FreshNetworks Blog

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We’re going through quite a momentous period of change in the UK at the moment. Slowly but surely, the analogue TV signal is being turned off. In it’s place we have digital TV. This is a huge change, not just because people need new equipment to receive the new signal, but also because this change lets us consumer television in the way we have always wanted.

No longer do I have to start watching a programme on the hour. No more must I be in on a Wednesday night to catch the latest episode of The Apprentice. No longer is my TV schedule dictated to me by the broadcasters. They may think I want to watch game shows on a Saturday evening, every Saturday evening. But perhaps I don’t. Digital TV gives the possibility for real choice and control over what you watch and when you watch it.

This reflects a change in consumer behaviour we are seeing across media. When users (consumers) are given the chance to personalise and control their own experience, they use this. This is natural – not everybody wants to do the same things in exactly the same way. And so whether it’s allowing you to personalise a site’s homepage (as with the BBC), tag content in a way that makes sense to you, or choose what you want to see when, personalisation is key.

When we are planning and designing online communities with our clients we work hard to understand the target audience, the people we hope will be members of the community and benefit from being a part of it. However, it is important that some degree of control and personalisation is given to the user – be that letting them arrange their own profile page, choosing which view they see when they join the community, or just giving them an easy and simple way to navigate the site according to the content that matters to them most. Finding ways to allow this kind of personalisation (be it simple or complex) will enhance the community member’s experience. And watching and analysing how people personalise their experience helps us to understand them more too.

Users like personalisation. They like to have some control over how they navigate and use the online community. As their other media consumption becomes more tailored and within their control, their expectations here will only increase.

Image by djfoobarmatt via Flickr

We highlighted Mayo Clinic in a recent post of examples of online communities in healthcare. They are doing great things with blogs, podcasts, video and online communities. That’s why this week’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks is a great presentation from Lee Aase, Manager, Syndication and Social Media at Mayo Clinic. He looks at how the use of social media at Mayo Clinic has progressed and, in particular how it has helped to spread word-of-mouth.

The presentation highlights an important for those of us who work in social media – technology really should be invisible. Whilst the technology you use must meet your needs and aims it isn’t the most important factor in making your use of social media a success. Of much more importance is how you use it, the way in which you encourage people to engage with you and the quality of the content, comments and conversations that you have on your site.

Whether your technology costs zero dollars, or many hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is the way you use it and the way you manage the conversations and engagement that will make a difference.

Some more reading

• Social media experience at Mayo Clinic (fastforwardblog.com)
• Sharing Mayo Clinic Goes to Facebook and other Social Networks (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• Mayo Clinic launches new culture blog (tissuepathology.typepad.com)
• How Mayo Clinic utilizes Web 2.0 (ivor-kovic.com)
• Health Care Meets Social Networking (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• FIR Interview: Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic (nevillehobson.com)

Two-third of marketers in the UK don’t understand social media, according to a survey from McCann Erickson Bristol.

The survey found that almost two-thirds of marketers in the survey felt that they didn’t understand enough about social media to use it effectively in marketing. Despite this, 86% thought that social media was here to stay.

This survey does surprise us at FreshNetworks a little. Over the last year we have we have noticed a real change in the market not only in the UK, but across Europe. There is a growing realisation of the power that social media can have in marketing and the role that it can play. Marketers and brands are becoming more innovative and, to some extent, more demanding of agencies like ours in their use of social media marketing.

It is, perhaps, worth exploring the McCann Erickson survey results in more depth. Of particular interest is the social networks where UK marketers say they have a presence – Facebook is, as we might expect, the most popular, but more than one in every four marketers has a presence in Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube as well. This shows that, even if they report that they are not sure how effectively to use social media in marketing, UK marketers are experimenting. And this is one of the first, and probably one of the most important steps. Social networks and online communities are relatively forgiving environments, and they allow you to experiment with a relatively low cost of entry. And in the current economic climate, innovation and experimentation is what counts.

So perhaps the fact that so many UK marketers feel unsure of how to use social media in marketing is not surprising after all. They are experimenting. Find out what works for them and what doesn’t work. Experimenting with different social networks and online communities, and using these for different purposes. This is a good thing. A great thing in fact. And if they don’t know exactly how they can use social media for marketing, the fact that they are experimenting and trying things is what counts.

