Considering the pace of change at Facebook, by the time you read this it is likely that these useful clarifications be out of date, still worth keeping up.
This article offers an excellent, simple guide on how to make the most of Facebook’s LISTS and SUBSCRIBE options.
A recent study by Weber Shandwick’s Social Impact (you can see here its summary) reinforced the opportunity of web 2.0 communication to engage and drive home the responsible culture of a company through crowdsourcing. With two initial striking findings of this survey of over 200 CSR-related executives in Fortune companies: already 44% of companies interviews had used some form of crowdsourcing and that 95% of companies felt that the use of crowdsourcing had been beneficial.
In case you are wondering, what is crowdsourcing in the first place?
I went to one of the best examples of crowdsourcing – wikipedia – to offer you a definition “Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call” Web 2.0 platforms have opened a new era in crowdsourcing and specially in our passion to have responsible, values-based approaches drive success. For example you can ask “your crowd” to provide feedback about a new sustainable product you are launching or more generic ideas on how to make your company more sustainable.
The key to crowdsourcing is of course to make the conversation relevant and worthwhile to your audience. The higher the “purpose” of the topic and the more likely you are to get good ideas, high levels of engagement. So if you ask your “crowd” to give you their opinion on how you can increase your sales by 10%, guess what, the level of engagement will be pretty low. But if your question is how can we best “refresh the world” through a CSR campaign, like Pepsi-Cola did with its web 2.0 refresheverything platform you will see how over 3,3 million people (!) joined in the campaign.
Why does a web 2.0 platform become the ideal place where crowdsourcing can take place?
- It makes it very easy to handle interactions with large groups of people
- If the conversation is worthwhile and purposeful it is also easy to reach a much wider group of people than your company’s direct contacts could reach.
- Leveraging the “word of mouth” driver that is so particularly powerful on web 2.0 social platforms, it is very likely that the “friends” of people engaged in your idea exchange platform will become aware and either join in the conversation or promote it to an ever widening audience.
- With the right incentives people will feel very satisfied at having contributed as opposed to being forced into a survey or poll.
But let’s now go back to the Social Impact survey that we mentioned at the beginning of the post to and highlight some of the main benefits that these Fortune managers found and that are most commonly found when using crowdsourcing:
36% said that it surfaces new perspectives and diverse opinions
26% mentioned it as a way to build engagement and relationships with key audiences
22% said it invites clients and customers from nontraditional sources to contribute to ideas and opinions
16% highlighted how it brings new energy into the process of generating ideas
It therefore becomes an interesting opportunity offered by web 2.0 technology to open the dialogue, inviting people to participate in Responsible Business Solutions building, thus engaging them more closely to your brand and purpose.
Three additional suggestions were highlighted in the study on how to create most value from crowdsourcing:
1. Listen to what people are saying, be open, use this to align your offering to the public good, to what the public wants.
2. Give feedback on how you used people’s ideas, engage as much as possible reacting positively to individual’s inputs.
3. Create a constant flow, don’t start and stop engagement around a single project. Continue the conversations so that new thinking can always come to you, even after a CSR campaign has been launched to continuously hear of the evolving needs of your public.
You may have heard how TIME magazine voted as the most influential person of the year for 2010 Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Time justified their decision as follows:
For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives
And indeed Facebook is one of the new ways of exchanging information that web 2.0 technology has brought about in just the last few years.
Be it your Facebook Page, your LinkedIn Group, your Wiki platform, your customer interaction platform or your Twitter platform, each of these and thousands of other web 2.0 solutions allows you and your company to not only inform your stakeholders but most importantly to hear them, to learn from them, to have them find solutions for you and to have them promote you and your products and services on your behalf.
The key underlying condition behind the successful use of the opportunities that web 2.0 offers you is trust, or the origin of this status which is trustworthiness. By being and acting in a trustworthy manner you will gain the trust, the engagement and increase the brand, reputation and success of your organisation.
