A great post last week from the NEXT web on why people participate in online communities (see post here). It’s an interesting read, bringing together various bits of thinking in this space.
What I like most is that the discussion makes us start before why users participate to just understanding their users. This is a process that some often overlook and to their peril.
Most important in this understanding of users is to acknowledge and accept that not everybody who uses your community will actively contribute. In a large public community we find that the 90:9:1 rule is quite a fair description of activity - for every 100 people on the community, 90 will just read, 9 will reply to other people’s posts and 1 will start a conversation. Of course the 90 people are critical for the others to take part and so must be there, but good community management can help to shift these balances and in private communities we see very different participation rates. That’s why we hate the word ‘lurker’ that some people often use to describe people like this; they’re participants in the community too, just less overt ones.
In this environment, understanding why those who will overtly contribute do so is critical. Great content and an empathetic community manager are critical, but the real reasons people particpate include:
The expectation that they will get something back that will be useful to them
The desire for increased personal recognition in a peer group
A sense of community and the willingness to solve something together
Building connections and networking
The sense of belonging to a group of peers
The desire to help others
This list is not necessarily complete but includes the main reasons that people will participate. When setting up a community it’s critical to evaluate how important these are and then to design your approach in a way that capitalises upon these desires.
Even with the best community manager and most impressive and interesting content, it is getting these member dynamics right that will really ensure success.
Next week I’m speaking at the SocialMediaInfluence conference in London on Measuring Influence and Audience online. It’s a tricky subject and looking around today I have been unable to find any examples of an approach which has been successfully and repeatedly applied.
The problem appears to be that whilst there are a whole range of metrics that we can measure in social media (see The Social Organisation blog for a fairly comprehensive list) but none of these truly gets to the crux of the problem. What we want to do is know is to measure the influence that a single blogger, commenter or video upload has. What is the value of a blog post praising Coca-Cola in terms that Coca-Cola could understand and measure. As many of our clients ask us, what’s the ROI of encouraging this kind of activity.
The answer is that it’s difficult to measure, not because we don’t have a range of metrics (we do) but because at the moment our understanding of what causes a particular post or a particular individual to be influential is limited. We can measure proxies, such as trackbacks, links to the site from other sites (and the number of links to the sites that link there). But these really only reflect an inherent influence that we still haven’t measured.
What we really want to know is how influential is everybody that is exposed to an piece of content, and how influential are all the people they influence. Of course calculating this number would be difficult if not impossible. And the information you need to gather would be huge. It really wouldn’t be worthwhile.
Which is why some more basic measure is needed. Take the sites like Dell’s Ideastorm and MyStarbucksIdea. These get peers to vote posts up or down depending how relevant they think they are. You can then migrate only the more popular posts to the front page or the top of the list. This kind of rough approach might be a crowd-sourced way of measuring influence. We know that the most popular posts are those that people in the community think the brand needs to listen to most. Perhaps this is the only measure of influence we need.
The RSA has just launched a new website and one of the new features are videos online of the great lectures they run in London. Earlier this year I went to see Clay Shirky talking about his book Here Comes Everybody, that was launched a few months ago. It’s great to see a video of this talk online here.
If you haven’t read Shirky’s new book I really recommend reading it. It takes a look at how groups are using the internet, from students and graduates in the UK forcing HSBC to reinstate their interest-free overdraft, to flash-mobs combating the secret police in Belarus, or businesses in Pisa taking on the Mafia together.
If you’d ever thought that twitter or flash mobs or Facebook groups had now purpose and no power then Shirky shows you how they do. How groups can organise each other online in a way that they couldn’t previously and how this can be used by them to further their aims.
In all of his examples, he shows how the Internet has meant that the imbalance of power between a small, well-organised core and a large dispersed society has been changed. A group of students could take on HSBC, businesses and customers in Pisa could take on the Mafia.
