Social Media Management Tools – Are they Ready for the Enterprise?

by Matthew Lees

Over the past 6-12 months a lot of companies and technology platforms have entered the market purporting to make it easier for individuals and organizations to participate throughout the social Web. If you’ve got accounts at one or more social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn, why, for example, should you have to log into each one? Wouldn’t it be much easier simply to log into one interface to organize, read, post, and search comments?

I’ve seen the phrase Social Media Management used as a catch-all for these types of tools. That sums things up as well as anything else.

To a basic degree, this is the idea behind Twitter-centric apps such as HootSuite, Seesmic, and TweetDeck. If you’re using Twitter on your own, these programs may meet your needs just fine. But the social Web stretches beyond Twitter and, if you’re responsible for social media at a large organization, you’ve got quite a few requirements beyond convenience. When the stakes are high, when there are more than one or two stakeholders involved, and when time – yours and your colleagues’ – is at a premium, many of these systems fall short.

What Makes Social Software Enterprise* Ready?
I see six main categories where enterprise social applications differentiate themselves from software that isn’t ready or appropriate for enterprise environments:

1. Security – We’ll start with what’s probably the most obvious item on the list. Enterprise social software adheres to high standards of security, both in terms of technology (i.e., secure protocols) and process (i.e., the ability to define access and keep audit trails; see below). How comfortable would you be sending your social security number to someone via a Twitter direct message?
2. Access, Accountability, and Auditing – These are the three As of enterprise social software. (Well, I just made that up…but it works well.) Social software for the enterprise lets system administrators set user permissions and access in a granular and effective way; it tracks activity and creates an audit trail, so you can determine who did what, when; and it allows for passwords to be recovered and/or changed as appropriate.
3. Content Management – Twitter is an example of a very rudimentary form of content management, which is pretty much based purely on a “push” model of publishing. Once you tweet, it’s out there…you can’t take it back and you can’t change it. Enterprise social software includes content management capabilities that let you save, undo, modify, and schedule for publishing at a later date. It also lets you adapt content to the particular channels you’re sending it to, and to choose which channels to send what (i.e., “I want this post to go to Twitter and Facebook, and I want that comment to go to our corporate blog).
4. Performance – This primarily encompasses speed, scalability, and reliability. For example, if Flickr or Facebook go down for a while, you’ve got little, if any, recourse. With enterprise social software, you should have support people to talk with and (usually) SLAs in place.
5. Integration Points – Enterprise social software will have hooks that allow for bi-directional integration, so data can come in from appropriate sources, and be sent out to other places (such as other applications, such as a CRM system, sites on the social Web, or your branded customer community). The architecture is important here, as ideally the platform’s engine is robust enough so that when the next new big social network crops up, it would be easy enough to configure its integration.
6. Analytics and Reporting – Social analytics providers are doing strong business helping organizations make sense of the social Web. Most social sites and tools provide woefully limited statistics. Of course, they weren’t designed with reporting in mind – particularly unified reporting, which lets you look at everything from one place — but if you’re using them for your business, you need to understand their effectiveness and impact. And that goes beyond counting how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans you have.

Note that many of these items translate into increased productivity. Social Management Tools, whether enterprise-ready or not, are largely, though not exclusively, about making it easier for individuals and organizations to do social media more efficiently and effectively.

Social Media Management Platforms
A few of the companies doing some interesting and promising things in the Social Media Management space are:
•    Socialize Your Stuff (Butterfly Publisher platform)
•    Regroup
•    Social Agency (Spredfast platform)
•    Spry Hive Industries

Community platform vendors are also thinking about how branded communities fit into all this, as well. On the leading edge of the trend toward connecting your customer communities to the social Web are:
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies
•    LiveWorld
•    RightNow Technologies (Social Experience platform)
•    Pluck

Of course, the tools can only do so much. Technology platforms won’t get you where you want to go without a sound business strategy and a plan for engaging with your customers, members, readers, followers, prospects, etc.  But if you’re evaluating — or reevaluating – your social media strategy and presence, the six items above will play a central role.

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* What I Mean by “Enterprise”
“Enterprise” is one of those buzz words that means different things to different people. I’m using it here in a somewhat non-rigorous way to really mean a level of sophistication and maturity. Enterprise software is sturdy and full-featured, to meet the many and varied needs of professional organizations. In this way, it relates to the concept of enterprise architecture, particularly the definition from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research: “Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model.”

