Monthly Archives: January 2012

Your First Social Media Contributions

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Your First Social Media Contributions

In our previous post, Social Media Engagement Plan Contents, we laid out a suggested outline for your engagement plan. In this post, we talk about your first social media contributions.

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Your First Contributions

Before considering a large undertaking such as modifying your site with social media features or creating a do-it-yourself standalone social media site, dip your toe in the water and gauge the tenor of your community. After you’ve listened for an extended period, you can start engaging by posting on existing communities. Here are a few suggestions for your first contributions:

  • Be low-risk, for example, by posting interesting, non-controversial news, comments, or events
  • Know who the champions are in your community and acknowledge them visibly, perhaps by commenting on their posts
  • Share professional/personal information
  • Share a professional problem and ask if somebody has the same problems/interests
  • Highlight content from well-established community members more often than content you create. You’ll build good will.
  • Refresh your content often, but not TOO often: Performing A/B split content analysis using Google Analytics can help you figure out how often

Once you’re a familiar face, consider asking the community to help you design your enterprise’s social media presence. If appropriate (and your legal counsel approves), you can conduct contests that invite ideas and let other members help judge them. This is a technique called crowdsourcing (see bit.ly/cpyFhG for more information), and it is an effective way to encourage people to not only contribute ideas, but to take a stake in them.

Keep It Fresh

Change the content on your social media sites regularly. How you define regularly depends on your community, but you should shoot for at least weekly updates. The surest way to ensure the death of a community site is to let it get stale. This goes for the content you generate, and the discussion and other material your members generate. Mix it up. Give people a reason to come back, or to follow your feed, or to seek you out wherever you are.

Promote the Community via Other Venues

Social media should not exist in a vacuum, or even only online. Feature your social media presence in your newsletter, in your advertising, at your events, anywhere you’re doing public relations or marketing.

Even if you decide to focus on social features of your enterprise’s Website, or on a standalone social networking site that you build, also engage members and donors where they are (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube)

And of course, don’t forget to promote your social media activities on traditional media.

Synergistic Promotion Activities

We’ve said previously that you shouldn’t stop doing anything you’re currently doing just because you’ve started to use social media. Even more important: Fold your social media efforts into your other efforts so they reinforce one another. Here are some ideas along those lines.

  • Social network outreach— If you have your own community or are sponsoring online events,  use social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to promote your activities and gather feedback
    • Blog outreach — Create a plan to involve influential bloggers and get them to write about your organization. Be sure to designate someone to follow and engage bloggers. Read Fanscape and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s white paper, Pitching to Bloggers.[1]
    • Email — Identify e-mail lists you can encourage to pass your message on. Ask staff, managers, and board to consider informing their personal contacts about your social computing efforts.
    • Personal networks — Ask staff, managers, community members and supporters to tell their personal networks (online and offline) about your social media activities
  • Traditional media outreach — Fold in links to your social media presence and promote your online events along with your offline events. Ensure that your current media personnel are well-versed in what you’re doing online.
    • Online ads — Although online advertising is no longer as effective as it once was, you may still want to leverage it. Consider buying ads on search engines, such as Google AdWords, and ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites. Determine whether you will you hire professionals to produce the creative and manage the ad buy.
    • Offline ads — How will you promote via broadcast advertising? Will you do print ads — even if it’s just including your URL in another ad for your enterprise or brand?
    • Direct mail — If you do regular mailings, integrate your online messaging and URLs
    • Collateral — If you produce written materials or trinkets, be sure to promote your social media presence
  • Partnerships — Ask partners to spread the word to their customers, members, or constituencies
  • Other established channels — Consider telling your social media story wherever you communicate with people, for example, your telephone hold music

Next up: Ask for the Commitment on Social Media

Your First Social Media Contributions is the 31st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

[1]The Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s white paper, Pitching to Bloggers: bit.ly/wW6CXk
Social Media Engagement Plan Contents

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Social Media Engagement Plan Contents

In our previous post, Social Media Engagement on Your Site, we took a look getting our Website ready for launch your engagement plan. In this post, we detail the contents of your engagement planning document.