The book’s a good read, and thanks the the RSA’s new site you can see Shirky’s lecture earlier this year in London.
In case you don’t know them, Radiohead are one of the best bands to come out of the UK in the last 20 years. And they have embraced the internet with real vigour. Their last album, In Rainbows, was released online on a “pay-what-you-like” basis and in addition to selling 1.2 million copies this way, the album recently won a prestigious Best Album award in the UK.
To go with the album, they created a video-making competition. They asked for people to pick a track from the album and then create their own video to go with it. There are some cash rewards, but given the quality of the videos produced (and the time it must have taken to produce them) it’s clear that people are entering for the prestige and the desire to create and show their skills. To share their creations with other fans, or merely to show their support for their favourite band.
This is a fantastic way to increase engagement with and loyalty to the band. If you create a film, you know it’s going to be seen and voted on by other fans, but more importantly by the band. It’s also a way of allowing the fans to put their own stamp on a song (Radiohead’s music is particularly suited to this as each song can be interpreted in thousands of ways).
But what I really love about this marketing activity is that by generating loads of UGC videos it’s getting the songs out there and listened to by more and more people. I have just listened to one song three times - with a different video interpretation each time.
Measuring the ROI and value of social media activities is difficult and still in its infancy, but just the saving of the advertising costs needed to create this kind of exposure is huge.
Some examples
To see the quality and value of the amateur videos produced just look at the three below, all made by amateur fans as part of the online video-making competition.
It’s been a while since the last installment, so apologies for that. This time we’re going to look at a few principles for engaging people online.
Understand who you want to engage. The first stage is critical - know who you want to engage. This may be a certain type of consumer, your most loyal customers or maybe people you are targeting in the future. Do some work to understand these people, what makes them tick and what inspires them. What do they do online at the moment and where do they hang out? Get a real and full understanding of the people you want to engage so that you know how to approach them, what content and discussions are relevant to them, and where to find them.
Explore what’s in it for them. You’re engaging people and they’re engaging with you - it’s a two-way process. To make sure that you get the most out of people you need to make sure there is something in it for them. They may not be as enthusiastic to learn about your latest product as you think (or maybe just hope) they should be. Whatever you’re engaging them with, and however you’re doing it, make sure there really is something in it for them.
Create a space people feel comfortable in. Think of hosting a party or inviting friend over for a chat. You know that the party wouldn’t be good if the venue and atmosphere wasn’t right; or that the chat would be abrupt if the chairs were uncomfortable. Online it’s critical that you create a space that people feel comfortable in. If you are to truly engage with them you need to make sure you create a space they want to visit and then want to return to. Work on the previous two stages to get this right.
Be open and honest in the way you engage. Honesty is critical online. You need people to trust you and to do this in the online space it’s best to be clear and frank about who you are and what you’re doing. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not and don’t pretend you’re looking to do something you’re not. People will trust you more if you’re honest with them, and if you want this engagement to be most successful then you want them to be honest back.
Reward participation. Don’t reward with payment or free products, but reward by letting people know you care. They want to engage with you and will be even more motivated if you show them how this engagement is impacting you. Feedback to them any changes you make on the back of this engagement, let them inside the firm and make them a real part of the organisation. People want to help and want to feel a stronger link to a brand they love and so make the most of these feelings and use them to your advantage.
Whether you are engaging people through blogs, email newsletters, their social networks or your own online communities, these principles are critical. The online space is different to traditional means of engaging with or marketing too customers and so it’s critical that you take a new approach. Honesty really is the best policy.
Next time we’ll be looking at how you can make use of video and photos online as part of a social media strategy.
In the original article, Business Week marvelled how in a world where you could set up an account and be posting your ideas to the world in less than ten minutes, companies needed to stay on top of the rise in blogging. “Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out,” the article warned, so business should “Catch up…or catch you later.”
