Considerations for setting up Social Media
This chapter discusses topics that should be considered prior to using social media for business purposes. We discuss using social media on an intranet, setting goals for your social media presence, and how you’ll represent yourself and monitor what’s being said. While there is a focus on business in this chapter, there is also information related to personal use. For example, in using social media, there may be a need to use shortened URLs, which can also be a security risk as it hides the actual location you’re being taken to. By making the right decisions early, a person or an organization can save considerable time and resources and have a consistent presence on the Internet.
Keywords
Social networking; social media; communications; privacy; security; audiences; monitoring; suspicious URLs; requirements
Information in This Chapter:
• Considerations for Setting Up Social Media
• Identifying How Social Media Will be Used in Your Organization
• What’s Being Said About Your Brand?
• Making the Right Decisions Early
Considerations for setting up social media
Many people and organizations jump into using social media without giving any consideration as to why they’re really doing it, what they’re hoping to achieve, and whether they’ve considered all their options. While using social media, because so many others are, is certainly a motivating factor, just because someone else is doing something doesn’t necessarily mean you should follow their example. That’s the logic of lemmings, and you certainly don’t want to follow someone over a cliff.
Even if an organization is in the same industry as another company, there are often differences between them. Although they could be very much alike, each company has unique needs and slight differences. In some cases, those differences can be quite distinct. If you looked at two department stores, you might find that one is a discount chain and the other serves higher-end products. They probably wouldn’t carry the same products and would have different clientele who might even frequent different social media sites. Even the tone of how they address customers through social media might be different, with one appealing to a sense of humor and the other to a sense of decadence. While it could be beneficial for each company to see how the other is using such sites, you can see that how they utilize them would be very different.
Before creating a social media presence, there are many considerations that should be made that are specific to your needs. You should define clear goals, identify how it will be used, understand the audience you’re trying to reach, and decide how you’ll represent yourself. These are components of creating a strategy that will guide how social media will be used to your advantage.
While much of this chapter will focus on the business use of social media, this isn’t to say we’ve forgotten individuals using social sites. After all, an organization’s employees will use these sites, either on behalf of the company or on their own time. In using them, you should understand how companies target you in social media, possible security risks, and how inappropriate use can impact your employer and employment.
Why are we doing this?
In the excitement of any new endeavor, you’d be surprised how many people forget to ask the simple question “why are we doing this?” If you ask a key player, you’ll find that some will be defensive and others will parrot back something they heard in a sales pitch or seminar. For those who have thought out why they’re using social media, they can generally explain what the organization is hoping to achieve, how they’re working toward those goals, and perhaps even tell you some indicators being used to measure success.
An organization may have many reasons why a social media presence is necessary, because different departments may want to use it for different purposes. Sales staff may see it as a way to raise product awareness and lead customers to the company’s Web site to place orders. Customer service may want to decrease the number of support calls and use these sites to provide information on service outages and answers to common questions. HR may see it as a way of hiring employees and interacting with other professionals. Developers may want to create blogs providing technical support and inform customers about software upgrades and new versions of products. As you can see by this, different people will have different ideas on how the company should use social media.
Requirements gathering
Gathering the requirements of an organization is an important step in determining how those needs will be met. Never assume that you know what people want. Using surveys and interviewing department managers can provide important insight into how social media can solve problems and improve how things are currently done. If you’re unsure about what they want, go back and get them to clarify it so you have a firm understanding. You may have started by looking at how social media could be used for one purpose, only to find that there are a number of ways it can provide solutions.
When asking about requirements, you’ll want to initially keep things simple and avoid making too many references to specific technology or solutions. Remember that you’re the expert, and many will be learning as they go. Just because you know the difference between a content community and a social network, the people you’re talking to may not. Because of this, you may get inaccurate answers if they don’t comprehend what you’re saying. For example, one time I asked a person whether he wanted a blog on his new site and he said yes. When I later noticed it wasn’t being used, I realized he didn’t know what a blog was and had been too embarrassed to ask. Once you know what a group requires, you’ll be able to discuss ways to meet those needs and introduce new terms, processes, and sites as part of educating them about social media.
By gathering requirements that are specific, realistic, and measurable, you’ll find that you’re getting information that will be used throughout your social media project. To avoid any disputes, you should create a requirements document that outlines the needs and specifications in a clear and thorough manner. The document can then be reviewed by those you’ve interviewed, who can correct mistakes or agree that you understood each need.
In talking with managers and coworkers, you’ll often find that people have resources you were unaware of. Perhaps, the HR department is already using a social network like hr.com and has access to information on how others achieved success using social media. They would also have insight regarding rules and regulations related to their particular field of expertise. As an added benefit, you may find people who are enthusiastic and want to play a bigger part in helping you to achieve success.
If your organization is already using social media, then it’s not too late to go back and gather requirements for your organization. In fact, it’s a good idea to do so every so often. Doing so will help you build on what you’ve already achieved, identify mistakes that need to be fixed, and discover things that have changed. You may find new goals or that previous ones need to be refined.
When setting goals, you should establish how you’ll know if they’ve been met. Indicators of success do not need to be overly complicated. For example, if your HR department wanted to use social media to hire people, the indicators of success might be setting up a page on LinkedIn, posting jobs, searching for active and passive candidates, and (of course) hiring people found on that site. By setting goals and having clear indicators and milestones for success, you will be able to show whether social media is working for the organization as intended. It will also help to guide you in its use, the types of social media involved, and the role it plays within the organization.
What is the place of social media in your organization?
By learning what’s needed in your business, you’ll begin to understand how social media will be used. You’ll often find that different departments will have common needs, such as wanting to communicate information more efficiently, and others that are unique to a specific group. These needs can be matched with features on various social media sites, equipment they’ll need to purchase, and so on, so that they’re able to perform the tasks they need to achieve results.
When a business looks at using social media, they’ll also need to decide how it will physically be used. Many departments may only want employees to access it from computers on their network. However, some departments may want to post and access content on the go, which means the company will need to purchase smartphones, tablets, or other devices so employees can use social media on the road. Not only does this need to be identified so the business includes the necessary equipment in their budget, but it may also lead to questions about whether the devices are configured to broadcast its physical location, which is used by social media sites like Foursquare.
