CrapHammer

Social Media Unplugged: The Framework and Guidelines

In this first post in the series, I’m going to focus on the core framework and guidelines that should be put in place for a company or brand to successfully engage in social media. 

You don't need to be a social media guru or expert.

You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

These don't have to be overly complex efforts or documents.  They just need to be appropriate to your organization.

Like most things, it takes a bit of planning, a willingness to learn-fail-adapt, and dedication.

I have whittled down the basic components you should have in place to the following five chunks:

1. A Strategy
2. An HR Policy (that addresses social media)
3. Key Workflows and Personnel
4. Training Tools  (includes Tone and Manner Guidelines)
5. Monitoring (ad hoc and systematized)
   

The Strategy

At its most basic level, I'd recommend that the following questions be answered

• Who are we?  Not to us, but to our customers and stakeholders?
• What must we accomplish?  What problem are we trying to solve?
• Who is our audience and where are they already?  What spaces?  What groups?
• What does our audience need or want?  How can we assist them in their spaces?  And can this be fulfilled by the "brand" or are individuals needed?
• What kind of commitment is needed from our organization?
• What spaces are we going to actively commit to for the entire year and moving forward?  How many can we realistically maintain a presence in?

Keep it informal. The days of media planning a year in advance are nearing their well-deserved end. Leave some flexibility to adapt your plans based on what is working and what is not.

The hardest part is determining how a brand and organization will behave in social media.  From this, the conversation can move to how individuals acting on behalf of the brand and organization must act.

HR Policy

It is becoming more and more important that a company have a policy that specifically addresses social media.  The days of simply outlawing it are over.  Yet many organizations I meet with still have not addressed the use of social media in their HR policies (aside from outlawing it.)

As Leigh Himel pointed out in a recent engagement, 17% of twitter users have tweeted from the toilet using their phone/device.  Your employees are already in these spaces and you need a policy that protects your employees, your brand, and your ability to engage with your audiences moving forward.

• Set the context
• • Where and when the policy applies
  • Define the appropriate macro use of Social Media (outreach, personal growth, leadership, etc.)
• Guiding principles
• • Define the guiding principles that align with your organizations values
• Use common sense
• • Give examples of how common sense applies
• Define the rules of engagement online that must be followed

I'm working on uploading a presentation that outlines the key questions to ask.  In the interim, be sure to check out this site where you can review some of the social media policies in use by other firms: Social Media Governance Policy Database

Key Workflows and Personnel

Whether you are planning to enable your entire organization to engage in social media or a core group of customer evangelists, simplified workflows are needed that help to identify the day to day interactions.

One critical area for any set of workflows is how to escalate issues.  This process should allow for at least two levels of escalation - simple assistance requests (second opinion) and what to do with a potential crisis.

I strongly recommend that the goal of any social media workflow should be to empower immediate action by the "people on the ground".  Any escalation or logging should occur after the individual has been able to engage with the individual or conversation.  This will go an insanely long way when it comes to stopping the echo chamber effect.  The days of circling the wagons and waiting 48 hours to respond are over.  Unless you enjoy making the front pages of every newspaper in existence for something that could have been easily addressed head on like Motrin and Taxi experienced.

I tend to not get too involved in the crisis escalation processes other than identifying the need for them.  Here is a great presentation from Ogilvy on Social Media Escalation.

Ogilvy On: Social Media for Crisis Management

View more presentations from 360digitalinfluence.

While it's important that escalation be thought through and a process put in place, there are other equally pressing issues to ensure are addressed.

Too many firms suffer from dead initiatives online.  As such, consider processes that highly incentivize the re-use or leveraging of your core social media spaces.  At Twist Image, we've generally done this by helping our clients commit to a set number of spaces and then setup processes that define the need for an exception if a new space is needed or desired for a campaign initiative.  This exception must showcase how the new space will be supported for the entire fiscal year and also include a migration plan for when they will no longer be supporting this space.

The people

Identifying the personnel needed to fuel and manage your social media efforts can be quite challenging. Many organizations are already struggling with properly resourcing existing programs let alone a new one of such breadth and scope.  Social media requires significant additional effort from a content and interaction perspective alone let alone monitoring and moderation.

Few organizations get approval to hire additional staff for their first forays into these spaces.  Many of our clients have had good success dividing up the responsibilities across a team of people that coordinate and share duties across the key spaces.  Using the training tools below and tools like HootSuite, it is totally possible to provide a great experience to customers, prospects and fans while also gaining key learnings and insight.

