Category: Community & Social Media

People talk about your company in online communities all the time. Do you know what they’re saying on Twitter? Facebook? Amazon? On your own community site? Get a handle on the buzz, find out how you stack up against the competition, and play an active role in shaping public opinion—build a social media monitoring and engagement strategy. It’s the most critical step in delivering value back to your customers.

We’ve led community strategy and development initiatives for more than two dozen publicly traded companies. Our solution: Make it easy for your team to find out what’s being said, share intelligence, collaborate on responses, and engage the public. To make it happen, we build on the Jive platform. We’ve found it to be the most enterprise-ready social business platform for public and private communities. Thanks to the recent acquisition of Filtrbox, Jive has reached a new level of learning and engagement. Separate modules make it easy to:

• Monitor the social web through powerful, easy-to-use dashboards. The foundation of a good social strategy starts with listening. Discover what people are saying about your brand and how they’re responding to your campaigns. Learn what questions they’re asking and what’s being said about your competitors.

• Share insights across your marketing, sales, support, and product development teams. Measure and discuss real-time chatter and how it impacts your strategies. Discuss your opportunities to control the flow of information, moderate discussions, and respond.

• Engage customers by turning your insights into actions, whether that’s responding to issues, countering misinformation, tuning marketing campaigns, or making changes to products. This allows you to build credibility and with it, a following. It’s that following that gives you the opportunity to market to customers and drive different types of transactions.

• Track and analyze how well people are responding to your message. See how social trends relate to commerce, including click-through to your product pages, how many community registrants convert to new customers, and if existing community members have increased purchases year over year.

Is it important to measure, track and optimize both market and direct engagement metrics. Market engagement is activity on third-party communities like Twitter, Facebook, and specialty industry sites, measuring your number of followers/fans, retweets, Facebook comments and links, and improved search engine ranking. Direct engagement happens on your own public-facing support site, partner site, or comment area. For example, the number of members in the community, unique visitors, page views, and subscribers to your blog’s RSS feed.

When you have the big picture, your teams can effectively engage customers. Ultimately, you’ll create the community of enthusiastic followers that evangelizes your brand and products.

Today was the first day of Symfony Live, the biggest symfony conference of the year and there has been a LOT going on. For day two of Symfony Live 2010, click here.

All of the presentation slides can be viewed online on the Symfony Live Event page on Joind.in.

sfPot

I don’t know if this event was named after Fabien Potencier (the leader of the symfony project) or what, but it was a good chance to drink some locally brewed beer with other serious members of the symfony community before the actual conference at Le Frog’s pub in a charming part of Paris.  I learned that Fabian thinks “Symfony 2 isn’t really an MVC framework in the typical sense”, but I’ll just wait until Wednesday’s unveiling of Symfony 2 to get the juicy details. Note: This event coupled with jet lag induced me to miss the first presentation the following day on internationalization.

Working with the Admin Generator

John Cleveley gave a useful and witty presentation on working with the symfony admin generator which included tips that are not in the documentation.  I did not know that the admin generator automatically created REST routes for your modules or the best techniques to go about creating your own admin theme.  Here are his “Ten Commandments”:

1. Understand the client’s workflow
2. Think about security from the start
3. Look through and understand the auto-generated, cached PHP files
4. Change the table_method call to reduce database calls
5. Use a custom (bespoke in U.K. english) form class for the admin if its different from your app(s)
6. Keep form configuration in the form classes (as opposed to the generator.yml) where possible
7. Create a theme or plugin to reuse your work
8. Consider users with small screens
9. Create functional tests to guard against regression
10. Maintain good MVC and decoupling practices

He also recommended the sfAdminDashPlugin and sfAdminThemeJsRollerPlugin.

Microsoft Presentation

Two representatives from Microsoft gave a pitch on the history of supporting PHP within Microsoft, the Open Source Techonology Center (OSTC) and using Windows Azure for cloud applications.

Symfony Internals

Geoffrey Bachelet quickly walked the audience through symfony’s execution of a request in a french accent so thick you could cut it with guillotine.  This was a review for advanced developers but a very useful reminder of the relevant design patterns that symfony implements such as the Observer and Chain of Responsibility.  It was enlightening to learn that returning the “Error” template is not often used since the new form framework was introduced and that the proper way to serve ajax requests for HTML is with the “None” return value in your action.

