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5 things your brand will gain from using social media

Hayden Raw @Hamrltd

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4 tips to help your brand handle a social media firefight

With the increase in brand presences in social media we are starting to see brands getting attacked by consumer power more and more. Does your brand have a plan to deal with such an occurrence? It may be time to dust off the old traditional threat/risk analysis plan and update it with some modern additions. 

Here are 4 ways you can prepare for and prevent consumer attacks through social media.

1: Track conversations.

Whether you're brand is represented in social media or not you NEED to be tracking the conversations about your brand. At a minimum you should be tracking conversations on blogs, forums, online magazines, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. This is for NZ specific brands; the level of social network usage differs from country to country.

Don't fret, you don't need to sign up to every social network just yet. There are tools to help you get a glimpse of what your customers are saying about you. If you're experimenting with social media and don’t want to outlay much money, doing some simple site searches or using tools like Social Mention will help you find out the basics. Be careful with these tools though. Social Mention is only approximately 70 -80% correct in it’s sentiment rating; approach it analytically. If you’re of larger size, you will want to use much more serious tracking software. Getting a profile set up with Neilson's Buzz Metrics (see my old post Buzz Metrics – They're watching us.) is in your best interests.

2: Determine genuine threats.

Large brands get a lot of negative conversation… Its par for the course really, you can’t make everyone happy. To make best use of your time you need to identify a set of properties that will help you identify genuine threats. Genuine threats can come from anybody. In particular you need to keep an eye out for people who:

+ Have large followings in social media – large reach.

+ Are of high influence to their peers – large influence.

+ Are leaders (Will they set up a Facebook group to gather momentum behind their complaint?) – large potential capability.

3: Formulate a Mitigation Plan.

Are you a SME or a large international company? Who is going to be monitoring sentiment from the public? Is the customer relations or social communicator the best person to be handling a firefight? These are all valid questions you need to ask yourself and your social communication team. If you are a one man SME I recommend you have a sounding board to talk over your response tactics with. If you're a large international brand make sure you get clearance from an authority for how you intend to handle a firefight.

Brands are fragile entities in today's hyper-feedback era. They must be protected with attention to detail. These days you just don't know whether that 15 year old your fobbing off has an army of 30,000 followers that hang off their every word or not.

4: Be aware of your own mistakes and fix them quickly.

It's ok to go back on a wrong decision, as long as you can identify what and when you have done wrong. Your community will still respect you if you can stop and take a laugh at your stupid decision and then rectify it.

The community will let you know when you’ve made a mistake so listen closely. The faster you can act on it to rectify your decision the better. For every major social interaction you are about to make without consulting your brand community, I recommend you have a plan B or a fallback plan including what, how, and who needs to be involved to get you back on track and in the good books.

I take my hat off to Cadbury and the whole palm oil situation on this one. They became aware of their mistake very quickly and took action to rectify it. For a large international company to react with such haste from customer feedback was genuinely amazing. Yes, they should have been listening to their community before they made the decision, but with what was done, they made the correct decision in the end. The lesson is to learn from ones mistakes; also known as learning the hard way.

The important thing to remember is, if you're listening to your community closely enough, you may never need to use your plan because your community will constantly be in love with you.

Hayden Raw @Hamrltd

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Twitter clients for Twitter clients - Echofon

Those of you lucky enough to be using Twitter on the iPhone should have heard of Echofon (used to be called Twitterfon.) I've been using this app since I first signed up to Twitter. A few months ago I had a wee play with others like Tweetdeck etc but always found myself coming back to Echofon. So really, without mucking around, I find this app so good I would go as far as saying it is the easiest Twitter client to use and understand for the iPhone. I have only used the free version mind you... but if you're checking tweets on the run and want a simple, light, easy to read superbly functional Twitter client I say get amongst Echofon.

It's not feature packed and I think that is the beauty of it; there's nothing there to confuse you. Its just Twitter.com on the iPhone. If you're after something for the tweet-elite you may want to look elsewhere for more functionality.

Can you point me towards a better iPhone Twitter client? I'd love to know.

Hayden Raw @Hamrltd

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TVNZ's Reservoir Hill interactive online drama

For those of you that don't know TVNZ is currently airing an online interactive drama called Reservoir Hill where you can txt and Bebo with the main character to influence her decisions in the next episode. A few people I've spoken to recently haven't heard about it so I thought I'd point you all to the link. 

The way it works is you get an opportunity to txt Beth for 48 hours after each episode or after each video blog she leaves. If your conversations are good enough your messages and suggestions get written into the next episode. You can also communicate to Beth on her Bebo page... very cool.

Check out the show and watch the old episodes to get up to speed. I give this a big double thumbs up for TVNZ. Well done for trying something innovative. 

http://tvnz.co.nz/reservoir-hill/ta-ent-index-group-2985476

Have you been tuned in?

Hayden Raw @Hamrltd

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Buzz Metrics .. They're watching us

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing a demo of Nielson's SaaS BuzzMetrics and I have to say, it does look very cool. If you're wanting to swim with the big boys this is probably the product that will help you. Buzzmetrics is nothing new, its been in development for almost a decade and has had many iterations over that time. From what I've gathered its primary focus is international brands and brand managers looking to listen in on what the community is saying about their brands, their products and services, as well as their promotions and marketing.  

Analytics of online social communication is very hot right now and it will continue to be. If you've worked (or plan to work) with clients on social media, being able to provide insight into how favorably your client is being talked about is going to substantially help you provide better service in the future. 

So what is Buzz Metrics all about? I'll let Nielson do all of the sales work.. see the overview and the .pdf one pager.

