Hi, I'm Christine. Welcome to Everything is Social - my blog to discuss all things digital and social media. I'm a 20-something who grew up in the digital world and is lucky enough to work in the space everyday. Read, interact, and let's talk.
All thoughts/opinions expressed are my own.
let’s talk about automating social media engagement, shall we?
I mentioned in my “social media management in times of national crisis” post my dislike of automating social media engagement and that we’d touch on that topic at another time.
Well, the time has come.
I understand the allure of scheduling social media posts. I get it. People are busy and crafting witty messages and uploading in real time takes a lot of effort. It’s simple to think that pre-crafting updates and setting them up to post automatically would be an easy solution.
But doing so opens the door for your brand to seem stale, your updates to reek of lacking humanity, and leaves you vulnerable to miss out on key opportunities.
Mickey Nall, 2013 PRSA Chair & CEO agrees. And he’s written about it at length. Nall goes as far as to call receiving automated responses “disingenuous, painful to read and, frankly, a bit insulting.”
And I have to agree.
Social media is, in its very nature and by its name, social. People expect that when engaging with people, organizations, brands, etc in social media they are talking to a person. There is another human on the other side of the iPhone, laptop, or tablet reading and responding to posts. Automating this process takes the social out of social media and replaces it with a robotic process that can harm your brand in more ways than I can count.
We’ve addressed in my previous post how automated tweets can backfire during a time of crisis and make your brand seem detached and insensitive. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.
When the personal process of crafting unique content and updating by hand is removed, it’s very easy to become detached from the monitoring and responding aspect of social media as well. Without a need to visit the page to update, engagement can go down and interactions become stale. Nall’s example of the Progressive debacle hits this right on the nose. You can’t respond to everyone with the same canned content. You are not a robot. Or at least, you shouldn’t be.
Canned content leaves little room for capitalizing on what is happening in the world and using this for your brand. Keeping an eye on the social media conversations happening is a great way to see what is popular in the moment and relevant to your community. These are opportunities for you to insert your brand into the conversation that is already happening. And this is missed if you are auto-populating posts weeks in advance.
Not to mention the fact that many services that allow you to auto-update your social media sites tend to be buggy - leading to updates disappearing, not posting, or posting more than once. Which makes the entire brand look sloppy.
My advice is this. Social Media needs to stay social. Removing the human element to respond in real time, capitalize on the news, and monitor/respond to your community changes the conversation from two-way dialogue to one-way message dissemination. You can’t just talk to your community, you need to talk with them.
And you can’t talk with them if a service is doing the talking for you.
If you’ve ever wondered what the biggest pet peeve/pain point is for a digital strategist, it’s this.
The desire to be EVERYWHERE. With no long term strategies or goals for what you will do, how you will build, engage and maintain a community, what messages and tactics you’ll utilize, and how this will ladder up to your overarching organizational goals.
It’s better to be a rock star with just a Facebook and Twitter presence than be mediocre (or awful) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Vine, LinkedIn, and Google+.
It’s even worse to have presences that are blank or haven’t been updated in days/weeks/years.
Social media strategy is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires constant feeding and monitoring and engagement to keep it running.
Don’t start unless you have a long term strategy to carry you through.
social media management in times of national crisis
The events yesterday in Boston were horrible. As has been the case the last few years, I received more news via Twitter and Facebook than anything else. The news media ran late and, a good portion of the time, was inaccurate. I relied on first hand experiences and retweets from people on the ground for most of my information.
Many of my social media strategist friends immediately began posting messages about how brands should be responding, engaging and posting during the tragedy. In light of what happened, here is my opinion on what brands and organizations should do in social media when a national crisis occurs.
1. Check your automatic updates scheduled for the day and edit/reevaluate. I’ll save my hatred of automatic updates on social media for another day, but if you do use these services, check and make sure that you are not scheduled to post something that would be offensive, out of line, or appear that you’re not informed. Many brands utilize national events (i.e. the marathon) to attach their brand to trending topics online. You don’t want to be the brand that offers marathon runners free pizza after the tragedy because you didn’t turn off your auto posts.
2. Post a message that acknowledges the event and offers your condolences and support. If you’re active in social media with a large following, they will be expecting you to address the major event somehow. Posting a message that acknowledges that you know whats going on and your hearts are with the people affected shows you are on top of the news, aware of what’s happening and the importance that it has on your communities’ lives. But…
3. Don’t lose your voice. Make sure the message that you post is still in your brand voice, to your brand community. This is not to say to make the event about you, but don’t forget who you are posting for and to. A great example of this was from my blog friend Charlsie at Elf on the Shelf. She posted the following on the brand’s Facebook page:
The post perfectly addressed the issue, in the brand’s voice and the community responded positively. She was able to make sure people know that the brand was paying attention without saying something out of character.
