Last night Facebook changed some of the terminology on Spot On PR’s Facebook page. It’s something that has been talked about for the past few weeks (see Mashable story from March) and is being rolled out across Facebook and organisation’s Facebook pages. As a result, this morning our Facebook page fans are no longer called Fans, Facebook users no longer click “Become a Fan” to join our Facebook page and the section of the Wall dedicated to Fans now says “Others”.
Apparently this is an attempt by Facebook to provide “a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in” and lower the perceived commitment for Facebook users to follow organisation’s Facebook pages (i.e. users no longer have to consider themselves a “fan” to follow a page’s content). Having worked with technology for the past 15 years, we know that terminology isn’t always perfect the first time around, can change quite often and any new terminology takes a while to get accepted. However, we’re going to miss our fans.
We also disagree with Facebook’s decision to foist this on page owners without consultation or consent. Spot On PR is on Facebook for business networking purposes. We like the fact that we can associate with Facebook users that share similar interests and careers to ourselves and we liked the fact that becoming a fan of our Facebook page made people consider what was in it for them before joining. I like many different things and people, but I don’t want daily updates from all of them. The “Like” button now seems to attribute the same level of commitment to joining a Facebook page as it does to liking a blog post or video that you “Like” in your Facebook News Stream. That doesn’t seem right to us.
Nor does calling our fans “Others” as they are termed on the Wall of our Facebook page, which now shows tabs for “Spot On Public Relations + others”, “Just Spot On Public Relations”, or “Just others”. It seems that Facebook no longer wants us to engage and entertain our Fans, but with “Others”. In fact, it’s now not clear how page fans should be referred to. Likes? Likers? Others? Lumping fans in with “Others” is a mistake in our opinion. “Others” implies people or things unknown and that used to be the difference between our fans and the others (the old others that is, not the new others!).
Thanks to all our Facebook fans and we hope that you continue to
Things are looking up for the online marketing community. Recent surveys and media reports widely credit the region’s online advertising spend to be growing fast and becoming increasingly important to more and more people. Although last year was a difficult one for many, some believe that this gave big advertisers pause for thought and time to re-look at where online marketing fits in with their overall spend. Meanwhile, the social media revolution that has forced many businesses in other parts of the world to rethink how they interact with customers seems to finally be making its presence felt in the region with Facebook’s user numbers in the Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia rivaling traditional media audiences. The likes of Facebook, Google and Yahoo! have also all commented during the past year about the Arab world’s Internet coming of age and opening up opportunities for developers, advertisers, governments and others stakeholders across the region.
That’s the glass-is-half-full story.
The other half
The empty half of the glass is that the numbers of advertisers, developers, web ventures, educationalists and government departments using the Internet effectively in the Middle East is still remarkably small. Online marketers are all too often siloed in their own disciplines such as online advertising, website development, e-commerce and lately social media. Businesses very often see their online as a bolt-on to their traditional media campaigns and their website as an elaborate company brochure: and their view of the online world can be equally siloed. Sales might see the value in direct response from websites and email campaigns. Marketing may favour banner ads. Public relations may want to do social media, but marketing and IT are probably in disagreement over that. And customer service is often the elephant in the room, being largely ignored because online budget is owned by marketing.
Businesses across the region have been challenged over the past 20 years to reinvent themselves from being importers and sales agents to being marketing brands that are associated with providing customer value. Today the Internet is challenging Arab businesses to reinvent themselves again and become more open and more customer centric. The divide and rule school of business development no longer works, particularly on the Internet. With the arrival of Web 2.0 customers, non-customers and other key audiences can all be affected by the actions of marketing, sales, PR, customer service and technical support. Marketing can’t send an email to new contacts without existing clients knowing about it any more than customer service can expect customers who have had a bad brand experience not to talk to anyone. This calls for a much higher degree of planning and coordination of communications than Middle East businesses have been used to. And businesses are scared.
