FreshNetworks Blog

One powerful use of online communities is to help get new ideas into a business; taking advantage of the fact that many (if not most) of the best ideas for your business are likely to come from outside, from people who don’t work for you. There are some well know examples of businesses working with consumers on co-creation in this way: MyStarbucksIdea and Dell’s Ideastorm being among the most well known.

Most of these sites use a similar process: people can join the community and then suggest their own idea, comment on existing ideas or vote for the ideas that they think are best. The best, most commented on or most voted for ideas are then responded to by the brand. They are an effective way for businesses to get ideas into their business and, more importantly perhaps, of showing customers some of their internal decision making and letting people who buy the product understand more about, and even influence, the processes by which it is made.

Like any good online community, such ideas sites work best when they work with other social networks – interacting with people on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, in forums and blogs. Going to where relevant people are and harvesting their ideas, encouraging them to come to ideas site and add their thoughts. This hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement is a classic and successful way of engaging people online, and a recent ideas site has gone one step further and integrated this model into its functionality.

Last week, Californian Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced the launch of MyIdea4CA.com, an online community to harvest and evaluate ideas for the State of California. The site has much of the same functionality that we have seen elsewhere: the public can suggest, comment on and vote for an idea. The difference with this site is that the ideas are submitted in the first place not by signing up for the site, but by posting the idea on Twitter with the hashtag #myidea4ca. You can even sort your idea by adding an additional category hashtag; so if your idea is about education you use #myidea4ca #edu. The site then pulls in all of these tweets using search and allows you to sort, read, comment on and vote for them.

Using Twitter in this way is a great way to increase the number of initial ideas submitted to the site, lowering that initial barrier to engagement by using a place where people already are (Twitter) to bring them and their content to a new place (MyIdea4CA.com). If you want to comment on, or vote for, ideas you still need to do this on the main ideas site, but to submit an idea you do not.

This certainly will help California to get more initial ideas, removing that barrier and allowing people who want give an idea to use Twitter to do so. The danger, of course, is that people who are not on Twitter are excluded from taking part. Whilst the Twitter population continues to grow, it is still far from a mass market tool and so restricts, perhaps quite significantly, participation in this ideas forum.

Of course, that could be said of many online communities and other ways in which organisations engage customers, stakeholders and the public online. But by mandating that all ideas must be submitted via Twitter does exclude a large proportion of online users in California. Whilst the use of Twitter is a great and fantastic example of how and online community can work with social networks to maximise participation, it is better if there are multiple ways of allowing people to engage. Let some people submit ideas via Twitter but allow others to submit them on the site in other ways.

A cardinal rule when you are building and growing an online community is that technology should be invisible. You shouldn’t put technological barriers in the way of sharing ideas. Whilst the use of Twitter on MyIdea4CA.com is a fantastic example of how organisations can engage people through this site, as an online community it is missing out on the opportunity to engage more people in different ways.

Some more reading

• How organisations can use Twitter – some ideas (freshnetworks.com)
• MyIdea4CA shows both the power and limitation of opening up to the crowd (thisisherd.com)
• The Governator Live From Twitter HQ Today. Has His Twitter Service Already Gone To Pot? (techcrunch.com)
• EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Schwarzenegger Launches Twitter Powered MyIdea4CA (mashable.com)
• Crowdsourcing Ideas: Apparently Marijuana Is All California Needs (cloudave.com)

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in August.

1. How to write your firm’s social media policy

Our most popular post is August outlines five things to consider when writing a social media policy for your firm. At FreshNetworks, our approach is to keep things simple and to make them inclusive. Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. Oh, and make sure your policy encourages your employees to use social media more and not less.

2. What’s next in marketing and advertising

Last year we highlighted a great presentation from Paul Isakson on the future of marketing and advertising, where his argument was that advertising was dead and the future was marketing. In August, Isakson updated this presentation and theory for 2009, with an equally good presentation on what’s next in marketing and advertising.

