FreshNetworks Blog

I recently chaired a roundtable on social media in the travel industry for Travel Trade Gazette where agents, providers and those working in PR in the travel industry discussed best practice use of social media and also what they hoped and thought would happen in the future.

The travel industry is a great place for social media innovation, as is seen by the many examples of online communities in the travel industry. Consumers tend to search for information and advice before making a purchase and want advice from people that they recognise as being like them. If these people like that particular hotel, resort or country, then I might too. And travel is an industry which generates a lot of stories, media and experiences, which are perfect for people to share with others. So people are looking for information to help make their purchase, and other people are generating a lot of stories, pictures and media. If organisations get it right, travel should offer a real opportunity for innovative and effective use of social media.

This week’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks comes from David Griner, and looks at how the role of the traveler has changed with social media (and the rise of what Griner refers to as the Traveler 2.0) and at how organisations in the industry can use social media to leverage this growing breed. The basic advice is the simplest (and best): encourage customers to share their stories, interact with them when they are doing it and start your own stories.

The presentation is below and is great for it’s look at how traveler (and consumer) habits have changed, but especially for a wealth of examples of great use of social media in the travel industry.

One powerful use of online communities is to help get new ideas into a business; taking advantage of the fact that many (if not most) of the best ideas for your business are likely to come from outside, from people who don’t work for you. There are some well know examples of businesses working with consumers on co-creation in this way: MyStarbucksIdea and Dell’s Ideastorm being among the most well known.

Most of these sites use a similar process: people can join the community and then suggest their own idea, comment on existing ideas or vote for the ideas that they think are best. The best, most commented on or most voted for ideas are then responded to by the brand. They are an effective way for businesses to get ideas into their business and, more importantly perhaps, of showing customers some of their internal decision making and letting people who buy the product understand more about, and even influence, the processes by which it is made.

Like any good online community, such ideas sites work best when they work with other social networks – interacting with people on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, in forums and blogs. Going to where relevant people are and harvesting their ideas, encouraging them to come to ideas site and add their thoughts. This hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement is a classic and successful way of engaging people online, and a recent ideas site has gone one step further and integrated this model into its functionality.

Last week, Californian Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced the launch of MyIdea4CA.com, an online community to harvest and evaluate ideas for the State of California. The site has much of the same functionality that we have seen elsewhere: the public can suggest, comment on and vote for an idea. The difference with this site is that the ideas are submitted in the first place not by signing up for the site, but by posting the idea on Twitter with the hashtag #myidea4ca. You can even sort your idea by adding an additional category hashtag; so if your idea is about education you use #myidea4ca #edu. The site then pulls in all of these tweets using search and allows you to sort, read, comment on and vote for them.

Using Twitter in this way is a great way to increase the number of initial ideas submitted to the site, lowering that initial barrier to engagement by using a place where people already are (Twitter) to bring them and their content to a new place (MyIdea4CA.com). If you want to comment on, or vote for, ideas you still need to do this on the main ideas site, but to submit an idea you do not.

This certainly will help California to get more initial ideas, removing that barrier and allowing people who want give an idea to use Twitter to do so. The danger, of course, is that people who are not on Twitter are excluded from taking part. Whilst the Twitter population continues to grow, it is still far from a mass market tool and so restricts, perhaps quite significantly, participation in this ideas forum.

Of course, that could be said of many online communities and other ways in which organisations engage customers, stakeholders and the public online. But by mandating that all ideas must be submitted via Twitter does exclude a large proportion of online users in California. Whilst the use of Twitter is a great and fantastic example of how and online community can work with social networks to maximise participation, it is better if there are multiple ways of allowing people to engage. Let some people submit ideas via Twitter but allow others to submit them on the site in other ways.

A cardinal rule when you are building and growing an online community is that technology should be invisible. You shouldn’t put technological barriers in the way of sharing ideas. Whilst the use of Twitter on MyIdea4CA.com is a fantastic example of how organisations can engage people through this site, as an online community it is missing out on the opportunity to engage more people in different ways.

