Monthly Archives: March 2013

03.26.13
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Facebook Raises Its Engagement Game

Facebook is always tweaking and fiddling with its service, and very seldom do these changes deliver real value to the users, they are mainly focussed – it seems to me – on serving Facebook Advertisers’ needs, or certainly the sales pitch of those selling to those advertisers.  However, an apparently minute change introduced yesterday US time strikes me as very significant indeed and worth commenting on.

For me at least, Facebook has been the poor relative when it comes to audience engagement.  Because of its enormous user-base, a Facebook Page is a great way to harvest a lot of “likes” for ambitious Community Managers, and seems (see below) a great way to promote a brand in the contextual feed of Facebook users – i.e. pushing news – but appears severely limited technically when it comes to true *engagement*.

Twitter with its simple but powerful @mention feature has always meant that despite the overwhelming scale of the #Social service, brands have always been able to have very direct and at times personal conversations one-to-one with their customers.  With Engagement establishing itself as the raison d’etre of Social investment, the ability to effectively converse with people is the key to success for Community Managers.   As Emm McAndrew (@twit_brit) says on the Social Media Today Blog: “wade through your follower posts and publicly respond – think of brand social media pages as an extension of the customer service department.”

Also, as Charlene Li (@charleneli) said in the Social Bible, Groundswell: “Customers…are engaged in conversations on blogs, in discussion forums, and in social networks.  Your company can participate in these places but shouting doesn’t work, conversations do.”  But if the context and the interface of the conversation is not intuitive enough, the engagement will fail and the moment will pass.  This is why this new feature is so important for Community Managers.

Overnight, Facebook introduced Direct Replies.  Before, to reply to a comment by a user, a Community Manager would only be able to comment in the general comment stream.  This stream could be just the two of them – which is fine – or several hundred people.  I have seen instances where a post by the brand in question (e.g. a bank suffering from off-line ATMS) sparks furious comments from many hundred people – how can a community manager meaningfully repsond to those comments if his or her comments are merely rendering within the same stream?  Of course you can *at* a user but its very time consuming.

Now with direct replies and threads, real person-to-person conversations between Community Manager and users can emerge out of the mayhem within the context of a post but distinct from the rest of the comment stream. Very.  Very.  Powerful.

The challenge of course beyond that is managing that stuff.  Tools do exist – such as those within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud through acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media; but there are many other tools.  One I read of recently but haven’t tried is Facebook’s own Page Manager App, for instance.  Other tools for Social Media Management can be found at this useful post on Social Media Examiner.

Of course this is not the silver bullet in the battle between Facebook and Twitter.  Facebook is only popular for brands because of its enormous audience – more than 1 billion.  But Twitter remains far more effective.  One reason is the way Facebook filters your stream, meaning that a brand’s post doesn’t necessarily render in every user’s feed.  To understand this reality more, its worth reading this post by Jeff Bullas (@jessbullas) on why Twitter can be a far more effective engagement tool than Facebook. Until Facebook is more democratic about the way it manages its feed-  like Twitter is – I will always favour Twitter.

 (Picture credits: hispanicmarketing.com and AllFacebook.com)

 

03.18.13
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Building your Profile and Network using "Affinity Content"

When I first started using Twitter, back in January 2008, I hit the same roadblock everyone does:  “What do I say?”

In fact, some people never get past that moment and become simply consumers of Social content rather than contributors to it.  These users have become derogatively known as “lurkers”.  But that rather short-sighted opinion denies the reality that a large majority of Social users don’t say anything at all – they just read.  Research shows that in fact depending on the nature of the Social Network, anywhere between 40 and 80 per cent of members are so-called “lurkers”.  Many of these are very sophisticated users, cleverly filtering their feed based on keywords and groups of users, curating the many millions of information sources into one, highly informative and timely stream.  If knowledge is power, these people are very powerful.

Contributing valuable information is in fact the common currency of the Social web.  People do want to hear what you think, but only when they have had a chance to identify whether they like you or not and whether they have anything in common with you.  Whether or not they have any affinity for you.  In order to create affinity for you among your target audience, the fundamental strategy for any sophisticated Social user is to continuously harvest and share Affinity Content that ambiently defines your expertise and point of view.

But what is Affinity Content?  The key is not to over-think this as it shouldn’t take up too much time selecting it.  Based on a number of themes or keywords, set up feeds – using RSS or Google Alerts as well as your Social Networks – to curate interesting and well-informed third party content for sharing.  The New York Times, The Harvard Business Review, The Lancer or Business Insider are a good start depending on what your chosen topic is, but the more niche you are and the more honed your searches, the more unique value you will add.  Here is a good starting list for curating classy content.

