social media

The communication mismatch: Why risk-averse sectors struggle with social media

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A businessman in a dark suit stands at a podium reading financial compliance documents; the documents flow from his mouth toward a bright neon social media feed on the right, marked with repeated "REJECTED" stamps. The feed displays viral content (dogs, travel, coffee, emojis) with high engagement numbers. The composition contrasts formal financial communication with the algorithm's preference for engagement-driven content.

Platforms engineered to make you angry, envious or unable to stop scrolling are, it turns out, not ideal places to get financial advice.

And yet here we are.

I’ve spent nearly two decades working around this problem, from the early days of social through my time as Head of Digital Comms at a global bank, to a decade advising fintech, insurance, legal and other regulated sectors.

The pattern is remarkably consistent. Organisations want to be on social media. They believe they should be there. Someone senior has noticed a competitor doing suspiciously well on LinkedIn. A strategy is commissioned. A content calendar appears. Somebody says we need to “humanise the brand”.

And then everyone discovers that the platforms reward almost exactly the opposite of what the organisation is built to do.

This isn’t really a content problem. It’s a structural mismatch between the communication social platforms reward and the communication risk-averse organisations actually need to do.

And no amount of making the logo bigger will fix it.

The incentives are almost perfectly backwards

Social platforms reward certainty, novelty, outrage and aspiration. They like strong opinions, simple answers and people who became financially independent at 23 through a combination of waking up at 4.30am, owning seven Airbnbs and selling a course explaining how you can too.

Nuance has a tougher time.

Good financial communication is slow, qualified and probabilistic. It contains sentences like “this depends on your circumstances” and “the value of your investment may go down as well as up”. Nobody has ever screenshotted a risk disclaimer and captioned it THIS 👏.

The same tension exists across regulated sectors. Insurance has edge cases. Law has liability. Pharma has uncertainty and adverse effects. Financial products contain actual financial risk. These aren’t unfortunate communication wrinkles awaiting a sufficiently talented copywriter. They are the nature of the thing being communicated.

The platform says: make it fast, certain and shareable.

The sector says: it’s complicated, and we’re legally required to explain several ways this might go wrong.

Then someone in Marketing asks if we could make it a carousel.

The organisation isn’t built for this either

There is a second mismatch, and this one happens inside the building.

LinkedIn rewards what we like to call authenticity, although what it really rewards is a very particular performance of authenticity: personal, frequent, opinionated, immediate and just controversial enough to generate comments without requiring a meeting with HR.

Risk-averse organisations are not built like this.

They’re built around governance, approval, consistency and the management of reputational risk. This can be maddening if you’re waiting three days for someone to approve a post saying you’re delighted to be attending a conference. But these things aren’t necessarily organisational pathologies. A bank should care more about whether something is true than whether it is trending.

Put that organisation onto a platform demanding speed, personality and opinion and one of two things generally happens.

Either it moves at organisational speed and nobody sees it.

Or it learns to imitate the people who are getting attention.

Thus we arrive at one of the stranger artefacts of modern corporate life: the professionally produced spontaneous thought.

The CEO selfie accompanied by a surprisingly well-structured personal reflection. The employee story which has passed through six pairs of hands and somehow acquired three brand messages. The executive who independently decides, at exactly 8.07am on Tuesday, to share precisely the same campaign hashtag as 46 colleagues.

The more carefully authenticity is manufactured, the less authentic it becomes.

Now make the employees do it

This is where employee advocacy enters the chat.

The logic is seductive. Corporate accounts don’t travel very far. People trust people more than logos. Employees have networks. Employees are authentic! Excellent! Let’s get the employees posting!

And this is roughly where a perfectly sensible observation about how trust works turns into a programme with a toolkit, a webinar, some Canva templates and an Excel sheet tracking who has posted this month.

Because organisations tend to want the benefits of employee voice without the awkward bit where the employee has to have a voice.

Thought leadership only works if somebody has a thought. Advocacy only means anything if people have some agency over what they advocate for.

Give 400 employees the same approved copy and branded graphic and you haven’t created 400 advocates. You’ve created one corporate account with 400 passwords and family photographs. And trust me, audiences can tell the difference.

The people who are genuinely good at this aren’t good because they attended a 45-minute personal branding webinar. They’re good because they know something. They have opinions. They have experience. They can connect what they know to what other people care about.

And, crucially, they feel sufficiently trusted by their organisation to say something that hasn’t first been passed around a Teams chat called FINAL_SOCIAL_COPY_v7.

That makes employee advocacy much less of an external communications problem than it first appears.

There isn’t really an inside and an outside any more

Once upon a time, internal and external communications could at least pretend to be separate.

Employees were over here. Customers and the public were over there. Internal Comms had an intranet; External Comms had journalists; Marketing had campaigns. Everyone had their own mailing list and, with luck, their own budget.

Social media has made that distinction largely fictional. An employee can read an announcement on the intranet at 9am, discuss it on Teams at 9.15, and post their interpretation of it on LinkedIn before lunch.

Meanwhile, the CEO’s supposedly personal LinkedIn post may have been drafted by Corporate Affairs, polished by an agency, checked by Legal and then read by more employees than the CEO’s actual internal communication.

The inside is outside. The outside comes straight back in.

Which creates a fairly obvious problem if the story you’re telling externally bears little resemblance to what people are experiencing internally.

You can spend a fortune telling the world you’re a wonderful employer. Your employees are also on LinkedIn.

Also, they have met you.

This is why I think we need to stop treating employee advocacy as essentially a distribution strategy. Its success depends on what happens long before anybody opens LinkedIn.

Do people understand what the organisation is doing and why? Do they know where their work fits? Do they trust what they’re being told? Do they have access to useful information? Do leaders trust them to exercise judgement?

If not, another advocacy toolkit is unlikely to be the breakthrough.

You can’t manufacture externally what doesn’t exist internally. Employee advocacy isn’t really a social media strategy, it’s an organisational trust strategy with a social media output.

Perhaps being bad at social is useful information

We tend to treat poor performance on social media as a problem requiring intervention.

Perhaps it is information.

If your organisation struggles to communicate effectively on a platform, that tells you something about the organisation, the platform or, usually, both.

But because we’ve spent the past 15 years treating social media presence as more or less axiomatic, we rarely ask the obvious question.

Why are we doing this?

Instead we ask how to improve the strategy.

We need a LinkedIn strategy.

We need an employee advocacy programme.

We need more video.

We need our leaders posting.

We need thought leadership.

But y tho?

Nobody wakes up wanting their bank to have better LinkedIn engagement. They want to know whether they can afford the mortgage.

So: FFS start there.

The boring stuff is often boring because it works

For some communication, the answer is deeply unfashionable.

A clear piece of long-form guidance on a channel you control can be read, revisited, checked and shared. Email remains remarkably effective at putting information in front of a known group of people. Documentation lets complexity exist without being squeezed into six slides with enormous numbers on them. An intranet can provide context, provenance and somewhere to find the bloody thing again next Tuesday.

None of this will make anyone at a marketing conference gasp, but that is not a serious argument against it.

Then there are people. Financial advisers, branch staff, lawyers, medical teams, managers, subject-matter experts: people who can explain the awkward bit, answer the follow-up question and understand why the answer for one person might not be the answer for another.

Some of those people will also be your best external communicators. Not because you’ve successfully transformed them into Brand Ambassadors™. But because expertise travels.