Is it really needed?
You’ve probably heard the adage “If dreams were horses, then beggars would ride.” Not everything someone identifies as desirable or necessary for social media may be a priority or even possible. Just because everyone wants brand-new tablets to access social media doesn’t mean the business can afford it. Similarly, they may want to see information about each person who visits their page on a social site, only to find out that the feature doesn’t exist. As the requirements mount, you’ll find that there are varying degrees of what’s needed and realistic.
The MoSCoW principle is a technique that helps to prioritize requirements, so that everyone involved understands the importance of a particular need or desire. The word MoSCoW comes from the first letter of Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t. In using it with a list of requirements, you associate a requested item with one of the following categories to set its priority:
• Must, which is something that has to be included in a project. If the requirement isn’t met, then this could cause your social media project to fail. For example, if the primary reason for starting the project was to have updates about media releases posted on Twitter, then a Twitter account would be a must.
• Should, which is a requirement that is a higher priority and should be included if possible. For example, the social media person would probably need a smartphone or tablet to post and access content on social media sites at any time. This should be included, but if you couldn’t afford it, the person could use the laptop he or she already has to do the work.
• Could, which is a requirement that may be desirable but isn’t really needed. If there’s time and available resources it may be included. For example, graphics can enhance a site and help to increase interest in your brand. Paying for an account on an infographics site would help with this, but it wouldn’t prevent you from being successful.
• Won’t, which is something that won’t be included in the current project. It may be included in the future, but it isn’t needed now.
As you determine what will and won’t be included, the shape of how social media is used and the business’ presence on these sites will begin to take form. You’ll be able to associate the necessary functionality with the features offered by various sites and platforms. Key players will be established, and you’ll begin to see who will be using it and how it will be used. While there will still be questions that need to be answered, many of them will be resolved through the information you’ve compiled.
How will it be used?
Prior to looking into the prospect of using social media, you probably had a number of core reasons, which were expanded on as you gathered the requirements of others in your company. In looking through this information, you’ll find that how social media will be used falls into three basic categories:
1. An Internet-based social media presence for you andor your organization. These would include Twitter, Facebook, and other publicly accessible sites.
2. Internal social media. As we’ll see later in this chapter, there are platforms that run on an intranet, which are private networks that use Internet-based technologies. These are used to provide sites and services that are accessible to people on your corporate network, such as Microsoft SharePoint. There are also sites on the Internet that limit access to members of an organization, such as Yammer.
3. Internet sites that members of your organization can use andor join, such as we mentioned earlier in the example of your HR department using a site like hr.com.
A presence on the Internet is what most people think of when an organization looks at using social media, and what we focus on in this book. However, it isn’t the only possible solution for your social media needs. If you’re trying to reach the public, then you would want to create an Internet presence. If you wanted to provide social networking between members of your staff or give them the ability to interact with others in their profession, then you might want to look at creating your own internal social networking platform or use existing sites.
As we’ll discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, software platforms like Microsoft SharePoint can be installed on corporate network servers or accessed via the Internet to provide social networking and collaboration features to users. SharePoint allows you to create sites that provide blogs, wikis, profile pages, and many other features. Because you control security, individual SharePoint sites can only be accessed by those you designate. This can be very useful as a replacement for a corporate intranet Web site, as it allows members of your organization to collaborate with one another, share documents, and it also provides a platform for Web-based applications and communication.
Although there are resources to create individual sites for groups in your company, don’t feel that you need to reinvent the wheel and create something that already exists. This is especially true when there’s a need to interact with others in the same profession who work outside of your organization. There are hundreds of social media sites available on the Internet. Some of these are used by the general public, but there are many that are specific to certain groups of professionals. If you search Google, and enter your profession followed by the word “social network,” you’ll probably be surprised that a social network or community exists. For example, if your IT staff wanted a social network for developers, you’d find sites like:
• Stack overflow (www.stackoverflow.com), which is a great source for posting problems with code, chat about development issues, getting answers to questions, and so on. Badges are earned as you assist others by answering questions.
• Reddit—programming (www.reddit.com/r/programming), which provides voting on news related to programming topics, resources, and news.
Depending on how social media will be used in your organization, you may find that some of these resources are available or already being used. In creating a social media strategy for your business, you should identify such things as:
• Do key members of the organization already have Twitter or LinkedIn accounts? You may find that a number of individuals have accounts of their own, which may mean that you don’t need to create new ones for them. If you decide to use corporate Twitter accounts for each of these members (such as one for the CEO, social media representatives, so on, regardless of who they are), then you may need to clarify that one is for business and theirs is only for personal use.
• Has a member of staff may have previously created an organization page on Facebook or added information about the organization to Wikipedia? Before going too far, you should search major social media sites and any additional ones you’re planning to use to determine whether a page or an account already exists.
• Do we have access to any of the accounts previously created for the organization? It’s possible someone created a Facebook page or Twitter account, but it has remained dormant. You may need to find who created it, what the password is, or if you need to report the page so that the social media site can delete it.
• Are the existing accounts and pages legitimate? If you find pages and accounts related to you or your organization and it wasn’t created by you or someone in your company, someone may be impersonating you and you’ll need to take action, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 10.
You should also investigate what your intranet is using for its Web site. If your intranet is running SharePoint, it may not be obvious. In branding the site, the business may have added your business logo, personalized it with a unique name, added custom navigation and page designs, or have other elements that make it indistinguishable from SharePoint sites that don’t have any customization. In such a case, you may think your intranet is a standard Web site, especially if many of the social networking features are not currently being used.
As you discover what’s already being used, decisions may need to be made as to what will be replaced. While many businesses use social media as an extension of their existing Web site, some may see a social media presence as a replacement. A small business that doesn’t get much benefit from paying hosting fees, domain name registration, and paying to have static Web pages professionally modified may decide that a page on Facebook is all they need. Similarly, if the company decides to use SharePoint or some other collaboration site, they may decide that the current intranet Web site is no longer needed.
