FreshNetworks Blog

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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

In the face of thousands of employers who have banned the likes of Facebook in the workplace, and claims that allowing people to access social networks disrupts productivity, research out this week suggests the opposite. That using social networks in the workplace can actually improve efficiency.

The research comes from AT&T who surveyed 2,500 people across five countries in Europe and reports that 65% of respondents claimed that using social networks had made them or their colleagues more efficient; 46% said it had sparked creativity.

Of course, the real detail of the report is not as some headlines might seem to suggest. The research doesn’t point to more use of Facebook in the workplace to increase efficiency. It’s actually much more interesting than that.

The respondents across the UK, Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands reported a range of social networking tools that helped efficiency and creativity, but rather than Facebook they were talking about internal tools for collaboration.

The top five social networking tools that respondents claimed helped increase efficiency in the workplace were:

1. Companies’ own collaboration sites on intranets (39%)
2. Internal forums within the company (20%)
3. Company-produced video material shared on intranets (16%)
4. Online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook (15%)
5. External collaboration sites on the web and internal blogging sites (both 11%)

The evidence is clear that businesses are using online community and social networking tools more and more internally. They’re using them to share information and ideas, connect with colleagues and to collaborate and co-create. A full 59% of these citing a tool in the survey named forums or intranets for this purpose, this compares with just 15% citing an external social network such as LinkedIn or Facebook. And I would imagine that more people were thinking of the likes of LinkedIn than the likes of Facebook here.

So when you dig into the actual research itself it isn’t suggesting what many reports seem to suggest - that using Facebook can make your employees more efficient. Rather it is highlighting a more interesting and insightful trend - for employees to use social media tools as internal collaboration and knowledge share. This is a great step and I’m not surprised it is adding to the efficiency of employees. Businesses rely heavily on the knowledge and creativity of their employees and tools that can help to maximise and harness these are bound to be embraced.

At FreshNetworks we also see that the use of social tools in an organisation can make them more comfortable about using the same tools with their customers. They see the benefits they get from online communities internally and want to get the same benefits from using them externally. This research may then point to a bigger trend - the use of social tools had become a norm inside organisations across Europe, The same organisations are now looking to use them externally.

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Some more reading

• Social networking makes staff more efficient
• Surprise: Social Networking Increases Efficiency But Don’t Expect Facebook Ban to be Lifted
• Survey highlights employee expectations from social networking in the European workplace
• Social Networking Makes Better Workers
• Social networking sites good for business: study
• Professional Networking: Just for Fun or Part of Your Job Or Combination? Tips for managing multi-memberships in social networks?
• Facebook vs. LinkedIn: Which is better for business?
• Online Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs
• Adopting Web 2.0 in Organisations

I came across a useful presentation from Nate Elliott at Forrester (and presented at the Web2.0 Expo in Berlin last month) on influencers and it had been required reading amongst the team here.

Elliott’s presentation provides a useful distinction between the ‘new influential’ (those active in social media), the ‘classic influentials’ (those who say they are a source of information for friends) and the ‘combination influentials’ (those who are a bit of both). These influentials are more likely to be male, and more likely to be early adopters of technologies. And the power of reaching out to these people is that consumers are most likely to trust a solicited piece of advice from a peer. Getting these influentials onside is key.

Whilst some in marketing (and especially in word of mouth marketing) think that we need to understand influencers so we can identify and target them, at FreshNetworks we are more interested in understanding how to create more influencers and advocates. If you know what the characteristics of your influentials are then you can start to spot the next generation - those you can nurture to become influential for you. This approach gives you a much broader base of potential advocates and can ultimately be better for your brand.

Of course, it isn’t simple. You need to spend time understanding your customers and who influences them and then to develop and appropriate strategy for engaging these different types. Great if you get it right.

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Some more reading

• Meebo Survey Proves Word-of-mouth Marketing Is Still Most Efficient for Internet Services
• PopularMedia, Getting Your Brand Word-of-Mouth Marketing
• Buzz and Word of Mouth Ryder Cup

When we talk about using social media for research one question that often comes up is “Why can’t we just do this research in Facebook?”. The answer is simple: “You can find out something from Facebook, but as an actual research tool it’s quite limited.”

So if the answer really is that simple, why is the question asked at all, and why not use Facebook?

Facebook is a great tool and it’s a site I’m a huge fan of. You can keep up with friends, meet new friends and talk about similar interests and issues, organise events, post photos, play games, flirt… The list is almost endless. ‘Almost’, because there are some things you really can’t do on Facebook. We’ve talk a lot about the difference between social networks and online communities, about how the former are ‘me’ places where I talk to my friends about things that interest me; and about how the latter are ‘we’ places where I work with people towards a common goal or end point. Social networks are difficult places to engage people and difficult places to build a group that is contributing towards a shared goal or end-point. Because of this, they’re difficult places for marketers, and difficult places for researchers.

