys, top 10 lists and infographics flowing through your sustainability Twitter feed.

But how can you be sure that you’re following the best people to help you cut through the noise of all that sustainability chatter?

That’s why we created the Wizness Green Twitterati, a list of 100 top tweeters about sustainability and business from the media, agencies and consultants, companies, government and academia.

To be honest there are so many good voices on Twitter about business sustainability that we had to leave some people out. Let us know if you think you should be included and we’ll revisit the Twitterati in six months time.

You can read the full Green Twitterati by downloading the new Social Media Sustainability Index.

Yesterday we launched the 2012 SMI-Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index. Here is the presentation deck that we shared with attendees of the launch.

It’s a snapshot of the main Index that can be downloaded at: http://socialmediainfluence.com/SMI-report/.

In 2012, corporate communicators will continue to grapple with the impact of social media – especially in the realm of crisis communications. How can they tailor and adapt plans to take into account a rapidly changing world that expects them to provide information almost instantly? Neil Chapman tells us how.

The profound role of social media in our lives was brought home to me dramatically a year ago. As the parent of a student caught up in the Japanese earthquakes and tsunami last March, I was reminded  just how vital good information is for those impacted by such terrible events, not only those caught up directly, but also for those with a direct (or perceived) interest – the ‘stakeholders’ in PR-speak.

Having myself responded to attention-grabbing events over a 25-year communications career, after Friday March 11, 2011 I found myself on the outside desperately seeking information. My reactions reinforced some thoughts I was still reflecting on. I was thrust back in time to the day I responded on-site in New Orleans to deal with the highly complex BP oil spill.

Fast-forward now to last year… During 2011 I shared crisis communications lessons learned about the spill with many corporate communicators trying to understand how to address the changing demands from both new and old media as well as other stakeholders, who appear to have insatiable information appetites in light of new technologies. However, corporate communicators are all too aware of the limited resources they have to hand in a crisis.

Here are some of the questions they asked me. I thought I’d share them with you here:

Should corporate communicators rethink their role in a crisis?

Yes. Time was, protecting reputation meant dampening or trying to soften headlines as much as possible. That might keep the CEO happy in the past. But with the capability to communicate directly to people in a way they want to receive information, communicators have to coach their organisations to adopt a more appropriate reputation philosophy – more on the lines of ensuring accurate information reaches people who need it most as quickly as possible. Media may be an important audience, but probably not THE most important in this scenario. Keeping faith with key audiences during a dramatic event can enhance an organisation’s reputation in the long-term, even when something bad happens. Cost-effective technologies exist to do just that – Ushahidi, PIER Systems, YouTube, Twitter, email etc. – yet too many are choosing not to use them. Crisis communicators today should be familiar with and know the value of different information channels and plan for the two-way flow of information rather than just one-way broadcasting.

How ‘demanding’ are different audiences in a crisis?

Very – and they won’t wait for you to get your act together. Dealing with hundreds if not thousands of emails, tweets, on-line comments/day with phones ringing off the hook is not the time to plan what to do. Meanwhile web traffic will test an organisation’s IT infrastructure, sometimes to collapse. Just one (of a number) of the websites launched to provide information on the BP oil spill received 150 million hits alone. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) now offers good web information about its Fukushima nuclear power station. For weeks after the tsunami it didn’t. I turned to Ushahidi  – an open source software that collects and displays information on inter-active maps – and other sources for the information I sought to help my son decide whether it was safe to continue his studies in light of the Fukushima nuclear fall out. Any organisation needs to plan and prepare for the digital information demand onslaught; otherwise audiences will drift away, along with their trust.

Is your staff prepared to handle a fast-moving social media crisis? Join us on Feb. 29th for SMI’s instructional Social Media Crisis Communications and Reputation Management workshop in London. We’ll again be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP. His stories and lessons from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy will fascinate you!

How do we monitor what people are saying about us and what should we do?

Not easy. It takes a lot of monitoring because no single system – whether Google alerts or Hootsuite – can do it all. Besides, monitoring should be part of an overall reputational tracking strategy. It’s better to ask: ‘How should we respond when we find our name being used or abused?’ The Social Media Monitoring tool by SMI is a simple tool to help communicators think through actions when an organisation finds itself in the digital firing line (see graphic below).

