FreshNetworks Blog

Social media is not just about conversations; it’s also about collaboration.With this in mind we thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the most well known collaboration tools on the market at the moment.

Much like our list of social media management tools wiki, this is an ongoing project, so if you know of any others please let us know so we can add them to the list.

• Adobe Acrobat – Acrobat.com allows teams to work collaboratively on documents through their browsers. Options for web conferencing and screen-sharing provide additional communication channels.
• Atlassian Confluence – offers a powerful wiki-based solution to enterprise collaboration. Content can be simply dragged and dropped from the desktop to the platform, eliminating the need for keeping track of attachments sent via email.
• Basecamp – collaborative messaging and file sharing. Project management can be easily tracked with milestones and deadlines, and templates for saving time with common projects. Campfire by Basecamp implements real time chat for collaboration.
• Broadvision Clearvale – a Cloud-based platform that can be established without the need for any additional IT resources.
• Colaab – offer real time browser based collaboration by allowing annotations to appear simultaneously on other collaborator’s screens. A “DeepZoom” feature allows work and annotation to take place on very specific areas of large images, such as design documents.
• Chatter – provided by Salesforce and free for existing customers. It allows communication and sharing of projects by employees from their browsers, desktops or mobile devices.
• Google Documents – simultaneous editing of files makes Google Docs ideal for students and other casual collaborative groups. The upgraded Google Apps version offers additional security options for business.
• Huddle - project management and collaboration software that allows you to connect, share and invite people to work on projects.
• Sharepoint – provides a single platform for employees to work collaboratively through various methods such as wikis and work flows. Personal profiles allow a team to better understand each other’s skills, experience and interests.
• Socialcast – allows employees to discuss projects remotely through a microblogging service, which is also accessible from a smartphone. The Town Hall extension enables discussion between executives and employees.
• Socialtext – uses a Facebook-like interface and claims to increase typically increase productivity by 20% or more.
• Tibbr – uses a design that is familiar to Facebook users, providing an intuitive experience. One key feature is the ability for employees to follow subjects, to stay informed on news and developments in their area of business.
• Wiggio – a free service that simplifies keeping track of multiple groups. Collaboration on documents, polls, and communication by text are some of the offered services.
• Yammer – enables companies to create their own private social network, requiring a company email address to access the community.
• Zoho – a large variety of collaborative and sharing tools for individuals, groups and businesses.

(NB: The power of online collaboration is perhaps best exemplified by Wikipedia. The Wiki platform is a great collaboarative tool, but as there are so many versions and uses it’s quite difficult to cover them all).

Added since the post was originally written:

• Sosius – a hosted online workspace, accessible from any PC or Mac, that lets you create and collaborate and share.
• nu+/Yooplus – a team collaboration and social software platform for the SME market.
• Podio – a collaboration platform with  a new and radical take on work tools: you build it yourself.
• Teamlab – enterprise collaboration, project management, document sharing and instant messaging solution.
• Wikispaces – wikis for organisations, individuals and groups to enable online sharing and collaboration.
• Offbureau – Offbureau fuses on-line collaboration, document management, and a social network.
• Open Atrium – drupal based team collaboration tool.
• Episerver relate – collaboration and community software. Also turns out-of-date intranets into a social community where employees collaborate and share information.
• FYMI – a private collaboration site where you can store and share information securely and sustainably with your team.

Image courtesy of ETF trends

Yesterday I attended the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) How to be Safe and Social event.

Of particular interest was the presentation by Malcolm Phillips, the Code Policy Manager at the Committee for Advertising Practice (CAP), on updating the digital remit of the CAP code and the new Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) guidelines for online advertising that come into effect from 1 March 2011.

Of primary importance to me, and to the way FreshNetworks functions as a social media agency, are the rules regarding the re-purposing of user generated content.

While the ASA and CAP understand that marketers and brands cannot be held responsible for content produced by independent consumers and third parties, it’s how that content is used that will be come under scrutiny. From the 1st March,  if brands decide to re-purpose user generated content in their marketing strategies, they become liable for the content from the time of use onwards – it falls within the same guidelines as any offline or brand-generated marketing content.

So what does this actually mean for brands and businesses using social media marketing?

