Over a century later it’s hard to imagine a world more obsessed with checking how many likes, retweets or comments our latest social media status update has notched up. And now businesses are just as invested in their social media profiles as their individuals.

While the consumerisation of IT (a PC in every home you say Mr Gates?) has transformed the ability of consumers to communicate, social media has transformed how we communicate and the visibility of that communication.

But social media isn’t a whim for brands. The vast, living data that social media generates has become a crucial way to take a brand’s temperature. And, more importantly, a way to diagnose ills and administer the best medicine.

In a world where social media has become the new frontier for customer service and public relations, social listening is a must-have ingredient in a successful business model. And it’s not just customer service, but product feedback and brand engagement which are contributing to disruption in the brand/customer relationship.

78% of marketers plan to make greater use of social media data in 2013 according to an Infogroup survey of Forrester Research ebusiness conferences. And 53% plan on making greater use of real-time data in their campaigns. The same survey found that 68% of marketers plan to increase data spending in 2013 while 56% plan on hiring new employees for data positions.

What is social listening
So what is social listening exactly? In social media customers are sharing their thoughts publicly to an audience without invitation – and often without the brand being present at all.

Most often this audience is an intimate one; friends, colleagues and communities with shared interests. People who trust each other. Listening to these conversations and picking up on the questions, issues, advocacy and intent about your brand is invaluable. You can be prepared, you can act on information. Find issues as they happen, not when you see them on the news.

Take control of your messaging
You can also reward and encourage fans, help them to recruit new enthusiasts. Clarify uncertainty, give people your message and own that message so you’re not reacting to a third party. And identify customers who want to buy or want to quit so you’re not missing opportunities to grow or retain business.

It’s this unprompted, unstructured and highly candid sentiment which can provide the most revealing insights for brands. Brands still use customer surveys, focus groups, call centre conversations and formal letters to find out how customers feel about them.

But is this a canned response with all the pressures and prejudices of a controlled environment? Traditional research companies would disagree, but candour is key, and there’s nothing like a social setting in the customer’s channel of choice to encourage free and frank exchange.

I’m a bit of a geek at heart. So let me give you a geek example – Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – and don’t worry, you don’t need to know the finer points of quantum mechanics.

How do we measure anything with precision?
The Uncertainty Principle proposes that in an attempt to measure something we can never be truly precise because the act of measurement will change the object of our study. OK, this example relates to pointing an electron microscope at atoms and the power of the microscope disturbing the atoms but it’s relevant for social media too. Can you get a genuinely accurate reading from your customers when you whisk them away to a location, reward them, and bombard them with questions about your brand and how it makes them feel?

You can achieve accuracy with social channels. They produce a more authentic voice. As more businesses and consumers adopt social channels we’ll start to see how much pivoting on crowd-sourced feedback might change the nature of customer feedback. When consumers feel more empowered through social channels expectations and fulfilment need to keep up.

Social media is still going through a process of normalisation. As social listening becomes more powerful, like the metaphorical electron microscope, will those atoms be disrupted under the glare of measurement? Whatever happens, we will need to get smarter about listening and measuring.

Trends in the marketplace
There’s now a massive market for social monitoring tools, and the time is ripe for systems integration. Just as leading social platforms like Twitter and Facebook will acquire companies and fold them into their products there’s scope for combining technologies in social media tools.

Just looking at the offering that Adobe Social have put together and what Salesforce has done with its marketing cloud this trend will increase. That trend shows a pattern of consolidation which supports a distribution model favouring a small group of super vendors. Not unlike the powerhouses of the Hollywood studio system.

Adobe’s acquisition of Efficient Frontier (formerly Context Optional) and Omniture brings together the capability to build, manage, monitor and measure brand presence across the social web.
Salesforce has Radian6 and Buddy Media to unify social listening, engagement, advertising and measurement. Their pre-emptive purchase of the social.com URL for $2.6M shows the kind of commitment going into social advertising campaign management products.

So what’s next?
For me the next big leap forward will be in visually engaging interfaces that impart breadth of meaning and behavioural analysis beyond the bar charts and line graphs of yesterday. Needless to say they will be interactive, real-time, customisable and device agnostic. That complexity made convenient, powered by Data Science as a Service is one to watch for 2013.

Data will be the oil that fuels customer services, PR, marketing, product development, and a host of other commercial activity. But all this will depend on consumers continuing to speak out about the brands they care about and the service they receive, whether good, bad or indifferent – you need to make sure that people are talking about you.  After all, the worst punishment a customer can give to a brand is to say absolutely nothing.

According to a report on Mashable, a massive 80% of companies plan to use social media for customer service. But, as this recent interchange between the @Cineworld representative and a disgruntled customer revealed, if you don’t get it right, it’s a very public problem.

Maybe it was because it was late at night, maybe the @Cineworld incumbent had been on the end of just one too many pokes, but when the agent was accused of deleting tweets, enough was enough.

What followed was a lengthy skirmish between the two, during which @Cineworld revealed both a sense of humour and fallibility.  I don’t think the unhappy customer got the resolution he was seeking, but @Cineworld certainly gained a few fans, and raised the question of what is and is not appropriate when dealing with difficult customers.

