Steve Richards

Digital marketing background, having co-founded Swordfish in 1998.

MD of social media agency, Yomego since 2008. Launched the Social Media Reputation (SMR) service which provides data combined with actionable insight tailored to clients' marketing strategies and KPIs. The 'SMR score' benchmark is a popularity index which ranks brands alongside their competitors.

Do brands need to care about Vine?

It launched, like no other social network before it, with instructions on how to create the perfect steak tartare and very quickly, became all about spam, pornography and regulation.

Vine is one of the raft of new launches from Twitter. It’s novel, it’s got some spammy teething problems and it’s already had its first #fail.

But, assuming that all of this can be fixed (and this is social behemoth Twitter we’re talking about, so that’s a fair assumption) what does Vine mean for brands?

by Steve Richards 30 January 2013 10:18am 1 comment

Social CRM no longer a myth?

Big news recently from Facebook: companies can now link their customer data, including phone numbers and email addresses to those provided by people on Facebook.

It mightn’t seem like much, but this move, initially for ad targeting only, could be huge.

by Steve Richards 19 September 2012 10:52am 6 comments

Social Olympics: Nike versus Adidas

At the time of writing this article, there are just 40-something days left to go until the Olympics begins. And there’s been a lot of chatter so far this year about how well Nike has capitalised on the ‘Summer of Sport’ theme.

So we thought we would take a closer look at how Nike (not a headline Olympic sponsor) has fared compared to headline Olympic sponsor Adidas in the social stakes on some comparable key terms.

by Steve Richards 18 June 2012 10:40am 5 comments

Social customer service: eight things to consider before you start

There is a need to step back and think strategically about your social customer service offering before you leap in and do it.

By now, most brands realise that they can’t ignore it. They will probably have seen the case studies of people getting social customer service right and feel a slight sense of panic about getting it wrong as barely a week goes past without a social customer service failure going viral.

But as Luke Brynley-Jones outlines in the previous link, though they know it’s important, so many companies are a long way off developing a coherent approach here, and for a multitude of reasons.

by Steve Richards 10 April 2012 10:22am 3 comments

How social CRM will change the way brands deal with customers

Type ‘social CRM’ into Google and you get around eight million results, most of them using a different definition of the term.

But what can social CRM really achieve? And how can this potential be quantified?

In an ideal world, social CRM would give us the ability to integrate a brand’s existing customer data with their social media interactions.

In theory, social CRM should provide detailed information from a number of different sources and make the info available to whoever needs it.

by Steve Richards 05 March 2012 11:25am 4 comments

Social and the grey market

It’s easy to assume social networking is the domain of the young.

Generation Y might have grown up with social, but there’s a growing number of people over 60 for whom social media is every bit as important.

People over the age of 55 are the fastest growing group joining Facebook, according to research from Nielsen - and a survey by Kantar Media’s TGI MobiLens claims that people over 50 are more likely to use social networks on their mobiles than people under 30.

by Steve Richards 23 February 2012 10:30am 1 comment

Why social customer service will come of age in 2012

Social media and customer service would seem to be a match made in heaven. In 2012, more and more brands will commit beyond simply responding to customers on Twitter.

Brands are actively recruiting customers into online communities to help them develop products, give feedback and report issues.

First Direct’s ‘Live’ community discusses openly anything from savings rates to charitable donations, and includes a (very brave) sentiment tracker on the front page to show, live, what people think about the brand (it’s overwhelmingly positive at the time of writing).

by Steve Richards 09 January 2012 12:31pm 26 comments

11 of the best social media campaigns of 2011 (and what we can learn from them)

There are so many different metrics we can use to judge the success of a social media campaign: views, sales figures, donations, likes, even mentions, but perhaps the most important is the intangible.

Was it memorable? Did it resonate with the audience? I asked around the office for the team’s favourite social media campaigns of 2011.

Our favourites don’t necessarily represent the campaigns that have had the highest impact, or the biggest budgets spent on them. They were just good, different, or downright odd.

Anyway, here are our favourites. We’d be interested to read yours …

by Steve Richards 09 December 2011 12:20pm 10 comments

Using social media to make your sponsorship budget go further

Apparently, the 2012 Olympic Games aren’t just any old Games. They’re the world’s first social Olympic Games.

Sponsors are lining up their social campaigns, most notably BT’s Storytellers and Lloyds TSB’s ‘Local heroes’ campaigns.

But what of the (hundreds) of brands sponsoring major but non-Olympic events? The Grand National, FA Cup, Six Nations, Wimbledon, and the soon-to-be-not-the-Carling Cup?

We did some digging around to see how some of the brands currently sponsoring major events are using social media to make their sponsorship deals go further...

by Steve Richards 29 November 2011 15:31pm 2 comments