The Giddy Social Whirl: When teens attack

image via media bistro

Each week, Kate Williams ponders the world of social media. Today, she worries about teenage kicks.


Twitter was very nearly brought to its bony little bird-knees last week, after a particularly virulent worm infected 10% of its users, crippling the microblogging site for several hours. Hapless victims needed only to hover their mouse over an infected tweet to launch, amongst others, Japanese ‘adult’ websites, as well as automatically retweeting the virus to all their followers.

After a bit of back and forth, it turned out that all this unpleasantness had been unleashed by Pearce Delphin, a [drumroll] seventeen-year-old schoolboy living with his parents in suburban Melbourne, Australia. The news launched a flurry of headlines, but let's be frank: the only shocker in this teen-wreaks-web-havoc scenario is how vastly unsurprising it is.

Quite coincidentally, Harvard research director Carrie James this week unveiled her study of the ethical sensibilities of digital youth, at Mashable’s Social Good Summit – and people, the picture ain’t pretty.

Truth is, mostly they couldn't give a fig about their impact on others, as they zip around the net. They rarely think of the consequences of their actions for the wider community; and they frame their online behaviour almost entirely through an individualist lens.

It's also true that the teen at the centre of this most recent episode of digital vandalism didn’t sound especially chastened. On the contrary, he took advantage of the world’s attention to pitch for a job, betting - with some justification, given that many of his potential employers are themselves on the dewy side of thirty - that his audience would be more impressed with his hack skills than they would be appalled by his anti-social behaviour. So unflustered was he, that one wondered whether he’d been put through the parental mangle at all.

Now I am not yet so fortunate as to have teenagers myself. I was what is known by pitiless obstetricians everywhere as an ‘elderly primagravida’, and my young are still, well, young. At least, sufficiently so to pretend to love me in return for food.

But I was myself once adolescent, and I'd kind of assumed that the scene around the Delphin family table that night would be pretty similar to the grim dinner-table tete-a-tete I myself endured, after I’d used our Amstrad to rustle up a representation of a lady’s upper torso in zeros and ones.

The script for these encounters always went like this: "That machine is going in the boot of the Austin Princess and back to your Uncle Marv's RIGHT NOW!" Followed by a sharp slap round the back of the knees, then the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger bit. Happy days, and - aside from the ‘70s-specific casual violence - I’d assumed still the template for tense parent-teenager exchanges everywhere.

But perhaps it is too much to expect today’s parents to read from the same riot act as mine did? We live, after all, in such a vastly-altered digital landscape that, due to a complete lack of knowing-what-we’re-talking-about, most parents today would respond to viral Twitter havoc with a Father Ted-like “Now don’t let me catch you doing that... thing you were doing again. I mean it.”

And there’s the crux of it. The Harvard research pointed to a few possible causes for the failure of teenagers to behave, for want of a better word, nicely on the web – and the most striking was the complete absence of an adult presence in their online lives.

In real life, almost all these kids had a grown-up that they felt comfortable consulting when faced with a difficult situation. But online – nada. While parents rightly protect their pre-teens by drumming the rules of internet safety into them, by the time their kids are adolescents and can themselves do damage, they seem simply to melt away.

Now, I’m sure that offline, most parents wouldn’t dream of just leaving teens to get on with it. But a combination of exhaustion, time poverty, and a dearth of basic social-media knowledge might easily make them shut their eyes, cram their fingers in their ears and hum loudly, hoping it will all just go away.

But people, it’s in the job description: our unenviable but unshirkable task is to direct our offspring’s terrifying ingenuity towards ‘positive outcomes’, and away from the making-others-miserable thing. It's all the more vital because the web infinitely expands their capacity to do casual damage; just as its intrinsic anonymity increases the temptation to behave badly, by reducing the possibility of being caught.

We need to man up, arm ourselves with the knowledge we need - however mystifying it now seems - and get on with it. If we don’t nail this thing now, folks, we never will.


A bientôt, mes amis!


For more social media snippets, do follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

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eModeration scoops 'Best Service Provider' - and it's a team thing.

Last Thursday, I was thrilled as  our CEO, Tamara Littleton, and Senior Account Managers Paul Cockburn and Rebecca Fitzgerald stepped up to claim the gong for ‘Best Service Provider’ at the inaugural Reputation Online Effectiveness Awards at the Hospital Club.

