Shaping up for Social Corporate Engagement

February 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

In a previous post, I defended the idea that the use of social media by organizations to discuss corporate topics may be on the rise. Immediately after this, co-authoer Roxanne Varza described how 3 new social media platforms could be leveraged in your communications strategy.

Which is all well and fine, but we regularly hear the cries of overburdened PR and marketing managers : “how do we keep up with it all?”

Empower Me, Boss!

One of the secrets, probably the most important secret, is to learn to empower others to do so for you. The reality of social media is that your employees probably use – and know – them better than most managers in the company. Face it.

How to empower, train, guide and organize employees from various departments and business units in your organization is the topic of our soon-to-be-released white paper “Is There a PR Pilot In Your Social Plane?”, which also deals with measuring results from this engagement. If you’d like to receive this, just drop us a line on our contact form.

Get in Shape

Web Strategy expert Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter group has also conducted surveys of organizations to find out how they structure their social media teams and made some suggestions towards facing the task proactively rather than becoming a “social media help-desk”.

A chart by Altimeter Group shows how social media teams are structured in large coporatiions

Structure of the Social Media Team. (c) Altimeter Group

In Strategy: Five Steps to Achieve ‘Escape Velocity’ –and Finally Stay out of the Social Media ‘Help Desk’, he gives the following recommendations to stay ahead of the game and plan long-term rather than spend your days in a short-term reactive mode that lowers your value drastically :

  1. Be proactive. Provide business units and services with what they need before they ask.
  2. Adopt a hub and spoke structure. Do not centralise everything or you will not cope.
  3. Enable others. Relinquish control and teach. This is one of the focuses of our white paper.
  4. Deploy scalable technology. Monitoring and sharing are part of this.
  5. Deploy programs beyond marketing. Again, a central focus of our white paper.

And in Data: Composition of a corporate social media team, he gives very interesting insight into how teams are currently organised in large corporations (click above picture to access the article).

Interestingly, Altimeter predict that corporate social media strategists will work themselves out of a job (because they will have empowered other teams to operate their own programs) but that “a core team will always be required to coordinate the enterprise”. Hear! Hear!

What I personally disagree with is the concluding statement that “this will evolve into a customer experience team (or back into the CX team)”. Borrowing again from their increasingly rich repository of reports and surveys, here is a prediction of annual occurrences of social media crises.

A graph describing the rising number of annual social media crises in large organzations

Annual Social Media crises. (c) Altimeter Group.

I strongly believe that customer experience teams will react to short-term hiccups in near real-time. But with reputation management now a number 1 on fast growing companies’ top social media priorities, coordination will both be more and more important and will absolutely need to include input from the PR and reputation management team.

Again, I ask “Is there a PR Pilot in your Social Media plane?” What do you think ?

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12 important goals for a monitoring plan

January 27, 2012 by 1 Comment

While monitoring – particularly of the social subspecies – is on everyone’s lips today, it is often considered in only one of two contexts:

  • Customer feedback: by monitoring all customer expression channels (social media, phone, email …) and applying heavy technological machinery to face the daunting task of analysing the huge volumes implied, a summary of pain points can be extracted in order to alter the very structure of internal services and support
  • online PR measurement: since media production and consumption has shifted online in the past few years, paper clippings are no longer sufficient to evaluate the success of PR campaigns and online monitoring is used to complete the picture

While both are very valid uses, I’d like to point out a few more. Not because of a sudden crave for encyclopedic endeavours, however pleasant that may be, but because recent evolutions in the social and media landscape dictate profound changes in the way companies and organizations engage with their publics and monitoring is the single most important tool to navigate these often complex waters.

How the Web was won

This is a chart we use on our website to explain the four phases of engagement that must be considered in any communications campaign: Listen, Map, Engage, Measure …

Listen, Map, Engage, Measure. 4 steps in agile campaign management

4 phases of Engagement in a web 2.0 environment


… and back again.

