FreshNetworks Blog

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.

Morrisons Delivery Truck (Credit: kenjonbro)

The recent horsemeat scandal has highlighted the vital importance of businesses having a solid crisis communications plan, and making sure that social media is integral to this.

With all the major supermarkets and food producers active in social channels, it was no surprise that many consumers took to Twitter and Facebook to look for information and ask questions about the provenance of the meat they’d bought, as well as the potential safety risks of eating contaminated produce. However, while many supermarket chains and producers were left scrambling to explain how horsemeat had got into the supply chain, Morrisons quietly set about capitalising on the crisis, and used its social media channels as the main point of communication to do so.

So how did Morrisons go about doing this? Firstly, it’s important to understand how its business model differs greatly from that of its competitors. Unbeknown to most consumers, the Leeds-based supermarket is Britain’s largest food manufacturer. This is thanks to its strict policy of farm-to-fork vertical integration, and the fact it owns 18 food manufacturing plants with over 7,000 employees. This very different business model has allowed it the enviable position of being able to boast about the security of its supply chain on own-brand products.

Quite simply, Morrisons buys animals directly from farmers and sends them to their own abattoirs. The meat is then available for purchase over the counter, or – and here’s where some of those food manufacturing plants come in – it supplies its own food preparation sites with meat in order to make its own-brand pies, sausages, cooked meats and other products.

Up until three weeks ago, Morrisons has been promoting this business model by extolling the benefits to farmers, and promoting its better quality control, reduced waste and better use of resources. Now, however, fate has handed Morrisons a marketing message that its competitors were unable to deploy for themselves.

A Morrisons Facebook update

And Morrisons has certainly been quick to deploy these marketing messages; regularly taking to its social channels to remind customers of the fact that it controls its own supply chain, which has also– so far – remained completely clear of contaminated meat. And these messages have gone down well, with its horse-free meat updates being shared by thousands of customers both loyal and new at a time when much of the chatter in social was at its most hysterical and humorous.

Twitter - Search - Morrisons horsemeat

And it’s paying off. In the last few weeks Morrisons’ butchers sales have increased by nearly 20% since the crisis broke. As you can see in the graph below, the number of people talking about Morrisons in Facebook has exploded and they’ve earned themselves thousands of new followers. Nevertheless, having dealt with the horsemeat scandal so capably, they now face a new challenge – how will they keep those new customers and fans engaged and coming back, and how will they continue to maintain and develop their online presence?

People Talking About Morrisons

Deutsch: Discofeeling (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Femfresh came a cropper back in June, some argued that it was a brand that was intrinsically ill-suited for social. After all, how many people would want to be seen to like a feminine hygiene product on Facebook?

Euan Semple skirts this issue when he talks about some brands getting ‘into social’. He likened them, at a Digital Surrey event last week, to a dad dancing at a disco. “You’re proud of him for giving it a go,” he said. “But you wish he’d sit down.”

We work a lot with financial services brands which operate in a tightly regulated environment. This makes it tough to respond naturally and in anything like as real-time as the fluid and admirable O2, for example.

So should we assume then that social is only for brands which are already naturally engaging, aspirational and great at dancing?

If getting involved is a challenge, FS brands could hire the social equivalent of a body double and see how that works. Bodyform recently chose that route, achieving great viewing figures and industry acclaim for its video rejoinder to a comment on its Facebook page.

But surely, this is missing the point.

Some of those dancing dad brands aren’t there just because everyone else is on the dancefloor. Some are learning to engage in a new and changing world. Their customers, employees and partners are changing the way they communicate. Brands have no choice but to deal with the change. So they need to get in amongst it to understand it. And look for the opportunities to make a real connection with the people that are important to them.

Just being in it, isn’t enough. Bodyform was a great campaign tactic but it missed a trick by not being authentic. Femfresh got their fingers burned and missed a trick by not connecting with and understanding their detractors. These could have been valuable opportunities to learn about engaging in a world transformed by social. These brands do have interested communities active online had they been handled differently.

I don’t think Euan Semple was suggesting that some brands shouldn’t ‘do social’. His position rather was that we have amazing tools at our disposal now that can help us connect like never before.

Not every brand needs to be on Facebook. But every brand needs to understand the impact of social.

Because the opportunity of social is not really about scoring an extra point for awareness on your brand recognition tracker.

The real impact is far more strategic. It’s about building real relationships with the people that matter to your business, so that you can do better business with them.

Day 30 - Falling dominoes (Photo credit: evil_mel)

I really don’t care how many people follow your brand on Twitter, or Like your brand on Facebook. Numbers like these are essentially meaningless – building the right kind of relationships with 500 targeted people will always be more beneficial to you then meaningless, un-targeted relationships with 500,000.

The same is often said about ‘engagement’ – what value is there in engaging people on social media? This is a valid question to ask, but it is not the same as just attracting more Likes or Follows. Done well, engagement is valuable to a brand.