The good news: you don’t need to be a wizard
However, as with many new trends, much of the fear, uncertainty and doubt felt by business about Web 2.0 and Internet marketing is due to a lack of knowledge. Sadly, the online industry doesn’t help itself much here. Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need to be a member of the magicians union to know what PPC, PPV, CTR or CPC are, you don’t need a special qualification to use Google Analytics and there’s no secret handshake required to become a social media marketer! In fact, your organisation probably already has much of the expertise required to plan, execute and manage a successful online communications campaign, because the central and most important consideration in this campaign should be your customers and other important key audiences.
Coming late to the party also has its benefits. Organisations across the region can now learn from a wealth of knowledge, example campaigns and online case studies from around the world whilst developing their own online campaigns. Furthermore, many brands, across many business sectors still have the opportunity to be first movers in developing online campaigns for their particular markets.
Introducing Digimedia.ME
Spot On PR is supporting a first-time conference next month called Digimedia.ME. The conference was born out of an idea to showcase and help explain the range of online communications disciplines to the business community. We’re excited about Digitmedia.ME, because a real effort has been made to rope in many different voices from the region’s online business community and the cost of attending has been kept very affordable, making it easy for business people to attend. So, if you want SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, brand protection, online PR or brand monitoring demystified, we hope that you’ll join us there.
Spot On Public Relations is a supporting partner of Digimedia.ME 2010. Digimedia takes place in Dubai on 5th and 6th May 2010. See the Digimedia.ME website for more information: http://www.digimedia.me
The April issue of O’Dwyer’s PR Magazine has just come out in the USA and it features a report I wrote on social media in the Middle East and North Africa. It’s a very top-level view of social media and Internet trends in the region and primarily intended as an introduction to the Arab world for social media marketers outside the region.
It’s only when starting to write a summary like this that one realises just how much there is to tell and how much Internet and media habits are changing across the region. O’Dwyer’s generously allowed my 1,400 words to write my report, but it really was a challenge trying to cram it all in!
You can read the digital edition of April’s O’Dwyer’s Magazine here:
O’Dwyer’s Magazine – April 2010
Thanks to Ben Lorica Senior Analyst at O’Reilly Research for allowing me to use their Facebook charts to illustrate my report.
Disclosure: Spot On PR also advertised in the April issue of O’Dwyer’s Magazine . We dealt with O’Dwyer’s advertising team on the advertisement and separately with O’Dwyer’s editor regarding covering the Arab world in this issue. However, as pointed out by @rupertbu on Twitter, I can’t tell you with certainty what, if any, influence our advertising had on the treatment of my editorial submission. We previewed Spot On PR’s advertisement in O’Dwyer’s to our Twitter and Facebook followers last week, but I see now that I should have mentioned our advertisement in this blogpost also. Thanks to Rupert Bumfrey for pointing this out!
Erroneous, misguided or otherwise badly put together marketing communications are sent out by organisations every day. Sometimes it’s a genuine mistake, sometime it’s sloppy work, sometimes it’s a bad judgement call and sometimes it’s pure human error that has the potential to make the whole organisation look bad. Most of the time communications like these simply fail to resonate, are passed over, ignored or deleted, mobile text messages in particular. A mobile marketing SMS sent out yesterday resonated with many UAE residents for all the wrong reasons.
It all began with this SMS message, apparently from Le Meridien Mina Seyahi’s Barasti Bar, confirming to their contacts that the Vanilla Ice concert planned for Wednesday March 31st night was indeed going ahead:
“NORMAL OPERATION. WE ARE NOT DRY! NICE, NICE BABY! 5PM-3AM C U ON THE SAND”
As many people have already commented on, this made the organisers and venue seem, at the very least, insensitive to the fact that a 3 day period of mourning had just started for Sheikh Ahmed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, formerly head of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, who died this week in a flying accident in Morocco. UAE columnist and social commentator Mishaal Al Gergawi (@algergawi on Twitter) tweeted “let’s get #barasti trending for the one reason they’d never want to trend today!” Nearly 600 tweets followed over the next 8 hours mentioning the #barasti hashtag. Some three hours after the Twitter rampage began Le Meridien Mina Seyahi announced that the Vanilla Ice concert was cancelled “due to the death of Sheikh Ahmed bin Zayed Al Nahyan”.
