As I look at the 2012 schedule of social media events for the SF Bay/Silicon Valley area, I think about how this week used to be about a relatively few events. Now we have online registration for dozens of events per day in numerous large venues. People have a lot to talk about. Brands tout their efforts and reveal their results, some of them getting a lot of press for it.
Continue reading “Social media: Walk before you run” »
We already have one, actually; but with everything that’s going on, we need another.
We’re looking for someone with lots and lots of social media experience, savvy, and passion. We want an extensive business and marketing background, coupled with the ability to initiate, develop, manage, measure, and analyze social programs for our Fortune 100 clients. Plus, you need to be able to recruit, train, oversee, and provide ongoing direction for a growing social media team of experienced Community Programming Managers and Engagement Specialists.
LiveWorld has a long and rich history of developing online communities. Some of us have been at this for over 25 years, and even the newest members of our community teams generally come with 5 or more years of experience. For this job, we’re looking for 8-10 years of relevant experience, as well as clear evidence of successful personal and professional social engagement. Ideally, this position would be located in the San Francisco Bay Area, but New York would be good too. Ultimately, what you bring to us is more important than the location, as long as travel isn’t a problem. If you fit the bill otherwise, we can discuss location.
What else is important? You must be an exceptionally strong and confident presenter, a clear-headed strategist, and a good writer. An engaging personality goes without saying 
If you’re interested, here’s our link to the job. Then email your cover letter and resume to DirectorCP@liveworld.com.
At LiveWorld, with our history rooted in real-time online interaction and online events, we’ve always taken a 24-hour, global point of view. As our clients deal with the proliferation of customer content flowing their way, we’re seeing numerous pain points emerge:
Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group (disclosure: LiveWorld is a client) has a new report on Social Business Readiness that lays out what successful companies are doing to deal with such challenges. From the report (and keeping in mind that my quoting it doesn’t mean Jeremiah’s endorsing what I have to say next):
- Foundation: First, develop a business plan and put governance in place.
- Safety: Then, get organized by anointing a team and process to deal with crises.
- Formation: Next, connect business units to increase coordination and reduce duplication.
- Enablement: Grow by letting them prosper – give business units the support and flexibility to reach goals.
- Enlightenment: Finally, weave real-time market response into business processes and planning.
The Altimeter report points out that fully 75% of recent social media crises might have been averted if companies had properly prepared by following the above blueprint (with lots of useful details provided — read it!). Part of such preparation, the report notes, is to have a team of people monitoring social input during and beyond business hours (including nights, weekends, and holidays).
My intent here is blatantly pro-LiveWorld, in support of our moderation services: The LiveWorld virtual workforce can provide front-end screening for all the social input flooding into company processes. Human eyes, trained to the issues a company defines as critical to its goals, can assess meaning from customer input, triage judiciously, and send info and issues on to the appropriate business unit (or provide company approved responses) — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, around the globe, in dozens of languages.
We have technology to support that effort or we can use someone else’s, and business hours are all hours to us. It’s a service that can help with process and workflow issues associated with the today’s social media reality, and we can extend it even further by analyzing slices of the incoming activity and providing specific, actionable insights. Essentially, we can help fill in the blanks left by top-level, positive-negative reporting; provide centralized, leveraged, always-on, front-line troops; and productively route relevant issues and queries across the corporate organization.
If we can help with your social media monitoring or moderating needs, contact us online or call us at 1-800-301-9507.
Sometimes people talk about being on Facebook like it’s the great new thing — and traditional community forums are the boring old thing. They question the value of the traditional central website community in light of the prominence of Facebook on the social media landscape. Let’s stop and think about it: The question isn’t as simple as “should we close down our (old) website community in favor of (new) Facebook?” More complex issues are involved.
Is your central website community successful? Not from the point of view of the sometimes massive potential audience on Facebook, but from the point of view of the goals you have for your website community? Does your community produce loyal and engaged community members who are evangelists for your brand? Or, if leads are your goal, does it produce them? And do those reliably (or at least often) convert to sales? Or does your community provide people answers and assistance that reduces your overall customer support costs?
If your website community meets the goals you set up for it, why shut it down? A healthy website community is beneficial at minimum because the customers are on your site. You have the opportunity to get closer to them than you can on Facebook. You have their email addresses, and can send them news and offers that you’re pretty sure they’ll receive (without wondering about whether your news will survive the EdgeRank algorithm). It’s important not to get sidetracked by whether your community’s supporting technology is “old” or “new.” The main thing is whether, as a venue for interaction, it cranks out the results you planned for it in the first place — and that those results still support your current goals.
