FreshNetworks Blog

According to a recent report in Travel Mole, the travel and tourism industry is facing a social media revolution.

The Social Travel Report, carried out by independent media agency Total Media, has found that almost 70% of consumers surveyed use the internet to book their holidays, compared to 23% by phone and just 8% in-store with travel agents.

Those seeking to go away on a break trust complete strangers more than recommendations from the travel industry itself, and most British holidaymakers see the internet as an extension of the word-of-mouth recommendations they receive from friends and family.

Online reviews on social networking sites like Facebook,  or travel websites like TripAdvisor, are now more influential than brochures, advertising, travel supplements and travel agents. And travellers are willing to write reviews, as well as be influenced by them – almost one in every three UK holidaymakers over the age of 16 has written an online review.

Perhaps surprising to some, it is a slightly older generation of consumers who are leading the travel social media revolution. 16-24 year olds are the most likely age group to visit a travel agent, while 74% of the 35-44 year olds who were surveyed use travel websites to book their holiday online.

So in order to regain lost ground, it seems that the more traditional travel and tourism operators need to become more social. Aside from developing a sustainable social media strategy, perhaps a more general message in this age of increased online conversation and heightened word-of-mouth is to engage with customers, not advertise to them.  Share things that would be of interest, encourage them to review your products and offerings, and interact with them online on a regular basis. By bonding with customers through social media, rather then bombarding them with information and sales messages, perhaps more traditional travel operators can enjoy the success of some of their online counterparts.

Some more reading

• Death of the travel brochure as holidaymakers opt for online reviews (telegraph.co.uk)
• Online Reputation Management in the Hotel Industry (blogs.praized.com)
• Facebook and Twitter Change Travel Trends (travelinsurance.org)

Employees are visiting Facebook more than any other site when they are at work, and twice as often as the second most visited site, Google. Research out this week from Network Box, a Managed Security Services company, shows that visits to the social network accounted for 6.8% of all workplace traffic in Q1 2010, exactly twice the 3.4% of all traffic that went to Google. The research is based on analysing 13 billion URLs visited by a sample of workplaces in Q1 2010 and the company behind the research suggest that they underline the fact that IT Managers should be concerned about the amount of time employees are spending on social networks at work.

But the findings are not as clear-cut as this. And they should not be used to add weight to the misguided corporate policy of banning all access to social networks at work.

People are more likely to access Facebook out of work than in work

In March we saw Facebook become the most visited site in the US. With 7.1% of all web traffic (from workplaces, home and all other locations) going to Facebook. A smaller proportion of workplace traffic goes to Facebook than the average for all traffic. And, whilst we don’t have this data, we can infer that traffic from home must be much higher to average in this way.

People are visiting Facebook at work – but are visiting the site less often at work than out of work.

People are much more likely to visit other sites

By saying that Facebook is the most visited site from the workplace hides the fact that many many other sites are visited. In fact people are almost 20 times more likely to be visiting a site that is not Facebook. And because different people use the internet for different things to do different jobs it is unlikely that there are many websites that are common to them all. A law firm might ind that its employees spend the overwhelming majority if their time on legal journals and regulation websites, for example. But the sites visited in an Estate Agency or FMCG business would be very different. By aggregating all of these different people, doing different things in different industries there are likely to be very few common sites.

And let’s not forget that 6.8% of all web traffic is still quite small and could easily all take place during a lunch hour.

Social media sites are not necessarily bad

There is an assumption in some workplaces that social media and social networking sites are necessarily bad for employees. I have seen some internal social media policies that state “We should discourage employees from using social media”. This is dangerous and also denies the benefit that social media can bring to any organisation. Social media is becoming increasingly important for any business – wanting to work with and engage stakeholders, customers and even employees themselves online.

Social media can be scary – and  even business needs to write a social media policy. But the basis of this should not be banning things but encouraging people to use things. Your employees are already talking about your company in social media, talking to customers and representing you. Whether you know it or not and whether you want them to or not. The best approach is not to ban people but to give them training. To tell them what is reasonable and what is not and to encourage them to represent the business appropriately online.

