HC+T Update: November 15, 2013

From: "HC+T Update" <shel@holtz.com>

Subject: HC+T Update: November 15, 2013

Date: November 15th 2013

November 15, 2013
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I spent a wonderful two days with communicators from the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., talking about social visual communication, Google+, Twitter and a host of other digital communication topics. By Tuesday, you could tell winter was coming; it got downright cold. Even here in the Bay Area, the morning chill is setting in. I hope everything is sunny where you are.

Turn your attention inward to produce the best social media results

The Social Workplace Trust Study reinforces a lot of my core beliefs about social media, notably that you'll get better results externally if your employees are engaged. The study delves into what it takes to build that engagement, and how far most organizations still have to go. Read my blog post here.

This week on FIR

We made a couple big announcements this week. First, the long-running Inside PR podcast is joining the FIR Podcast Network, and we're introducing a new show, Linked Conversation with Chuck Hester, looking at communication uses of LinkedIn. Rachel Miller will host AllThingsIC, dealing with internal communications, as a monthly FIR podcast. Neville recorded FIR 729 on his own, since I was en route to D.C. Topics in this episode included Google Helpouts and how businesses might take advantage of them, Facebook's decision to ditch the thumbs-up like button, how Twitter communicated its IPO, and a study showing nearly every UK journalist uses social media daily. Hear the episode here. Episode 8 of FIR On Strategy with Andrea Vascellari deals with public-facing moderation plans. Hear the episode here.

I'm trying out a new format for the wrap that will make it a quicker read for you while allowing me to include more items that you might have missed over the course of the week. Let me know if you like it. I'll elaborate on two or three stories at the top of the Wrap, then more briefly summarize others. If a subject got attention from multiple outlets (as hashtags did this week), I'll wrap the Wrap with a quick summary of what they each had to say. In the meantime, all I continue to collect all the posts and articles over the course of the week are in my link blog, LinksFromShel.tumblr.com.

Above the fold

An in-depth look at mobile charitable giving

Surveying a sample of people who made donations to the 2010 relief efforts in Haiti under the "Text for Haiti" campaign, the Pew Internet & American Life project has found that SMS text message giving has become a new mode of engagement for philanthropies and charitable groups. Word that a small donation can be made quickly and easily by texting spreads virally through social networks, writes Pew Research Center's Aaron Smith. The study also uncovered a challenge: Will those donors remain engaged after they have made their donation? The study revealed that giving via text message is often an impulse decision made after learning of the campaign on TV; nearly a quarter of those who give in to the impulse make their contributions the same day they hear about it. Almost three quarters of respondents were first-time mobile givers, although more than half have made text-message donations to subsequ ent disaster relief efforts. Forty-three percent of the text donors surveyed encouraged their friends and family members to make their own donations using the same mobile channel, and 76% of them succeeded in getting those family and friends to donate.

Is a custom timeline enough to get you to switch to Tweetdeck?

I used to use Tweetdeck as my interface to Twitter, but switched some time ago to HootSuite. Twitter's announcement that Tweetdeck users can now curate tweets to share with followers has me considering a trial return to the platform (although I would have to give up HootSuite's key advantage: management of multiple social networks, including LinkedIn and Facebook). Observers like Selena Larson, writing for ReadWrite, see the launch of Custom Timelines as a challenge to Storify, but since Twitter is only one of the sources you can use in curating stories with Storify, I don't suspect it'll have much effect. ReadWrite offers an example of a Custom Timeline from TV's Carson Daly, who assembled tweets specifically related to the singing competition The Voice, which he hosts. Communicators could use it to collect reactions to a story or commentary on a product or service. And given jo urnalists' preference for Twitter, it could become a new tool for reporting. Mashable has a step-by-step guide to creating and embedding your own Custom Timeline.

Are you proactive in building a relationship with your advocates?

Awareness resides at the top of the marketing funnel, which is where most marketers focus their online and social media efforts. Forrester Consulting's Wildfire report finds that customers rely heavily on social networks through the entire funnel, according to an eMarketer report. The bottom of the funnel is home to those customers who have grown loyal to your brand and become advocates. With all that effort focused on building awareness, how much work do you do to sustain your relationship with your advocates? "You have to understand who you're marketing to and what motivates them as individuals," writes Influitive Marketing VP Jim Williams in an article on Oracle's It's All About Revenue blog. "Your customers won't keep on advocating for you forever if you don't work on a sustainable, long-term relationship by starting small, building up to more challenging asks, and recognizing and rewarding them appropriately." Reward and recognition has to be done right, Williams says, because "advocates love to know that they are valued and appreciated as individuals, not just for their individual acts of advocacy." Williams points to gamification as one way to keep advocates engaged in the long-term. He cautions against throwing gift cards and money at advocates, noting if you take this approach, "it should always be a highly personalized token of appreciation that they will treasure -- not tit-for-tat compensation."

Facebook tests 5-star ratings

One of the advantages of a Facebook brand page is that anybody who wants to follow your brand -- even critics -- have to "like" the page in order to do so. Some marketers and executives measure their success (no matter how wrong that may be) by counting the number of likes their pages get. That could change, as Facebook begins introducing a five-star rating under the company's name. In a Hubspot Inbound Hub piece, Ginny Soskey writes that brands could love the feature because of its prominence on the page. On the other hand, "They could end up being pulled into the Like Box on your website or any other place where you're promoting your brand page through embedded content. If you have great reviews, all of those worries are positive, but let's face it -- not all companies are going to have only five stars." That could encourage some businesses to force employees to leave fake reviews to ratchet up th e rating. The ratings your company gets could also be skewed if you don't allow people to write on your Timeline. If they can't and they want to share their thoughts, they can opt to leave a review -- especially if their motivation is a customer satisfaction issue.

