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Will the Olympics Suffer from its No-Social Rules?

By Mark Evans - January 27th, 2012

As we near the London Summer Olympics, it seems there will very limited insight provided by the army of volunteers (approx. 70,000) via Twitter, Facebook and any other popular social media services.

The edict, handed down from the Organizing Committee, is an antiquated way of doing business. The victims are the fans and supporters, who have grown accustomed to social media providing a behind-the-scenes look at big events.

This, by no way, means athletes will be limited, but let’s be honest, athletes can be fairly generic compared to someone who is part of the event from a different perspective.

Athletes have an image to protect and future endorsements to consider; a volunteer does not and, as a result, can be an amazing source of  unfiltered information. The lack of filter can go both ways, but a non-athletes or organizers’ viewpoint seems more enticing.

One of the harsher restrictions is that no volunteer can make public statements about the games without permission. This sounds more like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but that was more aligned with Beijing’s social media policies. As well, social media has grown a lot in the past four years.

The lack of communication will impact the overall Olympic experience for those outside of the event. We have come to rely on social media to learn, experience, enhance and deliver a voice to everyone.

The rules are understandable from certain standpoints (i.e. protecting the athletes), but there are bigger issues. Out of the 70,000 volunteers, can you imagine how many wonderful stories will not emerge now.

What are your thoughts? Do you think the London Olympics are being overly sensitive, and not putting their millions of fans first?

 

 

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Was Your Community Manager Appreciated?

By Sheldon Levine - January 26th, 2012

This past Monday was the third annual Community Manager Appreciation day, a day to celebrate all the hard work community managers do that sometimes goes unnoticed. Started back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang as a way to pay tribute to the people that are behind the scenes of thriving online communities, the knowledge of the celebration has grown as the job has become a lot more common at many companies. Some people think that community managers are the people that play on the internet all day, but really they’re the heart of a community for a business. From my own experience I can tell you that community managers handle almost all functions of a company at some level. They can be PR, marketing, sales and customer service all at the same time. As you may guess, I do have a personal affinity for this day.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics tool, I decided to take a look at just how much online talk was going on about Community Manager Appreciation Day. Since many community managers these days work in the social space, I thought that would be the best place to get the information from. Looking for the term “Community Manager Appreciation” or the few forms of the “#cmad” hashtag, I was able to find 114 blog posts, 74 online news articles, 80 forum postings and 4,744 tweets.

I then took a look at where this semi-holiday was being celebrated. The USA provided the most talk of Community Manager Appreciation Day at 55.2%. This is likely because a lot of companies have their head offices in the US, so that is likely where the community managers are also located. The UK had the second most talk with 15.8% followed by France, where there’s interesting social media happenings, at 10.2%. Canada, where this community manager is located, only accounted for 4%.

Next I pulled up a buzzgraph which shows us words that we find most connected to our search terms. Right in the center we can see Owyang’s name. He was brought up a lot in conversation as the man that first came up with the idea for Community Manager Appreciation Day. We can also see strong connections to “happy,” which was people celebrating, and “thank,” which was people thanking the community managers for doing what they do. The thing that threw me off in this buzz graph was the “23-oct.” After a little digging into it, I found that a social publishing platform company called Vitrue is holding an award for best community managers and submissions are open until October 23rd of this year.

What’s interesting is that when I pulled up a word cloud around the talk, Owyang actually takes a back seat to the community managers. He appeared in the center of the buzzgraph because he was mentioned a lot in when people were talking about Community Manager Appreciation Day. However, the word cloud shows us the words that are being used most often, and as you can see, it’s the community managers that were being talked about the most on their day.

Lastly, and the thing that makes me the happiest, was the sentiment I found about Community Manager Appreciation Day. To be honest, I’ve actually never seen this before in any analysis I’ve done. Community Manager Appreciation day received ZERO negativity. However, positive sentiment was at an astounding 77%.

For some more information on community managers and a nice infograph, check out Social Fresh’s 2012 Community Manager Report.

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Reddit’s On A Major Roll

By Mark Evans - January 25th, 2012

There are plenty of news aggregators out there but perhaps one of the most dynamic and under-appreciated is Reddit.

Reddit? Yes, Reddit.

Long seen as Digg’s little cousin, Reddit is on a major roll while Digg trundles its way toward irrelevance.

The question is why has Reddit surged ahead while Digg has stumbled. In an interesting article, Slate’s Farhan Manjoo suggests it’s the enthusiastic and engaged nature of “a real and vibrant” community, particularly its willingness to get involved in political issues such as SOPA.

Manjoo also contends Reddit has thrived because it has become more than a service that just aggregates links from external sites.

What’s particularly interesting about Reddit is how it has thrived within the corporate bosom of Conde Nast, which acquired Reddit in 2006. It is rare to see a startup get stronger and bigger after becoming part of a big empire. In many cases, a startup flounders because its energy and entrepreneurial culture evaporates within the corporate confines.

