Passport to Social Media

Traveling around the world you are bound to be in a situation where the world as you know it will be challenged.  You may be in a situation where you need directions or have an important meeting with a client that requires mastery of local social etiquette.  You may not be fluent in the local language or the societal norms associated with that country.  What do you do?

For the most part we try to prepare for these kinds of experiences.  We try to learn a little about the language and the culture to help us overcome our weaknesses.  Traditionally, this has been done through guide books, books and talking to people who have been there.  Now, we have more options with the development of real time translation tools, GPS enabled maps, a number of different travel sites and mobile apps covering a variety of every day circumstances.  But the bottom line still remains the same if we want to be successful.  We have to take time to learn something about the place we are going, the people we will meet, something about their language and about how things work in that culture.

In so many ways, traveling to another country and using social media successfully are very similar.  Both challenge us to learn a new way of interacting with people.  This means we may need to change how we do things and how we think.  Social media and online communities all have their own unique set of societal norms and cultures.  There are different rules of engagement that development around each of these communities.  This includes how we speak to each other, what kinds of interactions are acceptable and what kinds of topics are considered acceptable content.

When we are new to a community we do feel a bit lost, uncomfortable and perhaps like a fish out of water.  We are working to figure out how this community works and interacts with each other.  We are trying to learn the language and what’s acceptable in that community.  This is where the Community Manager comes into play.  This person or people are there to help us learn the culture and language associated with this community.  They help us learn the essentials in order to make us comfortable and better able to successfully navigate through this new terrain.  They communicate the values of the community to us.  They are the ones who grant us access to information and help us connect with others.  They are our passports to the community.

Over time, we learn the language of the community and operating in that community becomes second nature.  It no longer requires us to think about how to do these things.  Just like learning a new language and culture in a country we are visiting.  Practice, education and helpful guides assist us in mastering this new world.

If we are to be successful in using social media, no matter what our business is, then we will have to understand what kind of communities we are joining and how to build communities that reflect our values.  What kinds of behaviors are we encouraging?  What kinds are we considering to be negative?  What is acceptable content?  All of these things contribute to the culture and language of that community.

Affiliate link

Most technology companies are still confused by Social Business

Wildfire PR recently released the results of research they performed with the top 50 companies in the 2009 Deloitte Fast Tech; a list of the fastest growing technology companies in the UK.  The research, focused on the use of social media by these companies, highlight the fact that most companies are leveraging social media for one-way, push-style, communications.

While I would urge you to read the report yourself, time permitting, here are some of the highlights, or lowlights, of the report:

• 74% of the companies were on Twitter.
• 72% of the companies were on LinkedIn.
• 48% of the companies have a corporate blog.
• Only 20% of the companies have a Facebook page.

The report notes that most communications, as I have already noted, are just for one way push.  Comments are mostly left unanswered.  Most of the value of being on social channels is lost.  If you are purely using social networks and social communities because you feel you have to, and have no desire or time to engage, you are wasting your time and money.  Worse, you are wasting the time of your customers, losing valuable social currency. 

Are you just pushing out information and not listening, not replying?  What is holding you back?

John

If you need help from The Lab, give me a call.

The importance of the Twitter Retweet

Microsoft Research came out with some very interesting research looking specifically at the act of retweeting on Twitter. If you’d like to read the full paper it is available for download in PDF format. Note that the following Twitter pros were behind the research:

• Danah Boyd, Microsoft Research, @zephoria
• Scott Golder, Cornell / Microsoft Research, @redlog
• Gilad Lota, Microsoft, @gilgul

The research is particularly interesting to me as the Twitter retweet is one of the most important ways to achieve value on Twitter and is often poorly used.  While there are a number of reasons that people retweet, the ones that are most important:

• While not specifically noted via their research, you should share great information as a way of helping your community while promoting your knowledge and awareness of certain topics.
• Making your presence known to others. These people could be potential customers, business partners, or mentors.
• As an act of friendship. You cannot succeed without the help of “friends”, help others, good Karma does exist in this world.

As part of their analysis they reviewed a random sample of 203,371 retweets from 107,116 unique users. They observed the following (these results quoted directly from their paper):

• 18% of retweets contain a hashtag
• 52% of retweets contain a URL
• 11% of retweets contain an encapsulated retweet (RT @user1 RT @user2 …message..)
• 9% of retweets contain an @reply that refers to the person retweeting the post Compared to the random sample of tweets, hashtag usage and linking areoverrepresented in retweets.

