FreshNetworks Blog

In the first part of our guide to getting started in social media, we looked at buzz tracking. Why brands benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. Once you have an understanding of what is currently being said about your brand in social media, you will be much better informed about the issues of interest to people, the opinions they have, who your influencers and advocates are and where you can start to engage with people in social media. The next step is to work out what you actually want to achieve.

For too many people, social media is seen first and foremost as a technological solution. People decide they want to ‘implement social media’ and then work out what they want to do with it. This kind of enthusiasm is great and people who want to harness and use social media for your brand should be embraced. However, for any business there is a critical question you need to answer first: “what are you trying to achieve”.

There is much talk about measurement and proving the ROI of social media. One way to ensure that you are able to show the impact that your use of social media has had is to make sure you have clear and measurable aims in the first place. Maybe you want to increase customer loyalty, reduce the cost of your current customer service channels, increase customer satisfaction, get new ideas into your business or reduce the cost of your customer insight spend. These are the kind of aims and objectives (at a very high level) that some of our current clients at FreshNetworks have. And all of them are measurable. You can show the impact you are having on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. And you can show either the revenue you are generating, or the costs your are saving, your brand.

A clear understanding of what you want to achieve should be the first step for any brand looking to get started in social media. This may be a detailed decision process or it may be simple, but no brand should try something without at least some aims. A simple three-step process for any brand is:

1. Think about your current business strategy. Consider what would make the biggest difference to your business. Evaluate where you can contribute in the short-, medium- and long-terms.
2. When you have thought through this you need to evaluate and refine your aims based on what is achievable using social media. Not everything is and not everything should be.
3. Finally consider each of the aims and objectives you have left and how you can measure the impact you are having. Think about what you should expect from social media, what return you should see and what return you would expect for the investment you are putting into your activities.

This is a simple but effective process. The most important thing is to critically evaluate what you want to achieve as a brand and then work with people with experience of using social media to understand the full and diverse range of things you could do, tools you might use and engagement methods you might employ to contribute to these. This is often an iterative process and will help you to refine what you are looking to achieve and make sure it is realistic and achievable.

At FreshNetworks, we have worked with brands who have started working in social media. They are doing great things and it’s great to see them experimenting. But without having thought through what they are trying to achieve, why and how they will measure it their social media efforts will more likely than not fail. If you are not clear in your mind why you are doing it, you can be sure that your users will not understand what they are supposed to be doing in your social media site.

Of course, this is easier said than done, but it is a valuable and important step for any brand getting started in social media. And remember at this stage we’re still not really talking about technology. Not yet at least. That part comes next.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

Enterprise rent-a-car have a legendary reputation for customer service. What I didn’t realise is just how large a role market research played in helping them grow and maintain that reputation.

Last year I attended an excellent conference – Wavelength 100.  I guess it’s a UK version of TED, their stated aim being to connect “visionary companies making a difference in the world through business”.

The delegates and speakers were a fascinating mix. In my first session I struck up a conversation with Peder Kolind who I happened to be next to. It turned out that having set up one of the world’s largest security firms he sold up to kick off six philanthropic projects in Nicaragua. Later, at lunch, I found myself sitting between Martin Narey who used to run the prison service and is now CEO of Barnados and Mark Addlestone who runs Beaverbrooks the jeweller – a family business that has been in the top 10 of the Times and FT Best Companies to Work for lists for four years in a row.

It was one of those days where you couldn’t help but feel in awe of your surroundings and rather small by comparison.

Anyway, the conference was excellent. I didn’t get to see all the sessions so I have been catching up on those I missed buy listening to their podcasts – which you can find on iTunes under “Wavelength 100 Listen Again“. Last night I had the pleasure of listening to Donna Miller, HR Director Europe at Enterprise-Rent-a-Car.

It’s a fascinating story.  Enterprise was founded in 1957 by Jack Taylor. Given that one of my other businesses is the recruitment consultancy, FreshMinds Talent, I knew about their policy of hiring graduates and investing deeply in their development. What I did not know about was how they had developed their customer satisfaction research over time.

Donna talks about how the firm came to realise the old truism: what is measured is done. She explains the evolution of a simple set of research questions around customer satisfaction and the importance attributed to the results of these surveys. At Enterprise, you can’t get a promotion unless your customers rate your service as excellent. That rule works all the way to the top of this $9Bn company. So even if you’re running a huge team across many sites and producing great profits, you’re promotion is still bound by your customer satisfaction scores.