Quick note: I find that it's important that marketing be involved in this effort and that it not be shuffled off to a customer service function.  The best teams are formed from a combination of roles and areas from within the organization.

Training Tools

I would simplify this into two parts: core skills and behavioral guardrails.

• Core skills: I've found it very useful that a program be put in place to train all staff from executives down to part-time workers (as appropriate) on the use of key websites and software as it relates to social media.  Step-by-step training on how to use twitter, Facebook and Google alerts through to using software like TweetDeck to participate in and monitor conversations.  No starting knowledge should be needed as the training should bring everyone up to a decent level of competence on a customized list of platforms specific to your social media efforts.  Besides, if 12 year olds can do this, we should be able to as well (just maybe not as fluently)  ;)
  
• Behavioral guardrails: One of the tools I was able to introduce to Twist Image was what we are calling the Tone and Manner Guidelines.  In essence, this is a powerpoint presentation meant to provide the guardrails to an individuals' behavior online.  Where the social media policy defines the limits and rules, this presentation provides a bit more guidance on the tone, the type of language to use and even how to respond to specific issues. By building scenarios of actual conversations, we''ve found that we can quickly and effectively convey how to respond to a variety of positive and negative situations.  In its simplest form, we show a conversation online and then present what not to say and give guidance on what to say.  We've found this to be a phenomenally successful way to quickly escalate people with little or no experience to full fledged social media evangelists acting on behalf of the brand within a very short period of time.

Monitoring

Frankly, you need to be monitoring.  End of sentence.

That said, there are two approaches.  If you have the resources, I recommend doing both.  But if resources are tight, start with ad hoc.

Ad Hoc Monitoring

My holy triad of ad hoc monitoring is a combination of the following three tools

• Google alerts
• TweetDeck search columns (or HootSuite search columns)
• Technorati (unsure if this is still viable - anyone have any suggestions?)

Quarterly Analysis

We've explored a number of tools here at Twist Image since I joined and I have to say there are two leaders at this point in time:

• Radian 6: the most powerful and effective way to slice, dice and analyze social media monitoring data but not best if you just want a dashboard "out of the box"
  
• Sysomos: comprehensive and easy to use dashboards combined with the ability to overlay demographic data

I like both of these tools as they both allow us to analyze and dig into the data reported.  There are a number of tools that don't allow for proper investigation and analysis (some quite expensive) which I've found quite frustrating and a waste of money.

In my next post (sometime this decade?), I'll explore some of the tools and approaches in this unplugged series.

Big News at Twist Image

Big things are afoot at Twist Image.  Our 1980's website not included.

I speak not of the cool work we're doing redefining influence or how brands can extend into social media.

And I'm not talking about Twist Image being named one of the top 10 agencies of Canada (though that was cool too.)

Nope.

I'm speaking of the fact that Paul McEnany is leaving the US and coming to Twist. 

Hee Haw meets Craphammer meets Blitherings. Good thing we have some Mitch in the mix or we'd be in for some major F bomb trouble.  ;)

It's a crazy awesome week.  And I am beyond elated and excited to be working with such an amazing and growing team.

Slicing Radian 6 for Key Properties

I'm often asked for a list of key properties or spaces where conversations are occurring.  I'm trying to avoid using the word "influencer" here as anyone who reads my blog likely knows my views of such.

But let's face it.  A week doesn't go by in our industry that we aren't asked to find "influencers."

Here is a common request.

"Find the mommy bloggers that are best aligned to our brand or a new campaign we are running."

I was recently chatting with the awesome folks from Radian 6 and thought I would run this kind of request past them as I had traditionally wasted a lot of time trying to answer it.  I got the typical response.  Search for phrases most likely to identify these types of people/sites and then use the tools to narrow down to a set of key places.

Note to anyone trying this at home.  It won't work, or at least not well.  Which made me realize that I should likely share with the world how I now go about answering these types of requests. (Note:  Using Radian 6.)

Let's assume that the brand/campaign is a new type of cell phone.

The Wrong Way

We've been asked to find Mommy Bloggers so the first approach is generally to think of what types of conversations Mommy Bloggers are having that might be relevant to this campaign.

How young is too young to get a cellphone?

Impossible to keep in touch with my kids.

My phone always loses its signal at soccer practice.

Then we start to wheedle down to a list of phrases, includes and excludes that would narrow down to the conversations of interest.  This takes quite a bit of time configuring and reconfiguring your search parameters and slicing and dicing the data.  And we are faced with an immediate dilemma.  How do we specify that the conversation is taking place on a Mommy Blog?