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Engagement Plan Contents

After doing the thinking and your preliminary goal and audience identification, you’re ready to create the engagement plan. The following are questions you should ask, as well as other recommended elements your engagement plan should include:

  • Reasons for Using Social Media
    • What do you have to offer?
    • What problem are you trying to solve (reaching an audience, encouraging evangelism, improving sales)?
    • Why are you using social media to accomplish your goal?
  • Social Media Approach
    • There are three basic approaches to using social media. Lay out how you’ll use them, singly, in combination, or simultaneously:
      • Participate where conversations are already happening (for example on Facebook, Google+, YouTube, or Twitter)
      • Use, enhance, or create social media aspects of your existing Website
      • Create new a social network that stands alone — using, for example, Ning or other white-box social network software to create an online venue that you control
  • Content Plan
    • What kind of content will you publish?
    • What are the style guidelines for content creation?
    • What are the rules of engagement with community members?
    • Will you syndicate content from/to other sites? If so, where, how, and why?
  • Design Plan
    • Determine your design parameters
      • How will the site look?
      • How will it work?
      • What features will it have?
    • Create a usability test plan
  • Release Plan
    • Avoid a single big-bang release; release incrementally
    • Start small
    • Coordinate final release with marketing efforts
  • Resource Plan
    • Identify/assign resources, including writers and a community manager
    • Create the required internal processes for ensuring adequate staffing
    • Create a budget for start up and the first two years
    • Indicate supporters and what they will contribute
  • Training Plan
    • Do a social media readiness assessment
    • Create a plan to fill the gaps
    • Ensure advanced social media training for staff assigned
    • Assess the amount of culture change involved in using social media and create change management plans to address
    • Recruit real users and have a professional do a test
    • Start with low-risk contributions, for example, by posting to existing social networking sites
  • Metrics Plan
    • What does success look like?
    • What measures will tell you your progress toward your goals?
    • What success factors are the most important?
    • What metrics assess those factors best?
    • How will you collect these metrics?
    • What metrics are related and should be analyzed together?
    • What kind of analyses are valid for the metrics?
    • How reliable are the metrics?
    • How reliable is the analysis? What specific tools will you use to measure activity and community engagement?
    • What corrective actions are triggered when metrics are bad?
  • Outreach/Promotion Plan
    • How will you promote online?
    • What bloggers/online influentials will you target for cross promotion?
    • How will you fold the social media message into your traditional marketing efforts?
  • Listening Strategy
    • How will you monitor what others are saying about you?
    • How will you engage them?
    • What will you do about negatives?
  • Community Management Plan
    • Communities require care and feeding. Determine who is responsible, their duties, and the support they’ll need.
    • Develop contingency plans for foreseeable problems such as dealing with trolls (excessively disruptive, negative, or argumentative community members)

These sections should get you started on your plan.

Next up: Your First Social Media Contributions

Create Your Social Media Engagement Plan is the 30th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

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Curation Gets a Boost from Twitter

My Twitter friend @dberkholz sent me an irritated message back in October complaining about all the Paper.li online newspapers (including mine, The Mike Ellsworth Daily) that glut his Twitter feed. After a bit of an exchange, he pointed me to a tweet by @5tu that he said summed up his attitude (partially redacted below):

Who give a f daily

The fact that 72 others retweeted this crusty post indicates a couple of things:

  • Curation is a rapidly growing trend
  • Current curation tools are annoying lots of people

So what is curation?

You may be familiar with the term curation in relation to curated art gallery or museum collections. The idea online is that, as we participate in more and more streams of information — our Facebook friends’, those we follow on Twitter, even LinkedIn updates — there’s an increasing inability to keep up. According to an article in Search Engine Journal, “less than half of what comes in to museums actually gets shown for public consumption.” However, for online curation to be successful, far fewer items can be selected for display due to the overwhelming flood of updates and posts.

