In the last post we looked at figures from the twentieth century and the lessons that could be learned from their experiences when implementing brand social media training.

In this post we’ll investigate some historical recommendations crowdsourced on Twitter over the past week.

Don’t expect people to be interested solely in your news, get the mix right - Samuel Pepys – a mixture of your own news and timely social comment is always advisable. People aren’t just interested in your latest news, version 2.6.8 of your latest software package or the appointment of so and so to Vice President of Packaging. By all means update your customers and fans through social media, but don’t expect them to share it with others unless it is relevant to their interests. As the great Pepys provided eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London he still provided daily insights into his home life from his love of wine to his wife’s dancing lessons. Getting the mixture of news and comment right is key in any social media and blog posting.

Watch your supply lines and make sure that your resources can live up to your social media platform commitments – Erwin Rommel‘s failure in North Africa was exacerbated by stretched supply lines and by limited resources across a wide front. Logistical problems plagued his Afrika Korps in 1941 and finally lead to his retreat. Brands need to realise that if they are going to set up social media platforms to interact with customers and fans then they need to be properly staffed, and have guidelines in place to respond to customer queries. A Facebook page with an empty wall or one that was updated months ago is worse than useless because it gives the impression that the brand does not care about its community and gives competitors the opportunity to step in and interact with your consumers.

Spelling and punctuation is vital – A social media platform is a real time representation of your brand, poor spelling and grammar reflect badly upon companies and give followers the impression that not enough care or resource is being devoted to them. Gordon Brown was hauled over the media coals for his numerous spelling mistakes in a letter to the family of an Afghanistan military casualty. The backlash was yet another costly PR mistake that took time and resource to try and resolve and still appears high in the Google search rankings when looking up the former Prime Minister. Proofing and sense checking should be at the heart of any communication that goes out on a branded social media profile.

Sex sells, or the prospect of sex and style sells – Now, I’m not advocating you to advise your social platform managers to turn branded profile into X-rated broadcasts, but Mae West certainly had the right idea in terms of promoting her personal brand. A maestro of the double entendre, Mae made a name for herself throughout Hollywood as the go to woman for quotes, quips and controversy. People don’t become fans of the mundane, they don’t share with friends and colleagues things that might label them as boring. Branded content should be treated in the same way as any other piece of content in the sense that; “If you wouldn’t share it with your own circle of friends, why should you customers or clients be interested?” With that, I leave you with one of Mae’s most famous quotes and one that has been shared by millions “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.” Brand managers take note.

Please feel free to proffer any tips you may think relevant for social media training or blog training and I’ll update the post accordingly.

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Those looking to ensure staff are equipped to represent their brand across social media platforms could do worse than learn from some of history’s most famous and infamous historical figures. So what can your social media training learn from the past?

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

Don’t take others at face value - Fake news stories spread like wildfire, especially on Twitter, from the reported death of Charlie Sheen to Rebecca Black’s pregnancy. Even seasoned journalists and media publications have been caught out by news that originated online without any facts behind to back it up. Even today, news that Madeline McCann has been found is a trending topic on Twitter, yet no news outlet has officially confirmed these reports at the time of writing this blog. Neville Chamberlain was easily swayed by a mixture of gullibility and persuasive argument from Hitler in Munich in September 1938. In short corroborate your news from a viable site prior to a blog, retweet or wall post. It pays to be vigilant and accurate rather than timely in many cases. It’s great to break some news early to fans and followers, but not at the cost of your brand integrity.

Wit and personality goes a long way – Brands looking to develop a voice and persona of their own, especially in a busy marketplace, should look to Oscar Wilde.  His belief that; ‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’ should not be taken lightly, there are many brands on Facebook and Twitter who are happy to go along with the crowd and not distinguish themselves from the competition for fear of controversy. However, people are far more likely to retweet or share something that they find amusing or useful; this could range from the bizarre Skittles profile to the erudite and compelling Dr Samuel Johnson. However, Oscar’s theory that ‘It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information’ may now be somewhat redundant.

Controlled controversy - Kenneth Tynan made a name for himself as an outspoken theatre critic and writer, oh and the first man to say ‘fuck’ on television. Link baiting or controversy has a role to play in certain aspects of social media activity in order to excite debate and encourage shareability of branded content and messaging. On 13 November 1965, Tynan participated in a live TV debate and was asked whether he would allow a play to be staged in which sexual intercourse was represented on the stage, and replied: “Well, I think so, certainly. I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything which can be printed or said can also be seen.” Critics later stated that Tynan’s use of the word was a “masterpiece of calculated self-publicity,” adding “for a time it made him the most notorious man in the country.” Notoriety is not always desired by brands, but publicity and the guts to say something out of the ordinary and that your competitors are afraid to, cannot be underestimated in terms of creating widespread brand awareness. Tynan was always one for breaking down linguistic inhibitions on the stage and in print and I’m positive that if he was still alive he would be confounding expectations on Twitter.