From a practical perspective I favor defining communication standards for your organization in regards to the use of retweets. Following a format like this has worked very well for me:

[Optional Kudos]   RT [USER1] [USER2] … [Content] [Hashtags] | [Your thoughts]

• Remove extraneous words and punctuation as needed, but never change the meaning of the original message.
• Always give credit where credit is due. If the author of the content is  missing from the original tweet try to add it to your retweet.  I use the beginning of the retweet,the [Optional Kudos] piece, to give a shout-out to the author.
• While hashtags are far from perfect use them. They help keep your message alive longer.
• If useful, I try to add my comments to the end of the message, always following a pipe symbol (|).  I insert this symbol to show the end of the original content and help readers understand my take on the content.
• If possible, keep your retweet short so that others can retweet  your message.  

Standards are a great way of ensuring that your content supports your goals and that your community understands why you have chosen to share a piece of content with them. Help your community and help them help you. Everyone will win and that is key to everyone’s success.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Does Twitter make sense for marketing?

While this infographic is 8 months old it provides some good information that you should understand.

Before digging into these statistics too deeply, also consider:

• As of April, 2010, Twitter had about 110 million registered users.
• Based upon research by Nielsen in April of 2010 only 11.4 million of those registered Twitter users used Twitter daily.
• As of June 18th, Twitter sees 750 tweets/second with 65 million tweets taking place on an average day.
• In January of 2010 the average Twitter user had just 27 followers according to research done by RJMetrics.

Okay, what does this mean?  it means that the average Twitter user can reach 729 users for each Tweet that is retweeted (assuming the 27  followers per user).  Now, if 20% of those accounts are truly dead accounts, that brings the reach down to 583 users that might reached with a given tweet if it is retweeted once.  The infographic to our right shows us, however, that only 8% of Tweets are retweetable.

This means the average user must tweet 12.5 times to see one retweet of content. 

The average user only reaches those 27 users in the vast majority of tweets.  In fact, out of every 13 tweets their message only reaches an audience of  907 potential viewers.  Again, however, 20% of these are dead/inactive accounts, bringing our number to 726 viewers (583 unique users).

Of course, this assumes that the all potential viewers are logged in when your tweet is sent and that they are not busy reading other people’s tweets.  It is safe to say that you would be lucky to see 10% of these users actually logged in at any moment, further reducing our audience down to 73 viewers with 58 uniques in that set. 

For the average user it takes 13 tweets to reach 58 unique viewers.

It does not pay to use Twitter for marketing if you are an average user.

Does Twitter make sense for marketing?    The answer that it depends.   Understanding the numbers should help you decide the right answer for your organization.

John

Juniper’s Mobile Community demonstrating great early results

You may recall that I chatted with Juniper Networks back in April to learn more about the new mobile community they had just launched.

Also, if you were at my presentation at Parafest ’10 you may recall that I shared stats similar to those above.  This report, run on the NetMarketShare web site, shows the devices people are using to browse the web.  As you can see,  mobile browsing continues to rise in terms of the overall percentage of web browsing, nearly doubling from October of last year (82% for the math gurus in the room).

How does Juniper compare to the rest of the world over the same period?

Well, mobile traffic to Juniper has climbed from 0.5% of all traffic to 1.5% of all traffic, 300% increase in terms of its part of overall traffic.  Even more impressive, the other major metrics have taken off since they deployed their mobile community.  These comparisons are against last October’s traffic numbers.

• The average mobile visitor now spends 121 seconds, an 86% increase.
• The average mobile visitor views 2.9 pages per visit, an increase of 81%.
• Bounce rate showed a decrease of 22%. 

Juniper’s mobile visitors are clearly finding tremendous value in this new offering.

I am going to stay in touch with Juniper as they continue to measure and tweak their mobile community.  In the mean time, step back and ask yourself if your community can benefit by providing robust mobile solutions to your customers.

John

Customer Experience Goes Into Overdrive (via Customer Experience Matters)

Bruce Temkin continues to deliver great information about customer experience and customer service. If you have not yet checked out his blog I would recommend you doing so.