Social media curation involves people (like me) curating, or selecting, articles, blogs, tweets, videos or other interesting online material and making them available in an easily-digestible format, often organized around a theme. It’s similar, but hardly identical, to content aggregators that use RSS feeds, like Google Reader. The main difference is RSS is the fire hose; Curation is the nozzle.

For examples, see my Scoop.it topic, Enterprise Social Media; the aforementioned Mike Ellsworth Daily (enterprise social media articles); my Summify paper; and my Snip.it enterprise social media collection.

Of these examples, the Paper.li and Summify represent automated curation, where I determine keywords and maybe blogs or other sites to follow, and the site automatically collects material based on an algorithm that represents my choices. I’ve got a few different Paper.li’s (Social Media Case Studies is one I read myself all the time.)

Scoop.it and Snip.it represent manually curated sites. I have bookmarklets on my bookmarks bar that I can click when I see something I want to curate. Scoop.it also provides a stream in my account that I can discard or scoop into my collection. I can add my own commentary to these articles and share them on Twitter, Facebook, and a blog called Internet Billboards.

People can subscribe to these various curated publications and get updates sent via email. The various sites assemble the bits and pieces into a magazine-like format. I like Scoop.it’s design the best:

Scoopit example

Twitter Buys Summify

The first article in the screenshot above provided the impetus for this post: Twitter has purchased Summify and is shutting down the service. I’m bummed they’re shuttering the service but the team of five (!) people who were running Summify will be folded into the TwitterBorg and presumably integrate some kind of curation features into Twitter in the future.

Twitter recently also bought Tweetdeck, a program you can install on your computer to organize and try to make some sense of social media updates. It’s not clear whether the purchase of Summify represents an admission of failure for the Tweetdeck purchase or an attempt to build upon it. My bet is the five Summifiers will bolt curation technology onto the Tweetdeck platform rather than into the Twitter Website, but they could eventually do both.

So what will it take to win the haters like Donnie and @5tu? Well there will always be purists, folks who won’t get on the big bus, who carve their own way, and who disdain the mainstream. But I think curation tools will evolve to the point where they move beyond random annoyance and become trusted filters delivering value.

What do you think? Which curation platforms have you tried? What is the future of this trend — flash in the pan or enduring phenomenon? Please comment below.

Social Media Engagement on Your Site

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Social Media Engagement on Your Site

In our previous post, Design Effective Social Media Community Processes, we examined some do’s and don’ts of community processes.  In this post, we give some tips on modifying your current Web site to be ready for social media.

Engagement on Your Site

Embracing social media will almost inevitably require you to make changes to your enterprise’s current Website. Thus it’s a good time to think about how your current site is organized, how effective it is, and how your site’s visitors are  going to find your social networking features.

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Try to avoid the corporate underpants approach. The term, apparently coined by user experience con­sult­ant Tamara Adlin, refers to sites that are organized completely around the structure of the enterprise, rather than in a way that will satisfy the goals and interests of the site’s visitors. You’ll know you’re showing your corporate underpants, Adlin says, “when your org chart shows up in the primary navigation of your Website.”[1]

Do your site’s visitors really want to know your enterprise is organized into departments, or regions, or brands and sub-brands? Why should they care?

Think about why a person would come to your social media site (OK, any of your sites).

Adlin gives an example of a travel site: “We knew we wanted to go on a ‘trip’ or ‘travel somewhere’ [ . . . ] but, when we arrived on the site, we just accepted that ‘flights’ and ‘hotels’ and ‘cars’ should be thought of, and booked, separately.”[2]

What do your visitors want? Give it to them quickly and plainly. You only have 10 seconds.[3]

How you do this depends on your business. A consumer packaged goods company is going to have a different approach than medical device business, or a bank. But let’s say you have several marketing initiatives. You could organize your community site around these initiatives, with special areas for each. Always make sure you put somebody in charge of responding to questions or comments in each of the sections. People always feel better if they can get a real human to respond to them.