Some more reading

• How organisations can use Twitter – some ideas (freshnetworks.com)
• MyIdea4CA shows both the power and limitation of opening up to the crowd (thisisherd.com)
• The Governator Live From Twitter HQ Today. Has His Twitter Service Already Gone To Pot? (techcrunch.com)
• EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Schwarzenegger Launches Twitter Powered MyIdea4CA (mashable.com)
• Crowdsourcing Ideas: Apparently Marijuana Is All California Needs (cloudave.com)

Day 6 - Night hunting by Mourner via Flickr

On a LinkedIn discussion about community management, a great comment was made about the importance of understanding foreign cultures when moderating international communities, such as those around football tournaments.

Very true. But I would expand it. As a good community manager, and especially as someone with a moderation role, you must think regional. Very regional.

When I was at school, I had a headmaster that was very proud of his Liverpool roots. One day, when talking to us about linguistics and on one of his lengthy preambles, he mentioned a ‘jiggerrabbit’.

Being a class of Devonshire teenagers, we stared at him blankly.

A ‘jigger’ is Liverpool slang for ‘alleyway’. A ‘jigger-rabbit’ is slang, therefore, for a cat.

It’s a great word, and a great example of how a word can simply not exist outside of a very tight radius on a map.

Now if I saw ‘jigger-rabbit’ in certain contexts, as a moderator who has been to Liverpool maybe two, three times in my life, I may well have thought it to be an insult.

Imagine seeing the phrase ‘black jigger-rabbit’. How does that sound to you? It means ‘black cat’, of course, but if you didn’t know the meaning, you could jump to entirely the wrong conclusion.

A good community manager gets to know their community inside out – and let’s not forget that communities themselves have their own little cultures and phrases too – and that includes letting yourself pick up on these nuances.

It’s impossible to learn every slang phrase across the world, of course, but you can pick things up, you can check unfamiliar words that don’t sit right.

The brilliant Urban Dictionary is one to add to your toolkit, as is www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk.

As a community manager, you need to develop a keen eye for these dialectical delights, otherwise they could turn around and bite you on the Queen Mum.

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in August.

1. How to write your firm’s social media policy

Our most popular post is August outlines five things to consider when writing a social media policy for your firm. At FreshNetworks, our approach is to keep things simple and to make them inclusive. Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. Oh, and make sure your policy encourages your employees to use social media more and not less.

2. What’s next in marketing and advertising

Last year we highlighted a great presentation from Paul Isakson on the future of marketing and advertising, where his argument was that advertising was dead and the future was marketing. In August, Isakson updated this presentation and theory for 2009, with an equally good presentation on what’s next in marketing and advertising.

3. Why every business needs a social media policy

In August, ESPN’s social media policy came in for some criticism from people who felt it was too harsh. But the truth is it is better to have such a policy than to have none at all. We are looking at a new medium which is letting people communicate in new ways. It is like the conversation with a friend in a cafe, just taken to new levels, reaching more people and being significantly more shareable. This should be a risk for all firms. We don’t need reminding of the examples where employees have posted a video that has embarrassed their employer, or a Facebook status that has lost them their job. Firms need a policy on social media and part of this policy should be guidelines for their staff.

4. Storytelling and social media

Social media is about conversations. It’s people connecting, interacting and sharing content. And whether it’s online or in the real world, the most engaging conversations involve other people’s stories. In this post, Charlie Osmond looks at what makes storytelling so important in social media and shows how a story can sometimes be told as effectively in a picture as it can be in words.

5. Dell makes $3 million on Twitter. What can we learn?

Dell has reportedly made $2 million in sales directly from their @DellOutlet Twitter stream, and a further $1 million from sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere. That’s $50 in revenue for every Twitter follower they have. In this post we look at three reasons why Dell has been so successful with Twitter and what others can learn.