As a social media man a big part of the role over the past few years has been selling in the benefits of social media to my employers. I've also done a wide number of lectures around the country and a similar type of sales job has been required to showcase the importance of social media and then of course to reveal some ways people can use it. A major tool in achieving this has been the wonderful Social Media Revolution video. It presents the importance of social media in a really nice way and with Fat Boy Slim providing the soundtrack has convinced many an indifferent soul of the value of social media.
I sense that such efforts are required in a wide range of spheres. In my current role we're champions for process improvement. This includes things such as lean and six sigma and it appears that many in the mangement world are skeptical of the benefits of process improvement. So we've tried our hand at a video of our own. I'm undoubtably bias but I think it's pretty darn good. Have a look and see what you think.
When I started The Environment Site we had a feature on our discussion forums called eCoBoT. This was a chat plugin. It used fairly basic AI to enable you to have a conversation with it. You would post a message, eCoBoT would make a reply based upon this input, and so on. It was unlikely to ever pass the Turing Test (although some members did think it was one of the admin team pretending), but the results were often very funny.
That was several years ago and this kind of thing hasn't really moved any further away from the fringes. I was reading today however about a Twitter Bot. This isn't a TwitterBot in the sense of having something merely retweet or follow particular accounts. This is a social bot that can actually hold conversations. Apparently anyway.
The research had it's origins in a scepticism around claims by social media 'experts' that they could grow clients' Twitter networks and increase engagement with their followers.
"A lot of people you can hire now say they are really good at community engagement," says Tim Hwang, one of the authors of a research paper describing the socialbot experiments. Hwang and his colleagues wondered, "Can we measure those claims?"
They joined the Web Ecology Project, in particular a competition to see which team of researchers could gain the most @replies on Twitter. There was nothing in the rules to say the process could not be automated, so they set about trying to win the competition by using bots.
To do this they followed 2,700 Twitter users over the course of 54 days. The first 33 days were the control period, so no social bots were deployed. The following 21 day period however saw 9 bots cut loose, one for each target group of 300 users. Each bot was instructed to do things like retweet messages and introduce users to one another.
Results
Interestingly it seems that many didn't seem to notice they were interacting with a bot. The experiment found that each bot account attracted on average 62 new followers and received 33 incoming tweets, split between @mentions and retweets.
What's even more interesting is the impact of the bots on the target group. Compared to the control period, the bots involvement saw a 43% increase in follows. One group saw a whopping 355% increase.
With crowdturfing on the increase this is indeed an interesting development. Can you see any positive use of this technology? I'm not sure I can but look forward to hearing your comments.
When we publish things on Twitter we naturally want our followers to pass things on to their own followers. A retweet makes us feel good, it says that our followers find what we share useful whilst at the same time enhancing the reach of our tweets. Researchers at MIT have studied what works and what doesn't work when it comes to getting those retweets.
How not to get retweets
Don't use a hard sell. Coming on strong reduces retweets by 32%
Don't ask questions. Whilst this may work well for getting @ responses, it doesn't work well for getting retweets, with questions getting 30% fewer retweets
Hashtags don't help. Using hashtags in your tweets seems standard now, even for boring events that no one really cares about. Their inclusion does nothing to encourage retweets though
People don't share competitions. Many of us think if we give people a fun way to win things that they'll instantly share it with their friends. The research suggests that this really doesn't happen.
Ok, so those are a few things that they suggest don't work for getting retweets. So what does work?
How to get retweets
Use <70 characters. Tweets of less than 70 characters were retweeted twice as often as normal. The message is clear. Leave room for people to both retweet you and add in their username and/or comment.
Grab their attention. Remember the old AIDA acronym? Get their attention early on in your tweet. Attention grabbing openings were retweeted 40% more often.
Ask for the retweet. This is always something I've shied away from. Bit naff isn't it? It works though. A simple RT request saw 34% more retweets.
Reveal the inner you. People tend to follow people on Twitter to hear the real them, not a corporate mouthpiece. Content that humanizes the user is retweeted 70% more often.
Share your success. If you've achieved a notable win, share it on Twitter. The research shows that people tend to enjoy this, with retweets up 29% for celebratory tweets.