Editor’s Note: SMI again this year will be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief of BP and a veteran of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, on a series of instructional Social Media Crisis Communications workshops. The first is scheduled for Feb. 29th in London.

We’ve published in the past some interesting pieces of social media research from Mike Schwede who has always taken an interesting look at how the public responds to and impacts the major stories of the day from the Greenpeace siege on Nestle to the shortlived love affair with Pippa Middleton. He joins us here for a look at some big observations for the year to come.My visit to LeWeb 2011 with Tobias and Barbara in December was very inspiring, especially the personal conversations with Internet entrepreneurs, app developers and social media pros. What seemed important to me for 2012, and will certainly be a big part of the discussion I’ve outlined here:

1. LoMoSo will be central – local, social, mobile. Mobile Internet use will increase sharply, especially with customers who already have a high online affinity. Its importance will actually exceed that of desktop use. This fact has an impact on the requirements of your website, or on search advertising strategies.
2. Social is a feature, not a platform – Users have gotten to know and grown to love news streams, commenting, sharing, likes and check-in functionalities. Additionally, they want to join the conversation, wherever it may be taking place – be it employees, customers, suppliers, or the public. I therefore recommend: approach social in a holistic manner and think about where social elements can generate added value between you and your target audience.
3. Social enterprise instead of just social media: In the future it won’t be enough to enrich communications efforts with a few social media elements. Enterprises must transform themselves into social enterprises – that way,  much like there is no switchboard or phone operator, every employee uses social media principles and platforms in the context of their role. The way is still a long one, which is why you should get started with it today, and not put it off until tomorrow. Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts formulates it more dramatically: “If you don’t do that – I don’t know what your business model will look like in five years!“
4. The role of the website is dramatically changing: Just one year ago I was convinced that the website was the central element of digital communication and that everything else is grouped around it. Today it looks a little different: why should you try to build functionality into a website that would be much more useful and easier to implement elsewhere? Why should content not be distributed across the web according to the target audience and media specifically? The most important thing is, however, that content can be easily found and lead the user to predefined goals (leads, buys, awareness, position, etc.). Where is this to occur, if not on the website? Of course, a Facebook app, a mobile App or a YouTube presence can help you achieve these goals more effectively. However, it is important that you retain perspective. Don’t become too dependent on other platforms (i.e. Facebook) for the sake of your website.

2011 proved to be the year social media really made its disruptive presence felt. Historians will look back at the role social networking played in fueling the Arab Spring and note how social tools – giving everyone the power to publish – created a democratization of information, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently put it, that even the most organised of authoritarian regimes couldn’t ignore.

So what of the business world? We’ve been documenting since 2005 the transformation social media is having on companies and never has the big picture of corporate social media looked both so inspiring and so depressing.

On the one hand, the adoption of social business thinking and the development of social technologies (as espoused by the likes of Dachis Group, Salesforce, IBM, Infoysis and Oracle) demonstrates how companies really are becoming more social from within – and how a fast-growing industry is helping them achieve that goal.

On the other hand, so much external social media marketing remains stuck in a digital popularity contest that seeks to game customers simply to amass the quantity of fans and followers that satisfy a measurable metric. The result may provide some solace to certain CMOs but ultimately it will alienate the social customer, who, don’t forget, has that powerful power to publish.

2012 will see more innovation and more opportunities to create a social media contract with customers and employees. Hopefully brands will move away from judging social media success through manufactured, meaningless social media popularity contests.

Just ask all those ousted Middle East leaders. They thought they were popular once as well.

Enjoy the holidays and we’ll be back in 2012.

Matthew Yeomans
Editor at Large

@mateoy @socialinfluence

Last month we told you about the launch of n0tice, a hyperlocal online community “noticeboard” incubated by The Guardian. Yesterday, they flipped the switch on a new advertising platform. Yes, the “SoMoLo” revolution will be ad-supported.

Here’s how it will work, explains Matt McAlister, Director of Digital Strategy at Guardian Media Group:

Featured offers cost users £1/day (or the equivalent base-level regional currency) and include both a visual enhancement and priority ranking on the page.  Payments are handled via PayPal.  We accept 25 different currencies around the world.