Creating a branded Facebook page can be daunting for any business; doing so without a robust moderation policy in place can be disastrous.

A branded Facebook page can be an open-invitation for foul-mouthed detractors to fill the page with expletives and abuse.

Perhaps less obvious are the implications of a well-meaning, but misguided employee jumping in and publicly defending the company against said detractor. Or worse, a recently redundant employee joining in and publicly attacking the company out of frustration.

Before creating a branded presence on Facebook, it is therefore important to consider the Three R’s – Resourcing, Redundancies and Restrictions.

Resourcing

Consider who will moderate the page and the hours the moderator(s) will be active for. Weekdays and work hours moderation is commonplace, but clearly state this on the page. For larger branded community pages, automated moderation packages, such as Crisp Certified, can be purchased, to automatically remove negative or abusive posts; while software such as the Digital Recognition Moderation Engine (DRME) can be used to moderate user generated images and video.

Do ensure all employees, from the boardroom to the shop floor, have been fully briefed on the page and its rules of engagement; a solid social media policy will provide employees with the confidence to know when and how to respond to customers as well as outlining the necessity for employees to transparently state their relationship with a brand when engaging online.

Redundancies

During sensitive times, such as mass redundancies, a branded Facebook page – or indeed the social web in general – can present itself as the perfect place to vent feelings of injustice. Employ a monitoring system, such as Radian 6 or Sysomos, to proactively search for any online conversations surrounding this. Ensure an escalation process is in place should the online conversation spread and fully brief the page moderator to watch for potential negativity on the page. Page guidelines should state that profanity and abuse can be removed and blocked, to enable the moderator to quickly deal with abusive or aggressive Wall posts and comments.

Restrictions

Consider sensitivities surrounding data protection. While automated moderation services can be employed to block specific words and profanities, moderation becomes more difficult when it isn’t a specific word that needs to be blocked, but a reference to something or someone. Ensure the page guidelines clearly state what can and cannot be referenced on the page, this ensures the moderator can remove or block users who ignore these guidelines. The General Medical Council is a good example of an organisation finding a balance between protecting data and driving discussion.

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In the words of the Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Chernov:

“Without content, social media is a sports car with an empty gas tank”.

No one knows that better than an online community manager. But what that community manager also knows is that accelerating your social media activity straight to sixth gear is risky. Without proper road safety, you might say, that sports car could find itself on a collision course with a ditch.

Continuing our series on online communities, we’ve pulled together our ‘top four road safety tips’ for smooth and secure community management.

1) Stop, look and listen

As Brian Solis said earlier this year, the days of a lone community manager watching out for a few keywords to react to are over. The overwhelming amplification of online conversations has made it impossible for larger and certainly global brands to expect one person in front of a screen to be able to keep track of the potentially thousands of brand mentions taking place on any given day. Today’s community manager needs to listen out for conversations as much as they need to interact with them. Thankfully there are multi-purpose tools that make this more manageable, for example, Lithium combines social media monitoring with a CRM networking solution; while Radian6 offers social media monitoring as well as an engagement console.

2) Watch your speed

If a brand has lots to say and a stack of rich and shareable content, things couldn’t be better for the community manager. But it’s important to resist the urge to shout it all out at once. The content might be flooding in now, but there could well be a drought four months down the line. A clear content strategy and plan will enable the community manager to spread out that content, make it flow in a logical and structured fashion and ultimately make it last. Too many posts in one day can also be seen as ‘spammy’ – so we generally recommend 2-3 a day on Facebook and 4-6 on Twitter.

3) Don’t drive without insurance

In an ideal world your community will chat happily amongst themselves and drop some nice brand evangelism into every other sentence. In reality there will always be the odd trouble-maker, which is why you need to take out an insurance policy: engagement guidelines. By making them clearly visible on your owned social platforms, the community manager is within reason to warn users, remove their posts and if needs be, block them altogether. The Alzheimer’s Society, for example, has a neat Guidelines tab on its Facebook page explaining its rules of engagement, without sounding draconian.

4) Don’t drink and drive

It might sound obvious to say that community managers should always be sober on the job, but the role can require out-of-hours checks on evenings and weekends. Tweeting after one glass of wine might seem harmless enough, but embarrassing hiccups are oh so easy when Twitter platforms are involved. Platforms, such as Tweetdeck, are a great way for brands to keep track of multiple conversations, but when a combination of personal and branded accounts are streaming through a single platform, it’s simple for that manager to find themselves telling their friends about a 40% rise in market share, while their branded community gets informed how pissed they plan to get that evening.