So think about it for a second: are your intentions as you step into the web 2.0 era truly trustworthy? Are you sincerely and transparently wishing to engage with your stakeholders or are you simply replicating the old 1.0 model (let me tell you and convince you of how great my product / service is and highlight how much you really need it?) using the 2.0 platforms?
Success in web 2.0 is about dialogue, it is not a monologue. It is about open and transparent interactions that aim to provide real benefit to the people involved. It is about allowing and encouraging conversations to take place amongst a community that forms around your organisation’s web 2.0 platforms. It is a lot about losing control of the conversations and allowing the community to guide you.
This takes us back to the title of this blog post connecting the TIME personality of the year with Trust, where can the link be?
The following data shows very clearly how trust in business and its leaders is at an all time low, not only are business leaders seen as some of the less trustworthy but it is the scale of our disillusionment with business which is amazing: only 25% of people believe that business leaders tell the truth.
IPSOS – MORI Poll Trust In Professionals
The question was: who do you trust to tell you the truth?
( http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=15 )
This would not be a problem is companies did not need to be trusted in order to sell you their products and services, in order to have a strong relationship with all their stakeholders more important than ever in this ever changing world or as Umair Haque at Harvard Business Reviews described it:
“a radically interdependent, increasingly transparent, tightly hyperconnected, brutally hypercompetitive, and viciously volatile world”
So what an opportunity! A fantastic competitive advantage for those companies who do manage to break the mold by being truly trustworthy.
Ok so then to make my trust levels increase and to create the right values based brand that people enjoy working with and buying from, I will now set up a Facebook account and tell the world what a great company I really am, right?
Wrong !
The new web 2.0 technology involves interaction, if it wants to be successful, this interaction involves a lot of listening. Hearing what people like and dislike about you, reacting transparently and openly to the ideas and issues that are voiced online.
These new social networks and web 2.0 platforms are allowing for transparent trustworthiness to arise but they are also very quickly exposing the fakes, the superficial marketing spin of some organizations who believe more in the sales potential of a Corporate Social Responsibility campaign than in the values and consequent behaviors that lie behind a successful CSR approach.
Apparently Twitter will soon be releasing its own official analytics product before the end of this 2010, as we await that to happen, below you can find a number of applications that allow you to measure and analyze the impact and presence of yourself, your company, your product or idea.
Track Your Favourite Brand – is the option you want to choose to select your own keyword / company etc.
- Klout
You can more details of each service in this full article here.
You can read here the article on Mashable announcing the new Twitter Stats feature clicking.
Trendsmap is a very interesting application that allows you to google-map navigate to any part of the world, visually highlighting the most popular themes that people are tweeting about in that specific city/place.
Go to: http://trendsmap.com/
How great to have an application that you can explain in two lines – that in itself has to be an aim for anyone wanting to create something useful and functional.
Practical advice on the best use of social media and also on how to handle the potential threats of negative feedback, turning it into opportunities for service improvement and client engagement – from McKinsey Quarterly review:
the evolution of new kinds of media means that consumers are engaging more often in real-time conversations, particularly on social networks and other digital platforms. Helping consumers to express themselves is a scary and significant reversal of the control marketers have traditionally tried to maintain over brands. While most marketers are already exploring tools to monitor conversations in social media, they need to develop triage and action engines to ward off people seeking to hijack their media.
One consumer electronics company, for example, has recognized that every review or rating posted about its products creates the possibility of a hijacked conversation. It now responds to all comments within 24 hours: positive feedback gets a thank you, an invitation to become a Facebook friend, and special offers; negative reviews get explanations of how to fix issues, instructions on how to navigate an interface more easily, or follow-up questions to learn more about what the consumer didn’t like. Some hotel chains, recognizing the importance of travel sites (such as the popular TripAdvisor), likewise encourage satisfied guests to post comments online, while employing staff to follow and answer negative comments. These conversations become an interactive public-research project to gather information for future improvements. In effect, the evolution of media types means that a company’s marketers are now on the front lines of its efforts to deliver outstanding goods and services.
