ECPO 2019: Social media overview, examples of effective communication via social media

My name is Alessandro Giovanni. I’ve been working for more than 20 years in corporate communication and I’m specialized in digital communication. So today we’ll take a look at the social media communication in particular.

So this presentation is a brief introduction which will give you some highlights on how the social media world is evolving and how it can be approached as an opportunity, how to manage issues coming from social media. So a lot of information. So feel free then to ask me for anything you may like to see which will be a little bit discussed in further details.

Some numbers about social media. This is the digital world in Europe. This is not just social media.

It’s a number of internet connections. We’re talking about Europe as a continent, not just the European community. We have now more than 700 million internet users.

A much bigger number of mobile users. So mobile has by far exceeded the number of internet connections. We have more mobile users than just the regular line users.

We have almost half a billion social media users and most of them, the biggest part of them, access social media via mobile. So we have more and more mobile users on social media, which means people that access Facebook, Twitter, Instagram from their mobile phones. In fact, if we take a look at the percentage of persons that use social media compared to the number of internet users, we are talking about 60% average of them.

So 60% of people that access the internet and browse the web have access and do something on social media, which is a huge number. This is time spent. If we compare the time spent on the web, which means every kind of activity we can do online, we see that at least one third of this time is spent on social media, which is really incredible if you think that this is an average number.

We have people that spend more than 5-6 hours a day on social media. So the average is more than 2 hours compared to the 6 hours which are spent online for work, for entertainment and so on. This percentage is different depending on the country, but you see the numbers, the trend is this.

Now some further information about the different social medias and their growth in the last few years. You see that now Facebook has more than 2.2 billion users. It means that Facebook is the largest country in the world, by far.

Because if you think that China has 1.5 billion people living there and Facebook has 2.2 billion, it is a really incredible number. But it’s even incredible to see how it grew in the last 3 years, because in 2017 it was 1.8 billion. The time spent on social media, is it to do art? Or is it really to make something useful? That’s for everything.

We’ll see there is a slide on the different topics that are developed on social media, but that’s really for everything, for entertainment, for looking for information about restaurants, looking for information about a new job opportunity, so everything you can think about. Is it possible to understand more the split or is it quite difficult? No, no, it is absolutely possible, because most of social media releases some statistical information about the users, what they do, and you yourself can access your personal insights on Facebook, as well as on Instagram, to see how many people access your account, from where, what do they do. You can manage communication campaigns over Facebook users, and see what’s their reaction, and which kind of comments they do, so if they are positive comments or negative comments.

And social media are using more and more this information for marketing purposes. Another question on this, because maybe this can help us to better understand. When you say that it’s possible to split, and to understand if they are spending time on, this is awareness information, let’s take a topic that is really useful for us.

Is there a website where you can go like Google Analytics, or for example, you should ask a specific agency or provider to get you this information? There is no place for aggregating information, there are some platforms which provide you some statistical information, that are not exactly the best you can get from the web. You should take a look at each one of these social media to get further information. Then there are some kind of platforms, like we are social for instance, which release general information, some comparisons on the different behaviours, on the different social medias, on their numbers, their figures, every 6 months or every 12 months, like market information.

Thanks for reminding as well, on the links of your Facebook and Twitter, and on all social media platforms, every post you have got, has got its own analytical data behind it. So that will tell you how many interactions you have had on that particular post. So you can engage to see how popular certain types of posts are, and hone in on that type of information to build your following, and to build your followers on the social media platforms.

That’s a huge difference compared to the old communication campaigns, where you used to buy half a page of a journal or a newspaper, and you didn’t get any information about your audience. Now if you put a banner somewhere on the web, or you just write a post, you get immediate information on the feedback of your users, quantitative as well as qualitative, because you can measure how many users for how many times, and with what kind of feedback, which is very interesting of course. So coming back to the numbers, you see this huge growth of Facebook.

It’s still growing, every year double digit growth, and by far now the largest social media in terms of figures. This is very strategic, because it’s not only a matter of numbers, it’s a matter of offering services to the largest worldwide audience that can be reached by a platform, online or offline. If you think that the largest media groups, so televisions, can reach no more than 1 billion people, you’ll see the power of Facebook.

So when Facebook says, I’m gonna develop my coin, my own coin, that means that government should be very, very concerned, because if this coin works, that will be much more used than the dollar, or than any other kind of coin in the world. That’s just an example. If Facebook launches an initiative and this works, and it works, it will be the most successful initiative in that field all over the world.

But there is not only Facebook, there are other social media. Yeah, please. Sorry, just a quick question.