3. Why every business needs a social media policy

In August, ESPN’s social media policy came in for some criticism from people who felt it was too harsh. But the truth is it is better to have such a policy than to have none at all. We are looking at a new medium which is letting people communicate in new ways. It is like the conversation with a friend in a cafe, just taken to new levels, reaching more people and being significantly more shareable. This should be a risk for all firms. We don’t need reminding of the examples where employees have posted a video that has embarrassed their employer, or a Facebook status that has lost them their job. Firms need a policy on social media and part of this policy should be guidelines for their staff.

4. Storytelling and social media

Social media is 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. In this post, Charlie Osmond looks at what makes storytelling so important in social media and shows how a story can sometimes be told as effectively in a picture as it can be in words.

5. Dell makes $3 million on Twitter. What can we learn?

Dell has reportedly made $2 million in sales directly from their @DellOutlet Twitter stream, and a further $1 million from sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere. That’s $50 in revenue for every Twitter follower they have. In this post we look at three reasons why Dell has been so successful with Twitter and what others can learn.

One of the latest projects from the MIT Media Lab is Personas. The concept is simple and the results are impressive. Just input your name and it searches the web for mentions of this name to put it in context. It then analyses each of these instances of your name to build a profile of how the web sees you. Are you more ‘sports” or more ‘books’, more ‘military’ or more ‘music’? Of course, if you happen to share your name with other people, your results will be subject to what is perhaps best thought of as ‘noise’. Take a look at my profile below to see what happens (it’s useful to know that I share my name with American Footballers, an artist and a singer in a band).

The main problem that the Personas project faces is the same problem that many of us face online: names are not unique identifiers. There are many many Matt Rhodes in the world, using the Internet and being written about for what they do. To me, the Matt Rhodes who is an American Footballer is ‘noise’. To him, the Matt Rhodes in London who write about social media and marketing is also ‘noise’. We need something cleverer than names to identify people and something cleverer than names to identify people and to enable them to bring together everything that they do and that is written about them online.

This is even more important with the growth of online communities and the use of social media. People have moved from being written about to being writers. And as everybody is now able to create, add to and organise content online, so the number of people being written about has increased.

This is where shared credentials like Facebook Connect or OpenID come in. Rather than relying on your name to connect your online presence, you can associate everything that you do online by using the same account details to log-in to different social media site, social networks or online communities. You can associate everything and be the curator of your own online brand. At FreshNetworks we use both of these credentials, if appropriate, to enable people to log into an online community with their Facebook details, for example. To pass activity between the two sites to start to bring together in one place your brand online, or at least some elements of it.

As the web grows, and the use of social media and social sites grows even more rapidly, the need to sort and search for information on individuals will become even more important. And, as MIT Media Lab’s Personas project shows, that cannot be left to something as un-unique as your name.

In our last post we looked at why every business needs a social media policy. And the fact that the most important thing for any business is to have a policy in the first place. But if you’re writing your social media policy for employees, what should it include? What kind of guidelines should you give the people who work at your business.

At FreshNetworks, our approach is to keep things simple and to make them inclusive. Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. Oh, and make sure your policy encourages your employees to use social media more and not less.

Here are five considerations we discuss with clients when developing their social media policies and guidelines that might help you if you are developing yours:

1. Encourage your employees to take part online

Your best representatives should be your own staff and so any social media policy should actively encourage them to take part online. Show them ways to share their opinions and enter discussions and debates. Encourage them to write a blog if they are keen (and perhaps provide a place for them to do so). Let them become comfortable online because they will be some of your strongest defenders in discussions about your brand.

2. Discourage discussion of what is happening internally

All employees will be privy to discussions, debates, meetings and decisions that are not public knowledge. That might not even be known by many other people in the organisation. Let your employees know that they may learn some things as part of their role that others don’t. And that these are not things you would expect to share with their colleagues over the watercooler, let alone online.