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Goodbye Call Center, Hello People Power – The giffgaff Experiment

By Matthew Lees

giffgaff is a UK-based mobile telephone service provider that runs off the O2 (Telefónica Europe) network. Basically, what it offers is a pre-paid SIM card that you pop into your (unlocked) mobile phone. (European wireless phone service operates on the GSM standard. In the US, many mobile carriers provide “locked” phones which only accept one type – their type — of SIM card. There’s much more flexibility and compatibility across Europe and, indeed, through the rest of the mobile-phone-using world.)

At giffgaff’s Web site (http://www.giffgaff.com), you can order a giffgaff SIM card and add money to (a.k.a. “top-up”) your existing card.

What you can’t do at the site, though, is contact a customer service representative. Not by phone and not by online chat.

giffgaff does provide a single email address for inquiries; automated acknowledgments promise a response within 24 hours. So somebody is handing email support, which is an asynchronous communications channel. But giffgaff does not have agents who provide synchronous support. (I suppose, though, that if you were to show up at giffgaff’s HQ in Slough, England, there’s a pretty good chance they’d help you out in real time. Based on the tone of the language used on the site, they seem an amiable, if borderline mischievous, bunch.)

No Operators Are Standing By
By not having customer support reps awaiting your calls, giffgaff can keep its prices low and its operation streamlined.

Instead, the company provides support nearly exclusively via Web-based self-service and its customer community. giffgaff’s FAQs, question and answer area, and discussion forums are its primary customer service mechanisms.

Within the community, which is running on Lithium Technologies’ Social CRM platform, giffgaff customers answer each others’ questions. Hence giffgaff’s taglines: “Mobile network with a difference” and “We’re people powered.”

It’s Payback Time
All online communities rely on the contributions of a small but essential numbers of dedicated members who answer a large and disproportionate number of questions. These “active contributors” or “super users” are the lifeblood of their communities and an essential part of their communities’ cultures. They typically participate for the personal and professional connections they make, the inside information they may get, the opportunity to learn, the ability to enhance their reputation and “strut their stuff,” and the sheer fun of it.

giffgaff adds another motivation to this list: making money. The more questions you answer, the more “Payback Points” you receive. Payback points (100 points = £1) can either go toward topping up your giffgaff account or be deposited into your bank account as cash.

In fact, there’s more to Payback points than just answering more and more questions. The better your answers are, the more points you receive, too (this is done via Lithium’s “accepted solution” feature). And you can also earn Payback points by acting as a giffgaff evangelist, getting friends to join and promoting the service (e.g., through social sites and networks such as YouTube and Twitter).

A Sustainable Support Model?
It’s a relatively new business and a relatively new community, having only launched in Q3 2009. And it’s still in beta (although this doesn’t mean what it used to; Gmail was ostensibly in beta for about five years). The site is certainly focused and playful. Is it effective, though? It’s too soon to tell. But here are the questions percolating in my mind:

•  How are giffgaff’s group andsocial dynamics different from those communities that don’t have financial incentives? I’d expect that that the giffgaff community wouldn’t put up with much nonsense, as that would get in the way of earning points. But would this lead to a more or less tolerant community and enjoyable community experience?
•  Can giffgaff provide satisfactory support on a long-term basis without a contact center?
•  If so, can this model work in other industries, or are there aspects of giffgaff’s business (e.g., the telecommunications industry, its particular demographics, etc.) that may make it work for them, but not elsewhere?

A quick Web search shows that “giffgaff” is a Scottish word referring to mutual accommodation or mutual giving. Seems like an appropriate name for an ostensibly people-powered network. Kind of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” thing. If things at giffgaff go according to plan, the UK could see an awful lot of scratching…

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Gaming the System – Why Follower Counts Don’t Represent Influence

In December of 2009, I wrote about Misleading Indicators – Followers and Friends after seeing a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. In that post, I explained why follower or friend counts do not represent a metric of influence nor should they be utilized as a relevant metric of importance. After several good comments as well as several emails to Impact Interactions giving me grief for disputing one of social media’s closely held beliefs, I decided to run an experiment on gaming the system.

My basic premise was that these counts are a false statistic which like placing value on “hits” in web metrics analysis leads you to focus on the wrong metric of your activities. Want to increase “hits”? Add more photos, widgets, content blocks, etc. to each of your pages. Each one adds a hit each time the page is opened. You can make the hit count be anything you want simply by adding more items to each page. In 2000, most people didn’t understand that aspect of the measurement so they used “hits” as a proxy for visits or even for influence of their content and site. We still have companies that talk about “hits” when they approach us about measurement. It’s a lasting issue that has thrown a lot of folks away from the important issues in measurement.