We’re trying to reach young people and educate them towards obesity as they grow older, and young women especially as well, it’s gonna have children. I don’t know much about social media, but what I’ve heard lately from young people is that Facebook, and you’ve mentioned it a lot, is for old people now, my age group. So I’d like your opinion on that, because they’re talking a lot now.

Like I hear my daughter saying, who’s on Facebook? That’s for old people. So you’ve Instagram and Twitter. Now I don’t know, maybe you can share in on this one, but you mentioned that it’s the highest, which is interesting.

It’s not what I’m hearing from young people now. I mix a lot with young people. Yeah, it’s true.

There is a slide on the breakdown, on a graphical breakdown of social media users. So we’ll see in more details what’s this composition. What is interesting to see is that it’s absolutely true.

Facebook users are more 35, 45, 55 than younger users. Because younger users are now using other social medias, which are more interactive, with more videos, and are a mix of chat and social network. Like, for instance, TikTok.

But these are very targeted. So they are not as large as Facebook, which includes the whole world, from 15 to 65, 70, 75. But we’ll see the differences, because each one of the social media has a different target.

And the users can vary in a relevant way. In some groups. And there are a few things.

The first is that when you have an account on Facebook, maybe you don’t use it anymore, but you don’t close it in space. So the people are still there, although they use less, or they use it temporarily. The second is that Facebook users are not just people.

They are corporations, companies. So, for example, there are a lot of companies that have a Facebook page account in the US, in Europe, in Africa. So don’t think about individuals.

Think also about communities and companies. There is also a difference between an account and a fan page. So you can have both, or just one of them.

What is also interesting to say is that we have a quite incredibly uniform composition in terms of geographies. So Facebook is not something which was grown in the US, and that’s it. It is in the US, it is in Europe, it is in South America, it is in Asia, except China, which is the most difficult country for every kind of American corporation to come in and develop.

Those Chinese people are developing their own social medias, which, by the way, are quite controlled by the government. But let’s come back to the key figures about social media. The second largest, by far, is YouTube.

This is very interesting. Maybe you know that YouTube is the most important social video, social media for sharing videos. Its growth has been huge in the last three years.

It started from one billion, and now it’s 1.9 billion. So it’s not so far from Facebook. And if you think that YouTube releases all kinds of videos, you’ll see that’s by far larger than any communication media group in the world.

It manages 7% of the worldwide share, which means that it’s by far larger than any media in any Western country. The third largest is Instagram, which, by the way, has been purchased by Facebook, so it’s now a property of Facebook, and shares images. It’s the main social media for sharing images among its users.

And it is mainly used by mobile phones, so it’s directly connected to the camera of the phone and allows you to share your photos with your friends and users. Now it has almost one billion users from the 500 million which it had three years ago. So it doubled in three years.

The fourth is Twitter. Twitter is the only one in this slide which did not grow. And it is in very big trouble, because when you don’t grow, and in three years you lose users, or you are almost at the same level of users, investors won’t trust you anymore, and will create very big problems in getting investments.

But on the other side, Twitter is still very important, because it has become some kind of online press office for most of the politicians, as well as of the journalists. If you take a look at the newspaper, you will find for sure some release of some president, or president of some country, or chairman of some company. Trump, for instance, uses Twitter, as well as Boris Johnson.

And you see that the recent agreement between Great Britain and the European community has been communicated by Juncker, as well as by Boris Johnson, almost at the same time on Twitter, before making the press release something incredible five years ago. A head of a country communicating such an important agreement through social media. That’s really incredible.

So, though Twitter is not growing, and is still keeping the same level of users, it is more and more important on the institutional side, as well as for the news world. Let’s take a look at the fifth, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the main platform for professionals, sharing their professional information, their CV, as well as for HR, to get information about their employees.

Actual and potential. It is still growing. The numbers are quite huge, because 300 million people, with a high level, high cultural level, using the social media just for professional purposes, is a really huge number.

And now HR in corporations, use LinkedIn as the main source for getting new resources, human resources. So, they just look at LinkedIn as their main source to find new talents, and attract new employees. Then there is Snapchat.

Snapchat is a very popular social media, which is a mix of chat and social media, and that’s exactly the example of social media for younger people that we were talking about. Now it is about 300 million, it is 2.8 million users, but it’s mainly in the US, it’s not that popular in Europe. And the last one is Pinterest.

Pinterest is a smaller platform, we are talking about a smaller platform if you have 2 billion, 100 million users. So, that’s something which should be interesting to consider. And it’s based on sharing interests and information about things you like.

If we take a look at the active users, which are exposed to advertising messages, we see that the numbers are still huge, less than the others, which were just the users, but still huge, which means that a campaign, an advertising campaign on Facebook, as well as on other social media, can be the most successful campaign you can do, just because of the potential audience you can reach. And key trends. You see, we have said many of these things, so Facebook is growing, YouTube, huge growth, Instagram, huge growth, Twitter, stable, or losing, LinkedIn, huge growth, Snapchat, quite a huge growth.