In the next part of the ‘Lessons from History’ series I’ll be delving into the training tips that can be gleaned from the lives of some recommended historical characters. Thanks to @photogirluk @Elle_Emmm @Carrot79 @nickhide @lesanto @Shinybiscuit for their input! Also please feel free to recommend your own historical characters who we could learn a few social media tips from.

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In the second part of our series on online influence, we round up the three best tools for measuring social media influence; along with a look at their advocates and sceptics.

In my last post I paraphrased Brian Solis and Vocus in defining an online influencer as someone who has online reach and someone who produces quality, relevant content. These are three of the top tools used in social media marketing to identify them:

1) Klout: markets itself as ‘The Standard for Influence’ and combines what it calls True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Influence to generate an overall Klout Score from 1-100 (100 being the highest and most influential) of a social media user.

Advocate: Michael Cohn offers a nice summary of precisely what Klout measures and why it’s so important to the success of a business.

Sceptic: Steve Farnsworth’s ‘Problem with Klout’ infographic demonstrates how, on the basis of the Klout algorithm, an automated Twitter user with zero engagement can still gain a high influence score.

What we say: An influencer’s network size and quality are both measured, in part, on the basis of retweets. But a good joke, or a cute animal video could become massively retweeted, can that be considered relevant and high quality content that will ultimately change anyone’s behaviour? Unlikely. Plus, if a non-human entity can be considered highly influential, it certainly casts doubt on the reliability of the tool.

2) PeerIndex: uses an algorithm to identify, rank, and score the authority of online influencers and is considered similar to, although less widely adopted, than Klout. According to PeerIndex itself, the tool “addresses the fact that merely being popular (or having gamed the system) doesn’t indicate authority”. It therefore promises to “build up your authority finger print on a category-by-category level using eight benchmark topics.”

Advocate: Andrew Bruce Smith demonstrates how he was able to use PeerIndex’s group function to make a highly popular list of UK Social Media Power Players; he also answers to sceptics with the point that “people had a similar attitude towards statistics based language translation in the 1990s.”

Sceptic: Mark Ralph recently called PeerIndex – along with Klout – the “Emperor’s New Clothes” of social media “appealing to our vanity but leaving us naked.”

What we say: It’s good for drawing in multiple social platforms and getting a broader view, but Twitter still seems to trump the other platforms – if you’re not considered influential on Twitter, you’re just not considered influential.

3) Tweet.Grader: a Twitter-specific tool measuring ‘power and reach’ across the social platform, grading influencers with a score between 1-100 (100 being the most influential). There’s is also a hashtag search function.

Advocate: Omar Kattan recommends it as a very useful tool for tracking the influence of your own business on Twitter, but also for identifying key influencers within your followers.

Sceptic: Steve Allan accuses Tweet.Grader and its ilk of “using fuzzy maths” and “trying to make a buck by rating you and selling that information to marketing companies”.

What we say: In short, even the best of today’s influencer measurement tools, has as many sceptics as advocates. The algorithms are getting better by the day, but they aren’t perfect. While a combination of measurement tools will give good insight into online reach, there’s still no substitute for good old-fashioned research as a means of measuring quality. As a social media agency, we find the best way of identifying the relevancy – and value – of an influencer to our clients, is to take a look for ourselves and ask, are they worth following?

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This is a two-part series exploring online influencers and their role in social media marketing. Part I looks at the reasons why a brand should focus on wooing influencers over journalists; Part II defines ways of identifying and measuring their influence.

Traditional PR vs social media marketing

Traditional media are longstanding powerhouses – politicians and even prime ministers have been kowtowing to them for generations.

Securing a piece of coverage in a leading national newspaper is an undeniable gateway to spiked consumer interest – which may convert to sales.

But newspapers rely heavily on circulation sales and as the Financial Times pointed out a few weeks ago, “in 1966, the Daily Mirror sold 5.1m copies a day, the Daily Express 4m and the Daily Telegraph 1.4m. Last month, those titles had circulations of 1.2m, 631,000 and 635,000 respectively.”

Less sales mean less editorial space and less editorial staff as a consequence. In short, the assumption that traditional PR is a sure-fire investment is coming under scrutiny, as more brands shift investment to social media marketing and the targeting of online influencers.

