Using new ICT tools and social media in providing advice

Prudence Cook,
Department of Primary Industries, Victoria

Take Home Messages:

• There are four ways advisers can benefit from social media:
  • Consuming content that is relevant to your business
  • Conversing with others in industry using social media
  • Creating content to market your goods/services
  • Curating content to make sense of the vast amounts of online content
• Implementing social media into a business needs to be carefully planned and managed with clear objectives as to what you want to achieve.
• Industry is already using social media as a tool for attracting new clients, while streamlining services to existing customers and improving internal collaboration.
• Social media is highly personalised - adapt your social media campaign to suit you, your business and your clients.

Introduction:

Despite its reputation as a time waster and a broadcast channel for celebrity gossip, social media has become an important and necessary component of many organisations as its potential for reaching a wider audience and creating a more consumer friendly mechanism for engagement is recognised.

However, a number of organisations are choosing to simply ‘do’ social media, without understanding how it operates, what is required to make a social media presence successful and most importantly, what can be gained from using social media.

To get maximum benefit from social media, use the four C’s:

Consume:

Using social media as an information source is often overlooked due to the perception of information being either worthless or too hard to find. However, access to the information provided through social media sites is one of the most valuable reasons for using it allowing for early identification of emerging research, issues, trends and solutions relevant to grain growers.

People and organisations using social media in agriculture include: producers, researchers, consumers, industry bodies, government departments, weather organisations, grower groups, seed/chemical/marketing companies and the media (who often monitor social media to find stories as news often breaks in social media before it hits the mainstream). This is on both a local, national and international scale.

Besides keeping up with general industry information, some companies are currently using information from social media to:

• Track customer sentiment
• Locate problems and speed up repairs to public transport/electricity grids etc.
• Predict product recalls
• Forecast stock prices
• Prevent customer defections
• Identify new clients and sales leads
• Recruit
• Monitor competition

In the agricultural world, information from social media can be used to identify problem issues such as disease outbreaks or weed issues, give clues about crop yields and local conditions, and give you fast access to market information, especially at an international level. The following link provides some excellent examples of how Twitter posts are being used by the agricultural sector in the United States.

In order to filter social media content to ensure that you’re only receiving content that matters to you, use a social media manager such as Tweetdeck (free), Hootsuite or Sproutsocial. This will allow you to not only monitor your presence across multiple social media platforms in one place, but also to identify people, organisations and topics that are relevant to you and monitor what is being said in easy to follow streams.

If you are new to social media, it is important that you spend more time consuming social media content, in the initial stages, to understand how the various platforms operate and how to interact with other participants.

Converse:

Social media has become such a popular tool because, unlike mainstream media, you not only have the ability to consume information, but you can engage with it, ask questions of it, build networks with other participants, identify and follow up opportunities and have meaningful conversations with other users, potentially on the other side of the world.

By conversing with those in industry through social media, in particular clients, you can:

• Position your brand
• Attract prospects
• Increase loyalty

Also remember that the customer has the ability to initiate conversation with you. This presents a new and highly visible way of providing customer service which brings some concerns regarding how you respond to negative feedback or difficult questions. However, the ability to respond quickly and rationally in a public sphere can still allow you to retain a customer and portray your business in a positive light by being honest and rapid in your response. Consider potential scenarios where negative feedback may occur in the future and prepare responses to these. This should form a part of any good social media strategy.

Create:

Once you’ve established networks in social media circles, developed an understanding of the various mediums and have a presence in online communities, you can start creating your own content to inform clients and market products, services and events. This is where you can build your online reputation while still maintaining conversations which gives for richer content.

Additionally, by creating content on social media that links to your existing website, you can increase your websites search engine optimisation (SEO) which means it will have a higher ranking in search engine searches.

Social media can also allow for more creative ways of collaboration within your team to create better ways of working internally. As email use declines, social media provides more efficient communication channels through real time collaboration and centralised information sharing. In this way, social media is becoming an office productivity tool. Examples of this include cloud storage, Skype, Google Drive, Google Hangouts and Yammer.

Curate:

The latest 'buzz word' in social media is content curation - sourcing relevant information regarding a particular topic that already exists on the Internet and organising and presenting it in a coherent way for either a private or public audience. The curation platform Pinterest is a perfect example of the rise in popularity of content curation having grown by 5124 per cent in 2012.

Pinterest may not necessarily be a good platform for the grains industry due to its visual nature (often used for wedding planning, crafts, cooking and fashion) and the demographic of participants (predominantly urban females). However, there are numerous content curation platforms that allow you to collaboratively create and share online newsletters/magazines and useful reference sources containing only quality content.

One of the most frequent complaints heard from both producers and agribusiness is how to negotiate the vast amounts of content available; there's either too much information that they're unsure where to start looking or the content generated by traditional search engines yield out of date, irrelevant and low quality results. Therefore content curation in Australian agriculture has huge potential for curating location specific, industry specific, high quality information, without the need to create it yourself.

How to incorporate social media into your business.

Often companies take on social media because they feel they need to do it, giving the responsibility to junior staff members and concentrating on the technology as opposed to strategy. This inevitably leads to an under performing social media presence and adds to the sentiment that social media adds no value.