What you can see here is that they all grow. The majority of them is still growing. So, it’s incredible.

It’s a very quick run, which is still going further. Breakdown of users by age. You see the difference.

So, what is very interesting is to see that there is a huge percentage, about 40-50% depending on the social media, which is over 35 years old. So, social media are no more something just for young people or students. They are for all kinds of people.

But there is a slight difference among them. So, some of them are for younger people. You see, for instance, Instagram, which has 58% users among between 25 and 34 years old.

But it’s interesting to see that if you think that a 35 years old or a 40 years old person can spend 2 hours a day on Facebook, that’s amazing, in my opinion. Yeah, sure. So, this chart, because it’s data about the individual users or, for example, it includes the corporation and companies.

Because, okay, I am the individual, but I am also the coordinator, admin of some companies’ fan pages. So, it’s all individuals or it’s also the people who are coordinating the other thing? That’s just for personal accounts. Okay.

Which means that is the age that you declare when you open a social media account, a personal social media account. Only personal. Only personal.

Okay. And this is a matter of trust between the social media and you and introduces to the problem of social media fakes, which means accounts that are of non-real people or of real people with fake information. That’s a major problem.

Social media are fighting against this problem because of the higher value that good accounts can have for advertising purposes as well as on the side of the companies for investing in that. Because if I know that here information are true, I would be more confident in giving money to the social media. If I think that most of them are fakes or that these anagraphical information are not true, I will be concerned.

But that’s just for individuals. So, real persons. Most discussed topics.

We were talking about what are the activities that users do online. We see that entertainment, so gaming and such these things, are the most important topic. But the second one is technology.

So, technology is also, by the way, the first e-commerce activity, so purchasing PCs, cell phones, accessories and so on. Travel and wellness is the third. And, interestingly for us, healthcare is the fourth.

So, healthcare is one of the most important topics discussed online. Restaurants, food and beverage, fashion, finance and beauty. And what about obesity? We did a research, thanks to this research, we can introduce another important brand of the web world, which is Google.

We did a research on Google about obesity. And we see that it is one of the most searched topics on Google, which is by far the most popular search engine in the world. It gets more than 85% of all the searches online.

And a huge number of searches every day. So, using these tools, you can see a comparison between some of the most important searches online in the healthcare world. Oncology, hypertension, osteoporosis.

And we see that obesity almost reaches the same level of interest of oncology. And it has more interest, it arouses more interest than osteoporosis and hypertension. So, very important topic.

I think, if I could just comment here as well, I think these numbers here show just how important it is for us as an organisation to have a presence online and on social media as well. We can be part of that line when people are searching. So, if people search, if we’re on these search engines, then we increase our following, we increase the understanding of our message, and we get our message out to the people.

Google can tell you also from where these searches come. So, you see on the map, in darker colours, which are the countries that have the most searches about obesity. And you see there is a prevalence of Anglo-Saxon countries.

We found this quite interesting, and you’ll see the slide after that. And we also analysed which were the most popular related queries. So, you see that the most important query to search on Google is what is obesity, childhood obesity, obesity rate, obesity BMI, BMI, obesity and diabetes.

So, it’s very interesting because these are real data coming from the most important search engine. Can I ask a question? You say you got most of the highest queries from Anglo-Saxon countries. Highest number of searches on the search engine.

Did you look for search terms only in English? No, of course. If you look at the comparison between obesity, obesidad, and obesité, you see the difference. The red one is obesity in English.

The blue one is obesidad in Spanish. And the yellow one is obesité en Francais. So, the English term is by far the most searched.

We don’t consider, of course, non-Western languages. It would be interesting to see if non-Western languages have the same percentage or not of searches. But this is for the Western world an interesting message.

This is very interesting, I think, also because if you take a look at the most searched words, you’ll see… Other languages, of course, other countries, of course, people also search in English much more probably than French or Spanish. Yeah, I agree. Except maybe for Portugal.

That’s why we made the geographical composition. Because Google can detect your IP address and can get the information about where you are when you do some kind of search. What I was telling is that it’s very interesting for you, in my opinion, to take a look at the related queries.

Because the related queries means the terms, the words, which are more interesting for people to search for on the web. And it is very important to take a look at them in editing contents for the web world. Because these contents will be indexed in the search engines.

And if they match the most popular words that are searched on the search engines, they will be more visible. So the organic results, which means the results you get on Google when you type a word, will be influenced by that. Again, it might be different in different languages.

