World Cup winning managers. Fighter pilots. Mountain climbers. Formula 1 racing bosses.
Harvey Thorneycroft Ltd has quite a stable of inspirational speakers.
Specialising in unforgettable events and relationship development strategies, ex Rugby Pro Harvey Thorneycroft brings together world class personalities – each delivering ideas and strategies to motivate business leaders to higher levels of performance.
However Harvey’s was very much a real world business. Face to face meetings. Events and speakers. Consultancy.
Harvey sensed the digital opportunity. And yBC.tv, as specialists in building digital ecosystems, saw right away the untapped digital value in Harvey’s strong business relationships.
Of course Harvey could have taken the normal digital agency approach: some digital marketing and some social media. But that is hardly the kind of “Matrix Thinking” today’s collaborative economy demands.
yBC helps industry bodies and leaders to adapt to a networked economy. To organise their networks of allies, customers and stakeholders into a digital channel, and to collaborate with them in valuable ways. Not just sales and marketing, but alliances, collaboration and disruptive new products. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing with Harvey Thorneycroft Limited.
Digital Goals for Harvey Thorneycroft Ltd
• increase frequency of engagement with most valued contacts
• keep front of mind with network of senior decision makers
• help speakers/experts to be more visible and to share their expertise
• move some key offerings into the digital sphere
• launch disruptive, scalable offerings
- Create an engagement platform for digital
To begin building your digital ecosystem, you need to do a number of things at the same time. And the most important is to create an engagement platform that supports your digital activities. The first step was a brand new website. Underpinning this, a video hosting platform, effective CRM, and of course analytics. These tools not only enable digital marketing, but also self-publishing with Harvey taking on a talented digital intern.
- Sorting out the data
Organising, leveraging and understanding your data is integral to digital success. yBC assisted Harvey to get his data into a more usable format. And the benefits of organising his data is the “result” that Harvey most often tells us about!
As a recognised “connector” Harvey has a rolodex “to die for”. How many people can call on F1 Racing bosses, World Cup winners and other leading personalities amongst their close network? But these relationships were real world and not activated for digital.
It’s not just about CRM: setting your data up correctly, collaborating with allies and gaining insights about your customers is integral to launching new products and services.
- Content creation
Harvey had made a name for himself by bringing amazing speakers to events. Some of these had been filmed in the past, but he had never curated this content. The opportunity existed to collaborate with his speakers and capture unique content on video. We already have dozens of personalities on camera including Sir Clive Woodward, Sahara Hashemi, John Inverdale and Sir Ian McGeechan.
- TV Briefings
A key idea was to organise the new content into structured TV briefings that are published fortnightly. Each briefing features 4-5 personalities organised around a theme.
- New value. New Products. New collaborations.
So here we are six months later, and Harvey’s team and yBC are now looking closely at digital products and collaborations. There are some very interesting opportunities on the drawing board, and we expect to make some announcements in the Autumn of 2015.
This is where it gets really interesting. Operating as Harvey’s digital capability, we are working on new and disruptive opportunities which will empower Harvey’s clients and networks, and help Harvey and his colleagues grow the business.
The future is all about sharing. The Sharing Economy is something that I have always believed in here at Harvey Thorneycroft Ltd, but my frustrations were that I had no way of being able to access the network of people that I have got to know over the last 19 years in business. yBC made this a reality for me, working collaboratively with them they allowed me to unlock and cleverly exploit the perfect storm of mobile, location-based technology, social networks, and an evolving ethos of community and collaboration. This has allowed us to have a voice within the community that matters to HTL and I look forward to our on-going business relationship. Harvey Thorneycroft, 7th July 2015.