Revisit that article three years later, Business Week sees that they missed something they couldn’t predict. After all only a quarter of the US population even reads a blog once a month. Their spread has been less prolific than the growth of social networks which people now use to share information. New applications and sites appear each week targetting a specific or more wide-ranging part of the population. Only a few people actually want to blog; many more want to use these new tools to stay in touch, share content and forge relationships.
It is these social connectors, and not just blogs, that are having the biggest impact on companies.
Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It’s as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides.
As Business Week points out, this is worrying for companies - they worry about lack of control. But there is a significant upside to this proliferation of social connectors. Collaboration, the ability to work together and talk together about issues, being able to watch what people discuss and get direct feedback from customers. Social media and social networks are truly changing the way that companies behave, inside and outside. BT use wikis for all internal projects - allowing people across the business (and across the world) to work in the same space on a new piece of code, a new marketing strategy or a map of mobile stations. And it’s well reported that P&G uses online social networks and online communities to develop and to test new product concepts and designs.
The tools that companies have to make the most of social media are changing, and Business Week think that they are now the future. I have to agree. In part. I think there is a real value to blogging as part of the social media toolkit that a company employs. But it can’t exist in isolation and needs to be just one element of a strategy to make the most of the emerging and growing opportunities that social media offers.
There’s a catchily titled new law that comes into force on the 26th May and that could have big impacts for the way some brands behave online: the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. The regulations are wide-ranging and aim to target “sharp practice and aggressive selling tactics”; the impact they have on online marketeers, however, could be huge.
The law requires that people make it absolutely clear who they are working for, so brands that pose as customers to fake blogs, put overly positive reviews on Tripadvisor or secretly back online soap operas will all be affected. Using blogging and fake recommendations has become a lucrative new business stream for PR agencies, and the raft of blogs-gone-bad is possibly led by Edelman PR and Wal-Marting across the US. This law would make this kind of activity illegal, at least in the UK.
It’s clear that this law brings more consistency into marketing regulations - it is currently illegal in the UK to use product-placement in TV and Film, and this new law should help to mean that product placement online is either equally illegal or would need an obvious health warning. However, my concern is about the all-encompassing impact of this law. It’s true that brands should be dishonest online. If not because of the damage it could do to their consumers, but also because of the damage it will do to the brand. Social media and social networks are inherently open and trusting places - you are only successful online if you are open and honest about who you are and what you’re doing.
Perhaps some element of self-regulation would be better than making blogs like Wal-Mart’s illegal. In fact, when I was talking with Edelman’s Head of Social Media in Paris earlier this month they said that from their perspective the ‘uncovering’ of the blog was a huge success. We would, of course, expect them to say this. They’re in PR. But it’s true that the coverage created by the blog ended up far exceeding what they thought it would, and the monetary value of this coverage is huge.
It will be interesting to see how the law pans out, how the first applications impact brands, PR agencies and bloggers. But the behaviour it is trying to ensure - that people are honest online - is one I suspect would happen anyway by natural means. People trust honest people; and being honest online would always become the most successful and most popular wy of engaging customers. Even without the law.
Michael Wesch is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and leads the Digital Ethnography Working Group. He was trying to find a way to describe Web 2.0 for a paper that he was writing and found that words were not quite enough - instead he created this video. Showing us rather than telling us what Web 2.0 is.
I love this video, as much for the content as for the example it sets. It’s true that some things aren’t easily explained with words, or indeed that some people find it easier to convey things in pictures or actions than words. Being creative and open in the way you describe things or allowing people to be creative and open in the way they respond to your questions can yield quite insightful results.
I know from my experience working with consumer good companies that customers often can’t describe what they think. If you want to understand what they think about your new smoothie brand, for example, some might be able to describe it whilst others might want to choose pictures that appropriate, make a short film or even draw a picture. Allowing a research process that lets people respond in these different ways is important, or indeed having an iterative process. Get some people to make films, others to put up pictures and others to describe in words. Then see how the group responds to this stimulus.