Doctrine Migrations

Dennis Benkert, the orgnizer of Symfony Day in Germany, shared his knowledge of Doctrine migrations which are largely inspired by Rails migrations.  I was pleased to learn that Doctrine now has command line tasks that will compare your newt schema.yml file to your existing model classes and generate a “migration file” for you.  This migration file is associated with a numbered and timestamped version of the database and consists of an up() and down() method which you run on your production database at deploy time.  This will replace the risky, error-prone and annoying process of having each developer maintain a SQL file with schema changes.  It is worth noting now that rollbacks don’t often work if a failure occurs during the migration and that Doctrine 2 will use a totally new migration technique.

Doctrine 2

The most exciting presentation of the day was given by Jon Wage on Doctrine 2.  With all of the talk recently about the Propel project being reinvigorated of late, this was Jon’s chance to show that Doctrine is still in the leading spot as far as PHP ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) go.  Given the features that Jon showed and that Fabien and Sensio are currently supporting Doctrine, I would agree that Doctrine is definitely the ORM to choose when starting a new symfony project or choose which one to learn.

The codebase has been completely rewritten to take advantage of PHP 5.3 and performs a LOT faster according to the benchmarks reported. Fabien requested that they “Remove the magic”, so there will be a bit more work for developers to do, but a better understanding of what is really happening and more control for advanced queries. A key feature is the separation of the ORM and the DBAL (Database Abstraction Layer). This will allow for the DBAL to used as a standalone component if desired and will allow for schema-to-database comparisons and improved migrations.  DQL (Doctrine Query Language) will be a true language with a recursive parser that builds queries and throws useful, informative exceptions.  A more explicit relationship between your model classes (based on PHP comments) will vastly improve entity inheritance, performance and the ability to write raw SQL and still get hydrated objects back as a result.

Worst case timeline for a stable release is six to twelve months.

Offline Admin Generator with HTML5 and Gears

Thomas Parisot’s offline admin generator is a peek into the future of running web applications offline.  Neither HTML5 nor Google Gears (which is discontinued) is supported enough to make this a reality for a consumer application yet…perhaps if you can force people to use a particular browser.  He did make some interesting observations about how it is possible make a javascript listener on every form that posts to the server to generically capture and locally store all of the transactions in the local SQLite database.  There are two models to choose from when designing an offline app.  The simpler approach is to have the user explicitly request to switch to “offline” mode before they lose connectivity.  The preferable, yet more complex approach is to always store transactions locally and then check if the connection is still up when moving from the local copy to the database.  Admittedly, the sample offline admin generator was more of a proof-of-concept than anything we can expect to actually use in the near future.

The Symfony Community

Finally, Stefan Koopmanschap, the current symfony community manager, gave a talk about how to properly get involved in the symfony community.  There are the Google Groups (symfony-users, symfony-docs, symfony-devs and symfony-community).  If you can’t find what you want there, then there are the IRC channels or sending out a tweet with the #symfony hashtag.  There are many local groups as well.  For example, the San Francisco Symfony Meetup group where I’ll be giving a recap of Symfony Live in the near future.  He stressed that if no one contributes, then there is nothing to be gained from the community, so please submit bugs to Trac if you find them, answer people’s questions, speak at a meetup or conference and introduce yourselves to your fellow developers!

For day two of Symfony Live 2010, click here.

Advertising is a fairly common sense business. Find out where your target spends their time and, well, hit them with an ad. Beer commercials during football games. Organic baby food banners on mommy blogs. Hotel ads in travel magazines.

So the news that retailers are increasing Back-to-School spending in social media should be no big surprise. A recent USA Today article reported that spending will be down 7.7% to about $548 per family versus $594 a year ago, so marketers are working hard to find the epicenter of teen activity. From the source:

The money that businesses spend on social media now is growing faster than any other form of online marketing. Some 25% of small businesses surveyed by Ad-ology Research said they would spend more on social networking in 2009, beating the numbers who’ll spend more on e-mail, blogging or company websites. Forrester Research projects the $455 million that companies spent on social networking in 2008 will balloon to more than $3.1 billion by 2014, a growth rate more than three times what it forecasts for e-mail marketing.

The real difficulty for brands will be whether or not their social media campaigns can pass the useful test. Retailers who create apps that function as tools like collaborative online shopping will have a better chance of survival in this hyper-connected demographic.

Barack Obama isn’t the first politician to successfully utilize social media, but he does seem to be the best at it. Not only is he on the Tweet, Facebook, and MySpace, he is also giving weekly YouTube speeches. Inspired fans have created a venue to celebrate his 48th birthday in the social networking world.

Monitoring, measuring, and reacting to chatter has become a requirement for companies that walk the halls of social media.