There’s lots more to say about renovating your current site, but it’s beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that if you think you can just graft a blog onto your existing site, you may find that nobody visits it, and conclude that social media doesn’t work. It’s better to integrate social media functions into the fabric of your site, and while you’re at it, take the time to examine your assumptions about the effectiv­eness of your current site.

Next up: Social Media Engagement Plan Contents

Social Media Engagement on Your Site is the 29th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

[1] Hide Your Corporate Underpants — Using Personas in UX Design: bit.ly/drZ0fG

[2] Process Pantylines: Why SEO and UX should share a cubicle: bit.ly/d3sb6j

[3] You have only 10 seconds to make a good first impression: bit.ly/cTz8sV

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How Can a Renegade Social Network Survive?

In the previous post, Even the Paranoid Have Enemies: Social Media and Law Enforcement, we examined some good reasons why the Occupy movement might want their own network, which they announced via a manifesto entitled The Global Square: Towards an Online Platform for the Occupy Movement. In this post, we examine how this effort could represent a threat to the Facebook social network hegemony and ignite a fragmentation movement for other niche groups to create their own networks.

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Facebook is a social media goliath with more than 900 million users and growing by 10 million a month. According to Jeff Bullas, “One in every 13 people on Earth is on Facebook. More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites.”

So what’s to worry?

If we’ve learned anything from social media history (I’m looking at you guys, Friendster and MySpace) it’s that things can change very quickly. The buzz dissipates and the crowd moves on to the next bright shiny thing. Facebook, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter all look pretty stable right now but one false move, and their lead could evaporate.

Thinking conventionally about the threat to the established commercial social networking sites, one might project that if these site will fall, it would be because they were supplanted by an upstart like Google+ that would attract the hundreds of millions to itself like a massive black hole.

But it could be that the threat might be from a constellation of more-niche networks like Global Square where millions of members who are dissatisfied with existing choices splinter into dozens or hundreds of specialty social sites.

The Global Square manifesto enumerates other reasons beyond privacy for needing a special social network:

While Facebook and Twitter have been very helpful for disseminating basic information and aiding mass mobilization, they do not provide us with the tools for extending our participatory model of decision-making beyond the direct reach of the assemblies and up to the global level. What we need, at this point, is a platform that allows us to radically democratize our global organizational efforts. In addition to the local squares, we now need a global square where people of all nations can come together as equals to participate in the coordination of collective actions and the formulation of common goals and aspirations.

OK, you say, but how many people are this radical? Granted, the majority probably aren’t. But if you read between the lines of this paragraph you see that some of the current social network shortcomings might be shared by others, including corporations.

The big social networks don’t currently provide:

  • Efficient collaboration— I personally have been waiting for this one. Sure, you can use Google Docs to collaborate on a document, but this is very rudimentary. You can use tools such as WebEx and GoToMeeting to show a common view to lots of people. You can use Twitter or Instant Messaging or Skype to create a real-time conferences. But cobbling these platforms together is unsatisfying and comprehensive sharing suites provided by the likes of Cisco are premium-priced.

What if Global Square solves this problem on their way to “extending our participatory model of decision-making beyond the direct reach of the assemblies and up to the global level?”

  • Distributed decision-making — Global Square wants to enable the “leaderless” distributed model that runs Occupy events. We’ve seen similar types of coalescence in social media via flash mobs, the so-called “smash and grab” flash mobs such as the one that terrorized shoppers at the Mall of America, and even in Groupon’s business model.

What if Global Square takes us all the way to a true distributed decision-making model? Such a model was envisioned in John Brunner’s classic, Shockwave Rider in which Delphi pools used the wisdom of crowds by enabling citizens to bet on important issues with the government making policy based on the results. Using prediction markets is not that far-fetched. The Bush administration’s John Poindexter’s Policy Analysis Market concept was abandoned (so they say) as a way to predict terrorist attacks. Embedding such markets in a social network to guide all kinds of decision-making is certainly feasible, and may well be an attractive feature to non-radicals.

