Target audience: Business executives, brand managers, marketing professionals, community managers, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, educators, Web publishers.

Post by Andrew Lisa

If part of your social marketing plan is the establishment of an online business community, you may be wondering if you need the help of a moderator or manager. It’s important to understand the difference between the two, what they do and how they can help you.

I’ve been a part of forums both with and without a manager, and there are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches.

What do managers do?

As discussed in 3 Career Options for People Who Master Social Media, social media managers wear a lot of different hats. They deal with communication, moderation, engaging with users online and offline, writing community guidelines and a whole lot more.

About moderators

Moderators are registered members of your forum or community who you grant special powers to. When running forums, I’ve given moderators the ability to freeze and unfreeze accounts, delete or alter comments, delete entire threads and counsel members on forum behavior.

How to know if it’s time for help

Do you have any controversial subject matter that could lead people to post emotional or agitated content? Is your online business community frequently the target of complaints regarding content, organization or direction? Do members reach out with a substantial number of questions or concerns? Perhaps most importantly, do you find it hard to make time to give your online community the attention it needs to run smoothly?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you probably need a moderator or manager.

Ask your moderator to establish clear rules

If you do enlist the help of a moderator, the most important thing is to establish clear and well-defined rules regarding their responsibilities, their powers, their job and their limitations. Especially when you have more than one moderator, the risk is inconsistency. Nothing drives me away from a forum faster than the feeling that different moderators come with different sets of rules.

Also, make sure your moderator visits the board frequently and regularly. This means not only should they visit the online community a lot (at least once a day, generally), but that they visit at around the same time when they can. This adds to the sense of consistency and continuity, and if a member has an issue, they should know when is the best time to seek you out.

Moderators should also follow an internal code of conduct regarding how they treat members, how they handle disputes and especially how they deal with confidential subject matter. They are the representatives of your forum, and they should handle the job professionally and consistently.

If your social marketing plan is so complex that you require the services of a manager, that’s a different level of commitment than a moderator. Your social marketing manager should have experience not just with moderation, but also with establishing community protocols and guidelines in the first place. Managers should be excellent communicators.

A good moderator will be fair and consistent.

An online community is a great way to boost your business with social marketing. Forums and communities were social media before being called social media. But the realities of the Internet’s anonymity is that disgruntled members or online vandals often abuse the power that comes with having total freedom of speech. Moderators – or in more complex cases, managers – can keep things tiny, organized and fair.

Related

• Should you hire a social media community manager?

• Grow your online community by offering value

• What makes an online community work

The post Does your online business community need a moderator or manager? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Why Facebook will find it hard to monetize the social graph

This is first of a three-part series on Facebook as an investment. Coming up:
• Facebook will remain king, but social pure plays will fade
• Brands: How to cut your exposure to Facebook business risk

If Facebook’s stock price were based on the number of blog posts about its IPO, the company would be in great shape, but too few posts have addressed Facebook’s real barrier to monetizing its business, so we will rectify that here. 

Although Facebook is a fantastic social venue and platform, I did not buy into Facebook and do not plan to invest in its stock. (The stock price is down 30 percent from its debut on May 18.) Facebook‘s Achilles heel is a significant trust gap with its users, and now, its investors. Its trust gap will make it difficult for Facebook management to fully monetize its most unique asset, its users’ social graph data. Moreover, the management team has not shown the insight or willingness to address this barrier.

Why lack of trust is Facebook’s Achilles heel

That Facebook has a spotty trust profile with users is an understatement. Its management has a history of being cavalier with users’ data. Although many have argued this point, I’ve observed that Facebook’s policies have been mostly legal, but trust is independent of legality. Facebook’s management has gotten better about “considering” users during the past year or so, but such consideration has felt compliant and not entirely voluntary.

This matters. Although I have no inside information about Facebook’s technology or strategy, my knowledge of user social data and its value in developing relationships leads me to deduce that Facebook’s gold mine is its unique knowledge of users’ social graphs. Just play around with Facebook ads. Only Facebook knows what California physics undergrads prefer in music, movies and running shoes. Who their friends and hobbies are, and when they post their running updates. And what moms with 3.2 kids who went to Berkeley think about whales or global warming or Republican budget proposals.

