Best Practices, Research•
on January 28th, 2010•
A trend we’re noticing in Social Networking services (i.e. Facebook or Bebo) and how people are behaving is a move to more specifically focused social networks. Perhaps the first to start this was Ning a few years ago, and Ning has steadily increased. We’ve seen the addition of services like Ning, such as Qlubb, Flux, Grouply and well, here’s a list.
When you compare this to real-world social behaviour, it’s not at all surprising. We all have our hobbies and activities; sports, travel, photography, community service. A number of social technology companies have seen this, it’s nothing new from an availability standpoint.
What is new as a trend we’re seeing is that these services are expanding. It’s changing how broad social networks like Facebook, are being used. We call social networking services like Facebook “Open Loop Social Networks” – meaning they are more open. You can form groups in Facebook, with group and fan pages. There are millions of them, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the activist.
In our analysis of these communities and social group behaviours online though, we’ve seen a 42% increase in use of “Closed Loop Social Networks” over the past 6 months from a sample size of 54,000 profiles. Facebook will always see such group and fan pages being built; but we note that 96% of Facebook groups that are formed are active for only 3 weeks on average. Highly active group pages in places like Facebook tend to be those that are more focused; such as kayakers or mountain bikers.
Specialty group social networking service like Grouply or Ning however, are much more active since the participants are all like-minded. For those looking to market to those groups, look beyond just Facebook and look at other Closed Loop Networks to truly reach your target.
In 2001, market regulators in Canada, Europe and the U.S. required public companies to simultaneously issue press releases to the Web and the newswire. In addition, any public meetings were to be broadcast to the Web via video feeds. All this before the rise of Social Media in a significant way. The bulletin boards (newsgroups) for discussion on public companies have been rampant for years, Stockhouse being among the pioneers.
My days running communications for a public company at the turn of the century saw us monitoring those newsgroups every day. Some days it was hard to not tap a condemning response to the idiocy of some of the comments and speculations made there. But other issues became apparent, among them was the damage that could happen when an employee spoke of something to a friend who then posted to the BullBoard on that company – this could wreak havoc on a stockprice; and nearly ended up in a line employee being fired once.
This was several years ago. It’s not about to get better. Public companies will face even greater challenges with Social Media in the years to come. Regulators may eventually require public companies to also post information to Social Networks, the same time they issue a press release. Video’s might have to be posted to several video networks and across mobile platforms as well.
Given how the content is both consumed, shared and managed across these channels, public companies are going to face complexities in shaping, distributing and monitoring those messages. What if the company must also issue notices across microblogging platforms like Twitter?
What will public relations and investor relations practitioners have to to consider if such issues arise? Increasingly, companies that thought they didn’t really have to concern themselves with the Web beyond marketing, will soon find out differently.
2010 will, I think, see some interesting changes to governance on communications issues for public companies.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
The biggest challenge on implementing Social Networking technologies in larger organizations is not the technology; it’s the people and the communications processes they use. We’ve found this in several instances now on consulting projects. Social Technologies are disruptive to current organizational communications. I’ve already posited about the potential decrease in the need for middle management earlier this year. read more
It’s a question we get almost every day from current and prospective clients. Usually it focuses on Social Media, but of late Social Media is getting lumped into “media consumption” as a whole. Let’s put this into perspective. Generationally speaking.We think the question is more appropriately posited as “What media is most popular by age group?” Different age groups consume media in different ways. Understanding this is vital to developing effective communications strategies, advertising or marketing. read more
Best Practices•
on November 9th, 2009•
There’s a lot of discussion around “how to sell using Social Media” (we found 1,400 blog articles since July of 2009) and I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with and training over 100 salespeople over the past year. I’ve learned a lot and hopefully my clients have as well. I also do a fair bit of research into tactics used. Here’s some pitfalls I’d like share.
The Blunt Pitch: Those sales folks who put the hard pitch in right up front. These are tactics like putting in your newsfeed lines such as “if you’re looking for a home, I’m the guy from which to buy.” Says who? or “I sell life insurance so talk to me today.” Why? How’re you different? I don’t know you.
