FreshNetworks Blog

The Co-operative has a long history of building sustainable consumer engagement in the UK. Long before Tesco or Sainsbury had loyalty cards in the UK, I remember at home as a child collecting stamps every time we did our weekly grocery shopping, and when the book was filled we could claim money off. At that stage my parents could also have had a say in the way the local branch was run - suggesting ideas and voting on ones to carry through to action. A real example of engagement on a local level.

Of course nowadays, engagement like this can be done on a much broader level and impact the business much more fundamentally than just the local store level. Working with online communities and leveraging the benefits of social media, brands can engage people more deeply. This is what the Co-operative Bank is aiming to do with its new blog, GoodWithMoney.

GoodWithMoney is a recent launch, with only a few days of posts. It is covering the bank’s efforts in micro-financing and the only posts that exist at the moment cover a current trip to visit organisations and businesses they are supporting in Bosnia. I have lots of questions about this blog (do they intend to keep it running or is it just a short term CSR or PR effort, how often will they update, is it designed to engage customers on an ongoing basis, how will they encourage interaction), but there is one thing I love already: their use of video.

We’ve written before about how powerful video can be in an online community, and how we work a lot with video in online communities we build at FreshNetworks. But the GoodWithMoney site is a really good case in point. Each blog post includes a relatively short paragraph or two updating us on what they have been doing, but it is the videos where things really come to life. A subject like micro-financing can be difficult to understand, what brings it to life are the real stories of real people. Video is a much more engaging way of conveying these types of stories. People come to life and feel more real. If one of the aims of online communities is to build a real connection between brand and consumer, then video is a great way of achieving this.

Video’s also great if it can be shared - it let’s you get your message out on other sites and bring people back into the community. As I’m doing right now…

Dina - Diary owner helped by microfinance from CFS on Vimeo.

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• When pictures speak a thousand words

We’ve written in the past about how to measure ROI in online communities. It’s a subject we return to often with our clients at FreshNetworks. The online communities that we build for them all tie into over-riding business aims, and so measuring the impact is important. We can, of course, measure specific insights that they get from the community, the benefit of  the qualitative information internally, the benefit that support communities have or any uplift in sales from the community. But there is a holy grail in online communities and indeed across social media - measuring ROI at a granular level; identifying influential members, recognising that these may not be those who post most.

In previous posts, I’ve suggested that what we need to do is develop a weighting that could be applied to individual members showing how important and influential they are. An analysis of the quality (not quantity) of their connections and of their connections’ own connections. A difficult and time-consuming task. And one that Google may have solved.

The latest edition of Business Week reports that Google has a patent pending on technology that measures influence in social networks. It apparently measures both the direct influence people have in terms of volume of connections, but also how successful your posts and feeds depending on how many people open, read and forward them.

The new technology could track not just how many friends you have on Facebook but how many friends your friends have. Well-connected chums make you particularly influential. The tracking system also would follow how frequently people post things on each other’s sites. It could even rate how successful somebody is in getting friends to read a news story or watch a video clip, according to people familiar with the patent filing.

It will be intriguing to see how this technology develops and what Google use it for. The measurement of influence online is of critical importance to brands, marketers and advertisers alike. Brands want to know how influential people who talk about their brand are, or how influential the people in their online community are. Marketers want to find these influential people and focus on what they are saying and what brands are saying to them. Advertisers can use this information to help target ads across social networks.

Of course, there must also be a benefit for Google. Given that their attempts at running their own social networks have not had the same success in sheer numbers as the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Hi5, Google is looking for other opportunities to capitalise upon this growing trend. They’re doing what they’ve done to the web - they don’t provide all the content they just offer a great way to search and prioritise it. So Google could become the Google of social media.

Some more reading

• So How Do You Measure ROI of Online Communities?
• Social Media ROI: Be Careful What You Promise (Part Two)
• Facebook Grows, but Where’s the Profit?

Today we’re kicking off a regular post updating you every Friday on the latest news on how brands and businesses are using social media: our weekly brands and social media diary. We kick-off this week with British Airways.

