FreshNetworks Blog

I saw a really useful set of research findings today from Universal McCann, the third wave of their research into the impact of social media. The research comes from a couple of months ago but is a fantastic digest based on a large respondent base.

The slide deck is below and is very detailed and worth going through, but I thought I’d pull out three highlights that resonate with our own experiences at FreshNetworks.

• The research highlights the power and continuing rise of the Asian social media market. China has more bloggers than the US and Western Europe combined and across the region social media growth is huge. I’ve seen this for a number of years, often investigating the Asian market (especially South Korea, China and Japan) for clients wanting to know what the next thing to hit the Western Europe might be.
• Video is the fastest growing reported area with significant growth in penetration across all regions. We see this every day - a growth in the use of video on sites and of making video portable and shareable. I know that the BBC in the UK has seen a significant rise in the viewing of video in its news site since it started embedding video rather than linking to it.
• There is a measurable impact of social media on brand reputation. The research shows that 34% of people post opinions (positive or negative) about brands and that 36% feel more positive about brands that have a blog. This is an interesting finding, our recent post on brand blogging talked about how brands might get this right, this research underlines the importance of getting it right.

The slide deck below covers the full detail of the research findings and I really think it is worth your while reading it. It’s particularly useful for looking at how different regions and countries are developing in different ways.

Some more reading

• Report: Like it or not, number of bloggers growing rapidly
• UK Social Network User, Ad Spend Numbers Keep Growing
• Firms ‘miss’ social site success
• YouTube most popular network site
• Summer Social-Network Traffic Still Sizzling, but Down from ‘07

I’ve spent the day talking about online communities. At the WOM UK Espresso briefing this morning and then with a client until now. So returning to my desk it was great to see updates of two new online communities that have launched. One for US brokers, Charles Schwab, and the other for UK high street retailer, New Look.

For Charles Schwab, the online community is a benefit to its active clients. It has created Schwab Trading Community for it’s active trading clients to, reportedly, do four things:

1. Participate in timely discussions on both short and long-term investing topics
2. Swap information, ideas and trading experiences
3. Connect with other traders to make trading more fun by learning from each other
4. Gain access to Schwab and third party trading experts both informally and via a series of blogs, tutorials and live webinars

The New Look community is different. MyLook, as the community is called, will be for a select group of customers to help with business issues. As they say:

MyLook allows customers to share their views, suggest improvements to the brand and give opinions on the latest trends through surveys and forums on the site.

The insights gained will be presented to the board to shape the brand’s direction and strategy.

These two communities highlight well the very different purposes brands can use communities for and the different ways in which they then execute their plans.

• Charles Schwab is an example of a community that rewards loyal and regular customers - providing services that would be of use to them while extending their brand experience and building advocacy and word of mouth for the brand.
• New Look is an example of an online research community, it is private and invite-only. Building a community of customers to test new business ideas and to get feedback.

Whilst these are both online communities they are very different, they will probably use very different features, be attracting different types of people and be managed in different ways.

They are, of course, aimed at different types of people from brands in very different sectors. For me that just shows how online communities can be used by a wide range of brands to reach a wide range of people.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
• Charles Schwab launches online community for active traders
• Charles Schwab Launches Virtual Community for Active Traders
• New Look to use online club to shape business

For the last few days I’ve been privy to an interesting  example of how not to use social networks for marketing. It all started when somebody I don’t know (let’s call him John) asked to be my friend on Facebook.

I don’t know John and have never known John. It became clear that we were both members of a couple of groups and that was, I assumed, where he had got my details from. I have a fairly tight group of friends on Facebook and use it mainly to keep in touch with people I know and don’t get to see as often as I like. So I haven’t accepted his invite. I did look at his profile though and the very day he asked me to be his friend he also befriended almost 200 other people.

People are popular, but often not all at the same time like this so I wanted to find out why.

As I checked back at John’s profile, signs came with his changing statuses. First was one telling us that his new book was out in a few months and we should call his PA to reserve a copy. Next came an update about a radio interview he was doing and then came one about an event.

It may be a coincidence but it seemed as though John had found people with interests aligned with his new book and asked them to be his friend so that he could constantly market his new book through their feeds.

