What is the real cost of a social networking effort? (or, Twitter can be risky business)

Jul 15 2009 Published by under consulting

Often people ask me about the ROI on investing in social networking services. My answer tends to be twofold – cost and risk. In currency terms, the cost of participating on existing platforms is negligible and more sophisticated offerings (e.g. your own Facebook app or your own user generated content site) might cost a few bob but nothing compared to the cost of a transactional platform. The real cost is risk, what is the risk of embarking on such a journey?

Dave’s half dozen social networking risks to consider

  • How you use these tools is inconsistent with your brand. I work for a consulting firm and an important part of our brand equity is our ability to maintain information confidential. It wouldn’t really be appropriate for someone in my firm to tweet “met with CIO of company x today to discuss their new sourcing platform”.
  • Your message is poorly crafted. Gordon Brown’s use of YouTube to try lead the discussion on the expenses scandal is widely covered and widely derided. No matter whether you agree with what he said, as a politician his message was relevant to current events and he was right to try and get it out there. He just didn’t do it particularly well.
  • Your timing is rotten. The immediate response to any such initiative will be considered in the context of events at the time. Are you a politician looking to build a followership? Launching the day after your name was in amongst the expenses sinners means all commentary will be linked your expenses matters.
  • What you publish is inconsistent with your brand. As exciting as the press makes it seem, social networking services are ‘just’ another channel. What you say on your Facebook page needs to be consistent with what you are saying in your advertising. And this needs to be consistent with what your call centre staff say on your customer services desk.
  • You’re inviting your detractors to speak up. This is often the hardest part to accept, social networking sites give people free rein to say what they really think about your product / service. I tend to think it’s better to know what people are saying than not as at least this allows you to manage the market’s perception. And, as the widely covered United breaks guitars story reminds us, if you don’t create the space to do this other people will.
  • There’s no turning back. The Internet is pervasive. Google (and other sites) cache everything so once you’ve launched such an initiative, it’s out there for good. The commonly cited rule of thumb is not to publish anything that you would be embarrassed to see repeated. And you can be sure that if it is embarrassing, it will be repeated. Often. Perhaps even often enough to hit the popular press.

I’m not saying don’t do social networking. Certainly not, what I’m saying is think about what you’re doing and – just like any technology implementation – be sure to consider and actively mitigate the risks.

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Why Google Wave will conquer the enterprise

Jul 08 2009 Published by under online services

The recent Google Wave announcement has caused considerable interest amongst us online social media geeks. There’s a lot published about what it is and how brilliant it will be so I’ll avoid that here. Instead, I’ll just make one observation: Google Wave can be privately hosted.

That’s quite important. I work for a consulting firm and we have lots of meetings and our face-to-face collaborative behaviours are great but there is room to enhance this with better use of online collaborative tools. The challenge is that as an organisation we have to be wary of these because of the data security implications.

Many of the existing collaborative platforms are web based and we cannot introduce a platform where data (including consultants’ work related conversations) has to leave our organisation as it would be in contravention of our security practices.  That’s not the case with Wave.

I appreciate that Wave is not the first to do this, there’s Microsoft’s SharePoint, Lockheed’s Eureka and presumably some others. But Wave is most likely the coolest. It is whizzy with lots of features that we can imagine using. It is cross platform and we can continue Waving on our Blackberries. (Is it going to be termed “waving?”) Many of us already use Google tools so the learning curve is not as steep.

So yes – part of the attraction is the feature base, but in reality without the ability to be privately hosted many corporates would not even consider such a tool. It’s the baseline for entry, and that makes it one of the killer features.

– oo –

Note, I was thinking this after reading Lockheed develops open source, social media framework (CivSource) and Mid-Year 2009 Predictions for the Future of Social Media (Ignite Social Media).

– oo –

In case you’re not sure what I’m banging on about, here’s the Google Wave announcement video.

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What's Twitter good for?

Jun 30 2009 Published by under online services

Recently I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to colleagues about Twitter and why it’s useful. We’ve been discussing whether Twitter is useful either for ourselves (a medium sized consulting firm) or for any of our clients. In order to dehype the conversation, I’ve been trying to distill my thinking around what can be done on Twitter into a few distinct functional uses…

Dave’s uses for Twitter (for a company / organisation)

  • Signposting –> using Twitter to link back into your own website whenever new content is available. If you’re already using RSS or some popular blogsites it can be automated with services such as Twitterstream.
  • Creating a customer services channel –> More and more companies are creating customer services channels on Twitter. I’ve personally used @easyjetcare with much success. This relies on having someone at the other end who is able to engage quickly and regularly, has sufficient information to address queries, etc.
  • Creating a brand engagement experience –> Some brands are coming up with innovative approaches to getting people engaged with their brands using social media platforms as the place to grab attention. Dunkin Donuts have come up with a great idea for a competition based on profile pics (although strangely only on Facebook, but the example remains relevant). At a simplistic level, this could be as easy as using Twitter for coupons and promotions.
  • Polling for opinions, help, information –> It’s called social networking for a reason – ask a question about your products/services, and see what people say. There are few other mediums that allow to ask your consumers for direct feedback in such a connected fashion.
  • [Added 07/07] An article in Inc introduced me to the idea of using Twitter to monitor keywords which may be translated into sales opportunities

The most important thing, of course, is to ensure that any efforts on Twitter is consistent with your communications strategy. It needs to be considered as one element of a broader channel strategy which presents a consistent brand image for your organisation across all platforms.

What do you think? Have you got any more?

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Statwistics

Jun 10 2009 Published by under interesting websites

This morning I got to thinking about how you measure the depth of engagement in your social network. My big idea was going to be Xobni style analytics looking at twitter activity but it seemed too obvious, surely someone was doing this already? A bit of googling around and I discovered these two sites…

http://tweetstats.com/status/davereinhardt

http://xefer.com/twitter/davereinhardt

I imagine there are more, but these were the two that caught my eye. What do your stats reveal?

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Poll (LinkedIn): Does your company have a social network policy?

Jun 09 2009 Published by under your input

I’ve been talking to colleagues in various parts of the firm about social networking. We’re trying to work out what’s the best approach to take both for ourselves and in the advice we provide to our clients. With this in mind, I setup a little poll on LinkedIn asking the question Does your company have a policy for publishing on social networking sites? Admittedly, it’s pretty one-dimensional but if I get enough responses the answer may be interesting.

Go on, answer the question. I’ll share the results here in a few days.

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Online timeline

May 28 2009 Published by under big idea

There are numerous aggregators around, each of which has a different take on aggregating. Most commonly there’s the business card idea (retaggr) and recently I’ve been playing with Geekchart which shows activities as a piechart.
Today’s big idea is a social network aggregator where activities are displayed on a timeline. Users should be able to show/hide different services and browse the timeline in chronological format. Also, the timeline should be able to be manipulated like Google Finance’s stock price timelines – they’re very slick indeed.

There are numerous aggregators around, each of which has a different take on aggregating. Most commonly there’s the business card idea (retaggr) and recently I’ve been playing with Geek chart which shows activities as a piechart.

Today’s big idea is a social network aggregator where activities are displayed on a timeline. Users should be able to show/hide different services and browse the timeline in chronological format. Also, the timeline should be able to be manipulated like Google Finance’s stock price timelines – they’re very slick indeed.

No responses yet

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