4. Don’t become an authority, a news source, a crisis center or speculator. Unless you’re actively associated with these types of situations (emergency preparedness, crisis counseling, etc) there is no need to be the voice of news for your community. Your community members will look to other sources for updates and information. And if they’re asking questions you aren’t qualified to answer, direct them somewhere else.
5. Determine your next steps & push pause. This is where opinions differ in terms of where to go from here. You’ve addressed the situation, protected yourself from putting your foot in your mouth, but what now? My personal opinion is to hold on your social media activities for the rest of the day. Not weeks, not until someone is brought to justice, but for the day. It’s insensitive to have a Twitter party 2 hours after people were killed. There’s no need to have people “like” a photo of your product when families are still searching for their loved ones. You can take the afternoon off just this once.
Many people will disagree with me on step 5. I’ve seen a lot of posts saying that brands should continue on like normal, that life shouldn’t stop because of these events, that we sensationalize them and let them take over.
But my thought is this.
I don’t want to live in a world where these events are “normal.” I don’t want to be completely desensitized to shootings and planes flying into buildings and kids dying and bombings. I don’t want to shrug, post a simple message from my brand then continue talking about what Kim Kardashian is wearing, encourage people to buy a hamburger and post cat gifs.
I want to live in a place where we pause and reflect. Where making money and spreading brand messages takes a backseat to rallying around each other. Where we pause for just a moment and acknowledge that the world sucks sometimes.
We can pick up our social media strategy where we left off the next day. But on day’s like yesterday, we can take a break.
I recently presented at an Advanced Learning Institute training on social media and government - specifically how one of my clients is using Twitter chats to engage with their audiences to spread important information to their followers & start a dialogue around particular issues.
And, I thought perhaps you would like to know some key takeaways that you could use for Twitter chats with your clients.
For background, a Twitter chat (sometimes called a Twitter party) occurs when a handle on Twitter sets a specific date and time to address a particular topic. So, from 1-2pm a Twitter handle may have an expert on hand to talk about depression, yoga, a new movie or product, etc. Users can log into Twitter, follow the chat hashtag and participate, ask questions and learn from other users.
So, here are a few tips if you want to use Twitter chats.
Set a consistent hashtag and use it for all chats. It will make it easier for people to participate on a month to month basis and recognize when your chats are taking place.
Invite experts and other organizations that have to do with your topic to co-host, or participate, to increase the chat reach.
Ask questions in advance to see what people want to hear about. Before drafting your script, ask people what they want to learn about the topic. Then, make sure to address those topics during the chat.
Use services available that make monitoring and analyzing the success of the chat easier. Tweetchat.com is a great service to use to conduct the chat and TweetReach provides great data post chat for only $20.
Learn from chats and use those insights in the future. Does your community love lists? What information from chats is more retweeted? What information is not really shared? Are the same questions asked over and over? Analyze each chat for content and sentiment and make changes moving forward.
Be engaging. No one wants to log into a Twitter chat to just see tweet after tweet of messages from an organization. Ask questions, answer questions, thank people for their participation, and retweet other information. The chat is to share your information but also interact with your followers.
Post your chat transcripts to your website so that people who were unable to participate can still see what was spoken about.
These are just some basic and easy ways to make your Twitter chats better, or start them in the first place. And if you’re not ready to take the leap for your clients just yet, try participating in chats first. As a participant you can see how others run their chats, see best practices and learn more about the ins and outs.
We’re just about one month into 2013 and many of the trends that have been discussed in the last few months are being put into action.
Here are a few identified at the Mashable Media Summit at the end of the last year that I think we’ll definitely continue to see in the near future.
Mobile. Mobile. Mobile. People are accessing the internet on their phones more than ever. Make sure your sites are optimized for mobile, that people can do whatever they can on your website on their phones as well. At the summit someone even said to start on mobile and work your way from there. And I agree.
e-commerce and the user experience. More applications and mobile sites are integrating one click purchasing. Instead of simply interacting with something you can scan it and actually buy it. In catalogs, magazines, and more. An ad should lead to a point of purchase.
Social first, paid second. Paid media tactics are great, advertising is great, but social is first. Content is king. Focus on your content and using social media channels to get that content to your customer, employee, member, etc. It works.
