The National Labor Relations Board released a report last week that lists the outcomes of investigations into 14 cases involving the use of social media and employers’ social and general media policies, with the goal of helping practicioners in their development of social media policies.
Outcomes included:
Four cases involving employees’ use of Facebook where the NLRB found that employees were engaged in “protected concerted activity” because they were discussing terms and conditions of employment with fellow employees.
Five other cases involving Facebook or Twitter posts where the NLRB found that the employee activity was not protected.
One case where the NLRB determined that a union engaged in unlawful coercive conduct when it videotaped interviews with employees at a non-union jobsite about their immigration status and posted an edited version on YouTube and the Local Union’s Facebook page.
Five cases wherein some provisions of employer’s social media policies was found to be unlawfully overly-broad.
One case wherein an employer’s lawful policy restricted its employees’ contact with the media.
I plan to provide actionable details for folks developing policies in the next few days.
In 33% of the cases, people shared because of product-involvement. The experience was so novel and pleasurable that it had to be shared.
In a quarter of cases, people shared because of self-involvement. Sharing knowledge or opinions was a way to gain attention, show connoisseurship, feel like a pioneer, have inside information, seek confirmation of a person’s own judgment, or assert superiority.
One-fifth of sharing occurred from other-involvement: the speaker wanted to reach out and help to express neighborliness, caring, and friendship.
In another 20% of cases, message-involvement drove sharing. The message was so humorous or informative that it deserved sharing.
Implications for Brands
If we assume those trends to be valid and normal expectations for online sharing today, we can use that distribution as a benchmark to assess the health of the conversation about any brand, based upon the extent to which the conversation about the brand deviates from this average distribution.
For example, we might expect 33% of conversation about a brand to focus on people describing their experience with the brand. And when we see more than 33% of a brand’s conversation being generated by customers based on product or service experience, we might guess that the brand is doing something exceptional — either within the customer experience, or within their social media marketing.
When we see a brand whose customers create significantly less than 33% of the conversation about the brand, we are likely to discover flaws in either the customer experience or the brand’s social media capabilities.
Category Benchmarks from Converseon
Apparel
In the apparel category, we have seen brands with more than 90% of their conversation generated by consumers talking about their experience with the product. On the other hand, we have also seen apparel brands with less than one-third of their conversation occurring based on customer experiences with the product.
Automotive
For one automotive client, we found that 28% of consumer messages about the brand described their involvement with the product. That’s slightly below the 33% general benchmark.
B2B Technology
On the other hand, for one of our B2B technology clients, 32% of online customer messages describe the customer’s involvement with the product.
The difference, we found, is that the technology company receives a greater share of mentions within online forums, where customers are trying to solve problems. And any brand that receives a lot of mentions in forums should expect that more of their mentions describe customer experience with the product.
Consumer Packaged Goods
On the other end of the spectrum, for one of our shampoo clients, 73% of online consumer messages described the consumer’s experience with the product. Most of the shampoo brand mentions existed within product reviews, recommendations and anecdotal messages such as status updates.
Thanks to Will Bottinick and his team at Converseon and his research team for pulling together these numbers.
Chris Boudreaux leads the Business Integration practice at Converseon, where he helps leading brands achieve business objectives through social media by transforming business processes, data integration, and governance. Chris can be reached at via email at cboudreaux@converseon.com or via Twitter.
Dr. Brent Coker of the University of Melbourne recently published findings indicating that web users tend to trust web sites 20% more today versus 2007, but are 30% less loyal to ecommerce sites versus 2007. 1. Why He Believes Trust Increased
Dr. Coker said the increase in online consumer trust is largely linked to the visual appeal of websites. “As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers.”
“The biggest source of frustration is the inability to find relevant information on a website. The best way to stop defection to other websites, and increase loyalty, is to be interesting. Being pretty, but with nothing to say, is not enough.”
The research found that if a website has poor navigation or access to information, or is slow (i.e. more than two seconds to download), web surfers are more likely to opt against purchasing and navigate to an alternate website. (No surprises there.)
“Shopping offline is very different to shopping online. Offline we shop in a large room, with clear signage, and often a sales assistant. Online, however, what we want to buy is buried somewhere, and we’re left to find it on our own.”
