Slam Branding is the winner of the Digital Impact Award for Professional Services for its client, the Actuarial Profession. As part of an integrated campaign, Slam Branding created a Facebook page to provide a platform for graduates and members of the Profession to come together, ask and answer questions, exchange information and get careers advice. The nomination recognises Slam’s skills in social media as well its expertise in content strategy.

Slam Global worked closely with the Actuarial Profession to devise a long-term strategy to build community links between the Profession and graduates. The Facebook page helps to educate the graduates about the multi-faceted nature of actuarial careers by creating a dynamic and interactive experience. The page now has over 9,0000 members, an impressive number given the membership of the Profession is just over 20,000 members, and the page continues to gain an average of 100 members per week. The award acknowledges the importance of having a solid content strategy in order to run a successful social media campaign that supports all other on- and offline activities. Slam Global has demonstrated exceptional research, understanding the intricacies of the actuarial profession, its history and its future.

The Digital Impact Awards is the UK’s leading established program that benchmarks and celebrates excellence in digital stakeholder communications and has seen a large increase in number and quality of entries this year. The ceremony was held on the 20th of October at the Grange St Pauls Hotel in London. Shiela Lumsden, Director at Slam Global said:

“We’re delighted for both the Actuarial Profession and ourselves to have been successful against what the awarding body described as strong competition for the professional services award. There is often resistance to Facebook as a platform for professional services companies and the Actuarial Profession showed great foresight in accepting Facebook as part of the strategy, and the page has certainly proved its value in strong relationship building for their audiences.”

Beyond the global brands whose opportunity to reach the masses through social media is immediately apparent, less mainstream businesses have taken a wait-and-see approach.  If you are working in the b2b or professional world, like the majority of your peers you probably view LinkedIn as comfortably business-like, while Facebook is more for people’s personal life.

A battle has been in progress between these two leading social platforms over the past couple of years, which has led to improved features on both, as well as some frustrating changes. Neither platform can escape its fundamental functionality and structure: LinkedIn is limited to a show and tell shop window, well suited to the job market and sales functions, while Facebook brings a personal space for people to access friends, information relating to both personal and business life, and in the near future direct shopping too. Overall, Facebook is less about projecting yourself or your company and is more a personal window looking out into the world. It also has an advantage in sheer popularity, with over 500 million active users worldwide and almost 29 million in the UK alone, making it by far the most influential.

Statistics

According to government statistics, 30 million people in the UK use the internet every day and they are most likely the same 29 million UK users who are registered with Facebook.

Together with its audience, Facebook has matured. Roughly 50% of the UK’s Facebook population are between 18 and 34 years of age, another 25% are between 35 and 54. Businesses are primarily using Facebook pages and groups in order to:

-       help build an online reputation

-       increase trust and generate new business

-       help find the key influencers and opinion formers

-       conduct market research

-       aid graduate recruitment campaigns

-       aid internal team building

Facebook also provides you with continuous analytics, which let you see the number of impressions for each of your posts, how many people have re-posted your news stories and links as well as demographic information on your audience.

We are all time poor

Using Facebook as a hub for information is a practical way to manage all your online interests. Rather than going onto the BBC World News Website or Harvard Business Review Website directly, more and more people are opting for “liking” the respective Facebook pages in order to access the information relevant to them. Therefore, even if you’re not using the platform to sell or advertise a product or service, you could find it particularly useful for keeping in touch with your audience by providing them with valuable information and sharing your news with them.

A Case Study

In May 2009 SLAM set up a Facebook page for the Actuarial Profession as part of an integrated repositioning campaign. Since then, the page has attracted over 8000 members and continues to attract an average of 100 members per week. An impressive number, given the UK Actuarial Profession has just over 20,000 members. The Facebook page has attracted fans from around the world as well as students and graduates exploring an actuarial career. With high post quality and levels of interaction, Actuaries is one of the most successful professional Facebook pages.

Facebook allows organisations to target audience segments with information they value, carefully timed and ordered to promote interactions. Online engagement is a long-term strategy, particularly when the audience is one of the world’s most respected professions, and content is always king in social media, but never more so than when you’re opening conversations with some of the smartest people around. Facebook pages are a huge opportunity for marketers and those who embrace it are reaping rewards… and if actuaries can be engaged on a Facebook page, it’s hard to believe there’s any group beyond your reach!

What’s New?

In June 2010 Facebook launched the “like” button, allowing users to share content with their friends. When the user clicks the “like” button on an organisation’s page, a story appears in the users friends’ news feed with a link back to your profile page / website. As the “like button” can be installed on any external webpage, it’s also an efficient way to improve SEO (search engine optimization).