There have been several blog posts written about how to game Twitter to gain followers in order to look more important than your competition.  One of my absolute favorites is from Chris Cree of Success Creeations. His blog entry “How to Game Twitter to Add Thousands of Followers Every Day” should be mandatory reading for all social media marketing professionals. It spells out how you can game Twitter, but also why that is such a bad idea. So with that advice in hand, we set up a little experiment using free tools to game the system.

The Experiment Begins

Using a tool we won’t name here, we were able to almost double our number of followers for our @impactinteract twitter account in five days. Granted we were working from a small base, but the results show how easy it was to pull off. So let’s go to our experiment.

We started last week with 143 followers who found us either from our website, our efforts on LinkedIn, our speaking engagements, or organically from our tweets. We were following 43 members who were mostly our competitors. On Monday, I signed up for a free demo of one of the many tools which advertise that they can add followers quickly. By using the key words of “Social Media” and “Online Community” the tool returned over 700 accounts on Twitter that had potential for us as followers. These accounts had either tweeted the key words “Social Media” or “Online Community” in the past ten days. Sounds good so far right?

The tool then allowed us to follow the accounts in order to grow our followers by getting their auto-follower to reciprocate.  The demo of the tool we choose allowed us to generate up to 250 new followers before we would have to buy a license. So we started the process using the tool of following 250 accounts. It was fast and painless. In the fifteen minutes it took to follow these accounts, we were able to work on other activities. Once the 250 follows had been accomplished, we waited about a day and then unfollowed any account that didn’t auto-follow us. Over the next several days, we repeated the steps. Here is the table of our activities:

 

To keep everyone who autofollowed us aware of what we were doing, we tweeted a message several times during the experiment that stated:

We are testing a few of the tools that advertise that they can build your follower base for an upcoming blog #socialmedia #Twittermarketing. 

The idea was that if the new followers actually read our tweets they would also know what we were doing. That way they could unfollow us as quickly as they auto-followed us. Incredibly only 9 new followers over the course of the week unfollowed us. None sent a direct message about what we were doing. So in a little over a business week, we came close to doubling our followers. Total time including the time to download and set up the tool was about 2 hours total.

“Ah ha, the tool worked!” you might be saying to yourself. But did it really add followers for our corporate Twitter account who might spread our message and help us grow? Let’s take a look and find out if our tweets on social media and online community news and trends, as well as our company news is really relevant to our new found followers.

Of the 136 new followers, 14 (10%) sent the same auto-messages to me about making money on my tweets:

MAKING MONEY for your Tweets? I am. Making 20 daily on autopilot. Make money too – TODAY! http://bit.ly/xxxxxx Thanks for following

Another 9 (6.7%) sent an auto-message inviting us to join their multi-level marketing scheme or affiliate marketing network:

Thank your for following me at http://bit.ly/xxxxxx. We’re looking for affiliate marketers to help us. Do you know any?

Welcome to AffilBits! Want to know how to get thousands of targeted Twitter followers and earn a 50% affiliate commission at the same time?

Two follows were from famous and semi-famous people: Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame and a porn star.

12 (9%) new followers were from two unique members who used multiple accounts, but the same photo.

So out of the 136 new followers, we found 37 (27%) were not, nor would they ever be interested in Impact Interactions.

Influence scoring of our new followers shows the truth in the fallacy of follower counts. We used a scale of 1 to 5 to rank our new followers in regards to our ability to be influential with them or in their networks. A score of 1 means Impact Interactions is not potentially influential at all, 2 means probably not potentially influential, 3 means neither potentially influential nor not influential , 4 means somewhat potentially influential, and 5 means Impact Interaction is potentially influential. (And yes, we understand that this is not scientific because we are making the judgement. But how many people on Twitter really analyze their follower base on an individual level?)

Our influence score would be 1 with the group of 37 detailed above.

But what of the other 99?

We reviewed their tweets over the past ten days to see if these would really be good followers for us or not. What we found was 65 were simply folks who had retweeted someone else’s message about a social media topic. They were neither working for companies involved in social media or online communities nor were they particularly interested in the topics based upon analysis of their tweets. In fact several of the members were serial retweeters. We went back through several weeks of tweets and never found a single tweet that they created. So our influence score for these twitterers would be a 2.

There were 7 new followers who are in the search engine optimization industry, another 20 who are potential competitors or individual consultants trying to find work in the social media industry. The influence score for these followers would be 3.