  • Real-time language translation— For Global Square to achieve “a global square where people of all nations can come together as equals to participate in the coordination of collective actions and the formulation of common goals and aspirations” people speaking different languages need to be able to converse in real-time. This implies integration of a fast real-time translation capability which is already in use in some social networks.

Wouldn’t this capability be attractive to businesses and other multi-national organizations?

  • Project management — Organizing an Occupy protest, especially in a decentralized organization, requires good project management. Organizing a worldwide protest requires management and coordination on a large scale. In addition, a centralized inventory of Occupy assets worldwide would be required for Global Square’s mission.

This is another feature that may prove quite attractive to businesses and other multi-national organizations.

  • Anonymous alternative to the social graph — Facebook introduced their Social Graph as a means for users to log in to other sites using Facebook credentials. This has two effects. It enables many sites to streamline their login procedures, and it also allows external sites access to some or all of a Facebook user’s information. In addition, use of social graph on shared computers can be problematic, as a user’s login session can persist after they’ve left the computer. Although the manifesto doesn’t specifically call for an anonymous single sign-on, it seems clear that a network concerned with preventing user information from falling into law enforcement or governmental hands would require an anonymous way for users to log in, and that method would undoubtedly be extended to other participating networks.

Many social media users are concerned with privacy matters and might be attracted to networks that offer more control than Facebook.

If Global Square succeeds in building their network with these features, their effort could embolden others to challenge the status quo by adopting their feature set. If Global Square takes the step of offering their code via an Open Source license, adoption by current or new social networks would be assured.

All of this would feed into a rapidly accelerating trend called the Web of One. With all the personalization of users’ experience — extending from Google localization and personalization to the nichification of TV news represented by Fox News and MSNBC — users can increasingly cocoon themselves into a self-referential personalized world where they only experience things that they already know they’ll like.

No matter what you think of this trend, it is unmistakable. And this might be the gale force driving the dismantling of the Facebook empire through the proliferation of Global-Square-like niche networks.

Or not. The only thing we know for sure is that size does not necessarily ensure survival, online or in the real world. Remember, only General Electric remains of the original 1896 Dow Jones index, and Ford is the only intact company among the top 100 corporations from 1900. And so the question that titles this post should be transformed as How Can the Current Social Networks Survive?

Even the Paranoid Have Enemies: Social Media and Law Enforcement

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Even the Paranoid Have Enemies: Social Media and Law Enforcement

In the previous post, You Say You Want a Revolution(ary) Social Network?, we examined why the Occupy movement wants their own network, which they announced via a manifesto entitled The Global Square: Towards an Online Platform for the Occupy Movement. In this post, we examine some reasons why Occupy feels they need to abandon existing social networks and build their own.

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Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest, quoted in a Wired magazine article, said “I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook. “We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists.”

There is good reason for dissident movements to mistrust commercial, mainstream social networks. Here are some examples:

  • Between September 2008 and October 2009, Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with customer GPS location information more than 8 million times
  • In December 2010, the U.S. district court in Alexandria, Virginia, granted an order asking Twitter to disclose information connected to four WikiLeaks-related accounts
  • Governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Iran, and others have shut down, restricted use, and mined social networks for information on dissidents
  • A Reuters review of the Westlaw legal database found that federal judges authorized at least two dozen warrants to search individuals’ Facebook accounts since 2008. Many requested a personal data such as messages, status updates, links to videos and photographs, calendars of future and past events, “Wall postings” and “rejected Friend requests.”
  • In 2010 Google complied with 94 percent of law enforcement requests for personal data, including search history. In six months, Google reported receiving 4,601 requests for data from the U.S. government. Google also reported an increase of 29 percent in the number of US requests in the first six months of 2011 compared to the previous reporting period.
  • Twitter released a subpoena they received from the Suffolk County Massachusetts District Attorney’s Office for information on user @P0isAn0N, a popular conspiracy blogger who calls himself Guido Fawkes.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted an Excel file of the various social networks’ privacy policies, which generally say they will cooperate with law enforcement without notifying users. Clearly, the Occupy movement has reason to worry that such tactics may be used against lawful activities they may indulge in.

