FreshNetworks Blog

The first podcast I’ve recorded is available from today. Brought to you from the guys at ResearchTalk, I’m talking with them and Tom Ewing from Kantar Operations about how to build an online research community. You can get the podcast over on the ResearchTalk blog (and on iTunes), or download from the link below:

Building an Online Research Community

In the podcast we discuss how brands can use online communities and how they can use this for research. We compare online research communities with other forms of market research (especially qualitative research) and finally we discuss in some detail how to go about setting up an online research community.

What I say builds on the experience we have as a team at FreshNetworks and also pull on some recent examples of online research communities that we have built and managed for clients. I hope it’s useful and if it is I might start recording more podcasts in the future…

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Online surveys bore respondents - they need to be engaged
• FIR Interview: Francois Gossieaux on Tribalization of Business
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them
• How the market research industry should embrace communities
• Ethnographers or Bricoleurs?

We’ve seen before the influence of online on purchase decisions in the US, with research showing that 25 million US consumers make purchase decisions based on social media. At the time I said that it would be great to see how these figures translated to Europe, and new research lets us do just that. The EIAA Mediascope Europe 2008 study looks at online habits across Europe and then explores the influence of online on decision making. The study was conducted with 9,095 respondents across UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands in September 2008. A presentation of the findings is here.

First some basic facts about online habits of Europeans. Of the 297 million Europeans, some 60% (178 million) are online, and a majority of these (80%) are now using broadband to access the Internet. Over half of those people online now access the internet every single day (including weekends) and the time spent online has increased to 12 hours a week. More people are spending more time and doing more things online. No surprises there.

Growth is greeted among 25-34 year olds. Here almost two-thirds (63%) are online daily, and they spend an average of almost 14 hours a week online. For them the Internet is very much a lifestyle tool - shown by the increased access from home and during the weekends, rather than just at work. Almost half of this age-range have used social networks to keep in touch with friends and one in four have their own up-to-date profile on a social network. This now makes social networking the fourth most popular activity to do online (after email, news and banking).

So what of the influence of online? Well the research shows that 64% of European internet users consider personal recommendations from other users to be important when researching a product or service.

When researching or considering a product or service, 46% of European internet users are influenced by reviews, ratings and discussions from other users. This means that there are some 82 million consumers across Europe are influenced by the reviews, ratings and discussions they read from other consumers in social media.

This research backs up what we have seen in the US. In Europe we know that 82 million consumers (about 27% of all consumers) consider the reviews and ratings they see in social media. The US data allows us to go further. There a similar proportion consider reviews and ratings online and about a third of these would go as far as to say that their purchase decision has been directly influenced by social media. If we saw the same proportion then some 27 million European consumers would directly change their purchase decisions based on what they read in social media.

Whatever the actual numbers are and however we cut them, a few things are clear. Social media is important. What other consumers say online is important. And how we engage people in social networks and online communities can have a real difference on our brand’s sales.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Web is driven by 25-34 age group
• Russia Is Rising In Internet Population
• How to Use Social Media to Get Hired
• For the Future of Marketing, Look to Social Media
• Social Networking: Making the Most Out of Social Networking Websites
• Web is driven by 25-34 age group
• Consumers spend 12 hours a week online, finds EIAA research
• Research about digital Europe
• EIAA „Mediascope Europe 2008″: Für die „Generation Online” der 25- bis 34-jährigen Deutschen ist das Internet Leitmedium

We’ve posted before about how and why good design matters in online communities. We spend a lot of time at FreshNetworks understanding the audience the online community is aimed at so that we can design a community that will appeal to them and help them to achieve what we want them to do.

This process of understanding who you are trying to attract and how you want to engage them is a critical step in designing the online community. It’s a critical stage in designing any content that you want to engage people, even if it’s a PowerPoint presentation.

Last week I came across this great presentation on good design in presentation from Alex Osterwalder. It’s required reading at FreshNetworks this week, and looks at a process for designing an engaging PowerPoint presentation. I see real parallels with the way we design our communities so that they engage the relevant audience.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

The relationship between a brand and the customer is a complex one. It can be fickle or it can be very strong, it can be two-way or it can be all take take take. Sometimes the customer has all the power - they know they want pizza but they’re not tied to a particular brand and so could make a different choice with each purchase. Other times they may be very brand loyal; they may love a brand so much they will almost always go with them. In this scenario what you often find is that the customer is significantly more passionate about the brand than the brand is about the customer.

