Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Recently I gave a presentation to Woodhead Architects and then selected a small part to share on social media channels.  Preparing a presentation takes time and there are others that might be interested, so sharing them on different channels makes sense. These are some suggested steps:

Prepare presentation in Keynote or Powerpoint

Select which parts of the presentation is applicable to wider social media audiences, this is what I selected:

1. Upload onto slideshare

2. Blog about it, then

3. tweet your blog post

4. link it to your LinkedIn profile,

5. and Facebook page,

6. Make it into a video for YouTube

Which is, indeed, what I have done. Giving those that are interested a choice of platforms to view.

Total: one presentation, six different places to see it.

Experimenting with various ways to share an article means I now have more facebook and twitter aps than you can shake a stick at:  in the column, in the article and on the wibiya toolbar at the bottom.  There is an argument for less is more. Nevertheless….

What are the stats on Twitter and Facebook influence?

Twitter reply and RT

Sysomos examined 1.2 billion tweets posted in the last two months (what do they do in their spare time?). Their analysis is worth a read. They surmise that a tweet that generates a reply or a retweet suggests it is interesting enough that it has sparked a conversation or people want to share it with their network (which is what you want if you are blogging for example).

29% of tweets generate a reply or a retweet

• Of this group of tweets, 19.3% were retweets (maybe because it’s quick and easy to do) and the rest replies, in other words of the 1.2 billion tweets examined, 6%, (or 72 million) were retweets.

Most retweets happen in the first hour

• Which means timing your tweet if you have just published a blog post is important (you may want to post the tweet more than once for different time zones for example).

Facebook ‘Like’

According to facebook + media, the like button is important.  They asked ‘Who are “likers” and found:

• People who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user.
  The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user.

• They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook
  They click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

• The ‘like’ button is favoured by a younger audience.
  The the average “liker” on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, (as reported by the Newspaper Association of America).

Again, maybe because the like button is easy to use (like the retweet) people favour using it and it means content is shared quickly. So, although less is more, for the moment, twitter and facebook are here to stay on this site for a while.

Every company has critics, however these critics are now able organize a coordinated global attack using social media tools.

‘Facebook fan page brand-jacking is the new form of tree hugging. As movements form, the organized groups can stage mass attacks on brand Facebook fan pages, overrunning it with negative messages.  Like sitting in trees with banners to slow down clear cutting and spray painting messages on buildings, this is simply the digital form of real-world protest’[1]

This is one of the reasons many are hesitant to jump in and start a blog or facebook page. Anyone embarking on social media, especially companies in health, should have guidelines or an escalation plan about what to do when things go wrong, protecting themselves (and their employees). Guidelines should describe those comments which require an immediate response, what the response will be, from whom, and indicate what to do if negative comments escalate.

Without such a plan you run the risk of being forced to shut your site down or take extreme remedial action (higher profile cases of organisations who got caught out include Nestlé, Sanofi Aventis, Elsevier). Whatever the case, it may not be possible to talk about specific adverse events but let readers know that they have been heard, that communication is open and that their comments have been taken seriously. Sometimes there may be instances where ‘top management’ are visible and active.

Processes Brand Triage

Although these guidelines were made for the ‘corporate’ world, they also apply to individuals, especially within the area of health and research where a comment taken out of context can harm not just reputations but also have clinical implications. The thing not to do is to ignore or block someone out of hand (unless they are a troll), this can lead to an escalation of the problem – a very public example of this was a mistake made by Nestlé in trying to ban a Greenpeace video on YouTube – it simply added fuel to the fire (see ‘Censored Greenpeace video gets helping hand from Nestlé).

Crisis communications is not necessarily about fixing the problem but putting forward the human face of a company and letting people know they have been heard. Addressing an issue will go a long way to building trust (whether that trust is warranted of course is another matter entirely).

References

[1] Jeremiah Owyang: Crisis Planning: Prepare Your Company For Social Media Attacks

‘On the one hand, I’d be crazy NOT to invest in a social media strategy.  It clearly matters. On the other hand, I’d be crazy to invest a LOT in a social media strategy. It is clearly matters a lot less than several other business priorities I have. So it’s all about optimizing.  If I’m only going spend, say, 1 hour a week on my social media strategy, I need it to be a well spent hour.’

These were questions put to me by someone managing a website on top of clinical work:

• How many online communities can I meaningfully participate in with a strictly limited time budget?  Is it better to participate a little bit in 6 communities or twice as much in each of 3?

• What KIND of contributions/interactions are the most meaningful?  It’s very emotionally addictive to engage in debates, but is that really the best use of time?
  

• If my goal is to be seen to work on a reputation in a community, how is that best done?  ”Suck up” to people, favourably review their contributions, “like” a lot of stuff, promote a lot of other people?  Promote blog posts?  Be a great source of interesting links?  Tell people what I had for dinner?  There are many ways to participate, clearly not all equally serving the strategy!

• Which are the best communities to participate in?  What’s hot?  What’s most relevant to my work?  What’s the most likely to last?  Is it just a matter of picking the biggest?

• Should my social media strategy favour interactions with professionals or patients?  I have both markets roughly equally, but social media may have quite different relevance to those two markets.

In response I would say this

Doing a little well, is far more effective than doing a lot sporadically

• Start small
• Pick something you can manage – one site, one community, one goal
• Measure the difference to your site
• Be consistent (important, so start small)
• Be genuine – one good conversation, comment, or link is worth far more than trying to be everywhere at once

Videos are often searched for and are useful tools for clinicians to include on their websites from exercises to education. How do you make sure your video is found?

Here Nelson Lee, Product Manager at Google, talks about video sitemaps, which help make your video content easier for users to find. Key points on what Google needs to know:

• The title
• A brief description of your video
• The play page URL where Google can direct users to watch the video
• The URL of the thumbnail image you would like Google to display
• and the raw file location where the video is stored securely.

Once you’ve collected this information, sign in and submit your sitemap using Google webmaster tools

For more info, visit http://www.google.com/videositemaps

‘The social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade, according to experts who responded to a survey about the future of the internet. They say this is because email, social networks, and other online tools offer ‘low-friction’ opportunities to create, enhance, and rediscover social ties that make a difference in people’s lives. The internet lowers traditional communications constraints of cost, geography, and time; and it supports the type of open information sharing that brings people together.’

Pew Internet Report 2010

Some might argue that making communication easier and lowering constraints equates to lower value relationships, but my experience at least is that through the social web the world has become a smaller place, and friendships are more accessible.