Someone who is useful, knowledgeable and trusted inside an organisation has a decent chance of being useful, knowledgeable and trusted outside it too.

Good thought leadership is often simply organisational knowledge with a name and a face attached to it. Comms doesn’t need to manufacture the thought. It needs to help the person who had it get it out of the building without sanding off everything interesting on the way.

Governance is critical, too. I know “governance is good, actually” is unlikely to get me booked for many tech conferences, but approval processes aren’t inherently communication failures. Sometimes they’re how organisations make sure what they say is accurate, lawful and trustworthy.

The answer isn’t zero governance. It’s governance proportionate to the risk, and quick enough that the information remains useful by the time it escapes.

Why do we keep doing this, then?

Because social media is wonderfully visible.

Followers! Impressions! Engagement!

A graph goes up and everybody gets to feel something happened.

“We posted 37 times this quarter and reached 1.2 million people” sounds reassuringly like achievement.

“We made our guidance considerably easier to understand” is harder to put on a dashboard.

This is one reason organisations repeatedly over-invest in things they can easily count. Social media provides abundant evidence that communication was distributed. It provides rather less evidence that communication did anything useful.

There is FOMO too, obviously.

Our competitors are there. Our customers are there. Our employees are there. The CEO is there and has started asking why a man he went to business school with gets more likes.

But “people are there” isn’t the same as “this is where this communication should happen”.

People are also in pubs. Most banks have resisted developing a pub strategy.

And social media isn’t really social media any more

There is another reason to revisit all this: the thing we’re calling social media isn’t really the thing organisations originally signed up for.

The promise was connection. Conversation. Communities. Organisations could talk directly to customers and employees; people could talk back; useful things might happen in public.

What we increasingly have instead is an advertising system wrapped around a feed.

Algorithms decide what gets seen. Organic reach has been squeezed. Platforms have become exceptionally sophisticated at identifying which bits of human behaviour will hold attention for long enough to put another advert beside them.

Advertising is useful.

Distribution is useful.

Discoverability is useful.

But advertising isn’t conversation, and attention-capture isn’t connection. We should stop pretending we’re still buying the thing in the 2012 brochure.

This matters particularly in regulated and high-trust sectors because social media doesn’t simply distribute their communications: it fundamentally changes them.

It encourages organisations to be more certain, more immediate, more personal and more provocative because those are the behaviours the system rewards. Then it provides a lovely dashboard showing how well the more provocative version performed.

The metric becomes the brief, and somewhere along the way, “is this useful?” becomes “did it engage?”

Use social where it earns its place

None of this means regulated organisations should delete LinkedIn, retreat behind the compliance manual and communicate exclusively through 47-page PDFs.

Social media can be extremely useful.

It can be good for discovery, recruitment, campaigning, customer service and professional reputation. It can help expertise travel beyond organisational boundaries. It can connect people who genuinely have something useful to say with people who genuinely want to hear it.

Those are jobs. “Being on social” isn’t one.

So start with your actual communication system. Where do people go when they need information they trust? Who do they ask? Which channels work for which tasks? Where does information get stuck? Where does it get distorted? What happens when something moves from internal to external and back again?

Then make those things work brilliantly.

And if you want employees to participate externally, don’t confuse enabling people to communicate with turning people into channels.

The former means giving people context, confidence, permission and access to good information, then trusting them to exercise judgement.

The latter means emailing everyone some suggested LinkedIn copy at 10am and wondering why 47 people are simultaneously “thrilled to share” the same news by lunchtime.

The channel should fit the job

For years we’ve treated social media presence as almost axiomatic. Of course an organisation should be there. The only questions were which platforms, how often and who gets the password.

I think that assumption deserves another look.

Not because social media is universally bad. Not because regulated organisations are uniquely incapable of being interesting. And not because everything was better when corporate communications involved a fax machine and a man called Nigel.

But because channels have characteristics. Organisations have characteristics. Communication tasks have characteristics.

Good communication happens when those things fit.

And the boundaries have changed. Employees are simultaneously audience, expert, commentator and public voice. What happens inside the organisation shapes what can credibly be said outside it. The external story comes straight back into the building to be judged by people who know whether it’s true.

Which means the answer isn’t simply to get better at feeding the platforms.

Sometimes the strategic decision is to stop trying to win a game whose rules require you to become worse at the thing people trust you to do.

Use social media where it earns its place. Trust knowledgeable people to have actual thoughts. Build the communication infrastructure that gives them something worth saying.

And stop assuming every communication problem needs to be solved in the feed.

This piece was prompted by commentary I contributed to Finextra’s “How Social Media Became a Fintech Antihero,” published in September 2026. The mismatch between social platforms and regulated sectors is one I’ve been working around for nearly two decades

Bank’s Snapchat stunt doesn’t add up

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

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The Bank of England caught some flack recently when Business Insider learned they’d spent almost £3000 on a Snapchat filter to promote the new £10 note.

The filter, which let Snapchat users overlay their selfies with the new note, was made available in seven cities around the UK, promoted by the Bank’s governor Mark Carney.

This struck me as a bizarre choice of ad spend for our central bank. Do banknotes really need promoting? Are they trying too hard to get down with the kids? Or is it just me – rapidly approaching middle age – who doesn’t get it?

So I followed up with a Freedom of Information request, hoping to find out why they chose this channel, and what increase in awareness the filter delivered, so I could better understand where Snapchat might add value for the businesses I advise.

I finally got a response to the request this week, a day after the statutory time limit elapsed. This doesn’t suggest a great commitment to transparency.

Shockingly, the answers to the questions I posed raised more concerns, not just about how they used Snapchat, but about the setting of outcome-based objectives in communications planning and execution. It appears that:

  • the BofE didn’t put together a business case for use of Snapchat
  • didn’t set any objectives for it
  • and haven’t evaluated its effectiveness
  • at least they didn’t spend a lot of money designing it

While this was a relatively small amount of money, what was more concerning than the potential waste of public funds was that the BofE lacked a robust, costed and measured campaign approach for their most high-profile launch this year.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the issues this raises.

Objectives

A campaign without an objective is not a campaign – it’s just some activity. Campaigns set out clearly what they’re trying to achieve, who they are targeting and how impact can be demonstrated. This, in turn guides the choice of channel and format and the allocation of spend across the channel mix.

“Raise awareness of the new £10 note” is an objective, but it’s not a very good one.

I’ll confess I find the idea of promoting a note that people have no choice about using absolutely baffling. I can understand them doing some PR on the new(ish) polymer maybe, or on the note featuring a woman (Jane Austen) after a controversial campaign. But not to simply tell people it exists. That’s what prompted me to ask for campaign objectives – but since they don’t exist, I’m none the wiser.

Did they have research to show that there needed to be awareness raising for a new note? Have they defined what awareness means in this context? What baseline are they measuring against?

You have to understand the current state of play in order to plan your response to it. This doesn’t seem to have happened here, which leaves the BofE without an effective basis on which to define, plan or measure success.

Better might be “To achieve 50% awareness of the new £10 (measured through surveys) by 31/09/17” as this is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic (when based on my fictional baseline) and time-bound.

Audiences

In their reply, the BofE told me “social media plays an important part of the Bank’s efforts to reach a broader range of people through non-traditional media.” 

For fiat money to have value it needs to be accepted as a medium of exchange. That means it needs widespread acceptance across all age groups – and given the ubiquity of social media use among younger age groups, it makes sense to use it to reach them.