Print isn’t dead. The digital marketer loves to say that print is dying, or dead already. That’s not true. People are still buying books and magazines. But print marketers need to make their content digital as well. Interactive through scanning and apps and additional content available online. That is the way for print and digital to live in harmony.
Images can’t be overstated. They are still the most engaging content on social media. Focus on images that resonate and are important to your audience. And don’t forget about images and content in ads. A billboard won’t drive anything unless it’s engaging and resonates.
These are only a few of the things to keep in mind as we venture further into 2013 and look for ways to stay on the cutting edge for our clients.
These can be applied across industries and topic areas and you can look for ways to integrate them as you execute social media strategy in the next few months.
And don’t forget to keep an eye on the news for companies and brands and agencies that are doing it well - learn from their success and mistakes and look for ways to make it work for you.
As I said, last week I attended the Mashable Media Summit in NYC. I was extremely excited to attend since I am a complete Mashable junkie and have watched the conference from afar for the last few years. The conference was originally scheduled for the Friday after Hurricane Sandy but for obvious reasons was post-poned until November 30.
Before a post on learnings let’s break down my thoughts on the conference in general. The format was one continuous session that featured a variety of speakers. Everyone was in the same room all day, so every attendee saw every speaker - there were no sessions to choose from. The speakers were broken up by a few breaks and lunch. The day ended with a networking reception.
Pros
Amazing line up of speakers. Everyone from the co-founder of Reddit (Alexis Ohanian), Pete Cashmore himself, and the DKNY PR girl to the Executive Editor of Tumblr, reps from Conde Nast and Facebook and journalists.
Great venue. The New York Times Center was an awesome and open space and the auditorium and crowd were a good size.
Lots of relevant talks. Many of the speakers were relevant to what I do and am interested in and represented platforms that I work on every day.
Good, digestible tidbits and tips for 2013. Each speaker touched on trends that they expect to see in 2013 and tips for how to make sure you’re ahead of the curve for the next year.
Variety of skilled attendees. Attendees spanned all different industries, companies, types of clients, and skill sets and traveled from all over the country (and even the world) to be a part of the summit.
Cons
Conference was not very well run logistically. There was no music or time filler in between speakers, one walked off the stage and the auditorium was silent until the next was introduced. The person serving as moderator wasn’t engaging and didn’t keep the crowd energized between speakers.
It ran late and they cut out questions. After the first speaker they began to run late and thus cut out questions from the audience. Even with cutting out questions it was still running approx 40 minutes behind and it was confusing to know when we were not expected to end.
Speakers left after their sessions. A main reason I wanted to go to the conference was the chance to engage with the speakers. But, many (if not all) of them gave their speech then left. Since the conference was all in 1 room and went from speaker to speaker, there was no opportunity to catch them before they left or engage with them in networking, which was disappointing.
Attendees kept to themselves. As I’ve found with a lot of social media conferences and gatherings you wind up in a room of people on their phones, tablets and computers but not really engaging with one another. I met a few people and did some networking, which was great, but wold have liked to see more people trying to mingle and connect.
Some sessions were not relevant (to me, at least). While a lot of the sessions were great there were some that were completely not relevant to me or what I do for a living. Since the format was one big room where everyone heard every speaker, I simply zoned out for the ones I wasn’t learning from. In the future it would be nice to see the Summit break down into individual sessions instead of one big, long running session.
Overall, I was happy I went and definitely learned some interesting things that I can take back and apply to my clients. Will I attend again? That’s a solid maybe. It would depend on the format of the Summit, the speakers they have lined up and whether or not they are making changes to improve over time.
Stay tuned for another post about tips I learned and trends for 2013!
Sometimes the amount of data, research, and analysis that I do on a daily basis to provide informed recommendations for clients surprises me. A lot of people think working in social media means playing on Facebook and Twitter all day and looking at funny gifs of cats on Buzzfeed. And yeah, we do that.
But we also have to keep a pulse of our clients coverage in the news both in traditional and online sources, analyze conversations, identify trends, show movements in tone and sentiment and analyze content for spikes and valleys in different topic profiles.
A few of my current favorite tools for monitoring online conversations are Radian6 and Topsy. Both provide a great in-depth analysis at the information you’re looking for and can be completely customized to the search terms and platforms you want to monitor.
So next time you think your friend working in social media is laughing and reading Mashable, they’re probably trying to convert data from something like this into a meaningful, strategic, and informative recommendation for a client.