Clever you might think and there are lots of people (myself included) who feed their blog posts and other items through Facebook. The problem came in John’s approach to adding friends.

Over the last couple of days posts have appeared on his wall saying things like

Thanks for the ad. Who are you?

This wasn’t just spam. John is a real person who has found people with similar interests to him and asked to befriend them. This happens all the time. That John was trying to use this for marketing just highlights the complexities of using Facebook for this.

Facebook is a very personal space. It’s the place I go to to find out about my friends, post my photos and read my messages. This can be a very difficult context for brands, or anybody trying to market a product, to enter. You are interrupting a user’s experience and need to do it sensibly and sensitively. Whilst some people will be happy to receive your updates to their news-feed, others will see this as an intrusion.

Of course dealing with this is easy. Just don’t befriend them. From the marketers perspective this makes it difficult to control who you can get your message to.

Some more reading

• Facebook Marketing
• The Facebook Platform is Biased Toward “Fun” Apps
• Three Reasons To Become Friends With FriendFeed
• Social Networking - Go Where the Fish Are!

I found the Coca-Cola Conversations blog for the first time today, reading a post about how Coca-Cola first sponsored the Olympics games 80 years ago today. The blog is written by Phil Mooney, the “historian/archivest” of Coca-Cola, with the aim of

sharing information on a wide variety of topics, ranging from brand history to the value of collectibles

The blog asks people to comment and enter into a dialogue, and there is some exchange there. But reading this blog reminded me that corporate blogs, and indeed social media, can be used in very different ways by different organisations. This blog isn’t about new product developments or service advice; it’s about the history and heritage of the brand. And it seems to serve it’s purpose very well.

There are a few things that seem to make for a successful corporate blog:

1. A named and dedicated (main) contributor - when you are using social media as an organisation it’s important that you enter into the social and personal nature of the medium. The blog shouldn’t be from a brand because a brand can’t write. People want to know who is writing what they are reading - they will build a bond with them as they read more and more of their posts and so a face and a name are critical
2. Regular updating - companies develop and change quickly, and a consumer’s experience with your product will also be regular. The nature of social media encourages regular engagement and people expect this. It’s critical that you update your blog regularly. There is nothing worse than going to a brand’s blog and finding the last post was a few days or a few weeks ago.
3. Find ways to bring your consumers inside the business - this is something I think Coca-Cola Conversations does well. Corporate blogs should provide a way for their readers to feel more like insiders in the business. You should learn things that are not available elsewhere and as a community of readers feel that you are getting exclusive information as well as learning more about the organisation. This is why the brand history and heritage aspect of the blog work really well - you can find out more about Coca-Cola and feel like a true insider by reading the blog.

Each of these are important, but I think the latter is most important in terms of building engagement through the blog. Whilst the content that you post might be interesting and you may be doing it on a regular basis, creating an environment where people feel that they are insiders by reading the blog will have real benefits. People will want to come back and read more because the more they know about the brand and organisation the more they want to know more. They’ll also feel more comfortable commenting because you are encouraging and creating an atmosphere of sharing and discovering.

Of course creating this atmosphere is not easy. Coca-Cola Conversations does it well, as do other brands, and some of the lessons from this exercise would be good for others to apply. Perhaps the first stage is to find the one thing you can truly engage people on and that you can write regularly about. Isolate this and you have the beginnings of a real corporate blogging and social media strategy.

Some more reading

• 35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action
• Should My CEO Have a Ghost-Written Blog?
• Why I Love Corporate Blogs
• Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures
• Is Social Networking and Blogging Bad for Business?

I really enoyed a post by Jim Tobin at Ignite Social Media about where social media sits in an organisation. his comments and experiences mirror very much ours at FreshNetworks. For different organisations social media sits in different places. It may be marketing, corporate communications, PR, product or proposition developers, a research team… the list can be endless.

Whilst it is true that for most organisations marketing and comms departments tend to be thinking about social media, you find that other departments are too. And some of these departments are thinking about social media in new and innovative ways.