The problem is, although I’m sure Facebook has employed some of the best attorneys for a long time, and user agreements give Facebook the “right” to use social data however they want, we have all witnessed that users themselves revolt when they perceive that they have been duped. And when they discover how Facebook intends to use their personal information (that they have willingly, if ignorantly, surrendered, by the way), they will undoubtedly see red. This is Facebook’s biggest risk. It’s not a legal issue, it’s a trust and relationship issue.

There is a significant chance that Facebook management has been intentionally keeping the implications and value of social graph data under wraps because a significant portion of its users would not agree with letting Facebook use their social information in the way that would monetize it best.

This is Facebook’s biggest, darkest secret, its deepest, broadest vein of gold. It’s Facebook’s biggest problem, and its IPO will force the issue in an unfortunate way.

Compounding interest: Facebook’s IPO trust snafu

By now, Facebook’s IPO has taken the trust gap into another realm. Whether the mismanagement of the IPO is ultimately Facebook’s “fault” or Morgan Stanley’s, it will raise stakeholders’ suspicions of the company. It would not have mattered so much if Facebook had not allowed a legacy of mistrust to form around the company.

I am assuming that Facebook management did not commit any crimes (from the analyses I’ve read, I have no reason to believe they did), but there is a risk that there was some impropriety.

Also IPO-related, Facebook management has done a subpar job managing investor expectations. Yes, dumb money rules the market because few analysts or investors have any idea about how to “value” social technologies, and the market’s ignorance is not Facebook’s fault. That said, management has not helped themselves by pumping up expectations of large advertising revenues and the claim that they will monetize on mobile. Regarding the latter, I predict that increasing network speeds will help mobile incrementally, but small screen size will persist.

Adverts on mobile will continue to disappoint. They will never deliver — for Facebook or anyone else — because online advertising in general has underperformed expectations. People do not like invasive ads in any form, and that will not change.

Wrapping up: Profound attitude change needed at Facebook

Facebook’s dilemma is that it won’t monetize enough to fulfill investor expectations through advertisements. It will probably continue to make money, but expectations are so high, it will disappoint. Facebook management has not been forthcoming with its biggest asset. This may be because:

• They want to collect more data while users are still ignorant and build out the information architecture to prepare to monetize it.
• Management really thinks they can fulfill investor expectations with advertising and ancillary businesses such as Facebook Payments.
• They want more time to experiment with ads; Timeline is built to increase advertising on Facebook, and they will learn much from users’ and Pages’ behaviors with it.
• If #1 or #2 is true, Facebook is in trouble.

Facebook management has to fix the trust gap, right away. This won’t be easy, but Facebook needs to appreciate the difference between being legally right and earning the trust of its community. This means a profound attitude change.

• Probably Facebook management thought like a startup — it created a high-tech cloud app. The problem is, although that’s true, Facebook has become a community, and to develop trust, Facebook has to submit to the community. Management has to accept that, although it has legal principle on its side, the community will feel that it doesn’t have ethics on its side.
• I don’t know any of Facebook’s management personally, but my impression is that this would be a profound attitude change. But it’s the only way Facebook will be able to fully monetize its gold.
• Facebook doesn’t have much time. As I’ll point out in Part 2, I estimate it has 2-5 years to optimize a return on its social data.
• The community has to feel that Facebook wants to serve it. Facebook talks the talk but has not walked the walk. There’s no faking here.
• It may be useful to compare Facebook with LinkedIn, where management is far more experienced, astute and careful. LinkedIn has been extremely conservative with how it collects and uses members’ data. True, its data is more “business-oriented,” less “intimate”; LinkedIn has a completely different social profile.
• I’ll close with this disruptive thought. Facebook, like most other Web 2.0/3.0 startups, has bought into “monetizing” by selling data [and access/adverts] to brands. Medium- to long-term, a big portion of the  money will come from users, reversing the Web 1.0 pattern (“everything online is free”).
• Imagine putting users’ data in their service, which would align Facebook with users. For example:

• Parents would pay for a roommate finding service, according to very specific criteria.
• Educate recruiters about “cultural fit” and help users leverage their personal activities into culture fit at jobs or consulting contracts; ditto for undergraduate school (“where do I go to college”?).
• Dating/romance according to unique data; if done at the same time as other suggestions, Facebook could avoid the perception that it’s a “dating site.”
• Help users find support for difficult life situations.
• Help very specific user types tackle difficult use cases through collaboration (bookish people who like to splurge help each other save money; Facebook has unique insights about how they splurge).