There may also be internal processes that will be replaced by your social media presence. For example, let’s say that when your company posts a new press release on its Web site, you email every news outlet that the media release is available on your site. This requires administration, because you need to maintain a distribution list of email addresses. If you decided to use Twitter, this process might be changed. Anyone following you would be notified about the new press release in your tweets and be able to click a link to open it directly. By this one simple change, there is zero administration for maintaining an email distribution list and the email account used specifically to send out press updates is no longer needed. Depending on your organization, you may find a number of changes can occur as social media sites are used.
How will it not be used?
A message conveyed once can be read many times. When thinking of social media, people tend to gravitate toward it, being content created by the user, and can overlook the perspective of the reader. As you start to use social media in your organization, it’s important to remember that there are more people who will read content than write it. While your organization may have a few people who will post a message or write a blog, there are many more who use social media sites as a source of information.
In gathering requirements, you may find a number of departments who have no use for social media. In saying that, they may mean creating content. They may find it very beneficial to read information on wikis and blogs or find out the latest information from a vendor’s social networking page or tweets. This is an important requirement to identify, as it may require accounts to be setup, policies to change, changes to firewall settings, and so on.
You will also find that there are people in your organization who have no use whatsoever for social media. This shouldn’t discourage you in trying to get people to adopt social media. Some departments and positions may simply not have a use for it. For example, the payroll department may care less about a public social media presence, because any of their information would be sent internally to employees. Others may not see a need to communicate any information. It’s a simple fact of life that not everything is for everyone. If you encounter this, just let them know that the business is implementing it and you’re available if they change their minds and you can help in the future.
You also shouldn’t feel that you need to be on all of the social media sites or use ones that aren’t of benefit to you. It’s better to have a good presence on a few sites than to have a poor one on many sites. Choosing the ones that will be of most advantage and keeping them updated with fresh content will attract and keep people following what you have to say.
Even though you don’t use all of the sites, you will want to create accounts on the most popular social media sites as a defensive measure against impersonation. As we’ll discuss in Chapter 10, if you create LinkedIn and Twitter accounts for senior members of your staff, it can aid against others pretending to be that person. Setting up such accounts will also reserve the account names for your use, so they’re not taken by others. This is something that actor Leonard Nimoy experienced when he tried to register as LeonardNimoy, only to find someone else had taken the name. As a result, he was left using the Twitter account @TheRealNimoy.
Identifying your audience
Knowing who your audience will be is important for any business. If you’re creating a social media presence, you’ll want to know who will be viewing your pages and tweets so that you can create appropriate content for them. You’ll also want to know this so that you create accounts on sites they’re using. By understanding who you’ll be talking to, you’ll know how to talk to them.
While social media sites are used by millions of people, some are more popular than others. According to Pew Internet & American Life Project, as of December 2012, the following percentage of adults said they visited these sites:
Also, as we mentioned in Chapter 3, as of August 2012, 20% of adults use LinkedIn. While this gives us an understanding of which sites adults are using the most, the demographics of your target audience may also consist of specific genders, ages, races, and so on.
Since 2009, women are more likely than men to use social networking sites. As of December 2012, 71% of women as opposed to 62% of men used these sites. This however is not the case when you look at certain sites on the Internet (and no, I don’t mean those sites). In visiting www.socialstatistics.com, you’ll find that the malefemale ratio is reversed on Google+. At the time of this writing, the site showed (based on a sample set of 183,464 profiles) that 69.4% of men and 29.2% women used Google+.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s State of Social Media Users study also found that specific groups of people tend to use other popular sites more than others. The number of Twitter users doubled since 2010, with more men using it than women. It has a higher usage among people who are black than Latino or white Internet users and has most used by people between the ages of 18–29 and those who live in urban areas.
Facebook is by far the most popular social media site looked at in the survey and is more popular among women than men. While a high number of people in all groups use the site, it is most popular among people of age 18–29 and those with some college. While the household income of those using Facebook is fairly evenly spread, most of those using the site had higher incomes of over $50,000/year and lived in urban areas.
Pinterest is especially popular among women with five times more female Internet users than men using it. The highest groups of people on Pinterest are those with college or higher education and those making higher incomes. It also appeals more to white people, those under the age of 50 and people living in rural or suburban areas.
Instagram is also more popular among women than men and those who are under the age of 50. In terms of race, more black Internet users are on Instagram, followed by Latino, and then white users. It is also more popular among people with some college, and those with lower household incomes, with Internet users making less than $30,000/year being its highest group. Instagram is also more popular in urban areas than those in suburban or rural areas.
Although fewer Internet users are on Tumblr than the other social media sites included in the survey, it appeals equally male and female Internet users. It was slightly more popular among Latino users than white or black users. Most of those using Tumblr were found to be in the age range of 18–29% and were mostly living in urban areas.
Younger audiences
While the survey only focused on groups who were 18 years or older, don’t think that children aren’t major users of social media. Even though the terms of using social media sites often have an age requirement, children will enter an age that will allow them to access. In a 2011 survey, Consumer Reports found that of 20 million Facebook users who were minors, 7.5 million of them were under the age of 13 and 5 million were 10 and under. Even though Facebook’s terms of use states “You will not use Facebook if you are under 13,” this should come as no surprise. There are a considerable number of games available on Facebook, and many that are designed to appeal to younger audiences.
Other sites may also have restrictions that may or may not be adhered to in real life. For example, Twitter’s Terms of Service doesn’t specify a specific age, but states that you can only use it “if you can form a binding contract with Twitter and are not a person barred from receiving services under the laws of the United States or other applicable jurisdiction.” While the legal age you can enter into a contract can vary from state to state and country to country, the common age in most parts of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom is 18. However, a person may enter into a legally binding agreement under certain conditions, such as when the person is under the age of 18 but has parental consent. Despite this, there is no real control on social media sites for preventing a minor from using the service, as it’s essentially an honor system that trusts a person is honest about their age when creating an account.
In 2010, Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that 73% of Internet users between the ages of 12 and 17 used social networks. Of those who were 14–17 years old, 82% of them reported using social media, while 55% of those aged 12–13 admitted to using these sites. Of course, being that they aren’t allowed to use such sites under the terms of use, one can assume the actual number is higher as a number of kids would be resistant to admitting the truth.