That “back again” is the essential part! While in the past you could plan, execute and measure, the web 2.0 has changed all this and mobile is only making it more complex. The minute a message leaves your company (very often, way before that …) it is amplified, distorted and relayed at various speeds and frequencies depending on media, channels and communities. As previously mentioned on this blog, this new environment requires your PR and communications to learn from Agile and Extreme programming methodologies in order to adapt. Monitoring is essential to plan ahead and gain rapid feedback from all possible channels.

Who you engage, how, and what you measure to keep the boat pointing in the right direction are important aspects of your monitoring plan. The real takeaway is that monitoring is behind all four of these phases.

12 essential goals

OK, I lied. I don’t have 12. 12 sounded like a great number. Large enough to pull the crowds and not so large that I would scare anyone away. But the fact is that the number varies on your own campaign. What are you trying to achieve? Consider all the aspects of your campaign then choose the most relevant from the list below and add your own!!

So, here we go, in no particular order.

Preparing a product launch

Chances are your new product will appeal to many audiences: users who want to know when and how and how much; journalists, who want to know what to write, whether it’s worth their time (unless you’re Apple); bloggers, who want to be the first to spread the news and gain influence and credit (and traffic); resellers, who want to know whether you have addressed past product criticism, whether the rumors about a feature are true …

All of these audiences and expectations need to be identified and addressed for a successful launch. For a recent and compelling example, see how Nokia launched their Lumia 800 after years of struggling in the smartphone market.

Counting on my fingers, that’s at least 4, right there !

Preparing your entry on social media

With Facebook rocketing towards the billionth member mark, not a day goes by without 20 messages turning up in my mail box enticing me to join the party and triple my company’s revenue on social media. Yet the reality is more sobering, and for every success story, ten companies are realizing the emperor really is naked.

The withheld truth is that social media is not a one-size-fits-all marketing venue. Set foot on the wrong network with the wrong approach, and that free community will suddenly look very costly.

Here are a few things you can measure before pressing the GO button:

  • Find out where your prospects/customers are. There’s no point in painting your house blue for Facebook if you should be thinking of Linkedin instead
  • Find out what the hot discussion topics are. Listen before you talk. Identify areas where you can add value
  • Understand the internal gearing of the community. Who pioneers the news, who relays it, who is vocal but not listened to, who is really influential …
  • Understand critical engagement points. What are the positive topics? What are the negative? What ideas are associated to your brand or products? Are there any false rumors going round …

+4 !

Finding your reputation drivers

As they do every year, Edelman have just published the latest edition of their worldwide Trust Barometer, analysing reputation drivers throughout the world. While I used to be (and still am) a huge fan of that enormous survey, I do have to admit that the granularity somehow doesn’t cut it anymore.

Reputation drivers must be measured on the community level to be acted upon and will be different for every company. Measure what blogs are saying about you and compare that to online media and traditional media. While the main stories will be the same, the finer points of view won’t.

Now, let me count … that’s plenty more.

Optimizing your channels

You have successfully engaged with multiple social media communities, you have a regular newsletter shipping, strong relationships with journalists and bloggers …

You have a corporate message to get across.

Measuring the efficiency of media kits across channels

In which channel is it being best received (open-rates, click-through rates) and relayed (retweets, +1, LIKEs …)? Which format suits which channel best? Answers to these questions are key to optimizing your 1 to many engagement.

Media monitoring

Cheating again! I mentioned that in my introduction.

Yes, but, should you stop monitoring TV and newspapers just because of your online feed? Maybe, maybe not? Which are your strongest lead generators? Where are your opponents being most listened to? What is your competition doing? What is your share of voice on the various channels? All this must be plainly visible from a single vantage point. You can then eliminate what is not providing actionable information.

I’ve stopped counting, by now. I need my fingers to type this.

Public affairs, CSR and stakeholder engagement

Who are the best stakeholders to meet for a specific campaign? Influence is one thing to consider. The more influential the person, the greater the amplification of your message.

But that’s not all. Obviously, you’ll want to know what she’s been talking/writing/filming about recently. Anything about you, or your competition? Are there topics you’re not likely to agree about?