Social customer service matters

Social customer service is increasingly under the spotlight, and acknowledged as a very important part of the relationship between brands and their consumers. More and more consumers – especially younger ones – are becoming frustrated with call centres, and with unanswered emails. Complaining via social media offers the chance to vent spleen in the hope that publicly calling out the brand will achieve swift resolution in their favour: as an added bonus, frustrated customers may get others on their side as well.

But it’s not a one-way street. The brand stands to benefit too. As e.Marketer.com puts it, the top reasons brands are using social media as a customer service medium are to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, to reduce customer support costs and to drive customer advocacy. Being seen to speedily resolve a problem, to deal sympathetically with consumers and acknowledge fault where it has occurred can result in not only a ‘complainant-turned-brand advocate’, but in heightened sentiment for the brand overall.

The pressures of social care

There’s an increasing amount of pressure on the channels though (as I’m sure @Cineworld will attest). Latest surveys reveal higher than ever levels of expectation – customers expect responses at least within the day on Facebook, and give it just 30 minutes on Twitter. To work properly, social customer service needs to be swift, channel-appropriate and – importantly – consistent: remember that consumers will be able to see how other people’s complaints are treated.

Brands are answering more questions, more quickly

Social Bakers has just released Q1 2013 of its Socially Devoted series, which measured the performance of response to questions posted on Facebook and Twitter pages. Its metrics attest to both the increase in size of social care and the improvement in brand responses: during Q1 2013, the volume of questions asked by fans increased by 30%. Also in this quarter, brands managed to answer almost 50% more questions than in Q4 2012. Since June 2012, the average industry response rate has increased from 30% to 60% in Q1 2013.

How are the best brands doing social customer care?

According to a 2012 study of ‘customer care sentiment’ for 40 top brands by Brandwatch, retail brands are by far the most likely to be well received.

In our next post, we will choose some of SocialBakers’ top performing retail brands in the UK and US and examine a recent crop of consumer interaction to see what they are doing right – and, in some cases, wrong.

For more about the impact that social media is making on customer care, download our free white paper A guide to social media and customer service.

Contact us if you’d like to talk about social media consultancy,  social media crisis management, community management or moderation services.

We kicked off with the engaging Rory Sutherland (Executive Creative Director for Ogilvy) who explained why he felt the next revolution would be psychological rather than technological. He felt that companies make decisions at board level without taking psychological behaviour into consideration. Marketers could step into the breach by providing the behavioural knowledge to validate decisions that are based on spreadsheets.

We have to fight back against ROI and accountability that isn’t based on real human behaviour.

- Rory Sutherland, Executive Creative Director, Ogilvy

He went on to add that the theory of purchases being made objectively, unaffected by outside influences, free of complex emotions and in complete trust, is broken. Psychometrics show us that a short queue for an airline desk is attractive, but a long one outside a nightclub is also attractive. The context is key.

Rory felt the sweet spot could be found within the overlap of technology, economics and psychology. He used a great expression – “the narcissism of small differences” – to describe how people might want a particular product, but felt that they were expressing their individuality through choosing one of many variants.

A panel on personalisation of customer engagement followed. We were given some strategy hints, such as spotting the dumbest “rational” assumption made by competitors and working against it by daring to be trivial.

Customisation was defined as explicit, while personalisation is implicit. While Web 2.0 brought in personalisation via search algorithms, Web 3.0 will push for personalisation without any effort or action required by the user.

Co-creation is very relevant for the BBC – either for TV storylines, or crowdsourcing merchandise design preferences before production

- Vincent Sider, VP Social, BBC Worldwide

There was a short debate on how much consumers are willing to be constantly monitored, which explored the view that serving up personalised content by default appears stalkerish. It was agreed that it is important to be transparent, selective and contextual.

What was clear is that you can’t rely on past behaviour as an indicator of future behaviour. Circumstances and interests change – and displaying what similar people do is one way around this. As people interact with brands across four screens, six social channels, with multiple media, the challenge for marketers is to ensure they deliver a consistent experience.

We broke off into three streams; I attended Prelini Udayan-Chiechi’s (Director EMEA Marketing, Lithium) talk, focused on owning the social experience. She argued that customers have changed, as they are now connected, empowered, impatient, and untrusting of corporate advertising. They spend on average 22 hours a week online, five of which are on social media, and this has a huge effect on their “real life”. People take to social media to express opinions which are now affecting government and corporate decisions.

Prelini shared that 95% of CEOs say their top priority is getting closer to customers, and feel that 52% of online and offline sales will be influenced by online comments. However, consumers’ priorities differ – they trust online personal reviews, followed by search engines and brand websites. Only 15% rely on social media for recommendations.

This means an onsite community provides full control of content and increased reach, while making a brand easier to find and increasing trust.

Be daring, turn off your support community for a few days to prove the cost benefits.

- Prelini Udayan-Chiech, Director Marketing, Lithium

She added that community power members spend up to 10 times more than non-members and that to be successful, a company must link social agents to their onsite community. Social channels should then be used to direct queries to the community. Social lives in its own channel within a company, not with marketing or customer service.

The value of community can be measured by call deflection, agent efficiency, knowledge creation, issues identification, conversion and spend.