Who has online influence

Online journalists might look like the obvious target, but if the key objective is to source people with influence (“the ability to cause measurable actions and outcomes,” Brian Solis), then online journalists are not necessarily the most obvious or effective choice.

In a study of online influence by Brian Solis and Vocus, an influencer is defined as:

• Someone with online reach (although that doesn’t automatically correlate with popularity i.e. celebrity status)
• Someone who produces quality content
• Someone who produces relevant content

Data courtesy of 'What Makes an Influencer: a Survey by Vocus and Brian Solis'

There is no uniform online influencer – they are not automatically a journalist, or a blogger, or even a Twitterer. And their content may not even come in the form of written words.

An online influencer could be on any social platform, producing any number of pieces of content, from videos, podcasts and tweets, to slideshares and infographics and on any number of niche subjects.

The relevancy of those influencers to their followers – and your potential customer base – is what makes their influence so powerful; they aren’t ruled by the editorial policy of a publishing house, so they are free to focus on a topic that interests them. And they are most probably creating content on a shoestring budget or even for free, which means it’s a labour of love not a looming deadline.

Signature 9 recently reported that, despite the larger staffs and budgets of online magazines such as Vogue, fashion bloggers have overtaken their online influence, generating more links, greater social media activity and more overall buzz.

Don’t miss Part II, when we take a look at identifying online influencers and measuring their influence.

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Social media knows no boundaries. Understanding what customers are saying in the social web has value for multiple parts of a business – not just marketing.

Breaking down internal silos and sharing social insight is still a challenge for many. A recent piece of research from Dell/Forrester Consulting showed that very few customer services, sales or HR teams are creating strategies based on information from social media monitoring.

So how should an organisation manage the flow of social media insight? We think it is essential that you:

• Capture – you need a paid for tool to do this. Free systems don’t give you the same power to store and analyse
• Filter – have the right filters in place to breakdown and categorise the conversation – this will give you bite-sized chunks of data
• Prioritise – based on time-sensitivity –  some comments need a real-time response, others can wait a few hours or days. A large proportion of the conversation might not need engagement but will be able to help identify trends in the longer term
• Act – identify a point person in each function/discipline who shares the relevant insights with their team

This can be summed up in this workflow:

Let us know what you think.

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More and more businesses are exploring how they integrate social media across all parts of their organisation. We call this social business. But does your organisation have what it takes to be a true social business?

Earlier this week, Harvard Business Review (HBR) posted an article outlining 4 different types of social media strategy. Over 1,100 companies were surveyed and their approaches to social media were analysed, resulting in 4 categories:

Predictive practitioner
The predictive practitioner is a company using social media for a specific purpose, for example as a customer service or lead generation platform. These companies tend to have a uniformed approach to social media, meaning they can easily measure their activity and avoid uncertainty.

Creative Experimenter
Unlike the predictive practitioner, creative experimenters aren’t afraid of trying something new; in fact they quite like it. They have a tried and tested approach to social media. They experiment and dip their toe into new areas of social media to see if it suits them.

Social media champion
Social media champions take on large scale projects to get predictable results. These initiatives can go across a number of platforms and require input from a number of agencies and partners.

Social media transformer
Established social businesses tend to be social media transformers. They create large scale social media strategies that encompass a variety of internal and external groups.

HBR rightly points out that companies can progress from one category to another overtime.  But, as a social media consultancy, we see the ultimate goal for any orgainsation (over time) to be social media transformer. We’ve visualised our thinking in this illustration below:

So, what do you have to do to become a social media transformer?

1. Social media activity cuts across multiple functions
2. There is a central group that use social media to inform business strategy
3. Social media technologies are ‘tightly integrated’
4. Social media involves internal AND external stakeholders

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As a social media consultancy, we find a lot of people ask us: what is social business? Here are our top 3 infographics to help you get your head into the idea of a social business. It should provide inspiration for your social media strategy!

1. Social business imperative

What is great about Michael Brito’s infographic is the idea of the fully collaborative social organisation, which includes a social media centre of excellence. Different departments and teams working together is the key to social business success and Brito’s diagram sums this up nicely.

The Social Business infographic created by Online MBA

2. Social business DNA

Mark Smiciklas shows how all areas of an organisation contribute to a social business by likening it to DNA structure. The key is in collaboration which Smiciklas shows here.

3. Social media strategy development

Sobizco makes some interesting points here about developing a social media strategy, for example set goals and monitoring. What’s interesting is that some of the key princples of social business success are also included. Listening and assessment, creating the right team and educating and training are key considerations when heading towards a social business. This will then help with your overall social media strategy planning and development.

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The importance of online communities is evident to many brands. What isn’t so obvious is how you set objectives for the community and, then, how you develop a framework to measure this.