Misuse of Valuable Tools: I like taking polls in various places online. Mixx and LinkedIn offer various polls that users can create themselves. I’ve noticed a trend when it comes to sales people using these polling tools; they’ll tend to ask an all too onvious question like “what Social Media tool do you use most for marketing?” While I’ve noticed some very clever use of polling tools to ask broader questions and engage.
Then there’s setting up discussions in places like FastPitch, LinkedIn and ecademy. Here sales people will start discussions that are far too obviously attempts to discuss their product. If you check the comments, well, there are none, or it’s someone from their own company.
Social Media channels and networks are places to engage, and it doesn’t mean results overnight. It takes time. Blunt selling does say what you do and let’s be sure, honesty and transparency goes a long way in Social Media as it does in real life. But straight hard pitches is not engaging and uncovering the broader needs of the person, and so much of sales is how we relate to people. Blunt tactics immediately throw up a wall, one that may not come down like the Berlin Wall.
What do you think?
Best Practices, Reputation•
on November 2nd, 2009•
Content chunking? A rather clunky phrase we use to describe breaking up your content for a press release or when promoting an important story about your business online. It helps when your building a story for release, to think of where you might be placing that story on various Web channels or how a press release might be broken up into fragments by bloggers or journalists or when “tweeted.”
Pick Up 2.0: These two words used to mean a reporter/journalist/editor at a newspaper/radio/TV got your story and then ran it or called for an interview. It still does, and that’s still important. But today it also means a blogger or regular citizen might send your story over Twitter or via their blog.
The Importance of the Headline: If it was important pre-Social Media then it’s even more important today. As you write a headline today, it’s not just to get the editors attention, you also want it to be “tweetable” on Twitter or a similar network. If its a good story, then be sure it can spread with a kicker headline.
The Content Chunks: Which brings us to the concept of “chunking” in that we have found that a press release or story should be written in a way that it can be broken down into chunks of content. Some blogs may only refer to a paragraph in the release or you may only be able to write a paragraph on some news seeding sites (i.e. newsvine). You may want to have a short bit for a Facebook company or group page or your LinkedIn company page.
The key is to know where you regularly “seed” your content from a press release or story and ensure the content can be adapted to each of the services you use. On average, we’ll “seed” a press release for clients to over 15 different online sources within relevant services. Yes, it adds work and puts ever more onus on the writer of the release, but it can help with SEO and generally getting to more of the right eyeballs wherever they may be in this vast media channel world.
Best Practices, Thunking•
on November 2nd, 2009•
One word: Attention.
Basic economic theory states that when you create a wealth of one thing, it creates scarcity of another. In the case of modern day media it’s a wealth of channels and a scarcity of attention. For the most part today, we “snack” on media. We consume when we’ve set aside our attention to watch a movie or a whole TV show or listen to a full broadcast of a radio show.
On the Web we mostly snack. The most effective bloggers have posts no more than 300 words.
Public Relations practitioners have always fought for our attention. But today that’s harder than ever. So many channels. And consumption changes by channel. Twitter is “grazing” while Blogs are a quick bag of crisps and Facebook is a cup of coffee and a cookie.
If the “story” starts as a press release and media advisory, backed by the press kit or background kit, then it will need to break into many little pieces as it goes out into all of the various media channels. Each snippet hopefully getting the right readers attention.
It might follow then that the second biggest hurdle is then getting your audience to act on the information they’ve received.
When we think of and mostly talk about, Social Media crises, we tend to look at the bigger stories; United Breaks Guitars, Motrin Moms, JetBlue. Let’s face it, they’re juicier and hit a broader audience. These stories bring together traditional and social media. But smaller, mostly “hidden” issues can create PR nightmares for a business.
As we experienced with a client today. For obvious reasons I can’t name them, I like having clients and don’t like making a painful issue worse. The issue didn’t get broadcast across Twitter or Plurk or similar microblogging channel. Nor did it wind it’s away through Facebook.
This crisis took place across three “closed” forums. By “closed” I mean that it was in semi-moderated forums focused to a particular topic/industry. Someone posted a topic in a forum, within a short while, others joined in, discussing a product and their feelings about that product. It started only 3 days ago, but by this morning had reached a significant volume and resulted in a large volume of calls to a contact centre and began migrating up to senior management.
