FreshNetworks Blog

The Hay Festival has been looking for the ‘most beautiful tweet ever written’. For the last ten days, the literary festival has been seeking nominations and then creating a shortlist of tweets. Today the winner was judged by Stephen Fry.

The winning tweet was from Marc MacKenzie:

“I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.”

This is a concise but informative tweet and perhaps is a great example of how people are using this new medium.

What makes a tweet beautiful?

As the Hay Festival’s founder and director, Peter Florence remarks:

The definition of most beautiful tweet could fall into a number of different categories: it could prove the most eloquent; the most impassioned; the best demonstration of a clever pun or metaphor; the most evocative description of a place or emotion, or perhaps prove that brevity is conducive to levity, and be the wittiest tweet ever committed to the Twittersphere

The beauty in Twitter, and in the tweets people send, is that they convey emotion, opinion, information and expression in a relatively short period, and they, broadly speaking, do so in public. Unlike other conversational forms, Twitter, even when you direct a tweet at a specific person, has a broader audience and often an audience you don’t know. And of course you only have 14o characters with which to express yourself. Marc MacKenzie’s tweet is a good example of this new medium – the audience is unclear and the tweet manages to convey information, opinion, belief and also humour. All in 140 characters.

How you use this medium to convey information is where the beauty lies. It is a different type of communication that is developing its own style of writing, using new elements, such as hashtags, and mixing in media. It is a type of communication where we can all benefit from practicing and trying new things.

So was the tweet the most beautiful ever? Well different people will probably have different opinions and we’d love to hear your’s below. What is clear is that this is a great example of how Twitter is being used in new and different ways to convey information. Perhaps of more importance, though, is the fact that this competition happened in the first place. Through it, Stephen Fry and the Hay Festival are showing the importance of Twitter and the innovative nature of this new medium for communication.

What are your thoughts on this tweet and the beauty of Twitter? Leave your thoughts in the comments below

Some brands are very successful on Twitter. They might be using it for customer service, to engage with customers or to discuss issues that they might be interested in. For many brands, Twitter is a great way for brands to engage directly with consumers, to learn what they are saying and to react and respond to this where relevant.

The question for many brands, though, is why would people want to engage with them on Twitter. In some instances this is clear. For example, when Twitter is being used as a servicing channel it is a way for customers to ask questions, complain or get support. In other instances it is less clear. And as with any social media strategy, it is critical that you think about why people will want to engage with you as much as why you want to engage with them.

When discussing this with clients and others recently, the question that always comes up is if brands should aim to gather a lot of followers on Twitter (as opposed to engaging a lot of people regardless of whether or not they follow you). And with this goes the question of whether brands are expected follow people back who follow them.

This week we published the final report in our Review of Social Media Monitoring Tools (download the final report here). Reflecting on the report and its findings with clients and others this week, we have found ourselves discussing the importance of not just listening (although this can often be a good first step for those who are not yet doing it) but also acting on what is said about your brand and other terms of interest in social media. As the report shows, the different social media tools are of value for different purposes and choosing the one that is most suited to your brand and your needs is an important step.

Even before you have your social media monitoring in place, any brand can benefit from working out a plan for what you will do with all this information you are going to gather. Dashboards and reports can be useful, but the ability to take actions or make decisions using this information is much more useful for any brand. What you do with your social media monitoring is as important, if not more important, than getting the monitoring in place in the first place.

Different brands will want to engage with the conversations they discover online in different ways. The following are three great ways for any brand to engage with these conversations. The first two are ways in which you can capitalise upon the outputs of your social media monitoring internally and the last one on how you can use it to engage externally. They all require you to connect with different teams and functions in your brand and may need internal process change to make a real difference.

1. Inform the language of your marketing and communications

Observing and analysing the way people talk about your brand, competitor brands and the market you are in more generally can be a real and valuable source of insight for marketing and communications teams. It lets you learn how people talk about you, the language they use and how they compare you to other competitors and substitutes in the market. By properly searching not just for brand terms but also the terms that people use in relation to them you can start to explore the language that people use. This has a number of benefits. You can use the language and keywords to refine and ammend your search strategy. You can use relevant language and expressions in your marketing and PR activities. And you can start to use the same language when you are engaging in social media.

