FreshNetworks Blog

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.

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.

Here at FreshNetworks we are big advocates of the concept that engagement makes for a better metric than the number of ‘likes’, and this infographic by Our Social Times provides a thought-provoking reminder to brands as to the reasons people declare themselves a fan. (Click the image to see it full-size).

Customer loyalty is the top consumer motivation for ‘liking’ a brand’s Facebook page. This is closely followed by the desire to keep on top of brand news and to receive rewards for engagement.

So you ‘like’ us, now what?

The crucial element is what happens after fan acquisition – converting this initial interest into long-term engagement.

Research into fan engagement suggests that only 1.3% of fans are actively engaged. The reason for this low figure? Brands are failing to deliver fans with what they expect, such as offers, interactions with other fans, and customer service. When you consider that on average, a page’s updates are only visible to 17% of its audience, it becomes even more important to provide a reason for fans to engage.

Give something back to your fans

I would not suggest that all brands use their Facebook page to distribute exclusive offers; this would not, for example, work for a luxury brand aiming to avoid diluting the value of their marque. It does show, though, that fans expect something in return for their loyalty, and they can be rewarded in other, exclusive ways, such as through receiving special content before anyone else.

…but don’t overload them

Knowing your audience and offering content that means something to them is crucial – irrelevant updates will just lead to fans “unliking” your page, however what is even more of a turn-0ff is when a page posts too often. This is where taking an analytic approach to your social media management is crucial – understanding the type of content that really connects with your fans, and the best time to post it, means that your efforts will go much further, and so will your levels of engagement.

Want to learn more about the science of social media?

Matt Rhodes, our Strategy Director, will be sharing his social media expertise in two free webinars:

• 9th May – How to Analyse & Optimise Your ROI

• 20th June – How to Identify and Reward True Advocates

Visit the Our Social Times page to view more details and register your place.

“Why would customers want to create content for our brand?” is a question we commonly come across at FreshNetworks. The truthful answer is often  “They don’t”. In fact, the question is the wrong one altogether.

Customers don’t want to create content for your brand and we see this with many unsuccessful uses of social media by brands. But customers will create content, and they will do it in a way that is really beneficial for you and your brand, but they are not necessarily doing it to help you.

Understanding motivation for doing anything is important, and this is especially true of social media. You may want consumers to show you lots of photos of exactly how they pack their children’s lunchboxes so that you can better design what you sell to them. Or you may want them to comment on and Like your posts on your Facebook page so that they and their friends will be kept up to date with what your brand is doing. But their motivation for doing this will rarely (if ever) be to help your brand. They are likely to do it for other reasons, and it is these that you need to uncover, before you plan any tactic or campaign, if it is really going to work.

There are many reasons people will choose to engage with you online, and many reasons that they will help you to achieve the aims that you have with your use of social media. The important step is to explore first of all who it is you want to engage in social media, and then to answer to simple (well actually not so simple) questions:

1. How engaged are they with us right now
2. What do they want from us

Probably exploring current relationships and motivations will let you understand what kind of engagement you can have with people in social media. This is not a one-way relationship; you can’t ask them to do something for you and then expect them to do it. You have to ask them to do something because they want to, something where it is clear what’s in it for them.

It may be that your target audience is looking for advice on how to pack the healthiest lunch for their children, or that they are looking for new ideas of what to feed them. Understanding this helps you to curate an environment in social media where they will be happy to do what you want (send you a photo of the lunchbox so you can better design what you are selling to them) but also provide them with what they want. You can provide experts on nutrition who will compare before-and-after shots of lunchboxes, or you could get mums to share their favourite lunchbox recipes. In both these cases the photos are gathered, just as you need for you brand, but not because you ask for them. Rather, because you engage with people online and they benefit too.

People do not always want to create content for your brand. They do, however, have many other needs that will lead to the same outcome for you. Proper time spent planning and investigating who you are looking to engage and what their motivation is is time well spent. It will help you to understand what both parties will get out of any engagement, and help to ensure that your campaign is not one of the many examples of social media where people really don’t want to engage with you.

The photo in this post is from the great Things real people don’t say about advertising