FreshNetworks Blog

Social Media Week in London saw a great set of events, thinking and presentations for all things social media. One of my favourite presentations from the week came from an event I wasn’t able to attend: Steve Bridger‘s keynote from the Media140 Third Sector and the Real-time Web event.

Steve’s presentation is based on his experience of working with charities and not-for-profits and highlights the importance of the internal change that must take place in any organisation if they are to make the most of using social media:

1. Social media is disruptive to an organisation. It changes the way you do things, whether you intend it to or not. We see this a lot with organisations we work with at FreshNetworks. Marketing communities often produce customer service queries or ideas; research communities often result in word of mouth about the brand. Customers are not siloed in how they think about your brand or organisation and they way you interact with them in social media cannot be siloed either.
2. Social media is about relationships. It is not about technology but about what you do with it and how you interact with people online.

These observations are as true for corporates as they are for not-for-profits. Social media is not a silo because it is about relationships. It is about how you engage and interact with people on an ongoing basis.

Steve’s full presentation is below and is our Required Reading this week. You can also hear Steve talk at the FreshNetworks Breakfast Briefing on Thursday 18th February: Strengthen your membership strategy with social media.

I’ve always supported Liverpool. And I’m like many modern fans – I watch the game on TV, I follow it online, and I’ve blogged about it on and off for a few years.

However, after a particularly ignominious defeat my girlfriend jokily suggested that I should offer my services as a fan to other teams. Never jokily suggest things like that to me, because I’m stubborn, and an attention seeker. So I did it. What happened next taught me a lot about the reach of social media, and the meaning of being a football fan.

Deciding that I couldn’t possibly follow another football team, I compiled a list of teams in other sports, and in many cases, in other countries. These included:

• UK basketball, ice hockey, rugby and cricket
• US basketball, NFL, ice hockey and baseball
• Aussie Rules

After sourcing email addresses for various different teams, I sent them the following message:

Greetings,

My name is Richie, and I humbly offer my services as your newest diehard fan.

Allow me to explain. I have been a fan of Liverpool Football Club since I was old enough to know what football was. I have loved the team and the club every day since. Until now. I have been concerned for some time about the takeover of the club by Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and the declining performances of the team under manager Rafael Benitez. This week, in the wake of an abusive email to a fellow supporter by Tom Hicks Jr, a member of the board, and the extra time capitulation to Reading in the FA Cup, I’ve finally given up on Liverpool FC, and am hereby tendering my resignation as a fan. While some part of me will always love LFC, I resent being seen as a cash cow by the club, who have loaded LFC with debt, to the detriment of the team.

Therefore, being done with both LFC and football, I am on the lookout for another team to love – and you could be it. I have many good qualities:

• I’m loyal (provided you don’t sell out to a bunch of cowboys and consistently trample on my dreams with scorn and impunity).
  
• I’m articulate – I prefer to rebuff opposition fans through wit, and therefore defuse trouble, rather than cause it, and act as a sophisticated representative of the team.
• I’m on the rebound.
• I’m keen – I bring much enthusiasm to my role as fan.
• I buy lots of merchandise, no matter how gaudy (I have both the ecru and canary yellow LFC away strips – that’s loyalty).

So what do you say? I’m casting my net wide, so why should I be your new biggest fan? Think about it – you won’t regret having a fan like me.

All the best
Richie

I started getting replies – Worcester Wolves basketball first, then Buffalo Bills and Houston Texans in the NFL, then loads of other teams all wanting me to be their fan. So I replied to some and also decided to start a blog called “Your New Diehard Fan”, with a sense of irony that got a little lost in the social media ether. I thought it would be clear that I was partly joking about quitting Liverpool, but apparently not. I just hadn’t considered the power of the internet and using social media for anything football related….

After blogging my responses for a while, I decided to boost traffic by emailing the Guardian’s Fiver – a daily satirical football mailout that gets sent out at 5pm every day. And, surprisingly, they decided to print my letter and a link to my blog.

At 16.59 that day, my blog had received 15 hits. By 17.30, it had reached 1,500 hits. My traffic for that day would end up being near 3,000 unique users. This continued for days, with word-of-mouth spreading like crazy.

I was contacted by an online ad agency that wanted to advertise on my blog. Comments were pouring in from around the world, recommending teams and sports. It was fun.

But while the Guardian was the main source of traffic to my blog, there was another site that was sending nearly as much traffic my way – an influential Liverpool FC fansite. And it was not complimentary. There was some serious verbal abuse – I was pilloried for abandoning my team and vilified for blogging about it. Even when I posted a reply laying out the jokey nature of the endeavour, I continued to be attacked.