There has been debate, discussion, media reporting and statements from the venue itself on the question of whether the #Barasti Twitter campaign was responsible for the cancellation of the concert and so we’re not going to debate this further. However, there are some important take-aways for business communicators from the announcements made yesterday by Le Meridien and the reaction to them by the public. So, here’s our 50 fils worth:
1. The SMS text was not thought through and shouldn’t have been sent. That’s pretty obvious, but the broader picture is that with today’s communications and Internet services, you never really know who’s receiving your messages. You can no longer develop messages for one audience and assume that other audiences won’t see them.
2. Twitter was not prioritised by the venue or organisers and instead left to debate and protest the SMS. The announcement by Le Meridien (via @minaseyahi) that the concert was still taking place as planned was made at 10.13am UAE time. The announcement by the hotel that the event was cancelled was made at 4pm UAE Time (about an hour after this was announced to media). For the six hours in between @minaseyahi was silent.
This was a mistake.
Twitter updates tagged #barasti from 1300-2100 UAE time
As often pointed out by social media marketers critics and user alike, Twitter is not the whole game, there’s a whole world out there. However, Twitter is one of the most visible, most easily monitored indicators of audience interest and sentiment there is and the activity on Twitter should have been recognised early on as a call to action. By our calculations, 218 Twitter users were engaged in the #barasti conversation on Wednesday. If you had 218 people in your hotel lobby you’d talk to them. If you had 218 people calling you by telephone you’d have to say something to them. Those 218 Twitter users also have a combined following of 126,995 Twitter users. Many of these users were obviously at work in their offices at the time, so its reasonable to assume that many non-Twitter users became part of this extended conversation (we’d tend to estimate those in the hundreds too, at the least).
3. Facebook and Twitter are different. Le Meridien posted an apology on the Barasti Beach Facebook page at 3.20pm UAE time. It would be unwise to assume that the hundreds of Twitter users following this story would have seen this, but no such apology was made on Twitter. In fact, there was no statement of any kind on Twitter until 4pm. It was, and is, worthwhile posting an apology.
Proportion of Twitter users that stated an opinion on the SMS or the event (according to Spot On PR analysis)
4. ‘Information’ expands to fill a vacuum. Despite the obvious attention and strength of feeling regarding the SMS sent and the holding of the concert during a period of mourning, only 19% (according to our analysis) of Twitter users taking part in the #Barasti conversation voiced a clear opinion against the communication and the event. That leaves 81% of those users having either not formed a strong opinion or not willing to voice it. In other words, to a large extent, the only information and comment being provided to those 81% over Twitter was by those protesting against the SMS and concert. No explanation, apology or statement of any kind from the brand being criticised.
Note: Don’t read too much into our percentages here. The 19% of Twitter users voicing a clear opinion ranges from mild disapproval through to “I’m not renewing my membership card”. The sentiment of the 81% without an opinion on the SMS or event ranges from “What is #Barasti?” to Twitter users that felt that the energy injected into the Twitter campaign was a waste of time and effort.
5. The communications medium doesn’t matter anymore. Prioritising audiences based on the media they use (and we can’t honestly say that we know this is what happened) isn’t particularly useful anymore. Yesterday an SMS was re-posted on Twitter. Facebook messages can be reported on and appear in print. Telephone conversations can be noted down and blogged. Today’s communicators need to bear in mind that any communication, anywhere, to anyone is potentially today’s news.
Links to media reports & blog posts
Proud: UAE Tweethearts & Mishaal AlGergawi (Emiratweet blog)
Barasti bar scraps concert after Twitter outrage (Arabianbusiness.com)
Twitter irrelevant as Vanilla is put on ice (Maktoob.com)
The Inevitable Blog Post (Fakeplasticsouks blog)
Barasti apologises for insensitive concert texts (Arabianbusiness.com)
Scroll down the page for survey download links
Summary
It’s now well publicised that the rapid growth Twitter experienced during 2008 and the first months of 2009 slowed dramatically towards the end of 2009, although ending the year with 75 million user accounts. Twitter activity, on the other hand, grew from 5,000 tweets per day in 2007 to 300,000 by 2008 and 2.5 million tweets per day in 2009. Figures released by Twitter in February 2010 registered 50 million tweets per day (or an average of 600 tweets per second). No such figures are available for the Middle East & North Africa, but activity on Twitter has visibly increased over the past year and overall user numbers have also grown. Spot On estimates that there are currently 35,000-40,000 registered Twitter users in the region compared with a mere 3,000 users in March 2009.