The remaining seven new followers were blog publishers creating newsletter style blogs of others’ content around social media and online communities. They were linked to content aggregation sites rather than competitors. As these sites could potentially help us to influence their readers, we gave them an influence score of 4.

There were no members of our target audience of corporate social media or online community management staff amongst our new followers.

The weighted influence score for our new members was better than we expected at 2.02 (meaning Impact Interactions is probably not potentially influential to this new group of followers).

So, does our newly increased follower count mean that we’re more influential in the social media and online community world? No, it does not. You shouldn’t be impressed with the number of your Twitter followers either. With the set of tools available today, you too can gain thousands of new followers in days. But those followers won’t buy into your view of the world or your brand. In many cases those counts have been culled from the Twitter Borg, not from an audience that cares.

Organic growth of your audience builds an audience that actually is interested in your message or company. Use your content, flair for creativity, and on-target messaging to grow your followers. Include your Twitter account information (@ImpactInteract) in your email and other outgoing communications. Your influence will be stronger, even if your follower counts are smaller. Bigger isn’t always better, but don’t buy into the myth that more followers equals more influence. If we don’t put an end to this measurement idea, we will be having the same discussion in five years that we do with “hit counts” today, more than ten years after it first came up. 

To all of you who began following us during the experiment, thank you for taking part. If you wish to unfollow us, we’ll understand.

Mike Rowland, President

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There’s No Place Like (the) Home (Page)

by Matthew Lees

They say, in politics, you can tell an administration’s priorities by its budget. Office holders can talk all they want about the importance of education, services to seniors, and having the latest and greatest fire-fighting equipment, but are they putting their money where their mouths are? It’s the how they allocate the dollars that tells you what they’re serious about.

Similarly, you can tell a company’s priorities by what’s on its home page.

Sure, home page real estate is precious, and what does or doesn’t appear there (and where it appears) can be a contentious issue. I don’t know of any fist fights that have broken out over what links appear on the home page (and where they appear), but I’ve been around some pretty heated discussions.

The debates are understandable, as your home page can be the gateway to your organization (and your products and services) as well as the first impression it makes. It also cuts across organizational lines, as just about all departments are impacted to one degree or another and should, therefore, have at least some say in the matter. Many voices makes for difficult decision making.

Of course, it’s not all about the home page. There are many ways besides your home page that customers, prospective customers, business partners, and others can discover the content within your site, including community content. In many ways, Google is your home-away-from-home page, as that’s often the entryway to your site’s content. So what’s on your internal pages, and your overall SEO efforts, will also have a sizable impact on how people get to your content.

But there’s no getting around the visibility, cachet, and effectiveness of being on the home page.

So the question comes down to: Is there a link to your customer or partner community on your home page?

If your customers (or partners or readers or users, etc.) are important enough to your organization, there will be. Linking to your community on your home page not only makes it easier for people to find your community, it also makes it easier for people to find each other. And, perhaps more importantly, it makes the symbolic statement that you highly value your customers and their perspectives – the good, the bad, and the ugly – by supporting their candid discussions, collaboration, and networking, and by being part of the conversation yourself.

(I’m not talking about displaying links to your Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pages. That’s all well and good, but that’s done more for marketing purposes than customer engagement.)

Here’s a selection of a dozen organizations that feature their communities via prominent links on their home pages. (There are certainly many others. If I handed out Customer Community Seals of Approval, all these sites would get them for their home page placement alone.)

•   AARP

•  Adobe

•  American Diabetes Association

•  Caterpillar

•  EMC

•  LeapFrog Enterprises

•  The MathWorks

•  NetApp

•  RIDGID

•  Sage Software (ACT!)

•  Unilever (Slim-Fast)

•  VMware

Many other organizations link to their communities from their home pages, but in less prominent locations. While not ideal, that’s still good. But many companies, even ones with vibrant communities, don’t put them on their home pages at all. Often this is despite the best efforts of the community team. The community manager in one such company has been trying to get a home page link for over a year.

How do you make the home page thing happen? Here are some things to try:

1. Begging and pleading.
2. Looking for examples of competitors that feature their communities on their home pages. Nothing spurs action like showing what the competition is doing.
3. Asking to include a home page link for a trial period of, say, one month. Measure the impact this placement has on the community metrics you track. Can you show a compelling correlation between a home page link and an increase in page views, membership, and return visits? Can you translate these numbers to positive business results?
4. What else works? Perhaps those of you who have fought this battle can share your experience and insights below…

While I haven’t formally tracked home page links to communities, it does appear that this practice is increasing. And that’s a good sign. When it comes to showing your customers how you value them, there’s no place like home.

