FreshNetworks Blog

When people talk about new media, social media or Web 2.0, there is often one thing in common: user generated content (UGC). This is really what the essence growth of Web 2.0 is. Web sites are crammed full of videos, photos, reviews and articles written by users. This reflects a shift not only in the amount of time people are spending online (more), but also a change in the reason for going online. People no longer go just to read and find a piece of information; they go to contribute information, share ideas and interact with other users. Wikipedia has over seven million articles in 200 languages - all user generated content. YouTube has over 150,000 new videos uploaded every day. People want to contribute to the debate and we need to give them the opportunity to do this.

The internet has changed from being about individual users interacting with websites, to individual users interacting with each other through websites.

This change is massive and the opportunities it opens up for you are equally large. For brands it’s about getting rid of traditional marketing approaches and engaging customers in what you are doing - involve them and use the content and ideas they generate to help you.

One simple but effective way to start use UGC in your business is to get customers to rate products on your site and write reviews. Many firms are worried about this, but they really shouldn’t be. Businesses like Amazon have been using customer reviews on their main site for years, others like Expedia have a customer reviews site that sits separate to the ecommerce site (TripAdvisor in their case).

To get the use of UGC in this way right, there are a few simple rules to follow:

1. Be clear why people are reviewing - they should be doing it so that they can let other people know what they think about the product rather than it just being feedback to you on your brand.
2. Allow people just to give a rating and use a five point scale. People tend to be very positive, in fact the average score given to products when rated online is 4.3 out of five!
3. Allow people to post reviews in real-time. You can moderate them afterwards and letting them see that their post is live will be the reward they need for taking the time to write something.
4. Don’t fake reviews. Not only is this going to become illegal, there is also no need. I’ve heard of companies that fake positive reviews, and ones that fake negative reviews. There’s no need to do either, so don’t.

Pretty soon your reviews will become an integral part of your site. It stops being somewhere customers go to perform a transaction and starts being somewhere they go to interact. They spend more time on the site and research suggests will spend more money with you. Products with reviews generate a much higher conversion rate than those without. Now there’s a real benefit of UGC!

Next time we’ll build on this and look at a range of ways you can start to engage customers online.

Your devoted customers are your most active advocates. Positive experiences in the past have taught them to have high expectations of you - they expect a great experience and they’re devoted to you because they get what they expect. But just as these customers are you most active advocates, they can also be the easiest to disappoint and can quickly turn into detractors.

I like the chart that Andy Hanselman uses to describe this scenario as I think it quite simply helps you to categorise your customers.

Your devoted customers have high expectations and could need just a single poor experience to turn them from ‘devoted’ to ‘disappointed’. I had a similar experience last night. I’ve written before that for air travel I’m a fan of Virgin Atlantic (see post here). I’ve enjoyed their service a number of times and would have always had good experiences. My expectations are high. I’m a devoted customer. And this is true - I genuinely would choose them above other carriers on the same route and always recommend them to others.

Sadly last night I had a poor experience. Nothing too major just a collection of things (my inflight entertainment didn’t work and none of the cabin crew helping to fix it, poor food and not the drinks service I was hoping for…). None of these things in and of themselves is significant. But together they made my experience poor. And as I sat on the plane last night, I felt disappointed. My expectations were high but my experience poor.

So what can companies like Virgin Atlantic do when their devoted customers are disappointed? Well the key is to listen to them and show that they are listening. These customers still want to be positive advocates about the brand, but they need their confidence in the brand to return. This is where a mechanism to engage them constantly and to feedback to them becomes important (both when their experiences are good and bad). Things go wrong and people have bad experiences from time to time - but brands need to make sure they act quickly when they do.

I stumbled upon a post on Museum 2.0 that seemed apt given that I’ve not posted for a couple of days (too busy!) and that I’m about to go on holiday for a week (to Cuba). A great look at how much time different social media and Web 2.0 activities take (see the post here and the graphic below).

I’ve barely had time to update my twitter account this week, let along blog or ‘go nuts’. Time to make more time I think - but after Cuba!

Thanks to Outside Innovation for pointing me in the direction of a report by Matthew Lees, How Should you Manage Customer Communities? (see here)

As Lees points out, designing, deploying and then managing a customer community is a nascent science. It’s a new but burgeoning area of expertise in customer engagement and is seeing influences from marketing, consulting and market research. The people you have desiging and running a community are critical, and it’s not a role just anybody can do. They need to be good community managers and also have an ability to interact with and input to the core of the brand.

A good community manager acts as the glue between a customer community and the brand and makes sure that every party gets the most they possibly can out of the experience. It’s a tough role and one worth investing in.

The biggest question that I hear from people who are new to the use of social media is what the tools are that they can use and when should they use them. Today’s lesson starts to look at these and in particular will look at four types of tool, which get increasingly more complex: blogs, forums, social networks and online communities.

