Communities

Social media policies & guidelines

May 27, 2009 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

Here are some highlights on emerging best practices in social media guidelines and policies, based on research we’re completing with several major Fortune 500 corporations and social media monitoring technology providers. The full report will be released next week, but here are some common elements among companies’ social media guidelines.

Commonalities among corporate social media guidelines

Employees must follow existing company policies, e.g., code of conduct, privacy policies.
Employees are responsible for their own views.
If writing about the company, the employee must disclose his/her name and role at the company, and, again, reiterate the views are theirs, not the company’s.
When expressing views not related to the company, the employee does not need to mention employment relationship.
Guidelines on what information should never be discussed, e.g., financials.
The requirement that hourly workers should not participate in work-related social media efforts when off the clock.
The requirement that employees be truthful, respectful and professional.
A disclaimer that even within the guidelines there remains a degree of risk for the employee.
The need for tone and content of guidelines to be aligned with company’s values.

What varies

Policies vary on whether an employee should use a personal email address or company email address as their primary means of identification. Some think that since the views expressed are the employee’s, not the company’s, they should not be identified in any way with the company.

Others believe that employee participation in professionally-related social media conversations enhances the company’s reputation as people are able to “see” the knowledge, integrity, and helpfulness of employees, with their company email address. Emerging best practice companies say that the stronger an organization’s corporate values, the more comfortable a company should be with allowing employees to use company email addresses.

Beyond content

The more plainly and clearly the guidelines are written, the greater the likelihood that employees will read and understand them. The more “legalese” they become, the greater the chance that they will be ignored or misunderstood. Best Buy and Sun Microsystems’ guidelines are good examples of writing simply and clearly while covering pertinent legal issues.

Some companies are incorporating social media guidelines into employees’ Conduct of Conduct or Employee Agreements, which employees are required to review and sign every year.

Lastly, companies stress that they are at greater risk at NOT having social media guidelines in place for their employees, as employees are participating in blogs, communities, Twitter, etc. with or without a company policy in place. Better to educate and help employees understand both the risk and how to succeed than leave it up to chance.

Filed Under: Communities, Conversational Marketing, Social media strategy Tagged With: social media best practices, social media guidelines, social media policy

Community of Sweden

April 9, 2009 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

Here’s a great example of a online community that delivers on its business objectives. I just got back from Scandinavia (Denmark) and want to go back after joining CommunityofSweden.com, the community that is part of VisitSweden, the official Swedish tourism site. Community of Sweden, developed by Tommy Sollen, does several things right:

Co-creation: First, Tommy co-created the community with people. He started out with a development blog asking people to share stories and pictures about Sweden — as well as for their ideas on the design of the community.

Design reflects brand: The community was designed to be clean, tidy, bright, positive, warm and friendly — the same feeling people say they get when they visit Sweden.

Photos! The purpose of the community is to inspire people to travel to Sweden. There’s no better way to inspire travel like great photos. The community makes it easy for people to upload and tag photos. I especially like the map feature where you can click on a location and up comes photos tagged with that location. (As well as stories from that area.) The tagging feature also minimizes the back end administrative work.

Board of directors’ fears unfounded: Tommy said that the board’s biggest concern was that people would post negative or inappropriate comments. Since its launch in Nov. 2007 there have been no issues.

Empowered users: the community’s easy-to-use tools allow users to be in control. They can rate content, take down content they might feel is inappropriate or misplace, create profiles, start discussion threads. Everything is published immediately, furthering inspiring trust. And members can create widgets to put on their own blogs and social networks. In other words, the community belongs more to the community than the tourism organization.

Integrated into the tourism Web site: the community is now also part of the official VistSweden Web site, embedding social intelligence into a marketing web site. Embedded reviews and recommendations soon will become a fundamental feature of all web sites. Sweden is ahead.

One interesting factoid about the community: Italians are the most active members.

