FreshNetworks Blog

A lot of people are excited about social media and think it could have a hugely positive impact on their brand, their marketing and communications, the insight they get, the way in which they deal with customer service and many other benefits it can bring to an organisation and to the way it interacts with and engages customers. They are right to be excited, the opportunities are great but brands should not hide from the fact that getting an engaging social media presence takes proper thought, some effort and may take time to embed.

When you are getting started in social media it is important to think carefully about what you as a business are looking to achieve and drive your activities from this, from a business-led social media strategy. Jumping straight to tools and hoping they will work for you often causes problems. Facebook is not always the answer and what works for one brand will not necessarily work for another brand. You need to think about what you want to achieve and choose tools that will help you to achieve this.

A second consideration should be what is possible with different tools and how you can use them in a way that truly benefits you. There is a lot said about social media and there can be a tendency to put up a Facebook Page to ‘do social media’ (or worse ‘to drive traffic and increase sales’). Working with any social media tool, just as with any marketing or communications tool needs proper thought. And with social media people often think you can put things up and wait for consumers to start ‘engaging’ with you. This almost always won’t happen. It is one of the myths of social media. You need to work hard to get engagement going, and have thought carefully first about what you are doing and why.

This great presentation from Bart De Waele of Belgium agency Netlash highlights some of these myths, or as he says the seven “harsh realities” of social media. Its is a great summary of some of the misconceptions people have of social media and some of the education and training that is often needed in a brand when they start thinking about why they should be engaging online and which tools to use. These seven myths are timely for everybody to consider:

1. Nobody reads your blog unless the content is valuable and relevant, you have conversations and you build loyalty over time
2. Your Twitterstream is boring unless you make it interesting with content that is relevant to your target audience and have the right mix of personality and conversation
3. Your Facebook Fan Page will be empty unless you have valuable content, interaction and conversation there
4. Your new social networking site will not be used unless you have valuable and relevant content, give people a reason to engage and build audience diligently with good community management
5. Your great idea will not go viral unless your content is engaging and valuable and people really want to engage with you
6. Users will not generate content unless you make it easy, ensure there is something in it for users who are generating the content and facilitate this with good community management
7. Your employees will not help unless you enthuse, train, encourage and support them

These are harsh realities and the myths that often exist about social media and how it can benefit brands and organisations. Overall they show that tools and technology are not the most important thing when any brand uses social media. Its your content and the people who manage and grow your activity who count. Social media is a social activity and it is having a good and thought-through strategy, and the people to launch and build your engagement online that will make a real difference.

Bart’s presentation is below and is also Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks.

Another day at SXSW, and a good seminar on crowd sourcing and not-for-profits. The ‘Crowd sourcing innovative social change’ session saw Amy Sample Ward, Beth Kanter and others talking about how to use crowd sourcing in a not-for-profit environment, not for fund raising or marketing, but for service and programme delivery. One interesting distinction was between a ‘crowd’ and a ‘community’ and how this impacts the model you use.

As with other SXSW sessions, rather than reproduce the conversations after the event, here are the hand-drawn notes taken during the session itself.

SXSW: Crowd sourcing innovative social change session notes

You can also see Amy’s presentation from the session here:

Read all our posts from SXSW

Drupal, Drupal, Drupal. Ever since I organised the “Drupal for Doughnuts” gathering during social media week back in January, all I seem to hear about is Drupal.

At our nfp and membership breakfast seminar a few weeks ago, Bertie Bosredon from Breast Cancer Care was talking about the benefits of Drupal as a content management system. And while some of the US government’s various administrative bodies have been using Drupal as their CMS system for some time now, the big news for Drupal in the UK was when Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt unveiled Data.gov.uk, a new government website allowing access to public sector data for mere mortals like myself. The Data.gov.uk website uses Drupal web technologies to encourage people to create and manipulate data in clear, imaginative ways – a great validation for Drupal’s adoption of the semantic web.

Here at FreshNetworks we have always believed in the power of Drupal, which is why we’ve chosen to use it as our social media software platform.

