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Syv harde fakta om sosiale medier for merkevarer

Dette er en artikkel som jeg leste på Fresh Networks, alltid en kilde til inspirasjon og tanke:

A lot of people are excited about social media and think it could have a hugely positive impact on their brand, their marketing and communications, the insight they get, the way in which they deal with customer service and many other benefits it can bring to an organisation and to the way it interacts with and engages customers. They are right to be excited, the opportunities are great but brands should not hide from the fact that getting an engaging social media presence takes proper thought, some effort and may take time to embed.

When you are getting started in social media it is important to think carefully about what you as a business are looking to achieve and drive your activities from this, from a business-led social media strategy. Jumping straight to tools and hoping they will work for you often causes problems. Facebook is not always the answer and what works for one brand will not necessarily work for another brand. You need to think about what you want to achieve and choose tools that will help you to achieve this.

A second consideration should be what is possible with different tools and how you can use them in a way that truly benefits you. There is a lot said about social media and there can be a tendency to put up a Facebook Page to ‘do social media’ (or worse ‘to drive traffic and increase sales’). Working with any social media tool, just as with any marketing or communications tool needs proper thought. And with social media people often think you can put things up and wait for consumers to start ‘engaging’ with you. This almost always won’t happen. It is one of the myths of social media. You need to work hard to get engagement going, and have thought carefully first about what you are doing and why.

This great presentation from Bart De Waele of Belgium agency Netlash highlights some of these myths, or as he says the seven “harsh realities” of social media. Its is a great summary of some of the misconceptions people have of social media and some of the education and training that is often needed in a brand when they start thinking about why they should be engaging online and which tools to use. These seven myths are timely for everybody to consider:

1.Nobody reads your blog unless the content is valuable and relevant, you have conversations and you build loyalty over time
2.Your Twitterstream is boring unless you make it interesting with content that is relevant to your target audience and have the right mix of personality and conversation
3.Your Facebook Fan Page will be empty unless you have valuable content, interaction and conversation there
4.Your new social networking site will not be used unless you have valuable and relevant content, give people a reason to engage and build audience diligently with good community management
5.Your great idea will not go viral unless your content is engaging and valuable and people really want to engage with you
6.Users will not generate content unless you make it easy, ensure there is something in it for users who are generating the content and facilitate this with good community management
7.Your employees will not help unless you enthuse, train, encourage and support them
These are harsh realities and the myths that often exist about social media and how it can benefit brands and organisations. Overall they show that tools and technology are not the most important thing when any brand uses social media. Its your content and the people who manage and grow your activity who count. Social media is a social activity and it is having a good and thought-through strategy, and the people to launch and build your engagement online that will make a real difference.

7 harsh realities in Social Media

Online communities in the telecom industry

There are not as many examples of good online communities for the telecoms industry. Part of the reason for this is that the nature of the industry is one that facilitates communication – they don’t provide content but allow people to communicate over their networks or using their products. Therefore many example of their use of social media are actually of them allowing people to communicate in social networks and on other sites. This means that you miss out on the benefits that online communities bring and is a shame – as the great examples below show the ways in which they can really support brands in the telecoms industry.

Telstra’s nowwearetalking

Telstra’s nowwearetalking has attracted some criticism in Australia as being too evidently a PR vehicle, but it is a good example of how a telecoms firm can build and run an online community and begin to have a different dialogue with shareholders and others with an interest in the firm.

The online community was originally built to provide a new dialogue with shareholders at Telstra, many large firms struggle with shareholder engagement and nowwearetalking was a way of overcoming this. The site also aims to increase the level of public debate across Australia on the future of telecommunications. Telstra want to engage and interact with their shareholders and also to discuss and debate bigger issues in the industry. For both of these an online community is a good solution.

Whether nowwearetalking has achieved these aims is not clear, but what is clear is that the online community is a great example of how to combine activity on the community and also on other sites – a hub-and-spoke model. Alongside the blogs and discussions on the site, there are videos on YouTube and podcasts to download. Telstra are engaging both on their own community and also distributing content across other social media domains. This can be a very successful strategy – you engage with people where they are and also provide a place for them to come to that you manage. A picture

Sprint’s Buzz About Wireless

Support forums can be a great way to build a community, and there are a number of great examples of these in the telecoms industry. Sprint’s Buzz About Wireless is a particularly good example. The site is designed for people to share experiences and ideas with each other, rate and review services and also to ask and answer questions in the forums. This is predominantly a support forum, but it provides a number of other ways for people to interact which both creates a fuller experience for members but also allows people to engage in the way appropriate to them at any given time. Sometimes you will want to ask a question or answers ones that have already been raised; other times you might just want to look at and rate ideas.

What makes Buzz About Wireless really work, however, is the forum area. Support and problem solving is an important component of customer service in the telecoms sector and one that many firms spend large amounts of time and resources on. What Sprint have done is to build an online community that takes away some of these time and resources. Rather than Sprint answering questions and solving problems, they provide a space where consumers can answer each other’s questions and solve each other’s problems.
Another picture...
The power of this should not be overlooked. Even a community of modest size could have a real impact if its members are motivated to respond to and answer problems. A community the size of Buzz About Wireless must have a large impact indeed. What Sprint need to do, and what they do do, is to provide different ways for people to engage but also to encourage people to support each other and answer questions. In a support forum it can be advantageous to create different user types to both reward people who answer a lot of questions, and also to highlight the potential weight and importance of any answers they give. A community like this needs a lot of work to get the planning and strategy right, and the success of Buzz About Wireless suggests that Sprint did just this.

T-Mobile’s Sidekick Wiki Community

Where online communities can support telecoms providers is to allow people to extend and enhance the experience they have of using their service. For mobile providers this can be a case of providing people with a place to discuss their handsets to to share advice and tips about using them, or content created with them. This is what T-Mobile did with their Sidekick Wiki.

The Sidekick Wiki site has been running since 2006, and is an online community where Sidekick owners can exchange ideas about using and customising the handset, solve each other’s problems, share tips on how to make the most of the equipment. The site is a Wiki and over the last three years has grown to include a vast quantity of content. All created by users, with the only noticeable presence from T-Mobile in the forums where they help to answer questions, and on the homepage and in the news sections where they provide an office T-Mobile presence. The rest of the site is what a Wiki is at its best – a customer-curated experience of ideas and experiences.

This online community shows how telecoms companies can add real value to their equipment and products, and also how they can extend the life of and interaction with them. Many people will move from one mobile handset (for example) to another quite quickly. This will be either because they want the new features, want to keep up with the latest trend or, in many cases, because they feel they have got all they can out of their existing handset. Sites like the Sidekick Wiki are designed to constantly show how you can get more from your handset, making you retain it for longer and so increasing customer loyalty and decreasing switching.

Two-thirds uses social media

According to Market Tools two thirds of the adult population in the USA says that they use social media (blogs, online communities and social networks).
Almost 20 percent sys the they use them on a daily basis and another 20 percent uses it at least once a week.
One third says they never uses it. But the bottom line, it increases, 42 percent says they use these kind of sites more frequently than six months ago.
The graph looks like this:
Women uses it in a larger amount than men, 70 percent women vs. 65 percent men. 22 percent women visits blogs and other social media, while men are 16 percent.