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A Lesson in Customer Engagement from Shawshank Prison

By Matthew Lees

One night while I was researching and writing a recent report on best practices in crowdsourcing, “The Shawshank Redemption” happened to be on TV. So I watched a bit of it for the umpteenth time. One scene jumped out as particularly relevant to what I was working on. I couldn’t find a way to weave it into the report, but it’s been on my mind ever since.

About halfway through the movie, the protagonist Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) ends up managing the library at Shawshank State Prison. In search of newer materials for his fellow convicts to read, he writes letters, interestingly enough at the warden’s suggestion, to the Maine State Senate. One letter a week. Every week. For years.

Eventually — actually, six years later! — he wears them down. Tired of his never-ending solicitations, the Senate sends him a check for $200. (The film takes place in 1947, so $200 was a tidy sum.) The library district also sends him boxes of books and magazines, along with a note saying they now consider the matter closed, so please, stop writing!

Success!

Surely our protagonist is pleased with the outcome. Well, he is…but he realizes that his persistence has paid off. So, with a twinkle in his eye, he says to a friend “From now on, I send two letters a week instead of one.”

I love that line.

Nothing succeeds like success, and the Main Senate and library district made Dufresne successful in his letter-writing campaign. (I’m admittedly focusing on this nice little moment in the movie, ignoring the harsh reality and horrid conditions under which Dufresne lives, although he does meet with success again later in the film.)

What did the Maine Senate do to deserve the increased volume of letters from the Shawshank librarian?

They listened and they took action.

Isn’t that what your customers (and business partners and employees) are looking for from you?

Crowdsourcing programs aren’t the solution to every problem, but they can be a great way to help you listen to your customers, and help them tee up their most important ideas, wishes, and requirements, so you can take action. For such programs to work, you need to engage people who not only have good ideas, but also the perseverance and determination to make things happen. If you’re running a crowdsourcing program (or managing an online community) your biggest wish should be to find and involve as many people as you can who have these characteristics in common with Andy Dufresne.

Like Dufresne, when people see how their actions generate positive results, they tend to repeat those actions. We hope your customers don’t need to be as determined as he was — your crowdsourcing efforts should see results in time frames closer to six weeks or six months than six years — but showing them how their input is making things better for your business, and, in turn, for them, too, should lead to both increased participation and a more effective and profitable business.

At least…I hope.

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Notes from the Online Community Unconference East 2010

By Matthew Lees

This week’s snow storm in New York City only marginally hampered this week’s Online Community Unconference East 2010 (OCUE10), a one-day event run by Forum One Communications. With a nod to local commuters, the program ended an hour early, although quite a few attendees were stuck in New York for the night due to rail and air cancellations. The snow kept some people at home, particularly those coming from more distant locations — it was disappointing, though understandable and, in hindsight, wise — that the Impact Interactions team didn’t venture north — but attendance overall was good. Not quite the 200 online community strategists, practitioners, vendors, and consultants that were originally expected that, but not too far off that number.

It was a good event, though not as strong as previous ones, despite the improved facilitation. Unconferences follow an Open Space-like methodology more frequently used, it seems, on the West coast than on the East. Attendees run the sessions themselves, selecting topics based something of interest, whether they’re expert in that subject or just want to talk about it and think others will, too. It’s a bit of organized chaos in which one of the underlying philosophical tenets is that you’re responsible for your own experience.

The Unconference’s theme was “Moving Forward, Together.” That’s a worthy and appropriate objective. Forum One did set the stage for us to think about our personal and professional goals, the direction of the industry, and ways of taking action and moving things forward, well, together. This is easier said than done, though, even for a group of inherently collaborative-minded souls. While I admittedly sucked the air out of a planning session intent on industry-wide adoption of social business metrics, the efforts are well intentioned. Making things happen will be a challenge, but with some sustained work and outreach to other concerned organizations, such initiatives could potentially gain some traction.

But my main frustration was that the sessions, which sometimes stay on topic and sometimes don’t, largely didn’t. Perhaps that’s part of the point of the format, to go wherever the discussions take you. But if I attend a session on, say, B2B revenue streams, I’d like to really dig into that topic. Tangents can be the norm, however. It also can take a while, sometimes 20 to 30 minutes of a one-hour session, for people to get on the same page regarding terminology. It’s not that the digressions are irrelevant or that the conversations are uninteresting; they’re usually not. It’s just that, more often than not, we didn’t get into the real substance I’m really looking for.