But for Germany, for instance, Apositas, which is the German translation of Obesity, is not that common at all. They search more for terms like overweight and weight loss and stuff like that. So did you do a comparison on different terms for the same thing? No, we just analyzed this term as an example.

But we can do that, because we have the tools to analyze each one of the most used terms and compare the frequency of the searches in each one of the countries. So we can tell how many searches are done in Germany on obesity in comparison with these other 4 or 5 terms. So it’s very important.

So, what we can do on social media. First, you can also think about this difference. The difference between identity and image.

Because social media is not a matter of yourself talking to yourself. It’s a matter of yourself talking to the people and people talking to you. So it’s a matter of image.

How is their perception of you from different users? This perception was in the old world, was influenced mainly by media. Because you were not able to reach many people outside the traditional media. 20 years ago there were newspapers, TVs and radios.

And you had to talk through these platforms to get a large audience. So your reputation was badly or positively influenced by the media. Now it’s no more like that.

It’s not true that your perception is influenced just by the web or just by the social media. It is much more complex now. There are many different platforms which interact to get information from the world.

And to release information to the world. Interacting with each other. Which work in a very different way.

And have to be considered and managed. So there are still newspapers which influence your opinion. You cannot trust them but they influence your opinion in any case.

There are search engines. There are still radios which by the way is the traditional media. Which is reacting in the best way to the invasion of the web and of the social media.

There are the blogs which are less popular than the social media. But work very well for the niche. Which means that they can have smaller communities of 10,000, 40,000, 50,000, 100,000 people.

But work very well because they trust this blog. Or they use this blog to get their opinion about something. There are still the TVs of course.

And then there are the social medias. So it is more and more complex. And it involves more and more risks.

Because they interact. So if bad news comes from the newspaper. It can then spread on the social media.

Or it can just grow on the social media until a certain point. And then explode on the traditional media. So there is a very interesting reaction.

And by the way, all the newspapers now have social media. So you have amplified exponentially the value of the media. Because it doesn’t publish only on the traditional paper way.

But they publish on their website and on their social media channels. The same with radio, the same with blogs, TV, everyone. Yeah, but the blog doesn’t have the printed.

Yeah, that’s true. And the radio doesn’t have the printed. While the printed has the printed and the online.

Yeah, that’s true. Okay, so it’s quite good. And you also see that many newspapers are hosting blogs on their websites.

And the journalists have become bloggers. And some of the bloggers have become journalists. What’s the difference between old media and new media? I’ve just got some examples.

You probably know Corvice. Corvice is the largest data bank for images. Which was bought by Microsoft.

And includes some of the most important data banks for images. It is just controlled by the company. They sell photos.

Flickr is a social media where users post photos. And other users can get these photos. So it’s no more a one-to-many, but it’s a many-to-many platform.

Britannica. Britannica was the most popular encyclopedia. Now Britannica is not used anymore.

Now we have Wikipedia. What’s the difference between Britannica and Wikipedia? Britannica was powered by a company that chose the experts to write different terms and voices of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia can allow anyone to create a topic and a description of this topic.

So, something incredible. Because of course you have millions of different terms and topics. And millions of different contributions to these terms and topics.

But you’ve got a very big problem. How can you check the truth of these topics? How can you check that they are done in a credible way? So that’s a major problem. Wikipedia is promoting the model of the community fact-checking.

That means that if anyone sees some bad information or incorrect information on Wikipedia, he can just write an email or post his correction, and the Wikipedia community will analyze and vote it. So it is working, but with some kind of problems. You can see, if you are an expert and you just check on Wikipedia, I’m sure you will find some error on that.

So it is still improving as a model. And then, traditional media, Washington Post and Twitter. So now the President of the United States talks no more to the Washington Post, he talks to Twitter.

Twitter is not receiving this message and re-elaborating this message, as the Washington Post used to do. Twitter is just a platform. You can write down whatever you want, and Twitter will spread it all over its network.

And for contacts. Now, Plaxo doesn’t exist anymore, but it is a very nice example. Because once you’ve got your Microsoft Outlook agenda, with all the information about your contacts, now on the social medias you can get platforms which allow your contacts to update their information.

Which means that they can update their personal cell phone number, their personal or business address, and you can get this information in real time on your agenda. And so, how the exchange of information is changing in this new world. There is a first phase, which is the genesis of information.

So the place in which information is born. Then the broadening of this information, because this information gets the interest of a number of users which can spread the information on the same platform or other platforms. Because I can have a Facebook account, a Google, a Twitter account, I can see something on Facebook and retweet it on Twitter.

Please. Should we still have the right information with the pertinence to be spread, so that it is relayed laterally? Because the complexity of social media relies on authority. But a work that is done in 20 years can be destroyed in 4 seconds.