British Airways launches online community

This week saw the pre-launch of a British Airways online community: Metrotwin. The site is invite-only at the moment, but you can add yourself to the list on the homepage and contact them through Twitter @Metrotwin.

The idea of the site is to take the concept of ‘town twinning’ to the very local level, providing recommendations on restaurants, events, shops, bars and other things in neighbourhoods across both cities. The benefit for BA is obvious, as Chris Davies, their Digital Marketing Manager states:

We fly more people between London and New York than anyone else. Creating a community website about the best of what’s on offer in the two cities we know best is a credible and useful tool.

From the press-releases and coverage so far the site is designed to help people navigate the range of recommendations and reviews on the web to help members of the community find the best things quickly. The site lets users review and rate recommendations, create their own profile and find ‘twins’. They can also follow other members’ recommendations. The features seem designed to foster a community that combines expert and user reviews and uses co-creation to source the best recommendations in both cities.

The benefits for BA are clear. In an increasingly challenging market, airlines need to retain their most profitable customers. And the business travel route between London and New York must be one of the most profitable routes out there. There is a clear gap in the market online for detailed peer-review sites specifically aimed at people making business trips to these cities. So if they get it right, I suspect this site will work.

So what can we learn from this?

The air industry is facing difficult times, the increasing price of oil and the Open Skies agreement are both hitting transatlantic carriers - increasing costs and increasing competition. What BA are doing here is something that all brands could learn from during difficult times. Their aim is to increase customer retention and their approach is to make their engagement with them sustainable. Rather than them being customers who buy individual experiences with BA (single flights), they want to create an ongoing experience.

At FreshNetworks we are working with a number of clients in the travel industry at the moment, and the aim in each of these is to create and provide a service that truly extends the experience beyond just individual trips. When designing and building online communities, it is important to work on what both the brand wants from the community, but also why a member would take part and what they want to do there. With Metrotwin, BA are providing a real service to their customers, and this should be central to any social media strategy a brand follows.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

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Some more reading

• BA Metrotwin first impressions - inside the British Airways London-New York new social network

Two pieces of research out this week highlight the fact that social media is truly entering the mainstream. The Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 report shows that three-quarters of active Internet users globally read blogs, and 184 million people have set up a blog. If the blogosphere were a country, it would be the sixth biggest in the world, just smaller than Brazil.

Then today came research from MarketTools showing that 70% of US adults visit blogs, social networks, online communities or other social media. And 42% report that their use of these sites and tools has increased in the last six months.

Both of these reports show that social media is more and more forming a part of people’s lives. With three quarters of global Internet users, and 70% of all US adults visiting social media sites it truly now is the mainstream.

What is interesting is to delve a little deeper in the MarketTools report and to understand why people are using sites like this. When we build online communities for clients, we spend a lot of time understand why the potential communities members would interact, what they like to do online and how this matches with our, and our client’s aims for the online community. The MarketTools research adds to our overall understanding here.

A third of respondents said that they use social media for product research, a telling statistic. With increasing numbers of brands integrating a social layer into their online presence it is reassuring to hear that almost one in four US adults uses social media to help decide what they will buy. And almost half of those who did use social media in this way said that it had a direct impact on the purchase decision.

So we are looking at an online environment where use of social media really has reached the mainstream. 70% of US adults visit social media sites. A third of these (so 23% of all US adults) research products online and 47% of these (11% of all US adults) say this directly impacts decision making. That’s about 25 million adults in the US making their purchase decisions on the basis of social media.

These statistics show that, for the US at least, social media is mainstream and something that all brands need to be making the most of. It would be interesting to see the same statistics repeated for Europe so that we can start to put a figure on the size of the opportunity for brands here. Our anecdotal evidence of working with brands across Europe at FreshNetworks suggests that the figures may not be far behind those in the US.

Some more reading

• Blog growth slows; more bloggers are bringing home the bacon
• Technorati Releases State of the Blogosphere 2008 Report
• Most Bloggers Want to Make Money on their Blog - Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008: What and Why of Blogging
• Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Report - 2008
• Confirmed: The blogosphere is mainstream
• Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
• Nearly 70% of Online Adults Use Social Media, Often Research Products
• 68% of Online Americans Visit Communities, Blogs, Social Networks… What Do The Rest Do?