As many of you will know, we’re one of a growing number of virtual companies, with a network of (currently) over 175 full and part-timers spread primarily throughout the US and UK, so the fact that I live in London and therefore was able to go the presentation do  is really just a happy chance, and the small group at the awards ceremony were very much only the visible tip of a worldwide pyramid.  (It's a good moment here to say thanks all at Reputation Online for a splendid night and to our award's sponsor, Visible Technologies - cheers guys!)

via Flickr, courtesy of www.christianholmer.com

My first move after yelling and whooping myself silly and (of course) tweeting the news from the @emoderation Twitter account , was to go to my Yammer iphone app and send out a message via our office watercooler to break the good news to the waiting crowd and say thanks to all.  As internal and external Communications Manager I’m very much aware of all the cogs in the machine and the considerable amount of grease which we need to apply to keep the eModeration engine running smoothly.   I’m thinking of such diverse elements as the online tech support  crew inputting projects in our databases, the hardworking,  rapid response Rota Team, the new business people bringing back increasingly succulent bacon, right down to each and every moderator working his/her shift, offering help to colleagues and stepping in to learn the intricacies of a project when we need to scale up, and pronto!

The award happened to be in recognition of our work on The Teens' Speech campaign by Barnardo’s (moderation of video content), ITV’s X-Factor (post-moderation of user comments and live chat moderation on the website) and ITN’s Election Night coverage (live chat moderation), and I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to those clients for allowing us to nominate their projects.   But those two were only representative of the hundreds of projects, long and short term, undertaken for clients since eModeration’s inception and  I like to think that’s the good reputation we’ve earned for being thorough, honest, loyal, hard –working, responsive and intelligent which contributed to our success with the Reputation Online judges.

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Facebook 'Events' settings - asking for trouble.

I'm cross with Facebook - again.

The Telegraph  just reported on a case of a UK teenager who accidentally posted her birthday party invite as 'public' and ended up with 21,000 promised guests and in a whole heap of trouble with her Mum (and the local police, who now have to spend time and resource patrolling the area she lives in on the date of the now-cancelled party).

Unsurprisingly, it's not the first time this has happened.  As the Telegraph reports, in February, a family's home was "trashed" after their teenage daughter advertised a party on Facebook, which was gatecrashed by dozens of adults, and there have been numerous other reports of such incidents.

Why am I so cross?

For starters, when contacted, a Facebook spokesperson said: "When someone creates an event on Facebook it clearly says 'anyone can view and rsvp (public event)'. If you leave this checked then it is a public event so anyone can view the content and respond."

Now, the girl in question may well have set her profile privacy settings the way she should.  But events pages are separate from this, and your profile settings don't apply.  This may well not be obvious to your average teenager, excited about her birthday bash.  The 'anyone can view and RSVP' could well be taken to mean 'any of your friends can view..'.

If Facebook have had instances of this reported (and they have), then why don't they do the sensible thing and put up a interstitial warning of some kind if the public box - which is default checked by the way - is left checked? Something like:

"STOP! ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT EVERY FACEBOOK USER IN THE WORLD TO SEE THIS INVITATION AND COME TO YOUR EVENT?"

It's not hard is it?

Oh, and I'm also cross that once again they were proved impossible to contact (despite their assurance that "Facebook also works with law enforcement where appropriate, and has set up a 24-hour helpline for the police to contact us if needed.")

And actually - to be honest, I'm not that chuffed with The Telegraph, who whilst publicising this story of personal information leakage, gave the girl's name, age, school, town, mother's name and age - and even the name of the father and the fact he is estranged from the mother.  Thanks for that.

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The Giddy Social Whirl...Twitter's phased roll-out - Why not Me?

Each week, Kate Williams ponders the world of social media. Today, she's a bit doubtful about phased rollouts.


Dizzy excitement this week, as Twitter sloughed off the dry husk of its former self to reveal the irridescent butterfly beneath. After many months of hints and winks, it seems that the New Twitter is as sparkly a game-changer, as emphatic a brake on the growth trajectories of its third-party clients as we could have hoped for.

The new look is based on two panels, much like the Twitter iPad app, and pics and videos are now embedded within the tweet. Clicking on a tweet launches the multimedia content in the right-hand panel, along with associated tweets, geographical info, and related mini-profiles, enabling us to follow user directly from the stream. Twitter’s new site, you know, rocks.

At least, that’s what I’ve heard. Can’t, sadly, speak from personal experience - haven’t actually seen it. See, I wasn’t one of the Chosen.

Now, I’m not so foolhardy as to give away my age (unless you are offering a Restylane BOGOF, in return for my DOB?) but the truth is that, despite the girlishness of my giggle and the skittishness of my step, I’m not going to see the right side of (cough) thirty again. Oh all RIGHT, thirty-five. What? Stop staring at my wattle like that, you are putting me off my bran.