The whole episode taught me something about football, social media and the internet. All human life is there on the internet, and social media has enabled one bored idiot to both engage and enrage thousands of people.

There were so many lovely comments from the teams themselves, and from people commenting on the blog, many of whom would leave their email address and twitters – in short, they connected their comments to themselves in a more concrete way via social media. It was heartwarming. But it also showed me how many people hide behind the anonymity of the internet to say things and espouse opinions that they would not dare to say in person. Maybe that anonymity is liberating, but I couldn’t help but think that the reaction of some of the fans was excessive. What it does show is that if you want to succeed in the social media sphere, you need to know your stuff.

Sometimes it seems that the internet is full of people who talk a lot, with nothing to say, and that messages can get lost and ignored. It was interesting to see how something which started out on a whim could get noticed with so little effort. But I might keep my head down for a while…

Guest post by Richie Jones from FreshMinds Research

It’s been an interesting afternoon for Vodafone. Their VodafoneUK Twitter account has attracted a lot of attention after one Tweet in particular stood out from their usual customer service conversations online. In between the Tweets resolving network coverage and other queries one stood out. You can read about what was actually said elsewhere. But, in addition to some rather questionable grammar, the message was offensive and not appropriate for a brand’s Twitter stream at all. It was clearly the work of either a hack, a case of very bad judgement, a disgruntled employee or an inappropriate sharing of passwords.

The official response from Vodafone (as you can see from almost every message they have sent since on Twitter) is that it was a breach of rules by an internal member of staff and that they are dealing with it internally. This is the kind of PR that any company doesn’t want, and as it was done through Twitter it will no doubt be held up by some as one of the downsides of social media and of engaging with customers online in this way.

Putting aside any short-term issues and negative publicity, there are a couple of things we can learn from what happened to Vodafone today. First in how you should manage your use of social media as a brand, and second in how you should respond when things go very wrong.

Managing your brand in social media

We’ve posted before about how to write your firm’s social media policy and, perhaps more importantly, what to do once your firm’s social media policy is written. The basic principal is that it is the quality of your staff and the relationships they make with customers that will make all the difference. Not the technology you use or any technological solutions you put in place. The general principal is that if you trust your staff to represent your brand in traditional media, then you should be able to trust them in social media.

Of course, Vodafone may not today be able to empathise with this and there are some differences. Notably that anybody with access to a Twitter account will be able to say something that is immediately and directly communicated to customers. This is a huge responsibility and one that people should not take lightly. But it is a responsibility that brands should give to their staff and one that is most important when building your brand online and in social media. Whilst there are many agencies out there who can help to manage your brand online for you, with the appropriate training and support (which may need to come from a specialist social media agency) the best person to represent your brand online are your own employees.

The key things here are:

1. Have a culture where social media is acceptable. Encourage your staff to use social media so that they become comfortable with it and that is becomes part of your culture. This is a big shift for many organisations and one they are often nervous of.
2. Have ongoing social media training across the business. Things change and they change quickly in social media. A firm that wants to position itself best online needs a regular and ongoing set of training and ideas and knowledge share. Try things out and share what works and what doesn’t for your brand.
3. Trust people but have a very clear policy in place. You should trust people to interact with your customers online but be aware of what they are doing. It is not one-to-one communications, nor is it always one-to-many. You are talking to one person but in a very public environment. Recognise this and have policies and processes in place for this new way of communicating. But make these policies simple and clear to understand.

And whatever happens you need to be aware of the risks and have processes for dealing with them. Social media is growing and changing rapidly and as such can be a very forgiving place if you approach things in the right way. Everybody is experimenting and will often forgive you if things go wrong and you handle them in the right way. For me this is what Vodafone got right.

What we can learn from Vodafone’s response

When things go wrong the way to respond to it can be simple. Vodafone did two things that all brands can learn from. Whilst there will be discussions, debate and probably some negativity about what was said this afternoon for sometime, fundamentally, Vodafone should not suffer too much damage, because:

1. They responded quickly and said what was happening. In social media, people can spread messages quickly. Vodafone also responded quickly and said exactly what happened and was happening. It wasn’t a hack but an internal employee and that person was being dealt with.
2. They responded in the same place that people are talking about them. Vodafone responded to its Twitter followers on Twitter, using the VodafoneUK account. The key to crisis management in social media is to respond where people complain. Otherwise you risk alienating them and losing your role in the story.