Firms don’t ban employees from talking to other people, answering the phone or responding to emails. But they do give them training on how to do these things and what they should, and shouldn’t, say. They should take this approach to social media and not one that bans things.

Most firms are anxious because they have no social media policy

Most firms are anxious about the amount of time employees are spending on social media sites for two reasons:

• They don’t understand what they are doing on the sites
• They have no policy to deal with it

The simplest thing any business should do is to write a social media policy, and to write one that encourages people to use and to represent themselves and the firm in social media in the right way. The policy should not ban, but should offer training. Employees are using social media already and talking about their employer the work that they do. They should be your best brand advocates online, but banning social media will not achieve this.

Research by Manpower earlier this year showed that 80% of firms have no social media policy. For me this is the biggest concern, not the amount of time people are spending on certain sites relative to other sites.

Does your firm not have a social media policy?

If your firm is one of the 80% without a social media policy then take a look at our previous posts on:

• Why every business needs a social media policy
• How to write your firm’s social media policy
• What to do once your firm’s social media policy is written

Can’t make it to the launch of our Social Media Monitoring Review 2010? We’ll soon be posting the findings from the research into seven of the leading social media monitoring tools – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. In the meantime you can follow the discussions and debates from the breakfast launch below. Join in and let us know your experiences and thoughts on social media monitoring and the tools we are investigating.

So what are social media monitoring tools?

In a nutshell, social media monitoring tools pretty much do what they say on the tin – they monitor online conversations taking place through social media.  They track anything that’s being said about your business or your brand on blogs, forums, Twitter and other social spaces. Each tool is different, varying in complexity and in the way they gather and process the information, as we will show you over the next few weeks.

Our sister company, FreshMinds Research, has been using social media tools to generate customer insights for years. We usually work with FreshMinds Research to conduct social media audits or monitoring when establishing a  social media strategy for clients. So over the next few weeks you’ll benefit from the unique findings of a research company working in collaboration with a social media agency.

We’ll start with the basics and work through our research step-by-step. If at any time you want us to explore a certain aspect in more detail, please let us know. Our next post will explore the basics of social media monitoring.

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010.

This is the fifth post in our Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series. In it we’ll be looking at the issue of duplication, one reason for some of the seemingly large differences between the seven leading social media monitoring tools under investigation – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos.

We saw from the first test in our review that the different tools produced markedly different volumes for the search terms we were using – all associated with Starbucks. The smallest number of conversations was found by Biz360 and the largest by Radian6 – over 11x the difference.

So which tools are reflecting better the conversations and discussions about Starbucks? Is bigger necessarily better? Are the tools with the largest number of conversations the best? We don’t think so.

The difference in volumes is striking. If you were using Radian6 you would get the impression that eleven times as many conversations were going on about Starbucks and related terms than if you were using Biz360. There are many reasons for this and bigger is not in this case necessarily better.

Think about the following: retweets, spam, signatures, adverts. Should these be counted in your study or not? Different tools treat them in different ways and so, as we saw with the issue of location, the actual number of conversations is not always as it seems.

Firstly, there’s the source of the conversation – who did is start with? Is there more than one conversation around the same topic or is someone copying it? Is this the same tweet that’s been retweeted or is it a new conversation? These distinctions are important. If a Tweet contains certain keywords it is often retweeted automatically many many times by ‘bots’ which search Twitter for these terms and automatically reposts them.

How do you deal with spam and adverts – taking blog posts titles or key terms from them and posting them on other sites. Should these be included or not in your counts of conversations? Are they real conversations if they are automatically taken from your site and used on others? Are they important to understand if they are being used in spam sites. Or indeed sites or an unsavoury nature (you know the ones I mean!)?

How many times should a comment in a forum thread be counted? If a comment is repeated in different places or on different pages should it be counted as a new conversation? Indeed if one person posts their comment on multiple sites to try to drive traffic or showcase their point of view should all of these instances be counted as a new conversation?

You need a social media monitoring tool that deals with these and other situations. The tools that identify the most conversations are often not the most useful or accurate. They may include a range of conversations that are irrelevant, spam or double-counted. Whereas any organisation looking to understand what people are saying about your brand online wants a more accurate portrayal of what is being said.