But can such a network be built and survive in the long run? That’s the subject of the next post, How Can a Renegade Social Network Survive?

You Say You Want a Revolution(ary) Social Network?

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You Say You Want a Revolution(ary) Social Network?

In the previous post, Anonymous’ Renegade Social Network Threatens Status Quo?, we took a look at the manifesto entitled The Global Square: Towards an Online Platform for the Occupy Movement that the Occupy movement (as in Occupy Wall Street) has released and stated that this effort could represent a threat to the Facebook social network hegemony and ignite a fragmentation movement for other niche groups to create their own networks. In this post, we examine why Occupy wants their own network.

You Say You Want a RevolutionAttributionSome rights reserved by List

Seceding from Social Media

So why does the Occupy movement want their own social network? One reason is because Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have routinely responded to law enforcement requests and demands for information on the identities of the movement’s members. And because governments have shut down social networks in an attempt to quash popular uprisings, especially during the Arab Spring.

The Occupy folks figure that if they own the networks, and the networks don’t follow a typical hierarchical management structure, it will be impossible for authorities to find someone to act on a subpoena or request to shutter the Global Square network. By distributing the ownership/management/responsibility/hosting of this network, the protesters may hope to avoid the experience of WikiLeaks where Julian Assange represented a single throat to choke.

However, as Wired reports, the builders of this new distributed network have goals beyond the Occupy movement. “They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.”

I think the movement would do well to follow the development path that Linux blazed back in 1991. Founder Linux Torvalds stated then: “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu.)” Today Torvalds’ “hobby” runs 60 percent of Websites, is the basis for Macintosh, iPhone and Android operating systems, and earns more than $10 billion annually just in the server market alone.

By emphasizing a decentralized, merit-based, volunteer development process with Torvalds as the final arbiter, Linux attracted thousands of developers and made Linux a worldwide phenomenon. The Linux Foundation reported in 2009: “Since 2005, over 5000 individual developers from nearly 500 different companies have contributed to the kernel.”

So there exists a model that Occupy could adopt in creating their social network. However, perhaps because of the need to work more quickly, the manifesto states: “It is important to note, however, that the project will require significant funding, as well as a team of full-time professional developers.” As soon as paychecks are involved, the autonomy and legal isolation the movement seeks becomes a lot more difficult.

Why does Occupy feel that they can’t get what they need from existing sites and need to create their own social network? That’s the topic of the next post, Even the Paranoid Have Enemies: Social Media and Law Enforcement.

Anonymous’ Renegade Social Network Threatens Status Quo?

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Anonymous’ Renegade Social Network Threatens Status Quo?

The Occupy movement (as in Occupy Wall Street) has released a manifesto entitled The Global Square: Towards an Online Platform for the Occupy Movement that could represent a threat to the Facebook hegemony and ignite a fragmentation movement for other niche groups to create their own networks.

ROAR anonymous

In typical Occupy fashion, the manifesto states:

This is a proposal made by a group of concerned global citizens who also act as volunteers for Take the Square, United for Global Change, 15october.net, European Revolution and Reflections on a Revolution (ROAR). We do not pretend to represent or speak on behalf of anyone but ourselves.