The social journey roadmap can be summed up in 5 steps:

1. Listen
2. Engage
3. Guide conversation
4. Prove value
5. Transform organisation.

Prelini urged us to follow our head, not the herd. It’s important to own your data, and it shouldn’t be outsourced to social sites. She also attacked the use of ‘fluffy metrics’, instead focusing on the dollar values.

The first day ended with a powerful keynote speech by Eric Edge (Head of Marketing Communications, Facebook), who explained  key shifts in communication: disruption to connection, search to discovery and heavyweight to lightweight.

Likes are NOT a valuable metric.

- Eric Edge, Head of Marketing Comms, Facebook

His principles for marketing success are to aim to:

1. Be authentic
2. Be useful
3. Be entertaining
4. Be timely & relevant
5. Listen

To show how easy and low-cost it could be to create great Facebook branded page content, he gave the example of Pimm’s, which produces photos with just a smartphone and filters.

iStrategy, The Hague, day two

The second day started off with the following metric: financial services brand ING reduced its direct marketing costs by 35% by moving to a system of engagement and tripled its response rate in the process.

One of the highlights of the conference was Lindsay Wiles’ (Strategic Sales Director, The Weather Channel) talk on why weather changes should be proactively monitored and taken into account when defining a marketing strategy.

Strange as though this may first sound, weather ticks all the marketing boxes in terms of attributes: it is real-time, it is local, it inherently affects social lives, and people check it on their mobile. It also drives customer behaviour.

The future of the CMO/CIO relationship will be to harness data to paint a predictive picture of each individual customer on massive scale.

- Surjit Chana, CMO Europe, IBM

Estee Lauder took advantage of the sunshine by promoting its night cream by pushing UV levels to customer phones. This is a great example of a brand tweaking its digital campaigns based on the weather forecast. Weather also has an effect on location-based purchasing – for example, in New York the ideal purchasing conditions are above average temperatures and clear skies, while in Seattle, only clear skies are needed to drive sales.

Probably the most popular session was Tony Wang (GM UK, Twitter), during which he presented some key stats and learnings from the micro-blogging platform. Twitter currently receives over a billion tweets in less than three days; for reference, it took three years to get to that number from Twitter’s launch.

Tony felt that once you enable the opportunity to create easy interactions, great things happen. There were  15,358 tweets per second for the Euro 2012 soccer final, and 8868 tweets per second during MTV’s VMAs. Compare this with just 400-odd tweets per second for Michael Jackson’s death back in 2009.

How Twitter boosts engagement for brands

Twitter gives brands an opportunity to get their message out quickly in a straightforward way – for example, NASCAR has integrated twitter with in-car livestreams for greater audience engagement. Deepening integration extends the connected story.

Mercedes asked people to tweet to decide the ending to an advert shown in a commercial break. They created two ads, one with a call to action, one without. The one with the call to action increased brand metrics by 17-44%.

You’re heard on Twitter, not because you’re loud, but because you’re good.

- Tony Wang, GM UK, Twitter

Deloitte just published some research on the effect of positive twitter mentions on sales – the consultancy firm found that mentions are more effective than above-the-line communications.

Tony also shared how to attain the best level of mentions on Twitter: This is done by combining an ad with a dedicated hashtag, a promoted tweet and deep integration.

Marc Mathieu (Senior VP of Marketing, Unilever) felt that marketers have put a barrier between brands and people – and wondered whether, by referring to them as targets, we were planning on shooting them! He summed up what he called the “forces of magic” in four words:

1. Empathy
2. Purpose
3. Virality
4. Execution

He finished by stating that a brand that can embrace human beings and provide them with a positive and uplifting experience, can really make a difference to the world.

If a customer’s opinion is that valuable to a brand, then payment by intrinsic participation is not enough.

Last but definitely not least

After two days of super-fast sessions, and heated debates, I should have been jaded, but far from it. And I don’t think I’d be alone in saying that the star of iStrategy at the Hague was the energetic closing speaker – Cindy Gallop (Founder, IfWeRanTheWorld)

Cindy blew us all away with her conviction, and kicked off by introducing the concept of collaborative competition. She pointed out that  copying each other opens up space for an external innovator to step in and take control of the industry, which means most players lose out.

According to Cindy, people say they hate advertising, but the most viral and best-loved videos have been ads. However, advertising user experience currently promotes the idea that people need to be cajoled, tricked, or bullied into watching. She stated that you cannot create new world order advertising from an old world order place. If you plug innovation into old processes, the results will suffer.

She then started redefining the ideal working environment, arguing that if more agencies spent as much time designing staff experience as they do on client experiences, everyone would be happier.

Most brands only operate at level of co-creation. Brands and consumers much works towards co-action.

- Cindy Gallop, Founder, IfWeRanTheWorld

Cindy continued with the concept that the new marketing reality is transparency. We should share to build trust, mutual respect and intimacy in a two-way fashion. Every brand claims to be consumer-centric, but who really delivers what the customer wants, when they want it, where they want it?

The future business will be summed up in this equation: Shared values + shared action = shared social and financial profits.

A great one-line marketing gem, to sum up two days of solid insights – roll on iStrategy, London.

Thanks to John Whitehurst and the iStrategy team.

I was fortunate to be part of a Google hangout discussing the FTC updates to COPPA with the following child internet safety professionals: Anne Collier (co-director of ConnectSafely.org and Editor of NetFamilyNews.org), Izzy Neis (Director of Digital Engagement & Strategy at Metaverse Mod Squad), and Joi Podgorny (Director of Community Engagement for Smart Bomb Interactive).