The post Facebook’s biggest barrier to enormous wealth? Trust appeared first on Inside Social Media.

A mobile marketplace for getting stuff done from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Start-up offers location-aware marketplace for getting stuff done

One of my favorite new iPhone apps and online services is TaskRabbit, a platform that allows people to hire other people to complete tasks in their own towns or neighborhoods.

The concept is drop-dead simple but difficult to pull off. Founder Leah Busque says TaskRabbit lets folks “outsource small jobs and tasks to other people in their neighborhood” — say, if you need dry cleaning or groceries picked up, house cleaning or yard work done, Ikea furniture assembled or a wifi system set up in your home.

“We’ve seen some really funny ones,” Leah said, “like, ‘Help me write a love letter to my ex-girlfriend to help win her back.’ Or, ‘Help me prank my office mate by wrapping all of his desk items in cellophane.'”

Here’s my 8-minute interview with founder Leah Busque on Vimeo.

A simple way to connect customers with a local workforce

TaskRabbit works like this:

• Sign up on the site for free.

• Post a task — what do you need done and at what price? Use the app to voice-record a description and upload photos.

• The task goes out to participants (“TaskRabbits”) based on their location. They bid on your job, you confirm the best match, he or she goes to work, and TaskRabbit gets a small cut of the price.

Well over 2,000 people have signed up to perform tasks in Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, San Antonio and Austin, with Atlanta, Dallas and Houston on the way. The company’s vetting process includes online applications, video interviews and a background check, which greatly weeds out the flakes (my term, not hers). Trust, safety and security are at the heart of the marketplace, Leah says.

Unlike online services like Angie’s List, TaskRabbit is not marketing the services of licensed electricians, plumbers and carpenters but instead is targeting regular folks — individuals in a community who can offer their free time, special skills and services.

TaskRabbit has 35 full-time staffers at its San Francisco headquarters with “city managers” across the United States, and it has $24.7 million in financial backing, TechCrunch reports.

In a phrase, TaskRabbit is about service networking rather than social networking. Check ’em out.

Related

• Do you have a strategy for social bookmarking and crowdsourcing?

• Book: ‘A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing’

The post TaskRabbit: Crowdsourcing comes to your neighborhood appeared first on Inside Social Media.

In the years that I’ve been involved in social media, I have heard so many misconceptions and myths about social media that I am certain this article is long overdue. Here is a list of the top five misconceptions regarding social media:

Misconception #1: Social media is only right for certain brands

Often people ask me: “Is social media only right for web services or for ‘cool’ products?” The answer is no. Social media is right for every brand as long as the brand is able to find its target audience within a certain platform and converse/interact with it in an effective manner. Of course it may be exciting to do a marketing campaign for Apple than for Charles Schwab but for either one of those brands a targeted social media campaign within social networks and the blogosphere can bring amazing results as far as: Brand awareness, Overall buzz around the brand, traffic, customer loyalty and ultimately revenue.

In fact, often it is the “duller” brands that experience the most growth out of social media campaigns because they experience a more substantial change in popularity between their starting point A and their ending point B than the “cooler” brands. Take for example Mint which is an online personal finance service and was just bought by Intuit for $170 Million. Not the most exciting of startups perhaps and yet Mint is a fine example of a company that did a great job in using social media to maximize the buzz around its brand, making its blog magazine-like with articles about tips for young parents and other interesting content. Mint made their content so interesting in fact that users/blog readers promote the brand on their own.

Misconception #2: Social media is all about getting traffic — and quickly

Social media marketing is a long term process that takes time. Once a brand enters any network such as Facebook or MySpace, it takes time to build that brand’s community. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a community on Facebook. If you want to do social media marketing right and not just spam the hell out of people, you must use conversational marketing to engage them. Conversational marketing is all about conversing with your community. Learning more about their likes and dislikes, listening before speaking and reacting based upon the customers’ feedback.

Whoever thinks that he will open a Facebook page and reach tens of thousands of site visitors on the first day, is dead wrong. Brands that use social media to promote themselves will see a steady growth in traffic to their sites over time as their brand names become more and more viral within the networks – due to the increase in number of fans, number of tweets, exposure in blogs, etc.

