6. New Practice #6: The Relationship Analyzer
In college, you learn how PR builds relationships with a company’s stakeholders to foster goodwill and to raise public confidence. Nurturing and leveraging relationships is a practice at the heart of the PR profession. When you graduate from school and you’re out in the business world, your skills are tested in a variety of situations—from the relationships you build within your own company to every audience segment connected to your organization. One of the most frequently talked about, and often tested, relationships is the PR person’s bond with the media. However, today’s media encompasses more than simply journalists. You must consider bloggers, which come in varying levels of influence, and your customers, who can also publish their own media.
As much as the media world has changed, increasing in size and scope, you have an incredible advantage to strategically organize your social media communications (remember Practice #4, the COMMs Organizer) and to use Web 2.0 technology (putting Practice #3, the PR Tech Tester, to use) to learn more about the people you want to reach and engage. However, connecting and building the relationship is only half of your job. The other major opportunity, and the second half of your focus, should be to dig deeper by analyzing relationships and to make them stronger for the long term. You have the mindset, skills, and technology, which allow you to observe the sociology of social media, or to study the behavior of the community members and the affects on the relationship.
You’re ready to discover what’s behind the interactions of your audience, one by one and more so than you could ever uncover in years past. Having access to the Internet gave you the ability to search and find massive amounts of information on journalists. At times, there was so much information available, journalists have confessed to feeling stalked by PR professionals who had too much knowledge about them.1 However, today, technology gives you the ability to examine not only individual behavior but also group behavior. You can pull meaningful sharing statistics and, in turn, create an environment of connections that suits the needs of your constituents.
When you move from relationship building to relationship examining, a new practice for public relations surfaces. It’s Practice #6, the Relationship Analyzer. The Relationship Analyzer is a strategic practice that digs into the psychographics of people based on like-mindedness and common critical issues, and the study of behavioral actions between people in your communities, as a key to higher-level interactions. Relationship analyzing is represented on your Social Media Strategy Wheel during the research and audience profiling phases, and when planning your monitoring, communications, and engagement strategies (see Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1. The Social Media Strategy Wheel: PR Practice #6
You’re about to embark on a three-part Relationship Analyzer process. From this point onward, you can capitalize on your relationships and take none of them for granted.
What Are the Responsibilities of the Relationship Analyzer?
The three-part Relationship Analyzer process guides your approach to connections and deepening relationships. This three-part process includes the following:
• Part I: Development of the Audience Profile
• Part II: Technology to Analyze Direction/Growth
• Part III: Strategy to Build Relationships Based on Community Culture
Each phase of the process lets you apply knowledge you already have, and you also can employ new technology skills to move the relationship “needle” toward advocacy.
Part I: Development of the Audience Profile
Relationship analyzing is a new practice, which calls for a closer view of the critical issues of the people you want to reach in their web communities. This requires a good look at your audience segments and developing profiles to detail their participation. You also need to identify what topics of interest drive the influencers in those communities and how focusing on the critical issues work to your benefit.
Relationship Analyzers must know the best way for their organization to reach out and, in turn, affect many groups of people in the social media landscape. You communicate in a number of different ways to connect and interest different audiences, including customers, prospects, influencers/bloggers (from A-List bloggers to Trendsetters and other public relations influencers), partners, and journalists through your social channels. At the same time, as a PR Policymaker and Internal Collaboration Generator, you begin to work more closely with your own colleagues on their communications to help champion social media interactions internally, as well as your own.
An Audience Profile is a helpful resource to identify the needs of each audience segment to pinpoint exactly where groups are congregating, to distinguish what issues/topics interest them, and to allow you to discover the best ways to communicate directly. By identifying specific needs and interests, you can provide helpful and meaningful information to build stronger, more mutually beneficial relationships. Audience profile development helps you to engage more as a “peer” and to be seen as a helpful and valued resource, rather than a communications professional from an agency, corporate entity, government agency, or nonprofit association looking to increase awareness, leads, sales, or donations. Social media is about people, and your company’s social media must reflect the humans behind the business.
The Audience Profile consists of answering the following questions:
• What are the benefits and opportunities of interacting with a particular group? What exactly do you want from this group? Are you looking for a specific type of engagement, whether it’s learning about your industry thought leadership, or you would like to have some type of mutual reciprocation?