My point is this: it’s been many years since I was subject to the playground horrors of being ‘picked’. Decades have passed since Nadia Stephens, limber captain of the netball team and de facto Queen of Everything deliberately chose everyone else except me, till I was the only one left. Not because of my sporting aptitude, which was fair to middling, but because she had discovered that I was wearing a pair of my brother’s underpants, following another of my mother’s laundry debacles.

No matter - it makes no difference how many years have passed since first I tasted those bitter ashes. The pain of it became a part of me, woven into the fabric of my being like a long hair shed by a food-operative into spaghetti-based ready-meal. And, like an alien ovum in a derivative sci-fi movie, it has lain dormant all these years – pulsating patiently till the invention, dissemination and eventual domination of social media triggered its life-force once again. Now, I feel that pain. I feel it – because of Twitter.

Why are tech companies so attached to these these phased roll-outs, I wonder? It’s possible there is a perfectly sound commercial rationale, for but for the life of me I can’t think what it could be. It’s not like a closed-beta release, designed to iron out any wrinkles in private so it can be handed, perfected, to the whole wide world. This release is quite big enough for everyone to know who is a Golden Child, and who is a Runt - a strategy which seems both pointless and divisive, not to mention somewhat antithetical to the egalitarian imperatives upon which Twitter’s success is built.

Excuse me for one moment, there is mail incoming. Oh I see! "Administrative error… an accidental oversight, corrected with immediate effect."

In that case, as you were. Do carry on.

A bientôt, mes amis!


For more social media snippets, do follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

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Avoiding a social media crisis - Glasgow style

On Thursday morning, we held the second in our series of ‘Breakfast Bunker Briefings’, at the Glasgow offices of our social media partner, Yomego, and co-hosted by eModeration and Carrot Communications. The turnout was great, the bacon sarnies were delicious and the discussions threw up some really interesting questions.

The seminar tackled the thorny issue of how to avoid a social media crisis - and when you can’t avoid it, how to manage it (you can find the presentation here, and our white paper on the subject here).

One of the issues that came up was how to resource the management of a social community that operates 24/7, and how to spot (and filter) information that comes in through social channels. Some companies (like Gatorade) set up vast social media ‘war rooms’, but for many, this isn’t practical. There are a number of solutions to this; outsourcing moderation or community management to a company that can apply resource 24 hours a day is obviously one answer; or predicting the times that your community is most active and staffing them accordingly is another. Spotting and escalating issues that might affect the brand’s reputation is tied in with this issue, and brands are clearly facing the problem of how to spot an issue within a community and pass it to the right person within the company to deal with it. Brands must train their community managers and have a clear escalation process so that  issues can be spotted and addressed before they become fully fledged crises.

Another interesting question our audience raised was whether B2B companies need to worry about social media crises? If so, do the same rules of managing the crisis apply? It’s a really interesting question and an increasing concern. Our PR partners, Carrot, led the answer on this: although the audiences are likely to be smaller when a B2B crisis hits an online community, the impact of a disaster could potentially be worse: the communities are likely to be more closely connected; and B2B brands live and die by the quality of their service (as opposed to, say, Nestle, for whom the recent Greenpeace Killer Kit Kat campaign doesn’t appear to have dented sales at all).

Yomego briefed the room on social media monitoring, and were sympathetic to the generally-held view in the room that, given the volume of data presented by monitoring services, it was hard to see what was really important. Companies are looking for a monitoring service that provides some sort of context and understanding - applying analysis to help brands understand what they should listen to, what they should act upon and what can be ignored. If being submerged in a sea of buzz data sounds familiar, then Yomego’s SMR tool (which provides human analysis of the monitoring) is well worth checking out.

We also discussed corporate censorship (never a good idea); astroturfing (ditto); what travel companies can do about TripAdvisor; and even what to do about Blogger blackmail: bloggers who threaten negative coverage if their demands for money / movie tickets / free pairs of crocs aren't met. (Don't pay up).
We’ll keep posting on the issue of social media crises over at our ‘Breakfast Bunker Briefing’ blog, but if you have any comments, questions or observations on the best way to deal with a ‘social media crisis’, we’d love to hear from you.

Our thanks to Yomego for hosting the event, and to the lovely guests who made the event so enjoyable.

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The Giddy Social Whirl: Twitter anatomized

Each week, Kate Williams ponders the world of social media. Today, she dissects Twitter's brain.