3. Encourage them open and honest about who you are online

The best policy online is openness and honesty. You will be quickly found out if you claim to be something or somebody you are not. Encourage your employees to be open about who they are and who they work for. This is good for them (if they are talking about something related to their work people will credit them with more knowledge). Encourage them to do this even if they are writing about something totally un-workrelated. They should say who they work for, and that what they are saying is nothing at all to do with their job!

4. Discourage arguments and disputes online

It is very difficult in social media to have an argument with somebody. It quickly descends into confusion and conflict. Encourage your employees to take part in debate and discussions but to steer clear of arguments. Whether they are talking about your brand or not it’s best to not to post anything emotional. Wait a day and consider it again.

5. Make sure employees know the best route for their opinions

Many businesses find that their employees use social media to raise issues, concerns or opinions about their employer. This is usually because they don’t know the best way of having their voice heard. Part of your social media strategy should be a clarification of the different routes available for them to have their voice heard. Some things are best aired in social media, and some things will be dealt with a lot quicker and a lot better if you raise them in other ways.

This week, ESPN, a US sports cable TV network, appeared to tell its employees that they could no longer use Twitter except to Tweet about ESPN. A few hours later it turned out that things were not quite so simple as ESPN released its internal social media policy. Whist perhaps a little direct in its choice of wording and phrases, this policy is a good example of what every firm should have.

Perhaps the biggest threat to a firm in their use of social media is to not have a policy about it. To not have guidelines for your staff and to not know how you expect people to behave. Most firms will have policies about how employees should behave both in and out of work. About how they shouldn’t discuss the detail of work that they are doing out of work, or how they can’t earn additional money doing certain things out of office hours. And there are sensible reasons for this. Employees represent the firm they work for, and they also should not act to either to discredit the firm or to take business away from the firm. If you work selling fruit then it would be unreasonable for you to set up stall outside the shop selling goods from your own garden. If you work selling your thoughts on sporting events, the logic perhaps goes, it is unreasonable for you to do this elsewhere.

Of course employees’ use of social media is not as simple as this. We are looking at a new medium which is letting people communicate in new ways. It is like the conversation with a friend in a cafe, just taken to new levels, reaching more people and being significantly more shareable. This should be a risk for all firms. We don’t need reminding of the examples where employees have posted a video that has embarrassed their employer, or a Facebook status that has lost them their job. Firms need a policy on social media and part of this policy should be guidelines for their staff. It’s not about banning them, as the ESPN story suggested, just about being sensible, as the ESPN policy actually is.

The core elements of ESPN’s policy are sensible and could be of use to most firms:

• Don’t run your own websites or blogs that talk about sports content – this is not to be unexpected for a business that produces sports content. They should, however, make sure they are harnessing any enthusiastic employees and giving them a platform to write their own thoughts in a place that benefits ESPN too, such as an ESPN blog
• You are representatives of ESPN even out of working hours – this is a sensible policy that most firms have already had – to remind people that even when they are not at work people will see them as representing the firm and so they shouldn’t do anything to discredit it
• Show respect for your colleague and for fans – in this case the fans are the customers and it is sensible to remind people not to embarrass or otherwise harm either them or fellow colleagues
• Content posted by employees needs to conform to ESPN editorial guidelines – it is difficult if employees talk about things in one way at work and another out of work but both are visible and shareable on the web
• Do not discuss internal policies, processes, decisions or debates – what goes on in the office, stays in the office and some things probably shouldn’t be shared.

These points include the basics that any firm should consider when it is drawing up its own social media policy. But perhaps the biggest danger is not to have one at all.

Some more reading

• No Social Networking for U.S. Marines [Shut Up, Twitter] (gawker.com)
• The White House Has a Ban on Twitter (laughingsquid.com)
• Bleep Tweet: Should Twitter Be Banned In Pro Sports During Games? (bleacherreport.com)
• espn’s twitter fumble: the real value of influencers (jburg.typepad.com)
• ESPN Responds to Criticism and Publishes Social Media Policy (mashable.com)
• ESPN Limits Social Networking (nytimes.com)
• ESPN Editor on Social Media Policy: Our Talent’s Personal Brand is ESPN (mashable.com)