Crafting a Great Community / Social Media Policy

By Ryan Turner | Nov 21, 2009 10:31:08 AM

(Cross-posted from Web Social Architecture.)

I've said before that there are three crucial elements of online community policy: Legality, appropriateness, and relevance. I'm now thinking that there's actually a "hierarchy of needs" among those three, and that taken together and put into practice, they are much more than a set of rules for what's ok to do in the community. They’re more like a social contract, a creator of quality and value.

 

Legality isn’t exactly black and white, as you’d sort of want it to be. But it is quite straightforward in that you basically need to do what your lawyers tell you. In many cases there’s some education and negotiation, but there’s also a reason lawyers get paid a lot. In the end, you do what they say.

Likewise, appropriateness is pretty easy. You generally rule out profanity and abuse. From there you can dial the politeness requirements up or down to suit your needs. In fantasy football, for example, smack talk is part of the fun; in a forum for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, behavioral standards are much higher.

But deciding what's relevant and what isn't is a very different story. I consulted, for example, with REI on their online community strategy and governance, and there are a few great examples from that exercise of how challenging relevance is to define:

 

• It’s tempting for an outdoor retailer with a merchandising focus to align community discussions with its product taxonomy. But REI doesn’t sell photography stuff, and photography is a huge part of many people’s outdoor experience. They want to talk about it. So, this one isn’t too tough, right? How about:

 

• Would it be ok to talk about snowmobiling? To post photos and videos of snowmobiling? What about heli-skiing? REI’s focus on stewardship and sustainable enjoyment of the outdoors makes this tough, because most cross-country skiers despise snowmobiles, and heli-skiing is accessible only to the well-off. And then there’s the whole snowmobiles in Yellowstone thing. Yikes. But wait:

 

• In regions like Texas, among the outdoor activities most enjoyed by REI customers are hunting and fishing. Would it be ok on an REI web site to post a photo of yourself posing with the elk you just shot? The poor barefoot hikers in Portland would pass out! But the folks in Plano, or Missoula, would get it. So maybe the elk feels like an extreme example. What about a photo of your six-year-old proudly displaying the day’s catch of bluegill?

 

The thing is, these are brand questions. And when you involve customers in content creation, you expose yourself to all the variety of your customers’ senses of what your brand is all about, from regional variation to variation in taste and preference.

It’s messy. And yes, you have to exercise control. But a degree of openness is also critical, and not only because people won’t participate in a system they perceive as restricting their self-expression. Online community and social media represent a tremendous opportunity to give customers an emotional stake in the brand, a sense of ownership that will increase value at the far end of the funnel—increasing loyalty and generating word of mouth advocacy.

Craft your policies—both outward-facing in community settings and inward-facing for managing your own company’s social media activity—not with the mindset that you need to restrict activity or restrain creative self-expression, but with the mindset that you need to enable creativity and empower participants. I think of it as analogous to sports: The rules are there to make the game safe, fair, and fun—not to keep people from playing.

Where to Start? 20 Questions for Corporate Social Media

By Ryan Turner | Nov 19, 2009 3:46:28 PM

(Cross-posted from Web Social Architecture.)

Our social media engagements typically start with some kind of assessment, with varying degrees of formality and scope. We have an internal list of questions we use to plan these assessments, some of which are more relevant and important for a given engagement than others. Here they are:

 

1. Have you formalized the goals, KPIs, and reporting for your social media activities?

This gives us a sense of the degree to which social media efforts are aligned with the business, as well as the current state of listening, analysis, and reporting.

2. Do you know who’s talking about you online, what they’re saying, and the scope of their influence?

Most (though not all) companies I’ve worked with have a general sense of what’s being said about them online. Typically, the past year, this sense is mainly anecdotal. In the next year I expect to see much more systematic, sophisticated, and analytical listening. But if you’re not there yet, you’re not alone.

3. How effectively are you able to respond?

Yes, this begs the question of whether a business is responding at all. For those who are, the question of degree of effectiveness can be a stumper. The real question here is: How do you know how effective you are (see #1)?

4. What technology tools are you using to monitor social media activity around your brand / product / service?

People really are surprisingly resourceful when it comes to using free tools to listen online. Even for businesses without a sophisticated listening platform in place, a conversation about the tools they’re using tells us a lot about what they care about and are (or aren’t yet) able to measure.

5. Which groups and individuals are informally involved in social media activities?

Once you start walking around asking people, the variety here can be surprising. Typically corporate social media efforts emerge out of PR, Marketing, or Customer Service. But ad hoc efforts are very common, and there’s usually something important driving them. Building out a strong program requires accommodating, supporting, and enabling ad hoc efforts.

6. Whose job description includes it, and who has overall responsibility?

As you might guess, the answer here last year was very often “nobody.” Next year we’ll see a shift toward the guerilla social media people formalizing their roles and management recognizing the need for coordination and leadership. And yes, this question can set off turf wars. Tread lightly.

