FreshNetworks Blog

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.

Image by ullrich.c via Flickr

Sometimes, if not most times, the best solution is also the simplest one. Why develop a complex device to connect two irregularly sized shapes when a bit of sellotape will do? Why ask people a series of complex questions about improving your product when what you really want to know is “how could we do things better”? And why provide complex levels of interactivity and engagement on your website when all you want is to get a few conversations going?

At FreshNetworks we are strong believers that simplicity sells. But, of course, simplicity is difficult. It is very easy to build a complex online community with many ways for people to engage and many ways for brands to talk to them. It is less easy to design and implement a simple site, one that is designed perfectly to get the benefits the brand wants but enables users to interact in a way that is simple and intuitive. Good design is important and good design is simple design. It’s the getting there that’s difficult.

This presentation from David Pogue (given at TED in 2006) looks at the value of simplicity in technology, and is our Required Reading for this week. It shows the value of simplicity (and perhaps also the value of a good song at the start of a presentation).

Image by LiminalMike via Flickr

We wrote last month about the Zappos story, about how they have used customer service to extend and enhance the customer experience and how this has had a positive impact on sales, satisfaction and growth. This example highlights the power of customer service – of listening to and then rewarding customers.

We know the real benefit that a brand can experience from engaging with its customer directly through online communities. Both in terms of the insights and ideas you can get from them, and also the way you can amplify word-of-mouth and build loyalty with them by listening to what they say and responding.

But even more than that. Customer service – listening to customers and having a direct dialogue with them – is a form of marketing. And an effective form of marketing at that.

This week’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks is a presentation Lane Becker from Get Satisfaction, delivered at Next09 that looks at exactly this issue. For Becker, customer service is marketing, and for brands who get this right, it is characterised in three ways:

1. You put conversations at the centre of your business – focus on exchange of ideas and information, in your business and with your customers
2. You get better at a smaller range of things – you can’t solve everything so you focus on the things that make a real difference to customers (which you identify by having a real dialogue with them)
3. You break down silos – customers don’t see a business the way many businesses are structured, so when they want to interact with you silos can get in the way

Some more reading

• Customer service is such an important job, perhaps we should spread it around (myventurepad.com)
• Follow-up on “Get Satisfaction, Or Else…” (37signals.com)
• Customer Service Is Defined By Customers (staygolinks.com)
• next09: The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer (designmind.frogdesign.com)

Image by djfoobarmatt via Flickr

We highlighted Mayo Clinic in a recent post of examples of online communities in healthcare. They are doing great things with blogs, podcasts, video and online communities. That’s why this week’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks is a great presentation from Lee Aase, Manager, Syndication and Social Media at Mayo Clinic. He looks at how the use of social media at Mayo Clinic has progressed and, in particular how it has helped to spread word-of-mouth.

The presentation highlights an important for those of us who work in social media – technology really should be invisible. Whilst the technology you use must meet your needs and aims it isn’t the most important factor in making your use of social media a success. Of much more importance is how you use it, the way in which you encourage people to engage with you and the quality of the content, comments and conversations that you have on your site.

Whether your technology costs zero dollars, or many hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is the way you use it and the way you manage the conversations and engagement that will make a difference.

Some more reading

• Social media experience at Mayo Clinic (fastforwardblog.com)
• Sharing Mayo Clinic Goes to Facebook and other Social Networks (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• Mayo Clinic launches new culture blog (tissuepathology.typepad.com)
• How Mayo Clinic utilizes Web 2.0 (ivor-kovic.com)
• Health Care Meets Social Networking (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• FIR Interview: Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic (nevillehobson.com)

Image by FredArmitage via Flickr

For any brand using social media, an important first stage is to find out what people are saying about you online and then monitor these discussions and conversations. You can build on these, engage the people talking about you and learn from what they say.

We’ve looked before at how to react if somebody writes about your brand online. Today’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks looks not at how to respond but the types of conversations themselves. The presentation below, from David Alston of Radian6 looks first at the worries and objections that people can have to using social media, and then moves on to the ten conversations to listen for in social media:

• The complaint
• The compliment
• The problem
• The question or inquiry
• The campaign impact
• The crisis
• The competitor
• The crowd
• The influencer
• The point of need

Search for conversations about your brand today and see which of these conversations you find.

Some more reading

• Understanding the Social Process (crystalware.wordpress.com)
• Monitoring and Measuring Social Media (ducttapemarketing.com)
• The Future of Social Media Monitoring (readwriteweb.com)