Everyone has more power on users than other users. It’s very difficult to say which one of the users is right and which one is wrong. What is the right information and which is the wrong information.

So it’s a problem of the credibility of sources and a strong argument of the traditional newspapers who say I’m the one who can guarantee the quality of this information, the truth of this information. Social media cannot. It’s true.

Then there is a third phase which is further discussion across the different medias. And then the final amplification which goes not only to the social medias but also to the search engines which is something that we’ll see. And in this very complex world there are also new figures which are no more comparable to the traditional journalists because they are like journalists but their profession is not communications.

They are just a pharmacist, a blog, a thematic blog or a fashion blogger. By the way, this kind of bloggers can drive sales. So companies are more and more working with them to influence users through them.

Or an employee, which is a big problem for companies that can spread information, not authorised information over LinkedIn or over other social media even in an anonymous form. So with fake accounts. And this is part of this complex platform because if there is a problem of credibility and on the other side the number of sources of information is exponentially bigger than the past.

So the problem is becoming more and more big. And talking about the possible crisis that can arise from the new communication platforms as well as the old ones we see that there are two possible models. In the first model we have some bad information that becomes an issue and the crisis is born on social media and becomes a crisis through the social medias until it reaches the traditional medias.

And then it stabilises, becomes stable on the search engines which means it’s no more in use but it’s still there. In this particular case we see that there is an opportunity which is managed, this issue or crisis before it is spread through the traditional paper all over the world. So you have with the red arrow you have a reaction possibility while on the green arrow you see a proactive possibility of action while with the green arrow you see only a reactive possibility.

Once something is on the newspapers it’s very difficult to be proactive. You can just react to the newspaper news. If some news is still on the social media and has not become a news of the traditional media you can work on that, manage that and prevent the explosion of the crisis on the traditional media.

On the other hand you have another maybe more complex situation which is a crisis in information that is born on the traditional media and then spreads on the social media. In this case social media amplifies this news and maybe they can it’s more difficult that they can add information to this news. It is possible if someone reads something on the newspapers and that is part of this news he can just add a video or add a content which changes the news.

But the most common use of the social media in this case is just to comment and to do something like a petition against someone or something. In this case it’s more difficult to be proactive. You have to be first reactive and then you can be proactive when the news is cold and it becomes just part of the search engines or the social media just to help this news become better and better in the months, in the following months and in the following years.

So what are the key evidences that we can, some of the key evidence that we can get from this scenario? First, there is a speed which is no more the speed of traditional media. You have all these informations through the social media go at lightning speed which means that it’s a matter of hours to do something, especially for a company. Why? Because something on the social media can happen in 5 hours, 6 hours with a number of users that can be of millions because you just have to click on a button and then it spreads.

It spreads on your 200 contacts and then from them to their 200 contacts which means 40,000, 40,000 and then 400,000 and then 4 million in just hours. People demand high transparency because fact-checking is easier than before because if anyone can tell something to the social media and if he’s part of that, he’s witness of something he can just post it and you can do the fact-checking in a very easy way. Dialogue is very important because now you can be a media you can broadcast yourself and you can be more popular than a traditional media so you have become a media in one sense.

And everyone has to manage the feedback as part of his message because it’s no more something like a one-way communication it’s more like elaborating a communication along with the users. So I just do the first message I just prepare the first message but then other messages will be prepared together with my users and my community. Everything is less formal because social media are just a part of the world with all its complexity and all its diversity.

So you have to be less formal and less institutional in one way and that’s very complex for companies because they usually have policies for communicating to external people. Search reputation delivers multimedia. Why? Because it’s easier to get an information and to change someone’s perception through a video than through a text.

So you see that if you use images or videos on your messages through the social media they spread in a much easier way with a much broader audience. And brand detractors have the same tools and sometimes more than companies because if they have more followers and more interactions than a company they can be stronger on a communication perspective than the company itself. So it’s no more a matter of the big company against one single person it’s like the company facing a community of millions of people and users.

Again, some trends. Very difficult to keep secrets. Why? Because if you are an employee you have a Facebook account or a LinkedIn account you can tell bad things about your company or just react in a bad way to something that the company says and you will be more credible.

But not only. In your Facebook you post what you do so everyone knows what you are doing. If you are in a congress, if you are a king.

So this is why it’s also no secret because beyond the company major or the professional image that each of us has Facebook or Instagram they are proof of what we are doing. So if we are at home, if we are not at home. I think this is a really important point.

So when the personal and the professional merge you just have to be aware that you create reputational risk to your organization by the personal sharing you do. Exactly. So that is exactly what this is about.

So this communication guide it tells you that feel free to quote us feel free to say what you are doing for us but be careful how you actually say that. Don’t be saying something that is going to damage us as a company. And that’s why it’s very important to monitor what you are actually posting online before you post it.