Help people. This one seems more obvious. If you give people things they can use, then they retweet it 51% more often than normal.
Save them money. Everyone loves to save money, so giving people deals etc. is a great way to generate retweets. Tweets containing deals were shared 16% more than normal.
Be relevant. Things age uber quickly on the web, so make sure what you tweet about is relevant. Topical tweets are shared 41% more often than normal.
Wet the appetite. If you can create a sense of anticipation you're 24% more likely to get a retweet.
Power combos. What's interesting is that if you can combine some of these into a single tweet your retweet power is supercharged. Can you reveal the inner you whilst sharing a success story? How about grabbing attention with a money saving offer?
We all want to get the most out of Twitter. Hopefully these tips will help you do just that.
Back in the day when I was running WebVideo4U one of the major selling points of our web conferencing software was that you could see all of the things you couldn't see over the phone. You'd pick up peoples body language for instance or detect their facial expression. Of course even the telephone has certain advantages over electronic communication. You can pick up the tone of voice for instance. A major line used in our sales attempts was that 93% of the meaning in what we say is actually non-verbal (of course this may not be entirely true, but y'know)
Despite these apparent shortcomings of course electronic communications have absolutely boomed since then. If we're not sending 294 billion emails per day, we're tweeting or texting or using any of the plethora of other digital communications tools available to us. Some new research has set out to explore just how effective this communication actually is. What's interesting is that, they believe, our success is often massively over-estimated and that what we say online is often lost in translation.
The researchers conducted 5 experiments to determine how well what we say online is communicated. Here are some of the main findings:
Non-written cues can seriously change the meaning of a sentance
Humour does not travel well digitally
Communicators are generally oblivious to #1 and #2
Turns out that when we write online we tend to assign the recipient of our message the same qualities as ourselves, therefore if we find something hilarious then of course the recipient will as well. This over-confidence tends to occur more often in synchronous media where we tend to respond instinctively and our thinking brain does not have time to kick in and remind us that what we're saying may have the potential to be misconstrued.
If the research is on the money, the chances are we'll all ignore this and carry on as before, which given that the findings are not really all that new suggests this is really quite likely. Don't say you haven't been warned though.
I wrote before Christmas about a quick poll of social media and community managers conducted on LinkedIn, asking them whether they planned to log-on to their communities over Christmas, a time when most people are relaxing and generally doing their best to think about anything but work. It turns out that around 80% planned to do just that.
So it's interesting to read this week about some new legislation emerging from Brazil suggesting that people answering work emails outside of work hours should be allowed to charge overtime for this. All of which begs the question of how this applies to social media folk? I suspect I'm in good company here, but office hours don't really apply to social media work. The beauty of social media is that you can get responses from people instantly and the notion of office hours doesn't really apply.
Last year I interviewed Alison Maitland and Peter Thomson for Professional Manager magazine. They are the authors of a book on the Future of Work. A central theme of the interview was that our perspective of work needs to undertake a fundamental shift away from what we input and towards what we output.
In such a world office hours become irrelevant. It no longer matters how long you work. It no longer matters where you work. All that matters is that you achieve the outputs that you're being paid to produce. So for social media people you shouldn't expect to get more money if you put in more hours, you should expect more money if you smash your targets.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm no domestic god. That's not to say I'm a man behaving badly, just that I suspect my cleaning standards are perhaps not up to the high standards of Jitka. I think making an effort is important though. New research suggests that men who attempt to shirk their responsibilities could be biting off more than they can chew.
A study has asked around 400 couples across Europe about the distribution of domestic chores in their household. They also quizzed each couple on their level of marital bliss.
All of those quizzed were dual-earning couples with young children. The women in each partnership each worked at least 15 hours a week, with the average professional workload being approximately 30 hours per week. The men in the study worked on average 49 hours. As is often common in much of the western world. despite working, the women in the relationship did the bulk of the domestic duties.
In addition to the total housework done in each household, the researchers wanted to understand both the distribution of that housework, and whether each person found that distribution fair or not, and indeed whether they found the process by which this distribution was decided upon was fair. They also attempted to gauge the health of the relationship by asking how often they argued and how happy each person was in general with the relationship.
