Pro-Active Social Media: Taking Audience Engagement to the Next Level

While doing some research on how companies are incorporating social media into their communications, I came across two intriguing articles that really got me thinking about how far the social media industry could go and whether it should go there. The first article, When Customer Service is a Twitter Response, was actually written in response to the Hotels Magazine article, A Day in the Life of the Digitized Hotel(registration required to read). The Hotels Magazine article was a proposed day of interaction between a hotel and their guest completely driven by social media. First, the guest gets off the plane and complains on Twitter that the taxi line is long to which to hotel quickly responds asking if they would like the hotel to contact a car service for them. In a second exchange, the guest is sent a message on their hotel provided iPad recommending a massage because the guest had mentioned in a tweet that they were considering having one after a long day. Finally, when the guest returns home and mentions the hotel in their tweet the hotel again responds this time thanking the guest and giving them a code for a complimentary upgrade on their next stay.

The idea of taking social media to this level was fascinating even though the “big brother” aspect was admittedly a little creepy. The comments I read in the Economist article were mostly against this kind of heavy social media driven interaction. Many of the comments lamented the loss of human interaction in our society while others were somewhat unsettled by the thought of companies knowing that much about where they were and what they were doing. One commenter actually recounted how he stayed at a hotel only to find out that the hotel (and many others) had actually removed the in-room phones because they assumed that all their guests had cell phones and it was just costing them money to keep them in the rooms.

Taking it to the extreme that the fictional hotel did does smack of something from Minority Report but I’m still left asking myself why shouldn’t companies engage their audience (or event heir business partners) in this way just on a smaller scale? I don’t know that I lament the use of social media by companies to pro-actively engage their customers. If my options for communication are calling a company and being put on hold for an undetermined amount of time or making a request online which can instantly be dealt with, I know which one I’m picking.

I recently helped put together a presentation on examples of companies successfully implementing social media into their business plan. One of the stand outs was TATA Docomo, a telecom provider in India. Rather than operating like most corporations who expect the masses to come to them, TATA Docomo realized that the only way they were going to make inroads in the tough Indian telecom market was to go to the people. They now skillfully leverage both Twitter and Facebook as their main means of communicating with their customers for both customer service issues as well as informing them of new offerings. This has lead to huge customer loyalty despite the lack of a “physical” connection.

The generations that are coming of age now are doing it in a time of amazing digital advancements. I’m old enough to remember the days before the internet was a daily part of life but young enough to be in the generation of adults who are keen to absorb any new digital gadget that comes onto the market. Businesses need to realize this fact and capitalize on it. Don’t be afraid of using social media for these kinds of communications. Companies that start a Facebook page only to tell all the people who ask for help that they need to contact the customer service number are going to be sorely disappointed by their “community” building efforts. That’s because they aren’t engaging people in the places where they actually want to be engaged. The example of TATA Docomo is one that companies should look to as the way forward. TATA has engaged their communities consistently on the formats they know are the most popular. What did it get them? It took them from the bottom of the Indian telecom barrel to the top of the mountain. They were the 9th telecom company to enter the Indian market and faced competitors who had been there for years but in a very short time they were the top. Why? It worked because they embraced what social media could do for them.

Ignoring the changing communication landscape is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. The world is changing around us, why not change with it? Our two part blog series on this very topic titled Executive Use of Social Media discusses the importance of this changing landscape and highlights the success several major companies have had in implementing social media into their business operations. Part One is already posted so be sure to check back and watch Part Two.

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.

Will Social Media Survive the Recession?

What constitutes a bubble? What constitutes a true business tool?

This was the type of question that those of us running Web 1.0 businesses in 2001-2003 were asking ourselves as we evaluated our prospects for the not to distant future. In our case, it was all about online communities and their ability to help both B2B and B2C companies increase sales, build brand loyalty, and market their products and services more efficiently. We had case studies that showed that online community members on average purchased more frequently, bought more items, and generated more profits than non-community members. We proved that online community could produce a return on investment of more than 100% (in some cases higher than 200%).

Yet for all the research and our expertise, many companies pulled the plug on their communities. The list is long: Transora (Multiple CPG companies), OurHouse (Ace Hardware), MuniGroup (Goldman Sachs), Quote.com, SoapCity (Sony), and many others.