Are people lining up to sign your yearbook? Or do you have a ‘Kick Me’ sign stuck to your back? Here’s a few links that will get you eavesdropping in no time:

• 13 Essential Social Media Listening Tools

• 10 Tools For Listening in Social Media

• Sophisticated Social Media Tracking on the Cheap

It won’t be long before tools like these are in the backpack of every marketer. Might as well familiarize yourself now.

Over the past year, I have worked very closely with the community managers for over a dozen large enterprises, several of which are in the Fortune 500. Using a social community in business is no longer a new concept, and by now there is a body of widely accepted best practices for achieving community success. Certainly all of my clients would agree on one of these practices, which is the importance of having a dedicated community manager. This person is the business owner of the community, the evangelist, the person responsible for the community’s success. Typical community manager responsibilities include promoting the community, moderating content, measuring success via analytics, training internal folks, encouraging community participation, gathering community feedback, and planning for new features.

One challenging (and sometimes new) area for community managers is handling the changes that come with a large platform upgrade. While yesterday’s community platform may have been limited to discussion forums and wiki documents, today’s platforms offer a host of new features — blogging, social groups, friending, following, Twitter integration, video, and more. Upgrades like this require significant effort on the IT side — new hardware must purchased, custom features must be developed, user generated content must be migrated. Because the IT side is necessary, and the work is significant, it is easy to focus efforts there. After all, if you don’t execute well on the IT side, then the upgrade is not going to happen.

But these upgrades have another side to them, which is the reaction of the community members to a large change. Even though the community members are going to be trading in something old and limited for something newer and better, they may not always react positively. My two year old son Isaac has a beloved little stuffed blue dog, which he calls “blue dog.”  The little man does not go anywhere without blue dog, but at this point, blue dog’s stuffing is coming out of his nose, and blue dog’s tail is little more than a gnawed stump. So of course I decided that Isaac needs a new blue dog, and that his next blue dog is going to be even better than the last.  This new blue dog  has all kinds of new features — it is multi-colored, it barks when you squeeze it, it even has floppy ears.  But what happened when I swapped the old blue dog for the new?  Nothing short of complete revolt.  A furious little man screaming, stamping his feet, and throwing himself prostrate on the floor, in an epic tantrum that lasted for an hour and probably made our neighbors consider calling Child Protective Services.

The same thing can happen during a community upgrade. Members of a business community may be a little but more mature than toddlers — but don’t forget that they always have the upper hand, since they can create user generated content. With a static marketing website, you may never know that people are disappointed with a re-design.  But on a community website, there is nothing to stop a very vocal user from starting a discussion thread entitled “Disappointed with Site Upgrade, Please Comment.”  If something like that happens, you can end up with a public feeding frenzy of negativity — not because anything is wrong, but simply because things have changed and people were not expecting it.

Change is scary, and navigating people through change is an art form unto itself.   One of my b-school professors once summed up the difference between management and leadership as follows:  Management is about handling complexity, whereas leadership is about handling change.  So when a large change comes to a community, the challenge for the community manager is to become a community leader, and show others how to navigate the changes that are about to take place.

Here at SolutionSet we have been putting more effort towards consulting and advising our clients through these types of transitions.  Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but here are some best practices and ideas that have been yielding successful results:

1. Identify your most vocal and involved users.  Do this early, and engage them in dialog about what they would like to see in a new site. Gather their feedback during the requirements phase of your upgrade project, and take their input seriously.
2. Make a beta version available to key users.  Do this 1-3 months before the launch. Engage with the users, solicit their feedback, and make sure that you can implement at least 5-10% of their ideas into the final release.
3. Place a teaser on the existing site.   Prepare ALL users that change is coming by constructing a simple “Check out the new community” piece using Flash.  Include information about new features, and some screenshots of the new design.
4. Announce the upgrade to all users.  2-4 weeks before the launch, announce the upgrade to all users via email, a banner on the existing site, or prompt that users see at log-in.
5. Include a “Welcome to the new Community” feature.  Do this concurrent with the launch.   We have built these using either Flash or Camtasia technology.  Provide a tour of the new site, and a brief tutorial on new features, and highlight the benefits of the upgrade to the users.
6. Engage in dialog about the upgrade.  If there is any public discussion on the site about the changes, then participate in it, and direct it.  If the feedback is at all negative, be sympathetic and explanatory:  “Jim, thanks for pointing out that issue.  I agree with you that it’s an important thing to improve, and there is an enhancement planned to be released next week in order to address it.”   Or “Thanks for the feedback.  We actually discussed this issue at length during our requirements phase and decided to attack the problem in a different way.  Here’s our thinking on it:…”

No change is ever easy.  But from what I’ve seen, the community managers who lead their members through the change with some combination of items #1-6 have smoother transitions, and their community members are less likely to behave like screaming toddlers.