This makes sense when you think about it. Imagine a brand like Virgin Atlantic. Lots of people like flying with them (and a few don’t, but let’s not focus on them today). Imagine they had  5,000 strongly loyal customers, people who loved flying with them and would always choose them if they could. For each of these individuals it’s a lot easier for them to be passionate about Virgin Atlantic than the other way round - they only have to be passionate about one thing, Virgin would have to be passionate about 5,000. It’s just not that easy to do this.

But being passionate matters. Traditionally there has been a concept of brand which essentially put types of consumer within a particular brand’s sphere of influence - “this is what an Abercrombie and Fitch customer looks like” was the way that many thought of things. But the consumer has much more control than this. They are really at the centre of the relationship. A brand should be thinking  of themselves as part of a consumer’s  personal brand rather than the other way around “we want to attract the kind of people who drink Innocent Smoothies and fly Virgin Atlantic”.

In this environment it’s critical that you move the relationship from give give give to something that really is two-way. You need to love your customers. Something that isn’t easy to do. People like Virgin Atlantic (and other airlines) try to do this with loyalty schemes. They reward their best (ie their highest spending customers) with perks like free access to their lounges on departure. But this doesn’t necessarily reward the customers who are most passionate about you. These may not be your biggest spenders, but they may be your most important influencers, amplifying word of mouth. They’re probably the ones who purchase your product every time they make a purchase in this category, even if that isn’t that often. But between purchases they’ll be the ones telling everybody they know how great you are.

So how do we love these people back as much as they love us. It’s not easy, but social media can really help and during the holiday season for the next month or so we’ll be showing you a few ways that you can love your customers.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Trends for 2009: Radical Transparency
• Will online communities by airlines help their brands take-off?
• Social Media + Community = a new approach to creating customer loyalty
• Web 2.0 Summit 08: Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com)
• Zappos: Above and beyond customer service

Sydney uses MySpace to attract visitors

This week saw the launch of MySpace MySydney, a community for people who want to move to Sydney on a working visa. The page pitches itself as an online community and ‘Ben’ is your host (he’s the one on the video on the homepage). The site contains information on how to get a visa, travel information, advice on Sydney as a place to live and work and also aims to be a hub for networking with others in the same situation as you.

The site is from the Tourism New South Wales who are hoping to capitalise upon recent changes in the work and holiday visa regulations for US students. It’s now easier than it was for those from North America to get these visas and this MySpace site supports a wider marketing and social media push accompanying the change.

So what can we learn from this?

We’ve covered a lot of travel initiatives recently in the Social Media Diary - from BA’s Metrotwin, to Amex’s community for travel managers and Air France-KLM’s Bluenity. Travel is certainly an area where social networking and online communities are being used more and more to engage people. We see this at FreshNetworks, where the latest community we helped to launch this week is for a big UK travel brand. Travel has a number of great hooks for activities in social media - some people need information and have questions that other users can answer based on their experiences, it’s a subject that lends itself well to media and there is the opportunity for connecting people doing similar things in similar places. We’re seeing different travel brands trying different things - from setting up their own online communities, to interacting with people on Facebook or MySpace, providing social networking tools or just blogging.

Some of these initiatives are successful and some aren’t. What it seems that Sydney hope to achieve with this site is to present a lot of genuinely useful information in a way that is relevant to their target audience. They also hope to leverage some social networking - getting  people in similar situations to get together, meet each other, share ideas and thoughts and between them build the usefulness of the site. This is an interesting proposition and I’ll be following how it pans out. Whilst I can see the clear benefit of the marketing and informational element of the site, I’ll be watching to see how (and in fact if) the social networking side of the proposition develops.

Whilst we often say that it is difficult for a brand to get a real presence in a social network, there is a real power of social networks to help people find others going through the same situation or with similar interests to them. It may be that getting people considering a move to Sydney to meet each other in MySpace might just work. We’ll wait and see.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Economy got you down? Move to Australia (seriously!)
• Will online communities by airlines help their brands take-off?
• Meet your fellow air passengers as airline launches Facebookstyle networking site
• Understand Social Networks Better for Effective Business Promotion
• Online Marketing Data: Which social networking sites are your customers using?

It was a great night at the e-mint / FreshNetworks Community Manager Meet-up in London. A great chance to meet other people many of us have talked to online, and also to attract some new faces.

At FreshNetworks we’re passionate about promoting community management as a role, a function and a profession. One of the things we all know and that was clear last night is that although we may use different names and do slightly different things, there’s a lot we can learn from sharing ideas and perspectives. We’re big on sharing at FreshNetworks and know it would be great to get community managers, strategists, digital marketing people and anybody interested in online communities together regularly to help us all improve, learn (and of course have fun!)