Sure there are different ways which will increase the rate of a brand’s virality on the Web. For example, creating strong social incentives for people on your site which will increase their urge to promote your brand is definitely a factor which will heighten the public’s awareness. You can read more about social incentives in this post I had written last year. However, don’t expect to get thousands of visitors to your site before you’ve been able to build 1) a strong loyal online community 2) a strong incentives system to increase brand awareness. Both these goals take time to achieve. From my experience, it usually takes about three months to start seeing effective results when using social media tools.

Misconception #3: “By using social media we will lose control of our brand’s image”

Executives (especially in big companies) often think that their employees will go wild and start telling every horror story imaginable regarding their brand because the company will open a Facebook page. So here’s the scoop: People will talk about your brand whether you like it or not. Opening a Facebook page is not going to change it and not opening a Facebook page is not going to make it go away. The question is: Do you want to be a part of that conversation or not? By having a presence in social networks and blogs, you as a brand show your customers and employees that you care about their feedback and that you are there to listen and satisfy their needs.

I’ll give you a real-time example: My hosting company is Network Solutions. For a few days my blog wasn’t uploading and I started to get very pissed off. I tweeted “Network Solutions Sucks” and specifically addressed @Shashib – the guy who handles Network Solutions’ social media efforts. A few moments later I received a tweet back from Shashib. He wanted to hear what’s wrong and help me resolve the problem. He promised a Network Solutions agent would call me soon. Within a few moments I received a phone call from an agent who helped me fix the situation and upload my site. At that moment, Network Solutions won my customer loyalty forever (or until the next time they screw up :-)). Real time customer care is something that brands can utilize social media tools for (specifically twitter) like no other marketing tools they have had till now. We’ve already seen amazing examples of customer care from Zappos and Dell. Brands should not be afraid of engaging in honest and transparent conversations with their clients online but rather they should be very afraid of ignoring their customers’ complaints and pretending that everything’s fine when it’s not.

Misconception #4: Social media is just a fad

I often hear people who say that social networks are just a passing fad. This is what I have to say to them: Social media is an inevitable digital evolution of our desire as humans to communicate with one another. It is a desire that we always had and will always continue to have as long as we are human. I had written about this topic in the past. To say that social media is just a fad is to say that communication is just a fad. Here are a few stats that might help to change the mind of those who are still apprehensive:

1) Two-thirds of the global internet population visit social networks and time spent on social networks is growing at three times the overall internet rate, accounting for ~10% of all Internet time.

2) Visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity — ahead of personal email!

Care to change your mind?

Misconception #5: “I don’t need a professional to do social media for me”

Many executives think that they don’t need a professional to help them with their social media activities. They’ll just take a student who has a few hours a week and get him to sit on the social networks and play with their company’s branding. It’s inconceivable to me how on one hand companies can be so cautious regarding beginning to use social media and on the other hand they’ll give the work to a mere student who could ruin their branding in a few hours just to save a few bucks. In order to engage in social media campaigns that are effective and successful, companies should use social media expert services at least in the first few months just to understand the specific rules of each community. One must remember that Facebook, twitter, Mixx, Bebo are all communities with their own set of rules and it is crucial for brands to respect the community’s rules in order to survive. Just like a company wouldn’t take on its PR on its own without consulting with a PR expert first, a company should not delve into social media without consulting with a social media expert. After a few months of training, I believe brands can take the work upon themselves, but they must not forgo the training period as they could do more damage than good for their branding.

These are the top five misconceptions I’ve heard regarding social media although I’ve heard many more. I would be delighted if you guys shared in the comments section some of the misconceptions that you’ve heard.

Photo credit: Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth

The post The Top Five Misconceptions About Social Media appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Social gaming has become huge in the last year — after all, playing games is naturally a social activity. Social gaming basically combines the best of the gaming portals with the social network platform. What’s so great about this idea is that the social tools offered enable casual gamers to play in a much more fun, interesting and competitive environment. It not only allows friends to share their scores with one another, it creates a fun way for people to interact, create and receive feedback.

While more and more gaming sites are hopping on this trend, XPO Games is one trend hopper that’s doing it right. XPO Games bills itself as a fully featured social network for both casual gamers and game developers. Gamers can join the fun, play original casual games and use the featured socializing tools to meet new people and share their experiences, while developers can submit and expose their originally created games and monetize them.