It is true that there are are huge amount of things that a brand can learn from seeing how it is discussed on Facebook. Take a brand like Starbucks and their are 34 groups in London alone (more than 500 globally) discussing the brand. In each of these there are things that the brand could learn - from ideas for advertising, to discussion on free Wi-Fi in store, to discussions about whether their drinks are kosher. These are all great discussions, but from a research perspective they are like listening to people’s conversations at a bus stop or in a restaurant (or indeed in a coffee shop!) But you cannot get the kind of detailed research and insight that you need from these discussions, from that you do need an online research community.

It’s only in a research community that you can really make sure you get the most out of the discussions and debates - both those that organically happen in the community, and those prompted by a specific activity. Only in an online research community do you have right or response and an ability to enter into an equal discussion with other members. Only in an online research community can you build and analyse the profiling data you get from the members and the vast backlog of their contributions and opinions. Only in an online research community do you have a set of members who are their to engage and interact directly with the brand and there to support you.

The benefits are huge, but more than anything, Facebook and other social networks don’t offer an ability for you to research and get meaningful insight. You can observe not research.

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Some more reading

• Polling, Opinion and Q&A; Sites are Redefining Social Networking
• Incentives In Online Social Communities
• Communities = more than the sum of their social media parts
• Four Pitfalls Associated with any Social Media Marketing Campaign

Air France-KLM launch Bluenity, the ‘first’ social network for the airline industry

Today Air France-KLM launch what they claim is the ‘first’ social network for the airline industry: Buenity. Once signed-up, members will be able to share tips on hotels, restaurants and shopping at destinations across the globe. But the real USP of the site is that is allows members to make their travel plans public - showing their flight bookings made through KLM or Air France. They can then find other members on the same flight or in the same locations when they are.

There are some obvious benefits to this - people to meet in the lounge and to travel, people to share taxis with, people to meet for dinner or business or just a way for people to share ideas with others who are similar to them. As Patrick Roux, Senior Vice President Marketing at Air France-KLM, says:

This is a response to those customers who would like to be proactive on their trip, whether they are travelling for professional or leisure purposes. From 7 November onwards, travellers and especially the 75 million customers who choose our two airlines every year, will be able, by using Bluenity, to meet before, during and after their flight

So what can we learn from this?

Whilst I’m not sure that this is the ‘first’ airline social network (see the launch of BA’s MetroTwin), but the proposition certainly is an interesting one. When we are working with clients at FreshNetworks, building online communities for them, we spend quite some time identifying why an online community could work in this situation and what the connection between and motivation of members would be. In this case it is clear that the commonality between members is first that they are both customers (maybe regular travellers on) Air France and/or KLM, and second that they might both share a closer experience - the same destination or flight.

I would expect the team who built this site to have looked into this shared experience in quite some detail. Do people who fly want to interact in this way? How do they currently meet people and spend their time in the lounge and on the place? How much do they actually want to engage and how much of this do they want to do online.

With the launch last week of LinkedIn Applications it is now possible for your TripIt travel plans to be visible there so that people can see where you are going and so that you can find others going to the same place. It will be interesting to see if users are more likely to use this kind of service than they are to use a site like Bluenity. Airfrance-KLM do have the significant benefit of a direct link to their reservations engine which makes the whole process much simpler, but I expect this will be a good case study of whether people prefer a separate social network or a widget to help them in this goal.

Of course, at FreshNetworks we know that travel is a vibrant market for online communities and social networks. It’s a sector that a lot of our clients come from and a sector where engagement with your customers and guests is critical. It should be no surprise that Air France-KLM have entered the fray. I’d expect most of the big players in this sector to be doing the same in 2009.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Alitalia on brink of bankruptcy as Air France-KLM talks collapse
• Air France and KLM launch Bluenity
• Air France-KLM launches social networking site
• Air France and KLM launch social networking site for travelers
• Avec Air France et KLM et Bluenity, vous savez à l’avance avec qui vous vous envoyez en l’air
• Bluenity, le réseau social d’Air France-KLM lancé vendredi
• Bluenity
• Air France et KLM lancent un réseau social pour les voyageurs aériens

So the Bank of England shocked the market today with a 1.5% cut in interest rates. Perhaps an indication that things are looking far from rosy in the economy at the moment. It’s an interesting time to be working at a growing business. Today we won another new client at FreshNetworks, to build and manage an online research community for a major museum here in the UK. We are growing when others are becoming more concerned about their business going forward. When I meet others in the market research industry, people at agencies and even at brands, one question that seems to be on everybody’s lips at the moment is “how exactly will the economic downturn impact research?” We’ve posted before about how brands can innovate through an economic downturn, but what about the agencies themselves?