Filed Under: Communities, Smart company stories, Social media strategy Tagged With: Communities, Social media, social networks, Visit Sweden

Rating 13 pragmatic social media marketing approaches

March 9, 2009 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

Last week I talked with another smart company that got sucked into what I call “stupid social media tricks,” those one-off tactics that have a “cool and wow” feel, but don’t actually provide any business value. Sort of like stupid pet tricks on Letterman, fun but not really valuable entertainment in the way say U2 is.

Here are 13 pragmatic social media marketing ideas, and the associated cost and business value of each. I welcome any additional ideas you may have!

Shareable content

1. Social tagging: add social media bookmarks/functionality on every page of your site. This will increase your keyword relevancy and organic search rankings, reducing paid search costs. Value: High/Cost: Low

2. Social mediafy your campaigns: create content people want to share; tap into right social media rigger points, places and people. This will increase viral effect, getting greater reach for less than paid media, traditional PR. Value: High/Cost: Moderate

3. Badges, widgets, ringtones: make it easy for people to promote your company “wearing” badges, sharing branded music. Value: Low/Cost: Low

4. Embed customer reviews/recommendations in your site. Online reviews are second only to personal advice from a friend as the driver of purchase decisions. So why not make it easy for people to decide when they come by your site? Value: High/Cost: Moderate

5. Create a YouTube channel, strategy: We live in a video world. Marketing needs to, too. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate to High

6. Take blogging to the next level: move from corporate mouthpiece to more of an online media property with high value to customers and prospects. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate

7. Use social sharing sites: Got great content? Share it and tag it where people can find it. Like on Slideshare.net. Value: Low/Cost: Low

Engaging

8. Create a Twitter channel, strategy: There’s a reason why Twitter, which has grown from 4 million 54 million users ini the past year, is disrupting Facebook, email and blogging. Head on over to Pistachio to get all the stats and good business cases on this trend. And then just get on so you experience what it’s all about. Value: Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate

9. Create ambassador programs: So many of your employees and customers want to help your company by commenting on blogs, Twittering, facilitating communities. Figure out a way to make it easy for people who love you to share the love. That’s word of mouth at its best and social media makes it easy to activate. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High

Insights/Ideas

10. Create a system to monitor social media conversations: Track issues and trends good and bad to be able to react; “see” how campaigns working or not and adjust; get competitive insights, nip problems before they’re big problems; inject Web 2.0 into customer service function. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Low to Moderate

11. Tap into the wisdom of your crowds: hold webstorm brainstorming sessions and online raves to get ideas from employees, customers, partners on how to solve problems small and big, how to do things better, how to stop doing things that aren’t so valuable. You’ll be able to cut costs, prioritize more easily, find new ideas. Plus when people participate and feel heard they’re more likely to share positive word of mouth about your company. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Moderate to High

12. Map your social media ecosystem: use social analytics to understand what’s being talked about in your industry about your company; your social media hot spots; who your advocates and detractors are, and what content your audience likes. Value: Low to Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate

13. Bring people together: develop specialized communities for like-minded people to share advice, get help, offer help, learn, solve problems, be entertained, create new business models, or change the world. One of the secrets to community success: tapping into deeply-felt and/or widely-felt issues. Check out The Tribalization of Business site, with results from last year’s study and the 2009 survey to learn more about communities. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High

One last note, if you can’t see the value in a new social media idea, talk to a few more people for their take. If it still sounds irrelevant to your business, rely on your good common sense.

Filed Under: Communities, Conversational Marketing, Innovation, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: blogging, blogs, Facebook, Marketingtwo, online communities, social marketing, Social media, social media ecosytems, social sharing, social tagging, tagging, Twitter, YouTube

Social media lessons from union organizers

January 10, 2009 By Lois Kelly 2 Comments

We marketers can learn a lot from union organizers in our quest to get people more involved in our companies, especially as part of the Marketing 2.0 collaboration/participation movement. Here are some organizing lessons that I’ve gleaned from different unions’ “tool kits” — many of which could be useful when developing customer communities or employee social networks.