An even newer development provides another good reason to build up a presence on Facebook: You may already have one and not know about it. As of late, Facebook has automatically generated business pages, taking information from Wikipedia and user generated information (i.e. employment details given directly on Facebook). It’s worth checking whether your organisation may already be on Facebook and populate it to suit your needs. Facebook is constantly evolving, releasing new features to cater to the needs of its users. For the latest updates, you can visit the official Facebook blog as well as keeping in touch with SLAM.

Facebook is an excellent resource for building strong connections with the student and graduate community, but achieving Facebook success is not as straightforward as it may seem.  Some pages such as the Oxford University page have achieved a high number of followers by really understanding the medium and using it to its full advantage. Other corporate pages are left behind with few followers and lacking impact or a strategy.

In our work with the Actuarial Profession we have taken a strategic approach by linking offline activities to social media in a carefully timed and orchestrated campaign. The result is a 7,000 strong Facebook community – a great achievement for one of the smallest and most elite of the professional bodies.

Since Facebook’s population has now risen to over 400 million active users, a size equivalent to the world’s third largest country, no one involved in communications can afford to ignore it – even those in the professional space who until now may have placed it in the “not for business” box.

Facebook tells us that half of their users are logged on in any given day and the average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on the site. With an average age of 33 and the 35+ group the fastest rising, business audiences are certainly present, providing great opportunities for HR and internal marketing teams to build company-wide communities.

At the same time as arranging their weekend plans and keeping in touch with friends and family, Facebook users are also busy learning and keeping up to date with the latest business thinking as the popularity of pages such as the following testify:

TED with over 384,000 (fans – has now given way to likers) we prefer – followers
The Harvard Business Review with over 100,000 followers
The Financial Times with over 39,000 followers

Linkedin can feel like a more natural home for business connections, but while it is a great place to make direct sales or supplier contacts and to speak to people one to one, the mechanics of the site are not ideal for creating a sense of community in a managed environment. Facebook’s sheer simplicity makes it perfect for integrating media and creating a sharing and listening environment.  All posts can be monitored and deleted so there is no fear of any comments companies would prefer not to hear.

One of the most important rules is to take a planned approach that considers both the nature of Facebook and the interests of the audience. Followers need to understand quickly why they’re on your page and what’s expected of them. While that may sound daunting, it is only a matter of combining imagination and organisation.

Engaging audiences’ interest does not mean you have to start from scratch. You probably already have a host of potential material tried and tested in past activities that could offer a potential central theme.  Supporting the central theme could be issues of particular interest to both the business and graduate audience, such as corporate social responsibility.

Uniting staff to share ideas and a common sense of purpose is a goal most organisations aim to achieve and Deloitte’s Facebook page with over 22,500 followers is a good place to see it in action.

Getting to the Deloitte level of activity doesn’t happen overnight, it requires a kick-off campaign around themes of genuine interest to the target audience and a carefully planned content strategy. While interactions and updated content are required ongoing to keep the page fresh, once the following reaches a few thousand members it becomes increasingly self-supporting.  We have been monitoring and managing ‘actuaries’ for over a year, successfully building awareness, promoting a positive image and uniting the profession around the world.

Actuaries on Facebook

Deloitte on Facebook

It’s always hard to grab students’ attention at careers fares when the guys in the corner have a tank to play with. But the latest communications technology offers some attention grabbers that can also demonstrate that innovation isn’t just a word in the recruitment blurb.

Mobile apps offer the opportunity to link on a very personal level with graduates. With the potential for downloads at career fairs as well as from your website they bring an instant buzz factor and, if the app has been designed for long-term usefulness, they can help build long-term relationships.

Essentially, there’s the option to focus either on smart functionality or brilliant content. The latter is not the easy option since simply providing a mobile download of your web content is unlikely to hold the attention unless it is suffused with the wit of a Stephen Fry. Smart functionality can range from harnessing the mobile phone features such as camera and location or linking to social networks, such as Twitter and Linkedin. Local area networking is a feature that could be used to share information at an event as well as providing students with ongoing file-sharing capability in their own networks.

We recommend centering your app around a theme, whether it relates directly to your company or to a broader area such as a general careers manager which could carry your brand banner.

Touch screens are not limited to iphones and rail ticketing machines.  The latest technology touch screens can use any glass surface from a coffee table to a large exhibition panel to project an interactive display through the glass.  Those who have seen the film ‘Minority Report’, will have an idea of just what can be achieved using this technology and how exciting that could be in an event space.

Creating an interesting and visually captivating journey within the software environment of the display is key to successful user engagement. None of us gets too excited about ticket machines, or just using a finger to point at a website.  A true minority report experience requires creativity and visual excitement, but need not break budgets.

Whichever digital experience fits the practicalities of your recruitment campaign, creating an interesting and visually captivating journey will ensure your company projects the up to date image this year’s high flyers will appreciate. Attracting innovators has the potential to feed energy into the cycle of innovation and creativity that is vital to the competitiveness of organisations today.