So why Snapchat? While the BofE hadn’t produced a business case – although I’d argue the email exchange in which this decision was made would count as one for the purposes of the FOIA – they did tell me:

“One of the reasons this was chosen ahead of other ideas was because a large percentage of Snapchat users are within the 16-24 demographic, which was one of the groups the Bank was keen to target within the overall campaign.”

Again on first glance this seems sensible. Having highlighted the need to target younger people, taking the message to the platforms, channels and communities where that audience segment is active is exactly what you should be doing.

But the beauty – and many would say the point – of paid social is the degree to which advertisers can use it to target audiences. While Snapchat’s targeting options aren’t anywhere near as granular as Facebook’s, they do enable targeting by demographics, interests and behaviours, as well as devices. Done properly this provides an effective and measureable way to hit their target of 16-25-year-old Brits.

Targeting

For those not familiar with Snapchat, it has a handful of ad products:

  • Ads: These are short vertical videos. According to research from Millward Brown Digital these are shown to boost brand favourability and mobile purchase intent – which explains their popularity with FMCG and lifestyle brands. There are ‘swipe up’ subcategories to drive web views, app installs and so on. In the course of this campaign the BofE spent £7250 on Snapchat video ads, but it’s not clear if these were targeted at particular demographic groups.
  • Filters: These allow users to add a graphic frame around a photo or selfie, which can then be made available within a specific geographic location or nationwide. KFC have had huge amounts of success with these, making the Colonel Sanders lens available only to those physically in or near their outlets – driving a 600% increase in footfall.This is the ad type BofE spent £2,819.28 on, and to which my FOI request refers.
  • Lenses: This is what comes to mind for most people think of Snapchat. Brand-sponsored lenses, active for 24 hours, allow users to interact with the lens and by opening their mouth or raising their eyebrows make their own funny, shareable video. These require significant investment to create and run, and typically are run nationally. And they can pack a punch; the Taco Bell Sponsored Lens received over 224 million views. Snapchatters tend to play with Sponsored Lenses for an average of 20 seconds. Think about that: while on most platforms people hate ads, people on Snapchat go out of their way to “play” with ads. So in terms of bang for buck, Lenses are pretty bloody good.

Which makes the decision to target by geography using lenses the most baffling element of the Bank of England’s approach. If the aim is to drive awareness among a broad demographic group all over the country – why make this available only in tiny geographic areas?

And why these areas? If I were to pick places where 16-to-25-year-olds hang out, I wouldn’t choose Borough Market or Winchester Cathedral. Piccadilly Circus was another location chosen. If they’d ever been there, there’d know it’s hardly teeming with young adult Brits on a Thursday (14 September, when the lens was live, was a weekday).

If the aim was to target young people, why not do it properly and develop a lens? Or make the geofilter available across the whole of the UK?

Given the miniscule ‘geofences’ they created for this campaign, the tiny budget allocated (relying on people on-sharing for reach), and the weekday timing, I’d argue they did this to say they’re doing something new and innovative, rather than as a serious attempt to use Snapchat to engage large numbers of under 25s. And that’s a missed opportunity.

Metrics

Communicators should consider outcome-based metrics right at the start of campaign planning, to ensure evaluation is built in before a single asset is produced or shared.

Again, the BofE have fallen short here. While admitting they “do not hold any ‘evaluations’ for the specific Snapchat geofilter”, the BofE did reveal their approach to measurement.

“progress against the educational campaign’s main objective was measured by independently run surveys of awareness amongst the general public, which showed that the level of overall awareness of the new £10 note increased over the duration of the campaign”.

Surveys aren’t, in principle, a bad way to measure awareness levels. But unless combined with additional approaches they tell you nothing about the role of the campaign in driving any increase in awareness (versus people simply becoming aware through, say, receiving the new note in change). To get a broader picture of campaign effectiveness this could have been combined with secondary metrics looking at advocacy and impact. For example:

  • Are people talking about the new note on social media?
  • Are there differences in volumes of queries about the note among groups who have seen the campaign versus those who did not?

Channel metrics are meaningless unless these are mapped against business objectives. We need to move away from outputs like impressions and look instead at outtakes and outcomes – that is, the stuff that actually matters. AMEC provides a useful, robust framework with which to do this. As a public body the BofE should also have followed the GCS OASIS framework. It’s not clear why they haven’t.

Value for money

Awareness surveys tell us nothing about the performance of any particular channel or asset, which makes it difficult to see whether Snapchat was a good use of resources. They did, however, share this insight:

“the Snapchat geofilter was used 1,415 times, earning 101,000 impressions”

What this does reveal is a spend of £1.99 per Snap and 2.8 pence per impression. Impressions are just vanity metrics, as they don’t tell you anything about whether the audience understood or recalled the message. But using the more common ad industry standard, this works out at a whopping £27.91 CPM. This is astoundingly poor value for a brand awareness campaign compared with other online display ad formats and platforms.

Resources

In response to my question about the cost of developing creative for the campaign, the BofE told me “the geofilter was designed in-house, and therefore there were no associated design and content development costs.”

The concept of cost-free internal resource is a new one on me. There might not be an invoice to pay, but bums on seats still cost money. In the context of the waste of resources that the filter represented, though, this is small fry.

Where did it go wrong?

By asking the right questions, communicators help an organisation determine and align to campaign metrics that drive business results rather than get distracted by vanity stats.

When this doesn’t happen, opportunities to test and optimise are missed, objectives aren’t met and money is flushed down the drain.

These days it not just enough to guess what is and isn’t working. The tools exist to track results, so they must be used and the data they produce be put to good use determining the effectiveness of any campaign.

So what’s perhaps most surprising of all is that this approach was, according to the FOI response, signed off by senior Bank of England officials, who then failed to ask for any evaluation or reporting. That suggests a worrying lack of strategic communications oversight.

While this was a small amount of money and a trivial campaign, the lack of management scrutiny over planning, execution and evaluation makes me wonder what else our money is being wasted on.

Read the FOI response in full.

Are there any stats or lessons I’ve missed? Am I just out of touch? Let me know in the comments below.

What if Twitter isn’t broken?

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Earlier this month writer Lindy West left Twitter, claiming in a blog for the Guardian that it’s now unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators.

This came as something as a surprise to me, as I’m none of these things and I still find it useful every single day. So this left me wondering: is Twitter really unusable thanks to trolls? Or is it simply that media commentators see this as an overwhelming problem as they’re the ones disproportionately targeted by trolls?

West is by no means the first high-profile user to walk away from the platform; her flounce is the latest in a long series of op-eds exclaiming Twitter is dead.

No one can deny there’s an abundance of arseholes on Twitter, ready to dole out abuse from behind a Pepe avatar. It’s hard to quantify quite how bad the problem of abuse is on Twitter, but research by Brandwatch found 15,000 instances of misogynistic hate speech used on Twitter every day. A report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) counted a whopping 2.6 million tweets containing anti-Semitic language in a year (that’s over 7,000 per day).

That volume of abusive language – and the failure to tackle the problem – is said to have been behind Disney’s decision to drop their bid to buy Twitter late last year.

Yet I’ve been an active, daily Twitter user for almost a decade and haven’t experienced much abuse or trolling at all. I still find the platform invaluable.  And I put this question to my network of mostly-not-high-profile Twitter users, who overwhelmingly felt the same.

Different filter bubbles deliver different experiences

That’s because your experience of Twitter is not like mine, or anyone else’s. Twitter is a vastly different experience depending on who you follow, who follows you, what you tweet about – and, perhaps to a lesser degree, your approach, style and tone.