The types of sites frequented by younger Internet users differ from those used by adults. A September 2009 survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project found that only 8% of Internet users aged 12–17 use Twitter. It also found that 8% of online teens use virtual worlds like Second Life, with younger users aged 12–13 using these sites more than older teens. In addition to the previously mentioned popularity of Facebook, they are also more prone than adults to use sites that allow them to create and share content.
Internet versus intranet
Social networking isn’t only used for reaching people on the Internet. Many companies use products with social networking features to share information with employees. These software platforms and sites allow employees to create profile pages, chat with coworkers, assign tasks, share documents, create their own pages, blogs and wikis, and other features that enable user-generated content and collaboration. Such products are increasingly common on corporate intranets. In fact, they may be used as a company’s internal Web site, which only employees have access to, or as an extension of an existing internal or public site to allow employees, partners, vendors, and others to collaborate on projects.
Collaboration is a major factor in using such products, as these features provide an opportunity for employees to use technology for sharing information and working as teams. Common features of collaboration include shared calendars, discussion boards, task management, file sharing, and storage. Using such features, you can have multiple people working on documents, so that multiple versions of the same document aren’t being created and passed between people via email or as files in various directories. As documents are changed, versions of the file can be created so that you can revert to a previous version if needed. You can also add many of the features available on your primary site to smaller collaboration sites, allowing you to create wikis, blogs, and other features that are only available to members of your team.
Microsoft SharePoint is a popular platform that provides the features we mentioned. Figure 4.1 shows a team site created in SharePoint 2010, which allows specific members of a team to generate their own content and collaborate on projects together. Using SharePoint, users of an organization can publish their own content, creating Web pages, organizing files into searchable libraries, and perform other tasks that previously required the intervention of IT staff. It also provides records and content management features to manage documents and assign a life cycle to content, so that it is archived or deleted when it is no longer relevant. Groups created in SharePoint allow you to control who can view, contribute, and approve content, ensuring that only those with the correct permissions can access information. If you need additional functionality, components that can be added to your pages called Web parts can be purchased or developed, allowing you to run other applications or content within the environment.
There are a large number of organizations who use SharePoint for their corporate intranet. In 2011, Microsoft’s market research reported that 78% of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint. However, while it is a powerful platform, it does involve certain overhead of having the infrastructure to support it, inclusive to servers to host the Web frontend and SQL Server backend, as well as having IT staff to provide technical support. Because smaller to medium companies may find this cost prohibitive, Microsoft has a cloud-based version available called SharePoint Online that doesn’t require a stand-alone version running on corporate servers. SharePoint Online provides the features of the stand-alone platform but has the site hosted on Internet servers.
Creating a corporate social network on the Internet may not be an option for many companies. Your organization may have policies or regulations that require any data to be stored on internal servers and would not allow using a multitenant server for business purposes. For example, the European Union has strict privacy laws that protect data on citizens. If data stored on the cloud resided on servers in the United States, US law enforcement and Intelligence agencies could potentially access a company’s data under the Patriot Act. Similar concerns may exist for storing data on servers in other countries with antiterrorism or other legislation that allows them broad powers over accessing information.
If you’re not prevented from hosting a social network for your business on the Internet, SharePoint is not the only option for businesses. Huddle (www.huddle.com) and Yammer (www.yammer.com) are social networks for businesses that also provide collaboration features. Both of these have integrated support for SharePoint and Office 365. For example, in Office 365, you can replace the SharePoint newsfeed with one from Yammer or embed the Yammer newsfeed into a SharePoint site. In doing so, Yammer appears as part of the existing SharePoint or Office environment.
As seen in Figure 4.2, without any changes in branding the site so that it has a different look and feel, Yammer has an appearance and functionality similar to Facebook. It allows you to provide status updates, post events, create polls that others can answer, and share images, videos, and documents. For communicating with others, you can send and receive email within Yammer or chat with others who are online. It also allows you to create groups and invite users, so that they can join you in a project and work with you as a team. If someone does especially well, there is a feature that allows you to praise the person, giving them the recognition they deserve.
Once you’ve created a new social network on Yammer, you can invite other people in your company. When logging in, access is determined by the domain of your email address, ensuring that only those with a corporate email account can log on to the network. Administrative features allow you to invite, remove, or block users who have joined.
Yammer is available free of charge, but fees are applied if you want more advanced features. As is the case with SharePoint Online, pricing is done through subscription or can also be combined with Office 365. Other sites like Huddle provide a free trial, but charge after the trial period has expired.
What’s being said about your brand?
It’s always good to know what people are saying before you enter a conversation. Before and after implementing social media for your business, you should review mentions of your business so you can gauge how people view your organization, track trends and activity, and identify issues you may encounter. By understanding the perspective of those you’re engaging, you won’t be caught off-guard and will be able to plan how your campaigns will create a positive opinion of your brand.
Before you begin using tools to monitor social media, you should create a list of what you’re going to monitor. Any sites or apps you use will require you to provide sites or keywords that will be used to search for conversations and other activity related to that criteria. Some of the things you may decide to monitor include:
• Names of people and accounts. You will want to watch for instances where your name or the names of key people in your organization are mentioned, as well as any accounts they have. This could include email addresses and usernames, like those used on Twitter.
• The name of your organization or brand name. Depending on the size of your business, this might also include any subsidiaries your company owns.
• The names of your products and any related project names. Some industries will try and conceal the real name of a product being developed by using codenames prior to their release. For example, Windows 7 was referred to as Blackcomb and Vienna prior to its final release, while movie makers tried to hide the filming of the movie The Dark Knight under the secret identity of “Rory’s First Kiss.”
• The URLs of your corporate Web site and any social media sites being used.
While monitoring mentions of your own brand, you should also consider monitoring those of competitors. In doing so, you’ll see what’s working for them, what’s unpopular, and gain insights into how you’ll create future campaigns and conversations. The information you acquire from these trends and conversations can also be useful in advertising, sales, and other areas of your business.