So lots that we can learn and lots that they got right. But no doubt a challenging day for Vodafone today.

Some more reading

• Vodafone suspends employee after obscene tweet (guardian.co.uk)
• Top five Twitter gaffes (guardian.co.uk)
• Vodafone suspends employee over obscene Twitter update (telegraph.co.uk)

Many people will have woken up this morning to another change to the Facebook user interface. You can read more about the redesign over on Mashable, but in summary the social network has:

• Improved its use of the main panel across the site, but especially for displaying photos. These are now displayed larger and more prominently
• Made messaging easier – taking it from being on a separate page to being a drop-down on any page. Giving the user immediate and convenient access to their inbox
• Put all notifications in one place in the top navigation – messages, updates and alerts now all show together in the top navigation
• Made the search box much more prominent

This last change is, perhaps, the most significant. It is much more than just moving and making the search box larger. It shows the importance of search to Facebook, and indeed to all social networks.

Why search is important in social networks

Social networks and online communities generate a lot of content. In online communities, people are there because they share similar interests, experiences or concerns. They are connected by content and so this content tends to be focused on a set of topics, subjects or questions of interest. In social networks, people are there because they are connected to each other because they know each other, have worked at or been to the same place, live near each other or have some other connection other than just the content. In these places, content will be about a range of disparate subjects, discussed by different people at different times and for different reasons.

The approach to findability in these two environments differs. In online communities search is important, but of equal importance is the way you structure the site, and the way you use taxonomies to arrange and sort content. In an online community for people interested in organic food, for example, you might organise your content so that all your recipes are together, and so that you can easily find all content about sweet potatoes. In a social network it is less easy to organise and then find all the content in this way. So it is less about structure and taxonomies and more about very good search.

Facebook is a great example of a social network where good search would make a huge difference to how much use it can make of, and how much value it can get from, all the content added to it every day. The company’s own statistics claim that 3.5 billion pieces of content are added to the social network every day. If I want to find all the content about, for example, one topic or issue it is currently very difficult for me to do so. Search should be the answer to this. If I search for ‘Holborn’, I want to find events in that area of London, public conversations about it, photos with that place in the description, pages talking abotu Holborn and so forth. Maximising the benefit of all this content will make a huge difference in the way people use the site and the way Facebook can use this content.

Facebook’s more prominent search box is much more than just a design change. It reflects the absolute importance of search in social networks. They are different to online communities where structure and taxonomies can help people to find content across the site. Facebook is huge, but to many of us feels very small. We mainly access content through feeds, messages and notifications. Training us as users to make search an integral part of our Facebook experience will make it a much bigger and more useful tool for us all.

Both not-for-profit and membership organisations rely on their members.  There’s just no getting away from that fact. And in order to increase their membership base both nfp and membership organisations need to interact with the public to gain support.

Several charities have already turned to social media as a way of engaging people. A  recent article from Third Sector reported that charities are using blogs, forums and other social media tools to highlight their key aims and encourage word-of-mouth . Large charities like Cancer Research, Amnesty International and ActionAid are all using social media, in particular, blogging, to increase their online presence. But are they using social media to actively strengthen their membership base or is it just another communication tool?

And what about membership organisations? Membership organisations are traditionally viewed as a source of specialist information and advice. They also provide an arena for networking with people who have a similar interest, profession or background.  Today, however,  many of these services are offered elsewhere for free. Search engines give people the ability to look up detailed information on the web.  Social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, allow people to reach out and communicate with people “like them”, giving them the opportunity to seek advice and to interact with each other without the need of a third party.

So as more and more people use social media tools to interact and connect with like-minded people, membership organisations need to develop a social media strategy to harness and utilise these connections.  Membership organisations need to join the online conversation. They need to use social media to engage with the people who would be interested in joining their group – and often these people are already talking to eachother, so this should be easy to do.

With this in mind, we’re running a free breakfast seminar for nfp and membership organisations on how to strengthen membership strategy with social media.  The event starts at 8.30am on Thursday 18th February and will include useful tips, advice and case studies from the likes of  Bertie Bosredon, Assistant Director of Services at Breast Cancer Care, and Steve Bridger, Social Media Consultant for nfp and membership organisations.

If you’re an nfp or membership organisation and you want to find out how you can strengthen your membership strategy with social media you can register below for the event.

Strengthen your membership strategy with social media

• Location: FreshNetworks, 229 High Holborn, WC1V 7DA,  London (map)
• Date and time: Thursday February 18, 2010, 08:30-10:30