7. Have you defined a corporate policy for engaging with customers through social media?

If not, better get on it. Talking early to legal / brand / compliance, especially in regulated industries, always saves frustration later.

8. In what third-party venues do you have a presence?

This always yields surprises. “None…. Well, oh yeah, I guess we do have the Facebook thingie. And someone in marketing has been posting our ads to YouTube.” Or: “Marketing is in charge of our Twitter accounts. Except for the ones they use in customer service. And Dale down in R&D is a total Twitter fanatic.”

9. How well are those efforts coordinated?

Yes, more question-begging. Most often, efforts across social networks, blogs, and media sharing sites are not coordinated. Maybe, just maybe, they should be.

10. What is your brand’s online personality?

This one is a great conversation starter. It’s really about understanding how to show up in social media (hint: not with offers, and not with campaign messages). This topic is really about starting to think about how the people representing the brand should show up in social settings—authentically, as people, but as people not only representing but also enacting the brand and its character. I like to use the example of our client NAU. They make sustainably-developed clothing, and they blog not about their clothing products but about sustainability, outdoor recreation, and social action—the passions that are at the emotional core of their brand. A while back they posted, for example, a video of people moving an entire Portland, OR household by bicycle. Awesome. You want to subscribe, to follow, to befriend them.

11. How consistently do your social media efforts embody the character of the brand?

This is really a question about governance. How organized are you? Do you have a system in place to manage customer interaction across touch points? Is the system in use?

12. Where do your customers spend time online? What content do they create?

Market research typically tells us a lot about where customers spend time online. What it typically doesn’t tell us is very much about what they’re doing—So 40% of your customers check Facebook daily. That’s good to know, but to really drive action, you need to understand whether they’re there socially, professionally, or both. Whether they’re using it to market their services, keep in touch with Granny (oh yes, Granny is definitely on there), or what. They’re on Twitter, good—but what are they talking about? Whom are they following?

13. What are their preferred information sources, and how do they consume them?

What’s the information ecosystem your customers tap? Who are the influencers? What do they read? Blogs, newspapers, Digg? Are they looking at web pages, RSS feeds? Are they reading on mobile? Are they sharing things they find? Which things? With whom?

14. Where are their relationships?

Whom do your customers interact with online? Through what channels—IM, email, blog post commentary, Flickr photostreams? On social networks? Twitter? Do they use different channels for different kinds of relationships? Which ones, and what kinds?

15. What are you doing to enable customer participation on your own properties?

Do you have an email contact form buried in your footer? Or a p2p support forum? Corporate blogs? Can customers comment? Review? Rate? Can they interact with each other? Create content and add it? Suggest or vet ideas? Do they have a stake in your next version? What value can they create for each other, and how can you enable it?

16. How does your organization interact with customers online?

Can your customers contact you? How? Simply being reachable is a great first step. The next step is to proactively engage customers who need support, to reach out to your customers for feedback and ideas, and to create opportunities for customer collective intelligence to create business intelligence.

17. How do you capture business intelligence from those conversations?

Social media listening has a major difference from behavioral web analytics: It’s a two-way conversation, and it’s not just about what people do. It’s also about what they say, and how they feel.

18. What is the process for making your business intelligence actionable?

Intelligence is useless without action. But the challenges in actionablizing (ha!) business intelligence are often really substantial. How do you get the right bits and pieces to the people who can take action? This question is really about escalation, delegation, roles and responsibilities, and workflow. To make the most of what you know, you need definition around how you’re going to do something about it, who’s responsible, and how success gets measured and reported.

19. Have you monetized the value of your social media efforts?

I’ll be honest. The answer here is always no. Social media ROI is one thing, and monetized estimates of the impact of social media activities are another. ROI is great, and showing ROI in social media is absolutely possible to do. The problem is that a large portion of the payoff in social media happens over the long term and is measured in, for example, lifetime customer value and word of mouth—neither of which show up on your quarterly balance sheets.

20. Estimated the financial impact on lifetime customer value or word of mouth?

We do have a very advanced approach to this, but it’s a subject for another post. Essentially the idea is to be really smart about some monetized estimates of the value of certain measurable activities, then validate and refine those estimates over time.

 

Naturally, we don’t typically get these questions answered by sitting down with the marketing people for an hour and just asking. We basically never ask these questions in these words. A huge part of the assessment is getting time in conversation with the right people in the first place, and talking with them about their jobs, their goals, satisfactions, and frustrations. We use a combination of interviewing approaches including contextual inquiry and appreciative inquiry, and a fair amount of intuition and sneaking around. In other words, it’s not a mechanical process.

But I hope you (you few who’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post) find this list useful, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. Anything missing? Anything off the mark?