3. Sharing Drives Us to Trust More and Share More
In the last five years, the frequency of referring others to websites has increased by 32%. Largely due to social utilities, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Overall, “… we are more trusting of attractive websites, less tolerant of websites that have irrelevant information, and more likely to introduce ourselves to websites that are new.” Dr. Coker says.
A Few Thoughts
First, consumer trust is harmed where brands blur advertising with authentic conversation. On the other hand, when brands engage in helpful and sincere dialog with consumers, trust and engagement grow.
Second, with more brands spending more money on social media, many brands simply fail to achieve meaningful engagement within their targeted communities due to poorly conceived and executed social campaigns that don’t respect the norms of social platforms and conversations they seek to engage.
For many brands, the poor conception and execution results from inadequate and inconsistent performance metrics — where performance feedback in inadequate, or teams are allowed to spend without accountability for business outcomes.
Dr. Coker’s Methodology
Dr. Coker developed a formula to track patterns and trends in online behaviors and purchasing, called Webreep (shown in the image below, which you can click to enlarge). The formula, called ‘Webreep’, creates a score for 130 industries based on seven dimensions of quality: visual appeal, trustworthiness, ease of use, search quality, information quality, information relevancy and load speed. Webreep started mapping the internet in 2007.
He will present his paper at the 2011 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing in Las Vegas.
Michael Maoz of Gartner recently wrote that CIOs can only shake their heads when marketing, sales and services leaders are able to obtain funding for social media projects without a business case, instead of being held accountable for the same level of quantitative rigor as other IT-enabled investments. While it is true that most social media investments still travel with no business case, anyone who wants to change that fact needs to undertand a bit of history:
One challenge is that most communications professionals and social media consultants don’t have much experience in organizational change. They’ve never led cross-functional change programs. They’ve never built a business case that had to stand up to the CFO’s rigor. So they just don’t know how to do those things.
And, in the corporate communications arena, they never had to measure business impact from their efforts. Clippings were all they ever counted.
But that is all changing as marketing, sales and customer service leaders begin to ask for real dollars for social media.
However, the one critical factor that is changing the slowest is that CIOs are simply not getting in the game. CIOs and their teams are simply not at the table when cross-functional social media efforts are launched. And, ultimately, the CIO has to change that. CIOs need to start reaching out to their VPs of Communications and Marketing, and start figuring out how enterprise IT will enable the business goals that social media supports.
The bottom line is that CIO can not sit back and wait for other functional leaders to bring them a business case or a well-defined social application architecture. CIOs need to get out of their foxholes, and go be the smartest person in the room about how the organization should use technology to solve challenges in marketing, communications, sales and service.
And if you want some help developing your technology strategy for social in your organization, I’d be happy to help. Send me a note any time.
FINRA proposed rule changes to the SEC regarding communications to the public, and the proposed changes simplify rules for financial services firms using social media.
First, FINRA proposed that firms will not need prior approval of content posted on social sites as long as the site qualifies as an interactive electronic forum.
Second, FINRA proposes to reduce the six categories of communications to three, as follows:
Institutional communication: includes all communications that fall within the current guidelines.
Retail communication: includes any written (including electronic) communication that is made available to more than 25 retail investors within any 30-day period.
Correspondence: includes any written (including electronic) communication that is distributed or made available to 25 or fewer retail investors within any 30-day period.
The proposal eliminates definitions for advertisement, sales literature, institutional sales material, public appearance and independently prepared reprints, and “… communication that currently qualifies as advertisements and sales literature would generally fall under the definition for retail communications.”
Within Retail Communication FINRA proposes a supervisory exemption for:
any retail communication that is posted on an online interactive electronic forum (eg., social networks), and
any retail communication that does not make any financial or investment recommendation or otherwise promote a product or service of the member.
All of this is good news for firms and reps engaging in social media, since organizations will not need to pre-review content posted to social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Even so, the following rules still apply:
Firms must still maintain records of the communications at existing levels.
In addition, firms must supervise the content in the same manner as correspondence, which means firms must review the content after it is posted, so conversation monitoring and mining capabilities are still important for firms.
And you still can’t predict performance, imply past performance will recur, or making any exaggerated or unwarranted claim, opinion or forecast. As the NY Times reported, a California broker was suspended and fined $10,000 in July for posting “misrepresentative and unbalanced” messages on Twitter.