On the other hand, you may have a lot more customers on Facebook — a potential pool from which you could acquire more website visitors and community members. So if your website community is working, you may be able to give the commuity a boost by starting a Facebook Page and/or integrating Facebook social plugins into it. Facebook touts examples of brands using an integrated strategy to successfully increase traffic, engagement, time on site, and even revenue. If you know your constituency is on Facebook and would likely engage with you there (remembering you can’t be anonymous on Facebook), and if you know you have the resources to run two venues, integrating the two may be the way to go.
If the community on your website has never really taken off, or if it’s past its prime and on the decline, why is that?
Remember, this isn’t about what’s old or new; it’s about business goals, strategic community interaction models, and consistent programming and management of a social environment. How will your Facebook Page differ from your failed website community?
Whether you abandon your website community and put all your resources into Facebook, or you decide to keep both and work them together, you’ll do best with a strategic effort toward a consistent cultural model for meeting your customers, wherever they are.
If you keep both venues, and if they’re run by different groups (as they commonly are), can you agree on a common strategy for collaboration on a flow between the sites? For example, you might decide Facebook is primarily for acquisition, with an effort to move people closer toward the website for conversion and/or retention. Or perhaps you’ll make a push to bring a more intensely engaged conversational model from your website onto parts of your Facebook Page. Or encourage customers who provide support to other customers on your website to do the same on Facebook. No matter your goal, you’ll need to make content programming, voice, and interaction styles consistent across the two sites — so that customers who know you in one place still recognize you in the other. We’ve run across situations where the website voice and message was quite different on Facebook than on the website — with customers noticing and commenting on the mixed message. “Almost,” they said, “like people in the company aren’t talking to each other” (which they weren’t).
If, on the other hand, you decide to close a failing website community in favor of Facebook, make sure you don’t repeat the mistakes that doomed it. To create and support any online social venue, you’ve got to define a cultural interaction model, provide experienced and creative community management (including moderation), come up with a detailed content programming plan (with a conversation calendar), and integrate the whole program with your greater marketing strategy. No matter where you start your conversations with customers, the nature of the platform doesn’t make success a slam-dunk. Wherever you do it, you have to be serious about your social
Everyone talks about the importance of relationships with fans and customers, there’s no doubt that it’s important to be ready for big trouble — bad trouble. But as in any relationship, not every kind of trouble can be termed a crisis. Things come up that cause smaller trouble — good trouble, if you like, because it comes from misunderstanding, misinformation, hurt feelings, or dissatisfaction born from an investment in the relationship.
Because people feel strongly loyal to your customer venue, product, or brand, they also have a proprietary sense about it. They start to complain, but mainly because they value the product, respect the brand, or love the venue you’ve provided for interaction with your company and other people. You make a change (even a very small one), they don’t like it, and suddenly you have a community uprising on your hands. Sometimes it can be quite a stir, and very surprising to new community managers. With experience and understanding of its roots, however, they can learn to love it.
At the beginning of a new brand online effort, the first people to arrive are often quite positive about everything. They’d never get involved if they didn’t like or admire the brand, and everything about the online gathering may start out in a congenial, happy-to-get-to-know-you tone. As people get used to the culture, they’ll tune in regularly to see what’s going on, or they’ll jump right into the party and take a role. The more deeply they get involved, the more they’ll have their own opinions about what you should do (whether with community guidelines, moderation, or even company policy or product). It’s just about guaranteed that at some point, conflict will arise; something you do will tick off the community or a good slice of it. Some change in policy or product or interface. Take a deep breath; this is quite normal and should be expected.
As in any relationship, dealing with good trouble involves sitting down for a talk, listening, attempting to discover the root of dissatisfaction, exploring whether any compromise or solution exists, and having lots of patience. We’re not talking the kind of trouble here that typically leads to a break-up or divorce. Rather, this is the kind where people take the time to make you aware of what’s wrong, but from a point of dissatisfaction or disappointment as opposed to full-blown anger, outrage, or attack. They need to tell you how you’re making them feel, and you need to listen. One of the biggest challenges in maintaining a successful online conversation is dealing with this emotion and disagreement on the part of your membership, as well as handling disruptive and unpleasant posts.
From the beginning of the relationship, it’s important to be prepared for good trouble, setting the stage for dealing with conflict before it arises (because it will). It may help to keep these things in mind:
Sometimes things will escalate into a full-blown crisis. Often, however, recognition, appreciation, and straightforward handling of a minor community uprising can develop trust. Then, how you’ve dealt with good trouble will serve you well when bad trouble arises; you’ll benefit from the support of brand defenders whose confidence you will have earned in less dire situations.