Monitoring conversations
There are many different ways to monitor social media. While we’ll discuss a number of tools in Chapters 5 and 11, you don’t necessarily need to purchase additional software or subscriptions to online services prior to starting a presence. There are ways you can investigate what’s being said, what people are interested in, and who’s linking to your site. Some of these are offered by social media sites themselves, while others are available through mobile apps and third party Web sites.
Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) allows you to get updates on results found by the search engine, which can be emailed to you immediately, daily, or once a week. Going to this Web site, a “Search query” box allows you to enter the terms you want to be updated on. These terms could be a name, organization, Twitter username, URL, or anything else you wanted to be notified about as Google finds it. This provides an easy way of following what’s being said by yourself and others on specific topics, people, or other entities related to your business.
Search engines can also be useful to monitor what’s being said and get an overview of how your brand is perceived and where it’s mentioned. By typing your Twitter username into a search engine like Google, you’ll see results of tweets you’ve made and others that include your Twitter name. Searching for your name, business name, site, products, and other keywords related to you can return results that will let you know what’s being said about your brand and on what sites. If you’re searching for a name with spaces in it, you should include them in quotation marks to search for that exact phrase. If you want to limit the results to searching a particular site, include the word “site:” followed by the domain name of the Web site you’re searching, for example “BusinessName site:facebook.com.” Alternatively, you can use the Advanced Search features to get the results you want.
As we’ll discuss in Chapter 11, online monitoring tools often have free features or a trial period where you can evaluate its full functionality. These provide a better way of searching for social media content and monitoring conversations. For example, Topsy (www.topsy.com) provides a search engine that returns the most recent and relevant results based on the calculated social influence of a conversation. As seen in Figure 4.3, by typing in your Twitter username, business name, Web site URL, or other search criteria, it will return results of where you were mentioned and allow you to see which posts and tweets link back to your site. It also provides free analytics, where you can search and compare mentions within Twitter that have been retweeted or contain links. This lets you to compare mentions of your organization’s name, domain name, Twitter account, or other terms you’re interested in.
As we’ve mentioned in previous chapters, hashtags are words used in twitter that start with a number sign (#). Clicking one in Twitter allows you to see any other tweets using the same hashtag, allowing you to follow the conversation. By searching for ones created for a campaign, you can follow their usage. If several are being used by a campaign, you can use tools like Topsy to see which is the most popular.
Such sites can also be useful in following trends and seeing what people are talking about. Tools like Topsy allow you to view the latest trends in conversations and search for topics to see what people currently find interesting. Of course, in looking at what people want to know about your business, you shouldn’t ignore the tools already available to you.
Your corporate Web site can also give you clues as to what interests’ people. You should look at which pages are most viewed on your site. If people are visiting pages with press releases, product support, or other areas of interest, then consider including updates about this information on your social media sites. If your site has search features, you can look at the queries people are making when searching your site and identify trends in topics that are currently of interest. In gathering this information from the IT staff or Webmaster of your Web site, you may find valuable insight into what topics will engage people through your tweets and posts.
As you create your social media presence, you’ll also find that the sites themselves provide monitoring tools. Twitter provides a couple of ways to search for what’s being said. By clicking on @Connect on the top navigation bar and then clicking the Mentions tab on the left side of the screen, you’ll see a list of anything containing your username. This includes any mention of your username in tweets, as well as replies. You can also enter a name or username in the search field at the top of the screen to search for any mentions of an account or a name.
Twitter also provides an advanced search feature at www.twitter.com/search-advanced, where you can search for words, phrases, and hashtags. You can limit results on the basis of tweets to and from specific accounts, mentions of a username in tweets, and those that originated near a location. You can also limit results to positive and/or negative tweets, questions, and whether to include retweets.
Facebook also provides ways to follow conversations and view information related to your page. By clicking on the Notifications icon in the upper left hand corner of the screen, a dropdown menu will appear showing who’s Liked or commented on one of your posts. Clicking on the notification takes you to the post, allowing you to view the comments.
Facebook pages also provide basic information about new and total likes to your page, but as the number of users who like your page increases, you gain access to Insights. As we’ll discuss in Chapter 11, Facebook Insights is an analytics platform that allows you to view user statistics like daily and monthly active users, new users, daily comments, and so on. These provide a benchmark for determining the quality of what’s posted on your pages, allowing you to see whether new content has generated conversations and impacted users through Likes and comments.
Blog sites like WordPress (www.wordpress.com) also provide important information that should be monitored. After logging into your blog, you can review the comment people have made, statistics on the number of people who have visited and where they’re from, top searches, and the number of followers and shares to the blog. Such information helps to keep a pulse on what people find most interesting about your site, and what kinds of information you should provide more of to generate conversation and interest.
Making the right decisions early
The earlier you make decisions about your social media presence, the fewer problems you’ll have later. The worst approach is winging it, without any forethought about what you hope to achieve or how you or your business will manage the sites and accounts. As we’ve seen throughout this chapter, there are many questions that need to be answered, and many decisions that need to be made by the right people in an organization.
Setting corporate goals
Before implementing social media, you should identify what you want to achieve from it. Many businesses make the mistake of jumping into the social media pool, simply because that’s what everyone else is doing. However, unless you have an understanding of what the business hopes to get out of its investment, you’ll never really know whether you’re succeeding or not. Clearly defining goals will help to guide you in how you’ll handle your social media presence, the type of posts and tweets you make, and identify the markers that show whether you’re successful.
First, you should set some high-level objectives, which will be the primary goals for what you want to achieve. These could include:
• Increasing visits to your corporate Web site or an ecommerce site, resulting in higher sales
• Engage the consumer and build customer relations
• Raise awareness or change the perception of your organization or a product
• Generate conversations about products in an effort to advertise
• Decrease the number of support calls (e.g., people phoning a call center) by providing online support
• Increase the number of shares, Likes, or people following what your business has to say
Without setting objectives, you won’t know what to measure as success factors and whether your strategy is working. You might consider social media a success because you have a certain number of Likes on a Facebook page, but you’d be unpleasantly surprised if your boss was doing this to increase sales.
