Our CEOcial Media service has been created based upon decades of experience in business, using social media platforms and listening to our customers and more importantly their customers, and more latterly from talking to top executives to understand their motivations and brand aspirations.
While most of us have embraced social media to one extent or another, it seems that enthusiasm for professional social media is yet to reach the senior management of Britain’s top companies. Less than 20 of the FTSE 100’s CEOs actively use social media in a business context and while a few have social media accounts, they mostly lie unused or are used for personal use.
We know how busy executives are, but we also know that one of the first places prospective clients go when deciding on where to place their business is a company’s online presence and that of its leadership team.
Why should you as a senior leader have a social media presence?
You have a Marketing Team / Marketing Agency / PR Company. Possibly all three and maybe more than three. Why do you need to get involved or pay someone else on your behalf to do so?
Well, as has always been the case in business, business people need to know who they’re buying from. Where do they look? They talk to decision makers that they trust, look at your company’s website and that of your competitors and they talk to other business leaders. They look at your company’s social media feeds, particularly LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook…..and then they look for your senior management and the board. If a company is going to spend thousands, hundreds of thousands or more on their company’s brand marketing, why don’t their senior management team have a have a personal business brand and their own professional presence online? And no, just having a Twitter and LinkedIn account doesn’t count, although that’s a start. You and they need to be active.
Why CEOcial Media from Oak Consult?
Oak Consult is not a marketing agency. We partner with marketing agencies and other creative partners for great marketing, photography, animation, audio and video, but not for thought leadership. It takes experience, blood, sweat and tears to understand markets in detail. That’s what we do. We only work with B2B clients and we understand how business buys from business. Thought leadership from executives is expected from companies wanting to buy from your business. Silence and sitting behind your marketing team is no longer an option. You are expected to have an opinion….socially.
That’s where Oak Consult come in.
We invest time in understanding not only your business ambitions, but you.
- Your personal vision and values
- Your views on your marketplace and innovation
- How you support and engage with existing customers and prospects
- What business events you attend and your key business connections
- Business-related organisations and communities you are a member of
- Your personal interests and passions (within reason!)
We then help establish, build and grow your persona online to support all of these things over time.
Price Plans
For CEOsocial Media, we have not built off the shelf price plans, as we have for our standard social media management packages. We’ve realised after consultation with current and new clients that executives have a clear view as to how they want to be represented online and so we have built a matrix of executive social media management services that represent both a professional personal social media presence as well as a thought leadership presence in your marketplace. Prices start from £100 per month for a minimum initial period of 3 months plus a set-up fee of £250.
Our CEOcial Media Services
At our first meeting we will discuss your business, your markets, your key clients as well as your vision, your challenges and what you want you and your business to be famous for.
From there, we will create our recommended activity for you, and give you a proposal and a price. We always offer a 3 month trial for our executive clients so that we can prove ourselves to you and not tie you to a long-term contract.
Thought Leadership
At Oak Consult, we pride ourselves on curating and creating great content. The two are very different.
Curation
For every client we build a broad set of online feeds that tracks content that is pertinent to their business passion and strategy, their clients’ and prospects’ interests and successes as well as that of their communities. We then use our expertise to curate relevant content on a daily basis, to ensure your personal business brand is engaging in the right way.
Creation
We offer content creation services for executives in the form of blogs, podcasts, audio and video interviews as well as animation to represent you and your business. Based upon your needs, we will build a programme of activity to suit your budget.
Engage your people
Social Media engagement is not just about your external market. We can manage your social profiles in such a way that engages with internal resources as well as external resources. To be clear, we are not an internal communications consultancy. We would work with your internal communications resources to ensure that publicly social media activity is engaging for and with your own people.
Engage your Customers, Prospects and Stakeholders
Giving us access to your customer, prospect and stakeholder data (under very strict controls) will help you engage effectively on a day-to-day basis with the people and organisations that you want to as a senior leader.
Dealing with problems
In our experience, an internal team is always better to deal with complaints, emergencies and customer challenges. We will work with you internal teams to flag any challenges and offer advice on how to deal with them. We also have qualified business continuity and information security staff on hand to give advice should the going get tough!
Our Approach
Core Service
- Social Media Management of your accounts from a business, community and regional perspective
- We can take complete control of accounts that you would like us to, or we can supplement what you are posting when you have time
- We would recommend a small number of contacts to engage with us to keep us abreast of your business activity and diary so that we can support that ‘socially’. This could be an executive assistant, marketing manager or another board member
- We agree on how ‘social’ you would like to be. From a single post per day to multiple posts per day from one or more social networks. We will guide you as to the optimal approach, to ensure that your social ‘footprint’ is as successful as it can be within your budget.
- We will help you support local, regional, national or international organisations that you have an affinity with, through interactions with them on their social media
- We will promote your own brand activity, by sharing great internal news, updates, sponsorships and events
- We will provide you with a monthly report and insight as to how we are performing for you
- Day to day issues, complaints and escalations will be delivered to a single point of contact within your organisation to deal with. This will be escalated to you if not actioned in a timely or appropriate manner.
Additional Services
Additional services can be agreed at the start of any contract or added at any point in time based on relevance i.e. a new product launch, a change in strategy
- Blog writing – Subject to our expertise, we can provide a monthly blog to promote areas of the business or your community that you are passionate about. This can be short posts of approximately 500 words or longer form blogs that require more effort on both of our parts and deeper interaction with your teams. We will not provide any blog content that we are not proud of.
- Video or Audio interviews are a great way to engage with your audience. They are more time consuming, and we would recommend a clear plan in advance for what you would like to achieve from this effort, so that we can deliver a great product in a timely manner.
Our Promises
- What we will do
- Engage with your social community in a way that represents your brand and values
- Grow your social media engagement
- Improve your brand online
- Protect your brand
- Promote your brand
- Build your brand
- What we will not do
- Lie – Our brand is as important to us as yours is to you
- Cheat – We will not buy followers that are not in your target audience
- Steal – All content will be referenced
- Libel – We will not denigrate the competition
- Let you down
What we need from you (or your representative – we know you are busy!)
- Details in advance of news / announcements involving your brand and your company brand
- A timeline of any specific external marketing / PR campaigns
- Information regarding upcoming competitions, promotions, public meetings or appearances
- Details of any specific content you would like us to feature
- Key contacts within the business that we can engage with
- Names of people/companies/charities affiliated to the organisation
- Breaking news – Good AND Bad
- Images and content exclusive to the brand and brand guidelines
- Admin rights / passwords for your social networks