Now I’ve heard, time and again, from our Tech team about why Drupal is the best choice for developing online communities, but being a layman and not a Drupaler (I work in Marketing), I thought it might be beneficial to explain, in simple terms, my top 5 reasons for using Drupal as a social media platform:

1. Drupal supports the tools and modules needed to develop a successful online community

In order to engage your community and get them talking to each other you need to provide them with an online arena to interact. With a bit of techie know-how, Drupal can be used to build the various tools that are proven to encourage online conversation, including:

• Blogs: a person or multiple people can publish posts and comment on posts on a regular basis.
• Forums: an area for a structured group discussion about an idea, theme or topic.
• Profiles: people can publish information about themselves to help engage users and make the experience more “real”.
• Wikis: several people can jointly edit a document or group of documents to encourage collaboration and teamwork.

In fact, we’ve used Drupal to develop a variety of different tools and modules so that we can alter the function of the community depending on the needs of our clients.

2. Drupal is open source

Drupal is an open source platform. This is a fancy way of saying that the source code for the software is published and made available to the general public so that everyone can access it.

To me, the benefit of an open source platform is that it is supported by a large developer community. This means that if you use Drupal as a social media platform it’ll be improving all the time – vital in the fast-moving era of social media marketing. And as Drupal is quite a mature platform, it has been through several different version releases so it’s an extremely secure system.

3. Drupal is highly scalable when coupled with a good hosting platform

In a nutshell, Drupal has history of running big websites with lots of content. So you are free to add videos, articles, newsletters and downloads to your online community platform without fear of it crashing.  It also means you can keep on increasing the size of your community and its members.

4. Drupal has great SEO

You don’t have to do much to Drupal for it to be SEO friendly – it has good SEO straight out of the box. You can easily add in page titles, metatags and URLS to give your online community more SEO juice.  Drupal can also be integrated with google analytics so that you can track and monitor the success of your online community.

5. It’s easy to add, edit and change content in Drupal

Once your online community has been built you will want to add, edit and change content on the site. Speaking as someone who barely knows their cascading style sheets from their linen bed sheets, Drupal allows you to pretty much create and update content without any programming knowledge. This means that whoever manages your online community should have no problems changing, adding and altering things, making life easier and freeing up more time for other stuff like growing the community and managing online reputation.

Take a look for yourself at some notable brands running Drupal sites:

• Warner Bros. Records
• Sony BMG Myplay
• FedEx Newsroom

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 February.

1.The Economist on Social Networking

At the end of January, the Economist published a special report on on social networking.Their special report on A World of Connections, provided an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. You can download a free pdf of the report here. Or check out our summary of key highlights in this post.

2. Vodafone, Twitter and the challenges of managing your brand in social medial

An interesting afternoon at Vodafone in the UK saw a tweet on their official @VodafoneUK account that was clearly not the kind of message the brand intended to share with its customers. 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.

Putting aside any short-term issues and negative publicity, there are a couple of things we can learn from what happened to Vodafone. 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.

3. Facebook’s redesign shows how important search is for social networks

In February, Facebook rolled-out a redesigned homepage and navigation to its users. There four main areas where the site had changed: improved use of space n the main panel, made messaging easier, put notifications together in one place, and moved the search box. It is the last of these improvements that is, perhaps, the most significant. Facebook did more than just move the search box, they increased its importance on the site and showed the importance of search for Facebook, and indeed all social networks and online communities.

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.

4. The Matthew Effect – linking and how things become viral in social media

The Matthew Effect dates from the 1960s. It is the theory, first expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. Put simply: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In this post we discuss a great presentation and video from Torsten Henning Hensel that explores the power of linking online and how the Matthew Effect can help us to understand how things become viral and spread online and in social media.

5. Russia: the fourth largest social networking market in Europe

In a post from almost a year ago we look at data showing that Russia was the fourth largest market in Europe for social networking behind the UK, Germany and France.

I’m a podcast fanatic. I listen in the shower, on my cycle to work (sorry mum, I know that’s not safe) and when swimming (using the excellent Speedo Aquabeat). I have tried hundreds of different podcasts to find some that are consistently good. I thought you might like to know my favourites I’d love to hear about yours.