Maybe Conde Nast’s best decision was allowing Reddit to maintain its uniqueness and separate identity rather than trying to make it part of the fold. Yes, Reddit has had a redesign but it’s still pretty similar to what it was when Conde Nast acquired it.

As important, Reddit’s community has been allowed to participate, operate and be an active part of Reddit’s progression, which is pretty impressive given Reddit is part of a large and established media empire. It’s like Reddit has the best of both worlds: it has the backing of a large company but the culture and community of a startup.

As for why Reddit has rolled and Digg has lost its mojo, it’s hard to tell. Maybe Digg made some strategic mistakes that alienated users. Maybe the market shifted on Digg as social media gained more traction.

At the very least, Digg vs. Reddit would make for a fascinating case study or even a PhD thesis on the tale of two aggregators.

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Death of SOPA and the Rise of PIPA

By Mark Evans - January 24th, 2012

Does it strike you that the Web and social media have been on the defensive recently, playing the role of victim to the whims of the authorities who are attempting to instill some fairly radical, if not draconian, changes to possibly the greatest tool ever?

Powerful Web properties, search engines and social media services recently displayed their collective power of the digital world.

The Wikipedia blackout, Google’s blackout of its logo and the outspoken support of Mark Zuckerberg all played a vital role in this unprecedented act of Web activism.

Politicians gave up and SOPA has been shot down, but the sense of relief could be a short-lived mirage. A decision on PIPA (Protect IP Act) is nearing and Senate support seems to be high. Of course, the same was said about SOPA and we all know how that ended.

The voice of the Web transferred seamlessly to the political arena. It is fair to say SOPA and its aftermath will become a case study for years to come. The curious part is whether we can expect the same result for PIPA, which some believe has more legs.

It is imperative that we fight to secure the nature of the Web. We can achieve this by allowing social media to grow, not only in popularity but also in power and reach. If nothing else, we learned that our online voices can yield offline results.

SOPA and PIPA aren’t necessarily malicious and evil acts against the Web and its users, but they are out-of-touch posturing based on ideas that do not match our love and use of the web.

Ultimately, they have been born from people more concerned with political maneuvering, than with the unadulterated freedom and purpose of the internet.

For more, check out this video featuring Clay Shirky on why SOPA is going to disappear.

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Good Blogging is a State of Mind

By Mark Evans - January 23rd, 2012

Darren Rowse had an interesting blog post recently about the lessons he has learned from his five-year-old son about blogging. His son, otherwise known a “X”, is really into art, and often thinks about his next project while doing other activities.

It is a concept that resonated with me because, in many respects, blogging is about the next post. By their very nature, blogs are fluid and dynamic creatures. A good blog (and bloggers) constantly keeps moving forward. As much as a particular post can be fantastic, it is not long before the next post must be produced.

For some people, the steady demands of blogging can be overwhelming, which is why many blogs die on the vine after a few weeks or months. The need to “feed the beast” is a fact of life. By not blogging on a regular basis, a blog can lack the consistency it needs to attract an audience.

So what are the things that can be done to keep the beast happy?

A key is coming up with a non-stop flow of ideas that can be turned into blog posts. As important is the recognition that ideas can come from anywhere. You can be talking to a friend or colleague. Ideas can come from a newspaper article, blog post or newsletter. They can emerge when you’re working out, taking a shower or listening to music.

Given this reality, it is important to “bookmark” these ideas as they materialize. Keep a piece of paper or small notebook in your pocket, or have a text document on your desktop to quickly write down ideas. By being disciplined, you will be surprised by how quickly a notebook or document can start to fill up with ideas.

Not all of these ideas are going to be amazing but there will be enough quality ideas to keep your blog vibrant and consistent. As important, you’ll discover that as you open yourself up to ideas and start capturing them, the ideas will start to flow.

To paraphrase Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” (see the video below), doing well with your blog means being in a “Blogging State of Mind”.

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Is Customer Service Better in Social Media?

By Mark Evans - January 20th, 2012

Is it just me or are brands more pro-active doing customer service in social media than they do in their actual brick and mortar stores or through their websites?

Dell (@DellCares) and Rogers (@RogersHelps) are great examples of a social media trailblazer and a late comer getting it right. Their social media teams are really showing other customer service reps how it is done.

Recently, some Twitter users were experiencing poor customer service at a bank. Soon after, tweets about the experience were posted, and very quickly calls from branch managers (who was notified by the social media team) were made. Social media works.

Social media lends itself to better customer service than your average website: I don’t see how filling out a “Contact Us” form can ever beat the one-to-one connection on Facebook or Twitter.

Why do brands listen on social media listening while many in-store representatives are tuning customers out? This is not an indictment of employees; it is a tough job dealing with people who sometimes don’t want to compromise.

