Over the last ten days we have shared our thoughts on four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media. The aim is to give any brand who is looking to use social media (or indeed to use it better) a framework to work through, some ideas and also a lot of questions and decisions that will need to be made. Many of these posts raise as many questions as they offer answers and getting your use of social media right is not easy. Image by Cayusa via Flickr As I say in a recent article in the Independent: “The biggest mistakes companies make,

FreshNetworks, Social Media Agency Back in 2008, FreshNetworks was primarily a provider of social media technology. Whilst we always had a range of social media agency services wrapped around the tech (Community Management, Social Media Strategy and Social Media Monitoring), we led on being a technology provider – a builder of online communities. You may have noticed we’ve just rebranded, launched a new identity and redesigned our site. I

Appropriately for the day before Valentine’s Day, this week saw lingerie brand, Agent Provocateur , launch a social media campaign to promote its HelloAgentProvocateur blog. The idea, according to Scott Goodson, CEO of StrawberryFrog , the agency working on the project, …is the first time a luxury fashion brand has launched a provocative social media campaign tying together their various data-linked platforms, like a multi-entry daily blog, Twitter feed and Facebook Image via Wikipedia Agent Provocateur engages women consumers across multiple platform

Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. That’s why this week’s Required Reading is a great presentation on Social Media ROI from Egg Co . This is very similar to the way we work with clients at FreshNetworks, and the examples in the presentation show how this approach to ROI can show the real impact social media can have. Image via Wikipedia On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities , comparing paid and organic

Social media monitoring is easy, well at least the first part of it is – collecting mentions and stories about your brand, products or other terms. There are a lot of tools out there – from free social media monitoring tools to enterprise level solutions. Most people in the audience said that they did some kind of social media monitoring – from simple Google Alerts to large, enterprise-wide sentiment analysis Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr There are a lot of good agencies who can help you to use these, or it may be enough just

Over the last few weeks since they were launched to all users, we have been experimenting with them at FreshNetworks and with our clients. One clear and valuable use for them has become clear – as a free social media monitoring tool. Twitter Lists for social media monitoring Image by koalazymonkey via Flickr We’ve posted before about why Twitter lists are great and some of the uses that can be made with them.

In our last post we looked at why every business needs a social media policy . But if you’re writing your social media policy for employees, what should it include? At FreshNetworks , our approach is to keep things simple and to make them inclusive. Have a simple and clear policy on how employees Image by late night movie via Flickr And the fact that the most important thing for any business is to have a policy in the first place.

have a client who once said to me: “We want to use social media to attract more complaints” . This may seem an odd thing to say, all to often attracting complaints is a reason people cite for being anxious about using social media . People use social media for lots of things, but they often use it to express their opinion about a brand or organisation, to tell you where things are good and to tell you where things are bad. Image by ajburgess via Flickr I

Social Media is all about conversations. Storytelling is the most powerful driver of engagement in social media. Just as good stories provide the momentum for great books and great speeches, they’re also the impetus for the best in social media. assume the sudden rise comes from it’s ties to social media and conversational marketing made famous by  The Cluetrain Manifesto . – Image via Shutterstock It’s people connecting, interacting and sharing content.

Now they have continued their innovative approaches to engagement and embraced social media. The LEGO CLICK community is a great example of the hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement . But even without this kind of feature, LEGO CLICK is an interesting site and itself an innovative use of social media. Image by Kaptain Kobold via Flickr LEGO is a brand that many people are very passionate about, a brand people love and we’ve written before about how they use segmentation to engage their consumer base from children to enthusiasts in an innovative way.