Social Media Podcasts

1. Jaffe Juice and JJTV – author of “Join the Conversation”, Joseph Jaffe is a coherent and straight-forward social media commentator. Some of his podcasts are conversations with other industry leaders which can take occasionally random, but generally interesting paths.
2. For Immediate Release - by Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz. Recorded in the US and UK, this podcast provides a frequent deep dive into weekly events in the PR-focussed social web. I enjoy listening, but always do so at double speed – it’s very long and I feel they can spend more time on issues than necessary.
3. CMO 2.0 Conversations – Francois does an excellent job of securing some superb client-side interviews for these podcasts.  He has a very relaxed style that gets people talking, but sometimes I wish he’d push them harder for more detail or hold them to account on some of their statements

Marketing and Digital Podcasts

1. 3 Minute Ad Age – short and snappy. Often a video from a marketing conference. Wide subject area so it can be hit-and-miss, but great for filling that few minutes of a journey.
2. HubSpot TV – a digital marketing weekly TV show from the lovely people at Hubspot. The show is full of great guests and bristling with sexual tension. I often think I’d like to listen in double time, but being a video, I have not worked out how to do that yet.
3. DishyMix – I’ve been listening to Susan Bratton since meeting her during the Travelling Geeks trip to the UK. She’s an excellent interviewer – never lets her subjects off the hook with wooly statements. Some of the topics veer off into self-help and I do find myself having to fast through the adverts, but in general she gets strong guests and uncovers interesting insights.
4. NMA podcast – now only monthly. A useful overview of what’s been going on in the UK digital marketing scene

Other good podcasts

1. David Maister’s Business Masterclass – everything you ever wanted to know about running a successful services business. I always listen to Maister in the week leading up to my board meetings because he gets me thinking. It’s a bit like having a virtual (and free) non-exec.
2. More or Less, Behind the Stats – Before FreshNetworks I started the research consultancy, FreshMinds. I suspect it’s my background in research that makes this my favourite podcast. Tim Harford, FT journalist and author of The Undercover Economist, brings an indepth analysis of every-day statisitcs and seeks to uncover dodgy analysis.
3. The Bottom Line with Evan Davis is another BBC Radio4 podcast. Some excellent business guests (usually UK CEOs) and gentle probing from Evan make this a good listen. For some reason I find this is always where  start with when going for a run in the park. I particulary enjoyed the recent argument about PR
4. Business Week – Behind the Cover Story – This is the best Business Week podcast. There is also a good innovation one and the Welch Way with Jack Welch. Sadly John Byrne, Executive Editor,  seems to have handed over his host role to others in the editorial team. That’s a shame as he had a wonderful style and eclectic music choice. But it remains a good topical podcast.
5. Economist podcasts – I never find time to listen to all of these. A great shame as The Economist’s journalists deliver sharp insight and a beautiful turn of phrase at every opportunity. Recently I have enjoying their new book of the month episodes.
6. Great Lives – Matthew Paris piecing together some womderful biographies of famous folk with celebrity guests
7. Harvard Business Ideacast – useful overviews of the books that HBR authors are about to publish.
8. TED talks – no list would be complete with out mentioning these amazing set of downloads. some of the world’s most interesting (and random) speakers on topics that range from global finance to microbiology. Ken Robinson is a must-listen.
9. Listen to Lucy – Lucy Kellaway of the FT taking an entertaining swipe at corporate bullshit. If you’re after something more heavy-hitting, Martin Wolf the FTs Chief Economics Commentator, is excellent. But you really have to concentrate. Sadly I’ve had to stop listening whilst cycling as I almost crashed twice trying to decipher his arguments.

That’s my listening list. What’s on yours?

A useful survey from global PR firm Burson-Marsteller this week looks at the ways in which the Global Fortune 100 companies are using social media. The tools they are using and how they are developing a social media strategy. The survey looked at 100 firms in the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and examined how these firms are using social media.

The summary presentation is below, and is Required Reading here at FreshNetworks this week, and the full report can be downloaded here.