But that’s still not all. What been said/written/filmed about her? influential or not, the reactions she triggers might not be the ones you are looking for? What is her own image within your target audience? …

Bottom line, I promise

There are many more uses and goals, whether you’re a public sector corporation, an agency looking after you client’s visibility, a global company or a niche SMB.

But I hope by now my message is clear : monitoring is no longer (only) a question of plugging a clipping provider’s data stream into an application and counting mentions. As more and more departments and employees are becoming a part of your relations with the outside world, many more sources of information for planning and feedback should be integrated into and shared as a convenient and consistent whole to steer the whole organization towards its top line goal.

Sharing the results of monitoring

Sharing the results of monitoring

Offline media, online media, social media, one to one engagement, events, surveys … all are sources of precious information that need to be considered as monitoring and integrated into your daily tools and processes.

If you have any specific monitoring goals in mind I haven’t mentioned here, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment.

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How your everyday niggles can help you plan for major crises

December 9, 2011 by Leave a comment

My work at Augure implies a lot of train travel, which, frankly, I love. There’s no other mean of transport I can think of that is remotely as conducive to concentration, rêverie or conversation (or secretly watching the last episode of Desperate Housewives over your neighbour’s shoulder, without sound) than a TGV, France’s record breaking fast train. It’s simply addictive and I look forward to it every time in spite of traveling times at which no human should be made to wake up.

But sometimes, French rail just gets it wrong. Here’s a company that has the know-how to ship billions of people across France every year yet manages to blow the most benign incident into an infuriating experience out lack of communication empathy.

Early morning TGV train ride to Paris

Here’s the scenario. It’s happened to me so many times I was able to foretell its outcome at the first symptoms, last Tuesday evening, and had finished writing this blog post in my mind well before the end.

The incident

As the train is being prepared for travelers to board, a malfunction is found in the head locomotive, which will need replacing and will induce delays. Now, for a team that prepares several thousand trains every month and has likely faced the exact same situation hundreds of time over the years, the duration of this intervention is probably a fairly well-known constant. And yet, here’s what communication looks like on the traveler’s side:

  1. 6 minutes before departure, the platform number is not known, several automated announcements have been explaining a difficulty in train preparation, yet the train is still described as on schedule by the hall monitors. Since trains never leave less than 15-20 minutes after the platform is announced, regulars like me already know that to be impossible.
  2. 3 minutes before departure, a 10 minute delay is announced. Which, again, is already impossible, because it’s already too late and the platform is still not known. Some grumpies are already fretting.
  3. 10 minutes later a new message appears, adding another 10 minutes to the official time of departure (that’s 20 altogether). Which, again, is more than unlikely. By this time, some people have been standing for more than 30 minutes and unhappy puffing is spreading.
  4. 10 minutes later, the 20 minute delay is still on the monitor, amounting to a theoretical departure time that is now some minutes in the past. Elderly people are now seriously cold and tired. Human courtesy being what it is, the 4 available benches (in a room with hundreds of people) are used up by teens playing with their iPads. No officials are there to explain anything or give advice. Only the automated public address speakers and monitors keep us informed of the next move.
  5. Finally, we get a call for the platform, just over 35 minutes late.

A possible alternative

Now, let’s give the situation some context: this is the Christmas period, the station is surrounded with caffes and shops and most travelers, myself included, would be very happy to sit it out with a cuppa or get ahead of Christmas shopping. A very early message explaining “something’s wrong please come back in 30 minutes” would be ample information. Luxury would be an SMS reading “Hey, sorry about the delay, your train will be ready to leave at 7:15 PM. Have a nice trip”. Everyone is aware that problems happen and 90% of my neighbours would have appreciated the human touch. Instead of which, a very minor incident was turned into anger and strong language.

Learning the small lessons

Benign crises such as this one happen all the time in all businesses. They are not threatening to the company or its stakeholders. But instead of being shrugged off as insignificant or ignored, they should be used as preparation and rehearsal for potential worse events in the future.