We each have our own unique experiences working within the child and family safety space, so it was an enlightening, effective – and occasionally – passionate conversation. See the highlights of our discussion below and let us know whether you agree,  disagree, or have other questions to add to the debate.

Methods of gaining parental consent

In the FTC’s blog: “FTC’s revised COPPA Rule: Five need-to-know changes for your business”, number three on the list are the new ways that companies which market to children can get parental consent:

“In addition to the already-approved methods, amendments to the Rule offer more ways businesses can get parents’ OK: electronic scans of signed parental consent forms, videoconferencing, use of government-issued ID, and alternative payment systems (assuming they meet the same stringent criteria as credit cards).

“The sliding scale mechanism of parental consent — often called “email plus” — remains an acceptable method for operators collecting personal info just for internal use.  To encourage innovation in this area, the new Rule establishes a voluntary 120-day notice and comment process for businesses to get FTC approval for other methods.  In addition, operators that participate in an FTC-approved safe harbor program can use a method allowed under that program.”

Email plus

“Email plus” refers to the registration system on most child-directed products, so when a child enters an age of under 13, the “parents’ email address” is requested, before the child is permitted to take full advantage of the product. Theoretically, parents will receive an email that shares basic information about the product, asking the parent to approve their child’s account and allow him or her to fully explore the game.

Club Penguin registration

It’s useful that this method of consent is still on the books – however, there are further requirements to using this form of consent: to properly use the email plus method, you must take an additional confirming step after receiving the parent’s message (this is the “plus” factor). The confirming step may be:

• Requesting in your initial message to the parent that the parent include a phone or fax number or mailing address in the reply message, so that you can follow up with a confirmation phone call, fax or letter to the parent; or
• After a reasonable time delay, sending another message via the parent’s online contact information to confirm consent. In this confirmatory message, you should include all the original information contained in the direct notice, inform the parent that he or she can revoke the consent, and inform the parent how to do so.

So, if a mobile app company, or the phone’s operating system, whichever houses this data must collect parental approval before the download of say, a mobile game app like Angry Birds™, how are companies supposed to quickly and easily obtain consent? Where and when?

The FTC says that “ideally, collection of parental consent will occur before the download can happen.” But how is this possible?

No cellphone consent

The FTC is to consider new ways of collecting parental consent, but the realities of this prompt new questions. So far, the FTC won’t allow consent via the parent’s cellphone number, which as Izzy Neis pointed out, DOES in fact directly connect to an adult, via a credit card number and billing address.

If the point is to give parents more control of what their children are exposed to and who has access to their information, wouldn’t the FTC want to do their best to get as close to genuine parental information – and therefore, permission – as is possible?

What is ‘personal information’ under COPPA?

The Final Rule includes this modified definition as to what is considered “personal information” by the FTC:

“The definition of personal information now includes … photos, videos, and audio files that contain a child’s image or voice.”

(Although there is  a notable exception: COPPA’s parental notice and consent requirements don’t kick in if the identifier is used solely to support the internal operations of the site or service, “such as contextual advertising, frequency capping, legal compliance, site analysis, and network communications”.)

Images of minors under 13

Any image of a child under 13 MUST be approved by that child’s parent before it can go on public view.  However, this applies only to brands and products that either a) cater to the under 13 demographic, or b) are aware that a certain percentage of their product has an audience with the under 13s.

What this means is that if your brand’s site, product or app is planning to allow minors to upload pictures or videos of themselves, the parent must first give permission. It also means that any pictures that include pictures of other people’s children who are under 13 (i.e. team photos, birthday party group shots) are not compliant unless every single parent approves and allows the picture to be displayed.

Sites aimed at over 13s have no such restrictions.

Any sites claiming to market to a demographic of over 13s do not have to comply and therefore, for example, can still upload pictures of a child’s birthday party to sites such as Instagram or Facebook with all attendees pictured, even if the parents are not aware that their child’s image is being uploaded .

Joi Podgorny asked the poignant question: “Whether this amendment to the law truly helps make a child safe?”  None of us had an answer. And maybe there is no answer at this stage.

The threat to children’s online content

Image courtesy of Flickr/paz.ca

Those of us who work in the field of child safety chose this path because we are passionate about keeping kids as safe as possible – but we also want to create something that young people can enjoy, that will educate them and stretch their imagination while allowing them to be rewarded for their merits.

It is important to take in to consideration how the COPPA Rule will affect community members as well as the management of the community’s safety. At times it seems as if the Rule is not about the safety or privacy of the child but more about enforcing the laws.

Joi Podgorny again: “Who are these parents that have the time [or inclination!] to  jump through these hoops to get their kids to play a game or submit a picture?”

The danger of underground sites

Are there alternatives to COPPA?

It feels like we are back at another COPPA crossroads. So what’s next?

Ratings system

What about the idea of the “ESRB” stamp but for online? [That's the Pegi (Pan-European Game Information) system over the other side of the pond]. Something that is regulated and mandated across any product, website, app or game that is marketed to the under 13s. Something that a parent can take one look at, recognise what it means, and take necessary actions according to their own household rules?