You should also set secondary goals, which can be used as milestones related to the primary ones you’ve set. For example, you might set a goal of acquiring a certain number of subscriptions to a blog, comments on Facebook, or followers on Twitter by a certain date. You may want to see an increase in sales or a decrease in advertising costs over a specified period. As you reach these targets, you can see that you’re getting closer to achieving the big goals.
Getting the right people together
Unless you have a smaller business, creating a social media presence generally isn’t a one person job. No matter how smart you are, chances are you don’t have all the answers to questions that need to be asked. To do it properly, you need to bring key players and specialists within your business together early in the process.
Forming a governance committee for social media can be a big advantage for organizations. As we’ll discuss in Chapter 11, such committees can be extremely useful in formulating policy, training, monitoring, crisis management, and establishing guidelines and procedures. Members can be from different areas of your organization but should include people who can answer common questions and identify risks. This might include a representative of the IT department, legal department, public relations, training, and other members of your organization who can help ask the right questions and give the right answers.
By creating a governance committee, you’re surrounding yourself with people who can make effective decisions and recommendations. This group can help define the roles and procedures that will be used in social media and help you to understand who to contact for guidance in specific situations.
Remembering technology in the equation
Because setting up social media accounts is so easy, it’s easy to forget concerns related to the technology being used. There may be new email accounts that need to be set up, existing IT-related policies that need to be adhered to or modified, concerns about devices, and firewall rules that may need to be changed. If you’re planning on certain devices like smartphones or tablets to be used, then these may need to be purchased and configured by the business prior to the organization’s social media launch. While the account may be simple to set up, other elements related to technology may require considerable thought and work.
If a business plans to use social media, then they will probably want computers or devices on the network to access those sites. Firewall rules may exist that will block social networking and other sites, preventing a person from visiting Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. It could be somewhat embarrassing if you announced your business’ new social media presence, only for employees to find that the organization didn’t trust the site and still blocked computers from accessing it. Even worse, if you needed to send an important tweet, you might find that your tablet or smartphone couldn’t do it due to such restrictions. To avoid these problems, you’ll need to notify your IT department as to what social media sites employees are allowed to visit. If employees in general aren’t allowed to use social media, then you’ll need to notify them as to what network accounts, computer names or devices should have access.
Just because social media sites are easy to use, remember that setting up social media for a business goes beyond the actual account creation. By working with your IT department, you’ll be able to identify where changes need to be made, and what restrictions need to be in place to keep the business and its employees safe.
Nonwork computers
There are many potential threats on the Internet, and people using social media will access it from work and home. Antivirus software may protect computers on a corporate network, but how would you know if an employee’s personal devices are protected? A home computer might be used to click a link that installs malicious software (i.e., malware) or exposes a machine to code that exploits vulnerabilities. In such a case, passwords used to access a business’ social media accounts, and other sensitive information could be compromised. To avoid such problems, you might consider offering an employee program where antivirus software is offered to employees at a discounted price. Depending on the software license agreement your company has with Symantec, McAffee, or other vendors, you may be able to offer active employees free home use of the antivirus product.
Since browsers can save a password for a site, it’s also possible an unauthorized person can access the account. Internet Explorer, Chrome, and other browsers will give the option of saving the password for a site, so you don’t have to type the password the next time you visit. However, if the social media accounts were saved on a nonwork computer or device, it could be disastrous. Imagine how embarrassing it would be if a tweet was sent by a child using an employee’s family computer, or the chaos that could result if a person in an Internet café used a computer after you accessed the company’s social media site. To prevent this, you need to be aware of such problems and implement policies to prohibit saving passwords or accessing accounts from certain locations.
Shortened URLs and related risks
URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are the Web site addresses you enter into the address bar of your browser. They contain the domain name of a site (such as facebook.com) and any directories and files that you’re trying to open. An example of a URL would be Microsoft’s page on family safety when using social media, which is http://www.microsoft.com/security/family-safety/kids-social.aspx. As you can see from this, some URLs can be quite long and cumbersome. It also may be a concern when you’re making a tweet that allows a limited number of characters in the message. In the example just given, the URL is 118 characters long, but you’re only allowed to have 140 characters in a tweet. This would be a dilemma if it wasn’t for shortened URLs.
Shortened URL services take a long URL like the one mentioned and converts it to a smaller Web address. Two of the most popular services are TinyURL (www.tinyurl.com) and Bitly (www.bitly.com). When you go to either of these sites, you’re presented with a field where you can enter the full URL, click a button, and be presented with a small URL. For example, when I entered the Microsoft social media page mentioned into TinyURL, it provided the URL http://tinyurl.com/4jahns7. If you want a more user friendly URL, you can optionally create a custom URL like http://tinyurl.com/kidssocial. If you entered these shortened URLs into the address bar of your browser, a request would be made to tinyurl.com to resolve the address to the full URL and redirect your browser to the correct site.
Twitter also offers its own service, using a t.co domain that will automatically shorten any link in your tweet to 20 characters. A problem with the Twitter shortened URL is that it is only available for tweets, so this won’t necessarily help you if you want to shorten a URL for use on other social media sites. However, since it does decrease the characters automatically in the URL, it means you can send longer tweets without first converting links with Bitly or TinyURL.
Examine suspicious URLs
If you’re using social media, then you won’t just be creating shortened URLs, you’ll also probably click on links from other people. Before you open a shortened URL, it is often wise you examine it. While we’ll discuss security related to hijacked accounts in Chapter 7, you should look at the message to see if there’s anything odd about it. As with email, you may get strange tweets from people you’re following, but with messages offering tips to lose weight or get rich quick schemes with a link for additional information. If you receive a direct message in Twitter from your boss saying “LOL, funny pic of you” with a link, and you know the person shouldn’t have photos of you, chances are it’s not from that person. These days, you need to be as wary of posts on social networking sites and tweets as you do with email. It may be SPAM sent from a hijacked account, and clicking the link may compromise your account or computer.