Here is the crunch for men. For the majority of women in the study, the total housework they did was not a bone of contention. What caused them to gripe however was the distribution of the housework, and more importantly whether that was fair or not. Women who thought the distribution of housework was unfair were found to argue much more and be less happy in their relationship.
What made things even worse was if the women thought that the process by which the housework was divided up was also unfair. If that was the case then the menfolk are in a world of hurt.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the men had no such worries. For men there was nothing about the distribution of housework that could make them unhappy. The only way it affected their mood at all was if the women in their life did lots of it, which made them happier than usual.
This joy was short lived however because the research found that when their partner was mad about the inequitable distribution of the housework, they inflicted much more pain on their partner than the joy they received at getting out of doing it in the first place.
"The results support the proposition that it is not the balance of the division of labour itself but rather the subjective sense of justice associated with the division that matters primarily to the relationship satisfaction of the persons concerned," the researchers concluded. "Spouses should exchange their personal views and preferences in open discussions to arrive at an agreement that considers the wishes of both parties … "
So the message is clear for the men out there. If you want a happy household, you need to make sure that you chip in with the housework, or at least make sure that your partner is happy with how things are divided up.
There has been a lot of research and literature suggesting that to succeed in Adwords you need to ensure you're in the top positions for your keywords. They reason that these ads get many more clicks than ads lower down the page, therefore are going to be much more profitable.
Some Wharton research is casting doubt on this heuristic however. The research, conducted by Wharton operations and information management professor Kartik Hosanagar, University of Texas professor Ashish Agarwal and Carnegie Mellon professor Michael D. Smith, found that ads located lower down achieved much better conversion ratios. Therefore, despite achieving lower click through rates than ads higher up, these ads earnt more money.
"We found that the ads that are in the top position get disproportionately higher clicks, but that they are not necessarily maximizing revenues" for those advertisers, notes Hosanagar.
They found that the percentage of clicks that led to purchases were higher for ads in positions 2-4 than they were for the ad in pole position. The researchers this result was due to two main factors.
The browsers dilemma – They found that because the first ad attracted the most attention, it naturally attracted the attention of those that were merely browsing. Those with a stronger desire to buy therefore were more persistant and checked out a wider range of ads.
Persistent comparison shoppers – The really motivated shopper is likely to compare a number of suppliers before purchasing. So if they have gone to the effort to do this, they will buy from the best site, therefore the positioning of the ad is of less important.
Online the relative cost of comparing an extra product is pretty small, so consumers will happily shop around and return to the site that best meets their needs. If all are roughly equal then they'll often buy from the latest site. So you can see that the ad placing has little impact for the serious shopper.
Take-away
So the message from the research seems clear. If you're a marketer using Google Adwords, your job is to evaluate the effectiveness of that ad in driving sales/leads/whatever. So don't get hung-up on how effective the advert is in generating click throughs, focus instead on how effective it is at sending customers your way. By all means ensure that your ad is working well by testing variations of the copy and keywords, but don't forget to give plenty of attention to tying all of this in with landing page optimisation to ensure you're generating revenue rather than simply filling Google's pockets.
Large cities have a pretty good reputation as far as innovation goes. Their cultural diversity is said to bring a wide range of ideas together into a melting pot, with the resulting evolution leading to all manner of new companies, products and services. Steven Johnson is a particular advocate of this belief. In his book Where Good Ideas Come From he says “As cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip,”, citing the Vienna coffee houses for Sigmund Freud or the Italian towns that helped spawn the Renaissance.
Research however would cast doubt on this heuristic. A study looked at how diversity spreads across a university campus. They wanted to test the theory that larger campuses, with therefore greater diversity, would lead to us seeking out fresh people, with fresh ideas. The flipside of course is that smaller campuses, with less diversity, would lead to greater homogenity.
They compared a university with a student body of over 25,000 students with smaller schools with an average of around 500 students to see how diverse friendship groups were on the various campuses. People were asked about their opinions on things like religion, their exercise routines, views on birth control, binge drinking and so on. Their answers provided a basic portrait of each individual to use in the analysis.