That said, it’s always good to see old friends, make new ones, and discuss things we’re all passionate about. Here are some observations:

• Job Changes and Hiring. In recent months I’ve seen more than a few community and social media professionals change jobs, sometimes due to layoffs, sometimes due to taking advantage of a new opportunity. At the OCUE 2010 I learned of even more. And a few people mentioned that their organizations were hiring. This is good news for the industry (although perhaps small solace for the many who are still looking for jobs).

• Business Value. It’s pretty clear that the exploratory phase is over for online communities. More and more organizations are all but requiring bottom line results, or at least a solid plan to get there. If you’re a vendor, agency, or consulting group that can speak to helping an organization achieve quantifiable, attributable ROI success, you’ll have a leg (or two) up the competition.

• Community Strategy: Beyond Your Site. Bill Johnston, Forum One’s Chief Community Officer and the Unconference’s host, summed this up nicely, saying “Most companies are trying to pull together a more holistic strategy.” A lot of attendees talked to this point, and how they’re trying to consolidate and streamline their community and social media strategies. If your organization is running one or more online communities, that’s one or more customer-facing touchpoints. But you’re likely involved with Twitter, LinkedIn, other social sites, and perhaps some independent communities as well. Fractured strategy translates into a poor customer experience, diminished brand identity, and limited business results.

• Organizational Issues. This one will be with us for a long time. Organizational dynamics play a major role in the success (or not) of community and social initiatives. They’re also a contributor to the many tales of woe that attendees talked about. People were looking for ways of breaking down silos, clarifying ownership, ending turf wars, undoing inappropriate and/or ineffective structure, and getting more buy-in from colleagues and the executive suite. (One of my favorite quotes was from a Microsoft community manager who said, referencing collaboration among his company’s business units, “Any coordination between these groups happens accidentally.” That’s too bad, but, sad to say, not uncommon.)

Look for the next Forum One Unconference in Mountain View, CA on June 9, 2010. It’s doubtful they’ll have to worry about snow…

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Do You Use Social Media? Guess What…You’re a System Administrator

By Matthew Lees

The New York Times recently ran an informative article by Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb called “The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now.” It’s about changes that Facebook made last December that affected user privacy, and what you can do about a few key pieces of personal information.

The article got me thinking about a Patricia Seybold Group report I wrote in 2007, entitled (rather cleverly, I thought), “Helping Customers with Self-Control…of Their Own Content.” The discussion and perspective in that report are even truer today than they were a few years ago, with the trend toward user control only increasing.

The upshot of the report was that, whether you blog or spend time on social sites or online communities, you’re doing more than participating in conversations, seeking out people and information, and creating content. You’re probably also deciding (1) who can see what, and (2) what they’re allowed to do with what they can see.

Well, guess what. That’s what system administrators do. Did you know you’re a sysadmin?

(Tell your parents. If yours are like mine, they won’t understand what it means, but they’ll be impressed. Actually, if your parents are on Facebook or any other social network, they’re sysadmins, too!)

Of course, professional sysadmins are trained and experienced in the subtleties and ramifications of managing access rights, setting up group/subgroup permissions, and troubleshooting things when problems arise. The rest of us are doing this as amateurs, whether we’re…

• setting permissions on our Flickr photos
• managing the privacy settings in our Facebook accounts
• determining what our public and private LinkedIn accounts look like
• deciding if your blog will accept anonymous comments or if people need to be logged in to comment
• deciding which groups of people (e.g., everyone, friends, or family), if any, can comment on our YouTube videos
• deciding what URLs in del.icio.us to share and what to keep private (for example, I’ll let most of URLs I tag be publicly viewable, but not the ones of my financial accounts)

As the Internet has enabled more and more of us not only to be Content Consumers, but also Content Creators and Publishers (the simplicity of blogging laid a lot the groundwork for this), the natural evolution has been for us to have control over this content as well. And it’s not just the content itself (your blog entries, forum posts, comments, video clips, photos, pictures, animations, etc.), but also the information about you (such as your profile information, both personal and professional).

The advantage of all this is that systems are increasingly giving us more control over both our content and profile information. Some platforms offer impressively – perhaps overwhelmingly – granular control of pretty much everything. This is a great trend, since it’s generally better to give people control over their own stuff.