The survey highlights the ways in which these firms are using social media and is also insightful in terms of the tools and platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or a corporate blog) they are using. It is interesting to compare the use of the different tools – Twitter is the most popular and blogging the least. And to compare how behaviour differs by regions – particularly the differences between Asia-Pacific and the US and Europe.

Summary findings

• 79% of firms are using at least one of these social media platforms – this figure is higher in Europe (88%) and lowest in Asia-Pacific (50%) – and 20% of them are using all four
• The most popular platform is Twitter, with 65% of firms using this. Facebook and YouTube are next (54% and 50% respectively) with corporate blogs the least used (just 33% of firms surveyed)
• For companies that use Twitter the average number of accounts they are running is 4.2, with some companies (notably AT&T and Nokia) having a large number of accounts – 15 people in the case of these two firms
• For those companies who are engaging, their activity levels are mixed. 82% of those using Twitter have tweeted within the last week, whilst only 36% of those with blogs have added a new post in the last week

Twitter

• 65% of Fortune Global 100 firms have a Twitter account. In Europe and the US this figure is over 70%; in Asia-Pacific only 40% of firms have an account
• Firms are tweeting and average of 25-30 times per week
• Only 38% of companies are using Twitter actively to respond to other’s comments and questions
• In general companies are being followed by many more people than follow them. Typically they have about 1,500 followers and are following about 700 people

Facebook

• Facebook Fan pages are less popular that Twitter, with 54% of Fortune Global 100 firms having a page. They are significantly more popular in the US where 69% of fims have a Facebook Fan page
• Only 59% of companeis with a Fan page are actively using it with an average of only 3.8 posts per week
• The number of fans is higher than Twitter followers, with an average of 41,000 for firms with a Facebook Fan page

YouTube

• Half of all Fortune Global 100 firms have a YouTube Channel. Again firms in the US are more likely to have a Channel and those in Latin America least likely (59% and 33% respectively)
• 68% of firms with a YouTube channel are using it actively, with an average of 10 new videos each month
• Typically, firms are getting 40,000 views of their videos each month and over half of all Channels have comments

Corporate Blogs

• Whilst only a third of Fortune Global 100 firms have a corporate blog, these figures are much higher in Asia-Pacific (50%) and low in Europe (25%)
• The average number of posts per month is 7 (but again much higher in Asia-Pacific: 14), and almost three-quarters of blogs have comments

So the first FreshNetworks breakfast briefing has just finished and we had some great insights into how not for profit organisations (NFP’s) can use social media for strengthening their membership offering.

Breast Cancer Care Case Study

First up to speak was Bertie Bosredon, Assistant Director of Services (Information & Multimedia) at Breast Cancer Care. Bertie has been busy changing Breast Cancer Care’s social media strategy to utilise other social media platforms and contribute to overall integrated structure. More importantly changing the way they use social media to start listening and conversing with people online.

There were some key messages that resonated from his presentation, these were:

1. Have an integrated approach

Breast Cancer Care realise that a lot of conversations that were happening online were not necessarily happening in their space but through working with key influencers on other platforms supplying them with packaged information you can increase your presence online and collaborate with a lot more people.

2. Involve your members in planning

Bertie has been getting members involved in the planning of the current and future use of social media asking them what they would look for when engaging with Breast Cancer Care and how they could work this into a strategy that would best fit their organisational aims. Although a simple concept many companies forget that members and users usually know more about your brand then you do and can deliver some great insights.

3. Aligning all channels of communication

Breast Cancer Care have made sure that the social media strategy that they have been using is aligned with their offline print material so that it doesn’t matter where members go for the information. This means that they can use the channel that they prefer and the message will be consistent.

A popular point from Bertie: it doesn’t matter about the traffic to your site; care about how many people interact with your content even on other sites.

Social media marketing for not for profits

The next speaker was our very own Charlie Osmond from FreshNetworks. Charlie was speaking about how social media can be used for marketing and with specific reference to NFP organisations. Engaging people online is not about going for that quick win viral campaign but to successfully engage people online you need sustainable engagement.

Some key points to take away from Charlie’s presentations are:

1. The importance of the community manager

Engaging people online especially for sustainability requires a good community manager. They need to be able to reach out to people and facilitate discussions on a multitude of different platforms.

