Cattle, customers and a CIH book launch

It was a bright, cold day in November and the clock was striking seven-thirty when Nicola and I headed off to the launch of the new CIH book, Housing and the Customer on Friday.

The event pulled in a fairly diverse crowd, both audience- and speaker-side. Delegates ranged from housing officers of local stock transfers, through to communications directors of ‘top ten’ groups. The presenters covered national and regional providers, academic experts and consultants – including Neil McCall of @affinitysutton, Jo Richardson and Tim Brown of De Montfort University, Jane Chipp of Voluntas Housing, Lourdes Sharpe of Solihull Community Housing and Christoph Sinn of the CIH.

Our slot was a whistle-stop tour of branding in the housing sector. This covered a basic overview of how housing brands interact with staff, partners, suppliers and customers, and factors that providers need to be aware of to maintain their reputation in a permanently switched-on world. If you’d like a peek, feel free to browse the slides on the TBG Hub site. Also, a couple of people asked me for the links on brand monitoring tools – those referred to in the presentation were Addictomatic and Social Mention if you want to take a look.

We were fascinated by the acknowledged importance of internal culture and communications to getting customer care right. Several delegates posed comments and questions on how to get employees more engaged and inspired in an environment where cost-cutting is high on the agenda. In a week proposing radical policy reforms and apparently a fairer future for social housing, it’s clear that encouraging and rewarding employees is going to be business-critical for many organisations.

And what of the book? Part of the CIH’s ‘practice studies’ series, it aims to take housing providers through an overview of the changing provider landscape. Topics under the microscope include customer insight, change management, customer satisfaction, communications and social marketing. We’ve also proposed a new take on Arnstein’s ladder of participation for the 21st century – Winn’s wheel - which acknowledges that people will dip in and out of participation at different times, rather than progressing up and down a scale.

If you get a chance to read the book, we’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and input. Pleaes feel free to add your thoughts to the #cihcustomer hashtag set up specially to monitor feedback on the event and book; or tweet your thoughts to me and I’ll reply as soon as I can.

Best wishes,

Kerry James

Online supermarket shopping - hats off to innocent

Our household is a fan of online supermarket shopping and Sainsbury's have yet to let us down - always on time, sensible substitutions and very friendly and helpful delivery drivers.

This Saturday we were most amused to receive these little chaps - innocent smoothies complete with woolly hats for the winter. This is part of Age UK's the big knit - a campaign being run in conjunction with innocent. The campaign aims to deliver 800,000 little woolly hats that will be put on innocent smoothie bottles being sold in Sainsbury's and Boots stores across the country from 3 November. For every hat knitted, Age UK will receive 25p.

If you are wondering where all those hats come from then at least a hundred of them were knitted by residents of one of our clients - Daventry & District Housing - as tweeted by our PR team a few weeks ago.

Anyway, aside from this great campaign, what interested me most about our smoothies was that we ordered banana. They sent substitute flavours (no problem there) but the packaging had a flash on them saying "banana free". As a fan of conspiracy theories I wondered if there was some malevolence on the part of someone from Sainsbury's.

I have some experience of launching internet propositions back in the day when the internet was new (I developed the marketing campaign that supported the launch of NatWest's Online banking). I am reminded how hard it is to retro fit an e-commerce proposition onto a traditional offline business.

Amazon is my favourite retailer and they show what can be done. Whilst the supermarkets now have enough infrastructure for an effective home delivery service there is still some room for improvement. Sainsbury's should be able to deliver what you order online by now.

The hats were cute though.

JB

Tory councillor arrested over stoning tweet

Tory councillor Gareth Compton has been arrested over a stoning tweet in which he allegedly called on a female writer to be stoned to death. In case you missed it, the BBC has the full details.

It was only six weeks ago that I blogged about Tattoos, hooligans and the gem of all bad quotes.

As a communications agency, we are constantly amazed at how people in the public eye or in senior corporate positions seem to forget that their every word is captured, analysed and disseminated almost instantly.

As we say in our beginner's guide to social media, if you've sinned on social media, chances are people will have the video, photos or screen grab to prove it.

If you don't have the time to download our free guide, remember our top five tips:

1. Be clear what tone of voice is appropriate for your brand, especially if you have a range of people representing you online.

2. Wherever possible, use social media to engage people in ways that will interest them, rather than trying to use it purely as a PR mechanism

3. If actively using social media, expect to put a significant amount of time into it; posting once a month won't cut the mustard

4. Posts are like weddings - once you've committed, it's for better or worse (and hopefully richer rather than poorer) - so deleting a few weeks later rarely works.

5. If you get negative comments from third parties, don't get involved in a 'flame war'; stay positive and get your tactics sorted. Mashable's guide on how to deal with negative feedback in social media provides some useful tips to handle this.

JB

Resident Involvement Champions National Conference - November 2, 2010

We recently exhibited and took part in the Resident Involvement Champions National Conference on November 2, held at Villa Park in Birmingham.

The theme of the conference was "Resident Involvement In Challenging Times" and more than 150 delegates took part in a range of interactive exercises and sharing of knowledge supported by keynote speakers.

All presentations and the output from various sessions will be uploaded to the RIC website so it's well worth a look.

The day was very successful and we were particularly pleased that our special prize was grabbed by one delegate. To prove the advantages of enagegement, we tweeted a secret password and Paul Cole from Derby Homes was the first to get to our stand to grab the chocs. Paul was one of the keynote speakers leading a session on social marketing and was able to say with some authority that the results of utilising social marketing techniques is free food!

Something that really grabbed our attention was how some of the ideas and themes being discussed at the conference were translated by Graham Ogilvie into cartoons. What a great idea to bring a conference to life - all the cartoons were displayed and during lunch participants had the opportunity to vote for their favourites.










JB

Housing associations’ annual report best practice

As one of the leading housing communication agencies in the UK, we have taken a lead in developing best practice for the sector's annual reports.

We sponsored a competition to find the best new-style annual report to residents in the Midlands. Residents and the Chartered Institute of Housing helped select Optima Community Association’s publication as the winner from sixteen entries.

The award was presented by our engagement consultant Ian Hembrow at the Resident Involvement Champions conference in Birmingham on November 2.

JB

Let's be frank - local knowledge counts

Selfridges has clearly put a price on reputation - £10k in this case. The payment comes after its Christmas window displays were taken by fans and family of Frank Sidebottom to be a copy of Sidebottom's creator Chris Sievey's work. The proximinity of Sievey's town of Timperley to its Manchester and Trafford Centre stores shows how local concerns do matter. His untimely death earlier this year also added to the fury of online fans, and gave an extra reason to show remorse.

Following negative coverage yesterday the store reacted with an apology, a credit added to the display and a payment to Chris Sievey's estate. Sales figures and footfall this month may well indicate if their tactic has worked. A local commentator's view that 'it's the kind of fuss Chris would have loved' shows that perhaps it's already made some moves to restore local faith.

Michelle

Minimalist movie posters

Leigh