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.
Last year, a famous thinker in marketing theory was speaking in London and a group of us from FreshNetworks went along to listen to what was said. The speaker had some insightful things to say, the theories presented are useful, but for us and others there who work in social media marketing there was something that seemed just not to be true. The theory presented seemed not to have taken into account the changes we have seen in the world, the way people can share and exchange ideas and information thanks to online communities and social networks, the changing role of brand and consumer. Maybe, we said to each other as we left the session, there is a need to change what we mean and talk abotu when we talk about marketing. Maybe some of the old theories need to be updated and maybe there are some new theories to add in there.
That’s why this week’s Required Reading is a presentation from Alain Thys, a fellow blogger at Futurelab, given at F-Word in Helsinki. He looks at exactly this issue – how marketing can and should change.
The world has changed, but marketing is still applying the principles I learned in business school. This needs to change and this presentation is an “open source” call to help achieve this change.
He presents his thoughts as a starting point to answering the question of what should change and how and wants to provoke a discussion and debate. Seeing and reading this presentation is the first stage to doing this.
This has been yet another week where Twitter has featured high in many discussions – in part thanks to the triple impact of Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s got Talent, the Pirate Bay decision and of course Ashton Kutcher’s one millionth follower. At FreshNetworks we think that Twitter is a great example of how people are innovating with social media – each of these different topics is being made popular by different people using Twitter for different reasons – sharing good content, keeping up-to-date or just following celebrities.
One of the main benefits that organisations can get from Twitter is to use it as an engagement tool – as part of a hub-and-spoke approach to social media and online communities. Use it to engage people and then provide them with a destination to go to or a thing to do. Today, I was presenting on this topic and how to get value from Twitter as an engagement tool and you can find the slides below.
It’s been a busy week at FreshNetworks, with Charlie on Web Mission 09 in San Francisco and me in Paris for the Marketing 2.0 Conference. A great chance to meet people and also to learn, and this week’s Required Reading for the team is one of the presentations given in Paris.
Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach from Edelman presented about word-of-mouth and why it is important to brands. What I like most about this presentation is the emphasis that it places on word-of-mouth not being about technology. Too often, discussions on word-of-mouth revert to the mechanisms by which people hope this will be transmitted – by widgets, social networks or online communities.
Technology is, of course, important, but word-of-mouth is actually a social function. It’s about people trusting and respecting your brand so much that they are willing to put their reputation in line with it – recommending it to friends and peers. It’s about people doing your advertising for you and about helping you gain penetration in markets you could never reach effectively with traditional advertising. And perhaps most importantly, it’s about the outcome, not the process. Word-of-mouth is only useful when people act on what they hear.
On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities, comparing paid and organic search strategies. This is just one of the ways that our clients measure the ROI of their online community – by increased traffic from organic search or significant savings on their paid search bills.
Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. We spend time during the planning and strategy phases working on the objectives of the online community and how we can measure this. This may be increased sales, a specific number of new ideas generated for the business, increased retention rate, traffic to an ecommerce platform, savings in market and consumer research spending… The areas where online communities can contribute to business objectives can be vast and depend on the specific needs of the business. Time spent working on this is time well spent.
That’s why this week’s Required Reading is a great presentation on Social Media ROI from Egg Co. I particularly like the way that they break down an ROI measure into a Success Metric and then into a Goal. This is very similar to the way we work with clients at FreshNetworks, and the examples in the presentation show how this approach to ROI can show the real impact social media can have.
Again this week, Twitter has been high on the media agenda. As is always the case during a time of innovation, brands are experimenting with lots of different ways of using Twitter. Some successfully and some less so. Time will tell which are the most appropriate and which have the highest return on investment, but it is worth all brands learning the basics of Twitter usage for marketing purposes and in particular for PR.
That’s why Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks is Corinne Weisgerber’s presentation on Twitter for PR. Not only is the presentation a clear and comprehensive introduction to Twitter, it also includes case studies of how things can go wrong and right for brands using Twitter (with the cases of Comcast and JetBlue).
Weisgerber details eight ways in which Twitter should be used by brands and begins to detail how they should act for each one:
Tracking
Monitoring
Live-reporting
Journalism
Activism
Public Relations
Political Communications
Crisis Communications
We wrote earlier this week about how brands should use social media marketing instead of email. And any brand looking to innovate with Twitter should consider each of these eight areas in its social media strategy. Weisgerber’s presentation is a great introduction to what you should consider (and it contains video so is best viewed with the sound on).
The presentation below comes from Julius Solaris and details ten ‘commandments’ of managing online communities: from consolidating activities to having an offline presence for your online community. This is a great set of activities that I think help to define what a community manager does and what community management is. It is much more than just moderation of forums, also including strategic elements, such as considering how you monitise a community, or how you work with the different groups to grow and shape the conversations and the benefits all parties are getting.
For us, however, the most important part of community management is really to appreciate that as a community manager you can never control a community. You have to be part of it and work with people as an equal rather than trying to establish yourself as superior. These ‘commandments’ are a great starting point for shaping this kind of role and for building successful community management.
I truly believe that Twitter is growing and that 2009 will see it evolve beyond what we have at the moment. But sometimes it’s interesting to see another perspective. And this video from the Daily Show does that perfectly. It’s funny but as we should expect it’s also insightful.
I particularly like the way it shows the danger of using too many tools at the same time. Everything has its place and the danger with social media is that rather than using it to do the new things it allows us to do, we actually just use it alongside existing tools or replace (or even duplicate) things we do in other ways. But social media really should be much more exciting. We need to innovate and discover the new things we can do with it rather than just using it as a way to do old things.
That’s why this week I’m adding Jon Stewart’s look at ‘Twitter Frenzy’ to our Required Reading. It raises some insightful points about the way we use social media and the way the press and other media are seizing on these tools. It’s also quite funny.
Right. I’m off to tweet about this blog post right now…
Innovation is a good thing and social media and online communities are often a source of great and quite rapid innovation. That’s why, the Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks is this talk at TED from Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. He talks about the innovations we have seen in the use of Twitter, from it’s use as a tool to cover and gather information during live events to the use of hashtags to help share information (such as the impact of the snow in the UK earlier this year).
The importance of innovation in product development is known, and in most cases, the uses that people make of your products will be the greatest of all innovations. For a tool like Twitter it is easy for users to innovate, to co-create their own uses of the tool itself. This is one of the reasons it is so popular and one of the reasons for it’s growth. Different people use it in different ways, and each of these innovations improves the experience for all of us.
This is a great set of slides that look at how the changes in the media landscape are changing the role of advertising and creativity. And how the advertising industry should make the most of this opportunity. The presentation paints a clear picture showing how things have changed and what this means. Looking at the change from a Pre-Industrial to an Industrial society, and then to the Network society we have today and explaining this as a shift in terms of communications from a very localised, face-to-face relationship, through mass-media to an anytime, anywhere communications style.
This change is significant and important, in the context of online communities and social media we can also add: ‘anybody’. With these tools, anybody can communicate with anybody else, at anytime and anywhere. We are no longer constricted by the need to be local and to know people personally to be able to share ideas or to communicate with them. We’re seeing some real changes in marketing, customer engagement and market research based on this change and these opportunities.
This presentation shows how similar changes are being taken advantage of by the advertising industry too. It’s best if you watch it with the sound on.
Image by FredArmitage via Flickr
It’s been a busy week at 
Again this week, 