So we’re going to turn these drinks into a regular event - look out for the next one at the start of 2009. If you’re interested in being kept updated on these events then sign-up for e-mint or send me a message.

Also you can follow on the blog how we’re promoting community management.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Getting your online community right from the start
• Building your Community Strategy
• Online community managers: meet-up in London

As Josiah Bartlet in the West Wing once said “This time of the year there should be a hot line you can call with questions about cooking turkey. A special 800 number where the phones are staffed by experts”. There have been many comparisons drawn between the Bartlett administration on our screens and the potential Obama administration that comes into power next year. But with Obama’s use of social media (stories of him abandoning his BlackBerry aside) I would imagine he wouldn’t be calling for a hot line, but for texts, blogs and online communities. It turns out Butterball beat him to it.

Living in the UK, I’ve never used the Butterball ‘Turkey Talk-line’. In fact I learnt about it first from that episode of the West Wing. But I know that what they offer is a resource for people to ring and get advice on how to cook their Thanksgiving turkey. this year they’re trying something different. Rather than just having a team of 50 experts to answer calls from some 100,000 novice chefs each year, they have started to use social media to get their advice across.

This year, they’re using blogging and ‘Turkey Texts’ to get their advice across. When they started the service in the early 1980’s, the phone was the best way of getting in touch with their target audience. Now that’s no longer the place. The means through which we communicate have changed, and also the way that we connect. We no longer just look to experts, but also to getting advice from ‘people like me’ - those who are going through the same problems at the same time. Using social media, Butterball can build on each of these trends. Consumers can now  sign up for text messages, reminding them when to take their turkey out to thaw and advising them on the temperature and time needed to cook their bird. They can read blogs from experts, participate in live chats and watch how-to videos.

I’m quite impressed with this as an example of how social media can really enhance the user’s experience. Whereas previously you had to call and get advice once, you can keep going back to the website on multiple occasions, in your own time. This builds a stronger bond with the brand - they move from people the people who gave you advice once, to the people who gave you the resource to help yourself on an ongoing basis. This is the crux of what can make an online community really work. Identifying the ways in which you can extend and enhance a consumer’s brand experience. Work out how you can help them, how you can attract them to your site more frequently and for longer, and you will gain great brand exposure, loyalty and advocacy. So good news all round.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Butterball and Gather Host Thanksgiving Web Chat and Recipe Contest
• Butterball Goes Web 2.0 With Turkey Texts, Blogs
• A New Tradition: Butterball Launches Blogs, Text Message Advice For Turkey Day

So it’s official. Online surveys bore people. Two things confirmed this for me today. First, my colleague Helen was sent a particularly badly written online survey, and then I read of a report from Engage Research and Global Market Institute, which shows that people have become bored with the format of traditional online surveys. Helen’s experience was probably typical of many of those who responded. She received the questionnaire and started answering it, only to get bored by the layout, types of questions used and by the complexity of the questions themselves. So she stopped, abandoned the questionnaire, and became yet another statistic in the history of non-completions in market research.

The purpose of the study from Engage Research and GMI was to investigate why people drop out of online surveys. They examined the drop-out rates from over 550 surveys and then correlated these with survey length and question formats. They then asked a sample of 200 online panelists what frustrated them most about online questionnaires. Finally, they compared static HTML questionnaires and those using flash; and traditional question formats and more traditional ones.

The research showed that as boredom sets in, respondents speed up the rate at which they answer questions. Few responses are given and the quality of those that are dips. There is an increase of pattern answering and of people straight-lining - choosing all responses from one end of a scale (an easier way to respond to questionnaires). Respondents are getting bored with online surveys, and quality is suffering as a result.

So how do we make the most of respondents and get them to respond to our questionnaires online? Respondents to the survey said that relevance of subject matter and an interest in the questions were influential in deciding whether they would complete a survey or not. The format and structure of the questions themselves also matter. Many people drop out within the first five minutes of an online survey. Grid questions cause 80% more drop-out than any other question format.

So respondents are getting bored of online surveys. They no longer have the enthusiasm to spend on complex questionnaires or on subjects they are not interested in. The novelty really has run off and agencies are finding it more difficult than ever to get responses.

What can we do in this environment? Like many situations when the web has been used to change a process, people initially took an old process and just delivered it online. A script that might previously have been conducted by telephone was put online. As with many other examples of developing a process or product online, this really missed out on the real opportunities.