This relies on you ensuring that different teams across your brand are connected to what your social media monitoring reveals. And probably more importantly that you set up the reporting and analysis to ensure you are looking not just at what is said, but more importantly at how you can change your own communications and language on the basis of this.

2. Predict market changes

One of the real benefits of social media monitoring is that it allows you to track over time the things that are discussed in relation to your brand and your market. By tracking what is discussed over time allows you to identify when more conversations about certain issues being to emerge. Imagine, for example, that you are a large chain of pizza restaurants. One of the the things you might monitor is references to pizza being bought in a supermarket or eaten from take-away restaurants. Your social media monitoring should be set to alert you when and unusually large number of conversations of one of these kinds are present in social media. What is causing people to talk more than is usual about a topic and what can you do about it.

This kind of trend spotting can be of huge value to any business but relies on you having the mechanisms to capitalise upon this knowledge. Usually this would be a good indicator for your insight or research teams, or a marketing function to explore the trends that appear to be emerging and to make sure you are putting plans in place for any changes it may be spotting early.

3. React and respond to mentions of your brand online

Finally, any brand should consider its process for reacting and responding to what people say abotu you online. Whilst the previous two activities are very internal, this is external and involves engaging directly with people in social media.

There are many ways in which people refer to and mention a given brand online. And in most instances there is typically no need to respond. You can just leave the mention and monitor it if you think relevant. We have written before about how to react if somebody writes about your brand online, and the process described here is a great starting point. The next step is to integrate this with your own internal processes and to change these to ensure conversations online are engaged with and responded to when relevant.

This touches heavily on the importance of sentiment analysis – often negative comments need to be responded to in one way and by one set of people, and positive comments in a different way by a different set of people. We’ve written before about the problem with automated sentiment analysis and the best advice is to make sure that you keep a level of human involvement and analysis to make sure you’re responding to the right things in the right ways.

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010 or download our final report

Facebook today announced new features to address the criticism that is has faced recently for its privacy settings and processes. In December 2009 and then again in April this year, the site made a number of changes to its privacy options and settings. In essence they opened up more data to users beyond your friends and immediate networks and changed some of the default settings. This led to the situation where users had 50 different settings and 170 options to control the levels of access to and sharing of the data and information on their profiles.

As somebody with quite strict levels of access and privacy on Facebook, I know the complexity of these controls and the amount of time and effort needed to control access to your profile and your content. Sites like Openbook, which searches publicly viewable status updates, highlighting the vast amount of content that is out there for everybody to see. In many cases this isn’t because people have actively chosen to share this information outside their friendship groups and networks, but a result of not changing or fully managing your privacy settings.

What Facebook’s privacy changes mean

Today’s announcements are designed to make it simpler for users to see what their Facebook privacy settings are, and to manage them. The changes, to be rolled-out over the coming weeks, will mean that users will be able to:

• have one simple control over who sees their content – everybody, friends-of-friends or just your own friends
• easily see what their profile looks like to others
• opt out of sharing their information with third-party applications
• opt out of sharing your friends and pages

How easy the process will be, and how much you will actually be able to change will be fully understood as the new privacy settings roll-out, and there are already discussions about the ‘Recommended’ settings shown by Facebook. These will suggest that users share with everybody their status, photos and posts, biographies, family and relationship information. This may be more than some are willing to do.

The real test: will people manage their brand online

However, the real test of the new privacy settings will be the extent to which users actually make use of the ability to edit what they share about themselves and the information they add to Facebook. The previous settings did not help people to make these decisions and changes and to take control of their brand on Facebook without a lot of hassle. The power of the new changes will be if they encourage people to take control of their brand online. This may not mean that everybody stops sharing things, but is more likely to see people making sensible decisions about what they share and why. And this can only be a good thing.

We use social media tools, such as Facebook, for different reasons. Maybe we use it to keep up to date with school-friends, or maybe as a personal organiser for our lives right now, or maybe we just document our holidays with photos. Different people use Facebook for different reasons and so a single approach to privacy settings is not appropriate. That is why it is good that Facebook lets users manage their own settings – we each own our own brand online and should make sensible decisions about how we interact with and share from any social media tool we use.

The real test of the new privacy settings on Facebook will not be how many people share more or less of their data. The real test will be how many people take control of their personal brand and make sensible, and often personal, decisions about what to share, with whom and in what circumstances.

