Facebook Pages aren’t a community as most people would understand a community. They’re more like an email list in many ways (albeit an email list with some pretty compelling social features.)
The thing we see on all the brand Facebook Pages that we’ve analysed so far is how much the conversation is controlled by the Page Admins.
One of the most worrying questions in Social Media today seems to be, “what’s the value of all these fans? How can I mark them down as an asset, and not a cost?”
Recently I was invited to talk about these at Warc’s “Social Media: Beyond the Hype” conference and at Webit Congress 2011 (Webit is the digital industry’s get-together for CEE. It’s huge: very energetic, very exciting and great fun.)
Below are the slides, and below that, my script. I know that it’s hard to read the two together. Actually, someone told me that I mumbled a bit during the presentation (I wasn’t used to my Madonna-style headset mike to be fair) so the script is for them (and for anyone else who was too polite to complain.) You can download the script here.
NB: I write my scripts (like all my stuff) in a kind of lazy version of Markdown. This works great, but can make for a fairly ugly layout.
Today, a question popped up in a meeting: a client had two Twitter accounts and wanted to know how many users followed both accounts.
I’ve spent what seems like a great deal of time tinkering with a combination of open source and homespun SNA tools to answer interesting-sounding questions about Twitter social networks – but this seemed like a simpler method would suffice. And it does; I thought I’d note it down partly as an aide memoire, and partly in case I needed to tell someone else how to go about it.
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As has often been observed, there’s something irresistable about schadenfreude. That’s one reason for the obsessive finger-pointing by the digerati every time a new brand experiences a social media crisis.
Another may be our unholy desire for traffic. After all, I’m writing this blog post in response to today’s Nestlé-Greenpeace-Facebook storm (if you’re coming to this story late, Sam Ismail’s post offers background). More to the point, at least four bloggers cleverly promoted their coverage of the events in the Facebook comment stream.
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One of the problems I quickly encountered when noodling around with Mechanical Turk is the limited and clunky web interface. Amazon has a handy comparison table which shows you what I mean by “limited”. Below is a look at the web interface for managing submitted HITs which will show you what I mean by “clunky” (which you can click for bigger.) None of it is JavaScript enabled — so every button-click requires a page reload. And there’s no logging for who’s been paid, and who hasn’t. Aargh!
After my first foray into using bonuses to engineer better results, I found that I needed to pay over a hundred bonuses. It rapidly became clear that paying these using the web interface would be nearly impossible, forcing me to look at the command line interface tools a little faster than I’d been planning.
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When London PR blogger Melanie Seasons started her blog two and a half years ago, the subject of her first post was her first post from her MySpace blog. In fact, she took most of her content from there as well. She calls her first post “a cop-out first post of another first post”, but I think that she might have spun it as a “metapost”.
In some ways, the post you’re reading now could be another metapost — a post about first posts. But it’s really about new ways of working.
I know about Melanie’s first post because I’ve been carrying out some quantitative research using first posts. I took a user-generated list of UK PR blogs that I helped curate last October, and attempted to identify the date of the first ever post for each blog.
This is a task that’s almost impossible to automate. Getting the newest post is a cinch for a computer – the oldest post not so much. And yet it’s relatively simple for a human to perform the task – generally it’s just boring and repetitive (although I challenge you to find the first post on Jed Hallam’s blog, Rock Star PR). I’m not one of those people who enjoys repetitive tasks, so I decided to take this opportunity to set up the Magic Bean Lab’s first experiment; to test the efficiency of various alternative labour sources.
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Geek alert: if the title of this post isn’t a dead giveaway I should tell you — unless you’re interested in APIs and badly-put-together bits of code — this probably isn’t for you.
I’ve recently found myself using a service provided by Damon Clinkscale called DoesFollow. All it does is answer the simple question “does twitter user A follow twitter user B?” Apart from a frill which lets you reverse the order of your question (“does twitter user B follow twitter user A?”) that’s all it does. You can even interrogate it from the address bar like this: http://doesfollow.com/barackobama/mediaczar
While I was thinking about how useful a service this is, I was suddenly struck by a moment of clarity. A lot of the research I’ve been doing could be simplified by something like this.
