September 29th, 2011
In a new book entitled lol… OMG! : What Every Student Needs to Know About Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship, and Cyberbullying, Stanford MBA student Matt Ivester explains the dangers of bad online behavior, based on his experience creating and leading a web service entitled JuicyCampus, starting in 2007. The book explains the dangers of bad online behavior, and offers advice to college students who want to enter the adult world with their reputations intact.
In 2007, Ivester founded JuicyCampus.com and invited students at Duke University to gossip freely and anonymously. When he started it, he thought it would be a fun place for college students, but it soon became, “… this malicious website where students were attacked. It got away from me,” he sid in a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “The posts named names, and they were racist, homophobic, misogynistic, vulgar, sexually explicit, deeply personal,” he wrote in the book’s preface.
JuicyCampus.com spread to 500 campuses, attracted investigations from two state attorneys general, spawned hundreds of complaints from college administrators, students, and parents, and even caught the attention of national broadcaster Katie Couric, who described JuicyCampus as a “malicious cesspool of barbs, disses, and insults.” In February 2009 Ivester shut it down.
Out of that experience, he Ivester realized that reputation management and cyber-bullying are big problems on college campuses, and there are not a lot of resources for college students. So, he wrote the book to raise students’ awareness of (1) how their decisions about posting content online will affect how others see them, and (2) how posting decisions by one student will affect the reputations of others.
The book includes carefully chosen anecdotes about videos, PowerPoints, and emails that were meant to be private, but were seen by millions of people.
Previous generations did not have to worry about their college experiments and mistakes living forever for billions to view, Ivester said. But, now, photographs of unflattering behavior, vicious comments on blogs, and even students choices of which pages to “Like” on Facebook could come back to haunt a student twenty years into the future.
“The book is all about personal responsibility,” he says. He starts from the premise that students are creating their online reputations with every piece of content that they post. Most of them enter college with an established digital trail. “Now it’s time for them to take control of that trail and make sure that they are portraying themselves in a positive light,” he says. Campus life offers many temptations and opportunities to experiment. What goes up online will be taken seriously by many people in the outside world. Prospective dates will do a search on their names. Professors, future employers, neighbors, and parents of the friends of their children — the list of possibilities is long.
The book describes ways students can protect their reputations, from carefully managing their privacy settings to constantly monitoring what appears about them online, in addition to a crash course in free speech and tips to help persuade others — either through friendly or litigious means — to remove unflattering content.
Posted in: Governance, Legal and Regulatory
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September 28th, 2011
A lot of marketing and communications teams are simply measuring the wrong things. Instead of focusing on the few metrics that matter to their business, I still see a lot of people counting Fans as their primary success metric, or measuring brand sentiment as a Key Performance Indicator. In my next few posts, I’d like to help explain some of the pitfalls I see in social media performance measurement, and provide some suggestions for folks who want more actionable metrics from their social media marketing programs.
In general, there are two types of metrics: Vanity Metrics, and Actionable Metrics.
Actionable metrics provide real meaning because they help you take actions that improve your business.
Vanity Metrics, on the other hand, sound impressive, but don’t actually help you improve your business. Examples can include:
- Number of Fans or number of users
- Web site hits
- Unique visitors
For most businesses, those metrics simply do not inform rigorous business decisions or strategy. Instead, look at data per customer to understand the actions that will lead to better business outcomes from your social media marketing. Think about metrics such as:
- Engagement per customer
- Lifetime value of a customer
- Cost of acquiring a customer
- Retention rate, by cohort (customers segmented by the time they joined your service)
Don’t just measure things because they are easy, or because the numbers sound good. Take the effort to choose the handful of metrics that truly matter to your business, then focus on implementing reliable reporting of those metrics across your team for better collective decisions.
Posted in: Governance
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September 26th, 2011
Today, a teammate of mine DMed me on Twitter. I received it as a text message on my iPhone, and did not realize it was a DM through Twitter. When I replied to what I thought was a simple SMS message, Twitter posted it into my public tweet stream.
My colleague saw the public tweet, told me about it, and then I deleted it from Twitter.
Be very careful when replying to text messages. You may inadvertently publicize information that you think you are keeping private.
Posted in: Governance, Product Development
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September 9th, 2011
Startups that scale properly grow 20 times faster than startups that scaled prematurely, according to research by Blackbox. The findings are part of The Startup Genome Report, an ongoing, collaborative R&D project designed to take a comprehensive dive into what makes Silicon Valley startups successful — and not — and the Startup Genome Compass, a benchmarking tool for startups that helps founders monitor their progress in different growth categories. As of this week, more than 6,000 startups registered to use the Compass.
Blackbox says that the major cause of startup failure is premature scaling, which they define as: when a startup’s core dimensions (product, customer, team, finances and business model) are out of sync. As Blackbox Co-founder Bjoern Herrmann pointed out, “in some cases dysfunctional scaling may be a better description”.
In order to help folks understand the root causes, and how they can be better anticipated, Visual.ly created the graphic below:
Posted in: Product Development
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August 22nd, 2011
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 practitioners 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.
Posted in: Governance, Legal and Regulatory
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August 17th, 2011
In 1966, Harvard Business Review published a study by Ernest Dichter that identified four motivations for a person to communicate about brands, as follows:
- 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
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 research team for pulling together these numbers.
Posted in: Governance, Product Development
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August 16th, 2011
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.”
Anyone interested in web credibility should also visit the Web Credibility Project at Stanford University.
2. Why He Believes Loyalty Decreased
“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.
Posted in: Product Development
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August 15th, 2011
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.
Posted in: Governance, Product Development, Scaling Social Media, Team Building
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August 12th, 2011
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.
Posted in: Governance, Legal and Regulatory
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August 5th, 2011
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.
Posted in: Governance, Product Development
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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.