Social media is new and the way consumers and marketers use it is still developing. We’re all experimenting. And that’s what makes it exciting.

Some more reading

• Basic Ingredients of Social Media: Video and Photo Sharing plus SATX Social Media Workshop (sociableblog.com)
• Small Business Discovers Social Media (revenews.com)
• Build your own community or go where people are? Do both (freshnetworks.com)
• People are fed up of joining brand pages on Facebook (freshnetworks.com)

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It’s all go here at FreshNetworks; we’ve got online communities, social media strategies and web 2.0 conferences coming out of our ears. And with the social media wave gathering speed across Europe, we’re growing apace to stay on our surfboards.

At the moment we’re looking for two shiny new people to join our team. Specifically we’re looking for a social media project manager and business development manager for our online research community offering. We’re always on the look-out for great community managers too.

If you think you might have what it takes to join the team, then click on the links to check out the full listings or head to our careers page.

Image by massdistraction via Flickr

Brilliant and thrilling though it is, managing an online community is a strange and unusual job. Community managers will find they often fluff their words when describing what they do. That’s because they do so much.

Sometimes, as a community manager, you will feel like a primary school teacher, despairing at squabbles and laying down the rules. Sometimes you will feel like a grief counsellor, as members lay bare their deepest feelings, and you give them a safe place in which to do it.

Sometimes you will want to join in, but know you need to hold back to retain good, safe boundaries. Community members will enlighten you, amuse you and sometimes drive you a little bit crazy. (Which is why it’s great to be able to meet up with other community managers and ‘talk shop’).

And you will be trying to increase the number of members that you have, and encouraging the right kind of members to get involved and become active.

Maybe they’re the right kind of members because they fit a certain demographic, or have an interest in a set niche.

Sometimes they’re the right kind of members because they want to engage and they get the rules.

Sometimes they’re the right kind of members, because they will use a breadth of features and encourage others to do the same.

In a handful of cases, you will get members that tick all these boxes and more. They’re your community champions, they will spread the word about your community and bring in others like themselves – more about them and their fellow members in upcoming blogs.

Community Champions will back you up and support your work and they will make the community their community.

Who can run a community?

When online community forums first arose – perhaps as the natural follow-up to an email list, or face-to-face meetings or even a paper newsletter – naturally a lot of people ‘fell’ into running them.

The early community managers tended to be the practical organised ones that had always ensured the newsletter went out on time, or the good Samaritans that always listened to griping, or waded in when emails got personal.

We’re several ‘generations’ in now, with some of the newest community managers barely old enough to remember a world without mass access to the internet. But the core skills are essentially unchanged, see: The ten commandments of managing online communities.

Humans have always created communities that congregated around a place (such as a school or local pub), around a shared interest (a Bay City Rollers fan club or a football team) or a shared need (new mums, wanting to support each other over coffee and cake or sufferers of the same medical condition).

These communities have either been self-motivated and self-governed (informal but frequent meetings), gently organised and formalised (an unofficial fan club) or rigidly controlled (i.e. school).

The same skill-sets needed to shape, manage and keep-safe these communities (and by keep safe, we mean safe from spats and trouble-makers, just as much as safe from any more serious offences) are displayed by community managers online.

Chris Brogan put together a hard-to-beat list of the essential skills of a community manager.

Lingo and buzzwords

If you’re new to social media and community management, some of the language may seem a bit obscure.

Your community members, especially those who engage in social media a lot, will probably use text speak and standard community abbreviations without blinking. You’ll quickly get the hang of these, but here is just a tiny sample:

• DH – Dear Husband
• DW – Dear Wife
• DP – Dear Partner
• DS – Dear Son
• DD – Dear Daughter
• BBL – Be Back Later
• ROFL – Rolling on the floor laughing

The full list runs to the hundreds, probably thousands, but as with Twitter hashtags and text-speak, it is usually fairly easy to pick apart the meaning.

You’ll find that your community develops its own quirks of language too, for example a pregnancy community will use abbreviations like TTC (trying to conceive) while a niche scientific community will use even more nuanced abbreviations – but as a good community manager, you’ll be soaking up the syntax daily and speaking it like a native.

Next week we’ll be looking in depth at user type and behaviour.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management

Some more reading

• How to Demonstrate the Value of Social Media to Your Boss – Chris Brogan (slideshare.net)
• Top Five Skills a Community Manager Must Have (talkitup.typepad.com)