Buzzmetrics searches all public content across blogs, boards (forums,) comments, Twitter, Facebook and traditional news portals. It then saves all of this information to their data reservoir which then gets referenced as you run your searches. Seems like a simple process, but there are some very complex algorithms behind it, especially as it tries to work out the sentiment of the conversation. Free providers of this kind of service eg. Social Mention are doing an ok job, but they haven't yet cracked the level of quality required to make the results worth while. For example, one of my clients happens to share their brand name with the a location in the US. This makes using something like Social Mention almost impossible as most of the results I get returned are not relevant.

From a brand managers point of view Buzzmetrics looks great. You can track conversations, view trends over time for how people are talking about your brand, locate the major sources of conversation, track threats to your brand and all kinds of other tricks. But the main hitch I can see with it is that its not a fully automated programme. You can't modify it to search the locations you want without contacting Nielson and getting them to add sources and queries. Also the searched sources are region specific (ie, not global unless you pay the global price of $2000US per month - approx.) So if you're anything like me and don't see physical location as a boundary for your brand then this system starts to get expensive quickly.

I could rattle on for a while about the product but I wont clog up the SMNZ blog. If you're interested in talking more about it do contact me. I'm looking at using it once I've got enough clients locked into 12 month conversation tracking contracts. 

My question to you is should we be trawling the whole web in search of brand mentions? or should we be focussing on specific locations where we know conversation is happening?

Also... Do you use any cool tools for measuring conversation? If so, what are they called? and what are they good for?

Hayden Raw @Hamrltd

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Twitter clients for Twitter clients - Tweet Deck

Tweet Deck (www.tweetdeck.com) is the multifunctional printer/fax/scanner of Twitter clients. It comes in both Adobe Air and iPhone formats which means it works on pretty much anything. Sweet... The features are great and whilst I admire their willingness to innovate there comes a time when you've got to stop adding features and start to refine the ones you already have.

Good features.
+ Popup alerts (that you can switch off) for account actions, mentions, search tags
+ Easy retweeting, replying
+ Multiple account posting / tracking
+ Includes Facebook and Myspace interaction
+ Auto shortening of URL links

Items that need improvement
+ The Tech-gamer interface makes it comparatively hard to read compared to others
+ Chews your CPU (on a 2ghz MacBookPro it fluctuates between 10 - 15% of your CPU whilst idling)

These are two vital hitches with Tweetdeck that they really need to address. The functionality is great but they need to focus on their interface and usability if they want to attract the non-techgeek general public. I would suggest ditching the black / grey in light of some white, Decreasing the size of the font (but increasing the leading), Giving the tweets some more space to breath and adding in a bit of colour variation and they'd have an awesome product they could possibly even charge for.

Come to think of that, would you pay for the mack-daddy of social media interfaces? Something that handled everything and was ridiculously easy to use? Interested to hear your thoughts and persepctive

Hayden @hamrltd

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Twitter clients for Twitter clients - Brizzly

Over the past few weeks I've been testing all of the Twitter clients that I can find in the search for something I can recommend to my clients who use Twitter. So far I've found good points on some and bad points on others and there hasn't really been any clear winner. If you're teaching others to use social media, providing them with a nicely refined interface that is easy to understand will vastly decrease their level of confusion and increase their level of enjoyment.

Over the next few of posts I'll share with you my views on the good, the bad and the ugly of the Twitter clients available. My reviews will be on browser and iPhone based clients. I will use www.twitter.com as the benchmark and will be assessing based on level of features, usability, and interface design.

First up: Brizzly http://brizzly.com/

I scored myself an invite to start using Brizzly (it's not hard to get one if you're in the market) and my first impression was "Hey, this is nice." It felt easy to use, everything seems to be in a logical place, it's aesthetically pleasing and it includes features that would be awesome integrated into the real Twitter. Not bad, as far as first impressions go.

Brizzly's good features include:
+ Automatic display (in the feed timeline) of images and videos where the URL's have been inserted into Tweet.
+ Definition of why trending topics are trending (especially handy when you're in NZ and not always in the loop)
+ Managing of several accounts from one interface
+ Clear, uncluttered interface that uses pleasant colours
+ Easy Retweeting functionality

The things that hold Brizzly back:
+ Slowness of updating (requires human interaction to update)
+ A feeling of clunky-ness with the user interface (related to slowness)
+ Very similar to twitter.com interface just without the customisation.

All in all Brizzly is really good from a design point of view. My bad points are based on the interaction aspects of the interface which may be out of their control due to the time associated with referencing the Twitter database. I would recommend Brizzly to others to try, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to newbies as it doesn't differ that much from the slightly simpler twitter.com interface.

Have you used Brizzly before? What are your thoughts?

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It's Hamr Time

My name is Hayden and I am Managing Director at Hamr Ltd. Through Hamr I help brands integrate social media and socially interactive elements into their brand strategies and marketing regimes. I have a heavy focus on the design side of social media, making it as accessible as feasible for both brands and customers to use.

Social media is going to be a pivotal part of how brands survive in the future. It’s an exciting place and I’m excited to be part of a group that is paving the way for how it’s going to happen. I like pushing boundaries and trying new things, possibly due to a short attention span, but things like integrating traditional media with new media and creating real world mashups is what floats my boat. 

I come from an interaction, web, branding and game design background. I worked at Straylight Studios in Dunedin and moved to Auckland in mid 2008 to start their Auckland office. I am now based in Newton in a great wee studio space called Studio CO-4.

I look forward to sharing my insights, stellar examples and happenings from the design / SoMe world.

Check out the Hamr website www.hamr.co.nz
Follow me on Twitter @hamrltd
Add me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/haydenraw

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