Each company had its own reasons, but in the autopsies we performed several issues came out over and over. They were:

1. Budget taken away from community projects due to over staffing on the client side
2. Executive sponsorship changed due to layoffs
3. Software company providing hosting and platform went out of business
4. Movement of marketing dollars to “proven” traditional marketing methods like direct mail

Remember this was back in the day when for chat clients used eShare or iChat, for message boards they used Web Crossing or eShare, blogs were not widely accepted, wikis were non-existent, video was not used online except for B2B, and most community members were using dial-up connections. The overall conclusion that came back time and time again was that while communities were cool, they were a ‘soft’ application in the eyes of senior executives. These executives did not see value in kids chatting about irrelevant issues or fans cheering on their favorite television show or prospects engaging with customers independently.

Now shift to today.

Look at our social media space. We have seen blogs go mainstream, social networks competing with online communities (yes they are very different), broadband adoption bringing video and photos to the masses. Yet we also have the feeling of a bubble again as the world enters another recession. The movement towards cool applications like Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace & Facebook widgets, and others are viewed as fun to use. However, in practical terms they are all in danger of the same fate that hit many online communities in 2002-2003.

As budgets tighten, will money dry up for experimenting with social media? It’s possible. Remember that many of the same decision makers who turned off communities are still in the position to do so again. If you are running a community or social network, you need to start building a case for why your project must remain funded.

In a member survey completed in June of 2008, the online community research network published that 57% of all respondents stated that their communities contributed no revenues, less than 2% of revenues, or did not know how much the community contributed. 33% of respondents had budgets for community projects in excess of $100,000 per year (18% over $500,000). The average number of staff working on the community was 6.6 FTEs! But here is the astonishing fact from the report: 67% reported that they had no strategy for their online communities.

Will these communities survive a budget cut? Probably not. The respondents did not know how to prove the value as Alan Warms used to preach. The issue of ROI becomes much more important as the economy gets tighter. While we all know that intuitively communities help the hosting organization, intuition doesn’t get funded.

Community and social network management teams must get comfortable with metrics and with building an ROI Case for their project. Hard data is difficult to deny… soft data of conversations is easy to dismiss…

Want to learn more about how to prove the value of your community or social network? Learn more about our consulting services, experience, and then contact us with your questions. Or leave us a comment.

Online Communities: Will Online Anonymity Survive?

• Member A attacks Member B
• Member C, D, E, F & G join in the attack on Member B
• Blogger Z and Y post entries which repeat the attacks on Member B

1. According to court documents, a user on the site named “STANFORDtroll” began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled “Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law.” Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said.
2. Some posts made false claims about her academic record and urged users to warn law firms, or accused her of bribing Yale officials to gain admission and of forming a lesbian relationship with a Yale administrator, the court papers said.

• The two, who say they suffered substantial “psychological and economic injury,” also sued a former manager of the site because he refused to remove disparaging messages. The manager had cited free-speech protections.

Online Brand Defense: What Campaigns Can Learn from the Obama Attack

By now, we’ve all seen and heard about the false rumor released about Barack Obama attending a madrassa in Indonesia published online by the conservative Insight magazine. The amazing thing is that the article was published online and was allowed to run rampant all over the blogosphere for several days before the rumor was finally killed off. In our work with online communities that discuss politics, this rumor spread like wildfire with many, many conservative posters slamming Senator Obama and his campaign. Online Community sites like Hannity.com, Slate.com, and even AARP.org had many members publicizing the rumor for several days.

Once the mainstream media picked up the story, it had additional power online.

Yet, there was no one online to debunk the rumor for Senator Obama’s campaign.

As we see it (and we admit we’re biased), organizations must be prepared to deal with the inevitable attacks that take place online. In the case of presidential campaigns, they need a team that is established in the main online communities of the web as well as familiar with the bloggers out there who want to dethrone a candidate if they can. There must be a plan to deal with the negative publicity that is a part of online life today. It is no different than what we advise companies to do.

The question is whether the Communications Directors for these campaigns understand this as well as the Brand Managers who understand why brand defense is so important online today.

Want to learn more about how Impact Interactions helps organizations defend themselves online? Contact us today.