Even though a shortened URL may hide the original address, it doesn’t mean that you can’t check the URL and determine its origin. Using a site like unshort.me or LongURL (www.longurl.org), you see where the link will lead you without going to the actual site. To illustrate how to do this:
1. In your browser, go to www.unshort.me.
2. In the box on the main page, type in the following URL (which I’ve created and points to my blog): http://bit.ly/10TjJ3v.
After clicking the button, you’ll see a new screen appear with the full resolved URL. If you recognize the site, you could click on the link and go to it. If you don’t recognize it, you should reconsider visiting it or find out more information about it.
When in doubt, if you know and trust a person sending a link, you can of course send a message to the person and ask if they sent the link. However, if the account was hijacked, the person responding may not be the actually owner of the account. Another problem is that many of the people you follow on Twitter (or who follow you) may not be people you actually know. Similarly, Facebook friends may be added for games or LinkedIn contacts because they’re in the same industry as you. In such cases, you couldn’t be certain about the legitimacy of the link.
At this point, if you’re really curious about the link, you could use any number of sites to see if they’re listed as a problem. There are numerous sites that allow you to compare a Web site to information in Web site reputation engines, domain blacklists, and other sources that will determine if it’s possibly dangerous. Some of these sites include:
• URLVoid (www.urlvoid.com)
• McAfee SiteAdvisor (www.siteadvisor.com)
• Malware Domain List (www.malwaredomainlist.com)
While these methods require you to manually check the links, there are also software solutions that will examine suspicious URLs for you. As we’ll discuss in Chapter 7, firewalls may be configured to check a URL against known malware sites, and apps like Norton Safe Web may be used to scan your newsfeed for unsafe links. Being aware that a link may be dangerous and taking steps to insure its safe will go a long way in protecting yourself from malicious software being installed on your computer.
Using centralized corporate accounts and email
In setting up accounts for social media, it’s important to consider the email address you’ll use. When you set up a new account on social networking sites, you provide an email address in its creation. For businesses, corporate email addresses should be used, so the account is associated with the company and accessible when needed. If an employee uses a personal email account or creates an account solely controlled by that person, it can lead to a number of problems.
Any account can be compromised. If it happens, you would need to access the account’s settings to change the password and verify that a hacker hasn’t made changes or posed as you by sending messages or posting content. If you don’t have the correct password for a social media account or access to the email account used to create it, it will be more difficult regaining control. Until then, a hacker could send SPAM, post bogus information, or cause any number of other problems.
If a business allows employees to create corporate social media accounts using personal email, and he or she is the only person who knows the password, it creates a single point of failure. If the employee was unavailable or unwilling to provide the password (as in the cases of vacations, termination of employment, accident, injury, death, etc.), then it could be some time before you regain control. Without access to the person’s email account, you would never see notifications about how a password or an email address associated with a social media account was changed or see any verification emails when new accounts are created. By using corporate email accounts, other employees can monitor the email when your social media person is unavailable, and your IT staff could reset the password and regain control if it’s compromised. Any social media accounts setup created with the email could then be taken over by requesting a password change from the site.
As we’ll discuss in Chapter 9, policies and procedures can save considerable problems for an organization. However, when considering how you’ll set up a social media presence, you’ll need to make decisions that will affect what those policies will be. One item to consider is whether accounts will be created for roles in a company or if individuals will own their own accounts. For example, while you may create a Twitter account for the business itself, you may decide to create one for the CEO, public relations person, and so on. By naming the Twitter username after a business role, it won’t be tied to a particular person’s name. If you look at the Vatican’s Twitter account for the pope, it is called @Pontifex and doesn’t reflect any particular person. As one person steps out of that role, the Twitter username doesn’t need to be changed, which saves them from having to update Web pages, printed material, and anything else asking people to follow that account.
If you haven’t already, you may want to consider creating email accounts for authorized positions representing the company in social media. For example, if you had a public relations representative, you might create an email account named publicrelations@yourdomainname. In creating a Twitter account with this email and naming it after the position, it truly represents the company and not a person in it. In doing so, you’re laying claim to business ownership of the account.
Ownership of a social media account is important. If you imagine a salesperson in your company having a Twitter account with lots of followers, you could lose those customers and potential clients if the person left your company, changed the account password and settings, and retained control of it. It’s important for businesses to set up email and social media accounts properly, as it will allow them to keep control of the accounts and avoid possible lawsuits over who owns the account.
Identifying how you’ll represent yourself on the Internet
The impression you make on social media sites can have a lasting effect, especially if it doesn’t match the image you want to convey. The way you present your brand to the public should be consistent regardless of who’s making a post or tweet. Early in developing social media, there should be a clear understanding of how the business is to be portrayed, so that you can keep to that image.
While social media is generally seen as informal, this isn’t always the case. If you work in an organization that needs to present itself in a serious and professional manner, the tone and level of professionalism might be higher than other businesses. For example, people wouldn’t appreciate a mortician being insensitive about his work. The tone of your message needs to match the seriousness of a situation and the professionalism of your work. While it seems like common sense, there are many cases where you don’t see the image of a profession or business matching the expected public perception.
This not only applies to organizations as a whole but also to how employees use social media. In 2008, a photo of a nurse showing off her bra appeared on Facebook. The photo was taken on a ward at Northampton General Hospital in Britain and showed patients in the background. Although later reinstated, the hospital fired her and blocked access to social networking sites in the hospital. In 2009, photos of nurses having a food fight on a ward at Stafford Hospital in Britain appeared on Facebook. The photos were taken at a time when the hospital was trying to improve standards and work conditions, after a report found up to 1200 patients died as a result of poor nursing care, neglect, and being short staffed. Needless to say, neither of these incidents helped to convey a level of professionalism expected from health care professionals.
While these are extreme examples, they do show how the image of your company and its employees are an important part of how the public sees you. Employees are seen as representatives of a company, whether they are responsible for their own social network activities or act as social media officers for the business. Before content goes public, you should identify how you want to be represented and identify whether your organization has an existing code of conduct that employees are to follow.
Approved representatives
As your business establishes a social media presence, chances are you don’t want everyone to have access to the accounts and publishing content on behalf of the organization. After all, the more people representing an organization through social media, the more difficult it is to control. Centralizing responsibility for social media minimizes numerous risks by having a single person or group of people acting as a spokesperson for the company.
