Robin Hamman talk -- Community and Social Media

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?