FreshNetworks Blog

We posted a couple of weeks ago about Facebook fan pages and how more than a third of fan pages have fewer than 100 fans. There are lots of reasons for this – many fans pages are designed to have just small numbers, some are niche or local brands and some are small but powerful groups of people interested in a certain topic.

But for many brands, size is important and they use Facebook specifically for that reason. It is often not the best answer. There are a range of social media tools, techniques and strategies and you need to choose the one that fits your business aims and objectives. Facebook fan pages might not attract the numbers you want or achieve the engagement you are looking for.

This week, Brand Republic interviewed some users on how likely they are to join Facebook fan pages and what they think about brands on Facebook. There are some interesting views in the video below and it is Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week.

What are your thoughts on Facebook Fan Pages?

• Do you join them?
• Where do you think they work for brands?
• And where are they less successful?

As is traditional at this time of year, we’ve been looking back over 2009 and all the enormous leaps of innovation and learning that have happened in the social media space. For some of us old, creaking community managers that have been around longer than broadband, it’s slightly dizzying that the role of ‘community manager’ is creeping into the general lexicon. My mum suddenly understands what it is that I do!

So if 2009 has finally galvanised the concept that online community spaces need managers, is 2010 going to be the year when the role is formalised and ranked as highly as other CRM roles? Will the old broad term ‘community manager’ be split into various roles with tighter definitions and remits?

What will online communities look like in 2010? What will community managers be talking about? What legal changes are bubbling away? We asked some fantastic community managers for their 2010 predictions, and if their thinking comes true, 2010 is going to be a very exciting year.

Roles and responsibilities

Vincent Boon, Community Team Leader at Sony Computer Entertainment agrees thinks roles and responsibilities will become more targeted and defined: “The role itself will become less broad, with community managers trying to cover all the bases, but instead companies will employ different community managers, for their different areas of communication.”

Vincent suggests new roles will spring up around:

• Social Media
• Forum Specific
• Creative Media 
• Conflict Resolution 
• Shaping Conversation/Interest 
• Age group specific 

“Maybe my categories are incorrect, or you can think of many more, but with the role of Community Manager maturing, I believe the role itself will diversify into areas of expertise. Although whether this will happen in 2010 already, might just be wishful thinking.”

Wendy Christie from eModeration tweets: “Earlier involvement/consultation/hiring of CMs in new sites/products, maybe? I’m starting to see that, I think.”

She expands by email: “I think we’re starting to see a more widespread involvement of Community Managers at the early stages of project development. So rather than “we’re most of the way through developing the site which will involve some sort of interactivity – oh bugger, how do we manage that side of it?” we’re starting to see more cases of CMs identified from the beginning as vital members of the team.”

Community and moderation company, TemperoUK, agrees: “Trend = CM will take on a bigger customer service/CRM role”

Moderation

Tempero’s founder, Dominic Sparkes says: “For social media management, 2010 is going to be a year of realising moderation is vital, sentiment tracking will prove ROI (hopefully!) and platform integration will be second nature.”

Ilana Fox, head of Social Media at ASOS says more retailers will be getting into social media. She tweets her prediction for “more personalisation on news and retail sites. Google will cause problems.

“Issues with UK sites launching international versions in terms of moderation and media law.”

Community in Enterprise and Research

Stuart Glendinning Hall points me to Dion Hinchcliffe: “I reckon that Dion Hinchcliff may be right in seeing the role of community manager becoming increasing important in Enterprise 2.0 projects in 2010. Particularly in markets which are already leading on E2.0, such as Germany and the US.”

Andy_buckley tweets that he sees a: “Blurring between panel and communities.” He expands, “as more later adopting clients think about having a community I think they will want both qual (community) & quant (panel).”

Community as a force

Ed Mitchell, Network and Community expert, sees: “Purposeful communities – active groups using collaborative tools to do stuff in their neighbourhoods – like the hyperlocal stuff, transition
towns etc.”

Monitoring

A favourite community manager of mine, Alison Michalk from Fairfax Digital predicts: “The rise of social media monitoring is going to have an impact. I’ve already seen reps start jumping in to respond to statements in my forums.