There are two main challenges to the value of engaging people in social media as brand:

1. Surely sharing photos and chatting to people online has no connection to sales
2. If it does have a connection, is it just a correlation (people feel positive about our brand so they both join us in social media and spend more money with us) and not a causation (people join us in social media and therefore feel more positive about our brand and spend more money with us)

What’s the value of ‘just chatting’?

The first challenge is a valid one – you can spend forever as a brand mindlessly chatting away to people without it having any impact on what you do. Are the people you are talking to even valuable to you, and are your engagements helping at all with them to spend more money, to recommend you to more people or to do some other action that will be beneficial.

The truth is that nothing should be done in social media with a clear understanding of why you are doing it – what you want to achieve and why this will help your business – and a clear understanding of who you want to target. These can be difficult questions to answer, but if you are not completely clear on them then you just won’t get the same benefits from engaging people in social.

Imagine a luxury fashion brand. It is probably very easy to get lots of people to ‘Like’ you page on Facebook or to follow you on Pinterest, but are these people actually the ones you want to engage? Or are they just aspirants, or people who like looking at the beautiful pictures? If you haven’t clearly identified who you want to engage (who will be valuable to you) and are managing your activities to attract these, then you may just end up chatting away to people who could have little value for the brand.

Know what you want to achieve, know your audience and make sure you are working hard to attract the right people.

Is it a causation or a correlation?

The bigger challenge to the value of social media engagement is that it does not lead to greater value for a brand, but that people engage more and spend more because they already feel positive about the brand. In short – that this is an example of correlated events and not causation.

A great piece of work by Bain & Company last year addresses this. Their Social Media Consumer Survey looked at average annual spend of customers who have a meaningful engagement with a brand in social against those who do not. Overall, those with a meaningful relationship spend 30% more annually.

If we were confusing causation and correlation we would expect that it would be those who are already positive about the brand who are spending more; those who are less positive about the brand would not. But the research doesn’t show this – those who’s spending is increased the most are the ‘fence sitters’ (those ambivalent to the brand); even the brand’s ‘detractors’ spend 20% more annually if they engage in social.

Bain Social Media Consumer Survey, 2011

So what does this mean for engagement in social?

So having good engagement in social media can be valuable to a brand – it’s not another meaningless number like Followers or Likes. Meaningful engagement, with the right people can lead to greater value for the brand from those customers.

But getting good engagement is not easy – it involves having a clear view on why you are using social, on the audience you want to engage, and on how you turn them from being passive to having an active relationship with you in social media. Most brands could get better at this and a focus on quality engagement, with the right people, will always pay greater dividends than just hunting down a few more Twitter followers or Facebook Likes.

You may have already seen yesterday’s news that the Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke, has proposed changes to British defamation laws which could see websites obliged to hand over personal details (including IP address) of those posting defamatory messages online.

A number of high-profile cases of online trolling and cyberbullying have become big news of late including those of Nicola Brookes and Louise Mensch MP. The idea behind the change to the law is about shifting responsibility for user-generated content from the web platforms (who are currently treated as the ‘publisher’ under existing libel laws) to the user themselves.

We think that the change is a sensible one. It simply doesn’t make sense for websites like Facebook (25m UK users) and Twitter (10m UK users) to be held responsible for every word written on their platforms – policing content would be an impossible in terms of both the scale of the job and lack of context for judging whether offending posts are indeed defamatory or threatening.

Last night Al Jazeera English interviewed me about this and asked why I think the changes proposed are a good thing for our freedom of speech. So why do I think that? Well, at the moment, as a user of social networks and blogs, if I take offence at something someone says to me, I can contact the platform in question and demand that I want the content removed. The platform, lacking context and in fear of being responsible for potentially libellous or otherwise illegal content more often than not will just remove it – regardless of whether a law has been broken or not. And if the law is broken it would take extremely costly legal action (as in the case of Nicola Brookes) to get a website to reveal the identities of the law breaker.

Under the proposed changes, if I feel genuinely aggrieved and can provide context to prove I have a case, not only can I have the offending content removed, I can have the identity of the troll revealed to me so that I can take appropriate legal action.

The message: that trolls and cyberbullies with fake names and photo-less profiles can no longer hide behind a cloak of anonymity when they fail to act responsibly online.

How to avoid being the victim of trolls

Anyone who engages online – both individuals and brands – is at risk of becoming the victims of trolling. Here are some top tips to help you avoid being a victim:

1. Privacy settings
Tightly controlled privacy settings will help you control who can engage with you online and the places where they can do it. The tighter these are the less likely it is that trolls will be able to infringe on your most ‘personal’ places online – inbox, Facebook wall and in your newsfeeds etc

2. Know your enemy
Is the perpetrator really a troll? What can you find out about them by looking at their profile? Clearly using a pseudonym? Faceless profile photo? Lots of activity on their profile in a similarly negative vein? You may well have yourself a troll.

3. Don’t feed the trolls
A piece of advice I often to give to brands I work with who are worried about trolling is that 99% of the time the best thing to say is nothing at all.Trolls thrive on the attention they get and knowing that they’ve caused offence or got a similar reaction. If you can, avoid getting involved and tell your friends and family (or indeed colleagues) to do the same and they’ll usually just go away.