Organize around issues people really care about: to get people involved you need to identify the things that people really want to change. The more important and emotional the issue, the more likely people will overcome their apathy and get involved to do something about it. Ideal organizing issues are:

Be widely felt

Be deeply felt

Be winnable

Result in real improvement

Give people a sense of their own power

Be easy to understand

Increase the visibility of the organization

Be non-divisive among members

Send a message

Build solidarity

2. To uncover issues, ask good question, focusing on how people feel: Sometimes it’s easy to know what to organize around. Usually, it takes asking good questions to surface issues and find out if others feel the same way. The more comfortable you make people feel about expressing anger or frustration, the more people will tell you. Questions include:

What things make it hard doing this job?

What would you change if you could?

Do you think other people feel that way?

Do you think people would be willing to try to do something to change that?

3. Overcome obstacles to getting people involved. Most people prefer to sit on the sidelines because they don’t think there’s value in getting involved or they fear getting involved. Union organizers overcome these obstacles with a techniques called Anger, Hope, Action:

Anger overcomes fear: encouraging people to be angry about their own injustice helps them overcome their fears.

Hope overcomes apathy: anger without hope creates frustration. Educating members is the way to create hope — sharing how things are done in other organizations shows that the goals are realistic.

Action creates change: To get people to act, you have to show them how their action will change what they’re looking to change. Then, give people things to do as part of the cause so that they feel a sense of ownership. Start by asking people to contribute in small ways and then ask them to do more as their confidence builds.

4. Keep people motivated and involved:

Inclusion: give people a sense of being part of what’s going on

Control: allow people to control the pace of their involvement and have influence over decision making

Appreciation: recognize people for their efforts

While the anger, outrage and injustice strategy of unions may have little relevance to business communities, having a purpose that people feel strongly about certainly does. Why else get involved?

Filed Under: Activating change, Communities, Social media strategy Tagged With: Communities, Marketingtwo, Social media, social media participation

10 ideas for creating community guidelines

November 30, 2008 By Lois Kelly 4 Comments

Setting up clear, concrete guidelines for online communities is crucial. Doing so:

Helps members understand community expectations and culture
Makes it easier for your team — and other community members– to manage the community
Helps get legal buy-in as together you’re addressing many known risk areas

In his book Managing Online Forums, Patrick O’Keefe provides thoughtful, detailed recommendations on developing and enforcing guidelines based on running several thriving communities. Here are just 10 of his many guidelines; check out his book for more, as well as real world examples and nitty gritty advice on running a communities.

10 community guideline ideas

Advertising and spamming: beware the many, many sneaky advertising methods people try to use. Patrick provides several examples, which are also helpful to bloggers trying to understand whether some comments are legit or a backdoor spam strategy.
Copyright: guidelines should help members understand what they can and can’t do within copyright and intellectual property laws.
Personal, real-life information and privacy: don’t allow home addresses and phone numbers.
Vulgar language and offensive material: Not allowed.
Freedom of speech: Communities are intended to be places where people with like interests can share ideas, debate views and give and get help. But they;re not places where anyone can say anything. “You have no obligation to allow people to say whatever they want, whenever they want. It is your site and it is your responsibility to set the guidelines that all users must adhere to.”
Respect: Inflammatory or disrespectful comments not allowed, including slanderous information. Related, “Do not allow your site to become a soapbox for someone you believe has some sort of agenda.”
Deleting accounts and/or posts in the future: put guidelines in place that will respect someone’s request to have his/her posts removed, without removing valuable content from the community. (Patrick’s advice: change user name to something non-descriptive like username85673.
Hotlinking: No posting and linking to images, videos, fies on servers that you don’t have permsission to link to as the person paying for the server is paying for this. “The result is badnwidth theft.”
Caution on advice: “Your policies should make it clear that any advice given on your site is for informational and educational purposes only, that it is not verified by you or anyone else for accuracy and as such, it can be inaccurate.” He notes this is especially important if the community conversations get into highly sensitive — and often regulated — issues like healthcare and financial advice.
Who’s the boss? Make it clear who has the final say on enforcing guidelines, and be clear about who people should contact with a complaint and how the complaint should be lodged, e.g., via private email vs. on the community site.