Social Media Monitoring tools (at least the ones I work with) focus on the actual conversations (blog posts, forum entries, comments, tweets) not the source.  So we need to come up with phrases that only Mommy Bloggers would say when speaking about things pertinent to our campaign or brand.

Hopefully you are saying to yourself, "What??!!"  What would a Mommy Blogger say on her blog that wouldn't also appear on a parenting website?  Well, as a Mommy Blog IS a parenting website, the answer is "nothing".  So this simple sounding task quickly becomes a prolonged exercise in frustration. 

Note that it can be done and you will find results, but it can take you days.  And frankly, it's faster (if less comprehensive) to manually visit each of the top Mommy Blogs you know of and just do a search using their sites' search feature for conversations you are fishing for.

A Better Way

When the request (find the mommy bloggers that...) assumes that we are looking for the hottest and most relevant nodes of conversation within a "defined" slice of the Internet, then it is quite straight forward to just limit our listening tools  to that slice of the Internet. 

For example, we are looking for Mommy Bloggers in the opening objective.  So, let's limit our tool to only be sniffing the Mommy Blogs.  Simple and straight forward, no?  All great ideas are.  Or so I tell myself.  ;)

In the screenshot below, I'm loading in a list of all the Canadian Mommy Blogs we know about. I'm limiting Radian 6 to look only at the conversations from a defined list of sources that match the keywords we are looking for.

So now I can search for the conversations likely to be of value to our client and not worry about whether the conversation is happening on a mommy blog.

Takeaways

I have spent days configuring the first approach and would consider myself lucky to have 1 mommy blog in my top 10 influencer view.

Or I can spend 30 minutes on my "Better way" approach and find 10 hot mommy blogs of interest immediately in the top 10 influencer view.  And even better, I can remove a lot of bias by looking at trending phrases, top conversations, etc. versus just searching for the conversations I want to find.

Photo Credit: hownowdesign

What Spammers Know That We Don't

We are all working like mad to develop location based services and technologies. Phones that know where the nearest cool coffee shop is, discount coupons that apply to a store you just snubbed and walked past.  I believe it is considered to be a multi-billion dollar opportunity and the salvation of the mobile industry.

But frankly, we are sucking eggs and doing next to nothing while a few key individuals are proving you can mine for location based gold today with free or near-free resources.

Spammers Innovating Faster than Hi Tech:

The Real Estate, Online Pharmacies and Porn Spammers have once again proven they are leaders in adapting new technologies to their annoying purposes.

I tweeted the following:

And within minutes I received a follow from KatyFStewart.

She offers one link on her page.  To this site:

 

Should I be promoting her Twitter account?  Should I have clicked through on a link from a semi-naked nubile photo?  No.  Of course not.  But will I be alone?  Nope.  Guaranteed.  Not only that, I would bet that many a media person would cry to get even 1/10 of the clickthrough and conversion rates these people are achieving.

Not Just Porn:

Tweet the name of a city and you will undoubtedly get a sudden increase in followers.  Why?  Because the real estate industry is not about to be left behind by the porn industry.  Quite a few real estate agents appear to be using auto-subscribe services to add you as a friend in cities they do their work in.

These are services that listen for a set of keywords and once it finds a match with any twitter user in the world, it sends that person a follow request on your behalf.

Let me be clear. I hate auto-subscribe services.  It's like paying someone to get you more friends.

That said, it does make me wonder.  Do we really need fancy and expensive GPS and high tech solutions or could we just better monitor and respond to the contextual content people are providing in their tweets and status updates?

Brilliance:

What I love about [what] Ms. Stewart is doing (real name likely Amanda Hogsbottom) is that they are using simple, free and contextual tools to mine twitter and facebook.  Then they are doing simple (and free) IP sniffing from their website to provide an end to end contextually relevant and highly personalized (location based) solution.  Something the big brands are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve with likely far less success.

I am not an influencer and we are not friends (try 2)

 

I would think that writing an article titled "F*ck Influencers..." would have halted some of the SPAM PR email I receive every day, but alas, just last week I received yet another in a steady stream of such emails.  This one stood out as it actually referenced the "F*ck Influencers..." post. 

All of these emails tend to follow a very simple format.

Dear Mr. Howard,

[Introduction on how they love and follow my blog.]  [Crafty little segue into their new product and service they are launching.]

[Calling out a post they liked by its title] [Some reference about how their service may be of interest to me (call to action)]

[One or more paragraphs on their service/offering that appears to be cut and pasted from a press release.]

Signed,

Name, Phone, Email, etc.