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A couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of people to send me their OPML files (for those of you who aren’t aware, an OPML file is what tells your RSS reader what feeds you’ve subscribed to — it can act as a way of moving your subscriptions between readers.) Some of the more trusting among them agreed, and that gave me the raw material for the first bit of my experiment.
Along the way I uncovered a couple of things that were interesting but not (entirely) relevant to the experiment.
The current approach to WOM is to try to stimulate positive WOM while addressing or countering negative WOM. A sort of “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and don’t mess with Mr In-Between” strategy.
But what if we could do it a different way?
This idea stems from a conversation I had back in February with Martin Kelly and Andy Cocker of Infectious Media. Since that time I’ve chatted it through a couple of times with various interesting people. It’s not properly thought through yet, but following a chat a couple of weeks ago with Ketchum London’s new Head of Digital, the excellent Fernando Rizo, I’ve decided to put the idea out into the public domain to gauge what (if any) interest there is and whether I should continue to work on it.
I’ve read lots of word of mouth marketing case studies (there’s a great list over at WOMMA) and it strikes me that WOM is hard to do well for a few reasons. I don’t want to go into these in too much detail, but here are a couple of the structural issues:
Despite everything pointing towards personal contact being the best impetus for positive word of mouth, most word of mouth campaigns compensate for my low reach by trying to get me to self-service my relationship with the brand and the campaign.
While I’m quite likely to tell stories about my personal experience of a brand and fairly likely to tell stories that involve a mutual friend, I’m much less likely to tell stories about other friends’ experience, and not likely at all to tell stories about friends-of-friends.
Furthermore because of the ‘clumpiness’ of most people’s social graphs, geometric progression (the “I tell two people and they each tell two people and so on” effect) just doesn’t happen.
One of the many reasons that WOM works is a thing called homophily — which roughly translates to “birds of a feather flock together”, or “you can tell a man by the company he keeps.”
I’ve written about examples of this before: for example, my analyses of twittering US Congresspersons and Westminster MPs which showed that one can predict with some reasonable degree of accuracy the political colouration of any given twitter account based on their mutual friends and follows (if you want to know more about the methodology, it’s worth reading Robert Hanneman’s chapter on cliques and subgroups.)
But there’s another side to the homophily coin; the social pressure to conform to the group’s norms.
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These are the slides from a presentation I did this morning on the topic of the Integration Triangle. I’ve talked about this here before in the article “5 Straightforward Ways To Integrate Your Communication Activities” — this includes some quick case studies.
I created these slides to support the presentation I was giving: they aren’t the presentation itself. This means that while you’ll be able to have a good guess at what I was saying most of the time, there will be moments when my meaning is opaque.
There are 70 slides in the presentation, including the front and back cover. Nevertheless, I gave the presentation in under 25 minutes. To save you doing the maths, that averages out at around 3 slides every minute (actually, there was a 4 minute delay in the middle of the presentation — so it’s more like 3-and-a-half slides per minute.)
In fact, my slides fall into two categories — those on which I spend fewer than 5 seconds, and those on which I spend more than a minute. This is more an artistic decision than anything else — I think that lots of slides going past very quickly give an appearance of pace and energy (which I dearly need first thing in the morning), but can rapidly become exhausting to watch and hard to follow without the occasional pause for breath.
Even with 70 slides, there’s so much more that I can say about the “Integration Triangle” as a planning tool — but I was trying to keep this to a single simple message. I’m hoping that (whatever they thought about my presentation, and no matter whether they liked it or believed what I was saying) the audience will remember what it was that I was saying, and be able to tell a version of the story themselves.
There’s just so much that we can talk about when it comes to the whole Digital PR thing that it all becomes rather overwhelming. I’ve just got off the phone to a colleague in Vienna (where I’m speaking next week) who wants me to talk to his audience about “Facebook and Twitter and Blogs” (oh my!) And I’ve got 45 minutes to do this. Of course I can do it. But what on earth is the “one thing” I want them to remember?