XPO Games launched in 2007 by Daniel Yaron and Hagay Nave when they realized the void and solitude one can experience on other casual gaming websites. “The games were there, but the community and social tools weren’t!” says Daniel Yaron. They decided to go beyond the portal functionality by including features such as the ability to like games, create profiles, friend other users, send them messages, post on walls, utilize the live scoring system and news feed, and win trophies. In addition to all this, the XPO Games platform allows developers to ask users for feedback on which games to create.

Gaming just makes more sense when you play against your buddies. Daniel and Hagay have realized this and have taken it to the next level.

XPO Games is still in private beta and we’ve got  invites for all Blonde 2.0 readers on Socialmedia.biz! Get yours here.

The post Friends go head to head on XPO Games appeared first on Inside Social Media.

AOL sure is in an interesting place these days. They have a brand new CEO (ex Google VP Tim Armstrong), a legacy dial-up access business that more than 20 years after it was launched still makes billions of dollars a year and the rest of AOL split up into three different groups: Platform A, one of largest advertising networks; Media Glow, which includes AOL.com and mega blogs like TMZ and Engadget, and the group that most interests me, People Networks, which includes AIM, ICQ, Bebo, Yedda, Goowy and the newly acquired SocialThing.

People Networks is now planning an extensive synergy of all these properties (and also third party outside content) under the banner of “life streaming,” where users will be able to syndicate all their online activity into one stream.

I was lucky enough yesterday to have a conversation with Ziv Navoth, senior vice president of marketing at People Networks. Ziv is a very interesting guy. At Bebo, where he ran marketing, he grew the user base from 22 million to 45 million users and pioneered numerous innovations, including a new business model for media companies to distribute and monetize their content and a new form of online entertainment, combining original productions with brand sponsorship. Since the Bebo acquisition, his task at AOL has been to expand a network already 90+ million strong. See my full conversation with him in the video above.

The post AOL executive on its social services toolbox appeared first on Inside Social Media.

I just heard a fascinating story that speaks to how the community is tapping into social media on life-and-death matters — in this case, a bomb threat at a high school. Let me tell it to you.

Short version:

Tuesday night a history graduate student at at George Mason University in Virginia stumbled across a threat made by a student against a St. Louis school on the Wikipedia page for Langston Hughes. (See accompanying screen shot, which names the school’s principal as a target.) He alerted history professors and other followers on Twitter. One of the history professors, Marjorie McLellan (@margiemcl on Twitter), grabbed a screen shot of the threat before Wikipedia removed it — without, apparently, notifying police or officials at Lift For Life Academy charter school, south of downtown St. Louis.

About six or seven historians and librarians tracked down the user ID and other information about the teenager who made the threat. They then used Twitter to exchange information and ideas about what steps to take. McLellan phoned the St. Louis Police Department — which sent her to voicemail. She persisted but the officer said he “did not have access to the Web” and didn’t know how to get on the Web.

Give up, right? No.

McLellan, a history professor at Wright State University in Ohio, then called a nearby police department known for being smart about cybercrime. Those cops called the school. Officials there then called the St. Louis police, who closed down the school, conducted a search and sent everyone home on Wednesday. (Overreaction? Not a chance, given the recent history of school violence in this country.)

The police tracked down the teen who wrote in a friend’s name on the Wikipedia post; he’s no doubt in for a long round of counseling. McLellan notes that she she wouldn’t have known the local Ohio town was smart about cybercrime without reading her local newspaper, the Dayton Daily News. She may not have decided what steps to take without the continual feedback loop that Twitter provides.

Astonishing. A new ecosystem of news and civic responsibility.

McLellan’s sister, journalist Michele (a journalist and friend), told me: “I think it says a lot about the value of social networks to galvanize spontaneous communities in response to problems.” It does. And we’ll be seeing a lot of similar actions galvanized by aware “smart mobs” in the years ahead.

Erica Van Ross, a spokesperson for the St. Louis police department, would later tell her, “We certainly thank you and your group for your diligence in making sure someone was aware. This is certainly proof of the power of the internet and good people.”

Here is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s report on the incident: How Twitter warned of death threat at St. Louis school.

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