It became clear to me as I began to share blogs and articles, I was attracting a community of people with interests in my topic and content choice to my brand.  My Twitter following grew and I began to connect with more and more people on LinkedIn as well.

This loose-tie community was very targeted and centred on San Francisco and Redwood City as much as Sydney and Melbourne.  Over time, because of all the principles of the Loose Tie Network and The Mere Exposure Effect, talking to these people became much easier and seamless.  Furthermore, some of them began to form an Amplification Cohort for some of the new content I later shared too.
It emerged that the three-stage content strategy is as follows:

1. Harvest and share carefully selected “Affinity Content”
2. Begin to add commentary and thought leadership
3. Create and share your own original content for amplification

A discipline of commitment (e;g; a routine) and careful and time-efficient content curation are the keys to success in this area.  This post on Social Media Management Tools includes a review of a number of such tools, but my favourites have been TrapIt, ScoopIt, Google Reader (soon to be killed by Google in July), Digg, Reddit and Delicious (newly acquired by Yahoo.)

What Content Curation tools do you recommend?  Leave a comment if you’ve found something helpful for this.

Picture credit: seocontentadvantage.com

03.03.13
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Don't hang up on the Social Phone!

The Cloud is a godsend for a small business or lone operator like myself.  No end of mission-critical applications in The Cloud support my work with ever-up internet services and intuitive iOS apps available for the iPad and iPhone.  Google Drive has become essential very quickly and very nicely for free replacing the need for Microsoft Office (I have every intention of being a Microsoft-free zone.)  Not only does Google Docs provide a simple Word Processor and Spreadsheet utility, but Google Drive makes those documents easily accessible and discussable on all sorts of devices – for free.  I’m also getting so much value from Evernote, Google Calendar, Dropbox and do all my book keeping through Aussie Cloud accounting app Saasu.  While some of these services are free, some are not.  But most importantly, the principle advantage they offer is the ubiquitous availability and the automatic back-up.  This is what the Cloud means.  Security and Peace of mind.

One application in particular that has brought great ease and simplicity to me is Sliderocket.  I hate Microsoft Powerpoint.  I mean, I HATE Powerpoint.  I don’t just dislike it as a piece of computer software, I think its been a detriment to civilisation altogether.  Years working at Oracle I saw how people had begun to communicate only through Powerpoint.  Instead of writing a few pages, someone would instead replicate a 60 slide deck and email it to you, thereby blowing-up your inbox.  (Historians in the future will look back on the demise of Western civilisation and pin point the launch of Microsoft Powerpoint as the beginning of the end.  Mark my words.)

So when I set up on my own, I endeavoured to find a way where I could avoid using it and was delighted to be told about Sliderocket (thanks to @Apacloud!)  You design your slides using a very simple interface online, store them there and be able to log in on any computer or device and present them.  It can do complex “transitions” for people who need it, but primarily it’s about simply presenting thoughts, images or statistics to support concepts you are presenting.  Awesome.  So I paid for the premium version.

Given how so many of the new Cloud services are free, once you start paying for something like this, your expectations of bullet-proof availability go up significantly.  Lately, Sliderocket has been letting me down – in particular taking forever to login.  On one occasion I literally could not present to a client because my login – on any computer – took too long.  (Its acquisition by VMware has done more harm than good, I feel.)  Recently, I worked until midnight on a particularly complex concept slide I needed for a presentation only to get up the next morning to find Sliderocket apologising for effectively dropping my work and leaving the night’s work gone to waste.  Thanks.

Furious, I took to Twitter to complain.  There might have been an email address I could have gone to, but like many millions of consumers today my first instinct was to turn to Social Media to converse with a company.  So I made a Social Phone call.

It went unanswered.  No response.  A paying customer voices dissatisfaction in public about a major #fail in their product – no response.  It is my growing opinion that to fail to answer a public comment about your service with some expression of concern is akin to just not answering the phone.  No company would publish a phone number and then just refuse to answer it.  Even with a machine.  Companies with a service being consumed by customers should be attentive to their attempts to have Social conversations with them.  If your company is going to have a Twitter presence it should:

  • monitor that presence
  • track and report its mentions
  • resource a team to engage on its behalf
  • prioritise those requiring a response, and do so within 24 hours
  • have policies stipulating engagement protocols
  • plan content for that presence
  • measure its impact

I’ve since had a look at the @Sliderocket presence. While it has a lot of followers (26,000+) the account is almost exclusively used for self-promotion.  Here are just a selection of very recent tweets that have – like mine – gone unanswered; much to the detriment of the Sliderocket brand IMHO.