Blogs

A blog is a website that has regularly updated commentary - either on an individual’s life, a business, a sector or any subject. Many people think that it is just an online diary, but really it can be much more than that. Blogs are ways for one person or one team of person to regularly develop and communicate their opinions. They can connect with other blogs to start to form an exchange and to develop ideas with others.

For businesses, blogs can be a great way to get your message out. They are updated more often than websites typically are and can be thought of as a great alternative to the traditional newsletter mail out. Blogs, however, are about ongoing communication - so you need to update very regularly; they’re about collaboration - so it’s not just pushing a marketing message; and they’re personal - not corporate speak.

For an amusing take on blogs from the CommonCraft Show watch the video below.

Forums

Forums are a way for lots of people to discuss and contribute to an idea. If a blog is very much about the author (or authors), then a forum is about the ideas. Typically organised into topics (or threads) people post suggestions, answers or contributions which others can respond to or add to.

Forums are particularly good for groups of people with shared interests. HR professionals, doctors or entrepreneurs in a particular region would make great candidates for forums. Brands can use them to engage their customer base - with forums about their product, services or support functions. You might even think of replacing your customer service team with a moderated forum that answers queries. The key here is ‘moderated’ - too many forums have no activity on them, they need to be pertinent and well managed to survive.

Social Networks

Social networks are ways of connecting with people you know (and people they know) online - think Facebook, MySpace or Linkedin. They are about individuals, we say that they are about a ‘me’. It’s where you go to share things about your life with friends and to find things out about them: photos, stories, what you’re doing right now. You share all of these things with people through your profile.

For businesses, social networks are particularly useful if you want to track what a particular customer segment is saying and doing. Find out where they hang out online and then check in to see what they discuss and talk about. You might even find them discussing your brand. Of course, because social networks are based on individuals, it can be difficult to speak to engage people directly here without it seeming too much like you are forcing yourself and your brand on them, which is not the image you want to give.

Online communities

If social networks are about a ‘me’, then online communities are about an ‘us’. These are built around issues, themes, or even brands, and are about the common purpose of the community rather than an individual member. They’re great ways to engage customers or stakeholders and some big brands use them a lot. They can help with innovation and creating new ideas; with testing ideas and concepts or getting insight into what customers thing; and they really build advocacy and word of mouth.

Like forums, the success of an online community comes down to good management and moderation and a well planned set of activities or topics to discuss. You need a reason for people to take part - what do they get out of joining. This is where they differ from social networks, but also where they are more powerful. Social networks attract people because they want to meet friends and share information about them. Online communities are about sharing information for others.

And are they successful? Well you only have to look at Tripadvisor - and online community for travel and hotel recommendations. The site is owned by Expedia and is now the biggest source of traffic to their e-commerce site, and sees the highest conversions to sales. Impressive stuff.

We’ll be back next week with a look at User Generated Content (UGC).

Following up on our posts about what British Airways should have done during the T5 fiasco at Heathrow (see posts here and here), I notice today that American Airlines are doing what we advised BA to do.

Last Friday they quietly launched an online blog, AA Conversation, as a way to keep in touch with customers online. The blog only has a few entries so far and is basic. Its success needs to be judged on how it is used in the longer term but the first signs are very encouraging. It contains service update information and critically offers explanations for why delays and cancellations have happened.

This kind of medium is a great way to engage and inform passengers about what has happened. The blog also allows you to include more detail than you could in an announcement or a brief section on the existing website. It’s a great way to make sure that as much information as possible reaches the passengers online.

Keen users will follow the blog by RSS, others can just sign up for updates by email. Comments are encouraged and are flowing in.

One to watch - this could be managed badly and not used, or it could become a model of how airlines inform and engage with their passengers. Giving them information they need and allowing them the right of reply they want. This has to be better than the photocopied letter that BA handed out to people during the T5 fiasco. Let’s hope American Airways put in the time and effort to make this blog really work - that has to be a good development for all air travellers

This morning we spent some time with Robert East, Professor of Consumer Behaviour at Kingston University. His research focuses on word of mouth and brand loyalty and we spent the morning talking about how you can measure these things and in particular critiqued the Net Promoter Score as an approach to this.

One of the outcomes from the session was an initial set of five principals to bear in mind when trying to measure word of mouth. We’re going to be bouncing these around and building on them internally at FreshNetworks, but if you have any comments or can add to the debate let me know:

1. Don’t confuse word of mouth with satisfaction - only a small proportion of word of mouth is prompted by a satisfactory or dissatisfactory experience
2. Measuring word of mouth by the likelihood to talk (positively or negatively) about a brand misses the critical element - the impact the word of mouth has. A better measure is based around how people act when they receive word of mouth (positive or negative) - how this changes their propensity to purchase
3. Anybody can be an advocate and pass on positive word of mouth. It’s more important to activate the whole user base than to try to find a particularly segment of advocates
4. The world is just more positive than negative - that’s the way people think about things. So you should expect more positive word of mouth than negative
5. One size doesn’t fit all - people are just more likely to talk about some products than others. Recommendations are more important for a dentist than they are for a supermarket. So you can only compare brands at the category level; indeed a different measurement tool may be needed by category

I spoke about sharing some of our thoughts on how to go online as a set of lessons. We’re going to be feeding one or two lessons a week for the next couple of months as part of this, this first is below. We start by looking at how you should be communicating online - what’s good and what’s bad.

