FreshNetworks Blog

Snapchat seems to be attracting more interest recently with more users of and more questions about the mobile sharing app which allows you to send images and text (‘Snaps’) to contacts with an ‘auto-destruct’ after a few seconds. In April, CEO Evan Spiegel announced that 150m photos were shared each day, and the app has come under investigation as to whether the images actually do auto-destruct. There is also a perception that the app is a fad among teens, and the auto-destruct nature of the communication makes it suitable for mere frippery or even for sexting.

But the rise of Snapchat is much more interesting than that; it presents a real innovation in communication tools.

Social media tools typically allow communication (in text or visually) that is then stored forever. You can get lost in a sea of your own memories and in the messages and updates for others. This can be confusing in itself – the nature of memories tends to eschew this kind of cataloguing of detail. But also it reflects more the nature of written communications - things that are logged and recorded; filed and searchable. And this is at odds with the nature of much of the things that we communicate on social media.

Much of what we want to say to contacts in social media is ‘of the moment’ – it is a greeting or a friendly hello, a piece of information or advice. It is not content that the recipient will need after they have read it, and it is certainly not content that needs to be stored, catalogued and searchable. It reflects more much of our spoken communication – passing a message on in the now. And to date social media tools have been poor at meeting this need.

What Snapchat offers is a tool for communication as ephemera – content and messaging that has a shelf-life and doesn’t need to live on after that.

So much of the way we interact as human beings is like this that I would expect to see a real rise in tools that operate in a similar way to Snapchat; tools that don’t require everything we say in social media to be forever.

Of course, there is much that is wrong with Snapchat – the concerns of bullying, sexting and whether those photos are really deleted are all real. But the essence of the app – the ephemeral nature of communication is also very real. And it has the opportunity to develop and to change the way we communicate through digital devices, and the way brands communicate with us. What would you say if you could pass on a message that genuinely lived just in the now?

Forget-me-nots (Photo credit: churchofpunk)

After just a few days in the job, the UK’s first youth crime commissioner, Paris Brown, resigned over some of her past Twitter postings. There are no doubt many posts that she wishes could be deleted, forgotten forever, and she is not alone. As we leave more and more behind us in our digital exhaust there will no doubt be Tweets, photos, comments and the like that all of us would like to be forgotten. And not just because they were misjudged in the first place, as was the case with Paris Brown.

Social media will provide a continual record of our lives – of the detail of what we did and what we said at a particular time on a particular day in the past. Some people liken this to a diary, but it is different in two fundamental ways:

1. A diary is always written after the event, reporting something we did in the (near) past; our social media records were composed in the heat of the moment, in real time
2. What we write in a diary is selective, we think about what it is from the day that we want to record; our social media records are less so – our posts and photos often go through fewer filters

So social media is leaving behind us a very different set of records – records that are written in real-time, are less filtered, and tend to discuss the detail of what we were doing or thinking at a particular point in the past. And, in many cases, they can be seen by anybody – without us there to explain where this particular record fitted into our lives at the time; without context.

These new records present a number of potential challenges to us in the future, not least to how we remember and think about our past.

• We tend to forget detail – except for the most special of memories. Rather we remember events at a macro-level – we know broadly speaking where we were and when, what we were doing at different stages in our lives, and the things that happened to us. Our social media records are only the detail – they provide no context and no structure to our memories. Just a set of detailed comments that we will not be able to escape from.
• We think of the past through the lens of today – we interpret what we did and said based on our current experiences, beliefs and moral compass. This is why even reading diaries from your childhood can be cringe-worthy. Our social media records will come with no interpretation; there will be no escaping what we said or thought in the past.

So, our social media records will provide a different view of our own pasts (for ourselves and for others) than we might currently want to portray. And this is why we might want to explore a right to be forgotten online, a right for our posts to be removed or replaced and for us to curate our own pasts. Not for that odd ill thought-through Tweet, but because social risks changing the way we make and store memories of our lives.

Influential! Engaging! Intriguing! (Photo credit: quinn.anya)

At the end of last week Klout announced ‘Klout for Business’, its first real foray away from a consumer-focussed product to one aimed at businesses. The service will “give businesses a…set of analytics, with pointed insights into how and where influencers are engaging with their brands in social media”.

The information will be served-up in a simple dashboard to show a brand how it is engaging on its networks and most importantly how it is engaging with influencers.

So what does this mean for brands?

Klout for Business should help brands to plan the content they share on their channels more effectively. It is not, however, something that will add great benefit to brands with an established social presence. All of these brands will almost certainly be using existing tools such as SocialBakers, or Facebook analytics, to review the engagement of their content. What Klout for Business will do is allow brands to review the areas that their most influential followers are authoritative on, and so tweak the content that is being shared on each of their channels to ensure that it resonates well.

Another area that Klout for Business could help brands is by identifying potential shortfalls in the number of relevant or authoritative followers that they have in specific topic areas. This could help to dictate future content plans in order to help attract an audience that is of a higher quality rather than purely quantity.

An important caveat here, and something which we’ve written about before, is that the accuracy of automated tools such as Klout is not currently wholly reliable. The topics Klout tells me that I’m authoritative on are vaguely accurate, and while there is now functionality that allows you to prioritise the topics that it suggests, in order to make it more accurate, this also adds an inconsistency to the data because while some people will make sure their profile is as precise as possible, others will not, and some may even try to game the system.

