To illustrate the problem…

Managing your own Facebook page is relatively easy isn’t it?  Now imagine that each time you publish a wall comment, within one hour, 600 people post a response and 10 to 15% of those are inappropriate, offensive, spam or downright rude.  Then imagine people are doing the same on your discussion area, your photos, videos — or any other area you’ve allowed them to interact. Clearing the latest content is your best plan of attack, but what happens when an older posts picks up attention for some reason?  You then have the issue of having to hunt around your now frenetic Facebook page for new posts, any one of which could be a reputation or legal nightmare waiting to happen.

This scenario perhaps sounds a little over-the-top but it’s actually a live case study and mirrors many of the large Facebook pages we look after on a daily basis.

Here’s our top ten Facebook issues…

1.        There’s no moderation queue

2.        There’s no swear/spam filters

3.        Ability to contact users about their content depends on their settings

4.        You don’t get user alerts – they go straight to Facebook

5.        You may have to trawl through 1000s of fans slowly to try ban someone from a page

6.        There’s no audit trail of what you’ve edited or deleted

7.        Search is poor

8.        There is no way to change moderation status (pre, post or reactive)

9.        There’s no content workflow

10.     It’s time consuming when managing large pages

To be honest, many of these are non-issues on low volume pages and I don’t want to paint a picture that Facebook shouldn’t be used —  In fact, far from it. And thankfully, managing high volume pages can be solved through using a combination of  companies such as ourselves and the new wave of 3rd Facebook moderation tools.

We’ve teamed up with iPlatform, a long standing app development company, and had input into their ‘Conversocial’ Facebook moderation tool.  The system effortlessly plugs into Facebook and addresses many of our top ten concerns. It doesn’t remove the need for human moderation/administration but for large pages the return on investment is obvious.

The service will allow users to share where they are while on the move. The service is currently restricted to the US, however the company is hoping to extend this to its 500 million members as soon as possible.

Places will also allow you to tag your friends with your current location, as long as they’ve also ‘checked-in’ at the same location.

It’s an interesting development for Facebook, as it allows the site to publish real-time activities of its members, rather than simply the short updates and photos that are generally published after the event. It’ll also provide them with a lot more information on your general activities outside of work and home.

Vice president of product Chris Cox told BBC News “This third place is the one we end up talking about a lot. I went to a movie, I saw a band, I went to a bar. So much of the interesting stuff in our lives happens in this small amount of time and we want to make that come alive.”

Foursquare offers a similar service, offering users the ability to gain points and virtual badges after checking in to certain venues. Some quick-thinking companies have seen the potential for advertising and promotional purposes with the services, particularly as it provides an excellent opportunity for targeting customers when they’re actually near the venue. Domino’s Pizza came up with the concept of offering a free pizza to the ‘Mayor’ of each store, which they claim increased their profits significantly and expanded their current online community.

Foursquare and Facebook Places also expands on the theory that community recommendations are much more successful than standard advertising. If your friends love something and you see them visiting often, you’re more likely to visit too, right?

The main criticism of location-based services is the concern over privacy, and Facebook has been quick to ensure that users have as much access to their privacy settings as possible.

So, are these new location-based services the future for targeted and community-based advertising?

What is a community manager?

Take Community Manager for example. What exactly is a Online Community Manager? We have our own view but a quick look at available roles on the market rates salaries from 20 to 60k with a range of responsibilities that would make the Prime Minister gasp. True Community Management is highly under-rated and nothing annoys me more than so called social media experts creating best practice when they’ve managed nothing more than their own Twitter feed and Facebook presence.

Skills required for social media management

The difficulty in defining the skills required for social media management and communities is even harder for smaller companies and this was highlighted to me when presenting at a couple of Media Trust events recently. In the Third Sector where funds are tight, every penny has to work twice as hard as any other sector (well maybe apart from in government!) and that generally means roles are combined, responsibilities shared and even Jack has his work cut out to learn all the trades.

Managing social media

This is where we come in with our processes designed to take the pain out of managing social media as cost effectively as possible. That said, we’re always after good people so if you know anyone that can write great content, deal with the public, generate insightful reports, has experience of 20+ platforms and knows their Four Square from their four candles, send ‘em over

Other useful posts

• The Four Tenents of the Community Manager
• Three Emerging Digital Careers to watch
• Community management: the essential capability of successful enterprise

Download our FREE resources on using Facebook for business including advice from Head of International Business Development for Facebook, Christian Hernandez.

No registration required. Just click on the hyperlink of the resource you want and a new window will open.

Available:

1. Facebook presentation about Brands on Facebook
   
2. Protect your online brand reputation with Facebook page management (Dom Sparkes, Tempero)
3. Engagement: How to make a successful Facebook page (Josh March, iPlatform) PLUS info an intro to Conversocial and available packages
   
4. Case Studies from Blue Rubicon & Outside Line

A transcript from the night is also available via CoverItLive.

Facebook Page Management

Tempero now offers a range of tiered packages for Facebook page management providing brands with enhanced online brand protection within the social network.