2. Know your tools but don’t let them drive your strategy

In order to be able to know what channels are available to you, you have to have a grasp of what’s in the vast social media environment. To create a successful strategy you should be looking at the aims of the business and the needs of the people that you want to engage.

3. To drive word of mouth for a certain cause take the ‘believe, belong and bear witness approach’

A great way to get people involved in a cause is to find people that believe in it, help them become involved in it and then help them bear witness to what they believe in this will help spread the message of the organisation through yours, and their own networks.

Steve Bridger on social media in charities

Finally but by no means least was Steve Bridger. Steve is a social media consultant and has some great (and extensive) history in community management for various charities. One of the more prevalent points of Steve’s presentation was the importance of putting people at the heart of your social media strategy

Some great points from Steve:

1. Help your advocates to amplify their voice

A lot of member organisations were using their current strategy to try and control conversations and go against ‘the flow’ of what people were online to do. They had a clear goal that they wanted to achieve and member organisations should be “enabling and empowering” these people to help deliver your message.

2. It’s about relationships not transactions

Member organisations and more specifically charities are currently set-up for transactions and are very ‘me’ focussed, there is greater value for charities if they position themselves for conversations and engagement.

3. You have to be in it to win it

A lot of companies are hoping for a win in social media what ever that may be but they don’t have a social media policy or ban social media access completely. A restrictive approach rather than a guided one causes bottlenecks at many organisations and restricts valuable internal knowledge.

It was great to see the focus on relationships and emphasis on the value rather then how much money can be made. There were lots of interesting perspectives and too many to write all in this blog post. A big thank you to all the people that attended there were some great discussions and insight from lots of different organisations and another big thank you to the speakers involved.

This week we have been looking at social media for small businesses. Ways in which they can use the social media tools that exist to build their brand, engage their customers and learn about their brand, market and competitors. It is as important for small businesses as it is for large brands to build a social media strategy. And there are many different ways that you can start to use social media to get these benefits.

And social media strategy should be based on what your brand is looking to achieve. Only when you have established this should you start to experiment with different social media tools and will you be able to measure the success of what you are doing. This need not be an expensive and elaborate implementation, some great tools exist for small businesses to use to help achieve their aims with social media and this week we looked at four of them:

1. Social media monitoring and buzz tracking: Any social media strategy should start with a thorough process of social media monitoring. Listening to what is being said about your brand, competitors, market and customers. There are a range of free buzz tracking tools available and setting up some simple monitoring tools is something that any small business should do.
2. Twitter and targeting customers: Twitter is a very flexible tool. Some people think that it is most useful when you are following and being followed by very large numbers of people. But this is not always true and it can be particularly powerful with small groups. You can build a small community of people online who are interested in the same issues and use this to engage customers or potential customers. Better to target and engage a smaller group of people than to try to appeal to everybody.
3. Blogging and brand building: Blogging is a great tool that any and every brand should consider. For many small businesses, blogs are a tool that can help them punch above their weight. The content, themes and information that they share can lead them to be thought of as much larger or much more established than they really are. Blogging provides an easy way for organisations to share their thoughts and their content. And people will respect you for this.
4. Foursquare and customer engagement: Foursquare is just one of a number of mobile-enabled and geo-location social media tools that are being developed. They allow people to connect and share information based on where they are. Foursquare in particular offers great and exciting opportunities to brands. You can find out who is visiting your shop, store, cafe or building and then work out ways to engage them and turn them into loyal customers

These are just four ways in which small businesses can use social media tools as part of a social media strategy. They are all free tools to start using and the posts linked to above contain more details about each of them. Using and experimenting with social media tools need not cost money. The important stages are in the thinking and planning about what you are looking to achieve and so which tools are most appropriate, and then in how you manage and grow your activity in any tool you choice.

Small businesses can benefit hugely from a social media strategy. Plan what you are looking to achieve and how you will measure success, and then experiment!