If we can learn anything from social media, it is that listening really pays off. The other lesson is people will publish their bad experiences for their social networks to see, but not always publish the good moments.

What are some of the great customer service experiences you have had on social media? Has it outweighed your experience in store or on parent websites?

More: Check out this Mashable post looking at nine ways that top brands are customer service for better customer service. Dave Fleet has a good post on eight ways that brands can scale their social support efforts.

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The Day The Internet Went Dark

By Sheldon Levine - January 19th, 2012

You may have noticed yesterday that some of your favourite sites on the internet weren’t as they should be or were shut down all together. This was a large initiative by many internet based companies to protest the Stop Internet Piracy Act (more commonly known as SOPA) that was scheduled to be voted on in the US yesterday. Some of the sites that went black included Wikipedia, Reddit and even smaller sites like popular blogger Chris Brogan’s site.

For those unfamiliar with SOPA (and a similar bill known as PIPA), here’s a great video that explains just how it would affect everyday internet users like you and me:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Because these bills are heavily supported by the US entertainment industry, there has been very little talk about them in the mainstream media. Most people know about it because everyday people had taken to the internet and social networks to help spread the word. And spread it they did. I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to see just how much talk had been going on through social media.

To be inclusive of the numerous sayings and hashtags people have been using I searched for the terms “SOPA,” “PIPA,”StopSOPA,” “SOPAblackout” and “blackout.” Over the past 3 months I was able to find 247,213 blog posts, 82,713 online news articles, 311,327 forum posts and 2.9 million tweets containing my search terms.

Trended out over time that activity looks like this:

Because yesterday was a known day of protest the activity greatly overshadows all the previous activity. The following popularity chart shows the activity for three months up to January 17th, the day before the blackout. The first large spike in November was when the SOPA bill first started getting attention by the public. Then there were two large spikes in talk in December. The first, on December 15th, was the day that the US government passed NDAA, a non-internet related but also unpopular bill and people made connections between the two bills. The second spike in December was the day that the public became aware that the popular internet domain seller Go Daddy was supporting the SOPA bill. Go Daddy later retracted their support, but the public had already spoken.

While SOPA and PIPA are both bills that could be passed the United States government, they would have a great effect on the way the entire world uses the internet. That’s why the entire world has been talking about the bills. The greatest majority of talk through social media was coming from the United States (53.5%), but other countries were making their thoughts on the bills heard. Brazil, a large Twitter using country, accounted for 5.5% of the talk, followed by Spain (4.9%) and the UK (3.9%).

And just what have people been talking about? Our buzzgraph shows that “piracy” is right in the center of the conversation. But there’s strong connections to words like “protester,” infringement” and “censorship” showing that a lot of the talk was against SOPA and PIPA. We can also see a lot of talk about the websites that went black yesterday in opposition to the bills like “Wikipedia,” “Reddit” and “Google.” There’s also a strong connection to “Go Daddy” from that large spike in November that talked about their support of SOPA.

I already noted that talk on January 18th greatly overshadowed the previous three months, so I dug into the conversation that just happened yesterday. On blackout day alone I was bale to find 32,548 blog posts, 13,107 news articles, 18,504 forum posts and 1.4 million tweets containing my search terms.

All of the talk and support from everyday citizens led to the bill being temporarily shot down and not voted on yesterday as was originally planned. However, PIPA is still set to go in front of US congress on January 24th, so the internet blackout happened just as it was planned. The fate of the internet is still up in the air, but if enough people raise their voices, the people with power may just get the message that there has to be a better way to solve the piracy problem.

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Will the Lawyers Neuter Social Media?

By Mark Evans - January 18th, 2012

 Social media has given companies and their employees new ways to communicate and engage with key stakeholders such as potential and existing customers but it has also opened up another can of words: the potential to create problems around competitive, regulatory, liability and human relations issues.

As much as companies want to be active and more transparent on social media, they also need to be pragmatic about how and what they communicate and, as important, who gets to do it. We’re not talking about companies controlling the conversations because that horse left the barn a long time ago, but having the ability to manage different situations or, at least, have processes in place to deal with them.

In a recent blog post on Texas Lawyer, Darin Klemchuk puts the spotlight on some key issues and the things companies need to do to protect their interests. On one hand, it’s solid advice because he identifies issues and considerations that should not be ignored. But on the other hand, it is interesting and perhaps troubling when lawyers step into fray, particularly when it involves a fast-moving, free-flowing medium such as social media.

The mandate of many corporate lawyers is keeping their employers and employees out of trouble. It means they often take a conservative approach if there is any indication an issue or problem could arise. While they have the company’s best interests in mind, the involvement of lawyers can be frustrating for people running social media because it means they may not be able to operate with as much freedom or react as quickly as they would like.