Blimey, 3% of Twitter is Justin Bieber. I don’t think I need to explain who The Biebster is, but in case you’ve been stuck in a pop-cultural mineshaft for a couple of years, Justin Bieber is a peri-pubertal pop sensation whose identity, music, and considerable financial success has been entirely constructed within the internet. Oh sure, he exists in real life and all – but only in 2-D. In fact, it would have been far less surprising if we’d been told that 3% of Justin Bieber is Twitter.

Gosh though, 3%. Really? That’s an awful lot for a self-generated popster who is unlikely to be razzing the berries of anyone outside the pre- and mid-teen demograph. Least of all the 25-45 hipsters who make up – or believe they make up - Twitter’s core user base.

But, above and beyond the sheer oddness of that 3% stat, I’m intrigued that Twitter can be segmented like this.

I tend, romantically, to imagine Twitter as a bio-synthetic hive-mind, pulsing above us like a giant brainiac pancake. In this context, this segmenting idea gives me the willies - but of course it’s perfectly possible to anatomize this big pulsing flat brain, slicing up its constituent parts and poking around for a closer look. In the interests of human advancement, then, I present the results of my dissection of the 97% we’re left with, after scraping that Bieber segment into the biohazard bin.

The first four or five centiles are – obviously - taken up by the sheer weight of Kanye West’s regret. You’ll remember the spectacular manner in which he fouled up his career by leaping onto the Video Music Awards stage to interrupt, with foghorn arrogance, Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech? His ‘I’m-a let you finish’, his ‘Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time?’ Well, things haven’t been going so well for Kanye since that very day.

But his blossoming self-awareness, as the trappings of his former success crumble to dust in his hands, has been remarkable. Not least for it’s unedited accessibility via his Twitter stream, which seems, thus far, to remain beyond the reach of his PR company - @mashable has a good piece on it.

Which reminds me - we can write off at least another 40% by combining the compulsive reiteration of pretty much anything @mashable tweets – all those tech-competitive RTs which ping through cyberspace with such reflexive speed that they must frequently meet themselves coming out on their way back in. I imagine the resulting inversion of time and space must often cause Pete Cashmore to pause momentarily in front of his shaving mirror - perhaps to shiver involuntarily - before resuming his grooming.

Then there’s @50Cent’s misogyny, which, predictably, takes up an awful lot more room than it's strictly entitled to (and is very much not safe for work). Fiddy is one of those cultural tropes whom I have managed till now to avoid. In truth, I mainly believed that he was an auto-holographic meme, sprung fully-formed from Twitter’s ovaries to stimulate the nightmares of right-thinking folk. Seems he’s real, though, and chaps - he’s way offensive! I know, you were there before me. In fact, I only recently stumbled across his reality, via the comic flair of @English50Cent, who translates Fiddy’s unintelligible bile into the Queen’s English.

Approximately 14% of Twitter is genuinely useful stuff. Links to blog posts you might otherwise never have seen, but which change how you live your life or do your job, which point you to a different way at looking at your everyday world - or which, just as usefully, tell you ‘Victoria Line down’.

1% of Twitter is brought to you by the words ‘om’ and ‘nom’ in a range of permutations, and by the related discussion of food - what we’re having, what we’ve just had, what we wish we were having, but aren’t.

3%, perhaps, goes to those unmissable stories of political or global significance which unfold in real time - moments which force you to see the geoscape through a wide-angle lens.

2% of tweets are windows to intense human interest, suddenly thrown open to reveal astonishing challenges met and overcome; endurance cultivated the face of grinding adversity; and tests of conscience you will never be required to undergo. Also, to lifestyles which boggle your mind.

Where are we up to? I’ve lost count. No matter - the remaining centiles are full of Ourselves – tweets which either testify to the human imperative to self-expression, or unwittingly reveal the relentless narcissism of their originator. The papers last week were full of a new study, which purports to find that Facebook is a haven for narcissists. And while it usually pays to adopt a sceptical mien towards studies which demonize social media, especially those which pique the interest of the Daily Mail; and while it is equally true that this particular ‘study’ is based upon a statistically insignificant cohort of 100 17-25 year-olds, I’ve no doubt that it is an element of truth to it, and that this element of truth is equally applicable to Twitter.

And perhaps there's no need to find this intrinsically problematic - narcissists are narcissists, after all, and usually find a way to bring themselves to our attention through one medium or another, as this more respectable study finds. They are often rather entertaining – either intentionally or not – and on the whole I think they brighten rather than darken the social world. And of course, they can be avoided, if we’d rather.

So there we have it – the whole of Twitter dissected. Turns out it’s quite as bad - and as good - as we thought.