Note: Chapter 6 of Patrick’s book, “Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos,” addresses issues that every corporate legal eagle worries about when it comes to social media and that not enough marketers think through before launching. Showing legal that you have anticipated these types of possibilities and have detailed plans in place for dealing with them will help you more quickly overcome legal’s concerns and get them working with you vs. finding reasons why NOT to have a community.

Filed Under: Books, Communities, Social media strategy Tagged With: " social media legal issues, "Managing Online Forums, managing online communities, Patrick O'Keefe, social media guidelines

Management 2.0: Nurses unionize "to be heard"

October 26, 2008 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

The greatest impact of Web 2.0 on our culture is that people expect to have a voice and input into company and organizational decisions. Sure, this has always been true to some extent, but today people are taking action when they feel that management is ignoring them. (Note to executives: while you may feel like you are communicating, that’s different from making people feel heard. How they feel is often more important than all the usual rational communications strategies.)

One example: last week nurses at a local hospital — Kent Hospital in Rhode Island — voted 290 to 214 to join the United Nurses and Allied Professionals union. The reason? The nurses said that didn’t feel like they were being heard.

In a story in the Providence Journal psychiatric nurse Debbie Almeida said, “Over the years the whole climate has changed here. We felt we no longer had a voice in things.”

Nurse Rose Desnoyers added, “The reason I wanted to see a union here was basically for respect. Money is not the issue.”

With the community and social networking tools available, it’s much easier to open up discussions and invite employees to engage in a genuine way and in a large scale. The only obstacle is management mindset.

We’re working on one project where the senior management initially poo-poo’d our recommendation to set up an online community for employees to talk about the issues. “They hardly use email.” “They won’t participate.” ” What if someone starts trouble.” “This is more of a working class crowd, they’re not into that Web stuff.”

Instead of taking no, we created a private community using Ning, put up some discussion forums, showed it to management and suggested we invite employees in and try it. Worse case, we close it. The response from employees has been quite good. People are offering insightful ideas in the community. Others are talking to their friends at work not in the community and telling them that management is really trying and the community shows it.

Our only obstacle: the company’s corporate parent blocked employees from being able to access the community at work. So people have to access the community from home and use their personal emails to register. And, due to hourly employee regulations, we have had to explain to folks that the community is optional. If they felt it was mandatory for their jobs and could only access it at home, the lawyers felt that we would be liable; employees might think, they warned, that looking at the community at home was part of work and demand to be paid overtime.

Fortunately, the CEO we’re working with is a risk-taker, squarely focused on his employees and his customers. The lawyers and corporate naysayers are secondary.

We’re working with another client who has yet to embrace social media but whose employees are also being courted by unions. This company’s lawyers, too, block employees from being able to access the corporate intranet at home due to the same fears about hourly workers. And senior management and the lawyers worry about what might happen if they open up discussions and forums. What if someone starts trouble?

Seems to me that be trouble is already in the works. The risk of not opening up and really listening to employees — and acting on their often very good suggestions or helping them understand why their thoughtful ideas can’t be implemented — is unionization. And with unionization comes management issues of another magnitude.

In reading about the nurses at Kent Hospital it’s clear to me that they love their jobs and have a passion about the hospital. Same with our clients’ employees. Most people want to work for successful organizations and most willing to share ideas have good ideas.

So why not learn how to really listen so that people are heard?

PS — If anyone has examples of how to get around legal issues, and open up employee communities and corporate Intranets so people can access from home, please share!