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This post is part of an ongoing social media marketing series on “Building Relationships” from LiveWorld, a social media agency that offers moderation, insight, and community programming Facebook services for Fortune 1000 brands.
The social media efforts of large companies typically start somewhere in the marketing department. However, in short order, it becomes apparent that a large portion of what customers want from a company is customer service. Marketing then sets up an escalation process for providing answers from customer service. Eventually, as we’re starting to see with some of our clients, the customer service department may start to be more closely involved with the company’s social media channels, or even taking over running them. Even in the cases where customer service stays strictly separate, however, the culture of social media is having an effect.
In the traditional customer service model, departments are generally in reactive mode, waiting for customers to contact them, and then providing templated, business-language responses to the typical questions people ask. Plus, the customer service reps may reside deep in the organization in a large group, and their responses don’t get beyond the individual with the question or issue and the company representative responding to them. Customer satisfaction may or may not be the result, but in any event, the effect of the interaction rarely moves into the public eye.
In today’s environment, with customer problems and questions surfacing in highly public venues such as Twitter and Facebook, where people have vast connections, the stakes are much higher. Customer services responders are no longer dealing in a relatively low-risk interaction, but instead, a high-stakes public stage where a misstep can blow up into a major crisis for the company. We’ve all seen well-publicized cases where inexperienced people lose their cool with the public, and the company has to deal with the consequences for weeks or months.
Let’s face it: Consumer expectations are very different these days. People expect responses in a much shorter period of time, feel empowered to punish a company for unsatisfactory attention to their problems, and react with suspicion to any communication delivered in an impersonal corporate tone.
These new expectations brought forward by social media are causing customer service departments to perceive new requirements and make some changes like these:
It’s an informal, conversational, and highly connected world out there. Customers are changing — no longer intimidated or even necessarily impressed with corporations. What’s needed is a perception that real people populate the corporation in real time, responding to customers in an ongoing give and take. Customer service is at the center, regardless of which employees are providing it, and companies need to change, too, in order to meet the challenge.
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This post is part of an ongoing social media marketing series on “Building Relationships” from LiveWorld, a social media agency that offers moderation, insight, and community programming Facebook services for Fortune 1000 brands.
Facebook has decided to no longer allow pharma companies to “whitelist” their Pages.
What this means: Up until now, pharma companies with Facebook Pages could request that Facebook disable the ability for people to comment on and/or Like brand posts. This exception should not be confused with the ability every Page has to disable the capability for fans to originate a post. Even where Pages do not allow fans to post, people can comment on the Page owner’s posts (unless they have requested and received such an exception). You can read a really good explanation of the difference at Jonathan Richman’s Dose of Digital site.
The only Pages still eligible to request a commenting exception are branded Pages for prescription drugs or non-branded Pages centered on a disease state for which only one prescribed treatment exists. As of August 15, 2011, other Facebook Pages (even those previously eligible for exception — such as disease state Pages and OTC product Pages, like NyQuil) will see the comment and Like capabilities appear for fans.
For those companies who’ve had comments disabled to this point, and who’re no longer eligible for the exception, it’s essential to be prepared for the change. The truth is that, given FDA regulations, companies will need either to put well-planned Facebook moderation in place, or terminate their Pages. Because of the obligation to report adverse events (untoward experiences people have with a pharma product), certainly there’s no option not to moderate.
For all pharma companies planning to run Facebook Pages around OTC products or disease states, the resources required for running a Page are now quite different. It will no longer be enough to simply publish information to the Wall — a glorified digital brochure, really. Instead, companies need to be thinking about moderation of undesirable content like spam and profanity, about dealing with comments describing adverse events or off-label use, and ideally, about providing knowledgeable brand representatives who engage in a meaningful, helpful way with people who comment on their Pages.
At LiveWorld, we’ve been thinking about best practices for pharma for some time. Online venues are now and increasingly will be a major source of health information, sharing of experience, and support. This is a very good thing for a number of reasons: It’s good for people to be able to talk with each other about their experience living with health issues. It’s good for pharma and healthcare providers to hear from the people who are using their products. It’s good for people to get reliable information from experts.
While it’s understandable that pharma companies are nervous about the legal implications of people talking about their products, it’s also a great opportunity. Pharma can support all the potentially positive dynamics by allowing people to benefit from the company’s considerable knowledge base, by responding to users who bring forward issues and questions, and by providing a venue for connection among people who use their products and may be dealing with similar life experiences. Plus, they’ll learn a lot from their customers.