Here’s a team that has the ability to whisk 400 people across a country at 200mph in silence, comfort and security and that ends up looking bad because of the tiny details. Remember that in the age of social, there are no insignificant crises. Each episode is an opportunity to look better and more human or a risk of looking like you just don’t care.

Whatever the magnitude of the problem always ask yourself:

  • Who does this affect?
  • Will anyone know?
  • Should I acknowledge the issue publicly ? It’s not always necessary to do so if only a small group of stakeholders is impacted and can be addressed more efficiently in another way.

Once a decision has been made, inform as early, frequently and accurately as possible. Don’t over promise, be reliable and useful.

If you have other examples of similarly mishandled day-to-day niggles (and suggestions on how to make them better), please leave me a comment. I’d love to hear about them.

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Image courtesy of Dear SusanS

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Helping your Facebook fans help you – with engagement

December 2, 2011 by 1 Comment

2011 has been a big year for Facebook. New features were launched to make the world’s largest social network an indispensable tool for companies and to monetize its continent sized fan base via new forms of engagement and advertising. A few weeks ago, I asked whether the new Timeline, which appears to be still rolling out slowly, would help PR Pros or not.

More recently, I argued that using social media exclusively as a short-term branding tool was dangerous for corporate reputation management, that engagement is key to long-term social media success and that PR should always be involved in defining the organisation’s social media strategy.

Facebook F8 presented new features for PR and marketing

In this post, I’d like to examine some of the other news from Facebook to determine whether and how these may impact PR and reputation management.

What makes your fans tick ?

Among the slew of new features announced at Facebook’s F8 conference last September are new buttons that go beyond the LIKE action. This is Facebook’s first step towards making fans share more and in more varied ways. VIEWING, SHARING and others are being made possible, and content publishers are even able to create their own button through apps to suit their own publications.

More significantly, and far more controversially, Facebook introduced the Ticker on the right hand side of the page, to show you what your friends are doing, who they are friending, what cafe they are checking into and what brands or products they are liking.

The facebook ticker

The ticker was met with almost universal criticism. From users, who claim it simply provides too much information into their friends’ lives. And from many many experts denouncing privacy scares.

Since the introduction that feature, many articles have been written to explain how to protect yourself from it and even how to remove it altogether (thanks to a Google Chrome extension, how surprising ;) ).

But Ticker is amajor component of Facebook’s business plan, along with Top stories and Sponsored Stories.

Beyond the obvious personal branding/reputation associated to ticker, its significance is due to the fact that it now integrates Sponsored stories in its feed. Sponsored stories are adverts in which the text is not written by the advertiser but is extracted from a fan’s update or action: Eric LIKEs the latest news from your company and all of Eric’s friends will see an advert for your news containing his “this is really interesting” update. This is significant because, according to Facebook, sponsored stories have much more impact than conventional advertising.

Top Stories, the final element in Facebook’s engagement trilogy, may be even more important to PR and reputation management professionals. Indeed, while the news feed on your Facebook page has always been presented in chronological order, top stories can be pushed up to the top of your feed is enough of your friends have liked it or commented on it. I already mentioned EdgeRank – Facebook’s feed filtering algorithm, that determines what friend and brand updates you actually see in your newsfeed – in 5 reasons not to count Fans on Facebook. The algorithm strengthens the visibility of brands you engage with and reduces it for others. Top stories push this idea one big step forward.

Finding engaging content to publish

Obviously, producing and publishing engaging content on Facebook is key to starting engagement. How do you know what your fans like best ?

Smart Insights recently published an interesting infographic describing the basic types of sharers in the UK and what content they like to share best.

But this is generic and the best way to understand what your community wants is to … listen to discussions. Listening will give you insight in major issues, major likes and dominant speakers. But I’ll tell you much, much more about this in my next post ! Stay tuned :)

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Cross channel social engagement in Augure’s Autumn release

November 18, 2011 by 2 Comments

This isn’t the easiest period for running a company. Not only are twitchy financial markets making life harder for brand owners and their clients, but reputation drivers that are having a strong effect on businesses are changing very quickly and are being influenced by more and more by social channels that are notoriously difficult to harness effectively.