Filed Under: Activating change, Communicating, Communities, Leadership Tagged With: employee communications, Listening, Mangement 2.0, unions

Savvy Auntie, First Wives World communities get it

September 9, 2008 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

New online communities SavvyAuntie and FirstWivesWorld are good examples of successful communities. Each:

Focuses on a niche group of people who share a passionate bond: women who love children and relish their roles as “aunties,” and women who have gone through a divorce or are in the throes.
Allows people to connect with other people and ask questions, share stories, and just be social.
Provides lots of helpful advice, resources, and experts on topics related to the community’s theme.
Adds some fun: both have entertainment sections and some celebrity angle. (Did you know Hulk Hogan and his ex have just added a 5th team of lawyers to their divorce proceedings?)
Has a fairly simple technology platform with an easy-to-use interface and lots of easy ways for people to get involved, from creating a profile and uploading photos to starting a blog or creating a group. Then again, just reading these rich, content-filled would be fulfilling for many.

In any cateogry there are always niches of opportunity. Many businesses are approaching communities too broadly, trying to serve everyone about everything, and ending up with rather bland communities that have no real community. Auntie and First Wives show the power of going narrow.

Filed Under: Communities, Smart company stories Tagged With: First Wives World, online communities, Savvy Auntie

Communities and market segmentation

August 19, 2008 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

Understanding segmentation as it relates to online communities can help us gain insights from our most loyal users and influencers; prioritize community features, content and functionality; and possibly create ways to help customers become more loyal.

Back in 1999 Professor Rob Kozinets published a much-cited academic paper, “E-Tribalized Marketing?” The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption,” that provides some insights that are highly relevant today.

[photopress:Community_consumption_modelJPEG.jpg,full,pp_image]

Community involvement: two factors

Two non-independent factor influence how involved a person will become with a community, says Rob in the article.

1. The more central the consumption activity is to the person’s psychological self-concept, the more likely the person will pursue and value membership in the community.

2. The intensity of the social relationships the person has in the community.

Segmenting four types of community members

Community members can then be segmented into four types; two of which matter most to marketers, believes Rob.

1. Tourists: lack strong social ties, maintain only a superficial or passing interest in the consumption activity.

2. Minglers: have strong social ties, but aren’t all that interested in the consumption activity.

3. Devotees: maintain strong interest for consumption activity, but have few social attachments to the group .

4. Insiders: have strong social ties and strong personal ties to consumption activity.

Implications to marketers

Insights: Primary research shows that heavy users and loyal customers are represented in communities by the insiders and devotees. Invaluable business insights from these influencers can be gained from observing community.

Brand relationship development: Tourists and minglers can sometimes be “upgraded” to insiders and devotees as they become involved in the community. The community itself may propagate the development of loyalty and heavy usage, says Rob, by culturally and socially reinforcing consumption. To do this it’s important that the visitor find value and spend time in the community to see ways the consumption activity may be more relevant than she or he had realized.

Different content, activities: Different community member segments want to get different things from the community, which helps guide the community management strategy. In Rob’s view tourists and devotees want to get factual information from the community, while minglers and insiders tend to be much more social and relational, answering people’s questions, adding content. Since insiders are the most loyal customers, it’s important that the community appeal to what they want in information and how they want to socialize in the community.

Do you need a community? This point is mine, not Rob’s. If the business consumption activity is not central to your customers’ “psychological self concept,” do you need a community? To what percentage of your customers is the consumption activity central — and is that percentage large enough to justify the investment required in managing a community? I’ve been collecting communities that are largely abandoned, despite being beautifully designed with great functionality. The reason? People just aren’t into the issue/topic/business category all that much — it’s not central to who they are or what they need to be successful in their job. Sometimes all that’s needed is a souped-up Web site where people can get and share more kinds of information more easily.