Prices start from £750 month and include:

• Dedicated moderation resources 7 days per week
• Expert moderators with years of experience
• Multi-lingual across English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (additional languages on request)
• Ongoing advice and management support
• Monthly reporting
• Moderation software for profanity and keyword filtering outside moderation hours extending protection
• Professional indemnity insurance backed

Please contact us hello@tempero.co.uk to find out more.

A post over on Reputation Online ‘An interesting example of crisis management from Starbucks‘ received some comments on, well, comment moderation. Author Vikki Chowney noted that while well within their terms of use [and common sense] for deleting the comments, the brand could’ve posted something to explain what had happened and that the content was now removed. Apparently at the time there was a lot of online chatter discussing the issue but then the page appeared completely unaffected.

Most were in agreement, Starbucks did the responsible thing in removing the comments, but Community Management 101 would suggest that maybe they could’ve given all the members of the community a heads up – it only served to make them look great in terms of the speed of response!

[Via Drew Benvie]

Barry Bridges spotted Famecount - a service which can aggregate brands on different online platforms and score them based on…well, some sort of patent pending wizadry.

It’s too easy to either attach yourself slavishly to these basic free sites or complete dismiss them based on their lack of meaningful analysis. What I think is interesting is the trends behind the stats and what the leader board says about online brand management.

Food & Drink dominate

A few years ago the top brands engaging online would’ve been Tech brands like Microsoft and Dell (still in the Top 20) but fast forward to July 2010 and the Top 5 of the list are FMCG brands specifically in the Food & Drink sector; Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Skittles, Red Bull, Oreo.

Number 6 is Whole Foods Market, while technically classed as Retail it still supports the overall Food & Drink trend.

Online brand management is ongoing

The Top 5 brand leaders change very little when you change the filter to ‘Fastest Growing’, meaning these brands are adding fans all the time. Is this because the companies have reached a tipping point?  Or are these brands focusing on brand growth online?

Are ranking tools like this useful or damaging to an industry which already struggles to prove ROI for brands online?

The differing nodes show just how many touchpoints there can be for community and organisation – hence the many different approaches.

Kudos to Dion Hinchcliffe for this.

The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) Annual Report 2009 has revealed the existence of at least 450 distinct criminal ‘brands’ selling images and videos of the sexual abuse of children worldwide.

The ten most prolific ‘brands’ account for more than 650 unique web pages. The Foundation believes the stats give an indication of the scale of the pay-per-view child sexual abuse business online.

2009 figures:

• The IWF assessed 38,173 reports of online content;
• It took further action on 8,844 occasions against web pages depicting child sexual abuse content, across 1,316 websites around the world;
• 48% of all child sexual abuse content reports processed (commercial and non-commercial) were traced to networks in North America; 44% to Europe and Russia;
• IWF issued 40 notices to companies to remove child sexual abuse content in the UK

The severity of the content dealt with by the IWF is extremely serious with 72% of child victims appearing to be between 0 and 10 years old and 44% of images depicting the rape or sexual torture of a child.

Found illegal or suspect content? Report it here

Word of Mouth UK Association

Independent trade organisation representing word of mouth marketing in the UK and partnered with WOMMA in the US. http://womuk.net/

British Interactive Media Association

The industry association representing the interactive media and digital content sectors.  It supports individuals and organisations which deliver interactive media solutions. http://www.bima.co.uk/

The Association of Online Publishers (AOP)

An industry body representing digital publishing companies from diverse backgrounds including newspaper and magazine publishing, TV and radio broadcasting, and pure online media. http://www.ukaop.org.uk/

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is the trade association for digital advertising. http://www.iabuk.net/

EDiMA, the European Digital Media Association

EDiMA represents the interests of the new media sector in Europe in policymaking. http://www.europeandigitalmedia.org/

It’s a well thought-out and researched report. Point 9 picked up on the increasingly debated concerns over Erosion of Privacy. Are we becoming a society of over-sharers? Are we risking our safety and reputation on a daily basis while getting caught up in the heady excitement of new social networking technologies?

There are as many opinions on this as there are social networks themselves. In my mind though the most important issue is personal choice. While I’m as permanently connected as the next Social Media geek I, like others, have requirements for privacy. These can be easily breached with a quick tweet including @darika or a Flickr photo tagged darika which may not conform to the way I want to be represented either on- of off-line.

Brand reputations are also sensitive to unknown content appearing online. There are a few tools which can  help at least track online, so that damaging content does not lie un-noticed.

Social Media monitoring software

This has been well covered by others, here’s a selection of good analyses

• Dave Chaffey: review of 26 tools
• Econsultancy Online reputation and buzz monitoring buyers guide: slightly out of date but lists the main ones

Image search

• Photo Tagger: find photos of you on Facebook even if you’re not tagged
• TinEye: Reverse image search engine (try it out by uploading your brand logo, there’s also a commercial API)

Comment tracking

• YackTrack.com: Tracks comments about content you’ve created or posted online, even if the conversation shifts elsewhere
• Disqus: Useful for collating conversations across multiple platforms to remain under the original content

Other

• 123people.co.uk: Type in your name or your CEO’s name and see what it pulls in from the web…

What other tools are people are using? Specifically to protect brands online?