The email I received last week actually appeared to be written by hand and not by a PR firm.  I can only assume this individual had been told "how" to email blog owners, had paid someone to do this on his behalf, or is perfectly harmless and just stepped into a hornets nest.  So in an effort to help this individual out...

I AM NOT AN "INFLUENCER" AND WE ARE NOT FRIENDS.

That's not to say I don't have influence.  And that's not to say we couldn't one day be friends.  It simply means I am not a vehicle sitting around idly waiting to SPAM my friends no matter how "awesome" this piece of PR news is. 

Let's talk about what influence I have and how to get me to one day care enough about your service to potentially share it within my circles of influence.

It's amazingly simple.

1. Have a conversation with me.

Don't call me and don't email me.  So where can you have a conversation with me?  Well, here's a crazy idea, how about on the very blog that brought me to your attention?

2. Have a conversation with ME about what matters to ME. 

Every article on my blog has a wonderful little comment feature.  Here's an "out of the box" thought.  What about leaving a comment on the very post you were about to say your really liked in the spam email?

But there's a catch, you have bring some value to the conversation or I'm going to assume you are a spammer and press "mark as spam."

But that's a lot of comments you have to leave and monitor.  What is a PR lackey tasked to incent and measure massive viral reach via SPAM emails to do??? 

Die, hopefully.

3. Create a Relationship

Relationships are two way streets. They are touch and go.  They take lots of time and enormous amounts of effort. Which may be why everyone, including PR firms and agencies who should know better, spam everyone by email.

But it's only when we have a relationship that you are then able to leverage my influence. It's only when we have a relationship that we are able to determine what is of value to each other.  The relationships that bring value to each of us as well as our extended circles of influence become stronger and open up new opportunities.

4. Relationships are complex

Here is the good news about relationships: they are not an on/off switch.  There are more contexts for relationships than I think can be defined or addressed.  I may think you are cute.  You may think I'm nice but too big for my boots.  I may disagree with everything you say but admire your transparency and openness. We might see the world the same way or from radically different perspectives.

Or we may only have a relationship built around a topic or area of interest.  Something I'm interested in and you are able to provide insight or access to.

I am 100% in the Herd camp.  Influencers don't exist, only influence.  Step 1 is to have a relationship.  I'd go so far as to say that the person with the most relationships wins.

[Image Source: Xurble ]

F*ck Influencers (or Influencing Conversations)

I've recently been asked to work on an Influencer strategy.

I have to admit that I had a bit of a negative initial reaction to the task.  So much of what I read online about "influencers" seems to assume that people live to spread messages.  While there is some "status" truth to being the source or the first to report something, this rings naive and hollow as a prime motivator to me.  My personal sense of my own motivations is not that I desire to spread messages, but rather that I want to be part of a larger conversation or participate in something meaningful.

My first thought on how to approach this task was to expand influencers beyond a select group of "key" people.

In today's world everyone is a publisher, everyone has some level of influence, and everyone has a network of influence that is difficult to define let alone measure.  So to focus on just "A listers" or big names is to severely limit the potential for what can be achieved.    That's not to say I don't want "A listers" (if they even exist) to join in the conversation, rather it says that I always prefer to not put all my eggs in one basket.

My next step was to redefine influencers from people to nodes of influence. 

A node can be a major platform or property such as Twitter, Facebook or MTV.  A node can also be a community of interest that has gathered around a topic.  I spent some time defining all the different areas of influence (around the topic at hand) and then narrowing down into the nodes that make up each ecosystem or circle of influence.  These grew into some rather intricate maps that opened up all kinds of new opportunities I had not considered when I first approached this task, and it shifted quickly from finding a handful of influencers to looking at how to reach hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Next I pulled back to revisit the purpose of any influencer strategy, which I am currently defining as "to encourage conversations around the brand that are shared by individuals across their networks of influence."

Key stress is placed on individuals and the fact that each has unique networks but with lots of duplication between these networks. 

All of this thinking led me to some key questions.

Why do people share links or retweet on platforms like Twitter?
What types of things do people share and for what benefit?
How does how people see their networks affect their decisions on what to share?

I don't have any solid answers yet but I was brought to some wonderful resources by some great people within my network.  I look forward to other thoughts on this matter.

Dana Boyd's Analysis of ReTweeting activity on Twitter (h/t to Karen Quinn Fung via Twitter)

Segmenting and Targeting Users by Their Level of Interaction

Behavior First, Design Second (attention, to collect, status and vanity)

Image Source: FAS.research

Every Website Should be Social

Found this presentation over on the Frith'sters rantbase.  ;)

View more documents from shivsingh.