His survey shows that many companies are recognizing the need to give great experiences for their customers, and potential customers. Our efforts to deliver results through social business strategies that impact marketing,sales, customer service, and other functions, will play a key role in these efforts.

 In our survey of companies with at least $500 million in annual revenues, only 11% of respondents thought their company was a customer experience leader in their industry (or across industries). But 65% of respondents think their executive team has a goal to be customer experience leaders within three years. My take: Obviously, two-thirds of companies won’t end up leading their industry. But this ambition highlights the focus that companies are s … Read More

via Customer Experience Matters

Insights from a community manager

One of the people I chat with on Twitter, Toby Metcalf, works as a Community Management Associate at OnForce. The OnForce community has been in existence for six years,  Toby has been working with it for the last two years, and I asked him to share some insights from his experiences.

Q. What are the goals of your community?
A. My community is very unique to say the least. Our users are all OnForce service pros. The goals of my community are to make money and grow their IT / CE businesses. As a member of the Community Mgmt. team, I help manage the largest product my company offers; the service pros themselves – I help them use our platform efficiently, and provide them a forum to suggest site enhancements and an in-road to communicate problems.

Q. Is the community part of an overall strategy or something that grew organically due to grass-roots efforts?
A. The community is certainly part of our overall strategy: we have 2 products – our Platform and our Pro Community. Keeping the pros happy and giving them the tools to do their jobs makes our customers loyal to OnForce.

Q. Do you have usage policies setup for employees around how they are expected to behave within the community?
A. Absolutely. There are three of us on the Community Mgmt Team; we are the mods of the community and the voice of OnForce. We are the only three within OnForce who use our forums: it is very important that our messages are consistent, honest, and professional.

Q. What ROI have you seen from your community?
A. Because of all the experience and knowledge shared within our forums, our Pros can perform their jobs well, thus providing an excellent experience for our customers. Our customers believe in the quality of the pros they find on OnForce; this satisfaction translates into fewer calls to our Market Support team. It is our excellent community of Pros that makes OnForce the leader of our industry.

Q. What tools are you leveraging for your communities?
A. We have built an excellent command center for the Pros that helps them manages their work-day, as well as communicate with their customers. We have negotiated excellent rates (some even free) for industry specific training.

Q. Do you leverage mobile technologies as part of your communities?
A. We do: a WAP site for them to check and accept work orders through smart phones, an IVR for them to dial into and update their status with their customers (check in, check out of the site). A phone app is in the works – we are always looking to enhance our document management and mobile tools.

Q. What policies or best practices have you established?
A. Utilizing the IVR to document your time on site (Customers like a pro who is punctual as well as knowledgeable). Utilize our system to document any conversations that cover changes to work order scope or money (a phone call is great for communication, but not for documentation).

Q. Any tips for others involved in community management?
A. Be Fair
Be Honest
Ask questions
Admit when you are wrong
Don’t forget the personal touch – call or use direct messages

It had to be said

Rob Cottingham always provides me with food for thought with his cartoons and blog posts, and this one was no different.

When I began blogging, using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Empire Avenue, the telephone, I always told myself, and others, that the quality of your community is far more important than the size of your community.  While truthful, genuinely felt, and said in all sincerity, I do have something I have to share with you.

First though….  Get the kids and the teenagers out of the room….

Alright, get Michael Scott (Steve Carrell from the Office) out of the room too, I see him in the doorway.

Alright, here goes….  Size matters. Size does matter. No snickering in the back of the audience.  If we are both able to engage 2 to 3% of our audience to meet our goals, who is going to have the best chance of achieving the goals?  Well, simply put, the one with larger audience.  While no one would question the wisdom of Seth Godin as he discusses the need for a quality community you must always look to increase overall community size and the overall size of the quality core that makes up your community.   Here are a few thoughts on how I approach this challenge.