Finding the most effective way to capture all that is said about your organizations in social media is becoming a key competitive advantage. What to do with the information you gather and the opportunities of interaction with both your fans and detractors is just as important. More advice from McKinsey’s article:
Develop a clear community or social-networking strategy. Companies need an agreed-upon set of rules and principles for managing and responding to single or coordinated attacks against the brand. It’s imperative to appoint an experienced community or social-networks manager who knows in advance how to coordinate with marketing, public relations, legal, and other relevant units and has the required authority and decision-making rights. The cost of failing to respond effectively can be high. One multinational company, for example, responded to accusations about its business practices by arguing with its accusers on its Facebook page, even blocking and deleting posts. That move only heightened public interest in the dispute, in effect hijacking the page until the company apologized.
You can go and read the entire article clicking here.
I have recently been through a total re-brand of ebbf, the organization I serve, and can only imagine the investment of resources, the number of high and medium level management meetings and decision making that finally produced the new brand and also the new logo of a multinational consumer giant such as GAP.
As one would, they proudly showed off the new brand that they had so carefully crafted but then something unusual happened: they actually listened to an important amount of negative reactions that were voiced about their new logo by loyal customers and potential ones on a number of different online platforms.
And even more unusual yet brave and intelligent was their reaction, summarized in this BBC article, to decide to scrap the new logo and all the implications that this would have had in their marketing in favour of “the voice of the consumer”. You can now imagine how much more engaged and proud to have been able to make a difference those customers now feel, after this giant organization actually decided to listen to them and to have them lead the direction of the organization.
How much more loyal do you think these customers will now feel every time they walk under – their – old GAP logo as they enter their local shop?
Two excellent videos offer an introduction to how you can use Twitter to communicate with your stakeholders.
The first video is more of an introduction to twitter but worth looking at to highlight ways to track what is being said about you, your company or organization – an invaluable way to engage with individuals you may have never had the chance to interact with before and who are currently expressing both good and bad views about what is important to you.
I’d definitely suggest that you do not see negative feedback as a challenge to you, rather see it as a tremendous opportunity to learn from and improve your weak points and communicate directly with people who express a connection with your project or company.
The second video aims more directly to how you can make the most of the opportunities of Twitter to effect social change:
Some examples of how new technology can assist non-profits in creative ways comes from this post on the Have Fun Do Good blog that highlights:
This month’s Net2ThinkTank question on NetSquared is, “What do you think will be the big changes, new technologies, hot applications, or successful campaigns of 2009?” I predict that one of them will be iPhone apps for nonprofits. For developers looking for iPhone apps for nonprofits ideas, or projects to get involved with:
You can read here the full transcript interview with David Carr who covers media for The New York Times, offering new insights into the many potentialities of using Twitter. I highlighted a couple of concepts from that interview:
It can get you ahead of the news cycle, which is a pretty handy thing when you’re a reporter. You know, things blow up on Twitter frequently before they show up in the media.
I was at a conference at Yale not that long ago and everybody had their laptops open. I thought, I always used to have my laptop open, why don’t I? And I realized that I don’t really surf that much anymore, that relevant links get pushed toward me and then I can look at them and decide whether I want to follow the link or not.
Frederic Guarino is chief marketing officer for KeenKong, a new entry in the burgeoning field of social media analytics. KeenKong’s new platform enables marketers to learn not only what people are tweeting about brands, but to characterize that buzz into 19 categories, anger, dislike, and so on. I asked Guarino and his partner Olivier Berger to look at the chatter about Toyota, which is mired in a recall disaster.
FREDERIC GUARINO: What we’re seeing – so we, we have about 5,000 conversations that referenced Toyota on Twitter since March 22nd, and we’re actually only seeing about 25 that are clear – dislikes.
BOB GARFIELD: This is quite the cultural leap for gigantic corporations that hitherto were able to massage public opinion by flooding the marketplace with advertising. Amid the fragmentation and ongoing collapse of mass media, now they’re finding themselves dealing with the public one tweet at a time.
Twitter, the company, is counting on it. Clearly, the service is loved by its users and clearly the data trove is a goldmine for business, whether the majority of the business world has figured that out or not.
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