Corporate activity in the MENA Twittersphere has grown too, with an estimated 400 brands represented on Twitter in the region including companies, government departments, NGOs and non-profit organizations (more than 300 can be tracked via Spot On’s Middle East Brands Twitter List). Spot On Public Relations conducted the first major MENA Twitter habits and demographics survey in August 2009. In light of the growing commercial interest in Twitter and social media in the MENA region, Spot On carried out a customer service and Twitter survey in February 2010. About 1,000 active Twitter users across the region were invited to take part in the survey and 174 users completed the survey in its entirety.
Key Findings
— 95% of respondents welcomed brand engagement via Twitter
— 87% of those surveyed said that Twitter had affected their perception of a brand or company (up from 61% in our August 2009 survey)
— 50% of those surveyed had received customer service via Twitter
— 50% of the survey had purchased a product or service as a result of Twitter
— 65% of respondents were interested in receiving special offers & coupons from brands on Twitter
— 82% admitted a preference for brands that they knew via Twitter that affected their purchasing
— 88% of those surveyed said that they would recommend a brand based on their experience on Twitter
All respondents were also asked to give one piece of advice to brands using Twitter. 101 Twitter users out of 174 contributed advice from their experience on Twitter. We highly recommend any brand that is using Twitter or considering using Twitter to read their advice in the survey report.
You can follow Spot On PR on Twitter via @spotonpr
Survey Downloads
The report: 101 things brands should know about Twitter (PDF)
Twitter and customer service survey press release (English, Word doc)
Twitter and customer service survey press release (Arabic, Word doc)
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101 things brands should know about Twitter by Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Want to read more?
If you liked reading this post about Twitter, you might also like:
5 reasons Spot On PR uses Twitter
The uninvited guest at the party
Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)
#DubaiToday 'trending' on UAETweets.com (3/Mar/10)
Perhaps it was the rainy weather, perhaps it was the fact that four well known local Twitter users appeared live on the show, or perhaps it was just the conversations, but Dubai Eye 103.8FM’s Dubai Today show really got the UAE’s Twitter community buzzing on Tuesday.
On hearing about local social media folk heroes Wild Peeta’s presentation at the Corporate Communications Conference on Monday, Dubai Today presenter Jessica Swann (a.k.a. @JessicaSwann on Twitter) was keen to have the speakers on the show. Tiring of more traditional conference presentations, Wild Peeta had turned to their fans and, somewhat bravely, had asked four of their social media followers to talk about Wild Peeta’s social media campaign and business on its behalf: on 24 hours notice, unvetted and unrehearsed. So, Spot On’s Alexander McNabb (a.k.a. @AlexanderMcnabb), Mohamed Younes Parham Al Awadhi (@wildpeeta), Paul Castle (@DaddyBird) and Uzma Atcha (@Lhjunkie) were cordially invited to appear on Dubai Today (as was @yahya101 who sadly couldn’t make it to the studio at short notice).
Spot On PR notified its social media followers in advance, as it usually does about Alexander’s public appearances, as did Wild Peeta, together with Twitter reminders just before the show. However, the reaction to Tuesday’s show took us all a bit by surprise! Whilst not strictly accurate, as one tweep put it, everyone on Twitter was listening to Dubai Today!