I follow around 3,000 people who tweet about things I’m interested in – intranets, the digital workplace, digital engagement, data, innovation, FinTech, user experience, travel, London life – and broadly tweet about the same topics myself.

And while I follow a bunch of people and organisations talking about politics and current affairs, because I work for the government I steer clear of talking about politics myself. That, it would appear, is the critical difference; while Twitter began as a network for nerds, now it’s a highly political arena in which influencing and winning arguments is believed to shift mainstream public opinion enough to win or lose elections. In that super-charged environment controlling the message matters, and trolling is one way that control can be taken.

However, these two positions aren’t incompatible; while there does seem to have been a surge in abuse on Twitter in recent years, a great many users – probably the majority – using it to talk about work or what’s on the TV don’t experience this at all. 15,000 daily instances of misogynistic hate speech is a huge number – but that represents just 0.00003% of the 500 million tweets published daily. Tens of millions of people still enjoy using Twitter to talk about all manner of topics every day.

Asymmetry

Much of the differences in experience are down to volume; have a handful of followers and you might get the occasional rude tweet, but the bigger your following and the higher your profile, the more you experience the dark side of Twitter.

Nick Jones noted: “I think those under attack are often in very asymmetric relationships. I am followed by people like me who share similar interests. It is symmetrical.”

If you’re in the public eye you have far more people who want to talk to you, and a small but noisy proportion of them are pricks. This is particularly difficult for anyone who relies on their public profile to make a living – like journalists and authors, who these days are expected to build and manage their own fanbase online.

I was discussing this (online, natch) with a journalist friend – herself with a large Twitter following and with it a regular stream of keyboard warriors taking it upon themselves to Tell It How It Is. In her view the suggestion the trolling problem is overstated because it disproportionately affects media commentators comes across like a teacher saying that bullying doesn’t need addressing “it only happens to some privileged kids and most pupils love this school!”. Which is a fair challenge and an excellent analogy.

But no one’s saying the troll problem doesn’t need addressing. It does. However, there’s an important distinction to be drawn between the kind of stuff journalists are complaining about – essentially the comments section writ large, stuff they used to be insulated from in the days “letters to the editor” were the only form of feedback – and the general deterioration of civility on Twitter.

Twitter have been too slow to address abuse, and the steps they’ve taken to protect people have been inadequate. But solutions need to be designed for all users, not an unrepresentative group of power users.

Chilling effect?

For most average, unfamous social media users, abuse isn’t a daily experience that needs a mute button. Instead the presence of widespread trolling may have a chilling effect, with many – particularly women and minority ethnic users – consciously or unconsciously steering clear of controversial topics for fear of a potential backlash.

Anne McCrossan commented: “I think there is a mob mentality out there, and that some people find that out pretty decisively if they get on the wrong side of their prevailing opinion, whatever that happens to be.”

Social media strategist Rina Hiranand concurred, noting wariness of trolls “definitely stops me from tweeting now. It’s not that I think my views would attract anyone, but I’m aware that all it takes is one tweet for it to start.”

Nick Jones also admitted to self-censoring online: “I am very, very careful to think through how what I tweet might be misconstrued or used against me at some future point. It’s partly good training for the day job and an intellectual challenge.”

Regular users might experience a fraction of the bullying newspaper journalists do, but it’s likely they have a far lower tolerance for it too – and so need different mechanisms to deal with or report this behaviour. So trolling and bullying aren’t problems that can be fixed for the mainstream with a few code updates.

Blog posts like West’s, and the many hundreds of similar ones that preceded it, both overstate the issue – potentially exacerbating the chilling effect – and, by focusing on the problem only as it is experienced by high-profile individuals rather than the full spectrum of users, misjudge the solutions too.

Or, to use the school analogy, these flounce-pieces focus only on the privileged kids and not on the rest of the class.

Twitter has myriad problems; a lack of focus, obsession with new user growth over existing user delight, falling stock price, failure to monetise, and a decline in trust in the information it presents, not to mention inadvertently ushering in a kleptocracy. Against this backdrop, its failure to deliver an effective anti-trolling mechanism for minor celebrities is perhaps the least of its problems.

Instead, media commentators would do well to remember that for people (like me) who follow nice people talking about social innovation and user experience and other such non-controversial stuff it’s as useful as it’s ever been. Writing the platform off as irretrievably broken paints them as out of touch with the reality of how online abuse is experienced by the mainstream and its effects on public discourse.

Many thanks to Alex Blandford, Alex Hilton, Ann Kempster, Anne McCrossan, Hadley Beeman, Ingrid Koehler, James Royal-Lawson,  Jonathan Phillips, Laura Marcus, Mike Butcher, Mike Wilkins, Nick Jones, Paul Clarke, Rachel Clarke, Rina Hiranand, Sarah Lay and Stuart Bruce for their input on this post.

What’s setting social alight in 2017?

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

It’s a year since I got out my crystal ball and made some predictions for social media in 2016. Was I right? Partially.

It was indeed a steady-as-she-goes kind of year on social, with brands focusing their resources on a smaller number of channels rather than experimenting with new ones. Meanwhile, the platforms themselves have evolved, driven particularly by a desire to compete with upstart mega-unicorn Snapchat. Chat and real-time interaction grew. But the financial services sector has been slower to move than I predicted, so my suggestion that banks would finally embrace Instagram and move mobile wallets to social wasn’t as accurate.

You don’t need to be Mystic Meg to see where social media is going; it’s becoming more visual, more creative, more interactive – and more commercial. But that’s balanced by growing demands for quality and veracity. So what’s going to set the social world alight in 2017?

Going live

The biggest new trend this year was live video, which burst on the scene in 2015, but really took off this year with Facebook Live, YouTube Live and Instagram Stories all trying to copy Snapchat. Live social video was at the centre of several big news events, and it quickly became a key tool in the news producer’s armoury.

Forward-thinking brands such as the FT are already on board with this. My guess is that the ‘mass market’ will follow suit soon, as a means of giving audiences a view behind the scenes while delivering engaging content quickly and cheaply. The platforms themselves are starting to roll out support for pro users (such as Periscope Producer) and by the end of 2017 brands should have live video as a central plank of their social media strategy.

Twitter: turn it off or turn it up

It’s been a tough year for Twitter with its share price dropping following failed takeover talks. But it’s responded to rumours of its demise by pivoting from a social network to a real-time news and entertainment company and embracing its place as a second screen in an attempt to regain lost audiences.

As a result brands will question the value of Twitter as a delivery mechanism for content and links to websites. Some will close their channels, but more switched-on communicators will up their Twitter game to capitalise on the strong relationship between Twitter and TV.

Twitter audiences are smaller but highly influential compared to those on other channels. 35% of Twitter users regularly share their opinions on people and brands; these people are a third more likely to actually convince people of their opinions. They have a discovery mindset and seek content that is live, open and shareable so they can influence and engage others in an informed way.

Top-performing social brands can leverage this by using their feeds to provide the “pub argument ammo” this influential group want. That means shareable visuals which inform and educate, plus key facts that help them back up an argument.

Twitter’s not dead, but it’s a very different beast to 2008 so brands need to revise how they use it to make the most of its current strengths.

Enabling self-expression

In this year’s Internet Trends Report Mary Meeker charted the evolution of social tools that enable people to express themselves by creating an artefact – beginning with simple emojis through to Bitstrips and, more recently, Snapchat, with its simple-to-use lenses.