Not sure how I acquired a taste for government reports, but the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsement and Testimonials in Advertising is a real page-turner. Seriously. This is incredibly relevant stuff for anyone working in the commercial persuasion industry.

First released in 1972, these guidelines are responsible for fine print hits like “Individual results may vary” and “Paid actor”. The Commission recently decided it was time for some updates that consider paid blog endorsements and other social media “sponsored conversation” tactics.

[In case you’re looking for examples, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research maintains a running list of sponsored conversations—reads a bit like Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Hollywood blacklist.]

While the channels are changing, the basic question for marketers remains the same: If consumers know that an endorser has a financial interest in sales of a product or received gifts from the product’s producer, is this information likely to affect their assessement of the endorser’s credibility?

Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran established rules marketers should follow when using sponsored conversations, including educating everyone involved on the FTC guidelines, mandating absolute disclosure and transparency, and ensuring authenticity:

This is the real power of working with bloggers—to get them to talk freely about your brand with their community, not to use them as a megaphone to spin your message. If you’re not comfortable letting go of your brand then sponsored conversations aren’t for you (and you may want to revisit your overall social media strategy).

Corcoran goes on to explain that both the marketer and the blogger can be held liable for misleading or false statements made by the blogger about the brand. So not only will you have to wear a Scarlet Letter for being involved in a blogola scandal, your competition’s lawyers will be standing by ready to strike. Probably best to just play by the rules.

“Do I need this?”

“I’m not sure about the color.”

“Maybe I’ll come back for it.”

It often takes someone else’s opinion for you to finally pull the trigger on a purchase. Natalie Zmuda of AdAge wrote an article detailing the latest frontier for this timeless retail interaction—online. From the source:

In the coming weeks, two technologies — friend-based merchandising that involves Facebook and collaborative shopping — are being rolled out to big-name retailers, including Vans, Lucky Brand Jeans and Warner Entertainment.

The collaborative-shopping technology, which is now live at Vans.com, allows consumers who are building custom shoes on the site to chat with friends in real time about the product design. The customer clicks on a link saying, “Invite friends to design with you,” giving them the ability to access friends through AIM, e-mail or any other service a link can be sent through.

By creating a forum where consumers can get the validation they need to make the purchases they want, retailers could see less abandoned shopping carts and more sales.

Moccasins in Miami. Stilettos in Syracuse. Loafers in Lubbock. Be prepared to be mesmerized by this map developed by Zappos that shows where product orders are being placed across the country in real time.

Perhaps by showing the endless stream of purchases, Zappos will inspire consumers to pick up a little something for themselves.

Recently we were asked for our point of view on using customer testimonials in print advertising.

Our answer:

Follow the best practices of executing customer testimonials to achieve the best results. We posted on this topic a couple of months ago.

If you can’t follow the best practices, well maybe you should back away from the testimonial idea.  Here’s an example of a testimonial that breaks the rules: “Thinking about buying X? You should, X product is great!” -A.B. from Any Town, USA. Guess what the prospect thinks about that? It goes something like this: “What do I care about whether A.B. from Any Town thinks the product is great. If the Queen of England said the product was great, that would be one thing. Or if I know more about A.B., like if she was even real, or what specifically she liked about the product that would be helpful.” Trusts us, we executed some consumer research on this topic and there is rampant skepticism that the testimonials were  real, and this type of testimonial didn’t sway prospects in their purchase decision one iota.

Aren’t customer testimonials in print kind of old-fashioned, what with the web and all? Our take-away from our research is this: when reviews are featured in print marketing, they are less believable than when they are featured on a user review site on the web (even if it is a company’s own user review board).  The web is perceived to be owned not only by the brand but the customers too. It’s a place for customers to sound off, good and bad. But a piece of print communication is distinctly one-way, and it strips out the essential part of web reviews which is that it is two-way communication.  Which brings us to our next point:

Bring the web to the printed page. One of the things that makes online reviews and rankings useful is the sheer volume of them. When 1000 people rank something 4.5 stars, that is way more impactful than one or two people saying it. The online review and rankings have always operated on this principle - it is the sound of the entire community talking that makes reviews useful in making a purchase decision.  So by putting one or two rankings/reviews into print, a marketer misses the single most compelling part of reviews and rankings - the confidence a prospect gets from seeing a bunch of people give a product the thumbs-up.  The ideal situation occurs when a marketer can take the power of the web reviews and translate that to print. Think about how you can work in copy points like “10,000 gave this 4 out of 5 starts” and “Read thousands of customer reviews online.”  Skip the fluff and send your prospects directly to the source.