Social Media

It is drummed into us from a young age that if we are hungry we should eat a proper meal, not a chocolate bar. We’re taught this in order to keep our bodies healthy but do we know how to keep our mind healthy?

I recently attended an interesting talk where the effect of social media on mental well-being was discussed. The idea was being put forward that the positive feedback people receive through social media forums such as Facebook and Twitter (e.g. ‘likes’, comments or retweets) could contribute to better mental well-being as people said, when interviewed shortly after receiving the feedback, that these interactions gave them positive feelings.

However, this got me thinking and I wondered how these people felt a while later. Was this feedback enough to fulfil their needs for social contact or were they left feeling a bit low and wanting more?

I personally feel that the positive feelings that a person receives from a social media interaction can be much like the sugar rush that they would get from a chocolate bar. They think that it will be what they want, but soon after the high of getting it they realise they have not solved their hunger. In terms of food, we then know that it is a proper meal we need. However, had we not been taught this would we have simply gone for another chocolate bar? I feel that this could potentially be the harmful cycle that many people, particularly those who are less outgoing, may go through each day. Prior to the influx of social media they would have invested their time in interacting in ‘real world’ relationships. However, I wonder if many people may now be reaching out to social media channels as the easy option to try and gain that social contact that people need to stay happy. The concern is that they are then not being fulfilled by the results and perhaps can’t break the cycle of looking for their social fulfilment online. With the statistics for depression set to rise further over the coming years I feel that social media could potentially have a part to play in this.

Obviously there are marginalised groups of people for whom the world of social media is a genuine lifeline to gaining social contact. However, I feel that for the majority of people this is not the case and it could easily be that social media is resulting in as many low feelings as it is highs.

I think that social media has a role to play in peoples mental well-being, which could be both in a positive and negative way. However, this is essentially an online world that we have created and I think that healthy and unhealthy behaviour surrounding social media is something that needs to be brought the forefront. People live out their lives online more and more every day and it seems that this can only be set to be an increasingly current debate.

Social and mobile are two of the largest growth areas in the technology world. It is therefore inevitable that commentators are keen to identify (and understand how to monetise) convergence between the two. There is great synergy between the two areas. Both are focused on communication, both are undeniably personal and both are very immediate.

Whilst a computer is a window onto the web and into your social connections, a mobile, be it an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone, is your personal window. And unlike a computer it brings extra data and functionality with it. With a mobile, you can share where you are and what you’re doing, generally in a much richer way than a simple status update. This is all becoming fairly commonplace and the level of use of this type of functionality is growing inexorably. The question is, once you’ve gained access to your social network of choice through your smartphone, what is there to tempt you to do more than what effectively amount to multimedia or spatial updates?

This is the question put to business and organisations who seek to engage with users in the social mobile world. Some businesses have an easier time answering this question than others. Foursquare, for example, is a great example of a social mobile offering. Find, visit, share, rate, all a great fit for social mobile and one of the key factors behind its success (as well as the gamification). But your business isn’t Foursquare, so how do you work out where you fit in this space?

Josh Clark, a well-respected voice in the field of iPhone app design, talks about three mindsets mobile users tend to have:

• Microtasking, when a user is engaged in short periods of intensive activity
• Local, when a user seeks information about or to support them in their current context
• Bored, when the user is looking for distraction, novelty or entertainment

As Josh himself has recently pointed out, these mindsets map nicely onto Google’s categorisation of mobile information usage; repetitive, urgent and bored.

Now, social mobile can fill one or all of these categories. So we need to delve a little deeper to understand what aspects of social interaction match these mindsets.

When thinking about the different types of interaction possible through social media, I found this model by Isra Garcia particularly useful.

<Click to enlarge>

 From this model there are effectively four different types of interaction:

• Connecting to others
• Exposure, viewing information and activity within your network
• Sharing information with others
• Providing feedback on shared information or on a specific topic

There is also an associated interaction that can be facilitated or initiated through social media:

•  Communicating directly with others.