A bientôt, mes amis!


For more social media snippets, do follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

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Roundtable on Communities of Purpose (7) - Recruit and Reward

Following our white paper on the issues brands face when managing a ‘community of purpose', here are some of the conversations which didn't make it into the document ...


eModeration: Do you recruit community ambassadors, to keep the site alive and growing? If so, what should these ambassadors do and how do you recruit and reward them?


Patrick o’Keefe: I don’t know if looking to ambassadors to ‘keep the site alive and growing’ is a great idea. The site is what it is and they can help that goal, but they can’t do it all by themselves.

If I look at ambassadors like I look at my moderators, I first have guidelines for them and what is expected of them, so that everyone is on the same page before anyone is invited to join us. We can show them these guidelines when they are invited, so they can read them before they accept. This is key.

For the recruitment process itself, the person is vetted, based upon the comments of other moderators, my own experience and, perhaps most importantly, their history on the site. Their contributions and past issues play a major role in determining if they are invited. For me, it’s always an invite only thing, never something you can apply for.

I have private areas on my site for the staff and in those areas; you can plainly see how the current staff members go about their business. This is a powerful training tool. We also have documentation explaining how core responsibilities work and how to get the most of out of them.

As far as rewarding goes, that really depends. For many, the act of volunteering is a way of giving back to something that they themselves have benefited from. This is a big motivator.

It can also be beneficial to them personally or professionally, in getting their name out there. They may enjoy the idea of being part of a team, as well. I think it’s great to send gifts unannounced, if you can. Basically, random acts of kindness, like you might do for a friend.

Alison Michalk: We try to acknowledge long-term members but due to the sheer size of our membership base (180,000) this can be difficult. We reached a 10-year milestone recently and acknowledged the moderators and members who'd been with us for that time. I think this is a very important aspect of community management and it ideally it is not overlooked.

Our volunteer moderation team are community ambassadors - all have risen to the rank of moderator from member. They offer a lot of advice and input in to how we shape, structure and improve the community. Our moderators receive a small financial reward each year and attend an annual interstate conference, but the majority are not motivated by financial need. Ergo their needs have to be assessed and met in various ways; some respond to recognition, others are satisfied with their status among the community, and others again are motivated purely by the desire to give back to the community that has helped them.

Blaise Grimes-Viort: We would watch community activity and identify members whose contributions match with the task list we supply to community ambassadors before offering them the role of ambassadors. We also invite and follow up recommendations from current volunteers. We ask them to act as a welcoming committee and try to ensure all discussions have a response, as well as help out when members have questions about existing functionality.

Our thanks go to Leah Williams, Community and Social Media Manager at Breast Cancer Care; Patrick O’Keefe, owner of iFroggy Network and author of "Managing Online Forums"; Alison Michalk, Director of Quiip and ex-community manager for Essential Baby at Fairfax Digital Australia; Blaise Grimes-Viort,recently appointed Head of Social Media and engagement at WebJam, and Hearst Digital and Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of LeaderNetworks.

Look out for (the final)  Part 8) in this series: What are the best ways of encouraging people to share experiences and help each other?

And the other posts so far in this series:

Part 1) How do you engage with a community, as opposed to just informing a community?
Part 2) What is the value of that community once someone has reached their goal?
Part 3) How do you make an information-based site relevant to newbies as well as to those who’ve been using the site for a long time?
Part 4) How do you encourage experienced members to help out new members?
Part 5) How do you keep members motivated (for example in a weight loss site)?
Part 6) What are the best ways to lay out the terms of the site to make it clear to all members what the site is trying to achieve?

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Conversocial - Makes moderating Facebook easy

Q&A with Joshua March, CEO of The iPlatform, creators of the Conversocial Facebook moderation tool.

iPlatform have just released Conversocial v2 and we've been honestly delighted with the tool since we've been using it, and we are now recommending it to most of our Facebook clients.  I thought it was time to shed some light on this excellent way of moderating Facebook Fan Pages.  

Firstly, Josh, a little bit about The iPlatform.  You're one of the few approved Facebook development companies in the UK.  How did you start and what other Facebook work do you do?

When the Facebook platform launched in 2007, I saw it as a new paradigm for how companies could market and interact with customers. I started running the Facebook Developer Garage events for Facebook, and at the beginning of 2008 launched iPlatform as a technology company specialising in building applications and software for social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Since then, we’ve delivered a huge number of interactive campaigns in Facebook for brands and agencies, in the UK, US and Europe, as well as working directly with Facebook here in the UK to support them on their regional campaigns (e.g. during the general election).  We believe that public conversations between companies and their customers will become the primary way B2C communication takes place in the next couple of years, and this is changing how marketing and customer service is managed. Conversocial is a platform for managing these conversations.