Education

Izzy Neis and I both like the idea of creating a regulated program that would take place between youth, parents and a government body such as the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) in the US. For example, a socially responsible program that could be introduced to schools and mandated across all places of education, from kindergarten through to the 12th grade.

When you get down to it, the internet is just a big, new environment to explore and understand.  Creating, learning and then following social norms is not a new concept after all – for example: we won’t allow anyone to drive a car without first going through Driver’s Education. Navigating online should be treated the same way: in a responsible manner, understanding both appropriate online activity as well as potential consequences.

Compliance and circumvention of COPPA

As for me, I will be watching how companies figure out how to comply with the new mandates. It is timely to note that on 6th May the FTC publicly rejected a request for an extension to comply with the Rule. The final date to begin compliance is 1st July, 2013.

And in the meantime? People will continue to find ways to circumvent a safety system. Businesses will spend endless time, energy and money reinventing their products, and child safety advocates like Anne, Joi, Izzy and myself will continue to support the search for viable, marketable solutions.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr/lancesh

So why is there so much spam and trolling?

It all began with a spam business model…

Spam Statistics for 2012. Source: spamcop.net

 

With the implementation of stricter laws, anti-spam software and educated email users (who reply and forward using the BCC option for example), this creative business model started to decay. Even after the advent of robot-spammers and other automated forms of spam, this was soon fought by new anti-spam tools and programs (which also created new business models for many anti-virus and anti-spam software developers).

 

The social media graph

A few years ago, some people even thought that spam was coming to an end… until Facebook started a new communication revolution. After MySpace and other similar initiatives created a social media need among the internet population, Facebook managed to hook almost everyone into this new form of social gathering.

With slight variations, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Google+ soon followed the trend and became social media behemoths. And now, while few people are still concerned by email spam, a fear of social media spam is slowly growing to become the ‘new internet problem ’.

 

The ease of sharing a post or re-tweeting creates the spam effect over and over again. And very likely, the same reasons behind email spam are also behind social media spam.

Facebook social graph

 

“This journey is one per cent done, which means we realized there’s an enormous opportunity to do more in this space.” – Soren Lassen, Manager of the search infrastructure team at Facebook

Marketing companies are no longer interested in a simple email address to target random messages to unknown recipients. With an evolved internet, social media created a new ‘marketing paradise’.

Even without knowing someone’s identity, we are now privy to key statistics such as age, gender, geographic location, purchasing habits, political stands, social concerns and, above all, a social graph made by a network of common interests and profiles … exactly what any marketer will pay big money for.

So how far will you go to obtain this information? Reputation and ethics aside, almost any company would be interested in obtaining vital data to push their businesses forward. Marketing experts and social media experts are now ready to harvest this vast amount of valuable data, turn it into information and, ideally, create the ultimate product: market knowledge and consumer insight that is targeted to its audience – and therefore welcome.

 

And the trolls?

Trolls present an interesting psychological profile. While they’re generally referred to as ‘internet sociopaths’ and visualised as bitter individuals that spend their time bashing everyone and every product, company, and institution, interestingly, some of them have hundreds, thousands, and even millions of followers.

How do they earn that amount of attention just from spreading negativity? Why do people read their posts and eagerly await their next move? Are the followers as sick as the trolls they follow?

While I’m not a psychology expert, schadenfreude may explain the inner satisfaction of reading a negative comment that we lacked the courage to make ourselves. Yellow press, gossip magazines, and even a few politicians have succeeded by doing exactly that. If there is a demand, there is also a supply.

 

And what about the connection between trolls, spam and marketing?

Easy. User generated content (UGC), even when negative, generates attention. Attention generates engagement. Engagement generates social followers … exactly what spammers  – and some marketers are looking for. There is clear evidence and plenty of examples of paid trolls: users on a payroll whose only objective is to generate discussion and engagement, usually taking the other side of the general flow of conversation. Even bad press is good press and some trolls are good business.

Business ethics and marketing

We recognise the need of companies to understand a market and their honest objective to improve it to increase shareholders’ value. Marketing experts are paid to research these markets and obtain information to make sound business decisions. The grey area is how far they will go to obtain this data before their competition does?

There are undoubtedly a minority of marketing and social media professionals who bluntly offer this to their employers or customers: “Don’t ask how I will deliver, just be happy that I do”. No need to know, so no business ethics or even legal issues interfere.

But for most of us, as professionals, individuals and consumers, the buck stops there. So, the next time you’re annoyed by a shared post, unwanted message or a disgusting troll, take time to think about who may benefit from their activity. And please, help stop the chain!

 

By César Struve, moderator at eModeration. This post was originally posted on his blog.

Feature image: tburgy

Facebook social graph image: rafiqphillips

Facebook journalism

The keynote speaker was Vadim Lavrusik, Journalism Programme Manager for Facebook. He can also claim to have a foot in both camps as he’s a former journalist at the New York Times as well as a former Community Manager at Mashable. In typical Facebook fashion, his presentation kicked off with an explanation of how the newsfeed works – something we community managers are frequently asked by our clients. While this doesn’t explain how the algorithm actually works, these are the five things that Facebook takes into account when showing content in anyone’s newsfeed:

1. Frequency of engagement with page
2. Engagement with specific post
3. Interaction with types of content
4. Negative feedback to content
5. Freshness of post

This means no one newsfeed is the same – yours will always differ from your friend’s. So while he couldn’t guarantee that your content will make it into your target audience’s newsfeed, he shared some tips that work for journalists as well as community managers and brands.

