Sylvia Pennington
August 21, 2012
The Age
Women’s leisurewear company Lorna Jane has tightened the reins on its Facebook presence with the rollout last week of new software designed to give companies centralised control over their often fragmented social media activities.
Australian brands are racing to intensify social media monitoring, in the wake of a warning from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission that businesses that fail to remove false or misleading public comments from their Facebook pages could face court action.
The warning followed an Advertising Standards Board ruling that deemed everything appearing on a brand’s Facebook page to be advertising, regardless of whether posted by the company or the public.
Lorna Jane is the social media doyen of the Australian retail industry with a Facebook page boasting 435,000 ”likes”, individual pages for each of its 126 stores and 40,000 Facebook ”interactions” each week. It is also active in other social media channels including Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube.
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The company is the test customer for the Hearis social media management tool, built by Queensland software consultancy 4Impact in partnership with digital marketing house Traffika and the Private Equity Gateway Group.
An external interface to Facebook, Hearis enables organisations to group pages and conversations hierarchically and geographically, and publish messages simultaneously across multiple sites. It aggregates public comments and allows them to be centrally managed and tracked.
An initial pilot covering 10 Lorna Jane Facebook sites was extended last week, after just two days, to include the firm’s entire Facebook presence.
Lorna Jane digital strategist Sam Zivot said the tool would make the firm’s social media activities more efficient and uniform.
”The ability to cross publish across hundreds of social channels from a single platform in a single action is what had me and the team the most excited,” Zivot said.
”Not only will it increase the collective reach of our social presence but it will allow us to regionalise and segment our content so customers receive more messages more relevant to them.”
Maintaining a consistent message across its store-based Facebook pages, with dozens of regional managers with varying levels of experience at the helm simultaneously, had proved challenging in the past, Zivot said.
”It will also offer us a more complete view of the conversations that occur across the 130-plus pages and enable us to respond to difficult customer queries from a single platform,” he said.
While Lorna Jane prides itself on diligent curation of its social media presence, other firms have been less assiduous in the past, Traffika chief executive Matt Forman said.
Some brands had up to 200 social media profiles but only monitored a handful of them, Forman claimed. “The rest are in the wild.”
This was especially common among franchised organisations, with many franchisees pursuing their own social media strategies independently, or in the absence of, head office diktats.
Hearis was in talks with seven other large organisations and expected to make several sales once the Lorna Jane pilot was complete, Forman added.
Hearis will be sold under a software-as-a-service pricing model, whereby companies pay a monthly fee for each page monitored.
The tool’s functionality would be extended to cover additional social media channels including Twitter, 4 Impact chief executive Chris Eldridge said.
A team of six developers had worked on the product since last November and the result was “an enterprise system not a backyard solution”, he added.
Director of social media consultancy SR7 James Griffin said the ACCC announcement had galvanized companies which did not have social media management strategies in place.
“It will force companies to move beyond paying social media lip service to making a significant investment in it,” Griffin said.
“Companies have worked out that they need to defend their brand and mitigate risks or get off the platform.”
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/business-it/lorna-jane-tightens-up-social-media-apps-20120820-24ihq.html#ixzz248fqWQIe
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