FreshNetworks Blog

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Social Media is all about conversations. It’s people connecting, interacting and sharing content. And whether it’s online or in the real world, the most engaging conversations involve other people’s stories.

Storytelling is the most powerful driver of engagement in social media. Just as good stories provide the momentum for great books and great speeches, they’re also the impetus for the best in social media.

Storytelling as a tool has been well understood and consciously used by salespeople for decades. What I find surprising is that whilst it’s also been used by marketeers for a long time, it really only hit mainstream marketing theory in the last naughties. I assume the sudden rise comes from it’s ties to social media and conversational marketing made famous by The Cluetrain Manifesto. – I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Anyway, the real reason why I wrote this post was to share the following with you. This morning I recieved an unsolicited email pitch from an Indian IT Outsourcing firm, ValueLabs. I get a lot of these and I rarely open their attachments. However on this occasion I clicked on the attached PowerPoint. After skimming the first nine pages of text, charts and diagrams, I reached page ten and couldn’t help but take notice.

This was the only page with a photo rather than a chart and it had far less text on it – perhaps it was a combination of these two things that drew me in. But what really turned me on was the story behind the image. Thanks to the story, this slide is more powerful than any other I’ve been sent by outsourcers. It has a clear message and on top of that provides a clear reason to believe.

Here’s the slide…

Storytelling by ValueLabs

The real power of all the user-generated content and ideas that result from an increasing use of social media depends on our being able to find it. It’s no use to have millions upon millions of comments added each day if we can’t find them, or if we can’t sort for the ones most relevant to us at a particular moment.

This is, of course, not a new problem. Information from the earliest Medieval libraries to today’s online communities and social networks has needed sorting, categorising and cataloguing so that we  can find it successfully. Twitter users have a simple way of helping to sort data – the hashtag.

The concept is simple. A short code is added to the end of a Tweet to associate it with others – this then lets people search for everything on this  subject. So, for example, if you were tweeting at this weekend’s Glastonbury music festival in the UK then you could add the code #glastonbury to your tweet. If you wanted to search for what’s happening then you just need to search for everything with this code.

Hashtags are great for events and are a really effective way of associating related tweets with each other. But they are quite limited. As a means of sorting and cataloguing data they are very simple, perhaps too simple.

This became quite clear over the last couple of weeks with the use of the hashtag #iranelection. The tag was originally used by people in Iran who were tweeting updates about what was happening. Others in Iran were able to find out about  events, protests and developments by tracking these updates. The hashtag wasn’t the most used on Twitter but it was serving it’s purpose. Then it suddenly became popular, very popular. And that’s when you start to see the weaknesses of this way of organising information.

The #iranelection hashtag started being used by people not in Iran searching for information or merely expressing concern for or interest in what was happening in the country. The tweets from people on the ground were much less easy to find with hundreds of tweets from well wishers mixed in there. Information was much more difficult to find as the hashtag became more popular.

Whilst simple, the hashtag has limitations associated with this. One of the real challenges for Twitter (and indeed for many other social media sites) is finding ways to sort, file and catalogue information in a way that makes it easy for others to find. This is not easy – in part it depends on the fundamental structure of the site itself, and in part on the ways in which users use the site.

The ideal might be a way to filter content by type, by user information and by a series of categories. But this requires that you gather more profiling information than many of these sites do (or indeed than many users would want to give) and providing a way to categorise both at a parent and child level, which is complicated from an information architecture perspective. Resolving this is the real challenge of social media – finding a way to search for and discover information we want. It is this that will really show the benefits that social media can bring.

Some more reading

• Social Media and #IranElection | bigMETHOD (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• How to Search Twitter (olago.wordpress.com)
• Twitter numbers up thanks to Iran (thisisherd.com)
• Iran Twitter: Why The Movement Adopted This Medium (huffingtonpost.com)
• Iran, Twitter and the value of new media (sluggerotoole.com)
• ‘It’s Hot in Iran’ Is Latest Tech PR Gimmick (gawker.com)

Image by Simmy. via Flickr

It can be tempting, sometimes, to thing that online communities and social networks are about words. About people writing their current status, discussing in forums or sharing ideas. It can be tempting to think that text is king. And this just isn’t so.

There are many reasons for the over-dominance of text in some online communities, but two important ones are

1. the original message boards and forums were predominantly for text communications
2. until relatively recently text was the easiest way for users to get content onto the internet

But with a rise of both social media rich sites and of webcams and broadband connections this is no longer the case. People can now communicate their ideas easily in text, image, video or voice. As long as we let them, that is.

