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?

Facebook Home

Facebook Home, announced last week, is the social network’s latest bid to expand its social web over mobile devices. The Facebook Home app, available on Android phones, integrates the phone’s operating system with the Facebook platform by taking over your home screen with your Facebook news feed  and making SMS messaging look like a Facebook chat. This integration also gives Facebook the potential to mine vastly more information about its users than ever before.

What data can Facebook Home mine from your phone?

1. GPS: According to Gigaom, Facebook’s integration with the Android operating system allows Facebook to receive constant information about the phone user’s whereabouts via the phone’s GPS. From this Facebook could potentially work out things like where you live, based on your phone’s GPS location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
2. The phone’s accelerometer: The phone’s accelerometer could tell Facebook whether a phone user is walking, running or driving.  Adding this to the data Facebook already has about you, it can build a much better profile of its users, such as the places you shop, the restaurants you dine in and where you might spend a weekend pursuing your hobbies.
3. Chat Head: Facebook Home will bring together Facebook chat with SMS messages, so that your messages will get Facebook-ified and potentially, through the Android launcher, allow Facebook to read your messages sent outside its service.
4. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol): Facebook has already been inching into this space for a while, but Facebook Home could bring internet calls via Facebook front and center to a user’s mobile experiences and bypass phone calls altogether.  Facebook calls would mean you wouldn’t have to look up someone’s contact details (Facebook already has them) and you wouldn’t have to pay international rates, giving many incentives to use a Facebook VoIP service. Although Facebook is not likely to actually monitor your calls, it would be able to get a lot of information such who you call, and how long you talk them.

What might it do with this data?

David Jacobs of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) suggests that the increased information available to Facebook via the new app, will help it to monetise your personal information through advertising. Advertisements won’t be in the first release of Facebook Home, but future versions will include an ad feature which gives Facebook an unprecedented opportunity to aggressively push commercial messages at its users.

However, there have been more and more news stories about a potential privacy backlash, as users are trying to weigh up the benefits of sharing increasing amounts of information with the risks of losing their privacy, and the potential damage caused by personal data getting in the wrong hands. As Jan Dawson, senior telecoms analysts at Ovum points out, “users don’t want more advertising or tracking and Facebook wants to do more of both”.

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.

Reflections in the City (Photo credit: masochismtango)

This comes as no surprise – levels of social media adoption inside brands can be much lower than among their consumers, or indeed among their newer employees. But when you do engage a senior team with the opportunities that can come from social you tend to find that they become some of the most vociferous enthusiasts.A recent study by IBM found that only 16% of global CEOs are taking part in social media, and only 1 of the more than 1,700 CEOs interviewed had their own blog. They recognise the potential power of engaging in social (with 57% expecting to be engaging within 3-5 years); but the levels of participation are currently low.

Richard Branson wrote about this survey to say he was surprised by the low levels of social media use and to encourage other CEOs to take part:

…like all other areas of business, CEOs have the opportunity to set the bar. By ignoring social networks, they are potentially missing a trick.

There are many reasons why CEOs and the senior team should be engaging with social media and not just because it sets the bar for how the rest of the organisation behaves. The people buying your products and the newer recruits into the organisation are all using social media, and its importance will continue to increase. To make sensible business decisions in this climate CEOs really need to understand what social media is, and what it isn’t.

This does not mean that all CEOs should be actively using Twitter to engage with customers – we’ve written before about the confusing way the @StarbucksUKMD account has been used. But it does mean experimenting and trying things out – maybe joining a running forum to discuss their training with other athletes, or setting up a Pinterest account to bring together items they are considering for their new home.

It is the act of experimenting with and learning from social that is important for C-level; understanding the tools their consumers and employees have and the different ways they are engaging with others. Only by experimenting and using the tools themselves will they be able to really understand how their business could benefit from social. And by encouraging a process of experimenting with new tools and services from the most senior levels, a culture of innovation can grow more successfully through an organisation.

For any brand exploring the transformative impact of social, C-level buy-in is critical. And to get this you need a clear process of education as well as to encourage these executives to experiment with social in their personal and professional lives.

Peoplebrowsr’s Kred, a social influence and analytics service, today announced the launch of KredStory which is “a new way of seeing social influence that is different than anything we – or any social analytics company – have ever done before”. The good news is that this is an attempt to move away from a score automatically assigned to you.

Beware of influence scoring systems

The scores that each system produces differ drastically. Looking at my scores from Kred, Klout and PeerIndex highlights that these systems are rather mystical. Looking at it simplistically, I would argue that the data available to each of these platforms is the same and therefore my scores should be comparable, clearly that is not the case.

So what are my scores for each?

• Kred – 639 (out of 1,000)
• Klout – 51 (out of 100)
• PeerIndex – 11 (out of 100)

And what does this mean?

To be frank, not much if you are just looking at a score, but before completely writing off these scores it is important to note that I do think they can be of use such as by helping to identify influencers.

Using scoring systems to help identify influencers

For brands that have thousands and thousands of mentions on social media platforms each day, it would be an extremely time intensive (and not to mention costly) process, to review each and all of the people that were responsible. A couple of ways scoring systems can be of use:

1. To narrow down large lists of potential influencers

To make a huge list more manageable you filter to view only the top 10%. Using a tool such as Brandwatch would be a way of doing this as they integrate both Kred and Klout scores. The next step is the most valuable; it is the point where you ‘bring in the humans’. Tools such as Klout and Kred are largely reliant on the number of followers or friends that someone has to determine a score. What they cannot reliably do is tell you of those followers who will be relevant to your client, and who are even real followers and not automated bots.

2. Identify influencers on certain topics

Another aspect which the tools share is the ability to identify topics that people are influential on. For example, Klout tells me that I am influential about football, gym, steak, rugby and burritos (amongst other things). But these are vague and whilst fairly accurate this information on its own is useless. I may be influential about the gym, but of my followers, I know for a fact that only a small proportion are interested in this. So using a tool such as Klout to draw up a list of influencers on a certain topic is only useful if you undertake a thorough research into who the followers are and whether they are a relevant audience for you or your brand.

Does KredStory set it apart from its competitors?

KredStory provides information in a more intuitive and visual manner for people to see what is happening amongst their followers. For brands, it will easily allow them to identify influential individuals around specific topics, and in a more visual manner. In summary, while I don’t think this is a game changer, it may mean that when people are considering using a influence measurement tool, that Kred gets the nod.

What it doesn’t change is the fact that all these tools are merely scratching the tip of the iceberg and that none of these tools can be relied upon without a significant time investment from the people using them and deciphering the information they provide.