• Where does this group congregate? Do the group members spend more time on Facebook and Twitter, or are they in niche networks, such as LinkedIn or a Ning social network? Tools, such as Quantcast, are great to see how different groups participate on specific in social network.
• What are the key issues/concerns/needs of the group? What motivates this group to share, discuss or converse, debate, laugh, show emotion, and so on? By monitoring and tracking keywords in a platform, you can uncover the hot or trending topics of interest.
• Who are the key influencers in the group? Who drives these issues, and who are the most vocal on a topic of interest? What is their level of influence? Tools including Klout, Twitalyzer, and PeerIndex can provide the extent of an individual’s influence.
• How does this group like to participate, and what do they expect from you? Where do these people fall on the participation scale? For example, Forrester’s Technographics Ladder is a consumer tool that uses demographics to reveal how people participate from Inactives and Spectators of social media, all the way up the ladder to Conversationalists and Creators of content.
The answers to these questions enable you to create your Audience Profile. Now, you have a reason to connect and deepen the relationship the right way, and to also reach the type of engagement you set out to achieve. Remember, many of the people who participate with you in social media communities will be some of the people you already know through other traditional or digital channels. However, unlike any other type of communication, your participation is based on understanding what interactions mean for relationship growth. You must rely on technology to help you to visualize the relationship and foster growth from casual awareness to loyal advocacy.
Part II: Technology to Analyze Direction/Growth
Of course, the next part of the Relationship Analyzer’s job is a direct response to the depth of relationships and the participation required to keep close connections. The Relationship Analyzer uses technology tools and resources to monitor the direction, growth, and strength of the relationship, during all phases of communication. Technology reveals the weak connections between you and a friend/follower, or between your brand and its stakeholders, so that you can apply new strategies to strengthen those bonds. You can also learn to capitalize on the solid relationships by further leveraging your social champions, which leads to measurable outcomes for your organization, including endorsements, advocacy, registration, leads, and sales.
As you participate in social communities, you quickly learn your friendships fall into different buckets. (These buckets may change depending on the community.) However, you can group friends/followers into the following classifications: Casual Friend, Taker with Good Info, The Giver, The Giver and Taker Friendship, and then the Trusted Confidant/Brand Champion. Each level of relationship building in a community has the potential to move up a level and provide more value from your participation and direct engagement.
You can imagine these buckets as a Relationship Stairway. With each step you climb on the staircase, the relationship moves closer to advocacy. At the top of the stairs, you are rewarded with an experience or the ultimate engagement, whatever that means to you either personally or professionally. These are your social media engagement goals.
Following are definitions of the steps and the behavior you and your company experience as you climb the staircase:
• The Casual Friend may be the friend who gives you a quick “Good Morning” with a smiley face or a brief comment about the day. Don’t underestimate this friend; you have the opportunity to turn the brief encounter into sharing content and engaging in a deeper discussion.
• The Taker with Good Info is the friend who begins to share information with you, with the hope that you will discuss what she’s shared further in your communities. Because the information is meaningful, you willingly share but realize you have to move to a more reciprocal relationship.
• The Giver is the opposite of The Taker and is a special friend (whether you know this individual personally or professionally) who doesn’t ask anything of you; he/she simply finds you interesting and naturally wants to share your information with their friends. When you reciprocate, you move to a more meaningful relationship for both parties.
• The Giver and Taker Friendship is a level of friendship where the relationship becomes equally balanced, and both sides feel a great deal of benefit. You have the potential to move toward trusted confidante where the relationship goes far beyond social media.
• The Trusted Confidante and/or the Brand Champion is at the top of the Relationship Stairway and is someone who you will trust to further your initiative or cause, and whom you know will handle your brand with the utmost respect and praise. Suddenly your friendship has moved from virtual to physical.
Moving up the Relationship Stairway requires you to use technology to visualize your relationship. Resources and monitoring analytics can help. Now focus on some of the tools and monitoring related to platforms. One example of a technology tool/resource to help visualize your Twitter relationships is a MentionMapp. The MentionMapp illustrates a Twitter graph of connections with deep orange lines to reveal strong conversational relationships with peers and light gray lines to show connections that are not deep by nature. By seeing visually the deep orange connections, you can investigate the follower/type of influencer to see what it is that makes this person engaged, what content has been shared with this person, and why the relationship is represented as a deep connection. You can also see their connections to other people in your network. Use of MentionMapp will also reveal your competitors’ connections as well as the strengths and weaknesses of their relationships.