We monitor for this client monthly. Which helped. But the challenge of automated Social Media monitoring tools becomes quickly apparent – most of them are locked out of these forums. And this is a huge gap in Social Media monitoring.
Although this issue was “localized” and didn’t hit broadcast Social Media levels, it still caused a drop in sales in just 2 days of 8% and forced a mid-size business to focus many hours of senior management and people resources to contend with it. Fortunately it was kept localized and didn’t seep over into more public forums.
So what are some take-aways for a situation like this?
1. Don’t rely on Google Alerts or basic monitoring services.
2. Find out where “discussions” are going on in closed forums like newsgroups, chats or discussion forums and check in weekly to see what might be going on.
3. A crisis can occur in Social Media in closed loops and cause as much damage as if it hit the more public forums.
4. Engage in these discussions (be open and disclose who you are, trying to pretend your a customer is dangerous) and stay engaged.
5. Often times, these “hidden” sides of Social Media can be of more value than more public forums.
So what do you think? Have you had a similar experience? What steps do you take in this type of issue?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
Best Practices, Reputation•
on October 13th, 2009•
In Western nations as we see the steady increase in immigrants, marketers will have to become increasingly cognizant of ethnographic marketing. Advertising messages will take more research and ads that were easily understood before, may reach less of an audience or cause community anger.
In Social Media, it means deeper considerations when engaging an audience. It’s one thing to provide a Cantonese or Mandarin translation on your static web pages. It’s another to engage a Chinese audience in Social Media. Or Punjabi, Hindu, Ghanaian etc.
We’ve seen the rise of Social Networking sites for Latino Americans already. East Indians in Toronto use the Indian Social Networking site Bigadda more than Facebook in Canada – such knowledge can result in a failed Facebook campaign when your market is using an originating-country social media service. As a recent client of ours found out the hard way.
For longer term engagement, it means retaining staff who speak the language – and ensuring they can adequately communicate issues within the organization. More to the point, ensuring some form of sustainability in Social Media marketing efforts is also critical; these segment markets tend to be very loyal to products they feel value their culture and beliefs.
While a significant amount of acculturation occurs with immigrants, the deeper cultural assimilation and nuanced understanding of the country that have taken up their new lives in doesn’t usually happen until the first generation is born and of an age to be receptive to marketing tactics. So the two considerations we’ve found to be consistent is generation targeted and ensuring inter-organizational support while targeting the right Social Media vehicle.
It started earlier this year when the FTC announced it was considering passing regulations that bloggers and anyone taking cash to write about products declare they’ve been paid to do so. The vote passed 4-0 yesterday and will take effect Dec 1st; this much we all know.
Here’s what is interesting;
1. Enforcement & Monitoring Challenge: There’s no clear definition of how this will/can be enforced. Through complaints by consumers/businesses? Will they use a monitoring tool? When you think that roughly 150,000 new blog entries are posted each day, that’s about 54,750,000 blog entries a year, give or take a few hundred thousand. The FTC says they’re more likely to go after the advertiser and not the blogger. Not sure how much that will help in enforcement.
2. The Oxymoron of Disclosure: Many bloggers and Social Media practitioners have written many articles about how it’s important to declare if you’re writing posts on behalf of a client or representing a company. Some do, many don’t. In some cases these deceptive bloggers will be “outed” and suffer the consequences. But this is a “social rule” evolved as a general online conduct, it is not a government sanctioned rule. Many get away with it.
3. International Effect: Canadians and Americans share many daily communications. Similarities in language, geographical closeness and almost total trade transparency through NAFTA. We buy and sell and have personal relationships…will the FTC work with the Canadian government to develop similar rules in Canada? Many US products are sold in Canada and vice versa. Take Tim Horton’s coffee; if they pay a Canadian blogger to blog about a new offering that is also available in the U.S. but is undeclared, how will the FTC prosecute Tim Horton’s in Canada for the impact in the USA?
This ruling is one I agree with. I’ve personally seen the dangers of bloggers and eBay sellers promoting HIV tests and medications that are not FDA or Health Canada approved. This produces disastrous results for the deceived consumer who may use such faulty products. The FDA has some recourse, but monitoring is a huge issue. Then there’s the trust issue, but that’s another posting.
What do you think of the FTC ruling?