The truth is that not everybody likes using words, and even for those who do, sometimes an image or a video can convey things that words just can’t. If we want people to communicate their ideas and interests in our online communities we should then allow them to use whatever medium suits them best for the message they want to convey. We should allow images to alternate with text and video to be posted in response to written questions. If you make it easy for people to do this and to breakdown the barriers for communicating then you will find that you get both more and more creative ideas.

Images do foster creativity and they allow a different kind of conversation and exchange of ideas to take place. Just take a look at sites like Dailybooth to see this in action. The premise of the site is simple – members are encouraged to upload a photo of themselves everyday. But where it gets really interesting is to look at the comments. Photos beget photos – people respond to the photos with photo comments of their own. This leads to a level of creativity, ideas exchange and insight that just isn’t possible with text. Whether it’s people showing the latest item of clothing they bought, part of their home or just exchanging wishes by photo, this is the kind of insight that any brand or organisation could benefit from.

So not everybody likes words and, perhaps more importantly, words are constrictive.They don’t allow us to exchange many ideas that are or interest and of value. So no online community (and especially no online research community) should restrict its users to text-only conversation. The reverse should be true. They should encourage people to share ideas in whatever medium makes sense to them. Technology should not limit them and should be invisible. It’s the ideas that count, after all.

Image by manfrys via Flickr

People are often comparing Twitter with Facebook. They’re wrong to do this. Facebook is about connections, friends and contacts. Twitter is not about this at all. It’s about information and search.

The real value of Facebook is when you have a group of friends with who you share ideas, experiences and content. Twitter, on the other hand is not really built for connecting with people – its real value comes from the comments and contributions that are added to its database and that can then be searched.

That’s why I’ve always preferred to compare Twitter with Google. On Google I search for information and get a set of results based on which sites score most highly in their algorithm. On Twitter I search for information and get a set of results based on which links are most often read and forwarded by other users. Google produces mathematical search results. Twitter produces UGC ones. Until now.

ZDNet is reporting that Google has soft-launched public comments on search results:

Google’s Searchology press conference unveiled a boatload of new features including different ways to visualize results, better support for semantic markup, and more. But when I was looking at the results page, I noticed a little comment icon. There was no mention of this.

The article goes on to describe how some users can now comment on search results and this is made pubilc to others. I cannot see this yet and so it is probably being rolled-out across the user-base slowly.

This is a huge change and shows that Google is taking seriously the potential threat of Twitter and other UGC search sources. Allowing users to comment on search results really could combine a solid algorithm with user’s own expertise. And we know that people are more likely to trust peers when making purchase decisions, so why not when searching online too.

There is obviously a lot to know about how this might work – who can comment, are these comments moderated (and if so how and by whom, will rating of sites be included too, how will Google cope when many thousands of people review one site. But these will no doubt be resolved as people start to comment on search results and use these to inform their own search.

For now we just know that UGC search is serious business. Twitter has integrated search into its main page and now google is allowing comments on it’s own search results. This really does show the power of social media. Once an algorithm would show the those results that were mathematically best suited to our query. Now users influence this – either by searching user content and links on Twitter or, perhaps, the potential for comments on Google itself.

Exciting times.

This week some required reading for the team at FreshNetworks has been this set of slides from John V Willshire at PHD Media, that he presented at the APA’s ‘Future of Advertising in One Afternoon’ conference.

This is a great set of slides that look at how the changes in the media landscape are changing the role of advertising and creativity. And how the advertising industry should make the most of this opportunity. The presentation paints a clear picture showing how things have changed and what this means. Looking at the change from a Pre-Industrial to an Industrial society, and then to the Network society we have today and explaining this as a shift in terms of communications from a very localised, face-to-face relationship, through mass-media to an anytime, anywhere communications style.

This change is significant and important, in the context of online communities and social media we can also add: ‘anybody’. With these tools, anybody can communicate with anybody else, at anytime and anywhere. We are no longer constricted by the need to be local and to know people personally to be able to share ideas or to communicate with them. We’re seeing some real changes in marketing, customer engagement and market research based on this change and these opportunities.

This presentation shows how similar changes are being taken advantage of by the advertising industry too. It’s best if you watch it with the sound on.

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Some more reading

• Economic downturn could be a boom for social media marketing (freshnetworks.com)
• Reconsidering the advertising industry (freshnetworks.com)