#DubaiToday tweets per hour (2/Mar/10)
Encouraged to use the Dubai Today Twitter hashtag #DubaiToday, within a couple of hours listeners had not only made the tag ‘trend’ locally (as tracked by UAETweets.com), but had made #DubaiToday trend globally (appear on Twitter list of top tags in use). By mid-show (Dubai Today runs between 9am and 12 noon) #DubaiToday tweets were peaking at more than 200 tweets per hour and over the course of four hours, more than 500 tweets were exchanged continuing discussions on Dubai Today, including contributions to the show that were read live on air. By the end of the day, 118 Twitter users had taken part in conversations with and about the Dubai Today show by using the #DubaiToday tag and had tweeted some 700 times between 8am and 8pm Tuesday.
No cash prizes, no crisis, no scoop
It’s worth noting that the reaction on Twitter was in response to a fairly intellectual discussion about the merits of social media marketing. There was no competition for expensive air tickets or cash prizes, nor any significant breaking news. This was simply mid-morning talk radio where the conversation seemed to strike a chord with the online community.
During the same time-frame Spot On saw between 250 and 350 click-throughs on its links inviting social media users to listen live to Dubai Eye (sorry, this is as accurate as we can be with this statistic), which it had posted across a range of social networking sites on Monday evening and Tuesday morning, including Twitter.
Clicks per hour on Spot On's short URL to Dubai Eye website (3/Mar/10)
Meanwhile many elements of online conversations surrounding the Dubai Today show did not use the Dubai Today show hashtag at all, and so the number of tweets inspired by and about Dubai Today discussion topics on Tuesday was far in excess of 700, perhaps double.
In terms of engagement, this is really quite impressive. For sure, the Dubai Today show has never been able to engage 118 telephone callers on a single show, and yet 118 people had their say (obviously in addition to those that sent emails, SMS messages or called-in to the show). Many brands are delighted to generate a few comments on their product or service per day. Dubai Today got hundreds of comments on Tuesday, more than 80% of them during a four hour period over the show. It’s also worth noting that we’re not talking about views, visits to online content or passive radio listeners: this was 118 people that were engaged and responded in some way to the radio shows content.
And how many people did Dubai Today reach on Tuesday via Twitter? We will never know exactly. However, what we can tell you is that the 118 Twitter users who tweeted using the #DubaiToday hashtag had combined aggregate following of 71,500 Twitter users. Also that the likelihood is that as many as 200 were involved in related conversations, if we were to count those that didn’t specifically use the #DubaiToday hashtag. And that many (if not most) of the Twitter users involved probably had offline conversations of some kind about Dubai Today. That’s a lot of conversations.
The power of twalk radio!
Update 4 March 2010
You can now listen to some of the discussions aired on Tuesday’s Dubai Today program via Dubai Eye’s podcast page.
"By Zeus, I was sure that old grain of wheat gag was one of mine!"
The story appears to be apocryphal – I’d always thought it was Archimedes but apparently there’s also the inventor of the chessboard (an Indian bloke, according to certain online sources that can’t be used in scholastic research) and a Roman geezer. Everyone has done the old ‘one grain of wheat on the first square, two grains on the second and so on doubling with each square’ trick.
The exponential growth of figures through the 64 squares of a chessboard results, of course, in more wheat than could be grown in the kingdom – 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, to be precise. I do like the version of the story that has the ruler agreeing to the impossible bargain, but insisting the mathematician count each grain of wheat individually to be sure the ruler wasn’t cheating him.
The same mathematics potentially applies to the humble retweet, of course. It’s one reason why news can travel so astonishingly quickly over Twitter. If I find something interesting and share it with my followers on Twitter, they can in turn share it with their followers. If we assume for the sake of simplicity that each of my followers has 100 followers of their own, then if five followers RT my Tweet, we’ve just reached the eyeballs of 500 people, as well as the original audience of followers.
If five of their followers RT the Tweet, we’re looking at 2,500 people. And if we play that scenario again, 12,500 people. One last time gives us 62,500.
That’s pretty impressive – and it doesn’t begin to take into account the potential for average growth of a Tweet – which would be more likely based on a percentage than an absolute five number. The percentage would, of course, be based on the broad appeal of the Tweet or the link it contains. In other words, a Tweet can quickly reach large audiences of tens of thousands of people – millions, if it’s big news.