Below the fold

Pinterest inks deal with Getty Images -- Under the agreement, Pinterest will pay a fee for Getty's metadata, which should improve how Pinterest users search for, find and use photos while providing compensation to photographers whose images get pinned. The story is in the Columbia Journalism Review. In other Pinterest news, Hubspot notes that data from Piquora shows a pin brings in an average of $.78 in sales, increasing the value of a pin by 25% compared to a year ago.

Character counts -- A Hill+Knowlton Strategies study found that most Americans think the way companies behave is out of whack with the values they claim to apply to their business practices, and most find that dishonest. Seventy-three percent said they're more likely to do business with companies that are good at "communicating character," according to the Daily 'Dog.

Why do journalists prefer Twitter? -- Because it's more useful for their jobs, argues Ezra Klein, writing on the Washington Post's Wonk Blog. "For better or worse, it's where news breaks today. It's also where a lot of real-time reporting happens." And, because so many journalists use Twitter, the network has become valuable professionally to journalists. "Tweeting your articles ensures they're seen -- and discussed, and retweeted -- within a community that includes not just your friends and peers, but the people who might hire you someday."

How to drive traffic to your SlideShare content -- For years I've been saying that SlideShare should be a key content channel for companies, considering how many people use it for research. Now, brands like GE, IBM and HP "consider it a top content distribution channel," based largely on how search-friendly it is. The Content Marketing Institute offers six steps to take advantage of SlideShare's "SEO sauce."

AOL and Roku set to launch a news channel -- AOL and Roku are expected to launch an online news channel produced by AOL's editorial team with its home on the Roku home screen. Online Media Daily reports the service will be free and contain original content as well as material collected from more than 1,000 publishers, including The Wall Street Journal, AP and Reuters.

Brands rush to adopt Twitter's image preview feature -- Images and Vine videos now appear in the Twitter timeline, assuming you're actually using the Twitter website, and brands have been quick to take advantage of it eConsultancy offers a look at 10 brands sharing images via Twitter, including Burberry, CBS Films, Sephora, Cadbury, Adidas and Spotify. Buffer shares data that demonstrates these images increase clicks, retweets and favorites.

New York Times rolling out its native advertising platform -- I continue to be surprised by the number of communicators I talk to who haven't even heard of native advertising (aka "sponsored content.") It's a surging practice with virtually every media company offering to take brands' money to put their content on their sites. The New York Times is the latest to prepare a rollout of its platform, which includes a full content studio that will let companies create multimedia content like the Times' stunning Snowfall story. Advertising Executive VP Meredith Kopit Levien told AdAge the Times will reject boring content.

Quora adds a stats dashboard for writers -- In an effort to get people to write for Quora -- the site where people draft posts to answer questions posed by others -- the company is launching a stats tool "to show counts of views, upvotes and shares, much like what's available on other publishing and blogging platforms," according to TechCrunch has the story; you can try the studio out here.

How Morgan Stanley got the okay to use social media -- One thing you keep hearing from financial services and healthcare companies is the regulatory obstacles to engaging with social media. At Morgan Stanley, demand from advisors to use social media led to a technology solution to the compliance issue. Lauren Boyman, who leads digital strategy for Morgan Stanley Wealth management, explains how they did it in an OnWallStreet article. Not everything is rosy, though, as a hashtag campaign -- #AskJPM -- generated a backlash of sarcasm over the bank's recent controversies, according to AlJazeera America.

Everybody's talking about hashtags

During the week I collected three different items on hashtags which, according to Kevin Bobowski in an AdAge piece, "have an increasing presence in online search, and brands are realizing the hashtag's potential to be a link that unites messages in an increasingly fractured social-media landscape." Applying one hashtag across all social media channels increases the odds an audience will identify the tag with the brand. Bulldog Reporter's Daily 'Dog offers tips for brands wanting to use hashtags on Facebook, while Duct Tape Marketing provides insights into using hashtags on Google Plus.

I'll present a webinar on December 4 for Lorman Education on social visual communication. It'll be available to the public. Register here.
I'm conducting a webinar for members of PepsiCo's internal ambassador program on December 12.
Next February 6, I'll speak at an industry conference for manufacturers of Omega 3 products on crisis communications. The session is in Salt Lake City.
I'll be speaking at the global intranet conference from IntraTeam in Denmark on February 26-28.
On April 2 next year, I'll do two sessions at the Ragan Communications conference at Walt Disney World.

In-house training

Your communications team can benefit from the same kind of in-house training I conducted at the IMF on Monday and Tuesday. Let's talk about the possiblities. Give me a call at +1.415.881.7435 or email me at shel@holtz.com.

Since 1996, HC+T has helped organizations communicate effectively in the emerging online space using intranets to reach employees and various dimensions of the Internet to communicate with other stakeholder audiences.

HC+T provides a full range of services for large organizations, from speaking and training to communication audits and strategic plan development.

Visit us at Holtz.com.

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