Social Media – Co-op Digital Blog

The importance of privacy and safety on social media

February 28, 2018February 28, 2018Co-op

On Monday, the Social team held an event for 100 young people who attend Co-op Academies in Greater Manchester. The students were 14 to 16 years old and they’ll soon be leaving school and thinking about what’s next. The aim of the talk was to raise awareness about:

social media privacy
online safety
social media and your career
presenting yourself online

Here’s what happened.

Privacy and safety

The focus of my talk was on privacy and safety on social media networks. I warned that if we’re not careful, the range of data we disclose across various social platforms could easily be pieced together and someone with malicious intent they could steal your identity.

The takeaway points were:

Make sure you know who can see your social media interactions. Some networks, like Twitter, are ‘open’ and they’re designed for networking and engaging with people you don’t necessarily know. Facebook and Snapchat are ‘closed’ and reserved for engaging with people you know personally.
Create strong passwords for all your accounts and set up 2-factor authentication on your recovery email accounts. MUO gives decent guidance on this.
Don’t share photos with anyone you don’t trust. Although Snapchat photos appear to ‘disappear’ they can be screen-grabbed and saved. They also exist for a time in Snapchat’s servers and they can be retrieved by the police.

Social media and your career

Matt Eyre helps recruit people into Co-op Digital. He shared his tips on how to use social media to find your first, or your next, job. His advice is to:

Have different accounts for personal and professional purposes.
Check your privacy settings on all accounts.
Keep your professional profiles up-to-date.
Be proactive if you’re interested in working at a particular place. Get in touch with them.

How you present yourself online

Choosing how we present ourselves by controlling what we share is really important. It’s about creating an image of ourselves to people we might not have met which can be useful when we’re looking for new jobs. Catherine Storey is our Social media content planning manager at Co-op Digital. She landed her last few jobs, including this one, through her careful management of personal social media accounts.

Here are her tips:

Check who can see which parts of your profile on every social media account you have. It’s ok to show you have a social life, but make sure you know who can see it and the impression you might leave them with.
Your Twitter handle is searchable and it says a lot about you. It’s an online representation of you, your ‘digital name’ if you like. Where possible, your digital name should be the same across each social network which helps build your online identity.
Choose what you engage with carefully. When you tweet; update your status; post a photo; send a video, you expect people to see these things and it’s easy to be mindful of your output. However, when you ‘like’ a tweet, a photo or a status or leave a comment, your engagement is more passive and it’s easier to overlook the fact that these things can reflect on you too.

Aaron’s story

To finish, Aaron Omotosho talked about his (paid) work experience at Co-op Digital. Aaron spoke about the time he spent with product and service teams within Co-op Digital and his time after this completing a coding course at Northcoders. We also heard from Jonny Rathbone from Northcoders who spoke encouragingly about the opportunities out there for young people in the digital sector.

We hope to hold more events like this in the future. It’s all part of our work to encourage a thriving tech sector in the north-west.

Ian Ferguson
Community manager

Responding faster on social media

November 30, 2017November 30, 2017

The Social team has received over 580,000 social media interactions already this year. That’s over 580,000 comments and messages from colleagues, members and customers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and across our blogs. Of course, we want to respond as swiftly as possible, and we’ve been making our processes more efficient to help us to do just that.

How it used to work

For around 2 years, we’ve used a system called Sprinklr to bring all social media interactions together into one inbox. From there, the Social team (that’s us here in Co-op Digital) would review each interaction, answer the ones we could, and assign the ones we couldn’t to the relevant customer care team in different parts of the business.

However, we noticed that around 40% of questions and comments need a response from an expert in one of our customer care teams. Because that’s such a large chunk, manually sifting and sorting them took up a significant amount of time. To be more efficient, we decided to look at what we could do within Sprinklr to automatically assign interactions to the appropriate team.

Writing rules to speed things up

By August, we’d written a set of rules for the Sprinklr ‘rules engine’ with a series of yes/no scenarios. The sorting process sends each interaction down a flowchart and automatically assigns the interaction to the right team.

Here’s an idea of what the yes/no scenarios look like. But it’s a huge and sprawling live rules engine and it’s difficult to take a screenshot of the entire thing.

The rules we’ve written work out:

Who someone is, eg, a customer, member or colleague, an online influencer or a journalist.
Which part of the business their interaction relates to.

From this information, we decide how best to respond.

We’re seeing positive results

So far, the new process has meant we:

respond 30 minutes sooner, on average
respond within an hour, 70% of the time, during working hours. (This is fairly good because a 2015 survey found that 53% of UK tweeters expect a response within 1 hour).
are able to identify when an interaction has come from a Co-op member, and if it has, we respond to them within 28 minutes, on average

But it’s a work in progress

After the change, our Food customer care team noticed their response times were actually slightly slower. We realised this is largely because when people get in touch with a customer care team, they’ll say one thing over several messages.