• Identify the channels that best enable you to meet your goals and that fit within your strategy.  Starting with Twitter was a natural for me, an active audience from which to learn,share opinions, and grow.  While I have recently established communities on LinkedIn (a group), Facebook (a fan page), and Empire Avenue I started with the channels that best fit my needs.
• Identify the people you want to make part of your community.  I have been able to hand-pick many members of my community.  In taking the time to set up a relationship, first by listening, second by respectful engagement, you can often build up that quality core base that is critical for your community.
• Provide value.  My first goal is to always add value to the community that I am with.  No ulterior motives, simply add value.  How can you add value to your community?
  • Provide great content.
  • Make introductions.  Enable members of your community to meet other members so that they can benefit from those connections. 
  • Never seek to be the central part of your community.  A community is only as strong as its weakest points, it’s most distant parts.  As with a typical organization you should be seeking out the leaders, the influencers, and work with them on the core mission.   Let them help you spread the word.
• Keep checking how you are doing against your goals.
• Keep checking in with people in the community.  Are you meeting their needs, are they receiving value in return for being a part of your community?
• Be patient.  It takes time to grow a strong community.
• Be humble.  Remember, you are not the center of the universe. 
• Be honest.  Made a mistake, own up to it.

While the list could go on and on just remember to have fun.    If you’re not having fun, you’re probably doing something wrong.

John

Why do you need a Social Business Strategy?

To meet your goals, nothing more, nothing less.  Pretty silly question, wasn’t it?

What exactly is a social business strategy, then?  The more blogs and white papers I read the more I am convinced few people really understand the answer to this simple question.  A strategy, simply defined, is a plan, or series of plans,for obtaining a specific goal…  A social business strategy, therefore, is:

“A plan that takes into account the dual ownership of the role of the customer to your organization to maximize your ability to meet specific organizational goals.”

Funny, as I read that back all I see is blah, blah,blah…  Okay, let’s try to make this a little simpler.

What do I mean by the dual ownership of the role of the customer?

It is important to understand that the customer  is simply the person receiving products or services.  In traditional B2C relationships this is the direct buyer, in Government it is the citizen.

Dual ownership simply addresses the fact that  the organization delivering products/services and the customer that is receiving the products/services both own the relationship.  We do not live in a world where the majority of organizations can dictate what customers receive nor do we live in a world where customers dictate.  It is always, and always will be, a compromise.  Organizations will seek to increase profits while customers will seek to maximize the value of their purchase. 

What kind of plans are you referring to?

These plans must first acknowledge the dual ownership and find ways to bring the customer and organization, in the right amount required to meet the goals specified, together.  Plans may leverage tactics like:

• Developing a social support community.
• Building pages on Facebook.
• Including a suggestion box in the front of the store.
• Direct phone calls to customers to ask them what they want to buy.

This is not rocket science.  While many of the concepts need you to think differently about the customer,and need different approaches and different measurements, it still all comes back to finding ways to meet your organizational goals.  Not that complicated, is it?

John

Small Businesses Get Successful On Social (via ObjectiveMarketer)

I had the pleasure of chatting with Amita Paul, CEO of ObjectiveMarketer. After doing so I took a moment to check out their blog and came across this recent post. The post gives some very good guidance but, as always, I have to take a minute to throw in my own thoughts as well.  The post notes, based upon a study by Maryland’s Smith School of Business, that 20% of small businesses are making use of social media.  While I assume that a smaller percentage are approaching this strategically, the fact that they are listening,and hopefully engaging, is a good sign.

• The ObjectiveMarketer team recommends building up your presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube page, at least enough to make sure that the pages look reasonable when your customers find you there.  This is good advice.
• In addition to these sites, setup accounts on Flickr, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, and Foursquare.  The key is to reserve company and/or brand names you will need when you are ready to fully engage in these channels.
• Foursquare has around 1 million registered users.  While the number is small the active users are very active..  If you have a local retail store, setup a Foursquare account and immediately begin to offer coupons, discounts, for your Mayor.  This is a minor investment but will pay off in the near term.
• My favorite part of the article is to remember PLEASE (Plan, Listen, Engage, Act, Supervise, Evaluate).  Use this process and adjust strategies and tactics as needed to meet your goals.

 Today nearly 1-in-5 small business owners are using social media, according to a study conducted by Maryland’s Smith School of Business and the primary motivation is to “identify and attract” new customers. Not long ago, social media seemed so new and different that it was treated as a kind of marketing that should be tried only by the experts or as a complete contrast to this, “only when you have time”. While both views still exist to some degree … Read More

via ObjectiveMarketer