In 2004 social networks were a groundbreaking channel for brands to self-publicise and broadcast their news. Today, the dynamic between brands and their customers has shifted. Customers want brands to talk with and not just at them. According to Heather Taylor, founder of online community, RiotRemedy, today’s brands need to talk with and not at their customers. We asked Heather for the inside scoop on considerations to take before creating an online community; along with her top tips for making that community thrive.

1) What are the top 3 things organisations should consider before setting up an online community?

Firstly, know the purpose behind the community; it might seem that everybody else is already on Twitter or Facebook, but it’s important to remember that what’s right for one brand might be completely wrong for another. Also, make sure you have the resource to manage a community; do you have more than one person who can take the reins? A good online community manager is enthusiastic and completely immersed in their job. They need to be a part of that community all the time and that can get exhausting so do make sure they can have down time or they will burn out. When I worked for PayPal we had three people on shifts managing the @AskPaypal Twitter community and that worked really well. Finally, be clear on who your audience is and decide from the beginning whether you want that audience to be niche or broad. It will define your tone of voice and the way you engage.

2) Which online communities have you taken your inspiration from?

The first community I ever joined was Lonely Planet’s forum, Thorn Tree, and that was 11 years ago. At the time I wanted to move to the UK so I was asking lots of questions about travel. Thorn Tree was so well managed and had a real community spirit. I felt welcome from the beginning, it wasn’t cliquey or closed off, and I never felt overly criticised by my questions or that I was being spammed. The best online communities don’t actually work on a One-To-Many principal; they work on a One-To-One-To-Many. When you have a community of people who are really involved and care for that community, they become moderators themselves, they become super users.

3) What are your top tips for boosting engagement in an online community?

It may sound odd, but don’t be too involved once your community gets going. Allow members to engage and ask questions and don’t always ‘jump’ in to answer, let them be a community and help each other. And if you find pick up is slow, send a direct message to your more engaged community members and ask them if they could respond to it. If it’s a direct question on a platform such as Twitter, then naturally you respond, but if it’s an open question on a forum or Facebook, you’ll find the community wants to do the talking and engage with each other. Ask the right questions at the right time and don’t resort to cheap tactics like ‘retweet to win prizes’. By all means encourage people to use hashtags in their tweets, but give them a good reason; ask them an engaging question and you’ll get engaging answers. And then, most of all, act on those answers.

4) What advice do you have for online community managers?

Be interactive and be helpful. But also – and this important – allow downtime, time to disengage and switch off from the community. You’ll find community managers are checking their smart phones from the moment they wake up until the second they go to sleep and as I said, it can get exhausting. And be smart, you need to build your super users inside your company as much as outside; your brand managers, product developers, customer service teams are the ones who will have the answers to your community’s questions and you’ll need to coordinate a workflow system for getting those answers responded to quickly. You may be met with resistance, especially if your co-workers are busy and unengaged with social media, so incentivise them, explain how their involvement will benefit them, help them get feedback and ideas for product development; you need their buy in.

5) What do you think are the measures for success in terms of online communities?

To measure your community’s success, you really need to know why it’s being set up in the first place – are you trying to get feedback, improve customer service? Yes look at numbers i.e. how many people have joined the community, but ultimately the number of people isn’t as important as the number of engaged people; using dirty tactics like ‘retweets for prizes’ or ‘Likes for prizes’ might see a dramatic upturn in fan and follower numbers, but if they don’t stay and interact, what was the point? If it’s a forum or a blog, then look at traffic and bounce rates, if people are coming, staying, reading and finding their questions well answered by the community, then it’s a success.

6) What do you think is the future of online communities?

More integration and customer ownership of the brand. Mozilla works hand in hand with its customers and it’s a great example for other communities. Ultimately an online community should be a space for conversations and not just broadcasting news at people, which means there always needs to be somewhere within that community where people can engage.

About RiotRemedy

RiotRemedy channels charity donations through a partnership with JustGiving.com, while promoting and coordinating volunteering for cleanup projects across the country through Twitter and Facebook. For more information, see www.riotremedy.org

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Gotta catch 'em all

Netflix have learnt the hard way that social media can’t be a last minute consideration when it comes to a rebrand. Marketing has to be fully integrated with social media planning. On demand video service Netflix struck upon the name Qwikster for its DVD side of the business, you can find its official web holding page here. While the company may have managed to secure that prime piece of web real estate, it appears it was a little tardy in bagging relevant branded social media estates. Twitter was where it all came unstuck.

I urge you to visit the Twitter profile of Jason Castillo or @Qwikster as he is better known; Jason has an enviable way with words, a love of weed and an aversion to wasps. And he’s not beyond talking about the offers he has begun receiving from Netflix’s rapidly mobilising marketing dept to try and secure his Twitter handle (however, these references to money have been deleted from his account in the last 24 hours, it appears he doesn’t want to kill the goose that could lay some golden eggs.)