To date, most Facebook Connect sites make very limited us of the Social Graph information available.  So in the presentation above, the authors ask if the real value of something like FB Connect is in its being the window into things like collaborative commerce.

What if we logged into a retailer and reviews from our friends or our friends' friends were listed at the top?  It's one of the reasons I love services like GigPark because I'm able to get reviews from people I trust.  I'm quite fed up with reading highly emotional reviews that turn out to be bogus or misleading. Something tells me I'm not alone.

We are all building trusted networks online.  The question is how to tap into these.  Perhaps its less about how many clicks a person takes to get to a product and rather how many clicks it takes them to find out from THEIR network just how good or bad a product is.

I've long been interested in social shopping and while there have been a few attempts by some retailers to move into this area, they were hindered by the fact that your friends were likely not participating in the site.  So adoption became a significant barrier to entry.

As we move down the road of Facebook Connect microsites and promotions, it would do us all good to start thinking of this as a new opportunity for connecting everyday tasks with the uniqueness of our social connections.  In other words, to make the sites we visit far more relevant, helpful and of use.

Shouldn't you be watching porn right now?

Mike Arauz came up with a great test.  In a world where everyone is creating content, we would do well to ask ourselves if what we are about to publish passes the "I'd rather be watching Porn test?"

Here are 3 things I found this week but I'm not 100% sure how many actually pass the test.  Which ones do you feel pass the test?

1) Henry Jenkins on Transmedia (h/t to Mike Arauz)

2) Cialdini's Social Proof applied to Persuassion and Hotel Towels

Article in Psychology Today on how leveraging social proof thinking drove compliance by over 30% from normal marketing methods.  (h/t Mark Earls)

3) Paul's day with the Yim Gnome

I'm really not sure how to introduce this one.  Um.  Go here.

The Invisible Herd?

My copy of Mark Earl's Herd arrived today. 

It was awesome getting a chance to chat with him last month.  I think Mark is dead on when he tells us to stop looking for "influencers" and to focus on the human traits that drive us to spread memes.

The key is to identify WHY people should be or already are talking about and spreading your product, brand, etc. And yet it is so easy to get caught up in WHO is talking or WHO we want to be talking.

Mark implies that we are just herd mammals deep down and I think he's right.  The coolest part of the herd mentality is that it does not follow any one individual, contrary to myth.  Rather, each member follows the visible assumptions of those immediately around them.  And from this simple copying emerges complex systems or ecologies of behavior.

Which is why I find it so amazing that campaigns go out of their way to not be visible.  I can't tell you how many campaigns I've participated in on Facebook that don't ensure that my participation is made visible to my friends - update my feed, allow me to tweet it, etc.  The first step to being copy-able is that one be visible.

But what if there is no herd?  Or what if everyone just does what the celebrities tell them?

Recently there was a great Facebook experiment that was clearly false, but the researchers ensured that [large numbers] of people had already joined the group.  People continued to join in crazy numbers.  And when asked why they joined, they said that they figured it had to be true because so many people were already in there. [link: CBC Spark Episode ]

The herd exists.

If you are going to ask "Who," then the who question to answer is "who do people copy and why?"  And while we would all love to believe we copy the celebrities and the A list bloggers, the reality is we follow the majority and we follow our friends.

Today I saw seven boys walk by in a group.  All of them had jeans and a blank white t-shirt on.  Not only that, all but one had the same brand of sneakers.  Why?  Well, they could be an all-boy band on their way to practice or they simply wanted to belong to the collective group.  And while one or two may vie as leaders, reality is that it is impossible to predict what trend the group will pay attention to.  Only that the group will continue to copy the behaviors of the members around them.  (Note to my US readers, don't try this at home.  Following a gang in the US and taking notes may lead to getting shot.)

So what can we do?

1) Make our campaigns visible, visible, visible
2) Soft launch everything and continue to test and tweak until it catches
3) Pay attention to who is copying what and why

Image Credit:  Marxpix

Leaving the Path

I was going to talk about "fans" of brands today.  The theme of my comments was going to be that fans have their place, but a "fan economy" misses the mark when it comes to the opportunities presented by the most passionate.  Fans are about the brand in the centre.  It is about people attaching themselves to a brand. 

The opportunity is in the reverse:  brands supporting peoples' pursuit of the things they are most passionate about.

Mike Arauz saves us all by presenting a beautifully reasoned argument for the person at the centre.  He calls this method "Desire Paths".  I think he is on the right path, indeed.

Enjoy.

Desire Paths: Branding for Digital Lives

View more presentations from Mike Arauz. (tags: internet marketing)