ESSAYS
JUSTINE ROBERTS, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO AT MUMSNET
SINEAD DOYLE, SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIST AT ESSENCE
WIF YOU CLOSED YOUR SOCIAL CHANNELS, OULD ANYONE NOTICE?
What role can community engagement play in achieving
business objectives? I think this is the wrong question. What role can your business play in achieving the community’s objectives? What is a community, anyway? It’s more than just a bunch of people who all happened to click ‘Like’ on a brand page. A real community shares something important: a goal, a passion, a sense of trust and togetherness. Most brand social channels totally fail to create that feeling of belonging because they’re too busy focusing on sales and their own KPIs. A good start is to fl ip this on its head and ask what your brand is doing for the people who care about it.
Q
What do you think are the key challenges facing brands who
want to grow their communities in 2014? Paid social is going to become
ASK WHAT YOUR BRAND IS DOING FOR THE PEOPLE WHO CARE ABOUT IT”
increasingly necessary to sustain reach on Facebook. Brands need to decide if this is a game they want to keep playing. As Facebook reaches saturation point in terms of its own desktop and mobile ad inventory, we’ll start to see the Facebook mobile ad network emerge, with Facebook data powering ads on other mobile apps. Marketers will need to decide where to put their budget: mobile, social, or mobile-social? Social ads are going to spread from their native platforms to the rest of the internet. Google+ will power socially enabled ads on the GDN (Google Display Network). Brands need to experiment with these new formats and fi nd out what works.
How do you recommend
measuring the value of a community? One simple question: would it make any difference to your business if it disappeared? Take GiffGaff - without their community, the network couldn’t operate. For most brands, you could close their owned
social channels and no one would even notice.
essencedigital.com ENGAGE BUT DON’T BROADCAST
Improvise. When I fi rst started Mumsnet I used to post on the site under many different aliases. I was effectively talking to myself for a while. Don’t pre-moderate posts. Many of
our users post in the middle of the night when they’re breastfeeding, feeling a bit exhausted and overwhelmed. We want to give them the support they need immediately. Pre-moderating posts would slow the process down. Engage, but don’t broadcast. While
we make an effort to surface funny, useful content, our aim is to start a dialogue with the people who visit our site. We believe that by pooling knowledge we can make parents’ lives better. Encourage civility. It’s important that Mumsnet is a trusted space where people want to spend a lot of time. We don’t allow personal attacks or hate speech on the site. Protect your users’ data. We urge
people to be cautious about how much information they reveal about themselves. Most of our users are anonymous. This is important when people are revealing their innermost truths.
Publicise and celebrate your
community. I’ve done a lot of media to spread the word about Mumsnet. In the fi rst year I wrote a column of sorts called the ‘The Diary of a Dotcom Start-Up’ for the Times Magazine and I’ve done a lot more press since.
mumsnet.com
39 issue 21 july 2014
INTERVIEW WITH JUSTINE ROBERTS BY EILIDH WAGSTAFF
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