Jim Tobin lists five areas where social media sits in his experience:

Brand managers can now use social media as an integral part of marketing campaigns.  I lead with brand managers here because getting the right social media marketing plan developed and executed is an art-one that will certainly impact brand perception.

Product developers can use social media for consumer intelligence.  The idea that you have to spend tens of thousands to get limited information from focus groups is becoming outmoded.

Public relations can look at the messages that they send and figure out how they can make them a) more interesting and b) more easily digested by the blogosphere and the networks.  Typically (a) is harder than (b) for many companies.

Customer service should be using social media to decrease call volume and increase customer satisfaction.  Paying $35 per phone call to answer the same types of questions thousands of times isn’t helping anyone.

Human resources can be using social media to convey what working at the company is all about, and they should certainly be using it to go find candidates with particular backgrounds.

This is not dissimilar to our own experiences although I would add a couple of other areas:

• Research or insight teams make use of social media to monitor or probe customer opinions, watch how their brand and their competitors are being discussed, understand more about customer lives and habits and even ask specific questions. This can either be done passively (observing what others are saying in social media) but is much more effective if done actively, with organisations setting up their own online research communities.
• Senior managers should be using social media as a way of them connecting directly with consumers. Too often in organisations the traditional approach has seen customers sitting outside the organisation. They may not be actually engage directly with the organisation - rather they will buy the product through an intermediary and any research or other contact will be done through a third party. Social media makes it easier for the whole business to engage directly with customers.

Where social media sits probably depends on the current business or strategy needs of an organisation. In truth all firms could benefit from effective use of social media across each of these places (and probably even more). Where social media will sit will depend upon what their need is now. Is it reducing customer service costs or finding out more about how their customers discuss their brand? If is about conveying a corporate image or getting insight into product development?

Too often people can automatically think of social media as a marketing tool. It is undoubtedly effective as this. But it can be so much more. It is really about using new ways of communicating and new ways of sharing and working together to solve business problems. Which problems these are and where social media sits will depend on the business. It might be all of these places, some of them, or just one. In many cases it probably should be more than it is.

Some more reading

• Where does Social Media live in the organization?
• New Communication Theory and the New Roles for the New World of Marketing
• Social Media 101: How to Get Your Business Involved
• Who should take charge of Social Media?
• Social Media is a communications channel and not a marketing tactic
• The Five Questions Companies Ask About Social Media
• The statesman, the lawyer and the marketer

There has been a lot written this last week about the Deloitte report into online communities (the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study), in particular driven by a Wall Street Journal blog entry discussing how online communities fail. I wrote about this on our blog (here) and that article was also republished by FutureLab and Experientia.

At FreshNetworks we build online communities for brands, we help clients with their strategy, technology and platform. I have to say that my experience of working with clients and of online communities jarred with some of the things the Wall Street Journal blog seemed to be suggesting as it’s analysis of the report. In particular the fact that so many communities were ‘failing’ and the cost cited. The latter figure was later clarified as a mistake (6% and not the initially reported 60% of firms studied had spent in excess of $1 million on their communities). The former has been clarified thanks to Francois Glossieaux at EmergencyMarketing.

The study included a large number of cases where the community had been running for less than a year - a relatively short period. Whilst we see and help clients to realise some direct benefits of having an online community they take time to build and to develop. This changes the analysis of the Deloitte report quite a bit. At FreshNetworks we take communities through a process from infancy to maturity. For different audiences, different brands and different communities this process takes differing amounts of time. One thing that is common, however, is that considerable effort (on the part of all parties) is needed to build the community to a stage where it looks mature.

I would venture that although a business or brand may see siginificant and tangible benefits of the community from the very early days, running an evaluation of a range of communities that are less than a year old may lead to perverse conclusions. Maybe it isn’t that many online communities fail, as the Wall Street Journal blog suggested, but that many online communities are in their infancy. This is a conclusion I could relate to.

Online communities can have an impact on the business from the beginning, especially those built by brands are designed with specific business objectives in mind. But any longer-term evaluation of success really needs to allow for these communities to develop and mature and then take place.

I would be interested in any data that judges ROI or success of online communities against the stage of development for the particular community. This more detailed and segmented approach to success would have greater insights for those of use who build and manage online communities and advise clients on how best to engage with their consumers or stakeholders in this way.

