Over the past few months we have been investigating the essence of good online community management. We’ve dissected the very definition of an online community and we’ve gleaned insights from experienced community manager, Heather Taylor. Over the next two part-series we will be exploring the role emotion plays within a community; and the need for Emotional Intelligence in a community manager.

There was no end of speculation surrounding this year’s F8 conference. Facebook was making some drastic changes, and, as Mashable et al reported, Facebook was determined to once again re-ignite an “emotional connection” for its users.

This got us thinking. How big a part does emotion play in an online community? And how does this impact community management; if an online community manager has a high Emotional Intelligence (EI), does this automatically translate into a more engaged community?

Putting it to the test

We have decided to take the EI behavioural model as outlined by Daniel Goleman in his work, ‘Emotional Intelligence’, and apply it to the three most engaged branded Facebook pages in the UK, as outlined in SocialBaker’s latest report.

Over the space of a week we will be exploring whether the community managers for these three highly engaged communities do indeed display EI based on three of the key factors outlined in Goleman’s theory, which, for the purposes of this experiment, we have re-interpreted to measure interactions on Facebook:

1. Motivation
We will be measuring the frequency of wall posts and responses.

2. Self-regulation
We will be measuring reactions to negativity and whether the community manager responds in a level-headed manner.

3. Empathy
We will be measuring how much the community manager tailors the tone of their wall posts and responses according to the reactions of the community.

This Slideshare is really helpful for understanding Goleman’s model and how it fits with our working lives:

Stay tuned for Part II, where we find out what happens when you take one chatty beauty brand community, one passionate whisky-swilling community and one sentimental dog-loving community and ask the question: just how high is your community manager’s EI?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Google+ has really got the social media world excited. Twenty-five million users in 6 weeks, makes the growth of similar social networks like Facebook and Twitter look positively stunted in comparison. And the blogosphere is just as fired up – a quick Google blog search for Google+ returns more than 10 million results!

When Google+ launched, every marketeer worth his salt wondered what the network would do about brands; and companies across the globe started chomping at the bit to be the first to interact with the consumer communities on Google+. That privilege has gone to Ford Motor Company, which has managed to gain a corporate identity on the new social network, despite Google closing down all other brand pages. Google says it’s working on a suitable brand solution, but we’ll all have to sit tight until then.

Looking at the Ford page, it’s difficult to find any differences to established Facebook pages. It comes complete with a profile picture in the top right corner, smaller pictures at the top of the page and its ‘wall’ underneath. People can +1 things (akin to Facebook’s ‘Like’) and comment underneath.

While the aesthetics might be similar, there are a number of features we’re keen to start trialling and we’re excited to see what Google has in store for branded profiles. With the network looking set to spice up the social media marketing mix in the not too distant future, we take a look at what brands and businesses could be doing with Google+ in the coming months:

1) Hangouts

Customer service is one of the key areas we encourage our clients to explore and consider for their social media strategies and the Hangouts feature of Google+ could potentially revolutionise online customer service. The likes of Vodafone and ASOS are doing a great job on Facebook and Twitter already; and a number of companies offer instant chat via their websites. But, Hangouts could provide brands with the opportunity to chat to customers directly via video chat, making the whole experience more personal and friendly.

From a PR perspective, Hangouts offer some great opportunities, such as video roundtables with key influencers, and live customer events. This feature will get creative juices flowing as brands think of ways to engage with consumers using this new medium.

2) Search

As a search engine, it’s obvious to point out that Google’s strength lies in search. Google has already temporarily stopped its real time search function with assumptions that it will be restored with results from Google+.

Users can also +1 things, equivalent to a ‘Like’, and this will determine a website’s social value. This could potentially mean that the more +1′s a website has, the higher up it features in the rankings, affecting the SEO tactics we’ve become accustomed to. Google+’s Circles feature can also affect the way we search online, as recommendations from people in our circles, i.e. our trusted sources like friends and family, can feature in search results.  Social search is also beginning to affect the way businesses look at SEO. As well as +1′s, Facebook ‘Likes’ and re-tweets on Twitter can influence what we look for online. As this evolves, the customer experience has never been more important. You need to ensure you give the best experience possible to help encourage social recommendations.

