Ethnography in Social Media: Language

From Ebonics to Standard English (SE) to regional dialects, accents and contractions – all are elements of our daily lives in an urban setting.The larger the city you live in, whether it’s the U.S., Canada or Europe, the more ethnic groups we find and the bigger the challenge in Social Media engagement. Executing a Social Media campaign in one language is hard enough, crossing multiple cultures in one urban area is another. Continue reading »

Why Search Engines Aren’t Media Monitoring Tools

Some Social Media  consultants will tell you “hey, just set up Google Alerts and do some occasional checking across search engines, it’s all you need!”. There’s two major flaws to this approach.

1. Regional Result Changes: Google, like other search engines, collects massive amounts of data constantly. To help manage this load, Google, among others, have data centres scattered around the world. If you try a search string in Atlantic Canada you will get different results from New England etc. This effect can be seen with Google Alerts for news and other data as well. The same impact is seen with Bing and Yahoo! While you may get some data, you’ll miss a lot more. Perhaps what is critical.

2. They Don’t Dig Deep: Yes, the search engines dig into a lot of content, but they miss a lot of newsgroups, Bulletin Boards, Usenet, .alt discussions and all of the Social Networks, such as Facebook Groups and Fan Pages. It’s these places where the deeper discussions about your brand, service or organization are often taking place. In fact 95% of the monitoring or “reputation management” solutions out there also miss this critical data.

3.The Context and Sentiment is Missed: Search engines just deliver results, they don’t care if it’s good or bad. That means a human resource needs to read, analyse and place into context all that information. Is that an effective use of time?

4. The Flow of the Conversation: It’s often to also understand the “flow”, “spread” and valleys of a conversation to gain perspective. Search engines don’t provide this. Neither do most reputation management solutions.

5. It’s Getting Too Local for Search Engines: With smart phone usage growing and increased free public Web access, the Web is becoming very local. As this trend continues, consumer search engines will face a challenge in keeping up. Alternative local search engines may help. But reputation management and online brand monitoring solutions have yet to catch up to small and local as well.

6. The Commercial Ecosystem Bias: That’s a fancy way of saying “search engines are more likely to deliver results in Social Media services from applications that they own.” For example, Microsoft owns Bing, and LiveJournal; if the content is “relevant enough” Bing will be biased towards LiveJournal to increase the chances of advertising click through on their ad network. In our analysis of Google, Bing and Yahoo! we found a 46% bias on the same search strings to deliver search providers ecosystem relevant content. We’re just sayin’.

In the end, we’re saying that doing the odd Google or Yahoo! search and not finding anything about yourself or your business is a dangerous way to approach understanding your reputation or leveraging a reputation management service. Food for thought. What do you think?

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Director)

Ghost Writing for A Client in the Social Mediasphere

We’re often asked by a client “can you ghost write for me, cause we a) don’t have the time or b) no one here is a good writer.” Our answer is that we’re happy to do some writing, but never as a “ghost.” It would certainly be easy to do so, we’ve seen it done. We’ve also seen how it can bite back. Hard.

There are several ramifications to ghost writing for a company blog. Some of these we note are;

• Legal: As a ‘ghost” writer you are “representative” of the clients “voice” and there are potential legal hazards that could lead to trouble for the writer and the client. This should be discussed with the client and indemnification written into a contract if this avenue is pursued.
• Consistency: if you’re ghost writing for a blog, how long will the client want you to write for? There may be issues around the consistency of tone & manner, length and detail. Once you stop, and a client may not have the patience required for a blog to become effective, there can be consistency issues.
• Honesty & Reputation: Social Media is about emotion (see a good post on Collective Thoughts on this issue) and as such, when people read a blog and discover it was a ghost writer, especially for a business, they may feel “spun” and you may subsequently be coaching a client through a Social Media crisis situation. This perhaps, is the most important point, for reputation is everything and this is compounded in Social Media.

In our case, we are open about who we are when writing on a blog for a client, and why we’re doing the writing. We engage in the discussion and if the client is just engaging in Social Media it puts a more human face on the client, avoiding the One Way communication syndrome pre-Web 2.0 days.

What might you add to this list? Do you disagree? What is your experience?

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)