I think that the impact on the industry will really depends on what basis agencies are selling and who their clients are. Of course there are always the counter-cyclical sectors (take-away food, insurance, accountancy and bunk bed retailers) but the real argument in the economy is going to be the ROI one. Proving the return on investment of what you offer is more important than ever.

This may mean that the services and solutions that agencies offer to clients will need to be more tightly tailored, but the outlook i probably less gloomy than in other sectors. Businesses more than ever before need to get it right first time with what they take to market, and need to make sure they are really up-to-speed with their changing needs, habits, beliefs and intentions. In this kind of climate, research is more important than ever.

What agencies will need to do is innovate and offer ways for brands to get more out of each piece of research they do and to bring research earlier into the development cycle. Brands need to get things right when they send a new product to market, launch a new website or a new marketing campaign. The piece we won today for the museum is in category - the online research community we are building is about involving their visitors throughout a process of change and development, rather than testing ideas with them once prototypes are built.

Research needs to play a stronger role supporting brands and provide them greater value for money, but it is and will continue to be essential throughout the economic downturn. The agencies that work are those who are client focused and who are embracing new techniques and innovations to help deliver value to clients. That’s why I think we’ve seen a real surge in interest in online research communities in the last few months, and why we at FreshNetworks suspect at least this segment of the industry will flourish over the coming year.

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Some more reading

• Recession-proof branding - Part 1
• How to use market research to beat the recession
• Is the market research industry recession-proof?
• UK Market Research Industry Reports 2.3% Growth
• Maintain Those Marketing Budgets
• Focus On Consumer’s Behavior, Not Their Words

I know that polls can be inaccurate - they are biased towards people with a fixed-line telephone (rather than just a mobile phone or no phone at all), they suffer from people projecting the response they think the interviewer wants to hear (they may not admit that they wouldn’t vote for a black man), and we know that how you ask the question can vary the response you get. However, most polls seem to agree about the outcome of today’s US Presidential Election. From CNN to Bebo and even a poll of Americans in the office at FreshNetworks all suggest one outcome - an Obama victory. Okay the Bebo poll did see Paris Hilton take second place above McCain, and there are only two Americans in my office - but the argument holds!

We’ve posted in the past about the 2008 US Presidential Campaign. Be it Obama’s lead in the web campaign during the Primaries, his team posting Democrat strategy discussion online, things we can learn from Obama’s use of online communities or what UK politicians can learn about social media from this US campaign. What’s evident is that this campaign has been one that has really embraced social media and online communities both as a way to campaign and as a way to engage people on the issues. Both main candidates have embraced social networks and online communities, although nobody probably doubts that it is Obama who has shown real innovation. Using strong calls to action on his site, building and engaging with the community both on his site and where they are, and involving people in the process he has shown a real example of how engagement should work.

My question now is how this might carry on into a potential Obama-Biden administration. How would they use social media and online communities to continue to engage with people when they are in power. Social media can really help engage people when it provides away for them to have a real exchange about things that matter to them, where they can find out information on things they are interested in, share ideas and thoughts with peers and with politicians, report things to them and feel that they continue to be part of a campaign. Whatever happens tonight and whoever wins the election, it is likely that it will be a difficult few years; involving and engaging those who have been such strong supporters to now will continue to be a priority.

Whatever happens, our advice to Obama would be to keep it simple and focus on what has worked so far. Find a way to inspire and involve those who have been passionate about your campaign so far, keeping their enthusiasm and advocacy on side. But move beyond this and think about the ways in which social media can actually help to make your life easier. Whether that’s automating and bringing online petitions and discussions on issues, allowing review and comments on policy ideas online and in communities or using social media as a way of getting your message directly to people you are trying to engage and in a medium that really engages them.

Our work with clients at FreshNetworks shows that using social media successfully can really make things easier for them. We’ve seen this in the campaign - in terms of reach, letting advocates do your campaigning for you or raising money from a broad body of donors. I hope that when in the White House, Obama’s team use social media to make it easier for them to meet the new challenges and issues they will have to face in this role. That kind of engagement can only be good for citizens, and it can be powerful for the administration too.

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Some more reading

• United States Election Day 2008 Coverage Online
• US election: Barack Obama’s hometown of Chicago confident in his chances
• Using Social Media & Charisma To Brand
• US elections: the best of the rest on the web
• 2008 Presidential Race Tops $1B
• Top 10 election 2008 moments
• US Election 2008: Coming to a computer near you, live, tonight
• Can’t Miss This!: Election Day 2008
• Track the 2008 Presidental Election from your mobile phone