While social networking profiles will be classified as a Retail Communication, the proposed changes do not suggest that profile information will be exempt from pre-review requirements, so profiles still need to be reviewed before publishing.
According to TBG Digital, Facebook ads that keep users on Facebook cost less per click than ads that send traffic away from Facebook. Data collected on a sample of 2.8bn impressions by TBG Digital revealed that Facebook’s algorithm charges a 29% lower cost per click (CPC) for ads that keep traffic within the site, by directing users to a brand’s Facebook page, for example. TBG said Facebook uses approximately 140 factors to set an ad’s price. The Impacts?
First, advertisers will feel motivated to increase the portion of their customers’ experience that lives on Facebook. That means potentially fewer assets on brand-owned properties, and a greater reliance on Facebook-focused execution partners.
Second, The Center for Digital Democracy says that, “… regulators need to pry open how Facebook uses its clout to favor its own interests–and its impact on competition and consumer protection.” So, Facebook might soon find itself facing charges of anti-competitive practices, a la Microsoft just a few years ago.
TBG Digital is a Facebook advertising platform that competes against providers such as Context Optional and BuddyMedia.
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Two Boys Opera published a short video showing how silly our online habits appear when we use them in the physical world, to promote their opera at the London Coliseum, running this month and next.
All of us who drive change in organizations live and die by our ability to convince others to adopt our ideas. In the embedded video, Susan Duarte shares patterns that she discovered in her examination of compelling speeches by Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King.
Last week, the Governor of Tennesse signed a law that makes it a crime to “… transmit or display an image…” online that is likely to “… frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress… ” to someone who sees it. Violations can earn offenders nearly a year in jail time or up to $2,500 in fines.
The “emotionally distressed” individual need not be the intended recipient. Anyone who sees the image is a potential victim. If a court decides that the sender should have known that the image would upset anyone who sees it, the poster could face months in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.
Constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh recently wrote that the law doesn’t require that the picture be of the victim, and the government need not prove that the poster intended the image to be distressing. Volokh believes the bill is, “… pretty clearly unconstitutional.”
Another provision of the legislation lets law enforcement access the contents of your communications on social networking sites simply by offering “… specific and articulable facts…” suggesting that the information sought is “… relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” No warrant required.
Julian Sanchez — a privacy scholar at the Cato Institute — told Ars Technica that “this is a lower standard than the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act requires” for unread communications. More importantly, because Tennessee is in the Sixth Circuit, it is bound by that court’s Warshak decision, which held that the Fourth Amendment requires the government to obtain a full search warrant in order to access e-mail communications. “That case dealt with e-mail,” Sanchez said, “but there’s no good reason to think a private message on a social network site is any different.”
While nearly every organization has a social media policy today, most social media policies ignore the greatest business risk to their organization from social media: managers. The simple reality is that landmark law suits or sanction brought against employers in the past couple of years have resulted from the actions of a manager, not an employee. For example:
Earlier this year, the NLRB settled a case with American Medical Response, which the NLRB brought after the company fired an employee for disparaging remarks made in the employee’s personal social media account.
In each of the above cases, managers broke the law and exposed their employer to significant costs and damage to their brands, in addition to personal prosecution, in some cases.
Too many executives and employers hold false assumptions about their powers over their employees, and every employer should proactively educate their managers about their boundaries as managers. Social media training should be part of basic Manager training, just like sexual harassment, bribery or discrimination content.
While I am not aware of any juridictions requiring such training for managers, it is clearly in the interest of any employer to take the lead and educate their managers.
All employers should actively educate their managers about the boundaries.
Chris Boudreaux leads the Business Integration practice at Converseon, where he helps leading brands to harness the power of social media to meet business objectives through his 18 years of experience in business process design, data integration, and governance. His work has been featured by industry researchers and journalists including Forrester and Gartner, and he founded SocialMediaGovernance.com, the foremost resource on governance in social media. Chris is co-author of The Social Media Management Handbook, and he has helped leading global corporations including Bank of America, Boeing, eBay, IBM, Kodak and Microsoft.
I help the world's largest organizations develop and implement comprehensive social media strategies and capabilities across their business. My work has helped global organizations to improve their use of social media in marketing, sales and customer service.
While I am an executive at Converseon, the views I express on this site are my own, except where otherwise noted.