When combined with the mobile mindsets different types of social mobile interaction emerge. Using this, albeit simplistic abstraction, we can start to see how organisations can understand where their business and any potential mobile offering might fit.

<Click to enlarge>

 If we return to Foursquare we can see that it covers the following areas:

• Researching – what’s good in my area?
• Situational support – is there anything good near me right now.
• Reporting – I’ve found something great, or I want to review this too.
• Matchmaking – are any of my network available to join me?
• Reaching out – well, what could I do today?

Which is quite a large portion of the spectrum, particularly the local part. Interestingly if we look at the social networks themselves, we can see that Facebook covers the entire spectrum (depending upon which of their suite of services you use), whereas the professional network Linkedin, is rooted firmly in the microtasking area, with some small forays in local.

So, how is this useful? There are two aspects, understanding what situation you find a user in will directly influence how you can engage with them and what the likelihood of them wanting to engage with you is. This I will cover in a future article. The other is determining which aspects of a product or service could benefit from a social aspect. A couple of examples might help to illustrate this.

iPad video app:

I have an app that lets people insert their face over the lead character in short clips of popular films. It’s a great timewasting app, but after the initial rush of downloads, sales have stagnated. There are several aspects of social interaction we can target. Broadcasting and the flipside, consumption, would allow people to share their videos with others. If we add in reviewing, via commenting, then we cover off a neat conversion of a bored user into a microtasking (and therefore more engaged) user.

Customer reviews app:

I have a service that helps people to view and share reviews of cars. I only focused on letting people easily view the reviews database (the researching goal). This is great, but I’m missing two other goals that would help to harness the community. If I were to provide an easy route to information about “that car there” (situational support) then I add to the utility of my app/mobile site. If I were to offer the ability to review a car (reviewing/reporting) or even ask a question (conversation) then I would increase both the utility of and engagement with my app.

Or how about a real world example, Groupon. Groupon is an offers site, with the key to their success being the sharing and viral spread of deals. Currently the Groupon mobile offering lets people find offers near them and share them with their network. This is simple, straightforward and it works. However, there are a number of ways that this could be enhanced. What if the service were to recommend deals that my friends have looked at or taken up (consumption)? What about reviewing or rating deals (reporting)? For dinner deals in particular, how about the facility to invite other people in your network to take advantage of a deal (matchmaking). All of these could enhance the Groupon service. As I was putting this article together, Groupon and Foursquare announced that Groupon daily deals would now be available through Foursquare. This looks to be very much a win-win situation for both of these companies.

It’s important to stress that I don’t intend to advocate simply bolting social elements onto a mobile offering. The appropriateness and likely appeal of the social aspect should be carefully considered. For example it might be good to use a service to find reviews of local doctors, but you probably don’t want to connect to your doctor or share with others that you’re visiting them.

The question then becomes, how do we gauge appropriateness and appeal? A great first step is to look at what similar services are doing and the level of engagement they attain. This will provide some indication of what social features might be useful and whether people will actually use them. If you have an existing product that you’re looking to socially augment, then depending upon your budget you then have a couple of options for determining which social features would be best for your product. Surveys provide a cost effective way of building a picture of the types of features people might use. Focus groups and one to one interviews can then build upon this insight.

If you don’t have a product yet, then your silver bullet is ethnography, whereby actual user needs are collected in context over an extended period of time. This is a very powerful method for understanding a person’s interaction, not only with technology, but also their environment and the people in their lives.

As part of this process you also need to consider how social features in your mobile offering link up to the rest of your communications channels and services. If the social experience is constrained just to the mobile platform, this represents a missed opportunity to widen the reach of your service. This opens up another set of questions around consistency of experience and handling of transitions between channels.

All of the above can be considered in an ad-hoc manner, but I would strongly recommend creating a mobile strategy to guide the development of any mobile offering. When coupled with a full user centred design approach, you can ensure that your mobile service or product meets the needs of your users, delivers on your commercial priorities and offers a great user experience.

This article was originally published on MyCustomer.com

This webinar will discuss different ways companies in varying industries can provide a better customer service, by embracing social media. Guy Stephens will be sharing the dos and don’ts of engaging with customers in social networks and ASOS will be discussing their social media strategy.