The Kaiser Edition has posted some interesting thoughts on the social media epidemic that seems to be infiltrating every aspect of marketing at the moment.

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The approach mirrors to some extent what we have been talking about here. If you want to ‘do’ online properly and ‘do’ social media properly then you need to be honest online. There is too often the temptation to try to control everything online as part of a consistent and traditional marketing message. This is a false construct - it tries to take old methods online and just put them online rather than taking advantage of the new things that you can do online.

Stop thinking “putting old methods of marketing online”; start thinking “new methods of marketing”

This can be scary but really it shouldn’t be. It’s easy. Social media provides a way for you to get up close and personal with people online in a way you never could before. Think how you would talk to somebody at a networking event or if you met them in a pub or cafe. That’s more like how you should be speaking online. Be open and honest and they will be the same back to you.

Don’t write as though you’re marketing. Write as though you’re speaking to somebody you know

This can take practice. The best I know is to sign up for twitter, you have 140 characters to convey a message. Just the practice of doing this is useful - even if you don’t have anybody to follow. Of course, you should feel free to follow me of course (Matt’s twitter account).

We’ll be back next time with a look at what social media tools are out there and what each is most useful for.

The UK Department of Innovation and Skills (DIUS) has recently released a White Paper on how it could and should invest in innovation (see here). This got me thinking about innovation and what it means.

The official government definition of innovation is “the successful exploitation of new ideas”. As with many definitions, this just throws up as many queries as it helps to solve. In particular the meaning of the word ‘new’ and why ’successful’ has to be in there. The former can be got round by saying it just has to be new in some way to the industry or organisation, or indeed that is could be a new application of an something older. It’s a bit of a fudge but let’s run with that. However, ’successful’ is less easily explained - whilst I can understand that the best innovations are successful, not all of them are. Success is often a subjective measure and may not be obvious for many years after the innovation has occurred. I’d rather leave this out.

A few years ago I ran a large survey across more than 700 London SMEs to try to get an understanding of what innovation was. The results were interesting, if not a little concerning. We approached a definition from three angles:

1. In isolation how would a business owner define innovation
2. What examples could they give of other innovations they have seen and been impressed by
3. Could they give an example of an innovation in their own business in the previous twelve months

The first question brought back the usual definitions. Words like ‘new’ and ‘different’ were matched with ‘idea’ and ‘technology’ in most definitions. The examples from other businesses, however, was more revealing. Every respondent gave an example that was both tangible (a definite product not service) and from a technology business - in fact most people mentioned the iPod. This was surprising to me and when we explored why people mentioned this it became clear that they associated innovation with something that was either “not an idea I could come up with” or was “a cool bit of kit that lets me do something I couldn’t before”. In both cases the assumption is that innovation is something people don’t do themselves.

For a cross-section of London’s most active SMEs this was worrying. And their own examples only underlined this concern. few were able to mention an innovation that they had done in the previous year and those that could again mentioned new products.

We decided to probe a little further to get beneath this and it was then that I understood more about what was going on. It wasn’t that none of these businesses were innovating - in fact some were highly innovative - but that they just didn’t see it as this. They saw innovation, with it’s definitions and theories, as something that didn’t involve them, whereas in fact it was what they were doing day in and day out. They thought they were just focusing on the bottom line and growing their business rather than on some ‘innovation’. Based on this we came up with our own definition to add to the mix: Doing things differently to make more money. It seemed to capture the mood nicely.

There was a great article in the New York Times over the weekend about how a car thief was caught thanks to social networking online (see article here).

The story starts in Calgary, Canada at Shaun Ironside’s dealership. It’s a busy Saturday and when a man Ironside recognises comes in and wants to test drive a car he just hands him the keys, safe in the knowledge that there is practically no fuel in the tank and he couldn’t get far. But the car doesn’t come back, it didn’t return for the whole day.

That evening Ironside posts on beyonda.ca, a Canadian online community for car enthusiasts, with the following:

10:28 p.m., March 26 Unfortunately I have to post this as one of my first posts my 1991 Skyline GT-R is officially STOLEN.

The post included photos and descriptions of the car (quite a unique Japanese import), and Ironside offered a cash reward for return of the car. Results came in quickly. The next day a forum moderator (JAYMEZ) saw the car when he was driving through Calgary. The first Ironside found out was when he checked the thread later in the day to see a post at the bottom:

4:19 p.m., MARCH 27 I FOUUUNNNDDDDD THEM =) And I have pictures Called the police and chased them, also talked to them.

A few moments later the photo (with the driver looking straight at the camera) appeared on the thread. The police were informed and the car returned - according to them the photo and evidence of the car’s movement, as recorded on the site, was “as solid evidence as you’ll ever find”.

If you want to read the full thread from beyond.ca, see here.