This trend shows no sign of slowing down, with apps like playground phenomenon musical.ly  taking off this year. In 2017 brands will need to find new ways to enable their customers to be creative if they want to win the battle for eyeballs.

Hybrid public-enterprise social

Facebook’s now well established as a customer service channel, but the long-anticipated launch of Workplace, Facebook’s first foray into the enterprise market, creates new possibilities for conversation to flow in and out of organisations seamlessly.

So for example a customer could raise a query on the brand’s public Facebook page, a customer care team could pick it up and use Workplace to investigate and discuss it, before responding to the customer via Messenger. Workplace’s app platform could make it easy to track conversations flowing between public and closed social spaces in order to deliver better customer experiences.

Quality filters

With the rise of fake news, inaccurate polls and political attacks on experts, 2016 has been a challenging year for the concept of truth – and nowhere more so than on social media. The tech firms have already announced drives to clean up their newsfeed, but this is likely to be a race to stay ahead of the spammers.

The desire for quality could push users to seek out trusted names to help them filter, using humans rather than algorithms. So while some have declared the reign of the celebrity influencer to be over, the demand for content quality could create a new generation of influential ‘quality filterers’.

Facebook have released Signal for journalists to help them with the task of curating content to improve content quality, and I expect further moves from all the main platforms to rebuild trust in shared content.

Inside-out advocacy

The dawn of the post-truth era brings new challenges for organisations and brands, who need to find more creative ways of getting their messages through to an increasingly cynical public. This year’s Ipsos-Mori Veracity Index highlighted how little faith the public have in business leaders, politicians, economists and civil servants – yet trust in ‘the ordinary man in the street’ remains strong. Brands can take advantage of that trust by equipping and encouraging ordinary employees to share on their behalf.

There are a host of social amplification apps on the market which allow comms teams to upload content for their employees to share. But this has to be a voluntary process – the employee needs to choose to open the app, choose content and share it on.

Faced with the need to make content appealing enough to be both read and shared, companies who want to leverage their employees’ networks will be forced to up their content game. 2017 could be the year companies start giving employees content as compelling and engaging as that given to customers.

Chatbots take off

Customers increasingly expect prompt service via social channels, placing pressure on companies to resource real-time social customer care. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help manage that demand, in the form of chatbots – computer programs that you interact with by “chatting”, for example in threads in messaging apps. These are an important new human/machine interface, simulating intelligent conversation, answering queries and managing simple workflows, increasing the speed of engagement with customers.

Mark Zuckerberg opened the Facebook Messenger Platform to third party chatbots in April, and in the months since more than 30,000 have been built.

2017 will be a year of conversation, with customers talking to brands on Messenger, WhatsApp or Slack. Bots will enable that growth as they become more realistic and more human.

Chatbots are able to bridge the gap between services designed for humans (like text message) and those designed for machines, by breaking complex transactions into conversations. And these conversational interfaces will open up digital engagement to groups who have previously struggled to use online services, by making them more human in design.

Conclusion: convergence creating complexity

The most notable trend for 2016 has been the race for each of the main platforms to ape one another. Snapchat copied Facebook by adding Memories. Instagram encouraged users to share Snapchat-like content by adding Stories. Facebook is testing Snapchat-like disappearing messages and added Twitter-like trending topics.

This creates more complexity for users – and for brands, who now have to plan for multiple different content types within each of their channels. In the short term this gives communicators the option to experiment with different, visual content types to see what works. But by the end of 2017 I expect most will have worked out where they get the most bang for their buck and will settle into a more regular publishing pattern that’s more focused in order to reach the right audience with the right content.

Seven signs of the social media snake oil salesman

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Being on the internet doesn’t make you a social media expert any more than going for a jog makes you an Olympic athlete.

Yes, anyone who goes for a run is more qualified to talk about running than someone who sits on the sofa; but simply having a Twitter account doesn’t mean you know how to deliver real business outcomes using social channels.

Yet while it’s easy to tell the difference between a truly talented and experienced athlete like Mo Farrah  – who is considerably faster than your average Joe – and someone (like me) who finishes a marathon in over five hours, it’s not so easy to quantify someone’s expertise in something as subjective as social media.

As organisations recognise that making a mark in the social space is essential, they’re looking to hire in expertise – but often they have no idea what they’re looking for. And this provides rich pickings for a growing army of social media charlatans, peddling bad advice to unsuspecting punters.

How can communicators, marketers and executives spot – and avoid – these types? I asked my network: what marks a social media ‘expert’ out as a chancer? Suffice to say, this generated some Strong Views, which can be grouped under seven themes. Here’s the seven sins of the social media snake-oil salesman – and how to spot them.

1) Robo-posting

There’s a host of web services which post to social media on your behalf. Used well, these can be valuable – but they can’t be a substitute for real two-way interaction. Buffer, for example, can be a useful service for sharing links to interesting blog posts, allowing users to schedule posts in to create a steady stream rather than spamming your followers.

But if someone’s just spending half an hour a week lining up a stream of links, only sharing headlines – quite possibly without even reading the posts themselves – they’re no more useful to the audience than a bot. The giveaway here is if they seem to post all day, every day, but rarely reply or engage in any real conversation.

“Thanks for the value add. At least follow web best practice 101 and make it easy for your reader to get the crux of the message.”
Marged Cother

But mark of the true amateur, however, is the use of spammy services such as Rebel Mouse – what Anne McCrossan called “robo-posting, content-aggregating, click-baiting waste-of-attention platforms.”

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Stephen Waddington agreed, “Get out of my feed. You can’t automate a conversation.”

2) Quantity over quality

Social isn’t a numbers game – it’s about generating value for your brand or company. This means giving the audience something of value to them – insight, information, even just a laugh – in exchange for their attention. It’s a value exchange.

Steer well clear of anyone who advises generating huge volumes of low-quality content – think “ooh, it’s Friday” pictures – to post multiple times daily to grow reach. You’re almost always better off posting one good piece of content daily than ten bits of crap – and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Instead, look for people or firms who will help you develop and deliver content that your audience will find useful, engaging or interesting. The target here isn’t volume – of content, or engagements – but delivering outcomes such as conversion or brand awareness/consideration.

3) Self-describing as a guru

“People that write how to articles and guides that have plainly never actually worked in a crisis, managed trolls, planned a campaign or created a measurement framework.”
Stephen Waddington

“My feeling is that I/we will be the judge. It is not for them to declare themselves a guru.”
Jonathan Phillips

Like hotels called ‘Palace’ or countries with ‘Democratic’ in their name, it’s only necessary to mention this if it’s not immediately obvious from their reputation.

Look past the LinkedIn headline “Joe Bloggs – Social Media Marketing Expert” and keep an eye out for extensive, real-world experience managing social media – and showing tangible results from that.

Closely related this this are the constant ego-promoters:

“Resharing content that mentions you. Don’t get me wrong we all do it occasionally. But I’ve nothing but contempt for people who constantly reply to tweets with the RT comment function”
Stephen Waddington

4) Suspicious follower counts

There are two legitimate ways to get a big Twitter following: join in 2008, or be a celebrity. If someone’s not famous, and not a Twitter old-timer, yet has more than 10,000 followers, then often it’s because they follower-farmed or bought followers in order to inflate their influence to those who don’t have the nous to spot it.

