Posts Tagged ‘conversation’

Feeding The Social Media Beast

09.09.11

Ever felt a “need” to be active on Twitter? Do you feel guilty for not publishing to your blog for a few days?

Hungry dogSometimes there can almost be a compulsion to keep feeding your social media accounts. Go away for a week and watch your blog plummet down the AdAge Power 150, your visitors fall and your RSS subscriptions drop off. Stop tweeting and watch the online discussion around your brand diminish.

So as a business, how do you deal with that time when you just don’t have any content to post?

Personally, I agree with others who have argued that the volume of content isn’t as important as the quality of content and its relevance to the audience.

So, here are a few thoughts on what you can do when your content well appears dry:

  • Re-assess your content
  • Listen to consumers
  • Converse with people
  • Ask what people want
  • Experiment with new ideas
  • Mine your internal resources
  • Wait for useful content

Re-assess

Take advantage of the extra time you have right now to take a cold, hard look at what you’re doing online. Is it working? How do you know?

Take a look at the kind of content you’re posting. Is one kind working better than another? Is one medium reaching more of your audience than another? Could you experiment with something new? Perhaps there’s a potential source of content that you haven’t yet tapped.

Listening

Social media doesn’t have to be all about broadcasting your content (frankly, it shouldn’t). While you’re in this lull, consider placing additional focus on listening. What are people saying about you? Are they discussing your product or company? Are they complaining? Complimenting you? Inquiring? Who is saying these things?

Take the time to reassess where you are against the baseline you set at the outset (you did do that, right?)

Converse

This sits nicely alongside your listening. When people talk about you, do you respond? Perhaps now is a time to get the buy-in you need to start. Maybe it is; maybe it isn’t. Think about it.

Ask

When was the last time you asked the people who care about your company what they want from you? Have you ever done that? You may be making assumptions. Remember – building strong relationships with customers (and I don’t just mean in an online forum) means making it about them, not just you. Ask for input, and ye shall receive.

Experiment

One of the great aspects to social media (to online communication in general) is that you can experiment at little cost. Maybe it’s a new promotion; a new contest; a new feature on one of your social networking properties. That means you can test out ideas, stick with what works and discard what doesn’t. Instead of searching for that big idea to kick-start things, consider trying out a whole bunch of small ideas to see what works.

Plan

Do you have a content plan? How are you using each of the channels on which you have a presence? If you don’t have a plan for them, consider creating one now.

Mine

Just because you work in communications (or marketing, or whatever function you’re in), it doesn’t mean you can’t look elsewhere for help. Whether you’re communicating online or offline, you probably have a wealth of resources right under your nose. Ask around within your organization. Does your customer service, IT or product function have information that you can mine? You don’t know? Ask. Some of your biggest resources may be sitting there just waiting for you to find them.

Wait

You want to be heard. You want to build your community; to get results. Remember, though, that people may not want to hear you as much as you want to be heard. Don’t get me wrong – results are absolutely critical, but spamming people when you have nothing to say won’t help you to get those results.

As I mentioned earlier, look to speak when you have something to say rather than for the sake of it. If that time isn’t now, then wait.

What have you done when your company or your client struggles to find useful content? What would you add to the list?

(Image: Shutterstock)

Posted in: social media

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What’s Your Favourite Tool For Monitoring Conversations?

08.11.01

I’ve been thinking a lot about social media monitoring recently. I’m presenting on the topic at a couple of upcoming conferences, and I’m spending an increasing amount of time working in this area in my day job.

623562_whispered_secret_1As conversations become increasingly fragmented – blogs and discussion boards/forums are no longer the only source of discussion out there – they’re becoming increasingly more complex to monitor.

What’s more, there are thousands upon thousands of conversations happening, in real-time, online. The sheer quantity is almost overwhelming and it’s only going up.

So what do we do?

There are plenty of tools out there that let us monitor online conversations…

…the free ones, for example…

…and the professional ones, for example…

The search and monitoring tools out there are almost as diverse as the media we’re monitoring, and I’m seeing increasing interest from organizations in using these tools to listen.

So, I have a question for you:

What is your favourite monitoring tool (or tools)?

What have you found to be the most comprehensive/easiest to use/most logical/most cost effective?

What services might the rest of us have missed?

(If you want to hear more about social media monitoring, I’m presenting a workshop on the topic as part of a "Social Media Master Class" at The Canadian Institute’s Social Media conference in December and I’m doing a session on the topic at PodCamp Toronto 2009.)

Posted in: measurement, social media

Tags: , , , ,

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Social Media Outreach Won’t Work For Everyone

08.10.27

Here’s something to consider: engaging in “the conversation” won’t be right for every organization, at least at first.

Facebook isn’t a panacea for your company. Blogging may not change everyone’s perceptions of you. Twitter could be a light-year away from where you are now and, believe it or not, it may not be where you want to go right now.