We’re also keen to see the insights provided by Google+.  Facebook Insights are great but can be limited when it comes to identifying key influencers. And there are a number of Twitter apps and tools that give us good information but not all in one place. Monitoring and listening play a crucial role in informing your social media strategy so with Google’s background in analytics, we’re hopeful Google+ insights will provide the information brands need.

Time will tell if Google+ lives up to the buzz it has already created in the social media world. It may take time to become mainstream but, if and when it does, it’ll definitely make its mark on social media marketing.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

If you type the name “Roland Bunce” into Google you return 41,600 searches. According to media reports, Roland Bunce is a 24-year old computer science graduate, who has entered fashion and homeware brand Next’s online competition to find the next model.

Despite being atypical model material, he’s won public hearts and minds and is currently the frontrunner to win the competition, having received the most votes thanks to widespread social media support, along with some 54,000 Facebook ‘Likes’.

It doesn’t really matter whether Roland is a real person or not and it doesn’t matter if Roland Bunce is just a pseudonym. What matters is that social media has handed the public the power to make an unconventional underdog the winner of a high profile modelling competition. And the public loves it.

People from as far as Australia and Brazil have left comments of support on the Facebook group wall which has been created to raise Roland’s profile. A sense of camaraderie and communal anti-establishmentarianism is spreading across the social space.

I love a good revolution as much as the next person, but I can’t help feeling there’s a bit of a pack mentality starting to form. Look at the a recent comment left on the Roland Bunce To Win next model 2011 Facebook wall on Tuesday.

The comment was admittedly antagonistic towards Roland’s supporters and with emotions running high retaliation was to be expected. Someone creating a new Facebook profile taking the commenter’s name and adding ‘is an ugly shallow whOre’ to it solely to throw abuse back at the person starts to make things look ugly.

It’s interesting that Next has abstained from commenting on Roland’s rise to fame when the brand could surely turn this round into a positive PR story or at the very least put out a few of the negative fires that are starting to spread online.

It’s also sad to see the collective psyche taking a beautiful sentiment and turning it into an ugly mud-slinging match.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Social media likes to give and take with both hands. It gives you innumerable ways of getting your company’s voice out to your target market, managing your reputation and adding value to your business. And then it takes. It takes all the content you can possibly feed it and it always asks for more.

Quality content, as Jason Miller at Social Media Examiner recently wrote, is the “fuel for your social media rocket ship”. So if you need a constant stream of content filling your social platforms, where exactly do you get the constant stream of ideas?

Miller provides a series of really insightful tips, including the use of RSS feeds, identifying blogs which are relevant to your business and subscribing to their feeds for inspiration. He also suggests jumping into relevant LinkedIn groups to see what people are discussing; as well as searching forums, crowdsourcing topics that your audience would actually like to read about by posting up a tweet or FB post and even listening to industry audio books when you’re on the go.

With the Google Panda update which came in to play in February – followed by further changes in April – ‘quality’ content is more important than ever; and social media has become an even more valuable means of sharing content and securing search visibility.

Content isn’t really a conundrum. All it takes is a clear strategy and a pre-planned calendar. With these in place, you always know where your next content is coming from and you ensure your website content is aligned with and pushed out via your social media platforms to increase that all important Google visibility.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

So the Royal Wedding quickly became old news. Wills and Kate’s wedding of the year was quickly overshadowed on Monday by the news that the world’s most wanted man has been killed. And while this was a significant day in history, it also became a significant day in the social media world with an average of 3,440 tweets per second – the highest sustained rate in Twitter’s history.

The way we learn about news and the latest going’s on is changing thanks to social networking sites like Twitter. In the past we’ve relied on traditional news media to keep us updated, but with the advent of social media we have a resource that gives us the ability to share with our community. This by all means isn’t a new occurrence, on a daily basis we see news break on social networking sites.