Related articles

• What Exactly is an Online Community Manager? (thesmileystone.wordpress.com)

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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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There is a real dearth of social media case studies when it comes to business to business. The scarcity is even more profound when you are looking for examples from UK companies. Yet, surveys tell us that almost half of UK companies are active in social media.

We have delved online and found a few good examples of businesses tapping into the social opportunity. We popped them into a presentation so we can share. We have left our B2B social media clients out of this slideshare for the moment, as we hope to publish more detailed reviews to share later this year.

From this small sample there is quite a diverse range of approaches. However, they all follow the same philosophy covered in our report on B2B social media – they place employees at the heart of the engagement.

What is clear is that B2B social benefits from a very focused and tailored approach. These activities are working because the ideas are unique to the specific audiences targeted. And they are all in context and relevant.

When it comes to platforms being used Twitter dominates, followed by Facebook.  Psion and RICS are spreading their wings and managing five social estates. Almost half of the companies have created communities, either on the social platforms or in their own bespoke site. The engagement levels are deeper. The response to comments and involvement in discussions is more intense than B2C.

Of the sites we found, only one – HP – clearly uses its profiles for customer service. The rest focus on brand building, customer relationship building, loyalty and lead generation.

We are keen to create and share a comprehensive portfolio of UK businesses implementing B2B social media, so if we have missed anyone please add to the comments with notes and a link and we will update the deck and publish it soon.

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There’s been a flurry of activity and attention around the rapidly growing question and answer site, Quora, and this week it hit the mainstream media.

For anyone who’s missed the news, here’s a brief introduction, and some of the opportunities and risks that we have identified:

What is it?

In their own words, “Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” It is a combination of conversation, information and question forum: think Yahoo answers meets Twitter, with a Wikipedia like information page at the end.

How does it work?

Quora users follow topics, people and questions. They are able to add answers and edit existing answers, as well as rate those that have been provided by others. Accuracy is ensured by the biography that is provided by the users and the expertise that they bring to the topic, as well as the self-regulating nature of the site: inaccurate information can be commented on or rated by other users.

What does it mean to brands?

Quora aims to create “question pages” which bring together all the most relevant information relating to a particular questions.  These pages will provide content about the brand, derived from answers given by the Quora community.

This provides a number of risks and opportunities for brands, including:

• Insight into questions/needs relating to the brand /product
• Opportunity to engage in conversations relating to the product
• Opportunity to identify brand advocates, experts and influencers.
• Community-generated content and conversation about product/brand

Initial research suggests that Google is pulling in information from Quora. This could impact brand’s position in search ratings, as well as sales deriving from recommendation or consumer opinion.

The popularity of Q and A forums on the internet suggests that Quora will be one to watch in 2011. Signing up is through Facebook or Twitter profiles, and we’d recommend that you have a look.

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By Kate Eglinton

Last summer whilst researching graduate positions in communications and public relations, I was drawn in by the social media buzz that has taken the PR industry by storm in recent years.  Social media seemed to be big business. With my curiosity piqued and a brand new Twitter profile, I decided to take the leap into online PR – and managed to secure myself an internship at immediate future, where I’ve been for the last few weeks.

3 key learnings from my stint at IF:

Social media is without a doubt, social.

Social media has widened our communication horizons by an immeasurable amount. It’s human nature to want to share and discuss with others and social media allows us do this – wherever, whenever, non-stop.  The popularity of social media platforms is evidence enough in itself – we love to communicate. With social media you can have fun, be inspired, get involved, learn… and all a super speedy rate. I think there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.

It is also diverse.

Each social media platform serves a plethora of purposes and is used differently by different people. We must be careful not to lump all platforms into one social media box just because they come under the same label. I use Twitter to learn from tweeting PR and social media professionals and to keep-up-date with the latest news. Others use it for chitchat and staying in touch, which I save for Facebook. There are no rules of how to use social media – it’s entirely up to you! This diversity extends to brands and businesses…

A career in social media is equally diverse

Working in social media is surprisingly vibrant. From being at IF, I’ve learnt that social media still requires the creativity and communication prowess that traditional PR and marketing demands – with an element of geek which I love. It’s exciting to be involved in such a fast developing and ever-changing arena of business. And I don’t want to get left behind.

To round off…

I think social media’s brilliant. It’s a fabulous new way of communicating – but it’s also a big change which can scare some people. It took me a while to take the plunge and even now I’m a little nervous about tweeting. However, the social media sphere isn’t going to disappear and I believe there is something in it for everyone, whether brand or individual

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Brands on Facebook are a lot like teenagers in high school; both crave popularity.