You can certainly capitalize on the great connections by feeding the influencer with more of what they like and need. At the same time, the MentionMapp enables you to figure out a better strategy with certain gray connections that illustrate you are not cultivating a relationship as quickly as you would like. The technology enables you to see where your connections are the strongest and where you need help with your engagement to move from awareness and the casual friend (gray) to a confidant or loyal brand advocate (orange).
When you visualize your Relationship Stairway, you can ask:
• How do you think your friends/followers view you or your brand on the Relationship Stairway, and how do you view them?
• Have you taken the initiative to climb the steps a little higher with some or most of your friends/followers?
• How do you figure out which friends/followers you want to move up the steps quickly, and have you analyzed these friends lately?
Other tools to analyze relationships in social communities include TweetStats, TweetReach, WhoTweetedMe, The Archivist, Twenty Feet, Twiangulate, Facebook Insights, and Touch Graph, which allows you to not only see your close Facebook connections, but also visualize connections between related websites.
Part III: Strategy to Build Relationships Based on Community Culture
The last part of the Relationship Analyzer’s job is to understand the culture of different communities and to apply the cultural norms and group behavior to rally the community on your behalf. You need to investigate your own participation to know how to engage differently in networks. For example, communications professionals realize Twitter is frequently used for questions about customer service or product issues. Although Facebook is also used for customer service, it offers consumers unique promotions and sweepstakes for lead generation, as well as opportunities to ask questions for research or product innovations. Your job is to know how culture and best practice engagement play a part of relationship growth.
The more you work with your company to create engagement opportunities on the different social media platforms, the more you see some common threads, where information is shared in both places. However, as you become familiar with the platforms, you can also see there is a divide between network activities. For example, how you share on Twitter may differ significantly from the activities on Facebook. Of course, Google+ is also a part of the mix with companies learning to build their brand pages and determining what to offer in this network.
Brands should make each community experience different to accommodate the needs of the members, to respect and conform to the community culture, and to implement the best collaboration practices. In some cases, you have different people interacting with you, and in other cases, loyal brand enthusiasts may want to engage with your brand in more than one place. For this reason, there are some simple ways to differentiate and give your consumers a reason to interact with you in various communities. Although hundreds of networks and thousands of platforms exist, now focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Following are examples of the different and accepted ways to engage on the well-known and heavily populated networks. Call them Relationship Boosters you can use to actively participate on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. These Boosters are meant to raise your engagement from the bottom of the staircase to reach the higher steps.
Facebook Relationship Boosters
For Facebook relationships on the lower part of the staircase, you can:
• Share exclusive promotions and information about product discounts for only Facebook fans.
• Engage directly with a community by creating a Facebook group to spark passion and action with your consumers, bloggers, and other constituents.
• Create an engaging environment in which consumers interact with the brand and their peers, from “likes” and comments on wall posts to trivia and contests/sweepstakes.
• Drive traffic from your brand fan page to helpful information on the company’s website (leading to content your Facebook fans requested).
• Create unique content you can’t find on any other networks.
• Build a community in which consumers can engage with the brand in fun activities through Facebook customized applications.
• Use Facebook as a brand stream to maximize the brand’s presence through status updates.
• Address customer service questions and allow customers to chat with customer service representatives or company experts.
• Develop a community that encourages feedback for research purposes, listening to the conversations between active community members.
Twitter Relationship Boosters
For Twitter relationships on the lower part of the staircase, you can:
• Share newsworthy information related to your brand that interests the community, keeping community members updated about the brand’s activities.
• Link to content that’s not only interesting, but also has the potential to go viral. (This may or may not be directly related to your brand.)
• Recognize, thank, and reward customers, bloggers, media, and other stakeholders for sharing your brand information and activities.
• Develop conversations and engage in dialogue around industry topics for thought leadership.
• Engage in conversations to help people by answering questions, addressing concerns, and aiding consumers in the decision-making process.
• Promote your own community members’ content including their articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and so on, which help to build stronger and mutually beneficial relationships.
• Share special offers and discounts by offering links directly to those promotions on brand landing pages.