Filed Under: Communities, Social media strategy Tagged With: online communties, Rob Kozinets, social media segmentation

New online community study: what's working, what's in the way, advice from trenches

July 16, 2008 By Lois Kelly 3 Comments

Today my firm, Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research released highlights of an online communities study among 140 organizations which create and maintain communities. Some of the highlights, more of which can be found here:

Greatest value of communities:

increasing word of mouth (35%)
increasing brand awareness (28%)
bringing new ideas into the organization faster (24%)
increasing customer loyalty (24%)

Greatest obstacles

getting people involved in the community (51%)
finding enough time to manage the community (45%)
attracting people to the community (34%)

What contributes most to effectiveness:

• ability for community members to connect with other like-minded people: 54%
• ability for members to help others: 43%
• focusing community around a hot topic or issue: 41%
• quality of the community manager/community management team: 33%

Advice for others

When asked what their most important piece of advice is for others creating communities, survey participants’ advice focused around these eight areas:

1. Start with the end in mind: “Start with a business strategy, defining carefully what you want to accomplish through the community.”

2. Focus on the value to the members: “Make sure you deliver real, special, unique, obvious value to the core group you’re hoping to attract.”

3. Don’t start with the technology: “Too often people get drunk with Web 2.0 tool excitement and then try to push their business and customer goals into the wrong tool.”

4. Keep it simple and intuitive: “Focus on the least common denominator first. Keep it easy to navigate with simple tools to use.”

5. Keep it fresh and active: “Keep activity levels up, constantly add new content.”

6. Have dynamic community leaders: “Make sure you devote enough time to managing the community; letting it fester is worse than not having it in the first place.”

7. Think through who to involve – or not. “Get Legal and PR to buy-in and help on design, but keep them out of active management.”

8. Get a passionate core of participants active before launching: “Make sure you have a committed core of passionate users before you launch.”
Many thanks to everyone who took the time to take the survey and talk to us as part of the qualitative surveys. The complete results are on their way to you this morning.

Filed Under: Communities, Research, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: customer loyalty, online community, Social media strategy, Tribalization of Business, Word of mouth

Here Comes Everybody — Maybe

July 14, 2008 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

[photopress:Here_Comes_Everybody.jpg,full,pp_image] If you want to really understand how social media/tools are changing how we work, play, activate change and live, pick up Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. And if you are seriously considering communities as part of your marketing strategy, Do Not Pass Go without reading this.

Here are some of my takeaways:

There are three essential pieces of a community, starting with purpose:

1. Why: what’s the the promise of the group/community? Why would anyone want to join or contribute? “Creating a promise that enough people believe in is the basic requirement. The promise creates the basic desire to participate. ” Note: in my experience this is where marketers usually spend too little time. Or, rarely challenge their own. assumptions.

2. How: this is where you figure out which tools will help people do what the community is all about. Note: too many companies are buying tools and then trying to make a community fit the tools. A recipe for disaster — or, at a minimum, enormous frustration.

3. Rules of the road: this the what Shirky calls the bargain: “If you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect and what will be expected of you?”

People have always wanted to share and help one another. Pervasive, easy-to-use communications tools and ” the collapse of transaction costs makes it easier for people to get together — so much easier, in fact, that is changing the world.” “Social tools don’t create collective action — they merely remove the obstacles to it. This is why many of the significant changes are based not on the fanciest, newest bits of technology but on simple easy-to-use tools like email, mobile phones and websites, because those are the tools most people have access to and, critically, are comfortable using in their dauly lives.”

Incentives for participating are not financial: Attention, the desire to see your work spread, the desire to help others and be helped.

Why some communities grow and others don’t: “They grow if enough people care about them, and die if they don’t.” (This goes back to getting the promise right.)

How did you do that?: communities where a group of people help one another get better at some share task or interest — called communities of practice — are especially pervasive and appealing. The basic question that can trigger a community of practice: “How did you do that?”

Not everyone needs to be passionate, participate a lot: in the old model we had to work hard to get people passionate enough to act, because acting was a lot of work. Today you can have a handful of highly-motivated people participating a lot — and “people who care a little participate a little, while being effective in the aggregate.”

A small number needed to get things started: “The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.” Tap into a small core of passionate people; don’t expect a lot of people to contribute at the get-go. Many are more comfortable adding to what someone else has started.

Filed Under: Activating change, Books, Communities, Social media strategy Tagged With: Activating change, Books, online communities, Social media

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