Some more reading

• Online community effect proves tricky to pin down, claims survey
• Social Networking in the Enterprise
• Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds
• Online Community Numbers that Don’t Add Up
• Why (most) online communities fail
• Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds
• Some Q&A; on virtual private communities

I read in today’s Financial Times how the New York Times has struck a deal with LinkedIn. This is just a further example of the New York Times becoming more social (see our previous post here), and for the FT this is a sign of a significant change in the traditional media industry:

The deal, between the New York Times and LinkedIn, the largest online social network for professionals, is one of most far-reaching attempts yet by a traditional media company to tap into the booming popularity of online networks to super-charge its own services.

The deal means that personal profile data entered into LinkedIn will be used to make the content and advertising an individual sees on the New York Times site targeted to their industry, country, interests of profession.

This is a really interesting example for two reasons:

1. It shows how traditional media and publishing firms are having to adapt to the challenges and opportunities presented by social media and social networks. They need to change the way that they offer their content and be prepared for people wanting to interact with it in different ways. The barriers between the social and the editorial are blurring.
2. It highlights a significant benefit of social networks - the depth and richness of data that is gathered and kept by these sites. That the New York Times has struck a deal to use LinkedIn profile data to target advertising shows just how detailed this data is. With people adding and contributing to their social networks on an increasingly regular basis, the quality of this data will only heighten.

I expect us to see similar arrangements and innovations that build on these two reasons in the future. Social networks will seek to monetise the depth and quality of data they have gathered and traditional media and publishing firms are looking for new ways to target their readers. It would seem that a pairing of the two is a good solution and maybe the New York Times and LinkedIn will show us how good it could be.

Some more reading

• New York Times to offer targeted stories to LinkedIn users
• LinkedIn And New York Times Partnership
• New York Times, LinkedIn Enter Content Partnership
• Targeted ‘Times’ articles coming to LinkedIn
• Study reveals the mainstream media should link out more

I read a good post from LouisGray about the social rules of social networks. Who do you follow and why? Who don’t you follow and why not?

The online etiquette of social networks and online communities is an interesting and emerging area, and one that tools such as OpenSocial will only influence. For instance, I have profiles on a range of sites, from LinkedIn and Facebook, to Twitter and FriendFeed, to niche industry social networks and ones of people with similar interests to me. I often have different friends on each of these and in fact probably use each one for very different reasons.

These reasons are worth investigating. Some people choose to become friends with only their close circle of real-world friends, or conversely may accept every friend request they get. As LouisGray points out:

Suddenly, the issue of friending became less about wanting to actually follow real friends, or peers, and instead, became an arms race - to get the most followers, to follow the most people, to rise up a leaderboard, or feel some kind of achievement because you could claim a friend as a household name.

So whether you have your close friends, your wider friendship group, or as many friends as you can lay your hands on, you have a set of social media manners that define who you invite when.

Some people talk about having social network friends. I think this is a misnomer - you don’t have social network friends, but rather have Facebook friends, LinkedIn friends, Twitter friends and so forth. Not everybody I follow on Twitter are friends on LinkedIn, and I probably wouldn’t one some LinkedIn connections to follow me on Facebook.

Social media manners are actually quite advanced and getting more so as people adopt more networks and communities. I have decided that I want to use Facebook for certain purposes and so invite appropriate people; LinkedIn I’ve decided is for other purposes and so invite a different mix of people. The distinction isn’t clear-cut with a lot of overlap, so these friendship groups become blurred.

I would imagine that everybody has slightly different groups of friends on each different social network or online community they are a member of. I would also expect that their is blurring between them. Social networks are developing, rather than having distinct and distinguishing brand identities and so mean different things to different people. This means that the policy I have for using LinkedIn and making friends there is probably different to the one everybody else has.

This is where the real blurring is. Social networks are centred on me and so I decide how and why I use it. I develop my own social media manners and then develop and test these. The world of social media is changing and developing all the time, and we are helping to shape this by the mere fact of using them.