Conventional wisdom teaches us that to be popular you need to be seen fraternising with the cool kids.

Clueless (1995)

A recent study by The Daily Beast, however, reveals the quickest way to become popular on Facebook is to do the opposite.

The Daily Beast outlines a one-month experiment into Facebook’s news feed algorithm aimed at decoding why one member’s news is more prominent than another’s.

The experiment centres around a newly set-up page, which is befriended by a select group of people, monitoring to see how much the page features in their feeds.

The Daily Beast found the Facebook algorithm favoured established members over newcomers, with absolutely none of the page’s news appearing in feeds initially.

It was only when the friends began interacting – clicking on the page, browsing through pictures, leaving comments etc. that news started to appear in their feeds; page interaction and news feed visibility was directly correlated.

The Daily Beast also found that a status update carried a much greater chance of appearing in a news feed if it included a link to an external web page. 

Throughout the experiment the ‘popular’ friends never received any of the page’s news, which meant they never clicked-through, browsed pictures, left comments or clicked on links – all of the things that fuel the Facebook algorithm.

The takeout for brands on Facebook? Start small. Friends with low-level followings are the crucial first rung up the algorithm, only once a presence has been established does it make sense to go after Facebook popularity domination.

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One of the most intriguing trends emerging from the social shopping explosion is the re-positioning of the consumer as product expert; the level of trust we now place on strangers.

A recent post on ReadWriteWeb provided some further statistical evidence of this movement with specific reference to the travel industry. Referring to Kevin May’s review of the latest World Travel Market (WTM) Industry Report, Curt Hopkins writes: “Peer recommendations have overtaken specialist knowledge as a make-or-break point for online purchases”, and highlights that online forums and chat-rooms appear to have more influence on travel decisions than travel blogs.

The inherently social nature of sharing holiday discussions and the popularity of travel related conversations across social media could offer some explanation for why these mediums are so popular; but it is interesting to see how this pattern is replicated across other product categories. Whether the experiential nature of travel means that we prefer personal accounts to professional advice; and whether there are some areas where the consumer isn’t always right.

We asked survey respondents “Who would you trust to provide you with an accurate opinion on the following products?” With 19.6% of people trusting ‘another consumer online’ over both ‘someone who works at the retailer‘ (10.6%) and ‘a professional journalist’ (4.8%) in relation to travel products, our results echoed the WTM report. And we also found that:

• On average, the only product categories where someone who works for the retailer is trusted more than another consumer online are Sporting/Outdoor equipment, DIY purchases and Property/housing. For property/housing, the difference was only 1%.
• On average, men are more trusting of other consumers online than women. Women also trust ‘someone who works for the retailer’ more in relation to financial services and cars/automotives.
• Women trust the opinion of someone who works for a retailer 7% more than they trust other online consumers in relation to DIY products. Men trust them 0.7% more.
• Less than 1% of people trust ‘A celebrity that you like’, with the exception of their opinion on health and beauty products (1.8%) and fashion (1.6%). 1.3% of men would also trust celebrity’s opinions on sporting/outdoor products.

So what does this mean?

Let the consumer speak

– the travel industry has some great travel communities for people to share travel advice, ideas and recommendations.  So make it easy for consumers to share recommendations and reviews, particularly if you operate in an area where trust in other consumers is high.

Understand the influences

– our research highlights the different sources of influence across the product groups. Understanding these can help to direct where knowledge is provided and by whom.

Collaborate with the consumer

– work with reviews and reviewers to develop your brand and extend your customer base.

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In August 2001 Victoria Beckham went on stage with her lip pierced. The piercing became an overnight sensation, with hordes of young girls (so the papers said) rushing out to get the look.

When the piercing was revealed as a fake, certain echelons of the press branded Posh as a betrayer and hordes of young girls were left with ridiculous holes in their faces.

The question is, if Victoria Beckham had started the lip piercing rumour with a tweet, would it have had the same effect?

A recent scientific study by Northwestern University, Illinois, looked at celebrity influence on Twitter, using mathematical algorithms to measure whether the frequency of tweets and level of followers ultimately impacts the opinions of others.

According to The Daily Telegraph, tens of millions of tweets were sifted through on a daily basis, to decipher who the most influential tweeters were and their impact on trending topics.

The study found that the most influential tweeters were individuals that had low profiles, but high levels of expertise in their fields. In other words, when it comes to social media, wisdom triumphs over celebrity.