In CEOs Must Engage All Stakeholders (Harvard Business Review), Venkat Ramaswamy and Kerimcan Ozcan state: “Any attempt to reform capitalism must first take stock of the structural shifts in value creation that we are witnessing in society today. Because of the web, social media, and advances in mobile and interactive communications and information technologies, the experiences of human beings are now at the heart of value creation.”

Confirming this from the CEO’s perspective are the results of a recent Weber Shandwick survey: “Global brand executives attribute 52% of their brand’s reputation to how social it is today. They project it to be 65% in three years”.

Driving your social reputation consistently

What this means in practical terms is that the influence of social discussions on reputation in gaining and has as much impact as more traditional (and easy to engage) stakeholders. Perhaps even more importantly, it implies that messaging consistency (an essential factor of trust and reputation) has to be maintained through more channels than ever before.

Those were the main drivers behind the recent months of development that lead to two main features of Augure’s Autumn 2011 release:

  • The Online Presskit. While a previous version had enabled social publication of press releases and other documents, the online presskit embeds cross channel online publication into your campaign management and engagement projects. It lets you constitute a library of documents and messages, publish to social media, blogs, mail and other channels and measure the efficiency document by document and channel by channel. It tracks the success of your social campaign through time and provides actionable insight for building future campaigns.
    • Augure's online press kit

    The new Online Presskit

  • ComSuite mobile. Our previous mobile application, ComDecision mobile, enabled analysis of cross media coverage and reputation away from the office. ComSuite mobile complements it through engagement on the go: all your contacts, your past activites with them, their publications are just a couple of clicks away to prepare an appointment or exchange information between planes.

On top of these major features, ComSuite’s menu system and media files have received an overhaul to mirror our Map, Engage, Measure motto more closely.

All three evolutions contribute to the common goal of enabling more varied, cross channel engagement while ensuring consistency of messaging and measurement, by providing a holistic view of all channels used to interact with specific contacts and analysing one by one what channel is best suited for a given person.

These are just the tip of the social iceberg being sculpted by our R&D. An iceberg that is integrating social identity deeper into every process and placing online and social media monitoring more at the heart of PR than ever before. Speaking of monitoring, we have great news coming soon. Stay tuned !

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Why your brand image could be crippling your corporate reputation

October 14, 2011 by 5 Comments

It has been argued that corporate reputation is an aggregate of the company’s image over long periods but that’s not entirely true. And confusing image with reputation could in fact lead to a degradation of the latter.

It’s all relative

Let me explain.

Building brand image is trying to establish strong, favourable and unique associations with the brand in the consumer’s mind. When you think of Nike, the swoosh – Athena’s wings – comes to mind. So do the slogan “Just do it” and associations with high performing athletes.

Nike's swoosh

Corporate Reputation, on the other hand is the sum of perceptions by all stakeholder groups relative to their reputation drivers. World wide surveys such as Edelman’s Trust Barometer reveal what these reputation drivers are, year after year, at the country level.

But for a corporation, these can – and do – change with geography and stakeholder types. Consumers might or might not be happy with product quality. NGOs may still have memories of underaged labour or environmental misconduct. Partners may appreciate doing business with the company. Employees may love internal training and salaries but dislike work conditions …

  • One is about changing mindsets, the other about listening.
  • One is about selling products, the other about enabling business.
  • One is short-term, the other lasts for years. Years ago, Nike signed onto the Global Compact in an attempt to promote an environmentally and socially responsible image but negative associations still linger ten years on.

Social Media should not be (exclusively) a branding channel

Nowhere is stakeholder monitoring (and engagement) more important than in corporate reputation management. In order to find the reputation drivers and issues relative to them, there simply is no alternative to listen and engage.