We’re back to work this week after the excitement of our parent, FreshMinds, being crowned London winners of the £35 Million Bank of Scotland Entrepreneur Corporate Challenge, a title which brings with it up to £5m in funding for FreshNetworks. There has been some coverage over the weekend of our win, including an article in the Sunday Times yesterday.

Nick Wheeler, founder and managing director of Charles Tyrwhitt shirts, was one of the judges and said some nice things about us:

When you read about the business it’s easy to think FreshNetworks is just another media business, but when they came in to tell us about it we knew they would be a huge success [...] It was clear they had spotted a great opportunity.

And James Farrar from Bank of Scotland, the people providing the funding, also gave us their backing:

Their passion immediately came across. Their belief that they will deliver gave us confidence in backing them.

If you want to see more coverage follow the links below (latest first):

• FreshMinds named London’s top start-up, Management Today
• Research: Funding of up to £5 million for this winner - FreshMinds, the Marketing Blog
• FreshNetworks wins £5m funding in Entrepreneur Challenge, e-consultancy
• Online venture FreshMinds wins £5m of funding for founders, Sunday Times
• FreshMinds Wins London Entrepreneurial Crown, Market Research News
• FreshMinds wins £5m investment prize, Research-Live
• Photos and a video of the awards, Bank of Scotland
• Capital talents in the spotlight: The London regional finalists, Sunday Times

The written word is great. You can express ideas in many ways, you can enter into an exchange with people, you can tell them what you think and hear what they say. But online, video is just more engaging. You just have to look at the power and reach of YouTube and growth of the Flickr community to understand the demand and use of media-sharing functions online.

We try to include media as much as possible in the online communities that we build and manage at FreshNetworks. We find that different community members will want to engage and express themselves in different ways, and so allowing them to do this will maximise participation. It’s also a great way to build engagement between the brand and the community - letting them see inside an organisation; video can break down the barriers between brand and customer. It’s an effective way of conveying content as it often encourages more personal and more efficient presentation of ideas. Finally, video can be easily shared and so has a great viral effect.

Somebody who we think has got the use of video right online is Gary Vaynerchuk and his daily wine blog: Wine Library TV. Gary’s enthusiasm is palpable, his knowledge about wine is significantly greater than mine, and his ideas are easy for me to take away. But what really makes his site work is that every day I can watch a short clip and learn something. Rather than read some text describing which wines go with oysters, I can just watch and learn. The videos are easy to pass on to friends and they make me feel like I am really engaging with Gary. I can see him, hear him, watch and learn his mannerisms and habits. I get to know him better than I suspect I might be able to just reading text. So, his ideas are great, the content informative and this information useful. But I suspect it is the fact that he delivers this by video that really makes Gary’s site a success.

So what can we learn about this when we are planning and building online communities? The answer is simple - use video, include video, interact with video.

If you haven’t seen Gary in action, then take a look at this video below of him in action at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

Some more reading

• Gary Vaynerchuk
• What’s the Future of Online Video? Time to Ask the Leaders (Live Stream)
• Don’t Treat Web 2.0 Like Web 1.0
• Guardian column: Gary Vaynerchuk
• Web2Open New York - Get Involved!

An article in this week’s Economist looks at how science and scientific debate is being changed by the rise of social media tools. In the days before the Internet, a peer-reviewed scientific journal was the best (and maybe only) way to get your opinions and ideas heard by a large number of people. The process of reviewing and publishing articles was long, meaning that the time from idea to publication can be quite significant. As the Economist puts it:

With luck a paper will be published several months after being submitted; many languish for over a year because of bans on multiple submissions. This hampers scientific progress, especially in nascent fields where new discoveries abound. When a paper does get published, the easiest way to debate it is to submit another paper, with all the tedium that entails.

Even today, this is still the process followed by most scientific journals, although as the Economist article points out change is afoot.