• Any user comments re-tweeted by a brand will require proof that the claims made are true. For example, re-tweeting a comment that your brand makes the best coats will require proof that the coats are the best.
• Drinks companies will have to be very careful with any galleries they create on Facebook as advertising rules governing alcohol promotion state that no under 25s can be shown in the marketing material (CAP code point 18.6).
• A brand is responsible for any messages it produces that are then re-tweeted by followers. If it goes viral, the ASA may well ask for the brand to clarify the purpose of the message and its content.
• If any branded messages are re-tweeted with additional comments from the follower, the ASA will not hold the brand accountable for the additional user generated content.

The new rules also raise a number of additional questions that need clarification:

• At what point does user generated content fall under the brand control?
• How much additional information do you need to add to a tweet to ensure it isn’t misleading, and will a link to more information suffice?
• At which point does PR become marketing and visa versa?

The ASA are not actively looking for breaches of these new regulations, however it only takes one complaint from a customer or competitor brand and they will consider making an investigation. This will not be retrospective and will only be applied to content produced on or after 1st March 2011.

All in all, the IAB How to be Safe and Social event has thrown up just as many questions as it has answered. 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting year for online marketers, especially within Social Media, and there are bound to be a few real life examples that will set a precedent for what is and isn’t deemed acceptable.

Following on from our social media management tools wiki we thought it would be nice to catch up with our friend Joshua March, CEO and co-founder of Conversocial about his tool, social media management and the value to brands and businesses.

What do you feel is the most accurate definition of a social media management tool?

Social media management covers quite a wide area. Conversocial focuses on the core communication management through social channels, in terms of team workflow, content publishing and engagement analytics. We call Conversocial a social-media-management-system.

It’s also important to differentiate monitoring tools, that look at what people are saying about you, to management tools, which help with what people are saying to you. In our opinion, if people are saying something directly to you it’s much more business critical than if they’re talking about you generally on the web.

Why do you think they are valuable to brands or businesses (ie, time savers etc)?

Social channels like Facebook and Twitter are different from other marketing channels in two important ways. First, distribution is largely governed by fan engagement. No matter how many fans or followers you have, if they don’t like your content, it won’t be seen.

Almost all engagement with brands happens in the newsfeed – fans rarely go to a Facebook page directly. Facebook explicitly holds updates in the newsfeed for longer if they get more engagement such as comments and likes; and in Twitter, @replies and re-tweets directly increase visibility in the feed. So engagement with content is key – but how do you know how to increase this? Measuring and analysing engagement is therefore key – otherwise brands risk losing out of most of the value in social channels. If they’ve spent a lot of money to build up their fan base, this value can be huge.

Secondly, the nature of social channels is two way. Companies are used to having separate marketing and customer support channels – but in social these are the same. The more you push a Facebook page or a Twitter account for marketing, the more customers will use it to ask questions or grieve their complaints. But, responses from the brand are usually public, and directly from the brand – not a private email from Jenny in customer services. This means that new tools and processes are needed to manage this relationship between the two functions; without it, companies are at series risk of jeopardizing both the marketing value of social channels, and their customer relationships.

Social media management systems like Conversocial also of course save time and make team management easier; but this is secondary to ensuring the marketing and customer services are managed effectively for maximum value.

What do you think is the most accurate way of tracking social media activity without using a tool?

The key metrics are to compare not just fan growth, but also the engagement with content. There’s no use in increasing your fan base if they’re ignoring what you’re saying – unengaged fans have no value.

Explain how Conversocial works and why it is an effective tool for social media management.

Conversocial is a website that connects to your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. It provides tools to help publish content, measures the engagement with content via our own metric – IPM (interactions per thousand fans)- and makes it very easy for a team of people to manage all the incoming comments from fans in terms of moderation and community management workflow.

We work really hard to keep the system as simple and intuitive as possible to allow minimal training, with the tool being very fast to use. One of the moderation teams for a large media brand who use Conversocial for all their fan pages state that they can moderate 1,000 comments an hour using our system, which is pretty fast!

For reporting, we also try and just focus on the most important and useful data – ie the key engagement stats – rather than overwhelming users with everything available. We want to give real actionable data that allows customers to straight away start enhancing the content they publish and increase the engagement with fans, as well as making it easy to generate reports.

What platforms does Conversocial cover?