The standard thinking is that when there are lots of diverse people to interact with, as in a large city, that we seek out all of this diversity and devour its richness in all of its glory. The research findings however suggested something else entirely. They found that students at the large university spent most of their time with people that were just like them. What's more, they did so much more than the students in the smaller university. The level of correlation between friends was 80% higher in the large university than in the smaller ones.
These findings suggest that rather than using the large student body to find a diverse range of people, they were instead using this large group to find people who were as close to themselves as possible. Instead of learning from people who were extremely different – who disagreed with their stance on abortion, or didn’t like ultimate frisbee, or never attended football games – the students were obeying the similarity-attraction effect, sifting through the vast population to find the most homologous possible circle of friends. As the researchers put it, “the larger social contexts afford better opportunity for finegrained assortment.”
So with these findings in mind, are large cities really centres of innovation or are they merely places for people to find those just like themselves? Johnson has gone on to suggest that the web is akin to a city both in the way it evolves and the way it fosters innovation (see his TED video at the end of this post). Again though, does this research point to an Internet where people trawl to find niches that fit them like a glove rather than seeking out those that are different? Does it merely enforce existing prejudices and entrench our point of view as we can gorge ourselves on exactly the content we like, with who we like, whenever we like?
Here's that TED video for you. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Following is a great interview with recently departed IBM chief Sam Palmisano. The interview is with Wharton management professor Michael Useem. He talks about the importance of catching the shifts in technology, with the value IBM have always placed on this ability, and of course the near death experience they suffered by missing that shift a few decades ago. With IBM betting big on enterprise social media it would appear they regard that as a significant shift.
As human beings we are often guilty of not planning for negative events. We like the status quo and so like to assume that the status quo will be maintained forever. Of course reality often proves otherwise. As a sports fan the sporting world never fails to provide telling evidence of this. The Indian cricket team for instance have failed to do anything to negate the looming retirement of their legendary middle order, and having been roundly thrashed by both England and now Australia are set for a difficult time.
Likewise Manchester United have failed to plan for the retirement of Paul Scholes, to the extent that he has now come out of retirement to fill in the yawning gap in central midfield. You'd like to think that this experience will have driven home the importance of succession planning, especially as Alex Ferguson cannot go on forever. History would suggest otherwise however.
What about your community manager? I like to think that we fill a useful role in our organisations and that should we depart that the things we do will be both difficult to replace and sorely missed until a replacement is found. Yet a poll by SmartBrief has found that 72% of companies have no succession plan in place should their community manager leave.
This is not new. A KornFerry survey recently found that 65% of companies have no succession plan in place for their chief executives either, despite 98% regarding the issue as important.
So how can you plan for your community managers departure? Here are a few steps you can take to mitigate against this risk.
Identify the skills needed – I wrote last year about some of the key skills required to be a community manager. Your internal talent management plan should help you identify people with those skills.
Find successors – I've spoken about the importance of making social business a cultural thing, something that isn't confined to the marketing or IT departments. Therefore you should hopefully have a wide range of potential replacements to fill in.
Develop talent – Plans are very nice, but they don't achieve much on their own. To be effective you actually have to develop skills and talent, not just plan to do so. So make sure your focus is on actually developing the talent rather than planning to do so.
Work on your culture – All of this is really tough unless you have a culture of talent development in your organisation. If you're looking for measurable metrics to gauge how successful you are, it could include things like:
how many vacancies are filled internally?
what percentage of promotions come via the talent pool you've created in step #2
Be realistic – We tend to be pretty poor at self analysis – a so called illusory superiority. You need to be realistic about how attractive you are as an employer, how successful your plans are and so on. So when you're setting out your plans, be realistic about what to expect and the current state of things. Don't be tempted to sugar coat things.
I'd be interested to hear from you if your company has a plan in place should you move on? Are you part of a talent pool in your company?
I'll be the first to admit that I'm no domestic god. That's not to say I'm a man behaving badly, just that I suspect my cleaning standards are perhaps not up to the high standards of Jitka. I think making an effort is important though. New research suggests that men who attempt to shirk their responsibilities could be biting off more than they can chew.
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