Social media is not a numbers game: “reach” is meaningless. 10,000 followers gains you nothing if those followers aren’t real people who might spend real money.

fake-followers

Be sure to look at someone’s follower list. Are their followers real people with photos, descriptions and followers of their own? If they have a large number of followers with no profile picture, low follower numbers and/or little obvious reason to follow the person in question, it’s likely they tried to buy a following. And if they’re willing to do something so embarrassing with their personal brand, they shouldn’t be trusted with yours.

5) Sucking at search

If you’re hiring anyone, or considering an agency to provide any digital service, the very first thing you should so is Google it/them. Firstly, do the first three to five results clearly relate to them? If someone can’t even get their SEO act together to clearly own the first page of results themselves, they won’t be able to do the same for you.

Next, look at the successive few pages. Any individual who claims to be a digital specialist but isn’t visible – positively – on Google is either bullshitting, or has something sufficiently awful to hide they’ve made the effort to have it removed. Either way, it’s a big red flag.

Finally, take a look at both the agency and any named individuals they offer you to work on your account to see how they manage their social presence. If they don’t have one at all, or they have a Twitter account they barely use, that’s a warning sign.

“An eyebrow is always raised when I hear ‘but I don’t use social in my personal life…’. Say whut?”
Tony Stewart

You wouldn’t hire a Head of Press who said they didn’t read the news. Likewise, it simply isn’t credible for someone with responsibility for social/digital media not to have an active social presence. To really succeed on social you need to really get it – and that means using it, gaining a deep understanding of the community you’re trying to engage with, and demonstrating that through your own and your agency/company’s digital footprint.

6) Offering second-hand expertise

Alarm bells ring when a supposed expert relies on case studies they weren’t involved in in their sales pitch or conference deck; it’s often a sure sign they lack hands-on experience of their own.

“My issue is with those where the main parts of the conference speaking and/or training isn’t delivered from first hand knowledge” said Stuart Bruce. “Some of it inevitably won’t be and can’t be… But they should at least offer some inside knowledge gained from speaking to the people involved.”

“The same is true with ‘bad’ case studies where the reality of what happened internally isn’t what the gurus on the outside are saying as they throw criticism without understanding of the realities of operating in challenging environments”.

If someone offers a case study that’s delivered second-hand, challenge them on what inside insights they’ve sought to add value for you.

7) Claiming there are hard and fast rules for social media

Social media is ultimately about people, and like anything that relates to human behaviour, there really are no hard and fast rules.

Take, for example, the one I made above about robo-posting. I detest it, so much so that I have paper.li and all Facebook quizzes muted. And yet there are real and powerful use cases for both of these things, in the right context.

But no one can tell you that your brand is best conveyed on social by, say, posting six times a day at these specific times, because every audience will be different.

“There are no blanket rules or guidance – best time to post, when to use images, frequency of posting, this network or that network. It’s always going to be different as it depends on what your objectives are and the make-up of your community/audience/stakeholders (delete as appropriate).”
Stuart Bruce

The only hard and fast rule is that you should listen, try, measure, learn and iterate. Post different types of content at different times, measure what works – and by works, I mean delivers actual outcomes, not just ‘reach’ – and keep on improving.

People who promise to deliver big social media results using shortcuts – like robo-posting, or follower-farming – could give you some good social media stats, but these are numbers which offer little real-world value for your brand and reputation. “We should be focusing on KPIs and measurement that relate back to business objectives, not to pathetic 0.5/2% engagement rates” said Julio Romo. “What about the 98% who don’t engage?”

Why do people fall for it?

“We should be calling out these snake-oil tradesmen. But then again, is all this their problem? Or is it a case that there is still a basic understanding of social within many organisations?” Julio added.

That’s a large part of the problem – if the people who are buying, commissioning or hiring in social media expertise don’t know their digital arse from their elbow, it’s no surprise there are chancers ready to cash in.

If you were to task me with buying a car, I’d make a crap job of it since I don’t drive and know nothing about cars. I’d have to bring in people who do know about cars to help me choose. But when people fall for these chancers they’re doing much the same – admitting they lack the expertise themselves and attempting to plug the gap. So the problem is perhaps that those buying don’t know what to look for.

Maybe that’s where organisations like CIPR, CIM and BCS can help – each of these organisations can offer accreditation in their respective areas. As social is changing every profession/discipline, they have a role to play in championing good practice; by evolving their certification and advisory offers they can help buyers navigate their way to worthwhile social media advice.

Meanwhile, snake-oil salesmen give true social media specialists a bad name. To protect our own reputations and that of social media as a practice, the rest of us should be braver and call poor practice out when we see it.

Many thanks to Stuart Bruce, Paul Clarke, Amanda Coban, Marged Cother, Carol Ferro, Anke Holst, Ingrid Kohler, Anne McCrossan, Julio Romo, Tony Stewart, Steve Waddington, Steve Way, Louise Woollam for their input on this post.

#hashtagfail: What to do when a social campaign goes bad

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

Inviting audiences to share their content or comments via a hashtag campaign has long been a social media staple. But that comes with considerable risk that the campaign could go sour – at best failing to inspire engagement, at worst inviting outright ridicule.

The latest brand to invite Tweeters’ fury was IBM, who this week launched a well-meaning but nonetheless ill-considered campaign inviting women to consider careers in STEM by hacking a hairdryer.

The response from women on Twitter was a storm of rage and ridicule:

 

 

While IBM have provided a textbook example of User Generated Fury, there’s a lot others can learn from their response. First, they apologised – quickly and unreservedly, acknowledging why people felt the campaign was offensive.

 

They also deleted the offending tweet. While this opens up brands to accusations of trying to rewrite history, or pretending the incident didn’t happen, it also limits the damage. A ‘offending’ tweet can continue to be in circulation – and generating ire – long after the apology is issued. This was a tough call to make, but in my view the right one.

Many commentators are surprised that IBM, longtime champions of diversity in tech, made such an elementary error at all. Where I think they fell down is in failing to anticipate the response. They could and should have foreseen that a tactic that perpetuates gender stereotypes might go down badly in a campaign about combatting those stereotypes.

If you’re planning on any hashtag campaign, invest some time in planning. Before launch ask your entire team to think of all the ways in which it could go wrong.

Conducting a campaign pre-mortem like this helps you to identify and mitigate the risk things will go wrong – and help you plan what to do if your hashtag becomes a bashtag.

Hashtags are still one of the most effective ways to build engagement and participation with a campaign. While #HackAHairdryer highlights the risks in running social campaigns, it also shows that a swift apology can limit the reputational damage. Spend some time planning to avoid and manage disaster and proceed with caution.

Have you had a social campaign go south? What lessons did you learn? Let me know in the comments below.

Social media in financial services: six trends for 2016

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

Last week I had the pleasure of debating the role of social media in banking and finance with Nick Jones (Head of Digital Communications at Visa Europe) and Keith Lewis (Social Media Manager at Zurich) in the latest CIPR C-Suite podcast. Podcast host Russell Goldsmith has blogged about it here, and you can listen to the podcast on iTunes.

Social has transformed the way businesses engage with their customers and potential customers, and that’s as true in financial services as any other industry. Despite the three of us coming from quite different parts of financial services, we all felt that this is an exciting time for social in the sector.

Digital is now the primary way most of us access our banking services – I haven’t been in a branch or even phoned my bank in years – and social is a central part of that experience. So what lies ahead for social in the financial services sector? Let me jump on that year-end bandwagon and predict some trends for 2016…

Consolidating rather than innovating on platforms

As Nick commented on our podcast, when we were first getting into social four or five years ago, new channels would come along and everyone was happy to experiment for a month or two before disposing of it. Platforms would rise within weeks – and fall away even more quickly (who remembers Ello now?).