The drawback of the journal process is that it doesn’t allow a space for public and open debate and discussion of ideas in a convenient and quick way. This isn’t necessarily their fault, that’s not what they are designed for. But there is a space in the scientific community for this kind of reviewing, commenting and evaluation of ideas, allowing groups of scientists to work together to refine and improve ideas. It sounds like the perfect place for social media - scientist blogs where their ideas can be revealed as they emerge, online communities where people can discuss and work on a shared interest or goal, wikis where multiple parties can contribute towards knowledge. The opportunities are vast and, of course, alongside the traditional peer-reviewed journals there are a plethora of such social media initiatives out their in the scientific community.

One such example, cited by the Economist, is Seed Media’s Research Blogging, a site designed to act as a hub for peer-reviewed science. The aim is to bring together in one place all of the many discussions that are happening all over the web, to allow more people to get involved in the discussions and to organise them in a way that makes it easy to search. This seems like a really effective way of integrating the benefits of social media and online community tools with the existing, peer-reviewed science.

I spoke earlier this year at a conference about how to combine editorial and user-generated content in publishing, and this approach does seem to follow some of the best practice ideas we discussed then. Allowing the expert (in this case the peer-reviewed) content to sit separately from the discussions and debates but to encourage and facilitate the latter. This is the first stage many take to fully integrating crowd-reviewing into their expert content and allowing experts and readers to interact fully in the original content.

Of course getting to this point takes time. For it to be a real success it requires a significant proportion of the target audience to be able to join in and contribute. At the moment only 35% of scientists blog, and there are sometimes perverse incentives to not join these debates. The Economist cites Jennifer Rohn, a biologist at University College London, who says that:

There is a risk that rivals will see how your work unfolds and pip you to the post in being first to publish. Blogging is all well and good for tenured staff but lower down in the academic hierarchy it is still publish or perish

So change like this may be sometime coming, but developments to maximise the use of social media and community discussions are allowing scientists to debate issues more quickly and more conveniently. Ideas can be disseminated and debated more rapidly, and that has to be a good thing.

Some more reading

• Research Journals Make It As Difficult As Possible To Openly Publish Gov’t Funded Research
• Open Source Science
• Science Journal Won’t Publish Papers Because Authors Want To Put Them On Wikipedia
• The virtualisation of ideas
• Science publication is slow
• Online peer review supplements, doesn’t replace real thing
• Congress’s copyright fight puts open access science in peril
• ResearchBlogging.Org V2 Is Officially Launched!
• Peer review: the myth of the noble scientist

It’s a good day today at FreshNetworks. We’re dusting off some slightly fuzzy heads and Charlie, one of our CEOs, has finally got to leave for his much delayed holiday. Why all the excitement? Well last night we were crowned London winners of the £35 Million Bank of Scotland Entrepreneur Corporate Challenge.

The prize is a good one. As London winner we’ve been awarded an interest free loan of up to £5 million, with which to really grow the FreshNetworks business. We’ve been building and managing online communities for some big brands for quite some time now, and have a great and growing internal team. This money is going to help us go really big.

We were chosen in the final from a shortlist of great companies, including Gü Chocolate Puddings, Justgiving, Country House Weddings and Quintessentially. We now go through to the national final in December, where we will compete against the winners from six other regions across the UK for the chance to be named ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ and the opportunity to be mentored by one of Britain’s most successful and high profile entrepreneurs. The judges chose us for lots of great reasons: our flair, vision and creativity, as well as solid business acumen and impressive plans for the future.

There was an article about the finalists in last week’s Sunday Times and we’ll be in it again this week. I’ll let you know more about what we’re going to do with the funding and may even share the video we had to film for the final! But right now I need to move on from the excitement in the office and head to a client meeting.

Some coverage of the award

• Capital talents in the spotlight: The London regional finalists
• Photos and a video of the awards
• FreshMinds wins £5m investment prize
• FreshMinds Wins London Entrepreneurial Crown
• Online venture FreshMinds wins £5m of funding for founders
• FreshNetworks wins £5m funding in Entrepreneur Challenge

Last night I went to see Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired magazine, who was speaking at the ICA in London prior to publicising his new book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

We’ve written about crowdsourcing and co-creation at some length recently, and it’s an area of keen interest for all of us at FreshNetworks. Howe’s talk looked at the concept but also at its effect on various aspects of our life, from online design, merging concepts into businesses and even influencing political movements. He was really the first person to really take on the concept of gathering a group of people together online and realizing how this ‘crowd’ or ‘community’ could be harnessed to deliver innovation or insight into an idea, a brand, or simply to answer a question that might be stumping boffins in a particular company.