Policies should be created specifying which positions in the company are authorized to speak on behalf of the organization as an official source. For example, the public relations expert, CEO, social media person, or other officials within the organization may be allowed to post information through social media and other sources, but others may be restricted from doing so. Confidentiality agreements should also be created and signed by employees, so they know that they are not to divulge classified, sensitive, or other internal information to the public without authorization.
Preexisting accounts
While businesses are taking social media more seriously, individuals have been using it for years. It’s not uncommon for a member of an organization to be gung-ho and set up a social media presence with his or her own email. Unfortunately, this can be a major problem. The person may lose interest in a site or an account after moving on with his or her career, leaving it dormant. When the business discovers this problem, they may not know who created it or how to take it over. Prior to venturing into creating a social media presence, you should identify whether such accounts already exist and shut down any you find by notifying the site.
Privacy
In terms of information, privacy relates to data that’s collected and stored, and its availability for others to view. The degree of privacy desired or required by a person or business can vary, although there are often some consistencies. You don’t want data available to those you don’t know and trust, which could be used to cause embarrassment, financial loss, or potentially victimize you. Organizations may also have unique requirements for privacy and need to limit what’s shared about employees, clients, and business partners. Prior to using social media, you should address privacy concerns and identify what kinds of information must be kept private.
Depending on the industry and location of a business, there may be strict regulations and legislation controlling whether certain data can be shared and even restricting who views it within the organization. There are many sources of information that are protected by legislation, and either cannot be disseminated to the public or can only be shared under certain conditions. These include:
• Medical records, which are protected in many countries by doctor–patient confidentiality and by legislation, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) in the United States.
• Criminal records, which may include protected details of ongoing investigations or legal cases. Even when information can be released to the public, specific information may still be protected. An example of this is the Youth Criminal Justice Act in Canada, which bans publishing the identity of young persons under the age of 18 who have committed a crime.
• Financial records, including transactions, which are protected in the United States under such legislation as the Right to Financial Privacy Act (RFPA).
The confidentiality of information is important, not only to the security of a customer or client but also to the reputation and integrity of your organization. Even if your business doesn’t fall under such regulations, people will often have an expectation that information will be kept private. If people don’t feel that personal or sensitive information is safe, they won’t use your services. Because of its importance, your company may have internal policies that control information.
Some privacy concerns in using social media
Privacy should be an immediate concern when you sign up to use a social media site. When you create an account, you’re required to enter information to identify yourself. For example, when you create a Facebook account, you enter your name, email address, birthday, gender, and then go on to upload a profile picture, cover photo, and add additional facts about yourself. If security settings aren’t configured to restrict certain information, then this may be available for anyone to view. Even if security is set, certain information is considered public. To allow others to find and add you as a friend, your name, username, profile picture, cover photo, gender, and networks (which may identify your city or other revealing facts) are treated as public information.
Even if you’re diligent, others may not be. People you add as friends may identify you by tagging you in photos, status updates, locations, or reveal other information about you. Social networking sites often provide tools to find friends and contacts, which may require them gaining access to your email account. Sites like Facebook make this feature immediately available when you create an account, inviting you to give Facebook access to the contact list of an email account. If you allow this, contact information from the list is uploaded to the site, so the app can compare email addresses in your contact list to those of existing Facebook users. While the point of this is to help you find friends, it is done so by allowing a site access to your email account and the contact information of coworkers, business contacts, friends, family, and others who may have never intended their information to be uploaded to a social networking site. If permission is given to access an email account issued by an employer, this can also raise additional security issues.
Even if one site you use is protective of your data, others may not be. User data on social networking sites are packaged into databases and may be shared with third parties. Personal and private information like your name, age, gender, location, interests, hobbies, photographs, activities, and so on may be combined with other information on the Internet to create a comprehensive profile on you. The data gathered about you may be used by direct marketers, advertisers, data brokers, and others who may find the information beneficial or sell it others. By amassing information about what’s liked and followed, advertisers gain a real-time understanding on preferences and predictions about your interests and activities.
Data compiled from social media and other public sources can be searched online, revealing a considerable amount of information about you. For example, People Search sites like Spokeo (www.spokeo.com) and PeekYou (www.peekyou.com) allow you to search aggregated data sources to see a person’s usernames, work, schools, social media activity, public records, relatives, and so on. Depending on who’s conducting the search and what’s found, such information could be used to track your activities and location, impersonate you, or cause other problems which affect your employment or ability to rent an apartment.
Prior to creating a social media account, you should identify what kinds of information you’re willing to share. In doing so, you’ll have a better idea of what data you’ll enter when setting up your social media accounts. If the company has multiple locations or phone numbers, you should decide what address and number will be displayed on pages. For personal or business use, you may want to create a new email account for social media accounts, as this will decrease the amount of SPAM and notifications going to the email you use for day-to-day use. For personal accounts, limit the amount of information related to your employment and location and avoid filling out your address, phone, or anything else that enables others to contact you directly. If these are required fields when creating the account, then make sure the information isn’t visible afterward. Remove anything you’re not comfortable sharing from your profile pages and adjust privacy settings on the account. You don’t want a person you barely know or who’s seen the information online visiting your work or home.
Training and policy
As we’ve mentioned through this chapter, if you’re creating a social media presence for an organization, it’s good to see what’s already available to you. Your organization may already have policies related to areas of concern with social media. These may include confidentiality agreements that have to be signed by employees, policies on acceptable use of technology, and so on. There may also be policies that outline how to use email, which can be modified to address social media usage. While we’ll discuss policies in greater detail in Chapter 9, you should see what policies already exist and can be modified to meet your needs.
Another area worth examining is training. If you work for a larger organization, you may have staff that train employees or create training material for your company. By talking with them, you may find that they’re already taught about online privacy or security, customer relations, dealing with classified information, or other topics related to social media. You may also find that there are videos or sites that you want to refer that provide this information. By addressing concerns and discovering the resources already available to you, you can save yourself a lot of work later and avoid unforeseen problems.
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