Reputation barometers such as the Reputation Institute’s are vast surveys asking stakeholders what matter most to them. PR guidelines such as those published by the IPR and AMEC are constantly pushing towards primary reasearch because it is an area that has demonstrated the ability to provide actionable insights and meaningful information.

social media activity types for large french companies

Click the image to access our study (in French)

And yet, social media, the one area where organisations can engage directly with their public is very rarely used to question visitors and discuss social or environmental issues. It does happen, but more often social media is being used to promote brand image, run community-boosting contests or games and develop entertainment programs.

We have just released a study showing how France’s largest corporations are using social media. After recent surveys revealed how much social activity was being devoted by the public to these companies and their boards, we evaluated how these companies were responding.

We measured their presence on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube, their publication frequency, the variety of activities on these networks and community engagement. You can read the complete analysis on our website by clicking on the picture above, but here are three takeaways:

  • Companies tweet about 100x less than their public
  • Only 8% of social activity is devoted to bilateral engagement
  • Community engagement is non-existent for 70% of companies

Marketing and PR could share ownership of social media

In her book No Logo, writer Naomi Klein noted: “In many ways branding is the Achilles heel of the corporate world. The more these companies shift to being all about brand meaning and brand image, the more vulnerable they are to attacks on image.” That was a decade ago. But it remains as true today and nowhere is it more in evidence than on social media.

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that a Facebook page dealing only with the company’s environmental programs would remain quite empty and would not sell many products. But a combined effort between marketing and communications teams would likely be profitable to both. Organisations that have gathered large communities could listen to them more actively and combine reputation management with brand building. Just do it!

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Breaking free from reputation measurement silos

July 1, 2011 by 1 Comment

Silver Bullet In the first part of this article, I explained that no silver bullet single metric can adequately describe corporate reputation and described how most existing reputation measures fall into three categories:

  • Fashionable social media focused measures such as fans and likes
  • Primary research studies, periodically targeting either the general public or more specialized stakeholder groups in their surveys or focus groups
  • Monitoring-based solutions that evaluate in real-time the impact of (traditional, online and social) media exposure on a company’s stakeholders

While all these solutions have great advantages and some drawbacks, the real problem they present is a traditional one of ownership and measurement silos. Since results are rarely comparable and all target different services within the organisation, they make a bird’s-eye view interpretation very difficult.

Consistent messaging and consistent measurement

Reputation management has turned into a very fragmented market place with a very long tail indeed and the very definition of reputation has seen so many variations in the mouths of the numerous actors as to seem lost in myth. And it’s true that a formal definition of corporate reputation is hard to come by. The Financial Times Lexicon proposes the following, which is probably consensual enough for my use:

The term refers to the observers’ collective judgments of a corporation based on assessments of financial, social and environmental impacts attributed to the corporation over time.

More important than a definition, is the impact of reputation. The difference in corporate reputation between two companies mean that an identical event in both will induce different reactions from their respective stakeholder groups. The organisation with better reputation will recruit and retain better employees, increase profitability, lower legal costs, receive greater interest from investors and partners, navigate crises more smoothly, benefit from greater customer loyalty …

So reputation must be measured accordingly, as a perceptual capital in the eyes of all the organisation’s important stakeholder groups. Any (good) measurement system or study that focuses exclusively on one group and/or one department can be useful for tactical purposes, but in creating a measurement silo, it cannot provide the C-level with the complete dataset essential for strategic reputation management.

Just as consistent messaging from all communication touch points is essential for creating reputation, integrated measurement is a prerequisite for stakeholder analysis. And the two should hinge around the same communication pillars and messages.

Working with an integrated measurement framework

In Post Advertising Value Equivalent – New PR Measurement Metrics, I presented David Michaelson’s Valid Metrics Matrix, a table for organizing your various metrics into a meaningful framework.

Measuring reputation with the Valid Metrics MatrixThe matrix has two axes:

  • Horizontally, the progress from mere creation of awareness to the actions you would like your stakeholders to take
  • Vertically, the progress from company activity (press releases, community management, events) to intermediary effect (media coverage, blog posts from industry experts …) and finally to target audience effect (buying products, voting for a candidate, participating in clinical tests …)

The grid on the left is dedicated to reputation building. Click on it to access the complete version on the AMEC website.

