Struggling to Tweet like the cool kids?

*Yawn* Talking about using Twitter is so 2010 right? But new members still struggle to find meaning after signing up for the microblogging service. The reality is that Twitter is just a technology platform, different people get different value out of it. I thought it would be interesting to ask some of my favourite Tweeters….

“When was your Twitter A-HA! moment?”

Katie Lee, Miramus -  @shinykatie

Mine was when I installed OuTwit. You couldn’t use it now, but back when there weren’t many people on Twitter and not many Twitter clients available, OuTwit suddenly made it click for me. Before, I’d been quite bemused by why you might waste so much time telling people what you were doing. But when those messages started appearing in an Outlook folder, I just became addicted to clicking on the updates and seeing what friends and colleagues were up to. It was far more interesting than reading emails or doing work! Around the same time, a lot of the people in the office were getting into it too, so it felt like a very amusing place to hang out. Not a very interesting story, but it’s the truth!

TIP: Most established users of Twitter don’t use Twitter.com because the user-experience is fairly limited. Use a Twitter client like Seesmic or Hootsuite to make Twitter work better for you.

Gary Andrews, Content and Communities Manager, Spotlight - @garyandrews

I’d been aware of Twitter and a few possibilities for a while before I joined ITV’s PR department in October 2007. Ben Ayers, who at that point worked across factual and digital publicity, was adamant I should sign up, and gave me a quick once over in how it worked. At that point there were only three of us in the whole PR department on Twitter.

I was also new to London, having just moved up from Devon, and was keen to get out and about and meet new people – something most Londoners know is easier said than done. I saw a Tweet from somebody I followed about what a great time they’d had at the London Bloggers’ Meetup. Interested, I asked what it was about, they sent me the link and I duly turned up to the next one. Some of the people I met that night have become important contacts for work purposes, and friends. Most were on Twitter and that aha moment made me realise how it could be used in a professional manner.

Several months later came a 2nd aha moment. By this stage, a lot of the digital community knew and loved Twitter but it wasn’t exactly mainstream. The day Philip Schofield signed up to Twitter and mentioned the service on This Morning, ITV’s Twitter followers exploded, at least tripling if not more, with new users. This, for me, was the moment when it bcame clear that Twitter would be important and (for better or worse) celebrities would play a key part in driving this.

TIP: These days it’s not always easy to keep in touch. Use Twitter to make and foster real world connections. Also, celebrities may drive a lot of the buzz around Twitter but these aren’t the people you’ll be connecting with, seriously ;-)

Shannon Eastman, tcs digital world – @shannoneastman

My a-ha moment … was April 2007. Dealer program for a mobile phone manufacturer was rolled out nation wide (Canada) – to celebrate the launch of a new handset… parties were held in each major city to psych up the sales teams. The final city we arrived in had been following the tweets of their colleagues unknown to us agency folk… and suggested a few ideas to changes things up a bit since they already knew what the big reveal was going to be. We were horrified at first… felt stupid in front of the client for not having thought of using TWEETER first… and then recognized the value of having the front line sales folk teach us a thing or two. They did… life was never the same again.

My personal aha moment… was discovering how incredibly brilliant it is at researching anything… and what following the crumb trail can unearth.

TIP: There’s a lot of talk about how businesses can “crowdsource” ideas from product innovation to customer service. Use Twitter as an easy back channel to throw things out to opinion and get valuable feedback. In particular Twitter + Live Events = Additional Insight you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Ruggerblogger – @ruggerblogger

I think everyone has a eureka moment with twitter when it just clicks and you think, ‘holy heck, I never thought I’d get it, but I do’. You have to persevere for a little bit to get through to the other stage though. I think most people that don’t use twitter think it is just a site for the vacuous and self obsessed reporting on what colour socks they’re wearing that day. I too had those concerns myself when I set up @ruggerblogger  to direct more traffic to my rugby tragic blog. For a year I let the site sit idle because I just didn’t really know how to use it and I felt self conscious. I think the trick for me was following lots of people that were as pathetically rugby obsessed as I was. I suddenly realised that I could get a lot of scoops for my blog. I also began to really enjoy the connections I was making with other followers around the world and all the banter. And then, my ultimate favourite: sitting down to watch a game with the laptop and conversing with people in real time as the game went on.

There is something lovely and universal about twitter. It really does connect people and even though tweets can seem rather pointless, they can also be fun and quirky and enjoyable and helpful. If you have a twitter account then no matter what time of day or night it is, you never need to feel lonely again.

