A webcare team monitors online conversations on Twitter, blogs and other social media and has a strategy on how to deal with various types of negative responses via social media. When necesary, they can join the conversation, offer support, provide facts or anything else to steer things in the right direction. But it is not just about customer care, the webcare team can also do PR (discovering and preventing issues) and marketing (educating customers or providing feedback to product development).

Why do companies actually care about what is being said in social media? More and more companies realize that, in line with the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”: customers trust opinions of friends a lot more than they trust company websites, and they use information about products and services found on social media to make informed choices.

Who should be in your webcare team?
From the type of work a webcare team has to do, it should be clear that this is not a job for the IT department. Instead, people from marketing and corporate communication should be involved, and maybe even experts on your products and services. Pick your team from people who understand the norms of social media and are able to respond from a personal perspective. As such, your manager PR and corporate communication is probably not a good candidate for the job.

The tools of the trade
Webcare teams get more and more tools to discover what is currently being said about their brand, products and services. Important tools of the trade are Google Alerts, Twitter search, Technorati and Google blog search. These tools are all aimed at discovering relevant online conversations, without having to spend the whole day looking.

What is a smart social media strategy?
Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe for a smart social media strategy yet. Nevertheless, an important starting point is to accept each opinion as such, and not call opinions into question. As with any employee that takes part in an online conversation, the norm is to identify yourself as an employee of the company and behave accordingly. Also it seems important not to be drawn into online discussions: seek direct communication with the person behind the complaint. For more inspiration on social media strategies, I suggest you take a look at the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

I would like to hear your experiences with webcare teams!

The slides of our talk (in Dutch) are available via slideshare:

1. Social Media Market – a workshop in which we take you and your team through the current Social Media landscape and explore which of these fit your needs and preferences.
2. Social Media Hands-on – a pilot in which you and your team experiment with a social tool of your choice. Apart from enabling and facilitating the use of the tool, we help you in gathering lessons learned and in assessing whether this tool actually provides added value for your team.
3. Social Media Strategic Advice – an independent, realistic advice on what social media could mean for your organization in relation to the business issues you are faced with. This series of activities help you to gain insight in whether or not to apply social media, how to introduce these tools in your organization and how to help your people use these tools in a smart and responsible way.

This line of activities is also a good way of getting to know us and our way of working: with a clear objective, timeline and budget we work together with you to achieve results and learn along the way. And hopefully raise your interest in broader research on future ways of working.

We tested this prototype at the future workspaces project day. The participants of this day reacted enthusiastically, which resulted in approximately 100 swipes of badges within the hour. We are going to explore this way of social interaction more and extend this concept. If you are interested please feel free to contact us.

Some characteristics of the expertise group

• 14 researchers with a shared interest in how ICT affects work, life, and society;
• they are working in the same research institute, but located over various parts of the building;
• they frequently work elsewhere, for instance during client visits, workshops, conferences;
• they are all working on several different projects at a time;
• they are well acquainted with one another, though not co-working on a daily basis;
• they share a feeling that cohesion and knowledge sharing in the group could be improved. 

Twitter usage

13 People in the group used Twitter during the experiment, of which 5 were already using it. Usage statistics (averaged over all participants, those new to Twitter, and those experienced with Twitter) are shown in the table below. The table clearly shows that the new Twitter users twittered less and were following far fewer people outside the group than the experienced Twitter users. During the experiment, 2 new Twitter users gave up on Twitter.

Twitter evaluation

From the people who used Twitter, 11 completed the Twitter evaluation form. The form contained 10 statements, to be answered on a 5-point Likert scale (from -2 to 2 for “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”). The spider graph below shows the results.

The graph shows that, overall, Twitter is evaluated quite positively. Twitter scores extremely high on the aspect of getting to know your colleagues more personally. Furthermore, Twitter scores very high on ease of use, and the benefits for work clearly seem to outweigh the costs of using it. However, Twitter scores poorly on the aspects of finding information on a certain topic or finding an expert on a certain topic.

Twitter experiences

An individual brainstorm (reflecting on personal experiences with Twitter, and writing these down on post-its) was followed by a group discussion on four themes. 10 People participated in this brainstorm and discussion. Highlights are presented below.

Likes & Dislikes

Likes:

• It’s nice to “follow” your colleagues: what have they been doing, what are they up to.
• You don’t necessarily have to react to what others are twittering.
• Twitter can be used like an RSS feed to follow developments on a topic or the lives of celebrities.
• Twitter is easy to install and use, and it easily integrates into tools like Facebook and Blogger.

Dislikes:

• Requests from unknown people who want to follow you; how did these people find me?
• No option to tweet to different groups, for instance, just to colleagues or to friends.
• It’s difficult to find a good balance of how many followers/following (Quitter!!!).
• Some people twitter too much, they “bury” the tweets of others.
• The “avalanche” of unread tweets if you didn’t log into Twitter for a while.
• For “quality” information you should turn to weblogs, not to Twitter.

Staying in sync & Staying in touch

Staying in sync:

• You can get a better feeling about what’s going on in some projects.
• Twitter can be used to get up to date on general news in your field.
• It helped to stay in sync and in touch when colleagues were out of office.
• Twitter doesn’t help you to stay in sync if you don’t have the time to check it frequently.
• The mobile client does not support URLs, so tweets using URLs are difficult to interpret.

Staying in touch:

• It provides a sense of being in touch, albeit fragmented (not always, and without an overview).
• It’s difficult to get into an ongoing conversation.
• It works really well to stay in touch with people who are far away.
• It lowers the threshold to stay in touch with people as it is less intrusive than IM, email, phone.
• Being aware of relatively small details (what are people doing, and where they are) gives a good sense of being in touch.

