First Direct is a nifty piece of brand activity but try as I might I can’t find how one can properly interact with the brand and its representatives – for example by finding out whether the brand is actually listening to what one is saying and taking action as a result. As a result, it seems to miss a trick in regards of creating and operating a truly social initiative with their customers.

One of the services we provide is to help brands manage communities – of customers, enthusiasts, media or other interested parties. This feedback and action loop is critical in making these communities work.

As an example, we’re currently doing some work for Education UK, part of the Prime Minister’s Initiative for international education, managed by the British Council. We’ve recruited a group of ambassadors from recent overseas students who have studied in the UK. They engage with prospective students on behalf of Education UK – answering questions, providing thoughts and opinions on where and what to study in the UK. You can check out one of the ambassador groups here.

I know it’s been said before that BlackBerry needs to do more to motivate and incentivise its audience. If we take the rich area of BlackBerry hints and tips, we can compare what the brand is doing with what third-parties are doing.

Here’s the page on the BlackBerry site that Google presented me with (http://tinyurl.com/yh47vw8): six how-to videos and a link to a tips & tricks pdf. No opportunity to feedback, add or edit.

Here’s an article that ranks highly when you search for ‘BlackBerry tips’ on Google: http://tinyurl.com/2ktf9g. 121 tips, 669 diggs and around 36 comments.

If they aren’t already, there seems to be a real opportunity BlackBerry can take advantage of - to engage more with existing BlackBerry communities, to facilitate their needs, build relationships and trust. In short, they should be creating and operating truly social initiatives with their customers

A truly social initiative - or event or activity - might well be the way a brand can make this happen. With that in mind, I’m wondering what types of social initiatives exist within the online world. Recently, for example, we’ve had success in setting up an R&D group staffed by brand enthusiasts, and also with an ambassador program run using previous members of the scheme in question. Both have been successful in prompting participants in the activities to share and filter information, and to make recommendations.

Below is a list I’ve started of types of social media initiative. I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on any others

• R&D group
• Ambassador program (using existing/previous customers)
• Product/experience review/rating
• Lobbying official bodies
• Crowd-sourced data filtering/analysis
• Group learning initiative
• Crowd-sourced event management
• Sharing new ways to use a product
• Collaborating to reduce workload
• Group game-play
• Social networking event

Now, I’d consider most of my friends reasonably web savvy (the majority are active Facebookers), and yet I noticed a clear missing link of consciousness between their consumption of social media and its recognition as a genuine business enabler.  The fact that an agency would be applying some measurement, some analysis - some science if you like – to the use of LinkedIn, YouTube etc simply hadn’t landed with the majority.  Eventually the penny has started to drop, and with it some genuine interest and curiosity of what exactly I’m doing in this cutting edge, emerging industry.  And those faces - well perhaps their showing just a hint of envy!

Future Web, Global Web Index, 23rd Of September. Global Social Media Trends.

Moreover, if you begin to break all of the Global Web Index data down by age, demographic, nationality and you begin to see all sorts of eye-brow raising things that reinforce the fact that *gasp* Twitter isn’t the start and end of social media. Joking aside, what is important to take away from this is that it is so so so SO important to bear all of this data in mind when you are considering the type of social media campaign you want to run. Don’t decide you want to build a mega-hyper-super-vampire app for Facebook if your target audience are actually all watching videos on YouTube and don’t set up 17 Twitter accounts from various members of your brand if your audience are all sharing photos on Flickr.

What the Global Web Index presentation did was serve as a wonderful reminder that great social media ideas start with having a well defined target audience and understanding THEIR behaviours, not deciding what behaviours you want them to assume. We can all sometimes be a little guilty of getting carried away with the latest technology, as early adopters, and forget the long tail of mass adopters and what it is that they need from a brand.