• Have a conversational tone and personal voice
• Use targeting controls to reach the right audience and avoid inundating all your fans
• Thumbnails should be 600 x 600 pixels and compelling pictures – links with appealing thumbnails enjoy 20 per cent better engagement
• Highlight conversations on air – create conversations on Facebook and say what happened on air

While this last tip was aimed at broadcasting organisations, there is nothing to stop brands from including stats and quotes from Facebook in their marketing materials, websites and presentations.

Lavrusik even used the buzz word ‘crowdsourcing’ to claim that Facebook was the ideal tool for journalists to take a snapshot of sentiment towards an event. The presentation also highlighted how Facebook’s new replies feature, introduced last month, would make live Q+A much easier and simpler on the platform.

As community managers we’ve shied away from this, but the functionality allows brands to really talk one-on-one with users, as well as getting the community involved. You can watch Lavrusik’s complete presentation here.

Journalism and Community Management

One interesting session was entitled Curation: The journalist as manager. This could have been re-titled The journalist as a community manager. Today’s journalist, as well as researching the hard facts of their story, now has to take opinions and stories from social media platforms to incorporate  into their own news stories.

The Huffington Post maintains it is the only news organisation that links to other news websites. If it sees a story has already been written by its competitor, then it links to it.  Why bother rehashing the story when your readers have already seen it? Funny how community managers have been doing this for years.We recognise there is value in good quality content as long as the source is authoritative.

Curation, editing and journalism: the same thing?

Michael Rundle, Technology Editor of The Huffington Post UK, said at the session: “Curation is another name for editing which is another word for journalism – bringing together lots of info from one place.”  This is exactly what a good community manager does as well. By allowing your community to share and discuss topics that are relevant to them, we are acting as curators. That is precisely why we have community guidelines to help us moderate and manage the members, as well as encourage good community behaviour.

Anticipating social media backlash

Speaking of behaviour, it was suggested at the conference that some journalists have changed the angle of the story or toned down their story because of the backlash they expected to receive on social media or comments on their story. In my day, the only time we faced criticism was when someone took the trouble to ring the editor to complain and that was rare. Now we have empowered readers, members, users, communities and the general public to share their views, and they are absolutely entitled to do so. The key is to being able to moderate and manage these comments, and how you deal with them. Yes, it’s another task on the list, but it extends the shelf-life of a good news story, and journalists need to prepare for this.

Social media training

So what support and training are journalists given on social media? Some news organisations have community or social media teams sitting alongside their journalists to help manage the backlash as well as engage with readers, and this is a great way forward. But is the industry doing enough to share best practices around community building, how to deal with irate readers, interaction with members and keeping the community in order?

News organisations are encouraging reporters to join communities to help with their reporting. And if they can’t find a suitable community they should build their own. While community management is not a dark art, it is important that journalists – and anyone else for that matter – knows the basic principles behind good community management or they are in danger of having these communities backfire on them.

A trusted community is a very useful resource for journalists, and can provide valuable information and insight for use in their stories, but in return their members will want to feel rewarded and acknowledged, not just an unpaid anonymous source.

It looks as though reporters of the future will have to wear two hats  – community and journalism – but I think the pairing works very well.

For more on news:rewired’s Digital Journalism conference on April 19th, here’s the Storify round up of the event.

Image courtesy of Flickr: NS Newsflash

CEO Tamara Littleton delivered a six-minute iPitch to the iStrategy judges and crowd on eModeration’s ground-breaking ‘Social Media Simulation’ training tool.

Here’s the story!

Facebook Replies: a summary

Previously, page owners or users were not able to reply directly to any single comment on Facebook, and new messages just went to the bottom of a chain of correspondence.  This made it hard for readers to follow and did nothing for the brands’ engagement with their customers. With Facebook Replies enabled, brands and Facebook users will have the ability to reply directly to comments left on page content and start conversation threads,  making it easier for community managers to interact directly with individual readers and keep relevant conversations connected. It will also allow fans to talk to each other and the brand on a one-to-one basis, rather than one-to-many.

Facebook has also thrown something extra into the mix by showing the most active conversations at the top and any comments marked as spam are moved to the bottom (although users won’t see the posts marked as spam). What is really important for moderators  and community managers to note is that this means that not all content will be appear in chronological order.

How the Replies ranking system works:

For example, let’s look at this conversation on a brand page:

You can see from the example above that the time stamps are in no particular order. But if you look at the top two comments they have risen to the top because they have been ‘liked’, automatically jumping to the front of the queue.

How threaded replies work

So now if you reply as the brand owner, the comment will appear directly underneath the user’s comment.

Here’s a further example of how the threaded conversations will appear on the front end of the page:
On a different brand’s page, Reply has been used but they are not shown.

When you click on 2 Replies they drop down so everyone can see the conversation.

The brand has used Reply and the customer has replied to the reply.

How to monitor, moderate and manage Facebook Replies

If you are not using a Facebook management tool which has integrated the new API, then, although this change does dramatically improve how companies and customers can engage on the platform, trying to monitor a page for new content is an awful lot harder. Now new messages might be embedded anywhere in layers of conversation, rather than being at the bottom of a post.

