FreshNetworks Blog

Today I was giving a talk on social media marketing and the role of the social media agency at the University of Cambridge. I took a few moments at the end of my lecture to reflect on how the students in the session could use social media themselves as part of their job-hunt. On how employees can use social media to find out more about applicants for roles – with many frequently-cited examples of inappropriate things on Facebook damaging candidates and employees. But more importantly how you can use social media to help explore, research, learn and prepare for applications and interviews.

In the short presentation below we talked through four steps that the students, and indeed any job-hunters, can take to use social media to support them in their research, applications and interviews for roles. These steps, starting with the simplest, must-do, are:

1. Take control of your personal brand online – realise you have one and make sure you have a professional brand alongside your more personal one. Assume that any employer will look for you online and consider what they will find.
2. Use the tools available to research employers – blogs and online communities run by brands provide a brilliant insight into the business and what they are doing. Using social media to research potential employers will furnish you with more insight and material than standard recruitment materials will.
3. Find to people to talk from target employers to (and talk to them) – find people on Twitter, in online communities or on networks such as LinkedIn that work for employers or in the industry and engage them, ask them questions and their opinions.
4. Experiment with social media yourself – the best way to start to engage and to control your personal brand online is to experiment with social media yourself. This does not have to be just about your job-hunt. Maybe start a blog about your hockey team or your holidays. Use social media and experiment with blogs, Twitter and other tools. Only then will you really realise the potential it has.

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

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

It is important for any business to keep up-to-date on what people are saying about them, their competitors and the market they are in. Social media monitoring can play an important role here – letting you observe and then analyse what people are saying about these topics online and in social media. For small businesses this can be a powerful tool for research and for competitor intelligence.

We’ve previously posted a list of free social media monitoring tools, and how you can use tools like Twitter Lists to help keep a track of what is being said about you online. There is a lot that can be done here and setting up some simple monitoring tools is something that any small business should do. For free you can learn what people are saying right now about you, your competitors and the market you are in.

Imagine a small but growing emergency plumbing business that operates in a large city. You have a handful of competitors from one-man-bands to big plumbing firms. You are interested in what your customers are saying about you, about them and also about the plumbing needs that they have. Monitoring online can help you begin to understand better your competitors and your customers’ needs for minimal effort and no real cost. The key is to choose your keywords carefully. In this instance you could choose your own brand name and the name of the plumbers that work with you, your competitors and some key products you work with or services you offer. You might also choose to look for some bigger terms and topics concerned with DIY and other related issues.

Monitoring terms in this way is a useful mechanism for knowing what is going on and what is being said. Seeing when people refer to you, or the plumbers who work for you, and then knowing if they are happy or not with you. This gives you the information you need to change things, react if appropriate or just know that people are spreading the word about the good work that you have done. You can also gain competitive information on your competitors in the same way and start to learn where they are strong and weak.

But social media monitoring will help you in other ways. One example would be to help you develop new products and services. By monitoring what people in your area are saying about their DIY or plumbing needs, or telling their stories of what happened to them when things went wrong at home you will be able to start to explore and investigate potential new areas where you could help. Simple, free tools offer the chance for you to be more informed and then give you information for you to make the most of.

Social media monitoring is a powerful tool for any business or brand, large or small. One of the benefits of social media and online communities is that what people say is visible to others. When people talk about you, your competitors or their needs you can see this. And you can use this information to act and improve your own business.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

An experiment by students at MIT has shown that they were able to ‘successfully’ predict the sexuality of people based on their friends on Facebook. The so-called ‘Project Gaydar’* showed that by looking at information that a person’s friends share online (in this case, their gender and sexual preferences) they were able to learn something about an individual themselves, even if their profile had high levels of privacy.

On one hand this may not be ground-breaking research – people tend to be friends with people who have similar interests to them and so it might be expected that gay men are likely to have a higher than average proportion of gay male friends. However, the research does highlight, again, the privacy issues that people need to think about when using social networks, and when sharing information online.

The ongoing growth of social networks and online communities is actually the tale of the ongoing growth of people sharing information online. This is a good thing. People are connecting with friends old and new, and are engaging with people and organisations who have similar interests, face similar challenges or are discussing similar questions. This sharing of information is unprecedented. It allows people to get advice and recommendations from people like them, and from people who are in similar situations. This is a huge benefit to individuals and organisations alike, but this sharing of information does, of course, mean that people are sharing things about themselves with anybody who may stumble cross the content they have added. And if people are able to put together your contributions to various communities and sites, they may know more about you than you realise.

That people can read things that you are sharing online should be no surprise to anybody. But that people can analyse your connections and the various contributions you make across the web, now and in the past, means that they can, if they so choose, build up a fairly comprehensive picture. What the MIT students did with just one facet of somebody’s life (their sexuality) could be repeated to build a much more complete picture of people using the information they leave across social networks and online communities. That this surprises people is a sign of the maturity of social networking, and online communities more broadly asa social phenomenon.

People are, in many cases, just using online communities as extensions of their offline activity. They are doing old things in new ways. Meeting people, talking to friends, solving problems, sharing advice. The real power of social media is that it is a large collection of information that is connected to people, organisations or places, and that is archived and kept for posterity. It can be sorted, added to, amended and changed by the person who originally contributed it or by others. People are associating themselves with data in a vast information resource, just by doing what they will do anyway.

This is, of course, the power of social media and why it offers so much to us all. But many people are still thinking of it as just a new medium through which to do old things. That is why they don’t realise the full extent of what they are sharing (and why this can be a powerful and good thing) and why they are shocked by the findings of studies such as ‘Project Gaydar’ at MIT.

* You can read the full paper here – Gaydar: Facebook friendships expose sexual orientation