Social has grown up, and as it gains the attention of the c-suite there’s more demand to focus attention – and spend – on platforms that already have established audiences, ensuring these deliver tangible returns. Tolerance for experimentation will fall.

Fighting for attention on Facebook

Facebook recently rolled out its Instant Articles feature – which means users are served a version of content from Facebook’s servers, rather than directed to publishers’ own sites. Early indications show this could be a huge change to the way the internet giant directs traffic to websites outside of its own ‘walled garden’.

Commentators are widely predicting that Facebook’s algorithms will prioritise Instant Articles over links to websites. And while it’s traditional media publishers who are being courted to publish direct to Facebook now, brand publishers are the next logical extension. Expect to have to pay Facebook to get eyeballs on your blog content before long.

Banks finally embrace Instagram

2014-15 saw many brands dive into Instagram, but financial services firms have been slow to follow suit. Financial products are necessarily complicated – as are the regulatory demands to explain these in detail, which has led the sector to focus on long-form content.

But people find finances complicated – scary, even – and snackable content provides a means by which we can demystify what we do. A few are starting to dip their toes in the water, most notably Capital One and American Express. In the coming year more banks, insurers and payment providers will switch to visual formats in order to make their products simpler and more appealing, particularly for millennials – learning from media and other industries how to boil down messaging for the format.

Making conversation to conversion seamless

The growth in mobile wallets means that in a couple of years payment has gone from being the most annoying part of any e-commerce experience, to being simple.

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram have introduced buy buttons, making social and mobile commerce integrated. App developers have monetisation front of mind, so that conversation leads seamlessly to conversion. FinServs are likely to get in on the game this year, using social to collect leads directly from apps.

Mobile wallets get social

Taking that one step further, mobile wallets are becoming even more integrated into IM 3.0 apps. This innovation has been driven from the East, with Chinese banks offering payment services within WeChat as long ago as 2013.

WeChat has continued to build more financial products into its offering, from merchant payments (a bit like Shopify) to a nascent Private Bank called WeBank.

This trend continues to spread across emerging markets – where people are less likely to have traditional bank accounts – with WeChat-powered payments breaking through in Africa.

This innovation could spread to mature (Western) markets in 2016, as tech firms become bigger players in the finance space. Millennials, in particular, don’t just expect to talk to their bank on social – but expect to be able to transact there too.

Keeping it real(time)

While the integration of transactional and lead generation features into a wide range of social platforms could allow financial firms to generate tangible income from social, at the same time it places greater demands on those managing social channels. Customers expect 24/7 presence for customer services, and the growth of channels like Periscope require community managers to be more responsive to spot and respond to issues.

2016 looks set to be a demanding year for social media managers in finance, with increased demands from both consumers – to respond and provide better and more integrated services – and from those in the boardroom to show value. But if we rise to the challenge, the year ahead could be when social grows up and becomes a transformational force in finance.

What do you think of my predictions? What do you think we’ll see in 2016? Let me know in the comments below.

 

The email-free future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

It’s over five years since Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg predicted email is probably going away, and yet I returned from holiday this week to a bulging inbox. So what went wrong?

Here I explain why email alternatives haven’t yet made the breakthrough – and what needs to happen to really see an end to inefficient email culture.

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Underestimated the need for culture change

Cultural barriers in moving from email to enterprise social have been wildly underestimated. Email has had a long (20 year +) period of dominance, and has found its way into a vast range of tasks (many of which it’s inappropriate for, but nonetheless). Old habits die hard, and email is quite some habit – taking up 28% of employee time. Intranet expert Sam Marshall once commented that only two things will survive a nuclear winter – cockroaches, and email.

Email, for all its faults, offers privacy, preservation of silos and hierarchy, and the hoarding of knowledge – all things which fit with traditional ways of managing business. For enterprise social networks to really make a difference they need to form part of a massive change management programme – one that sees the ESN as a small part of a change to make the organisation fit for the future.

If an organisation is serious about embracing openness, meritocracy, flexibility and collaborative working, as a means of making itself more agile and innovative, and engaging its people, then an ESN will enable that. But the organisation needs to lead that change – the tool is merely a means of delivery, and can’t be seen as the culture change itself.

Few organisations have done this successfully yet. Most have barely started. But as hardly a day now passes without another news story about how traditional industries and business models are being disrupted by smaller, newer players – firms who are already embracing those values and working in open, collaborative and innovative ways – big business has to adapt or die. That culture change isn’t a nice to have: it’s existential.

The tools sucked

Back in 2010, the tools to go email-free just weren’t widespread enough; few enterprises had rolled them out, and where they had they were found wanting. Let’s be blunt here: they sucked compared to what was available on the web.

Enterprise social tools lacked powerful enough functionality to make people ditch their long-held habits. They were typically rolled out organically, which meant they relied heavily on enthusiasts and failed to gain critical mass.

All that has changed, though. Social intranet products such as Sharepoint, Jive and IBM Connections have continued to grow and evolve their functionality. At the same time, products like Salesforce, Oracle and SAP have moved on from token inclusion of social functionality to offering fully social systems. And a host of new entrants like Slack have come along to shake the whole enterprise collaboration market up, forcing everyone to raise their game.

The current crop of enterprise social tools now offer substantial and realistic alternatives to email with functionality and usability that are as good as anything offered to consumers.

The challenge, then, is ensuring the organisation has the right tool or set of tools. And that means focusing on user needs…

Lacked understanding of user needs

Too many intranet projects are conceived and designed from the corporate centre, designed without a detailed understanding of how, when and why people work – so that social fits the way people work, rather than expecting people to change the way they work to use social tools.

In this (old) blogpost, Andrew McAfee suggests that the continued use of email when superior alternatives are available is an example of the 9x problem. That is, that people are generally averse to change, so they overvalue what they have by a factor of three, and undervalue alternatives by 3x. So something needs to not just be better than the alternative for people to be convinced to change, but it needs to be 9x better.

The number one driver of adoption is utility. Intranet and digital workplace professionals need first to understand what people do and how they work – and why they use email – then select and configure tools so they provide a compelling alternative – one that users perceive as genuinely useful enough to be worth investing their time in learning.

Poor integration

All too often social intranets are yet another in the plethora of workplace portals, presenting users with a hot mess of interfaces and user experiences. It’s no surprise that people reached for the comfort blanket of Microsoft Outlook.

Email dominates because it’s familiar, and it’s made its way into almost everything we do at work. Email doesn’t force people to think about what tool to use – and nor should your digital workplace. The current generation of enterprise social tools are easy and cheap to integrate with each other, and with other systems. Crack that and present a coherent, integrated digital workplace that doesn’t require users to think, and you reduce the barriers to change.

Too inward looking

Finally, they didn’t extend beyond the firewall, forcing people to go back to email if they want to collaborate with anyone outside of the organisation. In this day and age collaboration can’t just be inward-looking; it will necessarily involve third parties like agencies – and ideally customers too.

With most vendors offering robust cloud-based solutions, there’s no longer a need to limit collaboration to inside the firewall, nor to force people to go back to email to collaborate externally.

The future

These five factors can explain why predictions about the imminent demise of email have failed to come true. While the tools have improved markedly, implementations must focus on user needs so that users feel social tools are substantial and realistic alternatives to email.