Dayum $1,000!

Jason has seen his follower count increase from the tens to more than 11k in just two days. This is high profile embarrassment for Netflix, more media attention is now on this social media faux pas and the expletives being pumped out from the @Qwikster profile than in the new service. The company’s online reputation had taken a knock on Sunday about the way it communicated its service update to customers, as seen in this apology from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

The reality is that the Jason Castillo incident could have been avoided.

If you’re a brand manager you simply have to remember that old Pokémon adage – ‘Gotta catch ‘em all.’

It’s a fine art, coming up with an original name and idea, but the proliferation of social media and the fact that anyone can own potentially valuable online real estate without out-laying cash means that brands are ever more likely to run into these clashes between the general public and their brand aspirations. Google +’s Huddle feature is another example of a big company (that really should know better) not researching new branding sufficiently.

The key learning?

Bag your brand handle and do your research. You can social media estate sense-check campaign and brand names via sites like Name Chk BEFORE an announcement or making your web site live. Prevention is better than cure, after all your online reputation is at stake.

Finally, you can’t Pikachus your social media estates after the fact, sorry, I had to put that in there.

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This week, in a move that Brian Solis entitled the ‘Mad Men Moment’, Twitter introduced the latest addition to the Promoted products family.

So what prompted the dramatic headline?

Well the latest version of the promoted tweet will appear in the timeline of users that are not already following your brand.

And why is this groundbreaking?

Twitter has entered the advertising arena cautiously. It’s been sensitive to the anticipated resistance of the Twitter community, only serving up advertisements to people that are already engaged with the brand or specifically searching for a related term . Now it’s going one step further. The new promoted tweet will be targeted to users that Twitter identifies as being interested in your brand.

So what does this mean?

There’s an opportunity for brands

Research into the first promoted tweets has demonstrated their value to brands. Nearly 25% of users reported seeing a promoted tweet that was of relevance to them. 14% reported re-tweeting a promoted tweet.

With the new promoted tweet, brands will now be able to extend these benefits by reaching a wider audience and an audience that includes people not already affiliated to their brand – but possibly affiliated to their competition.

The competition is hotting up

Twitter is identifying users on the basis of their existing interests and profiles. There’s a high chance that your promoted tweet will be featured in the timeline of a tweeter who is following a similar brand. This means that brands will have to work harder to retain the loyalty and engagement of their existing followers. It also means that tweets from your competitors might appear in your followers’ timeline.

Twitter is becoming more commercial

The extension of promoted tweets marks a new step in the evolution of Twitter. Although this is yet to roll out in the UK, the trend is towards more opportunities for brands to proactively engage with consumers rather than wait for consumers to demonstrate an interest in an area or brand.

It’s a great opportunity for brands, but not without its challenges. Barely distinguishable from regular tweets and restricted to the same format criteria, the content will have to be compelling to get cut through. And, whilst the anticipated backlash against Twitter advertising is yet to materialise, we’ll be watching how the Twitter community responds as advertisements increasingly feature in their Twitter streams.

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What we can learn from the world’s leading social businesses about how things can get out of control.

You can’t stop a crisis once it happens. But you can minimise the chances of getting embroiled in one in the first place.

New research from Altimeter Group backs up this maxim; three quarters of the 50 social media crises they tracked over that last 10 years could have been averted or diminished.  Note that these companies are described as ‘advanced’ in their deployment of social media – they are not novices.

So where exactly did they feel most exposed? We have talked previously about the steps to prevent a crisis but the chart below highlights the feedback from businesses.

Reproduced from Altimeter Group research

There are three here that I want to focus on:

1. The wrong team

The top two relate to education and people. Staff need to understand the difference between a ‘traditional’ and a ‘social’ crisis. The speed and the contagion effect are different and need to be understood. You also need the right skills in the crisis team – a blend of crisis management best practice as well as practical experience of using social media. All the crisis experience in the world isn’t going to save you if no one in the team can actually send a Tweet.

2. What? No plan?

Yes, you need a plan but not a ring-bound bible that sits on the shelf gathering dust. In the midst of a crisis you need a plan that can flex with the unique circumstances of each crisis. At its heart is the decision-making process – how to gather information, assess it, make decisions and then act on it. To some extent the plan needs generic processes – such as how and when to go live with a dark site but it should focus on principles rather than rigid rules.

3. Mediocre moderation

Knowing when to step into a Twitter storm or a frenzy of negativity on your Facebook page is always a difficult call. A workflow provides  a framework to help make that decision – when and where to get involved in the conversation and when to sit tight. Here is an example of one such model.

Social media crisis triage by immediate future

It’s not the sexy end of social media. But it’s the detail; it’s the policy, plans and training that will save you from a crisis.

Let us know your thoughts.

Find out more about our online reputation management and crisis management services.

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