Well worth a listen. And if you go to iTunes to get the Enterprise podcast, I also recommend:

- MyC4 – a superb social enterprise where anyone can loan money to African SMEs to help them invest and grow. You can start with just £5. It’s also an example of online community building for charities

- Southwest Airlines – a firm renowned for their outstanding people management. it has a very strong internal sense of community

- Middelfart Sparekasse – Hans shares a few fascinating stories about how this Danish Building Society has developed a strong community feeling and incredibly loyal workforce

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Some more reading

• Customer Service Is Public Relations (davefleet.com)
• Voice of the Customer: Service Based Differentiation Matters (seomashup.blogspot.com)

After having struggled for years to reduce its phone support load, Loftus Photography turned to Oddcast to implement a virtual sales rep, enabled with artificial intelligence, to assist potential customers. The avatar, named Kathleen, was taught to respond to user questions with context-sensitive spoken answers. The results were huge: a 50% increase in sales productivity due to reducing the time needed for an average phone consultation, as well as increased customer satisfaction. Click here to chat with Kathleen and see for yourself.

Next week I’m speaking at the SocialMediaInfluence conference in London on Measuring Influence and Audience online. It’s a tricky subject and looking around today I have been unable to find any examples of an approach which has been successfully and repeatedly applied.

The problem appears to be that whilst there are a whole range of metrics that we can measure in social media (see The Social Organisation blog for a fairly comprehensive list) but none of these truly gets to the crux of the problem. What we want to do is know is to measure the influence that a single blogger, commenter or video upload has. What is the value of a blog post praising Coca-Cola in terms that Coca-Cola could understand and measure. As many of our clients ask us, what’s the ROI of encouraging this kind of activity.

The answer is that it’s difficult to measure, not because we don’t have a range of metrics (we do) but because at the moment our understanding of what causes a particular post or a particular individual to be influential is limited. We can measure proxies, such as trackbacks, links to the site from other sites (and the number of links to the sites that link there). But these really only reflect an inherent influence that we still haven’t measured.

What we really want to know is how influential is everybody that is exposed to an piece of content, and how influential are all the people they influence. Of course calculating this number would be difficult if not impossible. And the information you need to gather would be huge. It really wouldn’t be worthwhile.

Which is why some more basic measure is needed. Take the sites like Dell’s Ideastorm and MyStarbucksIdea. These get peers to vote posts up or down depending how relevant they think they are. You can then migrate only the more popular posts to the front page or the top of the list. This kind of rough approach might be a crowd-sourced way of measuring influence. We know that the most popular posts are those that people in the community think the brand needs to listen to most. Perhaps this is the only measure of influence we need.

People talk about your brand everywhere online. A search in Google would find hundreds if not thousands of places where people are talking about or commenting on your brand. You could be mistaken for thinking that the rise of social media has led to people being exposed to more discussions about your brand that you don’t control. And you might think this is dangerous and get concerned about each of those hundreds or thousands of discussions.

But the mistake in this analysis is to assume that every discussion is equal. They’re not. A blog that criticises your brand but is read by hardly anybody is of very little importance to you. In fact the majority of discussions about your brand will each only have a very small audience. You don’t need to occupy yourself with them all, but rather with those which are repeatedly discussing you, or those that have significant influence.

This raises the question of how you measure influence. Aside from a very small number of well read bloggers, it is difficult at first glance to identify how influential somebody is online. You could look at how many posts they’ve made on a forum – but if nobody is reading them then that’s not a great measure.

Of more use is to measure the network effect that an individual has. How many forums or blogs are they active on and how many people read their posts on these sites? How many social networks are they a member of and how many friends do they have there?

These measures are much more useful when it comes to measuring influence – if somebody posts something about your brand how many different people will see it and how much will they trust the poster?

To some extent these measures can be made into a simple formula. Take each social network that somebody is a member of and give it a weighting for importance – so one that is more specific to your brand or product might be weighted more than a generic social network. So, taking a brand that sells baby products, a social network specifically for mums might be weighted twice as heavily as a Facebook. You can then multiply this number by the number of contacts you have on each site to get a measure of influence by site. And sum them to get a measure for the poster overall.

For example, Poster A has 100 friends on a Mum’s site (weighted 2) and 350 friends on Facebook (weighted 1) would have a total influence measure of 550. Compare this with Poster B, with 150 friends on a Mum’s site but only 70 friends on Facebook. Their influence measure would be 370.

So Poster A is about half as influential again as Poster B.

This is a good basis for a measure of influence and a way of finding the people you need to track and engage online. The problem at the moment is that the data needed to make this formula work isn’t readily available. Back to the drawing board maybe.