One of the key considerations going forward as social media becomes baked into the corporate landscape is how much freedom and latitude social media will continue to enjoy. As much as social media opens new opportunities, social media can also make a company more vulnerable to criticism, lawsuits, regulatory issues and liability concerns.

So the $64,000 question is how involved will the corporate lawyers be when it comes to social media, and if they do have a growing presence will it hamper or neuter a company’s social media activities?

In many ways, the rules when it comes to social media and the role of lawyers is still work in progress. As much as companies need to have best practice policies and codes of contact, they will undoubtedly have to be sure they are legally onside as well.

Here’s hoping the lawyers play an important role but, at the same time, allow companies to use social media as creatively and actively as they can.

 

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How Should Twitter Improve?

By Mark Evans - January 17th, 2012

The whole world is a Twitter! Whether you get it or not, Twitter is gaining more users and credibility each passing day. This being said, we’ve all had some issues with Twitter so now it is time to brainstorm some solutions.

Here are some ideas I have, and it is on you to agree, disagree, demand change or accept things the way they are:

Update the Newsfeed:

Twitter needs to take a page from Facebook, which wrote the book on fickle design and the need to constantly reinventing the wheel. Twitter’s interface is old, it is not intuitive and even though there is a nice simplicity to it, it fails to wow.

Twitter needs to go back to the drawing board and create a sleeker design that also includes more features and quicker access to some of its key features. As well, the direct messaging process needs to be re-thought and enhanced.

Twitter gave us something revolutionary concepts when it opened its doors; now it is time to give us a design that will make us connect on a whole new level.

Become a Home for Interactive Content:

This is my wild idea but consider this: at its very core Twitter is a content aggregator yet it doesn’t really lend itself to anything dynamic. It lends itself to micro-blogging via text. Twitter has to land upon a compelling and useful way to allow interactive content to appear on the website.

Maybe the answer is to embed content or maybe it borrows from Facebook in how it enables the viewing of content. Either way, Twitter needs to become a home for dynamic content rather than just a gateway.

Twitter has come a long way in terms of marketing and  monetization, which has let it become one of the leading social media services. At the same time, there is always room for improvement.

What are some of your suggestions for Twitter improvements? Or are you happy with the way it is now?

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Has Google Opened the Door to New Search Rivals?

By Mark Evans - January 16th, 2012

As Google scrambles to establish a strong social foothold, it has unveiled a new version of its ubiquitous search engine called Search Plus Your World.

While it may make sense for Google’s social strategy, it’s a controversial move because it arguably biases search results by putting Google+ front and centre. In particular, Danny Sullivan, one of the leading search engine analysts, has been extremely vocal about how Google’s new initiative had made its results less relevant.

Meanwhile, John Battelle has a thought-provoking blog post on how Google+ represents a conundrum for marketers and anyone interested in being found via Google search.

Given Google’s new bias for Google+, he suggests brands and people who care about search results will have no choice but to be on Google+ because their Web sites and blogs will rank below their Google+ profiles.

In many respects, Google has diluted the accuracy and relevance of its search results by placing the interests of Google+ above the interests of people seeking high-quality search results. That said, Google is a business as opposed to a public utility so it will clearly do things that serve its own interests without alienating its users in a significant way.

A Strategic Error?

Based on first impressions and the strong pushback from the Web community, Google has made a key strategic error in thrusting Google+ into the spotlight so aggressively.

As much as many people are die-hard Google search users, Search Plus Your World may given people news reasons to consider alternatives such as Bing, which has made solid market share inroads recently.

Blekko, Anyone?

At the same time, Google may have opened the doors to new rivals. Despite Google’s dominance, there have been a steady string of search startups who believe they have a better mousetrap. This includes well-financed startups such as Cuil, Powerset and Blekko.

The big problem has been while these startups may offer better results, Google users are so entrenched in their behaviour they can’t go through the aggravation of switching, let alone see whether a startup is a better experience.

But the launch of Search Plus Your World may provide search startups with a much-needed window of opportunity because it prompt even entrenched Google search users, including myself, to seriously consider and check out other options.

The reality of the digital world is there’s no such thing as guaranteed market dominance given other services are just a click away. This applies to Google, which has enjoyed a long and easy reign as search’s top dog.

If a new search engine captures the imagination of people, including influencers and mavens, it wouldn’t be farfetched to suggest Google could lose some market share in a heartbeat.

For the past few years, search startups have been looking for a crack in Google’s armour. With the introduction of Search Plus Your World, Google may have given startups what they’ve been seeking.

More: Another interesting read is CNet’s Peter Yared’s post, which includes this strong assertion:

“As I’ve written in the past, Google well knows that its search results suck, and over the past few years, it has started to short-circuit those results by putting more and more direct “answers” at the top search pages. That, of course, makes the search results themselves less and less important.”

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