And what Marius? Not quite for us as an organization but for us as employees at least in Belgium people have been discharged because of what they posted about their company in social media. So don’t be too negative about the approach you work. And of course you can get thrown out of ECBO if you are too negative.

I don’t think anyone here will do that but theoretically that’s possible. But depending on the country you live you can be discharged and at least in Belgium the courts were agreed with that. So don’t post everything to social media I think before you do.

Another point. In the social media it’s really difficult to differentiate your personal opinion from your opinion as a representative of an association or a company or a group. So be careful on the way you express yourself because it’s difficult to differentiate.

People can take what is your personal opinion on a fact or a story like the position of an ECBO representative. So be careful on that because maybe it’s not your intention but the audience can perceive it and can assimilate the two things. I totally agree and some of the social media allow you to just include in your profile what’s your role or profession which means that it’s very difficult for users to distinguish a personal position from the official professional position of your role.

The only thing is for example we as J&J when we post on our social media channel we need to include the hashtag mycompany so everyone knows that we are employees and what we are saying is something that is related to the fact that it’s not personal opinion but it’s something that is strongly connected with the company we work for. But although I think that this is not enough because if someone is misinterpreting what you are saying the presence of the hashtag doesn’t prevent people to do it. So this is why I always say be careful in the way we express ourselves, the opinion because then it’s not a hashtag that can help you and if from that statement then you create a big issue and the amplification is the one that you showed Alessandro it’s difficult not to come back and say oh yes but I put an hashtag but in the meantime the word was spread and the conversation was really diffused.

