Lorna Jane tightens management of social media

Women's active wear brand Lorna Jane has tightened the management of its Facebook presence with the recent introduction of a software program that gives companies centralised control over their often fragmented social media activities.

Australian brands are increasing their social media monitoring following 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 a leading player in social media with a Facebook page boasting 435,000 'likes', individual pages for each of its 126 lifesyle retail outlets and 40,000 Facebook 'interactions' each week. It is also active in other social media channels including Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube.

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 has been extended 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.

Zivot told the Sydney Morning Herald "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.

"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 retail 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 explained, adding "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."

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 explained.

Forman suggested that some brands had up to 200 social media profiles but only monitored a handful of them, stating "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 directives.

Lorna Jane is also encouraging Australians to take a collective step towards a healthier lifestyles by being part of Active Nation Day on Sunday, 30th September 2012.

For a list of Active Nation Day events go to www.lornajane.com.au/activenationdayevents

17th March 2012 - LORNA JANE FASHION STORES LAUNCH MOTIVATIONAL FACEBOOK APPLICATION