The webinar includes:
Why do you need to be social?
Why doesn’t one size fit all in customer service?
What customers should be targeted through social media?
Why do contact centers need to be at the forefront of the organisations social media strategy?

This social media networking event will be debating how social media impacts on an organisations customer relations activities. Both Richard Sedley and Guy Stephens, will be hosting a round table discussion sharing experiences on current social media and consumer relations issues.

Guy Stephens will be presenting Social Customer Care: From Novelty to Necessity which will begin to explain why the use of social within customer service has moved from novelty to necessity, and how to incorporate social within each customer service strategy.  The presentation will help delegates gain insight on how to set up a social customer care plan within the organisation by learning from recent successful case studies.

Some others presentations at the summit include:

• How support communities can earn their keep
• Engaging the new consumer to drive extraordinary results
• Three critical changes to VoC programs
• Designing customer communities as effective learning environments

The Social CRM will expore how companies can capture and manage social media data. Including ways to integrate social media into; sales, marketing, research and strategy-making processes. Richard Sedley, Commercial Director at Foviance, will be presenting at this Social Media CRM Conference held in both London and New York

Areas of the day will cover

• The latest tools and techniques for implementing a successful SCRM strategy
• How companies are capturing and managing social media data
• Challenges of implementing social CRM
• Mapping your CRM system to the customer journey
• How social media can data be stored and managed between teams

This article was originally published by Anna Richardson, NMA.

As the EU e-privacy directive is tightened in May, brands will have to be more open about the cookies they deliver to site users. This exclusive data explores which sectors will be most affected.

Tracking user behaviour across a website can provide invaluable data for companies looking to optimise customers’ experiences. But this May, the updated EU e-privacy directive comes into affect, requiring (among other things) site owners to provide visitors with information about how cookies are used on the site and give them the opportunity to refuse their data being collected.

Many site owners are still confused about which types of cookies will be affected by the new rules, and to what extent. Here at Foviance, we have been conducting cookie audits for media clients since the end of last year. Using a new cookie audit analytics tool to scan Hitwise’s most visited UK websites and gauge what types of cookies they use, in particular which ones might cause concern when the regulation rolls out.

Scanning more than 500 pages of each site, we extracted cookies that were sent to a user’s computer. Collecting these into a single database, we then analysed the information they were trying to store. They were segmented by function and by the type of data collected, to find out which sites and sectors are more likely to be exposed to the imminent regulation. The web pages were also scanned for known items that might set cookies, such as third-party software and plug-ins.

We then created an Exposure Index, which rated the likely impact of the new legislation on companies’ on-going ability to use the data collected by these cookies. Exposure was analysed both by the type of data being collected by cookies and consumer attitudes to brands using this type of data. Consumers are less likely to give explicit or informed consent to the use of cookies if they can’t see a link between sharing their data and any benefits to them.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty about which cookies might be excluded from the new rules, and the impact of functional cookies is particularly complex. Using a cookie to set a preferred weather forecast location on the BBC home page, for example, won’t be affected, as it’s useful for the user and isn’t used by a third party for further targeting. But other cookies that might personalise the user experience by targeting content or other products aren’t excluded.

Analytics providers, media organisations and the Government are still working to assess the impact of the legislation. It feels like the Government is prepared for the fact it will take a bit of time to understand how this legislation affects brand, adding that there certainly won’t be a crackdown immediately. But over the next year or so, the industry needs to show it’s making strides towards giving consumers the opportunity to refuse brands collecting data on them.

The message at the moment to brands is to work with their agencies to understand how they’re using cookies. The digital world is getting its house in order and there’s no reason why there should be a state of panic.

The research found that a single web page will drop anything from 1 to 25 persistent cookies. These may stay on an individual’s computer collecting information for up to 11 years if not deleted. A typical visit to a website saw 90 cookies being delivered.

At Foviance, we noted a huge proliferation of cookies used by brands and a large variance in the type of cookies used by each sector. The dependency of the news and media industry on generating revenue from advertising means there are large numbers of advertising cookies on these sites, that make them a prime target for the new EU legislation.

