FreshNetworks Blog

Wave Couresy of Shutterstock

People have been going mad to grab their Google Wave invites.

The’ve been auctioned on ebay and begged for in Facebook. But my favourite story so far has been the one about Ian Tait losing his Twitter mind: Ian Tait does not have 1,000 Google Wave invites

If you still haven’t got your invite, then go here for the least imaginative way to get one.

PS did you watch the first Wave video? It was good. Long but good. Sadly I was a bit put off by the t-shirts the presenters wore. It made them look like they had sweaty chests.

If you missed the content (and the t-shirts) you can see it here:

Is the world becoming less friendly? Some people might lead you to think so. “People don’t help out their neighbours like they used to”, they might say, “I’d never ask a stranger to help me”. It might be true that in some areas, especially in highly urban communities, people are less engaged with people who live near them. Statistics might show that people are less likely to hitch a ride on a Highway than they were 50 years ago. But at the same time we are seeing people becoming much more ‘friendly’, helping out friends and strangers alike. They are just doing it in different ways.

Social media, and online communities in particular are all about people helping other people because of a shared interest, aim, goal or question. They might help people to find the answers they are looking for, share their own experiences or help people to sort their content and ideas so that the most relevant comes to the front.

In one of the online communities that we run at FreshNetworks, we see such examples on a regular basis. Over the summer there was a particular poignant one. A group of women on a community focused on anti-aging and beauty were blogging about their diets and lifestyles. Then one of the lady’s husbands was rushed into hospital. She blogged about this, going off topic but writing from the heart about what was happening in her life and her trips to the hospital every day. It was wonderful to see the rest of the community rally round, supporting her, giving her advice and looking after her. People who have never met each other offline giving each other real help and support.

The internet, and social media in particular, is designed to allow people to connect not because they know each other, or they happen to be in the same place at the same time, but because they share genuine interests and concerns. People connect around these bonds rather than the happenstance of location or time. This results in an environment where people empathise with people more, and more easily, and want to help them out. Random acts of kindness are becoming commonplace online and with the growth of social media will be more so.

Jonathan Zittrain recently spoke at TED Global on this very issue, about how the internet is made up of millions of random acts of kindness. The video of his talk is our Required Reading for the week.

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

FMCG brands are often some of the most innovative in their use of digital and social media but this great presentation from Helge Tennø shows the importance of staying ahead of the market. And of continuing to innovate what you are doing, to avoid becoming what he calls a Big Lazy Brand.

His presentation outlines five ways to market FMCG brands in social media:

1. Use your marketing activities to impact how consumers feel about your brand, not just what they know about it
2. Build direct connections with consumers, rather than letter retailers have this connection. Engage them and have a dialogue
3. Use your marketing  activities to be part of their life, from home to the office to the store where they finally make a purchase
4. Remember that in social media it is about them and not just about you. This isn’t the place for a one-way conversation or for just telling them things. Ask questions and get ideas
5. Don’t confuse social media with media, the two things are different and need different strategies and approaches

Tennø’s presentation reflects well on the need for brands to move from just thinking about campaigns in social media, to thinking about ways in which they can use it to engage consumers in a sustained manner. For FMCG firms, who often have little direct contact with their consumers, this is of critical importance. Viral videos and buzz can be great, but too often it can leave users remembering the video or the game, but not remembering the brand. Engagement, on an ongoing basis, sees greater return for the brand and is a more effective use of social media marketing.

The presentation is Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks for its great thinking and the number of case studies and examples that it uses. It also highlights what we think of as an over-riding consideration for social media marketing: Digital is not a silo, it needs to integrate with other online and offline activities.

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.

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.

We are big fans of the work of Michael Wesch at FreshNetworks and have previously posted about his great presentation: An anthropological introduction to YouTube. His latest presentation builds on this and looks at the impact that social media sites such as YouTube has on society and also how society is influencing them.

The presentation looks at social theory, a segmentation of why people use YouTube and an analysis of why we use it in this way. A great 30 minutes of insight and learning, and our Required Reading for this week.

Some more reading

• The Web is Us/ing Us – check this video (wordspring.ca)
• YouTube as a Medium for Community (googlesystem.blogspot.com)

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. This week, Isakson updated this presentation and theory for 2009, with an equally good presentation on what’s next in marketing and advertising.

In this he looks at the constantly evolving marketing world and the way that marketing and advertising is reacting to and evolving with this. His basic thesis is that things no longer work like they used to and that marketing and advertising still needs to change to deal with this. For him:

The future of marketing is not about doing and saying things to people. The future of marketing is about doing and saying things with people.