Blasphemy!

No, I’m not pulling a complete 180 and saying companies shouldn’t engage using these new tools. I’m saying that companies (and we, as consultants) need to take a long, hard, considered look at their organization before engaging online.

How’s your culture?

Joe Thornley gives a great presentation on the steps companies should go through when engaging in social media. One of the early steps: take a hard look at your culture.

Shouting at people doesn't workIf your organizational culture is resistant to change, activities are rigidly controlled and everything goes through 1001 layers of approval, you’re going to find it very difficult to engage effectively online. If your blog posts will be written in bureaubabble by a committee, don’t bother.

Do you really want a conversation with people? I mean genuinely want to have a conversation; not just pay lip service to it. People can smell a fake from a long way away. If you do want this level of engagement then great. If you don’t, maybe you should just listen and learn.

If you try to leap into a two-way dialogue without this kind of critical analysis, you’re likely to engage in a way that irritates people, and you’ll create another way to piss people off. All you’re likely to succeed in doing is amplifying the voices of your dissatisfied customers.

As Valeria Maltoni wrote earlier this month, “Other customers and prospects now have the opportunity to evaluate whether they’d do business with you on the basis of your behavior.”

The road is bumpy

Head in the sand If you’re going to engage online, you need to work in a culture that is open to feedback from customers. What’s more, where it’s appropriate, you need to be open to making changes based on that.

This isn’t a smooth road, especially if you’ve had your head in the sand about your problems so far. You need to be willing to take your lumps when you get things wrong, along with the praise you’ll receive when you get things right.

People who write negative things about you aren’t necessarily trolls. Yes, trolls are out there, but the odds are high that the people writing about you are also regular customers who passionate enough about what you do (or the need you fill) that they feel the need to write about it.

When you start to think this way, you can start to see trends in the conversations; trends that can lead you to genuine problems in your company.

Be open to feedback, fix those problems and, in time, you’ll be ready to start reaching-out to people.

Remember: you’ve probably spent years ignoring what people are saying online. Another few months of not engaging while you learn and prepare within your organization won’t hurt.

Baby steps

If you’re not ready to engage yet, my advice would likely be (all other things being equal) to listen and learn from what your customers are saying:

  • Who is talking about you?
  • Where are they talking about you?
  • What do they like?
  • What do they hate?

As you go through this process, you can do two things:

  • Flag the problems that people talk about and advocate for their resolution. Is your customer service ineffective? Is the product unreliable or (heaven forbid) unsafe? Become an agent of change within your organization like Frank Eliason from Comcast on Twitter.
  • Begin to compile the case within your organization for engaging effectively.
    • I’m not suggesting you should aim to run amok without any oversight, but you need some level of autonomy and flexibility is necessary. Without any autonomy you’ll find yourself responding to comments, blog posts, Twitter messages etc. days after they were posted, at which point you’ll be (a) mocked and (b) too late to have any influence on the conversation.

</end rant>

Social media isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to your problems. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you it is.

If your own house isn’t in order or if you try to talk to people in the way you’re used to talking to them, you could be in for a world of hurt.

As Hugh MacLeod tactfully put it:

If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they'd punch you in the face.

However, if you use social media tools thoughtfully, appropriately and in the right situations, they can be effective.

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Posted in: social media, strategy

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Are Twitter Conversations Dying?

08.09.04

Twitter Over the last month or two I’ve noticed a sharp decline in the amount of conversation occurring on Twitter.

People are still using the service, for sure (witness the number of tweets about McCain’s “ground noise and static” comment, in reference to protesters at the Republican Convention, within seconds of the comment for proof). However, I’ve noticed that the number of replies I’m getting to messages has sharply declined recently.

Twitter has done well for itself recently. While its latest newsletter to members was distinctly underwhelming (where’s the news on IM or tracking – you know, the features that made Twitter useful to begin with?) it did make the point that over the last two months the service’s uptime has been around 99.9% – a big difference from the dismal levels a few months ago.

I’m wondering, though: is this partly due to people moving away from the service?

A couple of months ago, I would get 5-15 replies to any given question that I posed to my Twitter connections. Since that time I’ve added a couple of hundred “followers,” (currently sitting around 1,175) but the number of replies I’m getting to each question has fallen dramatically, my new followers have slowed to a trickle and many of them are wannabe spammers.

I still get a lot of value from Twitter and it continues to prove its value to me daily. However, this trend (if it is one) can’t be a good sign. The conversation is often what attracts people to Twitter to begin with, and it’s where I derive most of my value from the service.

Assuming I’m not a unique case here and that this is a real trend, this makes me wonder if Twitter’s shine is fading. Is their failure to replace services that they stated were their “top priority” three months ago finally hurting them? Are people actually moving to services like identi.ca, or even FriendFeed?

Have you experienced a similar pattern with Twitter? What’s your take on this?

Posted in: Twitter

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