26th August 2008, 08:49 pm
I own quite a few books. They’re on bookcases as you walk into my flat, on a table in the corner of the living room, and some are still in boxes waiting to be unpacked. Today I got a new book and this one was free.
A few weeks ago, I accepted an invite on Facebook for I wouldn’t say no to a free book from Faber. The premise is that each month they will give away a few copies of a book (or books) to the first people to email them after they put up the details on Facebook. One evening I was working late, saw a Facebook update and emailed them. I wasn’t expecting anything until I was told today that I was getting a copy of Churchill’s Wizards sent to me this week. Great stuff.
Of course what Faber are doing here is using Facebook to spread word of mouth for their new releases, and using free product to seed discussions. I’m contributing to it here and in fact doing exactly what they want me to do by writing about it. I may even write about the book itself when it arrives and I read it - not sure it’s exactly my thing but I tend to read anything I have so looking forward to finding out something new and, with luck, being impressed.
A look at the product page shows them seeding conversations about other products - telling us about the new Paul Auster novel and giving us an extract. The page is succeeding in building a group of fans, possibly drawn by the free book offers, and then seeding them with content and ideas to take elsewhere.
A nice tactic in Facebook and a good way of starting and seeding product-based word of mouth. Of course Faber can still only use this as a medium through which to push their messging and alert people to new content and new product. It’s difficult to really engage people in Facebook, they rely on people like me to get the book and then, hopefully blog about it or spread the word through our other online and offline networks. They don’t know anything about me nor are they able to gather profiling data to market to me. They don’t provide means for me to talk with the other people who got the book and share ideas - possibly in an online reading group.
This is because, great as Facebook is, it really isn’t designed for this kind of engagement and interaction. For that you really need to build an online community or add community elements into your site, rather than capitalising upon the reach of social networks. You need to provide a space for these kind of conversations, amplifying the word of mouth and building ongoing advocacy, rather than achieving the valuable but potentially limited word of mouth buzz that you can achieve in a social network.
Of course, I’m chuffed that I’m getting a free book, so no complaints from me!
26th August 2008, 05:32 pm
Over the past few days we have posted five types of co-creation. From those which involve only the customer and their own product to those which don’t involve the brand at all. These types can be seen as on a spectrum of co-creation with the following characteristics and variables:
- Who controls the process - brand or customer?
- Who is involved - only customers or a range of external stakeholders?
- Who benefits - does the co-creation impact upon the customer’s personal experience or the broader experience of all customers?
- What is the legacy - does the co-creation impact upon the customer’s version of the product alone or does it change the ultimate design?
This allows us to understand the five main types of co-creation highlighted in the series:
This is a typology we will be working on at FreshNetworks, but is one we use to analyse and understand innovation and co-creation in the social media and online community sites we see and work on.
A full list of the case studies for the five types we have show are below:
26th August 2008, 04:54 pm
The previous examples we have looked at in this short series on co-creation have involved the brand as the primary instigator and driver of change and innovation. They may allow the user to customise the product they receive (mass customisation), customise the experience right up to the point of delivery (real-time self-service), innovate and co-create the way they experience the product (service redesign) or work on new product development (new product co-creation). The final stage in our spectrum sees the consumer have more of a driving influence and more responsibility. Rather then helping the brand to co-create the product they as a community are co-creating it for the brand: community product design.
There are a number of organisations who have made this kind of co-creation the very essence of their business model, and others who use it to solve particularly tricky problems or ones they just don’t have time to deal with right now.
Threadless is perhaps one of the most well-known of the former - an organisation who have built their business model on community product design. The concept is simple but effective. You can upload your T-shirt designs, the community votes on the designs and comments on them and every couple of weeks ten of the most popular designs are chosen and printed. You can then buy these t-shirts. The concept is simple and the execution effective. By involving the community fully in the product design process, and in fact letting them take the lead, Threadless is able to build loyalty for its designs and concepts and to some extent guarantee a market for the T-shirts it produces. A relatively high proportion of those who comment on or vote for a design may want to purchase it when it is printed.
This is a great example of allowing co-creation at the heart of your business model - letting the community take control of product design and develop products for and on behalf of themselves and others. Another example of community product design is for a firm to co-create in this way on just one specific problem or area. This is where online communities such as Innocentive come to the fore. They allow companies to ask the community to solve a specific problem or issue and reward them (in this case financially). Community product design is used in such cases to provide extra support and input either when internal resources don’t have the time or the ability to solve the problem.
Customer product design is a very deep level of co-creation. Unlike the other examples we looked at in this series, it fully delegates responsibility for an area of business to a community. These may or may not be customers, more important is that they are people who can work together to solve the problem in hand. To embark upon such a deep level of co-creation requires a brand to change and adapt its internal processes but also its ways of interacting with external stakeholders and the wider community. Bringing them inside the brand is a big step but one that can both bring new ideas and be an effective way of innovating. As somebody once said to me: “the cleverest people don’t work for you”.