For Isakson, there are a number of ways in which this manifests itself. His presentation is Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week and below, but in summary his thoughts on marketing can be summarised into eight points:

1. The future of marketing is collaborative
2. The future of marketing is generous
3. The future of marketing is experimental
4. The future of marketing is helpful
5. The future of marketing is playful
6. The future of marketing is personal
7. The future of marketing is honest
8. The future of marketing is participatory

I wonder how much marketing is all of these things?

It wasn’t the invention of the printing press per se that caused a revolution; it was when everybody learned to read.

This extract from Antony Mayfield’s excellent WOMMA presentation on social web literacy sums up nicely my thoughts on social media tools. It’s not the tools, per se, that are changing the way we communicate, share information and learn. It is users themselves who are changing – talking in different ways about different things to different people. Tools will come and go, users will develop and change with them.

From this respect, social media literacy is important. We see this in the online communities that we run at FreshNetworks – users are very familiar with some tools and less so with others. They are developing their social media literacy and use different tools in different ways depending on their experience. We also see them develop this literacy – such as has been the case of a team of first-time bloggers.

Technology should be invisible and it is the way that users use the tools that matters. You can have the greatest piece of social media technology that exists, but if people don’t know how to use it then it is of no use. At least not now.

It’s an interesting area that is often overlooked – technology is placed too often in front of users’ habits and the social structure of interactions online. For that reason, Mayfield’s presentation is Required Reading for this week.

Some more reading

• Energising word of mouth through social media
• Steve Woodruff: Getting Started with Social Networking
• Technology, newspapers, the future
• Monster vs LinkedIn vs Twitter battle heats up

As we’ve written before, right now, in the current economic climate, it’s a great time for brands to innovate. In fact it is those brands and organisations who innovate now who are more likely to be on a faster growth trajectory when the economy starts to improve.

The big question for many organisations is exactly how to innovate, how to carve out the time needed to think about the future and how best to work on new ideas, how best to co-create. Whether you are doing an offline event or working in an online community, there is a lot of commonality in how to build a great innovation process. This presentation from Guy Kawasaki at Cisco Live last week presents ten steps to great innovation.

The steps are summarised below but you should really watch the video to see how Guy presents and explains them. There’s something that everybody can learn here, and so it’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week.

1. Make meaning
2. Make a mantra (not a mission statement)
3. Jump to the next curve
4. Roll the dice
5. Don’t worry, be crappy
6. Let 100 flowers blossom
7. Polarize people
8. Churn, baby, churn
9. Follow the 10-20-30 rule
10. Don’t let the bozos get you down

From HappyAbout.info

We were sent a review copy of ‘18 Rules of Community Engagement’ by Angela Connor, which contains very useful lessons for all businesses engaging with – or planning to engage with – their customers and potential customers online.

Angela Connor has boiled down a huge subject into an 18-step strategy. Think of it as an accessible masterclass by a pragmatist rather than a theoretical lecture or high-minded discussion.

Currently Managing Editor of User-Generated Content at WRAL.com, in 2007 Angela launched GOLO.com, the first online community for the top-rated television station in the state which has grown to more than 12,000 members.

Angela has a background in journalism that shines through in her written style, making it easy to follow, conversational and crisp.

Essentially, unlike some ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’ who perform a commentary, Angela has done the hard slog, learned the hard lessons and continues to grow her community day-to-day. Her thinking is fresh and grounded in reality.

Just like we do here at FreshNetworks, Connor returns again and again to the themes of interaction, engagement, conversation. Above all, the importance of getting in the mix, not performing a high-handed role from atop, but being a part of your community, regardless of what the community is formed around.

From the outset, Connor is clear:

“We are now living in the conversation age, where one-way communication is no longer acceptable or desired. People want to engage and discuss, react and interact.

“It is no longer effective to have an online presence without interaction.”

Key lessons:

•    “It takes a different kind of investment to grow community, and a major portion of that investment is TIME.”
•    Community managers need to have “a long-term strategy and a plethora of tools in your toolkit to turn lurkers into contributors and to encourage contributors to ramp it up a bit and move into the zone of those who post ‘very often.’
•    Engaging, asking questions, chatting to members and offering them something useful and interesting is all vital.
•    Look after your members and appreciate them: “stroke a few egos”.
•    Every community has its own culture and set of values.
•    Be open, honest, sharing – and accept and respond to criticism!

With this book, Angela Connor has put together a really handy overview with genuinely useful thinking points to steer community management efforts in the right direction.

Above all else, the breadth of activities she covers for community managers keeps us mindful of just how diverse a role it is, and how important it is to do it right.

ISBN: Paperback: 978-1-60005-142-5 (1-60005-142-1)
ISBN: eBook: 978-1-60005-143-2 (1-60005-143-X)
Published by Happy About®.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management.