Using such a framework, and having defined the most relevant topics on which you must communicate and measure perceptions, you can set goals and decide what indicators best represent success and track your progress within a meaningful context.

Sentiment EvolutionUsing our own ComSuite and ComDecision, for instance, you can define corporate messages, create campaigns and projects around them, distribute information organise events, meet with important stakeholders then measure open rates, click rates, stakeholder sentiment in surveys or social media, analyse media coverage, segments along countries, media types, sentiment scores, stakeholder groups, topics … ensuring all messaging and measurement hinge around common concepts whatever the service or targeted stakeholder group. You may also want to organise focus-groups or general public surveys. Combining all these reputation management tools within the context of the Valid Metrics Matrix guarantees that all the indicator values you have collected contribute to a common goal and can be interpreted with their true use in mind.

As usual, your feedback is welcome on this topic.

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Silver Bullet train Creative Commons image by Stuhacking

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Let policies and guidelines power your social media engagement

June 3, 2011 by 4 Comments

As noted in Should companies fear social media blunders?, the fear of employee misconduct on social media is a recurring corporate executive nightmare. So much so that many companies still shy away from social media engagement, missing out altogether on the potential benefits of direct engagement with their public, simplified customer support, increased media coverage …

Social media guidelines and policies are the cure to this. But they should follow certain rules to be effective.

Making guidelines usable

First of all, these are not legal documents! Remember your goal is to promote engagement, not scare everyone away. Education and encouragement are key. Anything that looks legally binding will detract even the most enthusiastic of your employees.

Forbidden

Secondly, understand the distinction between guidelines and policies. Although there is no hard rule,

  • Policies usually describe how to interact with social media on behalf of the company, while
  • Guidlines are sets of recommendations for employees using social media privately, to avoid any misconduct that could reflect badly on the company’s image.

Your actual naming is not important, but acknowledging the two situations is.

Third, keep it simple. Two well understood pages are better than 20 long and boring pages that no one will read and follow. There is nothing special in social media that warrants such lengthy documentation. You expect good conduct of your employees in any situation: at work, in a bar, on the road, in public buildings. These policies and guidelines should simply explain how social media work, what is considered good etiquette or not and what kind of messaging is accepted or not (no hard marketing, for instance).

Some examples of good practise

Many companies that have successfully embraced social media have made their own guidelines and policies public.

Intel is one such company. Their ‘on behalf-of Intel’ guidelines are brief, no-nonesense and to the point. Interesting quotes are:

What you write is ultimately your responsibility. Participation in social computing on behalf of Intel is not a right but an opportunity, so please treat it seriously and with respect.
Are you adding value? There are millions of words out there. The best way to get yours read is to write things that people will value.
Did you screw up? If you make a mistake, admit it.

Intel’s guideline are kept short because they refer to a more general code of conduct and privacy policies.

Recenlty, TNT also made their ‘private use’ TNT-Social-Media-Guidelines public. The document is more comprehensive but manages to pack an introduction to social media, potential risks, practical DO’s & DON’Ts and how to react online in 4 easy-to-read pages.

There are as many possible ways of presenting these documents as there are corporate cultures. Laurel Papworth presented a digest of 40 examples on her blog and you will access hundreds more on the excellent social media governance website.

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Click! to a new PR measure

May 6, 2011 by Leave a comment

Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes! Three measures for three types of goals you can hope to achieve through your PR. While these are formally defined in the IPR’s Dictionary for Public Relations Measurement and Research, they are also explained very intuitively in terms of Exposure, Influence and Action by metricsman.