Previously, we would have forwarded just one of the messages to the Food customer care team and they’d have been able to see the whole conversation. Now however, each message and image automatically ends up in the customer care team’s inbox meaning we’ve basically just passed the filtering on to them to do. In response, we’re working on new ways of displaying interactions in Sprinklr to speed up Food customer care’s responses.

We want to be faster still

We’re pleased with the improvements we’ve made but things can still be better. Faster. We’re hoping to help Food customer relations respond to 95% of the messages assigned to them within 2 hours during working hours. That’s our next goal.

We’ll continue to iterate as we learn more about what colleagues, customers and members need from us on social media.

Jordan McDowell
Senior Social Media Manager

Helping member pioneers and local causes get to grips with social

July 4, 2017May 24, 2018Co-op1 Comment

The Social team has been running online tutorials to help colleagues, new member pioneers and people from local causes use social media to create a community.

You can join our tutorial about Facebook communities on Thursday 6 July from 5pm.

Working together

Part of a member pioneer’s role is to get people talking about what matters most in their local community through meetings and events, and to encourage people to volunteer and co-operate on worthwhile causes.

My role as part of the Social Media team has some similarities. Our team’s purpose is to spread the word and encourage people to engage with their Co-op, but we do it online rather than down the local community centre. It made sense that our team shared some of our online community management skills with the new member pioneers. We wanted to help them promote their work and talk about what being a co-operative means in a wider sense.

Figuring out how we could help

The Social Media team met our member pioneers at their induction day to get a feel for how we could help them. We wanted to speak to them to find out their level of knowledge around social media before we spent time and money on designing training materials we thought they might need.

The things they wanted to know more about were:

which social channel is the right one for them or their cause
how to set up a new Twitter account
how to find people in their community on Twitter and who to follow
what ‘trending’ means
what type of thing they should tweet
what a hashtag is and how to use one
how to get started with local PR

Live broadcast tutorials

When we knew where member pioneers needed support, we could put together tutorials to help. We’ve been hosting them on YouTube Live then making them available on YouTube for anyone who missed out.

We broadcast our first tutorial ‘Getting started on Twitter’ a few weeks ago and welcomed around 30 live viewers including colleagues, member pioneers and people from local causes. People could ask us questions in the live chat as we were going along and we’ve had over 400 views of the recording too.

Our second stream was about ‘Creating content to share with your community’. In it, our social media content planning manager, Cat Storey, talked about what makes good content and how to present it.

You can watch these videos on our YouTube playlist and give us feedback to help us improve.

Join our social community of practice

We’d like to keep the conversation about effective ways to engage with people going. We listened to member pioneers and set up a Facebook group where we can chat and share advice and ideas. If you’re a member pioneer or work closely with one of our local causes, join our social community on Facebook. Hear from you soon.

Scott Bennett
Social media community manager

Join our tutorial about Facebook communities on Thursday 6 July from 5pm.

How listening to social media could influence decision making

March 30, 20171 Comment

Social media is an important space for us to learn more about how our online communities feel about us. By listening to, and sometimes joining in with, conversations about the Co-op we can glean valuable insights about what matters most to our members and customers. And that’s really important in a cooperative.

Talking policy

The Social Media team has begun working with our Food Policy team to group online mentions into related topics. The idea behind the collaboration is that we’ll make more informed policy decisions the more we listen.

We’ve started splitting mentions into the different areas of policy. They are:

Agriculture – anything to do with farming and how crops and animals are raised and looked after
Diet and health – this one’s self-explanatory!
Sustainability – mentions about any impact on the environment
Ethical trade – things to do with workers’ rights
Safety and legislation with Co-op or anyone affiliated with us

Listening in

Using a social media listening tool called Brandwatch, we’re picking up instances when people are talking about Co-op and our grocery competitors. Brandwatch crawls over 80 million sources, including social media and newspaper websites, looking for mentions based on a set of rules we’ve written called a Boolean query.

For example, the query that helps us pick up conversations and content related to ethical trade about Co-op and our competitors, reads like this:

Writing rules similar to this one for each of the policy topics has helped us pick up 56,378 mentions since the new year. That figure includes things about our competitors as well as things about our own grocery business.

We’re listening. Now we can start learning

We’ve begun to analyse the data. During #FairtradeFortnight in March, Co-op announced our commitment to 100% Fairtrade cocoa in all own brand products from May 2017. The announcement was a big deal and we saw it dominate online conversation related to ethical trade during those weeks. In fact, Co-op represented 50% of the conversation while our grocery competitors combined made up the other 50%.