Regardless of whether pharma companies decide to keep their Facebook Pages, people will find places to talk to each other about their experiences with particular products and disease states. If companies hold back on providing such conversational venues because of fear of legal liability, the public loses benefits the company can offer, and the company loses the benefit of a close relationship with their customers. When issues and questions come forward on the Page a company owns and controls, at least there’s the possibility of being able to respond, correct, or connect with the commenters. It’s much harder to take such positive actions on comments posted on any of the thousands of possible venues across the social web.
Understanding that any pharma company has to decide how much risk it can take with the FDA — which hasn’t yet clarified its stance on legal liability of companies in online venues — we recommend companies keep their Facebook Pages open, invest further in them, and provide diligent moderation of comments from the public. (LiveWorld provided relevant comments to the FDA in March of 2010.)
Whether pharma companies do such moderation themselves or outsource to a company like LiveWorld, it’s important to have a program in place, with focused process and attention on off-label use and adverse events. Essentially, that means a connection into the brand’s normal process for reporting adverse events when all parameters for submission are present (identifiable patient, identifiable reporter, specific product involved, and adverse event). Since Facebook doesn’t provide brands with user e-mail addresses, and since brand Pages can’t send private messages to users, this often means responding to a comment that suggests such an event with an address to which the user can write, providing the appropriate information for potential reporting (according to the company’s normal reporting processes). The brand’s Page should also include a clearly-stated process or form for reporting such events.
We also recommend that fully identified, credentialed brand representatives regularly participate on the Facebook Pages, help answer questions, and interact knowledgeably with people — whether discussing valid issues, providing guidance, or correcting misinformation. That way, the company takes and demonstrates full responsibility for the content it provides in its advertising, product-related content, and any articles, blogs, and comments its own people make. And the public gets accurate information, a channel for interaction around questions or concerns, and the opportunity to benefit from the collective experience and input of other brand customers.
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This post is part of an ongoing “31 Days of Facebook Marketing” series from LiveWorld, a social media agency that offers moderation, insight, and community programming Facebook services for Fortune 1000 brands.
A massive amount of content that could be of interest to your customers floods the web every day.
It may be what people are saying about your brand or what they’re saying about your industry — or current events that fall into the sphere of your brand culture, or even seasonal topics. While it’s great to be able to pull together a flow of such posts, what often happens is that keywords also bring in spam and inappropriate or duplicative comments as well. What’s ideal is to be able to aggregate and then curate them — selectively featuring the most meaningful and interesting on your Facebook Page or websites.
Today we’re launching a product that combines human understanding of goals and relevancy with technology that supports a process of collecting, classifying, and displaying in a timely, appealing way. LiveWorld Curator and our Moderation Services permit brands and agencies to aggregate and curate Twitter (and soon other social networks). As tweets come in from your keyword searches, Curator collects and shows them to our live moderators — who then use our Advanced Moderation Tools to sort out spam and irrelevancies before releasing them for display. Your constituency can then see the most meaningful comments, without having to wade through everything.
Our example here shows relevant tweets coming in about wine. It may have already weeded out crass jokes about the after-effects of too much partying, blatant spam posts, or other irrelevant or offensive comments. What’s left is information useful to the people interested in legitimate talk about wine. An organization sponsoring celebrity, business, or political events can do the same with tweets about the speakers or issues involved. Companies can provide nearly real-time social connection to anything going on in the world that might relate to their particular industries — from marketing and business information to news, weather, sports, food, holidays, and the whole gamut of potentially relevant and interesting topics. It’s even possible to change the display widget settings to bring in content on different topics or multiple topics at the same time. You can change it it as often as you like, so that what you’re collecting is always fresh and timely.
Given that moderators are reading every post for appropriateness and relevance, they can also classify or route the posts according to a system that makes sense for your goals — customer service escalations, specific product mentions or requests, brewing issues, complaints or praise — noting which need immediate response from other parts of your organization, or which ones are particularly suitable for featuring in some marketing context. Analyzing this segmented information, we can then provide you with actionable recommendations that go beyond the typical top-line categorization (positive-negative-neutral), which often doesn’t provide enough detail for informed decision making.
We intend Curator and Moderation Services together to provide a full system for aggregation, moderation, curation, display, and insight. We’re looking forward to the many ways our clients may use it, and to helping them get the most useful insight from all the daily content production out there on the social web. How would you use it?