What you measure depends on what you have set out to achieve. If awareness is the objective, then size does matter – the number of community members will count. If you’re hoping to crowdsource innovative ideas, then the quality of the contribution is more important than the quantity.

If you’re a community manager, here are some online community metrics that you might find useful:

1. Awareness

• Size of community
• Growth of community
• Links to your community

2. Engagement

• Proportion of members that contribute
• Changes in activity on a weekly/monthly basis
• Number of comments on content
• Speed of response to new content
• Tone of comments
• Amount of content contributed by community membership
• Quality and relevance of content contributed
• Community interactivity and, particularly, interactivity without brand intervention
• Length of time spent on the site
• Use of other functions, such as on-site search, within the community
• Click through rates on links

3. Loyalty

• Conversion from visitor to member
• Frequency of return
• Number of members leaving the community
• Need for moderation or intervention from the community manager
• Positive sentiment

4. Recruitment

• Sharing of content from the community
• Mentions of the community on social media
• Efficacy of any referral or recommendation mechanisms
• Traffic sources

5. Quality

• Match of community demographics to target audience demographics
• Relevance of content contributed
• Ideas and insights provided through contributions
• Response to call to actions

What would you add to this list?

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Facebook pages give brands an opportunity to build close relationships with consumers; however, they also present new challenges for online community managers. Unlike forum based communities, brands have little real ownership over the platform:  posting is instant, 24 / 7, and pre-moderating is restricted. This means that the risks are higher – and it’s important to be prepared.

Here are our top 5 tips for managing and moderating an online community on Facebook.

1. Use the Facebook tools: You can’t pre-moderate all comments on Facebook; however, you can block profanities; remove posts and ban users or pages.  You can also set up a list of blacklisted keywords that keeps these comments hidden until you have reviewed them. Make sure that your profanity setting screens out any obscene posts; and, use social media monitoring to identify any sensitive terms that you might want to review before the post becomes public.

2. Publish a moderation policy: Having a clear moderation policy can reduce the need to remove posts and also provide a justification, should you need to delete any content. Here are some good examples that tell the community what is acceptable and what is not.

The next web ‘To our fans’

Diabetes UK ‘House Rules’

Topshop ‘Info’

Baileys ‘Terms and Conditions’

3. Know when to delete: Negativity is not always a bad thing and certainly not a reason to automatically censor content. People may post negative comments and it’s important to have a workflow in place to decide what will be deleted and whether an explanation will be provided.

When we’re managing Facebook communities, we delete posts that are offensive, irrelevant or spam. When we get very negative conversation that does not fall outside of the Terms and Conditions, we use other techniques such as asking for the community’s input or direct messaging.

Nestlé’s handling of the Greenpeace Kit Kat campaign and its deletion of Facebook posts demonstrates the risks of a heavy handled deletion policy, so make sure that your reaction is planned and thought through.

4. Know when to ban users: Users and pages can be banned from posting.  We’d only recommend banning users/pages who repeatedly break the Terms and Conditions of your Facebook page; and those considered scammers or spammers. It’s helpful to be aware of your online detractors – but don’t ban them until they have given you reason to do so.

5. Make sure your page is adequately resourced: Are your staff clear about the moderation policy?  Is there an escalation process for any potential risks? What happens out of hours? If you want your online community to succeed and any moderation to be effective, it needs to be properly resourced and you need to act quickly.

These tips have helped us to successfully manage Facebook communities for international brands, but what do you think? Are there any tips that you’d add into the mix?

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Hot on the heels of being included in Econsultancy’s top ten recommended social media agencies, we have made it into the Reputation Online listing.

And more importantly into the top 5 ‘most respected agencies’ and ‘ones to watch’.

Thanks to all those that voted for us and congratulations to others on the list.

Sadly this good news is somewhat marred by the fact that Reputation Online closed on the day the results came out.

Back when this was just a twinkle in the publisher’s eye, I worked closely with Centaur to create a magazine for the burgeoning social media industry. And two years later it is the central point of the UK social media community. Not least, because it was led by the superb editor, @vikkichowney. Vikki is the heart of the industry and made sure that the site was always topical and a jolly good read.

But in these hard economic times, and I guess tough decisions had to be made.

Although I do find it surprising that it wasn’t considered an investment by the publisher. As the magazine closes, the top 100 list is showing a social business in growth. A diverse range of agencies from boutique to mainstream are claiming success in social media ventures. An industry where there is a great deal of opportunity for future revenues.

I suspect the industry will bounce back and coalesce around an alternative news and feature source. But we will miss Reputation Online a great deal. And all of us here at immediate future wish Vikki and her team the very best for the future.

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