TIP: If you’re creating content or trying to connect with communities Twitter can provide the conversational glue – getting content out there and finding like minded people. The real-time nature of Twitter also makes it fantastic to share Live events such as TV shows, festivals or conferences.

Darika Ahrens – the original @temperoUK (now run by an enthusiastic team across Tempero)

It was Christmas 07/08. I had just finished my job and was starting my social media marketing business Grapevine Consulting but I was also on the other side of the world in NZ attending two weddings. I needed a way to let people know what I was doing, keep up with the industry back in the UK, and rapidly grow contacts & connections for my budding business. Suddenly something that had seemed like self-indulgent over sharing became essential for a lonely sole trader.

TIP: Twitter doesn’t just have to be for your personal musings. Turn “sharing” into “networking” and you’ve found your reason for talking to strangers (and perhaps feeling a little uncomfortable doing it).

What was your Twitter “a-ha!” moment? Share your stories and tips in the comments below.

[Image Credit: carrotcreative]

I’ve been sitting on this neat little service for a while now and they just keep adding compatability with more and more platforms while I delay writing them up.

Memolane creates a viewable and searchable timeline of all the content you share online via services like YouTube, your blog, Twitter, Flickr and many more.

In my mind I think it would be a great brand service to visually archive Social Media activity and see a view of the brand over time.

For example, a marketing team may be considering what to do for Christmas and think “what did we do online last year”? A quick scroll back to Dec 2010 and voila it would visually all be laid out, every tweet, every Facebook status update. Handy no? Particularly when you think how often teams change over.

You can take a squizz at Tempero’s memolane to get an idea of what it looks like.

*One word of caution from my Private memolane* My android phone backs up photos to a private folder on Picasa until I approve them publically either on Picasa or Google+. However once you’ve approved Picasa for Memolane it will just pull in all photos, including this private folder, to show those images publicly.

Currently the services supported are:

• Facebook
• Facebook Pages
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Picasa
• Foursquare
• Tripit
• Vimeo
• Youtube
• Last.fm
• MySpace
• Instagram
• WordPress.com
• Soundcloud
• RSS Feeds

Strategy:

• Spending on Social before SEO: If you’re doing Social Media without any SEO planning or strategy then I guarantee you’ll be wasting some of your hard earned effort on creating content and conversations [Ref: Search Engine Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: The Showdown]
• Planning Social on a campaign by campaign basis: If you want fast results invest in Paid Media, if you want long-tail benefits and deeper engagement then choose Social. Doing ‘a little bit of Social Media’ to support one off campaigns is a waste of time. You may as well just buy some Facebook ads and check off the Social Media box [Ref: Social Media is a long-tail strategy]

People:

• Paying your PR agency to manage your Social profiles: While many evangelists think Social is returning the Public Relations professional to public facing activities the PR agency simply can’t deliver high-quality AND high-value ongoing community management. Unless your PR agency has a specific facility to offer community management and an appropriate pricing strategy then take the running of your social profiles in-house or look for a specialised company to do that. [Yes, that is a self-serving statement but if we believed our role could be done by any old agency there wouldn't be any belief in the nature of our business would there?]
• Letting an intern run your Social profiles: While hiring an intern to run your Social profiles might seem like the most frugal option available, the cost of leaving an untrained junior member of the team in control of the public facing role of your brand could be impossible to calculate. Mistakes could lead to hefty PR, Legal and even Employment Tribunal costs. [Ref: Marc Jacobs Intern Calls CEO a “Tyrant” in Twitter Meltdown, Habitat blames Twitter faux pas on intern, Nestle Learns an Important Lesson in Social Media Management]

Tools:

• Expensive Social Media tools/software subscriptions: Some companies don’t want to start Social Media activity until they have Social Media software in place. Unfortunately inexperience can lead to costly subscription of a tool which never gets used. Instead? Don’t just rely on sales demonstrations and recommendations. Strategise and pilot your Social Media activity with free tools or trials of software you are considering purchasing before signing subscription contracts. [Ref: Any thoughts on using paid social media monitoring/reporting/engaging tools?]
• Relying on/ignoring agency subscriptions: The wasting of money could go both ways here. Firstly, many agencies purchase multi-seat licenses for Social software which they resell to clients at advantage. Check what subscriptions they have in place before purchasing direct. However, some agencies make an absolute killing marking up user-seat licenses for Social software. Check direct with the technology vendor to make sure the agency isn’t re-billing unfairly beyond the convenience of paying via their account.

What ways have you saved money on Social Media Marketing?

[Image: Images_of_Money]

Contrary to a popular misconception the Net Promoter Score does not stand for INTERNet Promoter Score. However, it is back in favour with those looking to measure online programs again, particularly Social & Word-Of-Mouth activity.