“I think ‘platform-neutral’ brand involvement is on the rise (clearly there are benefits towards this approach over attempting to build their own community) – and just how this impacts communities is yet to be seen… will we need ‘protected spaces’, how will the merging of people’s personal/professional roles impact the online space in years to come…”

My prediction

I agree with our experts here, 2010 will be the year of more roles, with distinct remits, and a more ‘conversational’ approach within all but the least enlightened organisations. I believe that a studious approach to community will deliver greater understanding of how to measure success and monitor effects, and I believe there are likely to be more community-based roles than real experience out there to fill them.

But at risk of sounding like a doomsayer, my real prediction for 2010 is one of caution. This last year has been great fun, community is (rightly) at the forefront of the best of the web, conversations and connections are starting to be taken seriously and proving their worth at enhancing so many other areas  of business.

Now it’s time community grew up.

All eyes are on us, and there are still grey areas to be ironed out. Every community manager, publishing, curating or editing content from users, needs to have a handle on all the relevant laws and liabilities.

Every community manager needs to understand the business aims of their organisation, and how community fits to them. To be a community manager within an organisation is not to be a renegade, it’s to be a diplomat.

For me, 2010 is going to be the year that we took ourselves more seriously, tooled up legally, and set clearer principles for moderation, and expectations from us and of us.

Agree? Disagree? We’d love to hear your predictions for 2010.

Tim continues his series on Selling Social Media.

You have spent time building an understanding of the business requirements. You have built a short list of prioritised needs; these could be, for example, to grow online revenue, cut support costs, enhance innovation, build the brand, grow customer service, gain partner insight, etc.

It’s now time to move to the next phase of the sales cycle, namely ‘Propose the Solution’. This is the phase that links these business ‘needs’ to the specifics of the social media solution.

A useful memory device that I use in this phase is the acronym ‘NFAR’. Against each Need, align it to a Feature, then explain the Advantage, and finally gauge the Reaction : ‘NFAR’. I use variants of this process depending upon the dynamics of each individual meeting situation, but the basic principle remains the same.

Here’s an example. I am working with an organisation in the air travel sector that needs to market itself outside of the ‘bargain’ holiday brand, i.e. away from its slightly blemished association with ‘laddish’ type short breaks, particularly to some of the cheaper European city destinations, where young people get too much publicity by getting drunk and misbehaving. The marketing director wants to refocus his customers upon those clients (the ‘silent majority’ as he calls them) that enjoy the quieter and more cultural weekend breaks to these same destinations, perhaps visiting museums and local artifacts.

I have proposed a social media solution that builds a vibrant and engaged online community based around this silent majority. It will add tremendous value to them as they share with others their various trip ideas, stories, pictures, blogs, videos, etc.

Let’s look at one social media feature for this social media solution – i.e. the voting feature. So, for example, this will give the opportunity for the community to vote upon the best city museum to visit. Within my NFAR device, this is a social media “Feature”.

I raise this Feature idea, and explain the “Advantage” to the client: The advantage of the voting feature is that this is a simple-to-use capability, that will entice even the most sceptical casual user to simply press a button that registers their vote and, voila, before they know it they are engaging with the others in the community. Even better, if this Advantage can be quantified (e.g. we will gain 1000 extra members of the community) then I am motoring towards a ‘close’, or sale.

But to check that this is of real value to the marketing director, I need to test his agreement that the Feature will have the Benefit, i.e. does he ‘get it’? So, I check, by asking him his “Reaction”. And he says that he loves it, and can really see the value of polling to engage with the community.

Of course, there are many other social media features that I could mention, that could have a similar impact. The polling feature is a simple example that I use in this blog to demonstrate the principle.

I am not yet moving towards the sales close (that will be soon), but first I am methodically addressing the business needs with the appropriate social media features that are relevant, and getting the tick-in-the-box from the client that the social media solution is the answer to his requirements.

Read all our posts on Selling social media here.

The social media agency is on the rise (we at FreshNetworks being one of them!). Most of them are doing different things and have different approaches.

When a brand is getting started in social media, launching a particular campaign or engagement programme, or just looking for advice and support, it’s important to make sure you choose the right agency for you. One that you can work well with. One that offers what you need. One who will help you to realise your aims and expectations. And also one who will be practical and realistic about what you should do and what you can achieve.