<Click to enlarge>

Retailers, meanwhile, need to place a high emphasis on tracking consumer behaviour to enable site and content optimisation. The research found 43% of cookies used by these sites were for tracking purposes, which will also be impacted by the legislation.

Entertainment sites that use social media tools to engage consumers use a high number of social and functional cookies. They’ll be the least affected by the legislation. Finance and technology sites were both classed as medium on the Exposure Index. Finance sites had just fewer than 50% of tracking cookies and nearly a fifth of advertising cookies, while a third of technology website cookies were used for tracking.

<Click to enlarge>

In many cases organisations are still struggling to get the return on investment in their digital analytics that they were originally hoping for or could reasonably expect. Ten years on from when web analytics started to go mainstream, why is that still the case? If we look at the possible reasons, they tend to lie in the “triumvirate” of  technology, people and processes.

A lot of organisations have access to web analytics technology and have invested in it heavily over the years. The introduction of free services sparked by Google Analytics over 5 years ago means that it is cheap to acquire web analytics technology. For organisations with more sophisticated requirements such as the ability to integrate web data with other data sources and system, the enterprise market satisfies those needs. The technologies have developed significantly over the past few years and provide richer analytics, particularly in the area of behavioural segmentation, than they did a few years ago. There are still areas that are not addressed well generally by web analytics technologies, notably the attribution of acquisition channels. And while it’s great that the technology provides are adding additional functionality particularly in the social media arena, acquisition attribution is an area that it would be great to see some development in.

It wasn’t that long ago that it was generally recognised that organisations were underinvesting in getting enough of the right type of people into their organisations. Avinash Kaushik’s famous 10/90 rule he posted on his blog made the point admirably. We have seen organisations invest more in people more recently and significant web analytics teams exist in many large advertisers or digital property owners. Investing in people remains a problem naturally for smaller organisations with smaller budgets and resources, but if at least it becomes part of someone’s job, then it signals a degree of commitment.

To some extent, experience and qualifications remains a problem on the people side of things. Web analytics is still a relatively young marketing discipline and even the “veterans” in the industry have less than 15 years or so experience in the field. Again, this is evolving as organisations like the Web Analytics Association continue to develop education and certification programs. This will help to define “what good looks like” when it comes to web analysts and provide a means of reference for organisations to assess the quality of potential staff and suppliers alike.

So whilst there are still opportunities for improvement in the areas of technology and people, I think that process remains the Achilles heel of web analytics in most organisations. Process is really about how the technology and people are applied within the organisation to make a difference about the way the organisation does business. The problem often begins with a lack of process around the setting of goals and objectives so that correct key performance indicators can be set. This not an analytical process, it’s a business process and therefore is one that the business as a whole needs to buy into. This process operates at all levels from setting objectives for the channel as a whole, through to setting objectives for product development or down to individual campaigns. It’s the process that sets the analytical agenda within the organisation.

Processes then need to exist to maintain the quality of the data that is being collected within the organisation. A lot of effort can be spent getting a new technology in or applying an existing technology to a new website but it’s vital to have processes in place to maintain the integrity of the data. Digital channels are never static so continual effort is required to ensure that the data being captured reflects the latest developments. This means plugging analytical and measurement processes into the heart of the product development or campaign development processes and seeing data collection as being a core component of those processes rather than as an aftert thought.

The other important processes required are the ones that embed the data and insight into the decision making process. Optimisation is all about “test, learn and adjust” and the “learn” bit needs to be integral to that process. The challenge here is how to ensure that the analysts and their data are brought into the loop, and the challenge for analysts is to ensure that they can add value to the discussion. Part of the issue here might be about where analytical functions sit within the business and how they interact with their peers and colleagues. There are no easy answers to these organisational questions, but all the investments in technology and people will be undermined without consideration being given the way that the data and insights are capitalised upon.

In many cases, the hard investments in technology and people have been made, but the returns will be realised when the process issues are addressed as well.

This article was originally published on ClickZ