And always remember one thing also journalists are looking for news all the time on social medias so they can get also silly news silly bad news that can be spread online let me give you an example two weeks ago in Italy a teacher I think a high school teacher said that the two policemen were killed and this teacher said published on the Twitter account I’m happy this one killed a policeman she was fired the same week and why? because a journalist with the hashtag probably found this tweet on her account and published on Repubblica the most important online Italian newspaper so it spread all over Italy and she was fired in a week so that’s I mean something that you can think is just put there for five persons it’s my account no problem it will be spread all over the world on the newspapers and so on so any individual has the power to expose personal what were once private conversations making them public of course you have private tools on the social medias which can allow you to communicate in a private way to other single users but they can still do copy and paste on their public profile or their public wall on Facebook and these conversations which were private now have become public and then I was saying one way messaging doesn’t work anymore because of course the nature of social media is something which includes a feedback in the same message the possibility of a feedback is included and inviting customers into a conversation can be the most effective way to build goodwill of course and so you have to continuously listen not only to the replies to your messages but also to the key trends of the social medias on the topics that may interest interest to you and then you of course it’s not only a matter of communication it’s also a matter of knowing which are the rules of these social medias not only to be more effective but also to be understood by your audience for instance you cannot you cannot make a bad use of hashtags or replace a hashtag with a mention which is something that is very technical but implies a difference in the creation of your message and how your message will be perceived because if I use a hashtag I’m just trying to spread my message on a certain topic and to include it into a larger conversation if I mention someone or something I’m addressing this message to something or someone specific so it is considered like a direct message to him which can be viewed by the whole community so the feedback is often public of course you can write a message and someone can write a reply to your message which is read by the whole community of the people which are involved in the conversation and then social media gives also the opportunity to change your behavior because if you see that there is bad feedback or that you made a mistake on the social media it is much easier to say sorry I’m replacing my previous message with a new one so I change my behavior based on the feedback that social media gives to me and remember that if you still want to use a one way communication in any case everyone has the power and the tools to reply to your communication so feedback is a native part of the social media platforms and you cannot change it now search engines as you know search engines are the most common way to access the web so many people have google.com as their main first page to be opened when you open browser so you access the web through it so it’s becoming more and more important not only because of its popularity but also because while google is working with technical algorithms to select results people still believe that they do fact checking which is not true so if you type something on google you believe that on the first page there would be good contents while google is working only with a very complex algorithm based on popularity, recurrency of the same terms, words and so on so it’s a technical way to select contents and present them to you so be careful when you do a search and be aware that people will trust the results of this search and people are more and more concerned about the contents that google is releasing on them why? because they find them more popular than others but they can be not true, they can be just false and the situation is even more complex because 15 or 20 years ago google was influenced mainly by the online versions of traditional media, mainly newspapers so the first pages were often Washington Post Financial Times and the most popular newspapers now it’s no more like this you have probably the first results which would be Wikipedia which would be not google because google and not facebook because facebook and google fight to be the first platform online but you see twitter for instance so social media are influencing more and more search results on the search engines and another important thing which we were saying is that the results of something which is has become very popular on you or on your topic can last as top results of the search engines for months or years so you can find them after 4 years 5 years, 6 years and you say well it’s old news, it’s old, many other news have become have happened after this fact but maybe this was just the most popular and it still is the first one of google results and we also have to know the difference between what is called organic research and sponsor research why? because of course the first source of revenues for google is advertising so they sell keywords, you can purchase keywords and be part of the results on some kind of keyword google highlights this kind of keywords with a color on the top of the search bar or on the right these are sponsor links so by law for them they have they have to say that this is sponsored while the white part will be just organic but people trust the organic search so remember there are these 2 elements and the advertising part, so the sponsor links can influence the organic search because of course if organic search brings contacts the content will be more and more popular the sponsor search and so the organic search will be influenced by the sponsor search with organic results in the organic search and if multimedia is more popular than text multimedia will be more indexed than text so if you use videos and images in your messages they can become more popular than messages with simple text and they can be indexed in google in a better way than just simple text you also see that google has different there is a generic search which is the first page but google also has a video section which is connected to youtube of course, which is a google platform and an image section which just indexes the images, and that’s very important because if you are not popular for the text and you are not in the first google page, you can still be in the image section and if you have a nice graphic or a nice image someone can click on the image and access your website so it’s a way to become more popular also for the text part and unfortunately when you have a bad content on google is more and more difficult to dislodge this content from the key first results pages because you have to be at least as popular as the bad content and if you are not creating new contents, bad contents will be still there and will last for years so the world has changed now the communication communications are more and more difficult to do among users as well as among companies and users what kind of competence is required? so we know that content is still the most important thing, so you have to be relevant you have to be interesting to users and so communication skills are still very very important, but if you don’t know how to manage a hashtag or a mention or how to keep your message within the format that the social media is requiring you to use you won’t be relevant you won’t be in some cases accepted by the social media so you have to know some technical skills which will help you to manage your message and to spread it over the social media so the new skills include communication include some kind of technology, because you have to know that if you post a video you cannot post a one gig video, you have to optimize it, you have to reduce the length of this video, because usually on social media people won’t watch videos of more than 20-40 seconds so over a minute is difficult you have to know the media, because if you want to spread your message you have to search for the most relevant hashtags which will help you to connect to the media and to be relaunched and reshared by this media if you’re a company you have to balance your corporate alignment and your corporate culture and your corporate policies with a new peer-to-peer language which is more informal as we said and faster than before so you cannot get approvals for everything you have to manage messages in a time frame of minutes or hours and you cannot ask your boss everything about your feedbacks so if we divide the methodology that can be used to approach the social media communications into three big parts that could be the listening, so you have to take a look using the social media tools as well as cross-platforms which can help you manage this part to the topics that are relevant and interesting to you and analyze these contents getting relevant informations like the Google Trends informations which can show you what’s the popularity of a topic what’s the geography of the popularity of these topics and so on and then to develop interactions and then come back to the listening, so it’s a very