Why did you think it necessary to build Conversocial?

More and more brands are setting up Facebook pages (and other social presences), but currently there’s a real lack of tools to help manage the content from fans. As you're well aware, there's no pre-moderation on Facebook, so whatever is posted is up there immediately. It can be really damaging for the brand and off-putting or offensive - even potentially dangerous - for your fanbase.  Facebook's own limited moderation tools leave moderators wasting a lot of time searching to locate new content and filling in elaborate shift handovers so that the next moderator online can find what's not yet been checked.

As well as managing the incoming content, success in Facebook requires that your fan page is highly engaged; 85% of engagement with fan pages takes place in the Facebook homepage, in response to updates – fans don’t generally go to a fan page unless they’re prompted. This means that even a million fans have zero value if you’re not posting updates; and the way the Facebook newsfeed works means that the more engagement your updates have, the more they’ll be shown to fans. Companies need to learn what type of content is most engaging, and how many of their fans are actually actively engaging with them every month, and Conversocial works that out for you.

How does it work?

Once a fan page has been added to Conversocial, it pulls in every user post or comment on that page (including comments on photos, notes and videos), and feeds it through a standard moderation flow. This lets a team of moderators know exactly what content has been seen and what is new, assign comments to clients to respond to, automatically flag up comments based on keywords, and keep a full workflow history. We help admins focus on the content that needs to be dealt with, and learn more about their fans.

We also give tools to help schedule updates to fan pages, and track their success – including a simple dashboard to see how well a page is engaging its fans.

What benefits can Conversocial offer its users?

There are three core benefits: increased brand (and user) protection through effective moderation and management of UGC content; increased engagement and reporting, resulting in increased distribution and take up of campaigns; and effective customer service on social platforms - and so, happier customers.

Firstly, moderation.  Unlike other moderation tools, Conversocial gives a full moderation flow for all user content on your fan pages - allowing you to moderate quickly and efficiently and work with clients. With our latest update, you can now annotate and assign escalated comments to other members of the team, or to the brand community manager.  You can see each user's comment history on your page (useful in making decisions to ban users) and there's a powerful search function.

Conversocial can moderate comments from photos and videos as well, as well as comments, which is really important - it can be used to moderate anything within Facebook's own API.  Right now, it can't moderate comments in bespoke apps from third party developers, but we’ll be releasing our own API later in the year so that any developer can plug their applications into Conversocial.

We've been working with the eModeration team (thanks!) to tweak the tool and provide aids to rapid moderation, which is imperative for high volume clients.  We know that some of your clients receive in excess of seven thousand comments per day, all of which need to be checked.  So we help by auto-flagging against a blacklist, and showing which words in the comments have triggered the flag. Moderators can tackle the flagged queue first as these will be the ones most likely to contain offensive content. We've built in time-saving tricks that you asked for too, like 'okaying' a whole page with one click.  You can set up auto-delete on a separate blacklist too - great to use when you get a bunch of spam containing the same string of text, for example, and you've got full control over the black lists, so they can be modified instantly.

Secondly, increased engagement and reporting. To be successful in Facebook, you need to have a highly engaged fan base. 85% of all engagement with pages happens in a users home page, in the newsfeed – so even if you have a million fans, they’re worth nothing if you’re not speaking to them. Once you do send an update, only a small percentage of your fans will see your update. However, if you have a large amount of engagement with your updates, Facebook will highlight them to your fans in the ‘top news’ part of the home page, increasing distribution and the hence the success of your promotions and campaigns. Facebook’s own reporting tools aren’t great here, but we apply our own metrics to help you learn what type of content is most engaging for your fans, and how many of your fans are actually engaging every month; we also provide tools to allow you to schedule updates for when your fans are most active.  Read more about this functionality on our blog.

Thirdly, customer support:  once you have opened the door for conversations on Facebook, customers will start to use it to try and get in touch with you to ask questions, and share negative feedback or complaints. Because of the public nature of fan pages, these type of posts represent an intersection between marketing and customer support. A great use of moderators is to use them to wade through the bulk of comments – which don’t need responses – so they can then assign any comments that do need responses to the relevant person with Conversocial. We’ll then send an email alert to the assigned admin, who can see the full conversation history with the user, any admin notes, and reply in-line. We’re currently working on integrating customer email databases to match up your customers with your Facebook fans, allowing customer support to take complaints and queries off-line; and permissions so that marketing can sign off on public responses before they go live.