As Professor Wesch showed, social media tools and sites like YouTube allow for this kind of more creative description and development of ideas to flourish.
I never wrote about Gordon Brown’s brief appearance at NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference yesterday. Possibly because his speech, whilst impressively appearing unscripted and containing a few jokes, was more of a rallying cry than anything of much substance. If you’re interested you can listen to his speech here.
This week saw Gordon Brown with an innovation of his own. I wrote a few weeks back about the Prime Minister’s Office using Twitter as an engagement tool, now they’re using YouTube with their own channel being used for Ask the PM. The concept is simple. Every week fellow Members of Parliament can ask the Prime Minister any questions they want. Now anybody can ask him questions. All you need to do is record your question, make it non-party political and then upload it to YouTube.
Currently questions are being taken until the end of June at which point the Prime Minister will post responses. This direct engagement with the public is an exciting development and a real way of using new technologies to do old things in new ways. Rather than having town hall meetings or others around the country where people can ask questions, take it online. By doing this you open up the opportunity for more people to ask you questions, not just those who are able to and have the inclination to go to a certain place at a certain time.
And from the looks of things, the Ask the PM scheme will also be making the most of social media and social networking tools. From the end of May (about halfway through the current question submission period), anybody will be allowed to vote for questions. This ‘comment and vote’ approach is one that we’ve seen a lot recently, from Dell’s Ideastorm to MyStarbucksIdea. It can be an effective way of engaging with many people at once. Not everybody is going to want to post a question, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a question to ask. By allowing them to vote for the questions and ideas they agree with you let their voice be heard. You can find the most popular questions from the ones people ask and then respond to them, knowing that these are the ones that matter most to people.
I’m excited by people experimenting with social media. Too many people don’t. If Ask the PM doesn’t work then no doubt it will be quietly shelved. But I suspect it will work - the concept is simple and using the best of old techniques (the question and answer session) with the best of new media.
For the final session of the day I attended a seminar on whether our educational institutions living up to the innovation demands of the 21st century. The end of the day is always a tricky session and a bizarrely-shaped room didn’t help matters, but I couldn’t help but feel we never got to the meat of an exciting and radical topic.
I have worked with a lot of education clients in my previous roles and have always been struck by how traditional the structure is. Just taking schools as an example, the pattern of a day is still pretty much the same as it was 100 years ago - pupils arrive, listen to a teacher or read a book, make notes and answer questions and leave. They all go to the same building, and I bet school days typically start and end at the same time the always did, with a bell marking the same number of breaks.
Now compare this with the experiences of a modern workplace. Companies and the environments they create have changed radically in the last 100 years. The same is not true of our education establishments, many of which pride themselves on offering the same level and type of education that they have done for tens or hundreds of years. I went to a university that was proud of just that!
It’s not that this doesn’t work, or that things should change for the sake of it. Rather that the education system is not making the most of the creativity tools and social media that we see in the business world and social enterprise.
In work that I have done in the past we have developed innovative structures for education. We know that a real barrier to education for those with low skill levels or on low incomes is having to travel to a school or college - they either can’t afford the time or money to get there or feel intimidated by being in an ‘institution’. Why not, then, take education to them? Build small and localised learning studios that people can attend. Link them together through the internet and social media to create small studios that truly feel part of a larger (if virtual) organisation. There are pockets of innovation like this but nothing substantial and sustained.
Instead we’re Building Schools for the Future. As one colleague in the education sector once said to me “We risk knocking down old Victorian buildings to just build a cleaner, shinier modern replica in their place.”
I think the education system isn’t making the most of tools to support innovation and it’s a pity the discussion didn’t get here today. Perhaps it was the end of day blues and the bizarre room. I know at least one of the panellists, Andy Powell the Chief Executive of the Edge Foundation is passionate about change in education and making it more appropriate to the needs of learners. Sadly an open and detailed debate on these issues too often never emerges.