• Engage with influencers/bloggers, and build new relationships that lead to increased awareness and coverage/endorsement of your brand.
• Find and follow journalists to stay abreast of what they tweet to better understand their interests for possible editorial coverage.
• Create virtual events/Twitter chat sessions through hashtag discussions.
Google+ Relationship Boosters
Although fairly new to brands, Google+ launched its brand pages for organizations to connect with constituents in different ways and to further take advantage of the power of Google search. Google+ enables businesses to organize audience segments in circles; to differentiate customers, prospects, partners, vendors, bloggers, media, and so on; and to create more targeted communications for each group. Another great interaction tool on Google+ are the video hangouts, which allow company employees to have face-to-face video interactions. Customers can get more intimate interactions with the people behind the corporate logo. Chief Executive Michael Dell tested this principle in Google+ hangouts before the brand pages were launched. By personally experimenting in hangouts, he invited people to join him, which raised the idea of having customers join Google+ hangouts with Dell service and sales teams. Dell saw the distinct possibility to help multiple users with similar issues to find a solution at the same time and in the same Google+ hangout.
Another great example of boosting relationships in Google+ is what Indie music artist, Daria Musk, did to propel her career. Daria arranged 24-hour concerts in a video hangout. She had approximately 9,000 fans join her in a hangout, with more than 100 countries represented.2 This music artist’s career took a turn for the best when she used Google+ as her point of engagement, singing for thousands of fans. With direct interaction, she made the correlation between Google+ hangout activities and her newfound rock star recognition. In Daria’s case, there was no mistaking the results of her efforts. She’s been booked as a guest speaker/performer at various music and tech conferences, and she’s also solidified a worldwide music following, post Google+ concert hangout. Your greatest measure of relationships can be the one-on-one face time you spend with fans in a hang out.
News of Daria’s Google+ hangout concerts spread quickly, with the story picked up by CNN, Reuters, and other international outlets. In addition, Daria Musk landed on Business Insider’s list of “Interesting People to Circle on Google+” along with Republican Presidential Nominee Newt Gingrich and Actor William Shatner.3 Again, Google+ is an excellent example of moving the casual connection in a platform to a deeper, more intimate interaction based on the culture of the community and accepted activities, with the Google+ Hangout as the ultimate Relationship Booster
Of course, as you move forward, you can also discover your own best practices to build and analyze your relationships through Google+. Another major benefit of Google+ participation is the power of search and being found. Your audience’s ability to “+1” content they like on your page helps brands to raise their rank and to be found through organic search. In addition, Google+ Direct Connect enables people to find businesses on the Google+ page quickly, if they search using the “+” sign before the business name. Google+ is a social network to watch for its sharing culture and unique ways to build and strengthen relationships with the people you want to reach.
You can gauge the success of your relationships based on the activity of your audience in a community. Companies turn their own website properties into social communities, including the online newsroom, where the behavior of their constituents lend a hand to better ways to share and acknowledge how your journalists, bloggers, consumers, and other stakeholders want to gather, organize, and decide what’s appropriate to share with their networks. Newsrooms today are growing in importance because they offer PR professionals a glimpse at the stories that interest people, as they navigate to find and download information.
What Are the Best Practices of the Relationship Analyzer?
According to Steve Momorella, owner and founder of TEKGROUP International, “Due to the rapid growth of social media use, it’s been difficult for public relations professionals to manage multiple social media environments. Concentrating on the online newsroom as a central starting point creates easy access to all neighborhoods in which the company interacts.” In a Q&A with Steve, he offered his insight on how to build better relationships through a company’s newsroom.
Q: How has technology changed to allow us to build better relationships with the company’s constituents who frequent their newsroom?
A: Since its inception in the 1950s, the Internet has been unyielding in its capability to reduce the overall value of “the middleman.” Before the Internet, you had to write a letter, put it in a special envelope, put it in your mailbox, and then wait for the mailman to come, once a day, to pick it up and deliver it to your intended recipient. With email technology, you can type your letter and send it directly to your constituent, thus reducing the time, increasing the efficiency and deliverability, and diminishing the middleman in the process. Libraries? They used to be the gatekeepers for all sorts of books, until technologies from companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft began to erode the dominance of the library.