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Imagine if you could know who visits your cafe or shop on a regular basis. You will, of course, recognise many of these people. The man with the glasses who comes in most mornings for a flat white (that’s me by the way). The two women who always have lunch on a Thursday. Or the family who bring their children on a Saturday. You will recognise some regulars and you will no doubt speak to them and start to get to know them. Social media can help you do this more, and can, perhaps importantly, help you target people who visit sometimes but not yet regularly. This is where geolocation-based social media tools such as Foursquare come into play.

Foursquare is social media tool that lets users say where they are by ‘checking in’ at locations. You earn points for doing this and can see who else has checked-in here. If the location you are at is not yet on Foursquare then you can add details about it and plot it on a map. You earn points and get badges (status) the more times you check in and the person who visits somewhere more regularly becomes its Mayor.

I have been using Foursquare recently and, for example, might check in to the Fleet River Bakery just round the corner from my office when I get breakfast in the morning. Or I might check into Selfridges on Oxford Street in London when I’m shopping at the weekend. I am not yet Mayor of anywhere, but could become the Mayor of any of these places if I visit it most regularly. This is a small but growing tool, and it being joined by more and more geolocation-based social media tools that can be a real benefit to businesses.

Let’s take the Fleet River Bakery as an example. As a small bakery and cafe in central London they face a lot of competition (there are probably about ten similar venues nearby) but they are very popular with queues round the corner at lunchtime. Some people will be regulars and other will visit from time to time. On Foursquare, Fleet River has a profile, whether they set it up or not, and people who go there can check in – putting their details on this profile. For the guys at Fleet River this could be a powerful data resource. If they can attract people to visit them and check in on Foursquare then they can start to see who is visiting them, how often and when. But it can also be a powerful peer-to-peer marketing tool. On Foursquare your friends are told where you are. So when somebody checks in at the cafe their friends will learn where they are and so learn about Fleet River, where they are and what they do. They will also know that their friends go there and, as we know, peer-to-peer recommendation are much more important than anything a brand can say.

Using new and growing tools like Foursquare can be really powerful for small businesses. And if you work with these tools you will get even more out of them. Perhaps on the boards outside Fleet River they should say who the Mayor currently is, and perhaps even offer him or her a free coffee when they next come in. Or maybe offer exclusive discount, or a free cookie, to anybody on Foursquare who checks in.

There is a lot you can do to help people market your small business for you. Much of it free and just making use of the social media tools that are out there.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Many small businesses are unsure about what to put on their website beyond their services team and contact details. They know they need a website but don’t always have the time, resources or content to add to it on a regular basis. It can be daunting for them, and the website can quickly become out of date. Too many websites for small businesses can date and look stale. And this is easy to recitfy.

Blogging is a useful tool for any business. It can help you to show your expertise on a topic. It can provide a less formal way for you to share your thoughts, experiences and ideas. And it can allow you an easy and versatile way to add up-to-date content and thoughts to any website. For any small business this can be a useful tool.

Imagine you run a small chain of hairdressing salons. You are busy, as all small business owners are, but understand the importance of your online presence to attract new customers to walk through your doors. Any organisation, however small, will have things that it is passionate about, and things that it can talk about in social media. In your role as owner of these hairdressing salons, you spend your time split between working in store and visiting suppliers, competitors and events and trade shows where you see the latest techniques and the latest products. Rather than have a simple, and soon dated, website that just states where your salon are and when they are open, you could use blogging to share these experiences and to share your passion for hairdressing.

You could blog each week about the latest trends, you could encourage a trainee in one salon to write about their experiences, you could review new products or highlight new haircuts. Writing a blog is easy for any business, it just needs structure. Our salon could include a review every Monday, highlight new trends on a Wednesday and have a trainee’s diary on a Friday. Every week. Easily and quickly you can start adding 1,000-2,000 words of relevant and interesting content being added to your site each week. Rich in keywords that will help people find your site more easily (and so lead to more people visiting your salons). And showing your thought-leadership and knowledge in the market.

For many small businesses, blogs are a tool that can help them punch above their weight. The content, themes and information that they share can lead them to be thought of as much larger or much more established than they really are. Blogging provides an easy way for organisations to share their thoughts and their content. And people will respect you for this.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here