A more realistic everyday example would look at the thousands mark – and Tweets can easily reach audiences of thousands – and generate significant traffic to links, too. As the Internet’s current ‘go to’ darling, Twitter is great at allowing people to ‘discover’ stuff and share it with followers – I recently Tweeted a link with ‘This is funny’ and saw over 250 people hit the link within minutes.
It’s actually hard to track Twitter traffic in absolutes because people will tend to use their own link shorteners and so on, but you’d have to agree that any tool that can generate 250 views on a Website within minutes – in return for an investment of three words – is pretty powerful.
An analysis of random Tweets by a team at Microsoft found that 11% of Retweets contained a Retweet. At 11%, by the way, my ‘test tweet’ above (which would have to be, obviously, pretty sensational!) would in four steps reach over 2 million people. Which is slightly scary, isn’t it?
Marketers can no longer expect this reaction to every new tech product
In my thirty-odd years of involvement with technology, my favourite acronym remains TWAIN. In an industry so littered with acronyms, that’s some achievement. You may well recognise it if you’ve ever used a scanner hooked up to your computer – changes are that you’ll have been told you’re using a TWAIN driver. To my continued amusement (so I’m puerile, sue me) it stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.
However, this is about as interesting as technology gets these days. We’re no longer wowed by operating systems or ooh-aahed by CPUs (if many of us ever were). We tend to get excited about iPhone apps or new smartphones, but we don’t actually tend to spend hours poring over hardcore technology – we want it to do what it says on the box, simply and consistently. And beyond that, we don’t actually want to invest a huge amount of energy or emotional commitment into the technology we use – unless, say, we run data centres as a day job.
Alongside this change in consumer attitudes to technology comes a series of changes in the way in which people inform themselves of new things. That information flow, which used to take place across magazine pages or at exhibitions, now takes place online 24/7. The technology publishing market, once artificially inflated compared to the publishing seen in other vertical market sectors, has shrunk to virtually a handful of titles.
This commoditisation of technology is something of a challenge for the marketers tasked with trying to make it relevant to all of us. We don’t care about it most of the time and we’ll serve ourselves with the information we need from online resources when it comes to decision time. There are all too few publications that reach consumers – and broader business titles, say, tend not to buy technology stories.
What’s the solution?
Companies that are recognising that their technology isn’t perhaps the most important thing in the world to their customers are coming up trumps. In recognising this, they are able to take a realistic approach to what is important to customers and how they map to those priorities, provide content that is relevant to consumers and position themselves appropriately within that content. By maintaining an ongoing relationship that is based on providing content that customers actually want (as opposed to just saying whatever you’re doing is what customers want) and also by being ‘valued members’ of communities, these companies are standing in the wings when customers actually do say ‘I’m interested in you today.’ It’s a sea-change for marketers used to buying the right to access customers with dollars – increasingly they’re having to use a different currency.
This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.
I’ve been a big fan of LinkedIn since I signed up just after it launched in 2004. I immediately found lots of my technology industry friends and colleagues were doing the same and were more than happy to introduce me to their contacts. I spent hours browsing LinkedIn user records looking for useful contacts, business prospects and old friends and over the years LinkedIn’s introduced me to new clients, new staff and other useful new business contacts. However, LinkedIn is a very business-focused social network and, for me, using LinkedIn has always been about business. Moreover, it’s a way of keeping in touch with lots of people, without actually meeting them very often.
For many of us in the Middle East, we started using Twitter this way too. Twitter has been great for following what people are up to and, for the most part, those that we have a business interest in finding out about, learning from or keeping in contact with. In early 2009, when Twitter had just 1,000-2,000 users across the whole region it was the business social network users that were there first (and excited about the prospect of discovering more business contacts!). Well, one year on, things have got a great deal more ’social’. With some 30,000-40,000 Twitter users across the Middle East and North Africa (Spot On’s estimate), there seem to be many more people these days that use Twitter day-to-day for their social lives (read Eman Hussein’s ‘Life without Twitter?’). Tweetups and other offline gatherings have been springing up all over the region, bringing together people with shared interests, introducing new connections and putting faces to Twitter handles.