Taking surveys and conducting them online has sometimes resulted in longer and more complex surveys. Once the novelty of the online experience moved on, respondents grew bored of these surveys and it will soon become more difficult to conduct surveys online in this way. What we should be doing instead is thinking of ways in which the online experience can really enhance and augment the online research process. This is where developments in social media and online communities can really come to the fore. Rather than just offering a new way of transmitting the same questionnaire, online research communities offer a real way to do something different. Making the most of social media tools to engage people and to explore their attitudes, beliefs, behaviours and responses. Developments must be in this area, and we will probably see fewer cases of stand-alone online surveys in the future.

If respondents are getting bored of completing online surveys we just need to engage them more.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Market Research with a Twist
• Online Surveys for Money - Things to Remember to be Successful
• Telephone research must stop. Full stop.
• Online surveys bore respondents and damage data quality

Whilst we may use different language and names, we know that the role of a Community Manager as a good  party host is critical to the success of any online community. It’s a growing and developing job role and with the increase in branded communities the number of people doing it is increasing all the time.

At FreshNetworks we know that community management is critical. We’ve worked with clients who have launched communities without them, and whilst they may be able to drive traffic to the site, they lack the kind of real engagement and direction you get from a community with that good party host in place. The more communities brand launch, the more important this kind of role becomes. We need to capture best practice and share ideas; debate and discuss terms and techniques; and work together to make sure we help promote and improve the quality of online communities.

We want to be involved in this and thought a good first step would be to get a few people who work in this area together for drinks. So we’ve partnered with e-mint, the Association of Online Community Professionals, to organise a meet-up in London this week. We’re sponsoring the location and will put some money behind the bar to pay for what should be a fair few drinks and snacks before the tab runs out.

It would be great to get as many people who are interested in community management as possible along. Come for the whole evening or just pop in to say hello.

If you can’t come but want to be kept up to date on other events we’re running as part of our efforts in promoting community management, let me know. Otherwise see you on Thursday:

Time: from 6.30/7pm

Location: The Square Pig, 30-32 Proctor Street, Holborn, London, WC1R 4QG (we’ll be downstairs) map

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Microsoft turns Windows Live into a social network

This week, Microsoft announced a slew of changes to its Windows Live site, adding a social layer to the existing communications services. As some commentators are claiming - they are turning the Windows Live site into a social network. Whilst stressing that this is not what they are doing, Microsoft are adding tools that for many define social networks, including central profiles and news and activity feeds.

The changes are part of an aim to give their existing services (Spaces, Windows Live Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger) deeper ties with one another. As Brian Hall, the general manager for Windows Live, says:

The general thing people are trying to do in all of these services is keep in touch

As he goes on to explain, Microsoft are trying to increase the amount of time people spend on site (which already gets a reported 11% of internet minutes) and including news feeds from users other sites (such as Facebook or MySpace) will help to do this.

The other focus will be on photo sharing with Microsoft offering its own storage options as well as providing links to Flickr, Photobucket and the likes. Again, this will add a more social media element to the site, and bringing content from users’ other communities will help to increase stickiness.

So what can we learn from this?

Windows Live wants to increase the amount of time spent on site and to increase the connections between their communications tool. I’m not sure that what they are doing is building a social network, rather they are doing what we at FreshNetworks see as a major trend - they are adding a social layer to their existing content and tools.

Some of the examples we have seen of brands using social media have been of them setting up online communities, co-creation sites or social networks. I think that what Microsoft are doing is different; they are taking their existing site and making it more social. For many brands this can be a much more successful strategy. You can take elements of online communities (photo sharing maybe, profiles or forums) and integrate them into your existing site. It works really well where the existing site is well used and so is perfect for Windows Live. It also works well when you already provide useful tools to users.

When you are adding a social layer you are just augmenting the user experience or adding new and useful tools for them to do what they are already doing more efficiently or better. You make their user experience better by bringing other content to your site, letting them collaborate with other or just by creating central profiles that connect users. You are not setting up a completely separate online community, nor are you adding a community onto your existing site. Rather you are weaving community elements into your existing site.

What Microsoft are doing is capitalising both on the strengths of their existing site and the ability to weave social and online community elements into this to enhance the user experience. You don’t have to set up a separate online community to engage people online. You need to do it in the right way for you and for your users.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Windows Live tries to show its social side
• And Now, Windows Live Is a Social Network
• Microsoft gives Windows Live launch a Web 2.0 scrub-up
• Microsoft adds Facebook-like qualities to Windows Live
• Windows Live Service Gets More Social
• Microsoft starts to roll out Live Wave 3; reinvents Facebook