Now for the bottom line.  What's your pricing structure Josh?

Our pricing is based on how much actual engagement you get across your fan pages. We want Conversocial to help you succeed in social platforms by increasing the amount of engagement you get from your fans, and our pricing reflects that. So, you only pay for the actual comments and posts you get from fans – regardless of how many pages you have or how many fans. We have a number of base packages available, starting at just £50/$75 per month for smaller clients (up to 1,000 comments and posts), with most current clients on £500/$750 per month (which covers up to 10,000 comments and posts); you can then set an overflow spending limit for comments over your base package. The bigger the base package, the cheaper it is per comment (similar to a mobile phone package). As this represents actual incoming items, this can cover many very big pages – even Starbucks, with 11m+ fans, only gets around 25,000 comments and posts per month.
The pricing is per account, which can include multiple pages. We offer pricing in both UK pounds and US dollars, and offer a 50% discount for registered non-profits.

Update Nov 2010: Conversocial have added an alternative pricing platform - the Enteprise Package, aimed at larger companies and agencies charges £100 - £150 per log in on a minimum of 10 seats, with unlimited pages and volume of messages.

Thanks very much for this Josh. To see how eModeration and Conversocial could help your Facebook page, feel free to get in touch.  

In the interests of non-biased reporting, I should point out that there are other Facebook moderation tools out there: for example, Context Optional and Vitrue for example, both offer Facebook moderation and CRM packages.

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When is an ad not an ad? The new CAP codes for social media

Last week we got the news that the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) are due to extend their remit of internet control via the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the CAP Code).  Now it will also apply to marketing communications online in non-paid-for spaces, such as publisher's own websites and social networking sites.

CAP codes include the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children. The remit will apply to all sectors and all businesses and organisations regardless of size.

I'm broadly in favour of this move, although it may be a case of preaching to the converted ...  As Patricio Robles at Econsultancy pointed out: "legitimate businesses aren't behind most of the egregious online scams that ensnare online consumers. Scammers don't care about the rules, and for consumers, the ASA's ability to regulate won't be nearly as important as its capacity to enforce."

Defining what is, and what is not, going to fall under the new rules is going to be tricky, though the ASA have made a good stab at it.  The new regulations apply to communication “directly connected with the supply or transfer of goods, services, opportunities and gifts, or which consist of direct solicitations of donations as part of their own fundraising activities”.

Journalistic and editorial content and material related to causes and ideas - except those that are direct solicitations of donations for fund-raising - are excluded from the remit. 

As a UGC moderation agency, I was especially interested in how this applies to user generated content.  It would seem that in order to be regarded as a marketing communication and thus fall within the scope of the CAP code, the UGC must:

      1. Be directly connected with the supply or transfer of goods ... etc.

and also

     2. Be adapted by the brand and incorporated within their own marketing communications - i.e. be published by the brand and not the user.

So - in the case of a competition to submit a video which will, after winning, be used in an online campaign, the case is clear: the video used in the campaign must comply with the code.

But could it be argued that ALL UGC featured (for example) on a brand site or Facebook page  acts as advertising for the brand, and ultimately promotes sales?  (And if it doesn't, then you have to wonder why brands are getting involved with social media at all ...) 

Ah, the thorny ROI argument.  If the social media pundits are to be believed (and I do believe them), then the engagement with the online public ultimately, if indirectly, promotes business growth.  That being so, should the CAP code be applied to all UGC published on a brand's site, ALL UGC be moderated, and the moderation criteria need to be CAP code compliant?

I wouldn't  want to be accused of taking this position simply in order to drum up more moderation work for eModeration though ... it's a genuine question.  What do you think?  When does UGC published in a brand's own space become a marketing communication?

Update:  Just read a good post on the subject from Tony Foggett, CEO Code Computerlove in NetImperative - take a look.

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The Giddy Social Whirl: Apple Goes Ping

Each week, Kate Williams ponders the world of social media. Today, she considers this Ping thing.



The night before last, Apple CEO Steve Jobs – or The Sun King, as he’s known in my head – introduced the waiting world to the latest addition to his Imperial Line.

It was an illustrious occasion, carrying with it a whiff of the mad Hapsburg Court, where royal births took place before a murmuring crowd of toadies and sycophants. Intriguingly, amidst the usual cultish adulation, there was a new sense that the potency of dynastic chain was under scrutiny.

But enough of the pomp. What of the product?