For ten days every summer in the UK, more than 100,000 people gather in Hay, a small Welsh town on the edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park, for a festival of literature. Bill Clinton once described The Hay Festival as the “Woodstock of the Mind”. This year’s festival starts on 27th May, and, along with authors including Nadine Gordimer, Martin Amis and Phillip Pullman, the line-up includes a special place for Twitter. In fact a special prize for Twitter, as Stephen Fry will be awarding a prize for the most beautiful Tweet ever written.

As the festival’s founder and director, Peter Florence remarks:

The definition of most beautiful tweet could fall into a number of different categories: it could prove the most eloquent; the most impassioned; the best demonstration of a clever pun or metaphor; the most evocative description of a place or emotion, or perhaps prove that brevity is conducive to levity, and be the wittiest tweet ever committed to the Twittersphere

I’m not sure many of my Tweets (@mattrhodes) are eloquent or impassioned and I don’t often weave a clever pun or metaphor into them. But maybe now is time to start. I love the concept of the competition, but perhaps more I love that Twitter is being discussed and reviewed alongside more traditional understandings of the word ‘literature’. Too many people, often those who have never used it, think that Twitter is full of people saying such things as “I just ate a sandwich”. The truth is that most people are using Twitter to convey meaning, information, opinions and emotion. It is a new and growing communication medium which has spawned its own style of writing and expression. An award for the most beautiful Tweet ever written is exactly what we need.

How is the most beautiful Tweet being chosen?

Judging begins on Monday 21st May and nominations can be sent to the official festival Twitter account: @hayfestival. A shortlist will then be posted on the festival website and the winner announced on the 6 June.

So choose the Tweet you think most beautiful and send it the the judges now to see if it wins.

I have just typed “How do I” in Google today, and the fourth suggestion that it proposes is “…delete my Facebook account.”

There’s clearly some discontent out there. What’s the cause of these rumblings? Well, it was reported last week that there has been a significant review of security policy at Facebook HQ. Facebook user profiles are publicly accessible by default, and it seems that a growing number of commentators such as Jason Calacanis, chief executive of the question-and-answer website Malaho, are calling for a boycott of what is now a “not trustworthy” site.

And yet, this is against the backdrop that Facebook will shortly announce over 500 million users, and that’s 40% of everybody on the internet.

So, the dichotomy for businesses that have online security as a top priority, such as in the financial services or pharmaceutical industries for example, is how they should engage in social media when Facebook, the most popular of social media tools, is so open. And this question is always most loudly voiced in the Boardroom of the banks and insurers, where the decision-makers for a social media strategy will be immediate detractors because they consider the simple equation is “Social Media = Facebook”, and they can see no further!

The important resolve at the Boardroom must be that the social media strategies for banks and insurance companies should not focus upon social media tools. Instead, the message for the Boardroom is that the best uses of social media will demonstrate that it can yield amazing results without compromising security or the confidence of your customers. And to achieve this it can be better to think of more creative ways to engage people. We’ll be looking at some of these in the coming weeks.

Read all our posts about social media for financial services

A few months ago I read a great tip from Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, in which he described the importance of ‘guerrilla customer service’ as a way to grow small businesses. Crowley described how he would actively search for negative sentiment about Foursquare on Twitter in order to help customers solve their problems. I wholeheartedly agreed with his approach, and believe it’s a crucial consideration for online community managers too.

Very often community managers are too wrapped up in the drive to grow their audiences, due to client expectations and the idea that larger audiences yield greater ROI. We also get wrapped up in engaging only with the branded online community that we manage, forgetting that the majority of our customer base may not be aware that the community exists. So what often gets overlooked is the importance of seeking out and retaining existing customers, especially the unhappy ones.

I once came across a client’s customer who had tweeted a photo of a broken shoe (not the fault of the brand), frustrated that it was old season and she wouldn’t be able to replace it. I helped her to source a replacement shoe in her size. Needless to say, she bought the replacement and thanked us publicly on Twitter for helping her. There you have a great example of quantitative and qualitative ROI, and what was nice for her was the unexpected surprise at being assisted without asking for help. Think of all those unhappy customers whose complaints get lost in the noise of the social web.