Some more reading

• You Are Not My Friend
• Choose Wisely: Scrutinizing Your Social Network Connections
• Facebook Facelift Targets Aging Users and New Competitors
• Experiments and Lessons Learned in Social Media - Part III
• The Intangible Risk and Opportunity: Your Network
• What are your tips for using your social networking profile for professional work?
• What are your tips for using your social networking profile for professional work?

Most big brands track what their customers (and also often what their non-customers) think. Brand tracking is a well established and developed market research tool that often feeds directly into performance metrics for the marketing department or the firm as a whole. Typically this brand tracker has been developed over a number of years and measures a small amount of quantitative factors, building a time-series data set that will let the firm show how the attitude towards its brand has changed (or stayed the same) over a period of time.

Brand trackers are incredibly useful. They allow you to identify if and when there is a change in attitudes towards your brand. Are people less trusting of your brand now than they were previously? Do they have a more positive attitude towards you than they did six months ago? A regular and well managed brand tracker can identify these changes in customer and consumer attitude and can highlight these to brands.

What many brand trackers can’t tell you, however, is why or how these changes happen.

Quantitative data, such as brand tracking, is best when accompanied by qualitative data. The quantitative tells you the what and the when; the qualitative tells you the why and the how. One way that you can understand the why and the how of changes in brand perception is to run focus groups. We’ve spoken about the limitations of focus groups before, and the danger with using these in this case is that you investigate a change after it has happen. You notice in the Q2 brand tracker that positive attitudes towards your brand are down on the same period last year and so you launch some focus groups to investigate why. But these groups happen many months after consumers attitudes have change and so real understanding is difficult to gain.

This is where online research communities can really come into their own. They offer real-time qualitative research. You can watch how customers discuss and respond to your brand and detect changes of opinion as they happen. Overlaying this with the quantitative data from a brand tracker will let you see when attitudes change and immediately look at the qualitative conversations and insight to understand why.

If most brands currently dow some form of qualitative brand tracking, I would expect more and more of them to pair this with the kind of real-time qualitative insight you can gain from online research communities. To date brands have had to second guess why attitudes have changed, with online research communities they can really know.

Some more reading

• What do consumers think about your logo?
• How to create brand authenticity
• Brand and Branding - A Fundamental Difference
• one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies

A report in Business Week highlights the growing and increasingly large proportion of shopping in the UK. Online now accounts for 20p in every pound spent on shopping in the UK and the IMRG Capgemini E-Retail Sales Index reports that UK shoppers spent more than £26.5bn online in the first six months of 2008 alone. Online is big business for retail in the UK.

This statistic shows the power and growth of online as a transactional channel and with the current economic downturn reports suggest that even more people will go online to find the best value products. This change in shopping behaviour needs to be matched by a change in how retailers build their businesses and also a change in how they use online.

Shoppers use the online channel for two purposes - to get information or to purchase product. If 20% of retail spend involves the latter I would expect an even higher proportion of retail spend to begin with research online. This means that companies who will benefit from this shift in online shopping need to prepare to cater for this growing online traffic.

We’ve written before about the power of reviews on ecommerce site. 83% of consumers say that an online review would influence their purchase decision, and 61% would specifically hunt down such reviews online before making a purchase. With more people going online to shop, the importance of reviews is growing. And with most consumers likely to visit a brand’s own website first when they’re looking for information brands need to be ready to provide this information themselves.

So shopping online needs to drive retailers to provide a greater amount and greater depth of content. Reviews from other users and shoppers, information about the product and services for sale and even a place to get advice before purchasing. To capitalise upon this shift towards online shopping, retailers need to move beyond just providing a place for transactions, a directory online of products online. They need to offer a true and distinct online shopping experience, including reviews, insider information and online communities where shoppers can get information and share ideas.

The battle for customers is growing online. Those with the best and most developed online strategies will be those who succeed.

Some more reading

• U.K. Online Shopping Up 38% from Last Year
• UK internet shopping on the rise
• Online sales boom as shoppers desert high street
• Huge Surge In Online Shopping
• Revolution in store as online retail sales soar
• Consumers shun the high street for cheaper online shopping
• UK online spending continues to rise