The various interlocking groups noted in the statement are:

  • Take the Square — A movement “born from the demonstration on May 15, 2011 in Madrid” which is also referred to as the 15M movement and the Indignants movement. Like many Occupy/Arab Spring movements, these protest actions were organized via social networks. It is estimated that between 6.5 and 8 million Spaniards have participated in these protests.
  • United for Global Change — This group tracks Occupy movements worldwide, claiming that there are “currently 1,039 events in around 87 countries.”
  • 15october.net — This site features a “a proposal for the general assemblies of the Occupy #O15 movement” that encourages the people of the world to “rise up and demand that our G20 leaders immediately impose a 1% #ROBINHOOD tax on all financial transactions and currency trades.” The site further states: “This movement is not guided, it is clearly born as a reaction to injustice and corruption around the world, and therefore it is destined to change the underlying values of the system, not only the rules of it.”
  • European Revolution — A loose collection of Occupy groups in Europe that state: “We blame the economic and political forces for our bad situation and demand the necessary change of course. We call on all citizens, under the motto ‘Real Democracy NOW. We are not a commodity lying in the hands of politicians and bankers.’ to take to the street to protest.”
  • Reflections on a Revolution (ROAR) — An online magazine that “seeks to amplify the voice of our generation amidst the clamorous cacophony of a rapidly changing world. ROAR was founded in San Francisco in 2010 as an initiative of Spearhead Action Group, an NGO that champions the creation of a more just and more sustainable world.”

The hallmark of this movement, which is distinct from but closely associated with other Anonymous movements such as the Anonymous hackers and the Anonymous protestors against Scientology, is a decentralized, “leaderless” organizational style. Many movement members deeply distrust the global leaders whom they blame for the economic collapse of worldwide financial institutions and their own often dire economic circumstances. Many blame the cult of personality and the rigid hierarchical structure of current societal institutions for the many of the world’s problems.

So why do they want their own social network? That’s the subject of the next post, You Say You Want a Revolution(ary) Social Network?

Design Effective Social Media Community Processes

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Design Effective Social Media Community Processes

In our previous post, Create Your Social Media Engagement Plan, we gave you some tips on creating your engagement plan. In this post, we take a look at designing the processes you’ll use to manage your social media community.

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Design Your Community Processes

Think about how your community is going to interact with the social computing platform, whether it’s a public platform like Facebook, a do-it-yourself platform like Ning, or your own customized platform. If the user experience is frustrating, people won’t stay. It’s worthwhile to hire professionals to help you design the look and feel of your site and to test its usability. And by the way, this advice goes for your main site as well.

Good examples of user experience principles you should consider are contained in the following table, abridged and adapted from the excellent Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce handbook, Online Engagement Guidelines.[1]

User
Experience Principle

Description

Anti-Pattern
Examples (What Not To Do)
Show me what’s in it for me? Reduce uncertainty about participation.Enable community members to understand the purpose of the online engagement, and to have visibility into the process itself.Members need certainty about the activities and engagement process before they commit to participation. Forcing users to register before they can view activities.Hiding aspects of the engagement process because it is not time yet for that step.Deploying a particular technology used for online engagement in isolation.
Make it easy to contribute People who want to contribute may be busy, may be inexperienced or cautious computer users, or they may simply be nervous about contributing. Help them participate by:

  • Streamlining the process for contribution by, for example, minimizing the number of steps for registration by allowing people to log in using their Facebook or other sites’ credentials,[2] or eliminating it altogether.
  • Providing different methods for participation such as multimedia, video, active mechanisms (such voting against comments) or passive mechanisms (based on activity, such number of views).
  • Allowing collaborative methods of contribution, for example using a forum or a wiki. Moderation processes such as requiring approval for all posts may also make it harder to participate. See Where are we up to?
 Forcing users to register separately before they can contribute.Not providing a rich text editor.Separating the submission of content step from the viewing of contributions.Not allowing participants to contribute directly.
Let me tell my friends Allow users to share information and activity through their own social networks. Make it easy for participants to share content and their activities, for example, by adding a Facebook “Like” button or an AddThis button to your site.[3]For closed or offline engagement activities, it may still be beneficial to provide mechanisms to share information about the engagement process itself or participation in an activity.(Also see Help me keep up with activities) Not providing functionality to share on social media or social networking sites.Not providing activity stream feeds.Not allowing the online engagement solution to be indexed by search engines.Not providing static URLs to pages and anchors to individual participant’s contributions.
Where are we up to? If the online engagement process involves any kind of asynchronous step — such as registration, submission of content (including comment moderation processes), tally of results, competition results, etc. Participants must be kept informed about progress.This will not only help to manage the expectations of participants about the particular step but will also encourage them to stay engaged with the process.Also see Show me what happened? Moderating comments to a blog without providing any indication about how long it will take for comments to be approved.Asking people to sign up for an event with limited places, but not indicating how many places are left.
Help me to keep up with activities Keeping people up to date with activities is critical to ensuring ongoing participation throughout the engagement process.Multiple methods and channels should be supported, including, email, Real Simple Syndication (RSS),[4] mobile phone messaging (SMS),[5] microblogging[6] (Twitter and others), activity stream sharing[7] and instant messaging.[8]Mobile and other access channels should also be supported.Whenever possible (and appropriate) content and information should be delivered to participants, rather than forcing them to visit the site where it originated. Only providing a single mechanism for receiving updates — for example, email only.Not providing participants with the option to select which activity, how much, how frequently or what information streams they want to follow — for example, all or nothing approach.
Show me what happened? Report and provide access to outcomes of all online and offline activities.Providing easy access to the outcomes or steps of an engagement process, regardless of whether it was ultimately completed on- or offline, will help to support both the legitimacy and value of that engagement. Doing so will also help to encourage participation in the future. Archiving or restricting access to content and activities generated during the engagement process as soon as it has been completed.Waiting until long after the process has completed before sharing information with participants.

Next up: Social Media Engagement on Your Site

 

Design Effective Social Media Community Processes is the 28th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

[1] Available under a Creative Commons license: bit.ly/9k3jim

[2] You can ask your techies about using Open Authentication or Facebook’s Social Graph API.

[3] Point your techies to: bit.ly/bzw78P

[4] RSS definition: a family of formats that provide a way to publish frequently-updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. Users can subscribe to RSS feeds and read them in an RSS feed reader, such as Google Reader, without having to check each site they subscribe to for updates: bit.ly/cdx3Wx

[5] SMS definition: The text communication service component of mobile phones. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application in the world (bit.ly/9ftmze), with 2.4 billion active users, or 74 percent of all mobile phone subscribers. SMS text messages are generally limited to 160 characters: bit.ly/cE356R

[6] Microblogging definition: Generally, posting very short messages or comments as opposed to longer blog posts. Twitter is the most famous; others include Tumblr, Plurk, Emote.in, Beeing, Jaiku and identi.ca: bit.ly/bJ9nPs

[7] Techies should see: bit.ly/ddnlJ1

[8] Instant Messaging definition: Also known as online chat, IM is real-time text-based networked messaging, typically relying on computer-installed clients that facilitate connections between specified known users. Examples include AOL Instant Messager (AIM), Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger. Some social networking sites, such as Facebook, have integrated their own instant messenging: bit.ly/dx2iPW

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Create Your Social Media Engagement Plan

In our previous post, Determine Social Media Engagement Readiness, we took a look getting ready to launch your engagement plan. In this post, we give an example of an engagement planning document.

Create Your Engagement Plan

Based on your listening and the preliminary planning based on the foregoing, lay out how you’re going to engage with the online community.

Your first step is a simple one: Determine Who, What, and Where.

You might try a format like this one.

Once you have defined your community, and the internal and external audiences you want to reach, think about:

  • In what ways can we use social media to communicate with each of these audiences?
  • When should we communicate (Year round? During other events or activities?)
  • What are some opportunities we may be missing?
  • What resources do we need?

Create a worksheet answering the first two questions for each of your audiences similar to the following.

Next up: Design Effective Social Media Community Processes

Create Your Social Media Engagement Plan is the 27th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

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