But the disadvantage is that most of us don’t naturally take to this role or have the time to do it well. It takes attention to think through things and set them up the way we’d really want them to be. Most of us don’t have the bandwidth to do this for one site, let alone all the social sites and communities where we spend time. (Plus, things change over time, as with the Facebook situation above.) Therefore, as inexperienced and part-time sysadmins with a few other things on our plates, we may not be setting things up as well as we could. We typically rely on the defaults, which may or may not be in our best interests.

Why is this important?

• If you’re a technology vendor, you’ve got to figure out how to balance giving users granular control while making things easy for them to use. More tools, capabilities, and control is usually good, as long as you don’t confuse people, and having control over too much stuff can easily become overwhelming. Having an intuitive user interface can certainly help, but product managers have to draw the line somewhere.
• If you’re a social media user (and who isn’t?), you’ve got to decide how much time and brainpower to give the various settings on your content and personal/professional information at all the sites where you have an account. Most likely you’ll rely on the defaults, making changes only when a friend or colleague brings an issue to your attention, or when you come across a relevant article (or blog post!) that prompts your taking action.
• If you’re a community business sponsor, manager, or moderator, you’re looking to generate participation and sharing, while at the same time maintaining a safe and friendly environment. Participation can be enhanced by more open settings – the more people who can view things, the more discussion and collaboration will ensue – but if things are too open, particularly if users don’t realize or understand, conflicts can arise. How you set defaults, and how you communicate privacy and control settings is crucial. (Think about what can arise when a Facebook user doesn’t understand the consequences of giving visibility to Friends of Friends, for example, who you may not know…or trust.)

We haven’t even touched on other, non-sysadmin-related choices social media users have to make, such as how your content looks (control over design and layout; e.g., your blog header and Twitter background), and what people can do with your content (e.g., what license do you select to govern the photos you upload to Flickr?).

Decisions, decisions, decisions. For better or worse, though, in this do-it-yourself, connected, and increasingly social world, we’re all sysadmins now.

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It’s Not About You: Where Organizations Miss the Boat on Social Media

By Matthew Lees

Way back when (in the 80’s, perhaps?) I remember watching a stand-up comedian do a funny and perceptive routine on how magazine titles had changed over the years to reflect important changes in society. I’m paraphrasing — the old memory chips aren’t as good as they used to be — but here’s the gist:

Early on, there was a magazine called “Life.” It was pretty much about everything.

Later, someone came up with a magazine didn’t have such high aspirations, but still looked to include a large portion of what life is about. It was called “People.”

Apparently that wasn’t specific enough. So a new magazine hit the market: “Us.” It wasn’t about all people. Just some people. Not those people, of course. Us people.

Guess what! Even that was too broad. Who wants to know about Us? That still covers too much ground. Much better to focus on what’s really important. So what do we get? The magazine “Self.”

What’s next? Maybe they’ll just sell mirrors in the shape of magazines, so you can just stare at your own reflection.

There are times it seems the social Web is going down a similar path, where it’s all about “You.” What You’re doing. Who You know. Who knows You. What You sell. (And many of the times where it’s ostensibly not about You, it really is. Kind of like the old joke about the egotist, “So enough about me. How do you like my tie?”)

But what I’m really talking about here is organizations, not individuals. It’s You, the company, not You the person, who’s largely missing the boat on social media.

OK, I admit (happily) that it’s not really all about You out there. This is demonstrated by the organizations that support their own online communities, and engage on social networks in transparent, conversational, collaborative ways. And, yes, it’s appropriate for some things to indeed be about You: customers and prospective customers do want to know about Your businesses, how Your products and services can help them, and how and why You’re the best in the business; and members want to know about Your associations, and how You are helping those You’re supposed to help.

But social technologies sure make it easy to make it about You.

Yet the organizations that successfully leverage social media are the ones that don’t go this route. They’re the ones that make it about Them. Who’s Them? They’re your customers (or users, members, subscribers, readers, business partners, employees, or whatever audience is relevant and whatever terminology you prefer).

So how do you make it about Them? Here are some thoughts:

• Take Their Viewpoints and Ideas into Account. Crowdsourcing is a great way to make it about Them. Today’s technologies make it relatively easy to run a crowdsourcing program that gives Them a place not only to give you their ideas for making your business better, but also to vote on and rank each others’ ideas. The outcome is that the best and most feasible ideas bubble to the top, ready for you to take the actions that are most important to Them.

• Support What They Care About. Hard as it may seem to believe, They are interested in more than just your company, your products, and your services. So don’t just talk about your stuff; add some value related to the other things they care about. You can do this by blogging about trends you see in your industry, sponsoring an online community where They can to talk with, connect with, and learn from each other, and tweeting fast-breaking information that’s timely and relevant to what’s important to Them.