As William Gibson commented, the future is here… it’s just not evenly distributed yet. While the tools now exist to deliver on Sheryl Sandberg’s prediction of an email-free future, without significant investment in culture change email will persist.

Photo credit: Daniel Voyager

 

Social media lessons from Ed Balls

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

Today marks four years since Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls accidentally tweeted his own name, and inadvertently became an internet phenomenon.

It was back in 2011 when Balls was shopping for the ingredients for a 14-hour pulled pork recipe in Asda that an aide suggested he search for an article on Twitter which mentioned him. Balls began typing in his name, but a phone call distracted him and he accidentally hit ‘send’, to the delight of the Twittersphere.

Balls didn’t delete the tweet afterwards, apparently because he didn’t know he could. It has since been shared over 37,000 46,000 times. Tweeting Ed Balls became an internet meme – spawning photoshopped pictures, celebrity endorsements, media coverage and even fame on London’s tube network.

In 2013 internet users began marking the anniversary of the tweet’s now-legendary publication, tweeting Ed Balls at 4.20pm GMT. 28th April is now known as Ed Balls Day.

What can we learn from this?

  • Memes and social media backlashes can come from anywhere. While Balls is in the public eye, even private individuals can find a single tweet can make them a target for mockery or even hate. Balls was lucky; most people just found it funny. However, social media mistakes may have serious consequences. Once made, those mistakes are not easy to fix. Be mindful of what you share on social media. This story about comms professional Justine Sacco’s very ill-judged tweet is a salutatory lesson.
  • Tweet in haste, repent at leisure. Ed Balls’ attempts at multi-tasking made him the butt of many jokes. Take a moment to proof your social media posts, particularly if it’s anything important or serious. (That includes checking the links. I once tweeted a link to some underwear I was buying online when I meant to share a news story. #awkward.)
  • The internet never forgets. Balls’ eight-character mishap happened four years ago, but it’s still very visible. Be mindful of your digital footprint. Social media has not only made us more accessible to one another, but also more accountable. Your online presence can be an asset or a liability. Any remark you post in the public domain can be found, mocked, distorted or misinterpreted – even years later.
  • Acknowledging mistakes can earn you (some) respect. Four years on, the offending tweet is still up. And that Balls has accepted and even joined in the (largely good-natured) ribbing has earned him a little respect (alongside the inevitable laughter at Twitter incompetence).

UPDATE, 4.20 GMT: Ed Balls responds from the campaign trail:

Social media, serendipity and the power of trivia

/ Sharon O'Dea / 3 Comments

For most of us – and certainly anyone reading this blog – social media plays a significant role in our lives. We keep track of our friends’ lives through Facebook updates, message them on Twitter, see what they’re up to on Foursquare, and ‘like’ their photos on Instagram. I do this more than most, since social media is a big part of my job; my friend Richard commented that he doesn’t need to ring me anymore as he can find out exactly what I’m doing, thinking and feeling by looking at my various updates online.

A couple of weeks back my colleague Keith wrote an interesting blogpost, wondering if this stream of minutiae is bad for us, akin to obesity for the mind. He asked “is it possible that we have filled our brains with information, images, adverts, arguments, thoughts, news, features, blogs and opinions, to the extent that our brains aren’t functioning as they used to?”

The stream of updates about unimportant things, from lunchtime burritos to Daily Mail click-bait, are thought by many to be distracting us from the reading of improving books or forging of real-life relationships.

thinking man

Keith certainly isn’t the first person to ask if the sharing of trivia is affecting the way that we think. Plato argued the technology of writing would destroy humans’ ability to remember. 17th century lecturers complained that their students spent too much time in coffee shops catching up on news and gossip. Even the walls of Pompeii featured graffiti from Roman Jamie Olivers exclaiming ‘I baked bread today’.

As Tom Standage argues wonderfully, the sharing of tidbits of information in a peer-to-peer way is by no means a 21st century development, and nor either is the suggestion that this has a negative impact on wellbeing.

I’m an internet optimist. Sure, the internet gives us plenty to be worried about, from privacy worries to the impact on older industries and the economy. But in my lifetime the 20th century model –  in which mass-produced media were piped at us, to be passively consumed at a set time via a small number of TV or radio channels – has been completely transformed. The 21st century has seen a diversification in media in which has given us access to a wider array of information sources than we’ve ever had before.

While some may argue that this overwhelms people, I’d argue that on balance being informed via a wider range of sources is a good thing. The web gives us access to more information than we even knew existed, as well as the power to publish ourselves. Yet far from overwhelming us with a torrent of news, the amount of time younger people spend consuming news has gone down. It’s been suggested that we’re simply becoming more efficient, able to learn more in less time.

Yet it’s also wrong to say the web hasn’t had an impact on the way we think. When I’m talking to a friend or colleague and we’re not sure of a specific point, one or other of us will reach for our smartphone and settle the argument immediately. I don’t remember; I research.

On the one hand there’s a large body of evidence which suggests that the increasing complexity of the media we consume is leading to increased cognitive capacity and rising IQ scores. But there’s also a healthy academic debate taking place over how our behaviours are adapting to the changing information environment.

Just as printing put paid to the one-valued skill of memorising entire books, communications technology is changing what we choose to commit to memory.  For example, studies have shown that regular users of GPS devices begin to lose some of their innate sense of direction. It would seem we’re putting our faith in external storage, and reallocating our mental energy.

This is the same phenomenon Socrates described, in which writing “will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

What’s different is the ease of access to these external marks, such that it’s available to anyone with a smartphone in seconds. The question is whether this reliance on external storage and recall (‘exomemory’) is such a bad thing. What Socrates failed to see was the incredible opportunity created by access to knowledge greater than that our own heads can hold. As Amanda Palmer noted, we can only connect the dots we can collect. The out-housing of our collective intellectual capital has exponentially grown those collections of dots.

Having a network of information sources creates greater opportunities for serendipity. Some of the most useful things I’ve learned in recent years are bits of digital lint in my browser’s belly button.

Euan Semple made an interesting comment on Facebook today about location updates. Seen by many as a social media irritant, the ambient knowledge of knowing when someone’s in town also facilitates the arranging on real-life meetings. Similarly. the answering of questions about where to find lunch creates bridging capital, which helps us to establish trust in others.

The internet’s not going away; it’s speeding up, and growing at frightening speed. With the web being the gateway to our collective hive-mind, the ability to access and analyse information from the sources it provides has become an essential skill.

It’s said that in the West our environment is obesogenic – that food is so readily available that it encourages overeating. But just as you don’t have to eat everything, you don’t need to read everything you see either. The problem is not that we have too much information at our fingertips, but that we haven’t fully developed the tools and behaviours to help us manage it effectively.

Yet it’s the very technologies that cause the problem – search engines and social networks – that are also the solution.  Through knowing and using a wide range of sources, effective searchers are quickly able to sort the wheat from the chaff in our exomemory.  By establishing a network of trusted sources, I can quickly find a person or organisation who can give me the answer I need. By sharing and reading just the right amount of trivia, we create trusted connections – and learn what to scroll past.

Socrates argued that, exposed to writing, people would become “hearers of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing”.

The harsh light of history has shown this to be wrong. The human mind is a wonderful thing; by freeing up those synapic connections that might previously have been used to remember bus timetables or phone numbers, or discuss the 1989 first division football scores, we can put them to better use creating or connecting in ways that open up new possibilities for us all.