Just as the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world help consumers connect and build community, businesses are realizing that these types of online networks can provide great value within and across corporate boundaries. Some of the world's most respected organizations are leveraging the power of user-generated content to create online communities that connect employees, customers, prospects and partners.
As these companies quickly discover that online social media communities and networks bring a host of benefits -- including improved employee collaboration, customer communication and engagement, market research, and new forms of revenue -- they face a few unique challenges. The following is a framework of best practices for companies seeking to get the most out of social media and encourage participation in online communities.
1. Accelerate, give them voice
Many companies are discovering that the quickest way to tap into customers' and employees' thoughts, opinions and interests is to enable them to easily create their own content. Blogs have emerged as a great method to encourage people to share their ideas, but other social media technologies are enhancing this most basic form of content to make it more fun and worthwhile for people to participate. User-generated content can be created through a range of social media tools, such as wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, tags, polls, geographic information and user profiling via social networks, etc.
By giving customers and employees multiple ways to participate, organizations can increase the chances of them interacting or creating content. Whether they feel compelled to post comments about other blog posts, rate content if it was useful to them or contribute knowledge to a wiki, they are interacting with the information and contributing to the intelligence of the entire community.
2. The more content creators, the better
Companies must look to a broad range of people -- employees, partners and customers, for example -- to contribute content. Everyone in a company can contribute insights on both corporate and industry issues; meanwhile, customers or the public at large can join in and provide a unique perspective that can contribute to the community's overall intelligence. Ultimately, this content can be leveraged by a company to foster a robust online information resource for all participants.
3. Encourage abundant, robust discussion
The key for a company is not restricting content but instead encouraging robust communication. A large spread of content helps a company stay open and fluid, guaranteeing more options for calling content out on a community site. With more content, companies can choose from a huge sampling to select the right content for the right audience at the right time, in the right context.
4. Put on the brakes
User-generated content propels communication in an external or internal community, but it also poses a risk of inappropriate content being released. Communities should conform to an established code of conduct, while also being faithful to brand image. Can companies manage this risk and still keep user-generated content flowing freely? Community administrators at companies can manage security, compliance and risk issues by using controls that flag and filter inappropriate content while allowing the vast majority of contributions to fuel various company initiatives.
The right permissioning and authority for your users is vital, and you need to decide which users are trusted and automate their content to be posted immediately to the community, and also which users are not to be trusted and flag their content to be reviewed by an administrator before it's posted.
5. Watch your speed
But what if everyone shows up? Good moderation tools, akin to using a speedometer, can give companies a way to watch for content, whether good or bad. The key here is that companies not only want to see what people are writing about them, but they want to be able to interact with this content and be able to use it in the most meaningful way. For instance, a company can augment content by doing a variety of social media activities -- like adding live links or tagging to existing content by linking to product Web sites or other informative company content like webcasts or customer interviews -- to make it more informative for community members, while also increasing SEO.
You forgot one of the most important things to mention
The tips are nice and good, but you left out one major key element that businesses, especially the large brands who are in most cases overly protective about their brand image, should keep in mind, if they want to go the route of social media. Not every company is ready for it, actually most are not.
In order to have a successful social media site that has value for you and for its users, you have to make sure that people trust you and feel safe from expected and unexpected repercussions and consequences if they are expressing their thoughts and opinions freely. I am not referring to obscene, vulgar or plain and simple unethical, immoral or even illegal stuff, but to straight forward and sometimes blunt truth and honesty, which is either in opposition to your own views or at first glance negative for your precious brand image.
With a few exceptions are those negative or opposed views and opinions not malicious with the intention to just damage your reputation and brand. They often show a different perspective you have not been aware about before or a spelled out problem without any attempt to talk it nice and less of an issue than it actually is. In those instances is the intention of the person who expresses himself that way almost in every case very honorable. The person intents to change something that is not right, at least in the way how he experienced it, and get it fixed or seeks alternative options and suggestions. It is sometimes to remedy a current issue that is still open and unresolved and in other cases something from the past, where the person wants to help to prevent that other people have to make the same (negative) experience he made.
Those expressions will occur and the one thing you don't want to do with them is to suppress them, delete them or prohibit or use any other means to discourage those kind of expressions. You would lose trust and respect from people who notice it, from clients, staff members and outsiders alike. If the negative opinion has some real basis and is real and no joke, censorship will not make it go away or solve it. People are most likely to take their grudge and take it elsewhere to a place where you have most of the time no control at all over the events that might follow as a consequence. The person who took the time to express his issues and concerns at your site and finds out that you try solve the issue by avoiding it and suppressing any conversation will only get elevated in his negative thinking about you and get more mad than he already is because of the issue itself. That does in almost any case cause the next rant by the same guy at another place to be much more negative and damaging than the original expression on your site.
Everybody can forgive honest mistakes, because we all make them. Nobody is perfect, including the seemingly perfect brands that less people actually perceive that way, considering it to be fake, unreal and detached from real life.
People however are less forgiving when it comes to how somebody responses to sound and real criticisms. It demonstrates to any other customer and potential future customers how you handle problems, conflicts and concerns of your customers. They will see what they might have to expect in the case that they run into similar or completely different issues themselves. Even the happiest customers of your might get worried if they see you handling such conflicts and problems badly, without making reasonable attempts to clarify the issues, seek the cause and provide either possible solutions to the problem or an explanation why that problem occurred and why you might not be able to provide a solution that will be satisfactory to the gruntled customer.
This feedback is the most honest that you can get and no focus group will ever discover. It also lets you turn negative publicity into something positive for you and valuable for your clients or potential clients.
The quality of your product or service will benefit from it, if you implement changes to improve it based on customer response and feedback, if the product or service will not get better, then the specification of what your product is good for and what it is NOT so good for will be better defined and most importantly will customers of yours feel much better about doing business with you, as they can see that you will not abandon them in the event of a problem that might come up down the road in the future. ... and since you allow all this to happen on your grounds, it will be less likely to spread around as much, giving you the ability to "suck it all in" to just have to manage one larger fire that to combat many small fires all over the place and you can make sure that the problem does not escalate or sidetracks to make any solution finding impossible. You can ensure that the discussion remains fair and civilized and not turns into pointless flame wars.
In short, your brand and business will get out of this much stronger, more confident with a much better perception of you by the community, which will then result into a very good reputation, trust and more business for your company. And that is at the end of the day what it is all about, isn't it?!
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet marketer, entrepreneur and fellow blogger
http://www.cumbrowski.com/
p.s. sorry for the long comment :)
same is also true for internal social networks
Oh, this is not only limited to social media platforms that deal with outsiders, such as your customers, but also for purely internal wikis. If employees who express concerns or problems get discouraged, belittled, branded as "trouble makers" or worse, fear for their job, they and everybody else will simply stop raising those concerns and problems and only talk about all that is good and peachy.
This will cause problems to get worse and worse over time until they burst into the open and hard to impossible to deal with. By the time everybody can see the problem, the possible solutions are most of the time very radical and sometimes negative as well.
Many of those problems became a big problem over time and started out as a small and very manageable problem that could have been easily fixed a long time ago, if only somebody who saw it back at that early stage already would have voiced his concerns and pointed to the problem. That would at least have given the company the opportunity to fix it right then or at least keep an eye on it to act a bit later, but before it escalates into an unmanageable monster.
Cheers!
Carsten
Thanks for your thoughful
Thanks for your thoughful comments!
my pleasure. Your short
my pleasure. Your short response without a "...but" indicate that you agree with my statements.. or you just did not have the time yet to respond in detail, one of the two it is I guess. Which one is it? ;)
Cheers!
Carsten