Walking away I reflected on what I had heard meant, especially for those of us involved in building and managing online communities. I came up with four main takeaways that I thought I would share here:

1. Any attempt at crowdsourcing must be tailored to the needs of the brand, company or problem. Technology alone will not solve the problem, but through application of tailored (and flexible) tools, supported by planning and management, communities will flourish and return benefit far outstripping the original investment.
2. Online communities offer a greater depth of insight into the thoughts and behaviour of your supporters and detractors, due to a deeper level of emotional engagement from your customers, that no survey or focus group alone can offer (for a similar cost). Companies such as Dell and Nokia have used this to grow their brands in response to the direct wishes of their customers, with great success.
3. A community is not about selling a product, it’s about communicating needs and information. Nike achieved this with Nike+, where the motive is not to sell shoes, but to generate a feeling of community, a common bond amongst its customers. The results speak for themselves, with 93% of Nike+ community members saying that they would recommend it to a friend. Friendships are built, common bonds formed and the brand is strengthened as a result.
4. Communities can deliver change. Real change, not the sort promised during a political campaign, but it can turn a brand around. Who would have thought that a t shirt art competition could turn into a community that was the seed for a multi-million pound business - Threadless anyone?

Some more reading

• SideTaker - crowdsource your private life
• Crowdsourcing Book Excerpt: The Canary in the Coal Mine
• Crowd Funding: A Different Way to Pay for the News You Want
• Wiki Textbook: Two’s Company Three’s a Crowdsource
• Q&A;: Jeff Howe on ‘crowdsourcing’
• GotATeenager? Some best practices in online community strategy
• Incentives In Online Social Communities
• Ways to Crowdsource
• So Much for Crowdsourcing

It’s official. Where once pornography was the most popular thing searched for on the Internet, social networking has now taken its place. So says research reported in today’s Daily Telegraph. The finding comes from the the work of Bill Tancer, Head of Research at HitWise, and is based on analysing the search habits of 10 million Internet users.

Porn has long been the most popularly searched subject on the web, indeed Tancer’s research shows that a decade ago one in every five searches performed was porn-related. Today that figure is closer to one in ten, with a significant drop in searches among the 18-24 year olds. More people are searching for social networking. As Tancer observes:

As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased. My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.

I agree in part with Tancer’s observation. It is probably true that young people are spending more time on social networking sites than on adult sites. But I am not necessarily convinced that it is because they are spending so much time on social networks that they don’t have time for porn. Rather I think that this research reflects a growing maturity in the way we use the Internet.

The real progress we are witnessing with Web2.0 is that we are moving from an environment where information (be it news, product information or even pornography) is pushed out on the web by publishers, to one where the web is more about the way people interact. When it was just about pushing out information then the main reason people used the Internet was to find something that they couldn’t find elsewhere, or that wasn’t easily available to them. This was fertile ground for pornography, making it easier for people to find and view in relative privacy. Now the web is about interacting, about finding people and answers to questions rather than just information that others have put online. In this environment there are so many more things that people can do online. They can find people like them, they can ask questions of people in similar situations and they can interact with real people rather than just with content uploaded by publishers.

So while I agree that people spend more time on social networking than ever before, I think the real reason that social networking has overtaken porn on the web is more to do with the ever increasing opportunities that the web now presents. It is suited to more things and to interactions rather than just viewing content. The web has developed and it is no longer the place it was.

Some more reading

• Too busy on Twitter to look at Porn ?
• Porn passed over as Web users become social: author (Belinda Goldsmith/Reuters)
• Facebook and MySpace are Killing Porn?
• Social Networking Taking Market Share from Dating, Adult Entertainment Sites
• Social networks are more popular than porn
• Researcher: social networking trumps porn in web searches
• A brief history of online social networks
• Porn passed over as Web users become social: author
• Bored With Porn
• Study: Social Networking Sites Overtake Porn As Internet’s #1 Search