Community managers and moderators will have to do a lot of careful scanning and will need to be extra vigilant on the Activity Log and Notifications tabs, as detailed below.

To see exactly when users are posting, you must use the Notifications, which will then show all comments from the users in strict chronological order:  Click on ‘See All’.

By clicking on the words Wall Post, Photo, Timeline, or Link, you can open the thread in a separate page. This will still bring up comments in non-chronological order but will help you focus on just that thread, and make it much easier to hand over between shifts.

Summary

So here’s a reminder of how to moderate comments on a shift using Facebook’s Activity Log and Notifications. In Activity Log – under Edit Page – check:

• All
• Spam
• Posts by others

In Notifications click ‘See All’ to the recent activity. If you click on the words Timeline, Photo, Wall Post, you can see what’s been written by each user in chronological order.

When there are new items in either the activity log or notifications, a red number will show on the page to indicate that a user or users have done something on that page.

We’d be interested to hear what other community managers think of threaded replies and whether you think this helps improve the relationship between a user and a brand?  Tell us how are you dealing with moderation if you don’t use a third party tool?

I’ll summarize the ‘fireside chat’ featuring members of the Federal Trade Commission(FTC). Please note, eModeration is not offering legal advice or comment here: we are reporting the Q&A session to help build the sum of knowledge about the COPPA changes.

The chat was hosted by Liisa Thomas (Partner, Winston & Strawn LLP), with FTC representative Mamie Kresses joining via Skype. The pair discussed many of the upcoming changes to COPPA that consumers, businesses and child safety advocates need to know about in order to comply with the changing law. Mamie has worked  at the FTC for many years, focusing on COPPA and the many technological and social media changes since it was first put into law, 13 years ago.

All the questions asked were practical and addressed the key issues people have been itching to understand. Here’s our summary – and our own interpretation – of answers to the most frequently-asked questions posed to the FTC representatives. 

Liisa Thomas

LT: Many of us [representing the private sector] are worried about Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) and the need to get parental consent. If we have a website appealing to both kids and adults, and we have reason to believe that both audiences are using the site, does that mean that we can’t use OBA without parental permission? Or should we just not use OBA once someone actually tells us they are under 13?

Mamie Kresses, FTC

FTC: If your site is in that category of catering to both under and over 13 year olds, even if it is a site that is already directed to children, but you know or have reason to think that you are not limited to under 13s, you must assume everyone is under 13. We recognize that not all sites directed to kids are in practice catering to kids, and if you wish to market differently to each, then we won’t necessarily go after you. However, by July 1, if you wish to continue using OBA then you must age-gate your product so that only those claiming to be over 13 will be subject to this form of advertising. If you cannot separate out your users by age and you continue to use OBA then you will not be in compliance with the law. However, you can use OBA if you get parental permission.

We [at the FTC] also don’t know what is coming down the road with regards to collecting data from particular users. There will be tougher decisions in the future when and if we are dealing with a site that caters to more than one age group. People working on sites that are not directed at children will continue to be able to use OBA unless they know for a fact that they are catering to a child.

LT. Let’s say we are creating an app where kids can take photos and add a widget to the picture. The app, once downloaded, will not have any interaction back with the company and will live as a stand-alone on a user’s phone. Do we need to get parental permission – or does this scenario fall under an exception – under the Rule?*

 In other words, would the FTC view the company as “collecting” a child’s photo even though the pictures are not being sent back to (or seen by) the company? The app is simply facilitating someone taking the photo and “doctoring it up”.

FTC: [Paraphrased] This is currently under discussion. A website or online service has to involve a transfer of information across the internet for [the Rule] to apply. As the app itself in this scenario is not working with the online environment (sharing digitally), it would not be an online service within our definition.

LT: At what point do we put the consent block during the download of an app when we KNOW we are advertising and creating kid-based apps? Is it just before the download? Where? When?

FTC: The point before you need to give notice and get consent comes just before the purchase of the app takes place. You don’t need to collect information from every person on the account. If you have collected something from the user that indicates they are a child, you must collect parental consent and make account information easy to access for the parent; the usual place being somewhere on the company website where it can be found and edited if the parent wishes.

The FTC has tried to broaden the non-exclusive list of acceptable methods for collecting consent. If you as the company are doing your best to obtain parental consent even if it doesn’t fall under the list of acceptable means, FTC will accept it.

In the process of downloading the app, you will be collecting information. The first step of the download should be the place to get parental consent. However, app stores need to make it easier for developers to incorporate consent and collection of parental consent information.

The FTC will not prescribe a method, but in looking at past methods, you may want to do something new and this could be acceptable if the person on the other side is known to be a parent or adult that is accepting the consent. However, collecting an Apple ID or Google ID is not sufficient at this time.

LT: Many companies have concerns about what is viewed as personal information – information about the child submitting the data online, or anybody’s personal information that the child submits. For example: would you view the Rule as being triggered (and therefore being a need to get parental consent) if a child submits a parent’s information? What if the child submits information about a friend?

FTC: The Rule is triggered by information being given by a child. It doesn’t have to be their own information for the Rule to apply. In July [2013], we will have finally defined the concept of collecting a parent’s email address as a viable method for collecting consent.