The orange line represents daily conversation about Co-op and ethical trade so far in 2017. The other lines represent conversation about our competitors and ethical trade. This shows that when it comes to mentions related to ethical stuff which is part of our co-op difference, we really dominate.

It’s really useful to know how people are talking about us and when we come up in conversations. It means we can shape our approach to content and even future policy so we can meet our customer and members needs better.

Genuine feels

We’re going to start looking at sentiment on social so we can categorise mentions as being positive, negative or neutral. Sentiment software, including Brandwatch, can struggle to recognise sarcasm or slang and that means a user’s genuine feelings might not be picked up. We’re looking at ways to stop sentiments being categorised incorrectly so we can feel more confident in the results.

Where we’re going with it

We’re also going to be working with the data science team to see if there’s a correlation between membership recruitment or membership card transactions and spikes in conversation across social channels.

The more we listen, the more we’ll learn. The more we learn, the better the decisions we’ll make for our members and customers.

You can follow Co-op Digital on Twitter and add to the conversation. We’re listening!

Sophie Newton
Social media community manager

The importance of online communities in a co-operative

January 23, 2017May 24, 2018Co-op1 Comment

Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, a day for social media community managers across the world to share our experiences with our community of practice. Today seems like a good day to introduce ourselves and explain what community managers do at the Co-op. Here we are: Catherine Storey, Ian Ferguson, Jordan Mcdowell, Scott Bennett and Sophie Newton.

Managing Co-op communities

Let’s start with the ‘community’ part. Community is at the heart of Co-op and we talk about it often. Co-op members choose a cause in their local community and we give that chosen cause 1% of whatever a member spends on our own-brand products. We often think of communities as groups of people doing a similar thing or sharing an interest around where we live, but many of us are part of online communities too. If you use Twitter, Instagram, write blog posts or join a Facebook group, you’re engaged in some way in an online community, formed around common interests.

The ‘manager’ part of the role title comes from how we work with online communities. Our communities are generally made up of 3 types of people: colleagues from across the business, members and customers. We’re responsible for finding, nurturing and listening to the online communities that are speaking about Co-op products, services and the ways we work. By asking the right questions, listening to and collating community feedback we inform business decisions.

Talk to us. We’re listening

Listening to online communities is an important thing for all businesses, but, as a co-operative it’s essential that we give our members a voice and they have a say in how we’re run.

Our hashtag #shapeourcoop has been a really useful way of talking and listening to members and customers before feeding back to decision makers. During the AGM in May we took questions from our Twitter community and Richard Pennycook our Chief Executive; Allan Leighton, Chair of the Group Board and Nick Crofts, President of the Members Council answered them in real time.

It’s noisy out there!

In 2016 over 280,500 tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram posts and other social media posts were sent direct to our social channels. There were over 2 million mentions of our Food business on social media overall. So, there’s a lot of chatter to listen to and engage with.

We’ve created new conversations across social platforms. Our #TwitterTeaParty inspired online communities with ideas for mother’s day celebrations. We trended internationally for 12 hours, had 2010 mentions directed at our channels and made 56 million impressions. We also had a lot of tea and cake.

More recently at Christmas time we were involved in #ReverseAdvent, an existing trend on social media. We provided ‘packs’ (goody bags) to hundreds of people, helping them give back to their local communities. The hashtag was seen on social media over 77 million times during advent.

What we’re working on now

At the moment we’re working out ways we can have meaningful conversations with members and non-members about things that really matter to them. Once we find out, we can figure out if there’s a way that Co-op can help champion them. In the past this has included conversations about Co-op’s Ethical Framework, tackling loneliness and social isolation with British Red Cross and we have lots more coming up.

Don’t just watch this space – get involved!

You can join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and follow The Co-op blogs.

Sophie Newton
Social Media Community Manager

New Membership and social media

October 12, 2016October 14, 20162 Comments

Just like our Membership contact centre, our social media community management team have been busier than usual with the launch of our new membership. We’ve been helping thousands of members and customers understand more about it since it launched on 21st September.

Our team are based in Manchester at 1 Angel Square and between us work 365 days a year (yes, Christmas day too) and have around 20,000 social conversations with members, customers, and colleagues each month. We’re not alone though, colleagues in our Food and Insurance customer service teams help us out too.

Membership launch day saw our usual social inbox traffic increase by 80%, with members sharing which local cause they’d selected to receive their 1% with us. They were also asking us questions about how it all works.

The main topics of conversation we’ve been having with members, and the answers to their questions, are:

How do I nominate an alternate Co-op cause, to receive my 1%?

Our colleagues chose their community’s 3 Co-op causes for launch, but we’ll be asking members for their nominations on our next round of causes, very soon.

Where is my card and does my old card work in the interim?

All cards are being posted to members currently and will be with members by mid-October. Old cards work in the interim meaning the 5% and 1% is being earned already.

