ændrew.com v8

Robin Hamman talk -- Community and Social Media

October 19, 2011

Robin Hamman, Director of Digital, Edelman (London)

Visiting Fellow of Journalism, City

  • If you ask general questions, the responses tend to be pretty low-quality.
  • While at BBC, they spent upwards of £1 mil on moderating just non-news content.
  • When you engage visitors, make sure you can at least acknowledge their contributions

    • Have editorial guidelines for user-submitted content up front.
  • Use tools like Yahoo! Pipes to glean snapshot of current posts on a topic and respond back to community directly.
  • Once you know what people are searching for, you can start to intelligently use keywords/tags/etc.
  • Most people (60%) need to hear something 3-5 times about a company to believe it is likely true — Edelman Trust Barometer.
  • Seven behaviours of public engagement:

    • Listen with new intelligence
    • Participate in the conversation: real time / all the time
    • Socialise media relations
    • Create and co-create content
    • Champion open advocacy
    • Build active partnerships for the common good
    • Embrace the chaos
  • Embassies — important as a transitory space between broader Internet and owned content; Google pagerank via natural language results.
  • 5 C’s which deliver “lifetime value”

    • Content: value provided through quality content that educates, inspires, informs and connects community members.
    • Context: value provided by deep understanding of how participants within community want to engage and the tools they use to do so.
    • Connectivity: value provided by connecting members of community in mutually beneficial ways.
    • Continuity: value provided by sustaining efforts over time, ensuring that community is healthy and productive.

      • “Community isn’t just for Christmas.”
    • Collaboration: value established through collaborative efforts of participants who share, co-create and edit each others’ efforts.
  • Five steps towards community engagement:

    1. Assess community needs and interest — Radium6 ($$$$).
    2. Develop rules of engagement — what do you do when you find a piece of content online?

      • Response considerations: transparency, sourcing, timeliness, tone, influence
    3. Identify right managers for your community

      • moderation = policing; hosting = building engagement
      • When a comment is removed, build accountability and followup — Why was it removed? Who removed it?
      • Hosts provide environment, set agenda, welcome audience and then provide connections between audience members — before backing off and manages everything else.

        • Metaphor of a party host
        • Connecting community to content and bringing out audience voice.
    4. Establish internal and external processes

      • Community management takes time; set expectations (When and who will be around?)
    5. Train, Equip and Deploy (TED)

      • Articulate — able t communicate effectively in a variety of media
      • Social: engage in authentic conversation and interactions
      • Professional: act as a responsible ambassador of brand/org
      • Adaptable: can make decisions quickly, handle crisis situations
      • Enthusiastic: energetic, passionate and engaged in relevant topics
      • Connected: has ties to the right people within community
      • Organized: can keep track of data, relationships, content calendars and a variety of assets essential to maintaining community
  • Audiences are interested in your proceses

    • Cool idea: DJs using Last.fm

      • Panorama using Delicious
  • The life cycle of content can be extended through social participation

    • Always reuse content and keep back catalogue as an asset.
  • Social media measurement:

    • Attention, engagement, authority, influence, sentiment
  • Examples of good social utilization:

    • American Expres OpenForum
    • West Midlands Police; @wmp_helicopter; westmidlandspolice YouTube.
    • Spot.us — really cool way of crowdsourcing journalism; content licensed as CC-attrib
    • Help Me Investigate
    • Ushahidi — crowdsourcing, mapping crisis response (#radtacular)
    • “Glamour Ask a Stylist” app — take a photo and quickly get a response from a stylist. Can use incoming content for crowdsourcing article topics, targeting content, etc. etc. (#brilliant)
    • David Hone — Shell climate change advisor; how to make activities more visible to internal staff.

      • Created blog, hooked it up to Delicious, Vimeo, Slideshare
    • GE — curating voices of staff; marketing people don’t have the technical insights product designers and whatnot will.

Other stuff:

  1. What is a community

    • owned
    • embassies
    • social
  2. Key skills required

    • hosting (engagement building)
    • moderation (policing)
  3. ROI

    • insights and data
    • collaboration
    • eyeballs
    • sense of ownership
    • increased reach and depth of engagement
  4. Extending the life cycle of content

    • transparency of process
    • direct involvement of audiences
    • sharing and repurposing
  5. The importance of rules
  6. Managing challenging situations
  7. Legal implications

    • libel — “golden rules” at BBC (Wanted to be able to fall back on the Reynoldson case — i.e., site is just a conduit — but necessary for takedown policy)
    • harassment
    • incitement
    • hate speech
    • duty of care (?)
    • copyright
  8. Measurement
  9. Clarity of purpose (“meaningful participatory framework…“)
  10. So now what?

Ændrew Rininsland
© 2018 Ændrew Rininsland, except where otherwise noted.