Here’s a quick summary to help you get to get to grips with what it is and how it could apply to your Social Media marketing.

What is the Net Promoter Score?

Originating out of Bain & Company the Net Promoter Score was created as a customer loyalty metric to simply measure how many Promoters or Detractors a company had.

Customers are asked the single question

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” and asked to rank their responses on a 0 – 10 scale where 10 = “extremely likely” and 0 = “not at all likely.

Net Promoter Score Calculation

Once you have those responses you don’t need to be a maths whizz either to calculate the results.

Take the percentage of customers who are promoters (P) and subtract the percentage who are detractors (D). This equation is the Net Promoter Score for a company.

P – D = NPS

What does the NPS mean for Social Media?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) had a refresh towards the end of last year when Fred Reichheld released “The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World”

And the role of Social Media to the new NPS?

• Increases visibility of organic company sentiment & opinions
• Facilitates a platform to engage with Detractors (and Promoters, possibly to reward)
• Offers the potential to deploy customers surveys faster and more easily
• Data can create a complete feedback loop across the business

5 ways brands can use or reshape the NPS with Social Media

1. Sentiment as NPS: Conversocial has proposed a new social net promoter score and agency Razorfish has already piloted work with TNS/Cymfony to capture social media content and the net sentiment of a brand as far back as 2009
2. Customer Service programs: Fresh Networks highlights Twitter as a quick win to improve customer satisfaction and track results
3. Provide promoters with tools: From the Facebook like button to enabling ratings & reviews; actioning NPS insight could be as simple as integrating social/interactive tools like Feefo into your corporate site. This would enable recruiting and amplifying Promoters
4. Social Loyalty Programs: Identify, reward, retain and, er, promote Promoters. The Dominos/Foursquare tie-in is a great example of how this looks in practice
5. Engage with Detractors: NPS looks at Detractors and how they can be neutralised or converted into Promoters. There’s no shortage of platforms now integrating Social software so that Customer Service or Product Managers can quickly get to a detractor and either change their opinion or minimise their impact. Conversocial and Radian6/Salesforce are both examples of these

Granted, Richard’s post was inspired by a problematic plan from a client he consulted on – their plan was to create great content to attract people to visit the site and then include forums and other community elements. Voila, a community!

Can you spot the problems here?

Absolutely right, tacking community on to content is not going to result in successful, engaged conversations, but overall the post seemed down on content and for me it trivialised just how hard (and expensive) it is to build a successful community.

I wanted to redirect on the points that content is too competitive to be of use online and that unique communities are easy to create.

Content is essential for online strategies

Richard states “content is ridiculously competitive and people have a limited amount of time. There is far too much content on almost every topic on the internet”.

Well yes, but get over it. I don’t think any online brand or marketing strategy should be without content. Any SEO person will tell you it’s important (and explain why) and likewise avoiding competition is about finding a niche topic and opportunities to dominate within it.

It’s not easy to create a community

Richard says that it’s easier to create unique community than unique content. But it isn’t, for the simple reason he goes on to say later… you need to “attract people to a community that want to participate in a community.”

Yes people might group within a simple forum but usually for a reason, and that reason is to discuss a topic, which leads me to my final thought….

Content and community strategy has gotten confused

The roles of content and community have gotten confused. You can have content without community and you can have a community without content but – and here’s the fun part- if you have a thriving community the community BECOMES the content. That’s why Google  ranks online message boards and forums so highly, because of the content contained within those topic threads, which is often judged to be useful content to non-members of those communities.

My greatest fear is that a brand would interpret a dismissal of content as a great excuse to avoid the labour/cost investment in online content and hope that it’s enough to just build a community place then people will spontaneously turn up and start hanging out. Community building too is hard.

Recommended Reading:

• 3 laws of community management that will blow your mind

Sometimes, when speaking to companies about Social Media, I am mortified to hear “We can’t get on any social networks at work, everything’s blocked”.

Far from being an isolated dilemma, figures put the blocking of Social Media sites anywhere from a third of companies doing this to as high as 72% worldwide.

There can only be two possible reasons for a company to take this step. The first, is concerns about productivity (more about that later) but the second would be fear; fear that someone will put the company reputation at risk, fear that social technologies post a security risk, fear that staff simply won’t work hard enough if they can spend all day on Facebook.

The Persian poet Hafez wrote “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.”

Employers must get over their concerns about allowing Social Media usage at work to create better conditions for the business itself in today’s world and to respect the employees who make the company what it is.

