Tag Archives: Community Management
We’ve gotten beyond the idea that brands using social media is more than just a trend. This year, social media has reached a critical mass at which we must handle the audience playing in that space with intelligence and strategy – It is not a “B” platform to follow your “A” platforms.
A recent Emarketer piece reinforced this. The article titled US Social Network Usage: 2011 Demographic and Behavior Trends outlined the slowing, and projected continued slowing growth of unique new social network users. With the knowledge that growth is slowing and the assumption that less new users mean more seasoned or savvy users, does this mean that consumers will start to tune out attempts to market to them in social media? If we’re in this stage of saturation and tune-out, what is the next chapter in community management? I’m going to focus the remainder of this post on Facebook and Twitter, but a future post will detail other opportunities to evolve social media marketing for your brand.
It’s official: the Guinness Book of World Records has declared a new record for the fastest time to reach 1 million followers on Twitter. Not surprisingly, the “#winning” honor goes to the psycho celeb du jour, Charlie Sheen. Like a car crash, his bite-sized, 140-character nuggets of crazy have captured the attention of Tweeple the world over—at last count, his following is well over 2 million strong.
Is it Sheen’s extraordinary social media savvy that has everyone riveted? I think we’d all agree that’s not it. It’s more likely the poetic verse rolling from his fingertips and the spectacle of a train wreck unraveling before our eyes.
“This Warlock is in the breach. Poised. T – minus 51 mins. read my tigerblood dripping lips; you’ve been warned.”
Right…. Sheen, like the Ashton Kutchers and Kim Kardashians of the world, has what most of us do not: spell-bind celebrity status that draws people into their digital web of antics like moths to a flame.
So what strategy should the rest of us (whether brands or individuals) employ in order to achieve social media success?
After nearly a year of engaging with my client’s beloved fans about the product that they all owned and “Liked”, the community had grown thrice over and evolved into just another dissonant group of Facebook users who really just “Like” to converse about themselves.
So how do I know they weren’t like that all along? Unlike the playground bully’s Mom, I have the metrics to back it up and went straight to our Marketing Science team for help. The whole situation felt like the beginning of a bad joke.
A scientist and a social media-ist walk into a room…
It didn’t quite end with the punch line I’d hope for but from what I was able to make of their findings, this was no joke. The product passion had fizzled and the community was a narcissistic nightmare.
To get a better grasp of the affect of our posts on the community over time, I examined similar page posts from each of the community’s life stages (5,000+ fans, 10,000+ fans, and 15,000+ thousands fans) spanning the last 8 months and did a little AB testing. Not the kind of AB testing done on websites but I compared post semantics. It must have been something I said.
Whether you seek to praise or offend a community, you’re going to have to go through a pronoun first so I took a look at how I was using or misusing them in my posts. Some examples of pronouns are I, you, me, we, it, us, and they; basically the most self-involved rhetoric in all the English language so it only made sense to start there.
Extraordinary experiences come in a variety of forms, from the awe-inspiring Web site to a reminder of why you love your job. As a community moderator, my latest brush with an extraordinary social media experience was the latter. I was moved from blind-rage to placid-graciousness by one man and a Twitter handle. The story is one of Twitter customer service; at the end of the day, a well-served customer will shout your name from a mountain.
Flashback to Wednesday, Jan 12:
It all started with a call from an anonymous 800 number during my evening commute. It’s always jarring for anyone to get a call from a collections agency, but for someone who was taught to guard her credit with the same force as her purity, it’s especially disheartening. I was told that I owed $33 for a $25 modem that had been returned my senior year of college. Senior year: a lifetime ago, or 2.5 years, depending on how long your life is. Something felt off about this.
Flash forward through 2 hours of cell phone minutes later:
Feeling myself turn into an unpleasant person–and that’s generous–I removed myself from helpline purgatory and turned to Social Media. I had an “oh yeah!” moment on the consumer side of the Twitter customer service equation. Just when I needed someone to cut the crap, the 140-character limit came to my rescue.
One bitter tweet later:
Thinking I could get a reaction with the following tweet
“Oh hey UW grads, remember how terrible @Charter was? Still are. 2.5 years later – they decided that I lost a modem & billed me for it.”
I waited. Along came a Charter Communications representative, who used four Twitter consumer-relations tactics to neutralize the brand hater (i.e. me).
“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” – Sam Walton
We live in a world where we have access to just about anything and everything with a click, or two, of a button. There was a time when you would hear people talk about customer service and you would assume they were sharing a positive experience. Now when you hear customer service, you think of your worst story ever.
One of the keys to a successful business is how much emphasis you place on CRM. Henry Ford once said, “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” Whether you order a steak in a restaurant or purchase an iPad online, now more than ever consumers expect to be “taken care of.” Fulfilling the feeling like you’re being “taken care of” can come in many different forms but the one true key is simple… just LISTEN!
Almost any business can get a customer to try their product or service once. In order to have the consumer return, companies need to pay special attention to providing a positive experience from awareness to purchase and far beyond. Organizations retain customers online and offline simply by listening. People want to be heard. They will share their experiences and opinions if you ask (even when you don’t ask) in the hopes you will improve their experience. Listening to your audience shows that you care about them individually and can even make them feel like they are a part of your brand, which builds advocacy. If your customer–and specifically, your customer who belongs to a branded social community–thinks their opinion matters and they feel like they have influence on how you operate your business, the sky is really the limit.
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When I’m on social networking sites, I look for authenticity from the people I follow and the brands I interact with. Sure, that may be a given for many if not all users. However, when you think about the world we live in, filled with automation, filled with forms, filled with spam emails and the like, it’s essential to have a sense of realism coming from social accounts, especially when they are called “social” accounts.
What’s the point? Well, what I’m really talking about are brands online being authentic and transparent with the members. I am a Community Moderator. I am the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz if you will. The only thing that separates me from the community members is a thin veil of brand policy.