In the mid-1990s, the same thing happened with retail and shopping. Sites like Amazon.com and eBay using E-commerce technology have eaten into the revenues of traditional bricks-and-mortar. Are mailmen, libraries, and shopping malls extinct? No, but the damage has been done and it’s irreversible. In our world, the industry of Public Relations, Marketing, and Communications, our middleman is the traditional press or the journalist, the magazine editor, the newspaper, the public television station, or the local radio news station. And one of the technologies that empower this is the online newsroom. A centralized headquarters of communications content, available 24x7 and integrated with social media, the online newsroom becomes the vehicle, the voice, and the validity for your organization.
Traditionally, a company relied on media outlets as one of the primary channels to constituents, through media relations/PR. Now, with an online newsroom integrated with social media, communicators can build increasingly sophisticated and useful relationships with a wide range of stakeholders and influencers. Sure, the traditional media is still part of that mix—newspapers, magazines, television, radio combined with bloggers, citizen journalists, and news consumers all are included. But so are employees, investors and analysts, partners, resellers and vendors, and existing and potential customers. All these make up the variety of relationships that can develop from using an online newsroom, using content marketing, leveraging social media, and using digital communications.
First and foremost, if you are looking to build relationships with anyone, journalists included, you need to find out where they are, join their community, get an understanding of what is going on, and then participate/share and become more involved with that community. Using an online newsroom can help you by giving you the means to provide compelling stories about your organization and then making those stories available in a variety of locations—preferably locations where the people you are trying to target are located. If you are trying to provide story ideas for journalists to use, then you need to develop relationships with those journalists on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But, I think the real power comes when you use your online newsroom to provide stories and content directly to the constituents—the consumers, the partners and vendors, and the prospects. Using social media to create and nourish those relationships is also a key component of your strategy.
If I am a travel company, and I can develop a relationship (as informal as it may be) with followers of the Travel Channel Twitter account, I now have an opportunity to tell my organization’s story directly to them. At the same time, I can use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to develop closer relationships with travel bloggers, travel editors, and other traditional press that are on these channels. This is the part that scares a lot of PR professionals because they are not used to developing content and relationships at that level. But if done correctly, by leveraging an online newsroom as a headquarters of your news content, and then integrating that online newsroom with social media, you can achieve success both in creating an avenue for journalists to easily find your content and also a series of relationships with people who are directly interested in your organization or brand.
The Internet changed how quickly and directly we could interact, communicate, and share information. A company’s online newsroom provides communicators with a platform to make news content available to not only journalists, but also a whole series of constituents including investors, analysts, employees, partners, customers, and prospects. By creating compelling content aimed at each of these groups, and then leveraging social media channels to foster the relationship, organizations can not only take control of their communications efforts, but also develop direct and lasting relationships with their targeted constituents.
Q: What are the strongest measures or analytics we can track in a newsroom to reveal growing community relationships with a brand?
A: There are so many metrics that you are able to track these days, it is amazing. I remember when I was first building community websites in the early-mid 1990s, and we would have to wait a day for the WebTrends analytics reports to come out to know the previous day’s traffic. We’d be able to see what content was the most popular the day before, where people went on the site, what pages did they leave from, and so on. Then a program called LiveStats became available in the early 2000s and it was amazing. You could see how many people were on the site in real time, and more important see what content they were looking at, which pages were the most popular. I remember frequently scrambling to help create new content similar to the pages that were being accessed the most frequently. It was pretty amazing back then and set the stage for today’s available measures and analytics to be sure. Today, with something as simple as a bit.ly link, I can track in real time how many people are hitting that web page, where they are coming from, what device, and what platform. With Google Analytics, I can see an amazing amount of metrics across a variety of categories. With many API warehousing companies such as Gnip, Appinions, and OpenCalais, a wealth of metrics are available.
The key, though, is what metrics make sense for your business. Are you selling widgets? Or are you trying to build a relationship with a group of people by providing informative content, research, and news? What are your goals in terms of coverage, awareness, market share, lead generation, and sales? What are the goals of your existing communications strategy? After you have determined this overarching set of goals, then it will be easier to determine [which] metrics make the most sense. We’ve worked in the analytics and monitoring industry now for nearly 10 years and have worked with several different types of analytics packages and professionals including development of some of our own metrics and indexes in several cases. And there are some definite “must have” measurements you want to be tracking in terms of your communications efforts and growing your community.