Why blocking Social Media at work is stupid

I frequently mention at speaking or training engagements that I think blocking Social Media at work is a huge mistake and once a small business owner compained to me “Aw, but you don’t know what it’s like running a business and having people to manage” – I’ve done both, so yeah I sympathise.

However, I also read and nowadays there is a wealth of knowledge proving attempts to over manage employee time usage actually leads to less productivity with plenty of real world examples and practical advice on how to create a productive working environment.

It has absolutely nothing to do with employees using social media at work.

Using Social Media at work does not cause productivity issues. Productivity issues cause productivity issues. Let’s not forget either – as long as people have IM, email, even their mobile phones, there’s nothing stopping them from doing ‘time wasting stuff’ on company time.

A right to access media

Which brings me to my next belief: We have, in the UK, a basic human right to access media. When workers enter their workplaces they’re not asked to switch off their phones and throw their copies of Metro in the bin on the way through the door.

More and more people are finding and sharing news via social networking sites. The nature of social networking is bigger than just looking at pictures of friends from Saturday night, it’s how we find out what’s going on in the world. Social media host a wide range of media, from personal to professional and everything in between. No employer can or should moderate that.

Businesses need to open their doors to Social Media

My final thought is that irrespective of the role of Social Media to staff it’s relevance is increasing for business. It seems incredibly short-sighted to handicap your workforce by limiting their access to Social Media and minimise their skills set in using social for future business.

The marketing executive and customer service personnel able to sit casually on Twitter today will have key insights in to how to plan next year’s Twitter strategy when [not if] you integrate social in to the business.

How to allow Social Media in the workplace

I can only offer two bit of advice if you choose to join the rest of us in socially open workplaces:

1. Set expectations for usage: Have a clear Social Media policy and ensure staff know what will and won’t be tolerated within the business. They don’t want to breach policy and get in to trouble any more than employers want them to find trouble in the first place
2. Experiment & Review: Allow people to try a few things (again, within guidelines) and then regularly ask for feedback and shared learnings on best practice. This may be the points at which you find someone in your Sales team is closing business from LinkedIn, or that Customer Service reps are resolving issues faster and more efficiently online

Recommended Reading:

• What Air NZ can teach you about your Facebook policy
• Social Media Policy: 10 point checklist

What are Facebook Insights for?

Facebook Insights have a threefold purpose:

1. Understand how your page is performing overall
2. Optimise how you publish to and manage your Facebook page
3. Find out more about your audience/community

Which metrics matter?

Friends of Fans

Why does Facebook show this? As we’ve covered several times since our Facebook event, 85% of content is consumed in the Facebook news feed not on the page itself. Given that if a user likes, comments or engages with that content their friends can see the interaction – and the content itself – this is where your potential comes from for distribution. So, Frends of Fans is showing you your entire possible network.

People talking about this

People talking about this is just a fancy way of saying everyone who has Liked your Page, commented, answered a question, tagged your page etc. Note this is number of unique users, so doesn’t equal total number of engagements. So someone may have Liked your page, left several comments, tagged a photo and checked themselves in over the period of a week and that would be counted as 1. It gives you an indication of how many individuals you reached in a week.

*Note: Total Likes and People talking about this are visible to anyone visiting the page so users, and even competitors, can see how popular your Page is.

How Insights helps you optimise how you publish and manage your page

Your overall goal with running your Facebook page is to engage with an audience. As mentioned above, Facebook’s opportunity is the ‘viral’ distribution of content via interaction with content either being actively distributed to friends of friends or seen via friends’ interaction with content.

Facebook Insights now gives more granular detail in to each peice of content to help you find answers to questions like; Do fans respond better to video or pictures? Do they engage more with certain topics? Do they like answering questions or doing a quiz?

Reach

The new Reach graph is really useful to tell you which channel (paid, organic or ‘viral’) reaches the audience.

Understand your audience

The final part of Facebook Insights is understanding your community. This is often overlooked as brands focus on straight acquisition but if you are going to justify your activity on Facebook, and aim for a high level of engagements, it’s imperative you understand just who is the audience you’ve managed to attract.

A classic Insight I’ve seen time and time again is pages which have grown via promotions and claim high levels of engagement but are in reality doing lame tactics like asking generic questions (A favourite of mine was seeing “Comment on this post if you’re happy it’s Friday” to which a gleeful, and might I suggest zombie-like, community started leaving comments saying “me!”).

Your Facebook demographics should reflect your core customer demographics. For example if your customer base is predominantly female, offering software as prize, may attract more men than women to Like your page (please don’t lynch me for the gender stereotyping). Likewise posting a video of a celebrity in a bikini, even if it the content is aimed towards women, may also attract the wrong kind of audience (I’m going to go ahead and guess young males).