Finding the right social media agency can be tricky and to do it you need to get to understand them, their thinking and their work. Below are five questions we think you should be asking any social media agency before you start working with them. They are the things we would ask people, and also some of the things people have asked us in the past.

1. Are you social media pragmatists or social media purists?

There are many ways of approaching social media. For brands, the pragmatic approach is often best. In business time and resources are limited; you need to focus them only on the things that will bring you the greatest return. You should look for an agency that recognises this, that challenges you but that is grounded in pragmatism. That suggests things that you can really do, that contribute to your main business aims and that are the correct focusing of your time and resources.

2. Why do you use social media as an agency?

Most agencies will have a blog, use Twitter and may make use of Facebook,YouTube or other social networks and social media tools. This is to be expected. What you should be asking them is not if they are using these tools, but why they are using them. A social media strategy should be based on core strategic aims. If an agency can’t describe why they use social media (and the business objectives this use supports) then this tells you a lot about how strategic their thinking is.

3. How do you work with people in social media to get real engagement?

This question will give you an insight into their thinking and processes. Social media, and how you use it for brands, is not really about technology at all. It’s about people. How you work with people and online communities is much more important than the technology you use, that should really be invisible to them. Make sure you probe about the actual techniques agencies will use and the experience they have of building and growing communities online.

4. How do you measure social media ROI for your clients?

This is another question that will really give you an insight into how the agency thinks and their approach to social media in general. What you are interested in is their answer. A lot is said about social media ROI and the truth is that it depends very much on what you are looking to achieve; what your aims are in your use of social media. If you are looking to acquire new customer data, for example, you should be measuring one set of things; if you are looking to increase the basket size of orders you should be measuring something else. There is no simple answer to measuring social media ROI and an agency should be advising you that, as well as suggesting the metrics that you should be monitoring and measuring for your particular needs and aims.

5. What’s new; what’s next?

Any social media agency you work with should give you thought-leadership. They should be the ones leading your thinking and challenging you with new ideas and inspiration from other industries and other brands. You have a day job and any social media agency’s day job should be social media. Expect thought-leadership and expect to be challenged. This is a good thing.

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 October.

1. Google Wave vs Twitter at conferences

There has been a lot of talk and discussion of Google Wave as it has spread though invites. For many people the immediate response is: “I’m here; what now?”. In our most popular post in November, Charlie looked at one example of how Google Wave can be used to add real value: as a conference back-channel. We show how at the Ecomm conference delegates were provided with Google Wave accounts. What resulted was a fantastic showcase of collaboration and crowd-sourcing.

2. How to use Twitter Lists as a free social media monitoring tool

Twitter Lists are great. They are adding real and valuable functionality to Twitter and changing the way that people can use the service. In this post we look specifically at how Twitter Lists can be used as a free social media monitoring tool. How you can use them to track promoters and detractors of your brand and know what they are saying and feeling in real time.

3. PhotoSketch or Sketch2Photo, it rocks

A great app developed by five Chinese students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore. It allows you to turn a simple drawing into a photo. There is clearly always a big jump between a video showcase and a working proposition, but it certainly looks good so far.

4. Live TV and real-time chat: X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing

Watching TV is almost always a social experience. Whether it’s people in the room, friends on the phone, Facebook, Twitter or in forums or chat. People talk to people about what they see on TV. In this post we highlight two ways in which Live TV shows in the UK (namely X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing) are using real time chat and online communities to support their live broadcasts. We look at what they are doing and why they might be doing this.

5. Russian social network Vkontakte.ru plans global roll-out

Back in September, we posted about the success of Russian social network VKontakte (В контакте). The site serves 1.4 billion page views each day to its 42 million users, and attracts 14 million unique visitors each month. In one of the most engaged and fastest-growing social networking markets in the world, it is a force to be reckoned with. At the start of September, Vedomosti (Ведомости), the Russian business newspaper, had reported that VKontakte had registered the domain www.vk.com and plans to begin marketing the social network in twelve new markets globally before the end of 2010. One to watch next year.