Bigger is not necessarily better and duplication is a serious issue that needs to be addressed in any social media monitoring.

Next…

More detail on these tests, and the results,  can be found in our final report which will be available to download on Friday 16th April. We’re also holding a free social media monitoring breakfast seminar on 15th April in London, where we’ll be presenting the findings of our report, as well as giving practical tips and advice about social media monitoring and the best way to analyse results. This event is now fully booked but you can follow the results live as they are announced on Twitter from 08.30 (London time) on Thursday by following #smm10.

Preparing my keynote presentation for the Dutch Marketing Conference Digitaal willen we allemaal in Utrecht later this month I’ve been considering both the danger of building your social media strategy on tactics (“We need to use Twitter” or “We need to use Facebook”) and also the role of the social media agency. I wrote a post about how long-term success in social media is about more than tactics – the importance of exploring and critically evaluating why you are using social media and how you will measure success rather than jumping straight to tools and tactics. The second part of my presentation will consider the role of the social media agency and how and why they should work with brands.

The best person to represent your brand online is you

It may seem counter-intuitive for us to say this (FreshNetworks is a social media agency after all) but the best person to represent a brand online in the long-term is probably the brand itself and not an external agency. Social media should sit alongside your existing channels of engaging customers and should provide a way for you to have a sustainable relationship with them. You should be having conversations with them, working with them, sharing ideas and learning from them. The power of this engagement being with the brand directly is huge. And the value to any organisation of having a route direct to your customers and stakeholders is great.

However for many organisations this is a daunting prospect. Who should represent your brand? What part of the business do they sit in? How do you engage people online? What do you do if people talk about you? How do you find brand advocates and what do you do with them once you’ve found them? These and many other questions are often raised when brands think about engaging online using social media. And these are jsut some of the reasons a social media agency can help, at least in the short- or medium-term.

Why a social media agency can help your brand online

So, whilst a brand is the best to represent itself online in the long-term there can be strong, pragmatic reasons for working with a social media agency first. At the conference later this month, I’ll be talking through three main reasons but would love to hear your thoughts:

1. When you start engaging online a different set of skills are required

Building a growing social media engagement is hard work. It takes skills and experience to grow a community of people and manage the conversations and discussions in a way that is of interest to the community and of use to you as a brand. Taking the overall strategy and turning this into a set of tactics that you use to engage customers and other stakeholders needs experience and people who have been there before. Once the engagement is up-and-running a different set of skills are required and this is really where the brand comes to the fore.

2. It can be difficult to know where social media sits in an organisation

For many organisations it is difficult to know where social media, and engagement online, should sit. How you organise yourself is often very different to how customers and stakeholders think of you. One of the real benefits of engaging people online is that you can get real insight into your organisation that helps your brand. People won’t split themselves in the same way that you do and so a PR team may find itself being presented with new product ideas, or an insight team with needing to react and respond to customer complaints. This can be difficult and it takes time for social media, and the benefits it brings to your organisation, to be fully realised. A social media agency can act as the glue between you and the people you are engaging online and also help you to learn and to understand where it can fit into your organisation (or indeed what changes are needed internally to make the most of it).

3. Most organisations would benefit from social media skills transfer

Most brands could benefit from learning and practicing the skills needed to engage customers and stakeholders online. The role of the online community manager is becoming more and more established and is one that businesses can hire. The role of the social media manager (in its broader sense) is still developing and requires a number of skills and experiences. You need to know how to engage people, facilitate discussions online, run campaigns, respond in a crisis and to work with customers to co-create new ideas. You also need internal management skills to make sure you engage the appropriate people across your business and engage them at the appropriate point to contribute to discussions online. Finally you need a range of analytical and reporting tools so that you can analyse and report on the impact the engagement is having. Any good social media agency will use a team of people with different skill sets to help you in all these areas, and then coach and mentor internal to raise skill levels internally and transfer these skills to you.

So the most appropriate solution for many (if not most) brands is to work with a social media agency at first but to plan to transfer skills internally and take more responsibility for representing your brand online as the engagement changes in style and nature and the relationships you are building online grow.