I arrive from a background of working in customer service optimisation, and have a real passion for social media… which means RMM feels like the perfect place to be (which is nice).   And, building on Iain’s recent post (Using social media technologies for customer service), I’m really looking forward to helping our clients enhance their delivery of customer service through robust social media strategies and technologies.  I’ll certainly be looking to apply plenty of customer service experience in my new role, particularly around empathising with the end-user and making sure I frequently step into their shoes.

We’re delighted to have him on board and I shall let him introduce himself properly in a subsequent post or two.

I’ve been thinking about crowds recently and just how wise they can be with recourse to social media. Part of what we do is help brands and companies interact with audiences and occasionally such activity leans on the understanding that the crowd is wise. But, for us to do our job propoerly, we always need to make sure that if we’re calling upon a crowd to share their wisdom that we choose the right crowd. This might mean identifying a pre-existing crowd whose various skill sets will help solve a problem, or it might involve putting together a crowd with the right people to solve a given problem. Either way, there is a demand that the crowd be not a lumpen mass of people, but that the people within the crowd are there for a reason (more or less).

Increasingly one must think about the different roles different groups play within the crowd and at what point they can be used most effectively. The same group that can help with beta testing your product are unlikely to be the same group to tell you how to market it. Whilst any random group of people can be cobbled together, their guesses aggregated and the correct number sweeties in the jar guessed, the same is unlikely to be true when a brand needs the wisdom of the crowd.

With that, my thought for the day is that crowdsourcing is not about asking a lumpen group of people a question, but rather effective crowdsourcing is about understanding what questions need to be asked, and understanding the various roles a group within the crowd can variously perform that might solve the problem to hand.

Wikipedia’s editing culture has come into a lot of criticism for its Darwinian self-organisation. The status of “super-editors” has prompted cries about the stagnation and death of Wikipedia. But “super-editor” status is popular status: they are tribunes, not Caesars. Authority on Wikipedia is based on the intangibles of social currency: a network of respect and other reputation relationships.

On familiar vanilla Wikipedia an editor’s reputation had to be earned, at least in theory, through regular, reasoned and courteous engagement with other editors on the discussion page. Of course this system had its tinpot notability czars, but the constant debate over the best truth was what made Wikipedia so enormously successful.

So is Wikitrust going to take the humanity out of the system?

The very helpful and all-round classy guy Bo Adler (@thumper17) who works on the WikiTrust Project took my cynical suggestions of how their system might be “gamed” with good grace, and pointed out where such attacks have been anticipated. For instance, the algorithm is designed to resist “sock puppet” multi-user exploits; and because each word is tracked individually a contribution will have to be rewritten, not just re-ordered, for another user to “steal” authorship in order to profit from someone’s work.

But the crucial anti-gamer idea WikiTrust have is that the will not display outcome of an editor’s reputation calculation, except through colour-coding. So said Bo Adler:

Thumper17: @AboutThisLater I think our Wikimania group settled on not needing to present the actual rep num, which hope will discourage competitiveness

Now, it will of course be very easy for editors to gauge their status and to identify those who have affected it. But the vital difference is that editors will not have a WikiTag or a “score”. They will not have a title, nor a special hat. Their numbers will be crunched and their pungent utterances rated on a scale from comforting, vanilla pod transparency to a sort of surly, bloodshot puce. But they will not be on a leaderboard. It will not be possible to win the wikis. Reputation will still mainly be mediated through human relationships.

This is a mere psychological difference, but then trust is a psychological business. Wikipedia is the single most powerful poster child for the notion that truth is experimental, that truth is built through common consent, not derived from ideals above.

It may be that WikiTrust will make Wikipedia a more social space, better able to tap and encourage individuals and to generate truth more organically. It may be that trying to quantify something as intangible as reputation will make Wikipedia into a more chilly, points-obsessed place. Who can say? WikiTrust are approaching the process as a fascinating experiment, and after a while you have to stop worrying about what’s at stake. If you believe in crowdsourcing, you have to believe that the best solution will out.

But whatever you think, it seems likely that in the future viewing the internet will not just be a question of where you go, but of whose views you to use, and whose consensus you choose to trust.