What I find interesting this time is that I myself am an example of this new trend. I found out about Osama bin Laden’s death after I read an update from a friend on Facebook. I then double checked rolling TV news, online news sites and even Twitter to see if these claims were true and the detail behind them.

Interestingly, as the Wall Blog points out, while news breaks on Twitter (in this case by a local reporter) the frenzy really begins when news outlets tweet and report on the claims. So traditional news outlets are still leading the conversation. This could be for two reasons. One, they offer more content for us to share with our community. Two, they are trusted sources – we wait to hear from them that what we’re hearing is factual.

There is no doubt that social networking sites and mobile internet has given rise to citizen journalism and created a new resource for us to get our news. But traditional news media isn’t dead yet – we are still referring to our trust old news sources – the only difference is this time it’s online and instant.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

We’ve been hearing a lot recently about how Facebook fan numbers aren’t the be all and end all.  Brands should concentrate on engaging with their existing fan base. Even Facebook’s own are towing the line. David Parfect, agency sales group head at Facebook recently told the audience at the Social Media World Forum in London that brands should look beyond fan numbers. In his own words David said: “Just because a brand has 17,000 fans on Facebook, that does not mean these fans are engaged with them. That is just where the marketing should start.”

Fangager has listed the top engaged pages on Facebook based on their active fans. Looking at these pages closely, we’ve identified 5 recurring content themes that drive fan participation. While these pages listed by Fangager are mainly celebs, personalities or sporting clubs, their key themes can be adopted by brands to generate conversations on their own Facebook pages.

Lifestyle focus

The majority of pages with high interaction levels are lifestyle brands such as sports clubs, celebs, musicians etc. and the input from fans stems from these passion points. Even traditional product focused brands, such as Red Bull and Converse don’t use Facebook as a tool to directly promote their products. Their pages are filled with content that relates to their other ventures, for example Red Bull and extreme sports.

News and service announcements

As with most social media platforms, brands use Facebook pages to tell their customers about their latest news and often link to their website or blogs. Man Utd, which is third in Fangager’s list, uses this tactic a lot on its page. Nearly 4,000 people have comments on their latest post about Rooney’s match ban.

Platforms like Windows Live Messenger and even Facebook itself use their pages to tell fans about the latest service announcements, which for most people is more convenient than visiting an external page.

Personable

To help break down barriers between brands and their customers, some pages have adopted a personal tone which has helped keep them connected to their fans.  Some examples of these are:

• Justin Beiber – his page is populated with things he’s found interesting and make use of ‘I’ so it is as if he is personally writing to his 20 million fans. His average post receives around 7,000 comments.
• Skittles – it posts funny/random content to its fans and takes a personal approach by using ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. Its recent post that said: “I balance out my electric blanket with a refrigerator pillow” received 11,000 likes and 700 comments.
  

Questions

Almost all of the pages listed by Fangager use questions to help drive fan participation. Questions can be related to products and services or have no obvious connection at all. We’ve seen this work particularly well on the Sony UK Facebook page, which we manage alongside our client. For example, when we asked Sony’s fans  to tell us what they wanted to see in future home entertainment products we received over 50 comments.  

Event

Some of the top engaged Facebook pages often post links to brand events, whether they are real life such as gigs or sports fixtures or calendar events like product launches. Over 16,000 Man Utd fans were listed as attending the clubs Champions League match with Chelsea recently and fans posted over 9,000 comments.

Photos and videos

It may seem pretty standard nowadays but posting videos and photos on Facebook pages is a good way of increasing interaction with fans. For example, a video posted onto Justin Bieber’s fan page showing him pranking Willow Smith received over 74,000 likes and 20,000 comments. Exclusive, behind the scenes content also goes down well with Bieber’s fans.

You can view Fangager’s list here: http://www.fangager.com/site/top100/more/

Bookmark It

Hide Sites