First up: Apple TV – we can whizz through this, as it’s quite straightforward. The new iteration is rental-only, and it’s neater, sassier and markedly cheaper than the original. The weeny set-top box is an alluring $99, and users will be able to stream tip-top Hollywood films on the day of their DVD release, for a near-reasonable $4.99. So far, so fine – though the noses of owners of the original box, which notably failed to fly and which Jobs once described as his ‘hobby’, might be rather out of joint.

Next up, Ping. Ping is a music-based social network which allows music-loving users to follow musicians, as well as musical friends and strangers, and to see a stream of Facebook- or Twitter-like updates describing what these other music-oriented guys are listening to. The service is available as of, to more than 160 million iTunes account-holders globally.

But is Ping all it should be? Is Ping quite the thing? Will it move Apple’s global supremacy forward by one notch, or twenty? So many questions!

Let’s begin with the name. Initial calculations reveal that Ping is 75% Bing – Microsoft’s limp search engine - but let’s put that golden nugget aside for a rainy day, and examine the intrinsic merits of the word itself.

Roll it round your mouth: “Ping”. On the one hand, it borrows from the zippy breeziness of ‘ping me!’, an expression which resounds with all the immediacy and hyper-proximity of our remarkable digital age. On the other hand, it sounds like ‘Pingu’.

Pingu, you’ll recall, is a children’s animation series, in which a pre-teen, pre-verbal penguin has a series of incomprehensible adventures near an igloo. If you’re not familiar with the oeuvre, please assume that it’s not the first brand-association either of us would reach for, when marketing our modish new social network.

Infinitely more problematic is Jobs’ term for users of his nascent social network: “Pingers”. Pingers? Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’d like to be a Pinger - mainly on account of the fact that it sounds lame to the power of abnormal.

To be fair, the process of finding a word to describe a group who do anything tech-y, tribal, or youthful has long been fraught with danger. Like others before him, Steve’s first instinct has been to add the suffix ‘-ers’ to the root, but that tends to serve up words like ‘teenyboppers’, ‘rock’n’rollers’ and ‘hipsters – words which, in truth, only my dad and his jazz-buddy Terry have ever used.

It’s a problem, for sure, and one with which even Twitter has wrestled. Tweeters, or Twitterers? Say either out loud: you will feel like Jeremies Clarkson or Paxman, and will instantly recall why we now mutter “I’m on Twitter.”

A meagre cinq points, then, for the name of Apple’s fledgling social network. But what of Ping’s functionality? Well first off, Ping lives in iTunes, and that feels like an odd place for a social network to be: crowded, claustrophobic, and enclosed.

Openness has proved to be a bit of a fundamental of this social networking lark - think Twitter’s open API and generosity with third-party clients, think Facebook Connect. Then consider Apple’s constitutional inclination towards a closed-service model, and sigh. Ping’s lack of integration with our existing networks feels outmoded and clunky, forcing us to undergo the laborious process of manually inviting our friends. Molto tedioso.

Next up, this matter of sharing content – which again is something of a baseline in social networking. And again, Ping is behind the game, allowing users only to tell each other what they’re listening to, in the hope that they will then pay to download. Ad-supported Spotify, meanwhile, already let’s you send the track itself to your friends. As @shanerichmond has noted, this makes Ping less of a social network, more a giant shop.

So we come, finally, to Ping’s rationale, its underlying principle – music. One school of thought holds that it’s a pretty sensible idea for Apple to build on the success of iTunes, whose account-holders are, as @jemimakiss says, the “the engine behind Apple's money-making content machine.”

The other school, meanwhile, is repeatedly slamming its head against the desk, the words “Apple threw away its incomparable brand magic launching a niche social network?” scrawled in permanent marker on its arm. I have to share with you, folks: I dress this side.

Which of us, after all, currently chooses music as the organising principle for our online social life? If we did, Spotify would be Twitter or Facebook, and the whole world would look and sound a whole lot different. I might love my music – might purely live to dance, in fact. But when it comes to social networking, I don’t want to exist in a niche. I want to be free.

Here’s the rub, though: Apple can’t compete on an open field, because Facebook and Twitter between them already divvied up this broad-base social network thing. Which is why MySpace just this minute downgraded to a music-sharing site - to save its social skin. Which makes Ping an attempt to compete with MySpace. Which is already itself behind Spotify’s game.

One day, perhaps, Apple might challenge Facebook. Its multiplicity of physical platforms - iPod, iPhone, iPad – constitutes a powerful weapon, and its payments system and mammoth userbase will give it added heft. But this Ping Thing? It ain’t the one.


A bientôt, mes amis!


For more social media snippets, do follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

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