For me three points are key if you want to execute slick and successful guerrilla customer service:

1. Use social media monitoring tools to keep on top of all the sentiments flying around your brand everyday in an efficient way. Set up RSS feeds and real time alerts so that you never miss an angry tweet or blog post about your brand.
2. Deal with the unhappy customer in the public space online. Yes, you’re making your brand vulnerable to criticism, but at the end of the day the customer will publicly praise you if you’ve helped them solve their problem – driving positive word of mouth for your customer service.
3. Be prompt to respond. Aim for a best practice turnaround time by working closely with customer service and product teams. Use social media to communicate with the customer as close to real time as possible; the icing on the cake is in being able to prove that it is a more effective customer service channel than telephone or email.

Lots of people I meet and talk to worry about how they should speak in social media – what their, or indeed their brand’s, tone of voice should be. They recognise that social media is different – structurally (Twitter requires you to express yourself in no more than 140 characters), and in the nature of what you write and how you write it. Online communities and social media allow people who don’t know each other to share thoughts, ideas and information. They need to write and express themselves in a way that builds trust and exchanges information and this impact on the language you use and indeed your use of other tools, including video and images. Overall social media requires you to express yourself in a different way to spoken language or much written language. And brands and individuals needs to go thorough a learning process to develop their own tone of voice.

One of the best ways to get used to the type of language and tone of voice you should be using in social media is just to experiment and have a go. Twitter is a particular useful tool in this regard. It forces you to think about what you want to say (and express it in just a few words) and allows you to try engaging with other people and joining conversations. And above all, Twitter is quite a forgiving environment. It is moving and changing so quickly, and there are so many conversations and updates every day, that if you try something and it doesn’t quite work then you can quickly find yourself back with a relatively blank canvass to start again.

That’s why we encourage our clients to each experiment with Twitter themselves personally if they want to get used to social media and to start to really understand the benefit it can bring to their brand. And it’s why I have been delighted to discover @ClassroomTweets.

What we can learn from @ClassroomTweets

The six year old students in the Orange Class at Holy Trinity Rosehill school in Stockton-on-Tees in the North-East of England are on Twitter. The students tweet as @ClassroomTweets, sharing their thoughts and experiences every day in the classroom. They are able to update Twitter from a computer in the classroom that shows Twitter at all times. And their tweets are unmoderated by teacher @MultiMartin apart from a few sensible rules, including not being able to respond to messages or talk to other people on Twitter without a teacher present. Some of the things we learnt from @ClassroomTweets this week included “it is high school musical week”, “wow this class is very fun” and perhaps my favourite of the week “we are not doing spelling”.

The updates are a great way for students in the classroom to express themselves, and to get used to using social media and so experiment with new ways of expressing themselves and improve their literacy skills. But, as @MultiMartin says on his blog it is also a useful source of insight:

It’s extremely interesting to read as the class teacher. For example, I’ve learned that my class only class a ‘literacy lesson’ as the time I am teaching from the front of the class – they believe the time they are at their desks working isn’t classed as ‘literacy’ or indeed a lesson.

The use of Twitter is benefiting both the students in the classroom, the teacher and of course everybody who follows them and who’s day is brightened by hearing what they are doing. It is a great learning tool for everybody and a great way to experiment with social media.

There is something we could all learn here. Just start using social media. Learn how to express yourself, what works for you and what doesn’t. Report on your life, or on something that you are interested in. The subject doesn’t matter really because you are just using Twitter as a way to learn about social media, the way you use it and how to express yourself in it. There is a lot we can learn from these six year olds. And many of us could benefit from experimenting with social media in the way that they are doing.

Location-based apps and social media tools? If you haven’t heard of them you soon will. They use the GPS functionality of the iPhone – and the sharper developers have made them platform agnostic; compatible on Android, Palm and Blackberry.

The user registers on the site then “checks-in” with their geographic location to let their friends know where they are. The idea is if you can see your friends are in the vicinity of your current location you can arrange to meet up. You can also see interesting places others are visiting. There are other neat ideas like if you have visited a location more than anyone else you are named the “Mayor” of that location or retailers nearby by your current checked-in location can offer you rewards to visit them.

We’ve written before about how we think 2010 is the year of location-based social media tools. Foursquare it appears will be the defacto as it increases its prominence over others such as Gowalla and loopt as the location aware app of choice. Foursquare is even being spoken about in some circles as the new Twitter.

One of the more interesting applications of this type in my opinion is Causeworld. This app combines the gaming interest of the location aware app along with a feel good factor of donating to a cause simply by visiting certain shops or restaurants or scanning a particular product barcode.