Success stories & Disappointments

Success stories:

• I didn’t realize how much I would appreciate to stay in touch with my colleagues.
• Quickly got several responses on a request for input, ideas, or a translation.

Disappointments:

• Being too busy to use Twitter, a nagging feeling “I should have twittered more”.
• Time zone differences; too many tweets the next morning.
• The Twitter site experienced some problems and some of my tweets went missing.
• The Twitter client crashed and needed to be reinstalled.

Usability & “Other”

Usability:

• Some functionality is hidden or simply unknown, for instance the use of “#”.
• Difficult to compare the lists of “followers” and “following”.
• There are too many Twitter clients (PC and mobile) which is confusing.
• Mobile clients to not offer the support that is actually needed (e.g., overview of new tweets, being able to follow links).

“Other”:

• Reciprocity is a problem; some replies seem to be missing.
• Still able to use it even though I don’t have much time.
• Still don’t have the feeling that it integrated well into my work.

Conclusion

It is clear that Twitter is a useful tool for maintaining a sense of being “in touch” with your colleagues, especially when they are often out of office or when you otherwise don’t see them often. A lack of time to frequently use Twitter is the main obstacle for staying “in touch”. But ease of use and the general opinion that it is fun to use, alleviate this and keep people motivated to use it.

Although Twitter allows one to send a request to followers, or to exchange information by sharing interesting URLs, for the people in this group it did not (yet) provide clear benefits with regard to more traditional aspects of knowledge sharing, like finding information on a topic or finding an expert on a topic.

Probably the best indicator for the success of this experiment is that, at the end of the evaluation workshop, all people who were still using Twitter indicated that they would continue to use the tool.

Periodiek organiseert het NAF (Nederlands Architectuur Forum) vanuit de werkgroepen special interest sessies over specifieke thema’s, de Naf insights, in samenwerking met Automatisering Gids en Informatie. Eén van deze sessies is getiteld: Web 2.0 in de Enterprise
Enkele sprekers op het event: 

• Jeffrey Walker, President en CEO Atlassian
• Robert Slagter, Novay
• Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur, co-founder Fleck & initiator The Next Web Conference
• Steven Webster, Director Adobe Systems Incorporated

Reboot, the yearly unconference on innovation, new technologies, creativity and visions will be held again on June 25-26 2009, in Copenhagen, Denmark. More information will become available on: http://www.reboot.dk/

Alike the Projective case we organized a ‘marketplace’, covering the walls of the meeting room with posters containing screenshots and descriptions (what is it? what can you do with it? what are benefits and drawbacks?) of various social media. It was fun to do this, especially since some colleagues had strong opinions in favour or against certain social media - lively discussions just had to follow. Surprisingly, it took a workshop like this for some colleagues to realize that they were already using the same social medium!

The second aim of the workshop was to initiate a series of trials, each trial centered around one social medium and lasting for period of two months. We therefore asked our group members to cast their votes: five bonus points to be freely assigned to those social media that they liked, thought to be beneficial, were curious about, etc.; and five penalty points to be assigned to those social media that they disliked, felt uncomfortable about, couldn’t see the use of, etc. During a brief coffee break we then summarized the results.

Much of the discussion that followed after the coffee break focused our first trial: should it be Twitter or Yammer? Proponents of Yammer argued that it has useful functionality that makes it very well suited as a platform to exchange knowledge and to find experts. Proponents of Twitter (four colleagues were already using it actively)  argued that Yammer enforces an arbitrary division between one’s professional network inside and outside the organization, practically forcing one to use Twitter and Yammer side by side.

For this reason the choice was made to start the first trial with Twitter. Over the next two months we and our expertise group colleagues will use the tool, regularly evaluating its impact on knowledge sharing. We will conclude the two month trial period with a workshop where we will also pick a tool for the next two-month trial. By that time, expect on update on this post.

The group members created Twitter accounts, invited each other as contacts and started using the tool without any prior training. After one month of experimenting with the tool we held an evaluation workshop with them.

Questionnaire

The workshop started with a brief questionnaire to assess the ease of use, costs and benefits of Twitter. The outcome indicated that the tool was actively used during the test period and they perceived the tool easy to use. Although Twitter rated poorly as a tool for traditional knowledge management (finding experts and finding information on a specific topic), it rated moderately well as a tool for informal knowledge sharing and getting to know each other.

Sharing experiences

As a next step, we asked the group to share experiences: what worked well, what not, how did Twitter fit their working practices. A summary of their statements:

• “Easy to use”
• “Quick way to contact your colleagues”
• “Nice to read”
• “The more busy, the less Twitter”
• “Got to know my colleagues better”
• “Does not provide insight in what my colleagues are good at”
• “All contributions are in a timeline, it does not provide an overview”
• “Cannot find anything back”
• “Sometimes forgot to use it for days”
• “Mood sometimes too jolly”
• “Questions regarding work often too long for a Tweet”
• “Sometimes not enough activity”

Conclusions

Twitter is a tool that is easy to use and fun as well. There is moderate perceived value for sharing knowledge withing the department. Since it is not easy to have an overview of who is writing on what topics, the tool is not suitable to find experts within a group or finding specific information (the aims of traditional knowledge management). However, the tool did help the group to get to know each other, thereby stimulating informal knowledge sharing. Since the tool was not embedded in their daily working practices, contributions were irregular over time and usually of an informal nature. Contributions resulted in a follow-up not so much online, but rather face-to-face at the office. The perceived risk of using Twitter in a business environment is that it either leads to no contributions or to so many contributions that one loses track.