Right now it covers Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Facebook comment wall plugins on third party websites. Coming up we have plans to integrate YouTube.

How are you different from other social media management tools on the market?

Our key differentiator is our focus on increasing engagement and large-scale moderation of Facebook pages. There are quite a few tools out there that help with general management of Facebook and Twitter, but none that provide the engagement analysis we do, or that make it so fast and effective to moderate.

Who do you see as your main competitors?

We view CoTweet as our primary competitor; however Vitrue, Buddy Media, and Hootsuite are all in similar spaces, depending on the client requirements.

Image by moriza via Flickr

To celebrate the second annual Community Manager Appreciation Day, we’ve brought together 15 essential articles for online community managers and social media managers. From why community managers should get involved with their online community before it is even launched, through how to manage and grow a community, to how to measure the impact you are having.

This collection of articles, resources and thinking should have something for everybody to learn from or to add to. We’d love your thoughts on these and also your own favourite community manager articles and resources.

1. When does a community manager’s job begin?: Why it is critical that your community manager is involved in helping to plan and design the online community before it is launched.
2. The Ten Commandments of managing online communities: An insightful presentation on how to manage online communities from Julius Solaris.
3. The biggest mistakes an online community manager can make: From lack of engagement to a lack of discipline, we look at five of the biggest mistakes an online community manger can make.
4. How word of mouth grows online communities: A case study on the role of word of mouth helped to grow an online community at a critical early stage.
5. Five things to consider when engaging social media influencers: Influencers in social media can be a great help when growing your community and become advocates of your site. However engaging them can be difficult. Here are five things to consider when engaging them.
6. How to react if somebody writes about your brand online: A simple guide to help you decide when, and how, you should respond if somebody comments on your brand online.
7. Why you shouldn’t join every conversation about your brand online: When you should, and when you shouldn’t, join conversations about your brand online (and why you shouldn’t feel the need to respond to them all).
8. Champions, active users and trolls: Defining the different types of users in an online community and exploring how they behave and how you should manage them.
9. Moderation and safety: Why moderation is important, the four types of moderation you can choose from and how to decide which approach is right for you.
10. Should anonymous comments be allowed in your online community: The pros and cons of allowing anonymous comments in your online community, and those times when it really is the best option.
11. Comparing paid and organic search strategies for online communities: Which are more successful drivers of traffic? And which are more likely to drive engagement?
12. Eight ways you can use your online community to get insight: Eight tools and activities you can use in your online community to get insight from your members.
13. What online community managers can learn from gaming: How to use gaming techniques to help manage and grow your online community.
14. Using experts to encourage real engagement with your community: How experts can add value to your online community if used sensibly, and in a way that meets the needs of your community members.
15. Is time on site a useful measure of how successful your online community is?: The short answer is ‘no’. This article tells you why, and where time on site is a useful measure.

My first session on the IAB Social Media Council had us debating the upcoming regulation changes which will see the ASA’s remit extended to cover marketing on websites from 1st March 2011.

So what? Well the Advertising Standards Authority is “the UK’s independent regulator of advertising across all media” but until now this did not include websites (and for websites also read social networks, blogs etc). This new regulation means that marketing communications on companies’ own websites and in other third party space under their control, such as Facebook and Twitter, will have to adhere to the “non-broadcast advertising rules” as set out in the CAP Code.

The aim is to drive companies to ensure marketing messages on their websites are legal, decent, honest and truthful. This should go without saying but think of how celebs are used in social media marketing – when they are speaking about a product are they doing so because they are paid? What about the blog you read extolling a product – was that review paid for? Currently this is unclear but the ASA aims to remove that uncertainty.

How? Well, the ASA does not set rules, just guidance so it is currently unclear exactly what will fall foul of the regulations.

On the Council we are looking to lead the way with self regulation and I am interested in your views of how this should be done?

• Should sponsored tweets feature a hashtag such as #ad or #spon
• What if a paid brand advocate happens to tweet about the brand, is this ‘paid’
• What constitutes being paid? Is a blogger who is given product to review ‘paid’?

At FreshNetworks we have always advocated responsible social media practice and support the ASA’s work to clear up this grey area.

I will be updating you as new information comes out and would love your thoughts on this as they will help drive the self regulation response.