This perception is frequently held in agricultural circles, particularly as meaningful evaluation, beyond amount of likes or follows, can be elusive. However, a recent McKinsey report estimates that there is $1.3 trillion in untapped value from social technologies. In order to access these benefits your business needs to:

• Have a social media strategy:
  • Clearly outline your objectives, what you aim to achieve and by when.
  • Provide guidelines on how often you will contribute content, how you interact and how you respond to feedback, both positive and negative.
  • Outline how much time should be spent consuming, conversing, creating and curating. This doesn't need to be a massive time commitment.
  • Identify the skills required for a social media campaign. Do they currently exist within your team or should you outsource?
• Ensure your entire team understands why you are using social media:
  • What the benefits for the business are.
  • Staff can and should provide content to company accounts.
  • Make sure that a number of staff are familiar with how to source and create content for various platforms.
• Have a social media policy: outline how staff should use personal social media accounts during work hours, and how they interact with and represent your organisation outside work hours.

How an adviser uses ICTs and social media on a daily basis

An adviser arrives at work in the morning and checks his Tweetdeck. @Agridome has tweeted about the drought in Brazil. He follows a conversation between users speculating on the effect that South American crops will have on the USDA.

ABC rural reporter @lucybarbour tweets about a state-wide diesel shortage, providing a link to an audio clip. Other Twitter users regularly update comments on which petrol stations have diesel, alerting him as to where he needs to go to fill up.

He joins a staff meeting via videoconference with members of his team in several different regional locations using Google hangouts. They use Google Drive to collaborate on a document outlining a new control strategy for fleabane.

A new factsheet has been posted on the company website that morning. The adviser posts the link in both a tweet, and on Facebook to increase online visibility of the factsheet and increase the companies SEO.

A tech-savvy farmer Skypes the adviser from her paddock. She is able to show the adviser, in real time, a pre-sowing weed control issue, which the adviser is able to resolve without having to travel out to the location.

As the company is in need of a new staff member, the adviser peruses profiles of agronomists across the state in search of a new recruit. While there, he participates in a group conversation over barriers to adopting precision agriculture.

Over lunch, the adviser reads Australian Agriculture, Agribusiness and Agvocacy on Scoop.it and Farming Systems Research, Agriculture Daily and AgChatOz Daily on Paper.li. He adds a YouTube clip on how farmers in WA are using soil moisture probes to his Shareist notebook, where his colleagues and selected clients can access it along with a selection of other relevant online content that he has collected and organised into themed pages.

The company head of merchandise indicates a 24 hour special for farmers who purchase over 100L of a new chemical. The adviser direct messages clients on Twitter as well as sending an SMS, email and maybe even a fax or two to ensure the information is received in time.

While out in the paddock, the adviser receives a Skype call from a colleague who is having trouble using a new paddock record management app on his iPad. Using Skype’s screensharing function, the adviser is able to talk his colleague through how to correctly use the technology.

Back in the office, the adviser checks his Tweetdeck. @AgSure has issued a tweet with a link to a review on a new climate app. He also sees that @DPI_Vic_Grains has released the latest edition of ‘The Break’ Newsletter. With that in mind, he posts a tweet about the potential for dry sowing, which shows that he’s on top of the latest information and gains him Twitter followers.

Barriers for Agriculture:

One of the main barriers for agribusiness take up of social media is that the majority of their client base aren’t using the medium. A current study by Kaliber suggests that only 14 per cent of farmers are currently using some form of social media in the course of their business with a further 19 per cent planning on adopting the technology in the near future. The predominant reason for non-adoption is that they don't see a need for social media. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this is because they haven't been shown any benefits for using social media. Often when shown the quality of information on offer through social media and how it can be organised, producers can see potential uses.

Another difference between agriculture and the mainstream is that often, where the mainstream wants their content to be viewed by as many people as possible, the agricultural sector will be more selective in who their audience is and what information they give out; when you derive income from giving advice, you don't want to be providing it for free online. Many social media platforms offer privacy options that allow your content to only be viewed by users of your choosing and this is something that needs to be considered in a social media strategy.

Lastly, some social media platforms are not suitable mediums for portraying agricultural information and/or the audience is unsuitable. For example, platforms of a visual nature such as Pinterest, Flickr and Tumblr will not be as suitable for conveying agronomic information (with plant pathology being a potential exception). Additionally, platforms like LinkedIn, while incredibly useful from an industry information perspective, will not be useful for connecting with producers as very few are using the medium.

Another frustration with using social media is that it is a very fluid medium, rapidly expanding, with the platform of preference constantly changing and new tools regularly entering the market. The table on the next page outlines what platforms are currently available and whether or not they may be suitable for an agricultural audience.

References:

Chui, M., Manyika, J., Bughin, J., Dobbs, R., Roxburgh, C., Sarrazin, H., Sands, G. and Westergren M. (2012) The Social Economy – Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. McKinsey Global Institute.

The New Bush Telegraph: What social media means for agriculture. Interim Report December 2012. Kaliber, Hardman Communications,  BlandsLaw.

Contact details

Prudence Cook
Private Bag 260 Horsham 3400
(03) 5362 2111
prudence.cook@dpi.vic.gov.au