I went to the ecobuild conference at the ExCeL a couple of days ago. Possibly an odd place for a social media manager to end up (although I have to say it was seriously impressive), but the opportunity of going to see Rachel Botsman speaking about Collaborative Consumption wasn’t one that I was going to let slip.

I won’t go into huge amounts of detail about exactly what Collaborative Consumption is; either you’ve already heard about it, or you’ve clicked on the previous link and now you’re practically an expert. What I will say is that Rachel’s talk was really inspiring, and it suddenly struck me that what she was talking about was the kind of stuff my parents were doing on a very local (and at times laboured) way, when I was growing up in the ‘70s; bartering, sharing skills, space, time and ‘stuff’. The difference now, is obviously how the technology that has enabled social networking and the like, has made all of this so much easier, accessible and immediate. In some ways, it feels a little like we’re going back to the future; just not in the The DeLorean time machine.

Companies such as AirBnB, Park At My House, Task Rabbit, Landshare (a personal favourite), The Good Gym are all great examples of collaborative consumption in action, but this isn’t just about the ease of ‘you’ve got something I need that you want to share/give away/sell’ – although with the average AirBnB host making a whopping $21,000 per year, it’s an opportunity for people to make a living that perhaps they previously couldn’t have through the more traditional routes.

The great bit; the bit that really makes me smile, is that so much of this sharing and connecting is manifesting itself into community. I mean, real, proper, local, off-line, real world community. People that wouldn’t ordinarily know their neighbours well enough to even nod to them in the street are now becoming properly connected, and surely that can only be a good thing, right?

As Rachel so cleverly put it, “Stop buying ‘stuff’ so that you can keep up with the Joneses. Instead, get to know the Joneses”. She believes that we’re at the start of a collaborative revolution that could be bigger than the industrial revolution. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a really interesting thought. I guess a tell-tale sign is the noise that’s being made around peer-to-peer financing (the likes of Zopa), and in particular the little reported fact that Andy Haldane, head of policy at the Bank of England said this, this week.

Looks like interesting times ahead.

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]

For those of you that didn’t make it to our workshops:

1.    Shame on you!
2.    Feel free to download this and have a play

These tools are designed to help you work out the amount of time you need to set aside, recruit for, or buy from an agency so that you can carry out your social media activity; alongside helping you think through some questions that help you plan more effectively.
It’s pretty self-explanatory and hopefully something that some of you will find useful. As we said, these ‘tools’ (ok, a grandiose way of saying ‘Excel sheet’), were part of the workshops that Dom and some special guests held over the week, so for those of you that are interested, you can find the supporting PowerPoint slides for the 3 workshops here

Right, now download our Social Media Planning Tools and get planning!

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

However, in the new Facebook Timeline for Brand Pages ‘hidden’ posts, or ‘Spam’ as they’re now labelled, are trickier to find than they are currently.

So, where the current (until 31 March) Page format has hidden posts easily accessible in the left hand navigation of the Page:

The new Timeline format has made the hidden posts section fairly well hidden itself!

Here’s how to find it:

1. Go to the right of the Admin Panel at the top of your Brand Page, and click the ‘Manage’ option.

2. Choose ‘Use Activity Log’ from the drop-down menu.

3. Then click on the ‘All’ menu on the right, and select ‘Spam’.

You will now see a list of all hidden/Spam posts. To un-hide them, you can individually ‘Unmark as Spam’ by clicking on  the icon on the right of each post. This will move the post out of the Spam section and back into the Timeline, where it will be fully visible to all visitors to the page.

A couple more clicks, and slightly more ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ than before, so remember to build in regular checks of this section to ensure you don’t miss any important posts (complaints/questions/compliments) from your fans and customers.

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

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of days, you’ve probably heard the news that Facebook has launched Timelines for Brand Pages.

Initial reports on what this means for brands were somewhat confused – some said tabs were disappearing completely; others said only landing tabs were affected – our advice is to check out Facebook’s official Pages Product Guide for full details.

If you don’t have time to read the full document, here’s a top-line summary of what changes to expect when you migrate over to the new style:

1. A Cover Photo will appear at the top of the Page (851 x 315 pixels). There are various restrictions on what you can use so check the terms and conditions beforehand.
2. Facebook users will always land on the Timeline view of the Page when they visit – you can’t change the default landing view anymore. However, tabs will still appear on the Page as apps, and you can link directly to these on your Page.
3. Pinned Posts allow you to anchor specific pages to the top of the Page for a limited time.
4. A Star Icon at the top of each post allows you to highlight important stories, by stretching them across the width of the Page. This is particularly handy for more visually-striking content such as photos.
5. ‘Views and Apps’ is a new area on the Page where you’ll find the number of Likes on your Page, your photos and any Tabs you used to have. “Photos” has to appear in this section, but the other apps in view can be changed, so think carefully about which you want to be most visible on the Page.
6. A new Private Messaging feature allows you to speak directly to your Fans (and them to you) – this has great potential for Customer Service but might also lead to an increase in queries, so make sure you’ve got the appropriate resource in place to handle them.
7. Milestones allow you to highlight important dates in your Brand’s history.
8. The Admin Panel provides an overview of your Page’s activity – this is only seen by Page admins and can be hidden from view if desired.

Our advice to you: don’t rush into migrating your Page over to the Timeline. You’ve got until 30 March (when all Pages will naturally convert to the new style), so take some time to think about how you want the Page to appear before selecting “Publish”, as there’s no going back once you do.

We are recruiting a part-time, from home moderator to work on a high profile clients’ Arabic properties starting mid-March!

The role of a moderator is to check user-created content on websites, forums and social media profiles belonging to Tempero’s client(s), editing or removing any content deemed offensive, illegal or otherwise unacceptable in accordance with the moderation guidelines. Localisation and feedback/reporting on user comments and behaviour may also be required on some projects according to client needs.

Key Responsibilities Include:

1. Working with a team of moderators to ensure user-generated content e.g. comments, photos and videos that are uploaded to our client social network pages and online communities agree with Terms of Use and Community Guidelines; removing inappropriate content and managing problem users.
2. Encouraging discussion within our online communities and responding to user questions, concerns and feedback, according to client guidelines and requirements.
3. Localising key announcements, status updates, user guides and official community responses.
4. Assisting with the production of regular client reports on community activity statistics, key issues, feedback, trends and insights.
5. Ad hoc escalation of urgent issues, customer service or technical questions, and moderation policy queries.

The successful candidate will be self motivated and ideally used to working on a remote basis, have an excellent command of Arabic, including text language and slang/colloquialisms, as well as being fluent in both written and spoken English. A confident user of social networks with a good understanding of online user habits and idiosyncrasies coupled with a high level of computer literacy. Possess the ability to learn new skills and apply them effectively with an active interest in commercial and current affairs.

Moderation experience is not a pre-requisite and training will be provided but candidates should be aware that computer literacy, attention to detail and language skills will all be tested.

Is this you? Then apply by sending us your CV and cover letter to careers@tempero.co.uk with the subject header ‘Moderator – Arabic’.