• Make Them the Center of Attention. I remember an interesting networking tip. It suggested that you bring other people with you to networking events. In particular, bring someone who is looking for something new, such as a new job or new business. When the two of you are there, don’t talk about yourself. Act almost as if you’re your friend’s agent. Introduce her to other people, highlight what she’s good at; turn conversations towards her. You’ll be seen as a connector, and as someone who goes out of his way to help others. So your own networking stock will rise, not by blowing your own horn, but by making someone else look good. Extending this to social media means retweeting good stuff your followers say, spotlighting your customers on your Web site, asking them to share their stories on your blogs, and helping them “strut their stuff” (as Patty Seybold would say) on your online community.

The promise of social media is that, when we’re all engaged and communicating with each other, all boats rise. You are part of that equation, but so are They.

How are you making it about Them?

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Welcome to our Special Guest Blogger Matthew Lees

 

I grew up watching television shows where each week there was a “Special Guest Star” on an episode each week. These guests provided a little extra to the show and usually were cool celebrities. Think of all the villains on Batman for example or the Brat Pack on “Vegas” or the vacationers on Fantasy Island…or for those of you a little younger, the guests on the Simpsons.

Following that idea, I’d like to introduce our Special Guest Blogger, independent analyst Matthew Lees.

Matthew is a well respected analyst in the Social Media and Online Community World (see his bio here). He is the author of reports through the Patricia Seybold Group such as:

1. Selecting An Online Community Platform
2. Best Practices In Crowdsourcing
3. Analyst Report: Lithium’s Social CRM Suite

After reading his research and reviews of his findings, I thought Matthew truly understood how to make social media technology work in an enterprise organization. So, like all good social media practitioners I followed him on Twitter (@mlees) and his blog. Matthew and I first met in person at one of Forum One’s Online Community Unconferences. We’d been reading each other’s blogs and reports and discovered that we come to the industry with the same high level focus… using these tools to improve business results. While Matthew focuses on the technology and its impact, we focus on the process and the users. Together, we cover the issues that all enterprises need to succeed in their social media projects.

We decided in late December over a crab cake lunch here in Maryland, that we should find a way to collaborate together. Our idea is to inform, educate, and drive the best practices we’ve developed to a broader audience with this blog and our twitter accounts. Matthew will be posting here over the next few months both independently and collaboratively with our team members.

If you have a suggested issue of topic for us to cover, please contact us by adding a comment on this entry or by using our contact form.

So, with that said welcome Matthew!

Mike Rowland, President

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Social Media – The Global Story

The world is adopting social media at higher and higher levels according to a recent Neilsen Report.  According to the research by Neilsen, global time spent on social media sites increased by 82% in December 2009 when compared with December 2008. Pretty large increase especially if you look into the footnotes and understand that this research is based upon only U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. No China, no India, no Russia, nor are there any Nordic countries listed.

But this growth coincides with what we’re seeing here at Impact Interactions. We’ve helped develop and launch multiple communities in countries such as China, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and elsewhere over the past several years. And while clients are still interested in their communities in the U.S. their focus is shifting. We are seeing more interest in companies asking us to help them launch communities and social media plans in countries ranging from Japan to Russia to Brazil to Mexico.

The growth in third party applications such as Twitter and Facebook have helped companies to understand the potential reach of the medium, but it is the local language social networks like StudiVZ (German) which have helped in-country marketing teams decide that they must be engaged with their customers using social tools. So even as Facebook moves past these local social media/networks, the smart marketer understands that it’s not the tool so much as it’s the growth that matters in deciding whether social media is a good tactic in a particular market.

In our experience leading a social media workshop in Innsbruck, Austria at the prestigious Management Center of Innsbruck it was clear that our non-US audience were more engaged on local language social media tools including blogs and social networks than on the U.S. offerings. (In fact, it was there that I learned more about StudiVZ and other offerings.)

That doesn’t mean that non-U.S. members are not on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. But it does mean that for the savvy global marketer the research and identification of which sites or applications to use is a bit more difficult. While the strategy remains the same, each Internet culture requires a clear focus on localized tactics. That means a cookie cutter approach using the same tools like Twitter, Facebook, or other application across multiple markets will not deliver the results you desire.

Watch the growth, it’s here to stay. But also look for the smaller sites that can deliever more value to your organization when using social media globally. As the old adage goes “All marketing is local.” The same applies to social media.

 

-Mike Rowland, President

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