Does the 5% replace the dividend?

The 5% doesn’t replace the ‘divi’, membership points will still be accrued in the usual way on the total spend (not just Co-op branded products and services) and a ‘divi’ will be paid out again once our rebuild projects conclude in a couple of years.

How does the 5% and 1% work in independent co-operative society businesses?

The 5% and 1% can’t be earned on transactions with independent co-operative society businesses, but membership points still accrue. If that independent co-operative society makes an annual profit and pays a divi, it’ll be paid to members by us, on the independent society’s behalf.

I’ve been really excited by the level of intrigue among our members on social, members who perhaps hadn’t considered the Co-op as a different way of doing business before.

Members, like our colleagues, recognise something different is happening at the Co-op, and we’re just getting started.

Jordan McDowell
Senior Social Media Community Manager

The art of conversation generation

February 18, 2016February 18, 20164 Comments

The art of conversation is a difficult one to master, but as Community Managers at The Co-op, we’re responsible for predicting and evaluating the direction and volume of conversation across social media – in real time. In short, we help turn social conversation around our brand into an asset.

So when it came to Valentine’s Day this year, the objective was clear. Co-op Food were going after breakfast. After all, we are your local convenience store with all you need for the perfect breakfast in bed, from freshly baked croissants to award-winning Prosecco, or even just some (Fairtrade) tea bags for a morning brew! It made sense.

Food Marketing, PR and the commercial teams worked on their above-the-live proposition, looping in the support of Channel 4’s Fred Sirieix from #FirstDates, and we in the Social Media Community Management team set about generating the right conversation, at the right time!

We had two simple objectives: encourage users to share inspiration beforehand and then share in real-time on the big day. We choreographed a strategy in two phases. Firstly we hit key online influencers (who we already know and love) with a surprise through the post – Truly Irresistible croissants, coffee, Valentine’s chocolate and some Hazelnut spread for a truly indulgent breakfast in bed. All this, ahead of the big day, as a taster for them and their audiences. This acted as a catalyst with the influencer community sharing their breakfast ideas in the week running up to Valentine’s Day.

@CooperativeFood we had it on the beach after a morning surf! It was perfect thank you so much! #LoveAtFirstLight pic.twitter.com/gB33o9hlmt

— Rachel Louise Cox (@Rachelouise10) February 14, 2016

Then we targeted consumers with the next batch ensuring their #LoveAtFirstLight breakfast box arrived on Saturday 13^th, just in time for their Sunday morning treat where they gladly shared photos of their breakfast from bed, the beach and with their whole family too!

Co-op's valentine's conversation on 14th February (green) versus the grocery market's campaigns — Co-op’s valentine’s conversation on 14th February (green) versus the grocery market’s campaigns

Together these simple gestures helped Co-op Food become the #1 most talked about Valentine’s campaign within the UK grocery sector on Valentine’s morning. 20% of the day’s conversation was made up of our audiences sharing their breakfast in bed with us too. Our volume peaked at 11am and we then handed over the Valentine’s baton to the likes of Aldi, but our work as your local Co-op was done. We’d served breakfast in bed to the nation and it was delicious.

Find me on Twitter @jordanjmcdowell

Or contact me by email

Community Management and Content Collation

January 14, 20161 Comment

The Community Management team are responsible for engaging with content posted onto Group, Food, Insurance, Legal and Colleague social channels. Engaging directly with any responses, whether positive or negative, means we have a great insight into what our community is talking about.

This is why it’s vital we communicate with business units to have notice of what content is going out, giving us the opportunity to input suggestions based on current conversations with the community. Having this collected view of content being posted from all business units also helps us to ensure that we have the right amount of support to cover possible busy hours.

We’ve recently changed the process of content creation with certain BAUs, working with them in idea sessions and meeting regularly to go over upcoming content. These weekly meetings help us to also gain insight into what results the business units want to see. This could range from a post designed for the community to share or direct questions aimed to provoke conversation. Knowing this helps us to manage the conversation effectively and makes sure we have enough time to prepare responses and brief our team.

#NostalgiaFM

We were involved from an early stage during the production of #NostalgiaFM informed on all details that could affect our way of working, from how many posts were being promoted throughout the day, to the tone of voice the team were aiming for. Having this information helped us prepare brand responses that would engage the community as well as plan possible surprises and delights to send out on the day. Overall this helped us to successfully engage in 700 positive conversations.

At the end of 2015 we improved our content scheduling by using Trello and Outlook Calendar in a more efficient way. Each week we check in on what all BAUs have planned and input this information into a Trello board. Having this integrated with Outlook ensures the team all have the ability to check the weeks’ activity from the diary on their phone. This agile way of working is simple but effective and helps us access the information we need on the go.

Sophie Newton, Social Media Community Manager – @thatssonewt