Too Much Marketing

By Ryan Turner | Nov 6, 2009 4:37:11 PM

(Cross-posted from Web Social Architecture)

I really like David Armano’s Conversation Starter post from earlier this week with predicted trends in social media for next year. In particular, his first point hits on exactly what I think is going to be the key to success for marketers in social media:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more "exclusive." Not everyone can fit on someone's newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it's likely that user behavior such as "hiding" the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it's not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

OK, I actually think the header on Armano’s paragraph is, as he hints, actually the opposite of the truth—the way I’d say it is that “social media begins to look less anti-social!”

But the real point Armano is making is spot on. Social channels are too noisy, and as more and more marketers start to proactively reach out to consumers online next year, and as listening technologies are more widely adopted, we’ll see a dramatic increase in, well, spam.

I made a joke on Twitter recently about going to back to grad school. I was, I think, really obviously joking. But in minutes, I had four @replies from universities plugging their Master’s programs. Yikes!

We are fast approaching a time when public online social venues are saturated with listening marketers, responding to every mention of everything related to their brands, products, and services. It’s easy to anticipate Twitter’s @ channel, for example, becoming essentially useless.

Armano is right to predict an increase in user behaviors that enable them to filter the noise. But I also think we’ll see a rise in demand for and sophistication of privacy controls (and even products—like the “social router” I once pitched to Nancy White after her talk here at ZAAZ), as well as an increase in the importance of private networks and communities.

What’s a marketer to do?

Create value, that’s what. Next year will be a year for opt-in marketing—the focus will be on creating content and services people want to use. Heads up, folks, people don’t want you to “engage them” in “conversation.”

Web Analytics for Social Media

By Shane Atchison | Nov 6, 2009 11:29:39 AM

Most marketers approach social media in the same way they've approached broadcast media for decades. And that's true of measurement as well. But with social media, the old rules don't apply.

Traditionally, marketers focused on quantity metrics like impressions. As the Web emerged as a marketing platform, we translated that approach to digital, emphasizing quantity metrics like unique visitors and page views. Later, as the Web matured into a bona-fide business channel, transaction became important: sales conversion rate, average order value, and so on.

Web analytics, like much of the marketing world, has tended to focus on the short term, measuring marketing to do better marketing.

But social media is different than transaction, and it calls for a different approach to measurement. Today we look at the quality of relationships, experiences, and, yes, transactions, and we look at them over time. Unique visitors, for example, is still an important metric, but so is registered users. And more important still are metrics like return visitor sign-in.

We also look at the amount of user-created content, but we're more interested in measures of qualified content consumption. It's great if someone comes to your site and buys your product, but it's even better if she returns for service, tells her friends about the product, buys an upgrade, submits a suggestion, blogs about your response to her idea, and so on.

True Business Intelligence

On today's crowded Web, the winners are the people who create the most value for both the customer and the business over time. And value happens not when people buy your product but when they use it and love it. Not when they upload a video, but when someone else watches it.

Is it still important to strive for quantity? Absolutely. Awareness, for example, is key and always will be. But you get what you measure. Focus exclusively on quantity, and you're guaranteed to compromise quality. So make sure your KPIs reflect the creation of value, not just the number of widgets you sell.

Here's the other thing: traditional (broadcast and transactive) marketing measures tend to show campaign efforts' effectiveness, and Web analytics tends to measure Web site effectiveness. But social media, because it enables you to listen as well as speak, offers the opportunity to generate true business intelligence.

Measuring marketing in social media isn't about measuring your marketing to do better marketing, it's about understanding the customer, uncovering opportunities, and informing strategy to run the business better. The real opportunity in social media measurement isn't to see how well you're doing in social media but to translate online conversations into true, actionable intelligence that informs business decisions.

How Do You Measure Social?

Some great tools can help you monitor the online conversation, ranging from free (e.g., Google Alerts, Technorati Watchlists, FriendFeed, Yahoo Pipes, etc.) to, uh, committing (e.g., TruCast, BuzzMetrics, Cymfony). The more expensive tools are worth what they cost, but the free tools are easy to set up and, well, they're free.

And sometimes getting started is the biggest hurdle. You may just want to get something going on the cheap, show the value of your effort, and lobby for a robust, programmatic solution to monitor online activity and engage your customers where they hang out. You'll be surprised how much you'll learn, and you'll probably really enjoy it.

The real challenges aren't technological, but operational. You have to define the right governance policies to manage customer engagement through social media, and you have to build the right workflow to prioritize responses, route information to the right people, and manage your content even as you release it into the wild. Employees need encouragement to participate, and they need clear guidelines about exactly when, how, and where to get involved. It takes effort, but the payoff can be tremendous.

So don't stop at measuring your marketing efforts' success, or even the sentiment expressed in the broader online conversation about your brand. It's great to monitor online activity, better to develop reporting around online activity, and better yet to engage customers in their native online habitats.

Translate Insight Into Action

And don't stop there. Where the rubber really hits the road, and where social media has the potential to transform your business, is where insight gets translated into action. And that's where analysts, as the translators of social media data, have the opportunity to position themselves as crucial mediators of customer/business relationships.