Causeworld has initially been sponsored by some big names such as Kraft, P&G and Citi. The user earns “karma” points based upon visiting certain locations. Users can then donate the karmas to a choice of not-for-profits who in turn can convert the karmas to real money.

Over 300,000 have downloaded the app since December and hundreds of thousands of Dollars are given away to good causes each month.

As far as I understand it is only being used in the US right now but would expect it over here very shortly. In my mind doing my bit for a good cause by visiting a shop or a restaurant beats a 10K run anyday.

Like anything first mover advantage is everything so I look forward to the first charity in the UK becoming part of this.

Some more reading

• Gowalla battles Foursquare (guardian.co.uk)
• CauseWorld: Checking in for Charity (readwriteweb.com)
• CauseWorld Helps Nonprofits Through Social Networking (life.firelace.com)
• Location-awareness takes SXSW by storm (lostremote.com)
• The History of Location Technology [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)

Employees are visiting Facebook more than any other site when they are at work, and twice as often as the second most visited site, Google. Research out this week from Network Box, a Managed Security Services company, shows that visits to the social network accounted for 6.8% of all workplace traffic in Q1 2010, exactly twice the 3.4% of all traffic that went to Google. The research is based on analysing 13 billion URLs visited by a sample of workplaces in Q1 2010 and the company behind the research suggest that they underline the fact that IT Managers should be concerned about the amount of time employees are spending on social networks at work.

But the findings are not as clear-cut as this. And they should not be used to add weight to the misguided corporate policy of banning all access to social networks at work.

People are more likely to access Facebook out of work than in work

In March we saw Facebook become the most visited site in the US. With 7.1% of all web traffic (from workplaces, home and all other locations) going to Facebook. A smaller proportion of workplace traffic goes to Facebook than the average for all traffic. And, whilst we don’t have this data, we can infer that traffic from home must be much higher to average in this way.

People are visiting Facebook at work – but are visiting the site less often at work than out of work.

People are much more likely to visit other sites

By saying that Facebook is the most visited site from the workplace hides the fact that many many other sites are visited. In fact people are almost 20 times more likely to be visiting a site that is not Facebook. And because different people use the internet for different things to do different jobs it is unlikely that there are many websites that are common to them all. A law firm might ind that its employees spend the overwhelming majority if their time on legal journals and regulation websites, for example. But the sites visited in an Estate Agency or FMCG business would be very different. By aggregating all of these different people, doing different things in different industries there are likely to be very few common sites.

And let’s not forget that 6.8% of all web traffic is still quite small and could easily all take place during a lunch hour.

Social media sites are not necessarily bad

There is an assumption in some workplaces that social media and social networking sites are necessarily bad for employees. I have seen some internal social media policies that state “We should discourage employees from using social media”. This is dangerous and also denies the benefit that social media can bring to any organisation. Social media is becoming increasingly important for any business – wanting to work with and engage stakeholders, customers and even employees themselves online.

Social media can be scary – and  even business needs to write a social media policy. But the basis of this should not be banning things but encouraging people to use things. Your employees are already talking about your company in social media, talking to customers and representing you. Whether you know it or not and whether you want them to or not. The best approach is not to ban people but to give them training. To tell them what is reasonable and what is not and to encourage them to represent the business appropriately online.

Firms don’t ban employees from talking to other people, answering the phone or responding to emails. But they do give them training on how to do these things and what they should, and shouldn’t, say. They should take this approach to social media and not one that bans things.

Most firms are anxious because they have no social media policy

Most firms are anxious about the amount of time employees are spending on social media sites for two reasons:

• They don’t understand what they are doing on the sites
• They have no policy to deal with it

The simplest thing any business should do is to write a social media policy, and to write one that encourages people to use and to represent themselves and the firm in social media in the right way. The policy should not ban, but should offer training. Employees are using social media already and talking about their employer the work that they do. They should be your best brand advocates online, but banning social media will not achieve this.

Research by Manpower earlier this year showed that 80% of firms have no social media policy. For me this is the biggest concern, not the amount of time people are spending on certain sites relative to other sites.

Does your firm not have a social media policy?

If your firm is one of the 80% without a social media policy then take a look at our previous posts on:

• Why every business needs a social media policy
• How to write your firm’s social media policy
• What to do once your firm’s social media policy is written