You should aim to profile your Facebook demographic and aim to create & post content which is most likely to attract, retain, and engage them and their friends. Having a target audience in mind will help you better refine your content strategy and you can use your Facebook Audience Insights to check you’re on track.

[Image: Gigaom]

Want to know more about Facebook? Download our FREE Facebook Resources.

This research that people don’t want to engage with brands via Social Media has been circulating for a while. In fact I was somewhat stunned to see the huge numbers of industry people gleefully tweeting it on the day it came out (for the very fact that many seemed to be actively dissuading their own clients from working with them).

What’s wrong with the research?

The problem with a lot of stats like these is that it comes from surveys. Without even getting in to the logistics of what was the sample size, who constituted the sample size etc I have a very simple problem with Q&A research like this…

People often say one thing, but behave another way.

This research itself goes on to provide somewhat contradictory feedback like “54 per cent of people admit social networks are a good place to learn about products” and “61 per cent of consumers are driven to engage with brands online by a promotion or special offer.” Hold on, I thought 61% of them didn’t want to engage with brands, so the caveat is unless they’re learning something or getting a voucher?

My point is people don’t necessarily lie, they just aren’t always aware of their own behaviour - hence the contradictory findings of this research. Customer insight also comes from seeing what customers actually do, not just what they say they do.

Don’t ask your customers what they want, give them what they need

The whole ask/show debate has a far deeper learning for brands. Too often Social Media evangelism goes so far towards a happy fantasy world of transparency and cheerful working with customers to ‘crowdsource’ solutions  that two realities get forgotten:

1. Most people don’t want to tell brands how to make their products and services better, or promote them to their friends (this, I think, is what was at the heart of what the research was trying to say but came out as a silly headline)
2. Customers are already giving brands loads of data on what they need which is probably more commercially reliable than simply asking them. From monitoring services to capturing data from online conversations, Ecommerce data, or  using  Google Analytics to find out how customers find your/competitors products and services. It’s all there waiting for brands

Conclusion

I started off saying I’d got het up about the headline that 61% of people in the UK don’t want to engage with brands via Social Media.

The headline is annoying because it’s not necessarily true but then again also glaringly obvious. I mean, what next, a study that shows that 99.9% of people don’t like hurting animals? A desire to be kind to animals may be present in the majority of the population but only an estimated 3 – 5% of the population are vegetarian.

Human rationale doesn’t always stack up but never fear brands have a lot of other ways to learn about their customers before they start obsessively asking for online feedback.

Do you work in eCommerce, Travel, Finance, MCommerce, or generally doing Social Media? Well we’ve found something for you…

The clever people over at eDigitalResearch regularly release a host of benchmarking reports looking at these key areas in the UK with ranking and detailed analysis of how the Top 100 brands are performing online.

All you have to do is go to their site and register.

While I love the Retail Benchmarking report the Social Media reports are also a quick way to get an overview of who’s doing what in the industry with an indication of how it’s peforming.

I’d love to see these reports evolving their benchmarking and really see some metrics being developed/used aside of size of community and market research questioning. For example we’re big fans of Conversocial’s IPM metric for measuring engagement. As we’ve mentioned before anyone can attract a large community of disengaged users by offering a lot of competitions and discounts but Social Media success comes down to what they do once they’re part of that community.

Our Head of Insight, Thane Ryland, spotted Radian 6′s 100 uses of Social Media monitoring uber-post which could just provide one reason, or even 100 reasons, why this type of investment might be useful. The list covers everything from the more obvious, like Crisis Comms or Competitive Intelligence, to the less considered like Advertising Effectiveness and Thought Leadership.

Definitely worth checking out whether you’re interested in Radian 6 or another social media monitoring tool.

How does Tempero fit within this? Our Insights team use a suite a tools (many agencies subscribe to one then just resell the licence to a client or, even worse, cut and paste charts from the tool’s dashboard and charge for creating a report) and do the “thinky part” translating all of the data into a business insights – like Competive Analysis – ready for organisations to act on.

They also live and breathe the web so understand and contextualise a lot of the patterns that they see. For example they can track the rise and fall of crisis issues, identify potential hot points, and try advise on next steps to either minimise or manage ongoing flare ups around the same issue. They make sense of why a message or campaign may have gained more traction on Twitter rather than on say, Facebook, rather than just giving the straight numbers and stating the [often obvious] facts.

That’s the difference between monitoring and insight (in my view).

[Image: Travel 2.0]