What should brands expect to see from Klout for Business in the future?

At this stage, Klout has introduced some useful functionality for brands without introducing a game changer. Its offering is all about the engagement that brands are having with their current captive audience on their social channels, but the area where it could have a great impact for brands is in identifying and recommending influential individuals that brands do not have a current relationship with. For example, take Coca-Cola on Facebook. It has over 62m fans, but what about the 950m people who are not fans. If Klout could give Coca-Cola a list of the most influential people on the topics most important to it, then that would be very powerful indeed.

At this stage Klout for Business looks like a nice useful addition for brands, which could complement other tools used to measure and review social media channel activity but is not a must have. That said it does demonstrate that Klout is serious about its offering for businesses, and is one to keep an eye out for in future.

Hello!! (Photo credit: I_Believe_)

Only 10% of European consumers trust posts by brands on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter; in North America this number increases to 15%. This is the finding of new research from Forrester. It shows that consumer trust of brands in social media is still much lower than the trust they have for their friends and the posts they make.

The research, based on a sample of 20,788 (and 63,703 North American) European online consumers, was published by Forrester this week and explores how consumers react to different marketing messages and types of content.

Overall the message is clear – consumers trust content they go out to find (from expert reviews to recommendations from friends and family) than they do content that is pushed at them. Interruptive advertising such as marketing text messages and banner ads perform worst from a trust perspective. Posts by brands on Twitter and Facebook are the fourth least trusted source of information.

There is much brands can learn from this and from how they seek to build relationships online. The nature of social media is that it is about interaction and that it allows consumers to build their own networks or communities of people with whom they share common interests. And it can be difficult for brands to truly engage here.

Many consumers treat what brands say as they treat advertising – it is something that interrupts them when they are doing something else, and they treat it with a healthy level of scepticism. This is reinforced by the way many brands use these channels – promoting offers or discounts or new products to consumers.

For brands that truly engage in social the trust levels will be much higher. These brands are not using it for interruptive messages to to be part of consumers networks and communities, part of their shared interests. This is not easy to achieve and may not even be relevant for all brands, but with such trust can come real benefits.

In a world where we can learn so much from interacting with consumers and from seeing what they say, like and who they interact with, it is important that we earn their trust. Otherwise, there is a real risk that consumers block brands from their social media life; stop them seeing their data and stop them from understanding more about them.

Trust is important in social media and it comes from real engagement, not interruptive messages.

speed (Photo credit: alwarrete)

Most brands, thankfully, will not have a horsemeat or a Deepwater Horizon moment.

But any brand could experience some form of social media crisis or backlash, and many will. Not every crisis will be as epic as Tesco’s and BP’s. Many will cause far less damage. But every brand needs to understand what, for them, constitutes an acceptable level of potential reputational damage.

What does a social media crisis look like for your brand?

A clear idea of your brand’s appetite for risk will help when it comes to differentiating between issues and potential crises as they crop up in social.

But it’s not easy. Prediction is inexact and no two crises are the same.

Further much crisis management theory that has informed brands’ existing crisis processes does not take account of a still rather new environment. Many make the mistake of simply adding social as another channel for message delivery. But social media has changed crisis more fundamentally than this.

There are many factors to consider, now that social is mainstream

Your stakeholders will not accept broadcast messages in blind faith anymore. They expect transparency and dialogue. Search is critical – what goes online stays online – the impact of a crisis is extended and memories are kept alive. Those who would criticise you have the same tools as you – instant easy access to a mass audience online – and they probably have more time to come up with their campaign than you do.

But the facet that is hardest to deal with, at the point of trying to diagnose a crisis, is the sheer speed at which a situation can escalate.

How to handle the considerable pressure of an accelerating backlash online is one of the most valuable things you get to rehearse in a social media crisis simulation. The pressure of the onslaught is the most likely reason an incident team fails to follow their well-drilled process.

So how do you know if a crisis is brewing?

Really, often, only you will know. External experts will get you so far – but you need to develop your own experience and learning by building a living bank of knowledge.

This means keeping track of potential issues: how situations build up online, the investigations you undertook, the diagnosis decisions you came to, the response steps you took and what happened as a result.

Some situations will build up into major incidents, but many will simply blow over. All are useful for building a picture of what crisis does and, critically, doesn’t look like for your brand. And a clear picture of what worked before can be invaluable when you need to defuse a heightening incident.

You can fast track your understanding. We advocate keeping a private library of social media #fails. When brands get it wrong online, you can pull up to the front row to watch how the situation is handled. And there is no end of social media commenters who will analyse incidents. Critique these as you build your own perspective.

Some resources to help you short cut your knowledge building

• Categorising social media risk (Altimeter)
• Categorising social media brand backlash (Altimeter)
• A Typology of Social Media Crises (ESSEC Business School)
• Types of crisis and market impact (Freshfield Bruckhaus Deringer)

By the way, if you are about to revise your social media crisis plan, there are many templates on the web to inspire you. Just be sure to tailor and test anything you might use to ensure it works for your brand.