Measuring Outtakes (influence over your targeted audience) brings you one step closer to a true evaluation of ROI than measuring Outputs (the amount of exposure your PR bought you), and measuring outcomes (the action consequently undertaken by the audience you reached) is obviously even better. But the apparent complexity of a thorough A to Z measurement plan often leads to measuring Outputs almost exclusively and relying on such indicators as Advertising Value Equivalency in the hope to estimate financial profit from the measurement of Outputs only.

Click! Dollar!

Internet publication has both simplified and complexified this debate, as a quick glance at #pr20chat on Twitter will confirm.

  • On the one hand, it has multiplied the number of publication outlets and corresponding measures of success. A consequence of this diversity is the emergence of holy grail indicators just as silly as the AVE in the hope to justify ROI in a simple fashion.
  • On the other, the growing number of websites (e-commerce or not) with a well-known marketing funnel has given us easier access to an understanding of what financial outcome can mean.

If your website and its social media outposts have been designed around such a funnel, the relative value of a visit to any page is fairly well understood and any traffic driven to it by PR efforts can easily be measured in very practical terms.

So a click is a financial outcome?

It can be! But before some people get red in the face: it can also be an output. Or an outtake, for that matter … It all depends on the document you linked to. And it doesn’t have to be financial to matter.

What was the goal when the document/page you are linking to was written? Every click contributes to this goal. No more, no less:

  • If you are linking to an article written about your product, you are driving more exposure and measuring outputs.
  • If you are linking to a health warning campaign and know that 3% of readers begin the program you are promoting, then every 100 clicks mean 3 new programs started.
  • If you are linking to the contact form of your B2B program and know that each such lead is worth 2000£ to your company and that the rebound rate is 80%, then each click is worth 400£.

Integrated and holistic

Just as important as knowing the practical value of a click is being able to benchmark the various channels for efficiency. Counting clicks is a first step towards measuring engagement (which really requires monitoring comments and sentiment).

Clicks on a link published on various social networks

It shows how many contacts were willing to perform your intended action and understanding whether this was easier on Twitter, Facebook, in your Newsletter, on your blog or on Linkedin is precious information for the planning of your future campaigns.

Counting clicks is not the Holy Grail of PR Measurement for two reasons: (1) it lacks the monitoring aspect mentioned above and (2) contrarily to searching for the Holy Grail, it is easy to do well and derive meaningful information from.

So are you still counting fans or are you clicking to a new PR measure? What are your thoughts?

Filed under Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Social sharing in Augure’s reputation management suite

April 15, 2011 by 1 Comment

Regular readers know I never pitch Augure products on this blog, but today is different! The pitch will be short and the topic is not so much what I’m writing about as how I am writing about it !

Today, Augure shipped Version 6 of its PR and reputation management suite and this version is largely dedicated to pushing documents and information to social media and blog platforms and to monitoring stakeholder publications on all available channels directly from the software. Hence this post :)

Mixing it up! Social and traditional publication rolled into one

PR and Corporate Reputation Management are sometimes viewed very differently in different companies. Our vision is based on two main foundations:

  • A collaborative platform, to ensure consistency and speed
  • An integrated workflow, to ensure stakeholders can be reached using the most appropriate channel and protocols but also using the same process. Again, this is to avoid functional silos and disruptive actions.

Facebook update about the launch of Augure V6

V6 is a natural extension of these principles that helps users extend their reach to new channels and audiences without leaving familiar grounds or breaking the engagement and measure feedback loop.

So go on, pitch it!

OK! I promised I’d keep it short so here is a link to the new feature list and explanations on Augure V6 on our website: the sharing features, the analysis of impact on reputation and stakeholder relationship quality, how to use engagement history to plan new campaigns & how to use media coverage analysis in ComDecision, it’s all there.

The first piece of online content published via ComSuite

I’ll simply say that by publishing this link to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, email and wire from ComSuite I’ll finally be able to compare the efficiency of all these messages in one place. R&D even wrote its own URL shortener for more flexibility in analysing clicks.

Yeah, it may seem like a shameless pitch, but I’m actually pretty chuffed :)

So, please click-through so I can have fun analysing my reach and leave your thoughts and comments below !

Filed under Augure News Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

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