2010 has already seen tweetups held all over MENA including Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, plus GeekFestBeirut in Lebanon. These meetups happen for many different reasons at different types of venue, both as public open invite events and private gatherings. GeekFest Beirut, held on Friday February 5th at the Art Lounge in Beirut (see Alexander McNabb’s report on FakePlasticSouks ) drew about 120 people to socialise, talk geek and listen to geek speakers. On the same day in the Sultanate of Oman, 45 tweeps gathered at Muscat’s Indian Embassy to meet visiting Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Dr. Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor on Twitter, read Digital Oman for a full report), who now seems to have penciled in a Dubai tweetup for sometime in the near future. On Saturday January 30th a group of more than 30 Jordanian Twitter users met at Wild Jordan in Jabal Amman to meet ‘the faces behind the tweeps’ (see full report on Under My Olive Tree) and there have been at least two more Amman tweetups since! Meanwhile, more than twenty tweeps met at the Riyadh Tweetup on February 2nd. Organisers are now looking at bigger venues to hold a Riyadh Tweetup on the first Monday of every month.
As one of the volunteer organisers for the first Twestival Dubai held in February 2009 (by the way the next Twestival Dubai takes place on March 25th), which followed a month after the first ‘big’ tweetup in Dubai organised by @rida, I remember the air of mystery that used to surround organising a tweetup. Many were unsure of the etiquette (or twettiquette!) involved in hosting a tweetup. Many, also, were used to keeping ‘online friends’ and ‘real friends’ compartmentalised, never mixing the two, and never meeting the former! Now is seems Twitter has helped bring the walls down and people are more comfortable inviting people to an event over Twitter than they are over the telephone. People are inviting other people that they would normally have considered to be ’strangers’ to meet and socialise all over the region, making new contacts and yes, even friends.
Campaign planning is the easy part!
The coolest agency in the world can’t execute brilliant social media campaigns if the client doesn’t want to invest in the idea – not just of using social media as a megaphone like an advertising replacement, but of actually changing things around to make open social communications a long term investment. That investment necessarily takes a number of forms, too.
It’s not just about assigning a budget, by any means. The investment in time and effort required from the client in executing sound social media campaigns is nearly always greater than that required by advertising campaigns. Engaging with customers over social media platforms can mean some pretty big changes at the client’s side. They don’t all have to happen at once, but it’s important to map out some of the expected change points and commit to them in order that a long term programme of value is created, not just a tactical ‘quick hit’ with potentially negative consequences.
Is your management ready?
You have to ask if your company is structurally ready to undertake social media engagements – a process that involves some difficult questions. Do the management and reporting structures you have in place map to social media? Can you escalate issues quickly and effectively to all your different departments? Can you guarantee to respond quickly? How do your current HR policies map to social media? Who is responsible for that unhappy customer on Twitter – marketing or customer service? And how are you going to resource manning your social media engagements? (because if you think the agency is going to take the full 100% of the load and handle it, you’ve got another thing coming! If your agency says that you don’t have to be involved day-to-day, get another agency fast. Really.)
The next investment comes before you ever tweet a tweet or book a face. It’s in defining your social media guidelines, working with HR to make sure that these are embedded as a core element in the company’s process. Next up it’s making sure that staff are aware of what those guidelines are and, ideally, have the chance to question them or clear up any areas which appear difficult to understand or apply to a given person’s situation.
Now there’s a process of defining roles and responsibilities – who owns what platform and what are the internal processes and ownerships?
Once the job of deciding the niceties is out of the way, things like the naming conventions you’re going to use, building the graphical elements of your ‘social identity’ and deciding on the tools you’re going to use, you’ll need to work together with your agency on selecting platforms based on your target audiences, planning the use of those platforms and their rollout. Part of that process would include working out which platforms your key audiences frequent and what you can contribute to the communities you’re joining – what their informational preferences are and how you can help to improve things for them.
In fact, the key challenge that social media poses for companies, particularly those that consider themselves to be ‘customer centric’ is that they have to re-think their processes in order to be truly customer-centric via social media.
2010 Spot On Public Relations