If a child submits pictures or videos of another child, you as the company must remove this information from your records, on the basis that this falls under the category of collecting PII from a child without the consent of that child’s parents.

There is nothing that prevents the general public uploading pictures of another child in a general audience type of site, however.

LT. Let’s say that we are a publisher with in-app purchases. Other than your new graphic disclosure, what other things should we think about? Where should we place this graphic?

FTC: There is a new infographic at the FTC website. [http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0018-understanding-mobile-apps#kids]

The infographic was designed  by our Consumer and Business Education Department to give parents general information about what could be going on with the apps they buy, that there are different types of information, and to teach them how to get more information on apps.

There is no onus on companies to post it, but it has been widely picked up and it could be helpful to see this on an app store in the future.

As to whether or not in-app purchases are covered under COPPA, the vital thing to remember is that if your business is in a kids’ space, or is attracting youth, this is the kind of information parents want upfront rather than to find out later. It is more about being a good business model and delivering COPPA information and obligations in a common sense setting and could help you head off  trouble down the road.

LT: Let’s talk about screen names. The Rule now says that these are Personally Identifiable Information if it permits someone to directly contact the person online. How does this play out on a website with a chatroom? In particular, one where kids can register without parental permission because the only information collected is a screen name and the site has only set sentences that people can use to communicate with each other?

FTC: [Paraphrased] Whether the screen name has a “life of its own” outside the context of the site is seen as the key criteria here. For example, if on its own, it reveals something personally identifiable, something that could trace a person across other forms of online communication, I would see this falling within the Rule. The less personal information a child can put in to the username, the less the risk there is of being able to personally identify them. If they can put say, fullname@yourcompany.com, this can constitute PII.

In the chat context, the more restrictive you are with the type of information a user can put in, the more likely you will be to stay within the Rule. However, this is still a very gray area and one to approach with caution.

LT: Let’s talk about the mechanism you built in to the Rule to add additional types of parental consent. Can you walk through how that would work, and explain  any specific ideas about this? Video consents, where the parent records themselves giving permission? Scanned images of IDs? Any others? It may be helpful to remind people that they can select many different ways for getting consent; they don’t have to use one. Isn’t that right?

FTC: Here are some examples of how to collect parental consent. However, this list is not exhaustive:

• Collect the parent’s email
• Have the notice and consent on the screen, but collect the parent’s name and credit card information
• Video consent is being considered and may be acceptable, but there is not a final decision on this as yet

Video consent might even be fun, but as a practical business matter you must always give parents a place they can return to in writing so that they can review and change [consents]. Particularly with COPPA, where parents have multiple ongoing rights. As long as this happens if the company decides to use video consent, it should be fine.

LT: Are you considering how companies have attempted to collect parental consent before the changes to the Rule? What should businesses do with these accounts and account information?

FTC: That will be addressed in the upcoming FAQs, due out by the end of this month [April 2013]. Update: here are the new COPPA FAQs (Updated: April 26 2013)

___________________________________________________________

So there you have it. Clearly there are still a lot of areas that the FTC is ironing out, and a lot of practical situations to which there are not yet clear solutions. What is clear, however, is that more companies are becoming aware of the magnitude of these changes, and want to do the right thing by their customers and users, and for their business.

Next week, I’ll pick up where this conversation left off, with a panel of business lawyers and community professionals discussing the practicality of the COPPA mandates and how they will affect the practicalities of running their businesses.

*The “Rule” refers to COPPA

 Image via Flickr from IntelFreePress

In the UK, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) was replaced by a ‘strengthened regulatory architecture’ comprising two separate organisations. The Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) now regulates financial organisations to make sure they operate safely; the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is there to protect consumers. For the first time, there is significant guidance – an entire section of the FCA’s handbook – on ‘internet’ and ‘real-time’ communications, which can be seen on the FCA’s website.

In the US, the SEC issued further social media guidance to financial organisations. Companies are now permitted to post earnings and investment updates to Twitter and Facebook, as long as investors are told where to look in advance of the postings.

 Another communication channel for bank customers

It seems that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have taken the view that social media is another communication channel, rather than a new way of communicating. And yet less than three years ago, Thefinancialbrand.com published Why social media is a waste of time for most banks and credit unions, arguing that social media was useless for the financial sector. Some of the arguments then were that ‘banking is boring’, it was too risky, it was hard to do, and it was un-measurable.

So much has changed since then. As more of us turn to social media channels, banks – as so many other industries – have to respond over the channels that consumers choose to use to contact them. This is particularly true of younger customers, of course. There are some really interesting initiatives being taken by banks over social media, from Citibank using Twitter (@askciti) for customer service in the US, to HSBC running student bursary competitions on Facebook in the UK.

 Changing customer behaviour

In light of these changes – both regulatory and in consumer behaviour – we have updated our guide to social media for financial organisations: Managing social media engagement for financial organisations, which is available from our website. Please note, this is not intended to replace legal or regulatory advice; each company should have their own detailed legal advice on how and when to engage with customers on social media, to be compliant with new FCA regulations.

Whether you use social media for customer service, research and development, customer insight, recruitment or CSR, I hope the guide will help financial organisations develop a practical approach to managing customers who want to communicate over social channels.