Integrating Google Analytics into your online newsroom is vital for a few different reasons. First, the package offers a host of reports and measurements that will help show what content is the most popular. Is it a particular news story that keeps getting looked at over and over, or your video section, or is it one of your executive bios? What is the time of day when most people come to your online newsroom? Perhaps posting a story idea or evergreen content item slightly before that day or time might help increase pickup of that particular story. Another big metric inside of Google Analytics is to understand how people are getting to your newsroom. If they are coming from a search engine like Google, monitor what keywords they are searching on to get to your content, and then ensure all relevant content has those keywords. It only makes sense to offer more related content and making it available to those who are obviously already interested. Building relationships through content means you have to provide a steady stream of really good and really useful news, pictures, and videos. Traffic to your online newsroom can be one of the greatest measures. Sure, you want to know the quality of the traffic, but in my experience if you are able to grow your monthly newsroom traffic, the quality of relationships will grow along with it.
Q: How have you personally grown relationships through social media, and do you analyze your own relationships in different communities to make them stronger connections?
A: There are so many ways that I have personally (and professionally) grown relationships through social media. Everything from using Twitter to actually make sales, to using Facebook to generate leads, to using LinkedIn to connect with potential clients. But, also using Twitter to help get a story placed for a client, using Facebook to help promote a friend’s restaurant, and using LinkedIn to reconnect with an old business associate who it happened was in the need for my services.
Most of my time in social media is spent on trying to find people that have a problem. That problem is they have great stories to tell about their organizations—so they are PR, media relations, Investor Relations (IR), or marketing professionals—but they have either no control, no time, no budget, or a host of other issues preventing them from maximizing the opportunity for their company. So, with social media, I have just ingrained it into my lifestyle and made it part of me, my personal brand, but bigger than that, my company’s brand. I’ve developed relationships on social media that have led to new clients, new partnerships, new opportunities at existing clients, and new opportunities to speak and share my thoughts with others in my industry. For some of these relationships, I have never talked to the person on the phone or seen them in person.
Personally, one of my biggest successes in helping to grow relationships hinges on finding and sharing content. Whether it is content about PR, online newsrooms, green energy, travel, or sports, I work hard each and every day to find stories I think my followers would find interesting. Even if they might be able to get it from somewhere else, or it is not an original story, I try to aggregate and share the best of what I find each day. This has helped me build relationships in a number of ways. First, people always like when you share their content; it opens the door for them to thank you and for you to establish the start of a relationship with them. Second, when people share my content, I emphatically thank them as quickly as possible and let them know that I appreciate that, also opening the door for me to connect with them in some other way—another social network, or maybe down the road an opportunity might arise. These little “door openings” are amazing, and if you are consistent and forthcoming, there will be hundreds of opportunities to connect with people. Will each result in a client or the lead story in the Washington Post? No. But they will provide opportunities to help you achieve your communications goals, whatever they may be.
The Relationship Analyzer Check List
Begin relationship analyzing as you plan your communications program.
Take a good look at your audience segments, and developing profiles to detail their participation in different communities.
Identify what topics of interest drive the influencers in these communities and how focusing on the critical issues work to your benefit.
Build an Audience Profile as a helpful resource to identify the needs of each audience segment, to pinpoint exactly where they are congregating, to distinguish what issues/topics interest them, and to allow you to discover the best ways to communicate directly.
Ask the Audience Profile questions, such as: What are the benefits/opportunities of interacting with this group? What is it exactly do you want from this group? Are you looking for a specific type of engagement, whether it’s learning about your industry thought leadership or you would like to have some type of mutual reciprocation?
Define the steps and the behavior you and your company experience as you climb the Relationship Staircase, which include the Casual Friend, the Taker with Good Info, the Giver, the Giver and Taker, and the True Confidante/Brand Champion.
Rely on technology such as a MentionMapp or a Touch Graph to help you to visualize the relationship and foster growth from casual awareness to loyalty and advocacy.
Understand the culture of the different communities, and apply the cultural norms and group behavior to rally the community on your behalf.
Gauge the effectiveness of your relationship based on the activity of your audience in a community—for example, in your own newsroom.
Make each community experience different, to accommodate the needs of the members, to respect and conform to the community culture, and to implement the best collaboration practices.
Consider the Relationship Boosters on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to move casual relationships to higher steps on the Relationship Staircase.