If you’re focused on managing a brand, you’re faced with overwhelming waves of data advancing on you from and about your customers, prospects, critics, and competitors. No doubt your listening applications fill up quickly with the 24-hour spidering of posts, and associated charts categorize them as negative, positive, and neutral. While automation makes it possible to collect everything, our clients tell us the value of it all gets largely buried in the volume. In the end, what does it all mean? How can you use this information to help make decisions about the business?
And on another side of the equation, you’d like to provide valuable content to your customers — beyond information about your products and services. If you sell baby products, you’re looking for posts, photos, and perspectives that grab the attention of parents. If your product is high-end photographic equipment, you’d like to pull together the best and hottest comments professional and amateur experts are making out there across the social landscape. Respecting your customers, you want to offer them something that speaks to their lives and recognizes their passion. If you can provide your constituency with content they can use, your brand gets to bask in the glow of added value.
The value hidden in the mass of daily web content creation depends on the elusive factor of relevancy — which can be highly subjective. While many brand mentions appear trivial to most people, the management perspective can turn them into gems suggesting priorities for the next quarter or year. The real-time nature of trends and reactions demands easier access to meaning than you generally get from spidering hundreds of posts or scanning the listening application fire-hose. What’s really required is specific human attention and interpretation, focused on what you need to know today: What do your customers like? What are they asking for? What annoys or frustrates them about you and your products? How do people like your new commercial? Do they understand the features you’ve outlined in your product launch materials? How do they feel about your environmental practices? Is your customer service organization serving them well? What photos do they send you, and what does that tell you about them and about you? What tone do they use with you? Is it humorous, sarcastic, warm, indignant?
And if you’re aggregating content to present for your customers, how do you reflect back what you’re learning about them? You’ll need to sift through the mountains of possibilities and select items that validate what people are telling you — content that affirms and acknowledges what they value, and adds to it.
We’re all increasingly involved in a continuum of curation involving our friends and social media contacts. In a world where “everyone has become a creator,” we sift through the massive information that comes our way daily, paying most attention to the stories and threads curated for us by those we trust. Culling even further, we pass on a sub-set to our friends. We tag and aggregate and share selectively. Most of us are depending on this as a relatively efficient way to stay on top of what’s most relevant, what supports the most insightful perspective for us as individuals. It’s a people-oriented process.
Current and future LiveWorld solutions similarly focus on the human touch for curation — powered by technology that makes it more efficient. Our moderation and community programming staff meet the growing content challenge with a service evolved over decades of moderating content for clients. Human curation adds your brand’s perspective to the aggregation of customer or topical content. People, informed about and looking for brand priorities, can detect subtleties of tone and innuendo, accurately categorizing requests, detecting brewing issues, escalating (or answering) questions, discerning relevance, or just correctly classifying (and responding to) declarations of pure admiration. Going way beyond the simple classification as positive, negative or neutral, human curation can identify the best (for potential featuring on your sites or materials), the urgent (requiring immediate response or fixing), the incorrect (for correcting), the innovative (for product or service enhancement) — assembling all the elements of meaning toward then providing insightful and actionable business recommendations.
For some time, it’s been possible for you, as an individual, to sign into Facebook-integrated brand sites with your Facebook account, comment on content, and then elect to have the comments posted to your Facebook profile’s Wall. In a promising addition, Facebook has added a new comment plugin, so that now, when your friends chime in on your comment (from Facebook), their content appears not only on Facebook, but also on the site from which you originally posted.
This is good news for brands, as it increases their ability to get attention for content posted on their websites. Plus, conversations are integrated, instead of fragmented, which adds to their richness and depth. The viral effect of such content making its way through numerous friend networks is huge — but only part of the benefit. Here’s more:
As your customers move across the social landscape, it’s ideal if your brand culture, personality, and content are consistent everywhere they run into you. You’re investing resources in creating experiences for and starting up conversations with people. You put a lot of thought and planning into the programming you create for them — so the wider the reach, the more exposure it gets, the more likely it’ll result in a broader, more engaging exchange. Assuming your content gets people talking, you have the potential to get considerable leverage from your efforts — more brand buzz, customer advocacy, product feedback, insight , or even sales.
With judicious posting from your brand Facebook Page, you can spread the conversation around even further. Because Facebook has recently allowed brand Pages to comment on other sites, you can start a thread on your brand website from your Facebook brand Page account, electing to post also to the brand Page Wall. Now all your brand Page fans see the content, becoming aware of the broader conversation and capable of joining in (either from Facebook or from the brand website).
We’re still looking at the additional implications — especially for moderation; more on that later. For sure, with the potential of greatly-increased volume, you’ll want to be prepared with a sound moderation approach, supporting a savvy community programming and management strategy.