interactive process which can help you manage this so if you are at the communicating part maybe not just a company but a person you can use the power of social media to do things and to interact with the real world so if everyone has become a potential media he can broadcast himself, he can spread news he can use multimedia, so videos and images can attract audience can use new online tools which are very powerful like e-petition if you have you can use platforms like change.org to promote a petition and not only to be shared which can not only to be shared by users of the social media but can also interact with institutions and the real world because this petition can be brought to the parliament or to the official authorities which can be influenced by the numbers and by the force of this petition online and of course an online petition is much less expensive than doing a collection of signatures or just a traditional petition it can reach millions of people just in weeks and these initiatives can move politics, they can not the Brexit petition the petition against Brexit made 6 million subscriptions in less than 6 months and has not influenced the politics, Brexit is still there they have reached the agreement but there are some other cases of great success of these petitions because they influenced the rulers the petition is just one example of viral campaign you can develop these campaigns using your social media accounts if you have many followers or using accounts which are very popular that can join your initiative and spread information on their community so you have to design interesting contents you have to develop story angles which can be interesting and can be shared by other users on the social media and so again you have to do it in the right way required by the social media so the technical skills are required and create a viral loop which means a growth in visibility of your initiative even if you don’t spend any money on advertising so that’s just a free way with no cost to develop a communication and if we take a look at new influencers that have reached these results you see that there are figures online which did not have the economic power to develop advertising campaigns but became very popular this is just an example Giappo Gomerio is a freelance journalist who developed a campaign, a social campaign against the barriers for disabled people in the railway station as well as on board trains he became by the way a nightmare for Trenitalia and Italian public railway company because each one Trenitalia was tweeting something Giappo Gomerio said it’s not true I’m here I cannot there are no facilities for disabled people bad comments from social network thousands of users saying Trenitalia you’re not right it’s false and so on but since 2015 he became one of the most important influencers in Italy president of the republic awarded Giappo for his initiatives and now he’s working on airports and all the facilities for disabled people, he’s an influencer he has more than half a million followers and a very high reaction to all of his initiatives online so he’s an example of how you can manage these new tools in a very good way for you as well as for the community and can interact with institutions becoming relevant online so thanks a lot, this was the last slide I know you have some more questions I think on the back of as I was saying, as social media is our key it’s our key to communicating and to interacting with people who may not know the complexities of our disease so it’s really important that we use the tools that we have got to spread our message as far and as wide as we possibly can does anybody have any questions? not so much a question but maybe a comment I’m using the Google reviews to to make comments about accessibility in all the reviews I place about restaurants or hotels or everything for example, I’ve made reviews about this hotel the rooms are wonderful, they’re all accessible but there are no toilets for accessible toilets in the main areas I put that in the review I put other things in there like a lot of breakfast, a lot of and everything, but in all my reviews there are a few things about accessibility whether there are toilets whether you can get in everything like that and my reviews on Google reviews are very well read that’s something we can do too and people trust them people trust them, especially if it’s not one line, but if it’s a longer review people trust them because there will be people posting yeah, the social media can impact your everyday life if you think about restaurants or hotels they consider social media feedbacks as a major part of their communication they are trying to drive it I don’t know if you noticed that most of the international platforms ask you feedback after your your stay there send you an email or contact your social media account to ask a feedback, so they are trying to drive this kind of feedback, which is of course can be hosted on every one of the social media platforms but it’s very rare because if, as you do other people will do you can be sure that this will change things, because the hotel will perform the activity to make a service better we need that for airlines yeah, but for example this is something that you can do but for example I’m an Amazon buyer, I buy things on Amazon and last week I bought something for my mother and the seller sent me an email saying before putting the feedback if you have negative feedback to post before putting the feedback call me and I will solve your problem in case you have a problem so they take this into consideration and they understood that the customer experience the personal experience the people experience is the most important thing in the US there is maybe three, I don’t know if you are familiar with it, there is a patient like me so it’s a website and then it’s also online, where you can post your experience as a patient and you can say what you have done which was the centre how they treated you how was the treatment how was the experience so we don’t have this in Europe and there are a lot of attempts to realise it but this is something that think about that so sharing the perspective of the patient with other patients so that they can have a similar experience or a different experience a better experience so that’s why what I said before that take into consideration what you share and what you say because there is an area let’s say cross contamination between your personal experience, your role in an association your daily life as a person when there are these three things together you have a power you can use this, we have power as individuals so we need to use it in the best way and it’s interesting to see that Jacopo, that he is Italian his reputation went beyond Italy even BBC so each of us can have the power to go beyond the borders if you do the right thing and in the right way with the consistency and the credibility that Jacopo gained because Jacopo is not just complaining, he is proving he is engaging people and he is also promoting when things change so it’s not just complaining, there is another aspect that it’s important don’t just complain, but promote when things are going the right way I think it’s changing as well, I think for businesses and people like yourselves who use a lot of social media people listen to Trend a lot me, parents do, because they are parents of a Facebook user because of my age, demographic I don’t really believe anything I see I call it fake because I think we all know when we see stuff and they are happy families and they are all great you know it’s bull really so I think once you know that as a common sense attitude going into all of this I think most people can reach for the ball if that makes sense so that’s just me on my own personal pages and I put up a lot of funny stuff and people don’t like it, they don’t feel so friendly I don’t take it to a person but I think as a business, I think you are right but I think it’s hard for people that have a business and they have to come off their own personal page because they are worried what people think about them it makes you not be human sometimes some people get too I’m explaining myself here because I hate to think that I can’t be myself if I’m worried about what you are going to read about being business if that makes sense I don’t think that you have to behave differently than you do you just need to consider the impact of what you do is different for me but I don’t think this doesn’t mean that you have not to express your opinion but be aware that in this environment what you say has a different impact than just a two people conversation, that’s all I’m 56 I think I’ve gotten this far without upsetting myself and anybody in life or disrespecting people so I’m just saying I don’t think I should have to worry about that because I’m a good person but I agree with what you’re saying but I don’t think I should have to be taught in a lot of respects we should know this as adults we’ve got through life in the business of life so I respect what you’re saying but it’s sad the way the social media and the world has changed that we have to be like that that’s all I’m saying with the social media platforms out there because we all know there’s bloggers and influencers out there and they’re making a lot of money out of it and they’re creating their businesses and I think it’s very important for that but yeah, it’s sad Any other questions at all?