Robin Hamman talk -- Community and Social Media

Robin Hamman, Director of Digital, Edelman (London)

Visiting Fellow of Journalism, City

• If you ask general questions, the responses tend to be pretty low-quality.
• While at BBC, they spent upwards of £1 mil on moderating just non-news content.
• When you engage visitors, make sure you can at least acknowledge their contributions
• Have editorial guidelines for user-submitted content up front.
• Use tools like Yahoo! Pipes to glean snapshot of current posts on a topic and respond back to community directly.
• Once you know what people are searching for, you can start to intelligently use keywords/tags/etc.
• Most people (60%) need to hear something 3-5 times about a company to believe it is likely true -- Edelman Trust Barometer.
• Seven behaviours of public engagement:
• Listen with new intelligence
• Participate in the conversation: real time / all the time
• Socialise media relations
• Create and co-create content
• Champion open advocacy
• Build active partnerships for the common good
• Embrace the chaos
• Embassies -- important as a transitory space between broader Internet and owned content; Google pagerank via natural language results.
• 5 C's which deliver "lifetime value"
• Content: value provided through quality content that educates, inspires, informs and connects community members.
• Context: value provided by deep understanding of how participants within community want to engage and the tools they use to do so.
• Connectivity: value provided by connecting members of community in mutually beneficial ways.
• Continuity: value provided by sustaining efforts over time, ensuring that community is healthy and productive.
• "Community isn't just for Christmas."
• Collaboration: value established through collaborative efforts of participants who share, co-create and edit each others' efforts.
• Five steps towards community engagement:

1. Assess community needs and interest -- Radium6 ($$$$).
2. Develop rules of engagement -- what do you do when you find a piece of content online?

• Response considerations: transparency, sourcing, timeliness, tone, influence

1. Identify right managers for your community

• moderation = policing; hosting = building engagement
• When a comment is removed, build accountability and followup -- Why was it removed? Who removed it?
• Hosts provide environment, set agenda, welcome audience and then provide connections between audience members -- before backing off and manages everything else.
• Metaphor of a party host
• Connecting community to content and bringing out audience voice.

1. Establish internal and external processes

• Community management takes time; set expectations (When and who will be around?)

1. Train, Equip and Deploy (TED)

• Articulate -- able t communicate effectively in a variety of media
• Social: engage in authentic conversation and interactions
• Professional: act as a responsible ambassador of brand/org
• Adaptable: can make decisions quickly, handle crisis situations
• Enthusiastic: energetic, passionate and engaged in relevant topics
• Connected: has ties to the right people within community
• Organized: can keep track of data, relationships, content calendars and a variety of assets essential to maintaining community
• Audiences are interested in your proceses
• Cool idea: DJs using Last.fm
• Panorama using Delicious
• The life cycle of content can be extended through social participation
• Always reuse content and keep back catalogue as an asset.
• Social media measurement:
• Attention, engagement, authority, influence, sentiment
• Examples of good social utilization:
• American Expres OpenForum
• West Midlands Police; @wmp_helicopter; westmidlandspolice YouTube.
• Spot.us -- really cool way of crowdsourcing journalism; content licensed as CC-attrib
• Help Me Investigate
• Ushahidi -- crowdsourcing, mapping crisis response (#radtacular)
• "Glamour Ask a Stylist" app -- take a photo and quickly get a response from a stylist. Can use incoming content for crowdsourcing article topics, targeting content, etc. etc. (#brilliant)
• David Hone -- Shell climate change advisor; how to make activities more visible to internal staff.
• Created blog, hooked it up to Delicious, Vimeo, Slideshare
• GE -- curating voices of staff; marketing people don't have the technical insights product designers and whatnot will.

Other stuff:

1. What is a community

• owned
• embassies
• social

1. Key skills required

• hosting (engagement building)
• moderation (policing)

1. ROI

• insights and data
• collaboration
• eyeballs
• sense of ownership
• increased reach and depth of engagement

1. Extending the life cycle of content

• transparency of process
• direct involvement of audiences
• sharing and repurposing

1. The importance of rules
2. Managing challenging situations
3. Legal implications

• libel -- "golden rules" at BBC (Wanted to be able to fall back on the Reynoldson case -- i.e., site is just a conduit -- but necessary for takedown policy)
• harassment
• incitement
• hate speech
• duty of care (?)
• copyright

1. Measurement
2. Clarity of purpose ("meaningful participatory framework...")
3. So now what?