This does, however, pose a dilemma for social media marketers. Paying a celebrity to endorse a campaign no longer cuts the mustard – if hearts and minds are to be changed, a brand advocate with expertise needs to be employed.

However, as Dr Christian Jessen of Embarrassing Bodies recently pointed out, in a profession such as his, doctors have to swear by a Hippocratic Oath, forbidding them from using their medical knowledge for marketing or advertising purposes.

Even without the oath, professionals who have worked hard to build a reputation might not be keen to put it on the line for the sake of a brand.

Perhaps it’s time for brands to look a little closer to home for their social media advocates. Celebrities might turn heads, but it’s the hidden faces behind a company that will ultimately sway influence.

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Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend a great event, hosted by the London Press Club and Women in Journalism, with Carole Stone, the Queen of Networking herself, as a guest speaker. Having heard so much about Carole Stone, her weekly networking salons and her legendary Christmas parties (what I wouldn’t do for an invite…), I jumped at the chance to attend this event!

Carole was an extremely entertaining, dynamic and engaging speaker, and, as you would expect from a woman who has over 40,000 contacts in her database, she had some invaluable tips for anyone making their first forays into the world of networking. I have listed below the key outtakes from the event, and as an added extra, for each of Carole’s tips I have written my own social media version (with some help from my colleague James), highlighted in italics….

1. Wear something with pockets – It is important to always have business cards at hand so you don’t have to awkwardly rifle through your bag to find them! (Maybe more of an issue for females!) From a social media viewpoint, ensure that you have a LinkedIn profile, and it’s fully up to date, before you attend an event. You never know who will look you up!
2. Always follow-up with an email the day after you’ve met someone. And/or send them an email through LinkedIn, adding them to your online network at the same time.
3. When handing out business cards don’t scatter them like lawyers and accountants (Carole’s words…), make sure you actually spend time chatting to the people you’re giving them to. The same applies online really, just because LinkedIn is there doesn’t mean you should ask everybody you have ever heard of to join your network. As a general rule, only add people you have had a proper conversation with or who you would feel comfortable emailing.
4. It’s not all about quantity, it’s about quality. Pick out a few people in the room who you really want to meet. Don’t fret if you haven’t met the ‘big players’ at an event, chances are they’ll have so many people thrusting business cards in their direction that they won’t remember you anyway. Old school networking tips live on, this is definitely still relevant online. Engage the up-and-coming bloggers or influencers who will want to, and have time to, share knowledge with you.
5. Always remember details. Note down one or two key details about the person you’ve just met to remind yourself who they are/where you met. Taking this a step further, you could use tools like Evernote, Digg etc to log relevant posts, articles or web pages that will help you re-engage your new contact in a later conversation online.
6. If someone is acting rude, or haughty, be honest and ask them “did you mean to sound rude when you said that?” (Maybe a tip to be used with personal discretion…). This is particularly relevant in the world of social media as sometimes irony or humour does not come across quite as well in an email or a 140 character Tweet! If you have engaged with this contact through Twitter, send them a simple @reply asking whether their last comment was supposed to sound rude… This is a win-win technique, the contact will either laugh it off or they’ll (hopefully) realise that their comment was out of line and clarify what they meant/apologise. Easy.
7. Stand up at networking events so you can get away easier. Conversely, online it’s easy to leave a conversation so get as involved as possible, comment on walls, reply to tweets and use those hashtags!
8. Carry an empty glass so you have an excuse to leave a boring conversation (“I’m just going to get another drink…). As previously mentioned, online you can leave a conversation whenever you like, but always check back and make sure you are not missing an opportunity to engage with new connections.
9. OR carry 2 glasses of wine, pretending one is for a friend, allowing you to leave a conversation to look for said friend if necessary… See above… but there is nothing to stop you having two glasses of wine anyway!
10. . Don’t worry about failure! Absolutely true in social networking online as in the real world, be bold and don’t be afraid to get involved in conversations, it’s the best way to broaden your knowledge and understanding of a subject.
11. Never toss a card aside! You never know when that contact may come in useful… Hopefully LinkedIn won’t go down.

Et voila… the top tips from the Queen of Networking… and yes, most of them are pure common sense, however it was nice to hear these things from a lady whose reputation and business success are built on networking!

Hopefully these tips will prove useful and show you that, when it comes to taking your first tentative steps into networking, both online and offline, everyone has been in exactly the same situation as you and everyone is nervous about not having someone to talk to or saying the wrong thing. Confidence is key!

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