I was speaking on the Future of the Industry at the ESOMARPanel Research 08 conference in Dublin last week, an international market research conference. Over the two days of the conference, a lot was said about social media and online communities (see previous posts on lessons we can learn from the team at MomConnection). Speaking in the last session on the last day is always more difficult, and I wanted to leave the people at the conference with something to think about. So I spoke about two issues we have seen develop FreshNetworks.
Firstly I spoke about how online communities, and more importantly the ability for consumers and brands to talk directly with each other using social media, is changing the client-agency relationship in research and other marketing services. Whereas previous agencies played the role of standing between the consumer and the brand (or the client and respondent in market research terms), now their role is more to facilitate these two groups interacting directly with each other. This sounds like an easy change but really it isn’t. It shifts both the role of the agency (from intermediary and translator to facilitator and advisor) and it throws up it’s own problems. In the research industry, for example, the agency, standing between brand and consumer, has an important role to play ensuring that any research is conducted in an honest manner, designed and carried out to make sure that the results are meaningful and that business decisions can be made on them. With the role of the agency and client changing, there is a need to change processes and techniques. The first step is to recognise that the role has changed.
Secondly, and building on this I showed that whilst we’ve had online research communities for some time, to date they have typically been used as new ways of doing old things. Today, with the significant shift-change in the use of social media for customer engagement, online communities can now do completely new things. We are seeing more and more organisations building online communities as a way to engage with clients. Indeed just a few weeks ago a report from Gartner predicted such communities at more than 60% of large US firms by 2010. The challenge for the market research industry here is that, with so many communities being built and so many firms building them, they may lose the initiative. Communities are a brilliant source of insight (either planned and managed or insight through UGC). Organisations will begin to rely more and more on these tools as sources of insight and research, whether or not the community has been built or managed by a research firm.
So it was a bit of a “if we don’t do it somebody else will” speech. A sentiment that really does apply to the market research industry today.
I wrote a paper for ESOMAR on this and if you’re really keen it’s available here (or just ask me if you want to chat about it).
I’m at the ESOMARPanel Research 08 conference in Dublin for a couple of days. Tomorrow I present a paper on the future of the market research industry, talking about how online research communities are changing the agency-client relationship. Today I get to listen to the other speakers, talking on subjects from data quality to online communities. The latter sessions were obviously of most interest to me.
The site has been running for five years now and in part of their presentation they highlighted ten insights they have learnt from running the site:
Right size, don’t supersize - the team from MomConnection keep a community of 5,000 people and say that anything larger would be of less use from a research perspective
Protect the sponsor and the brand - when you’re building a branded online community it is important that you recognise and act as a brand ambassador
It never gets cheaper - the team claim that the need to constantly innovate and develop the site mean that there will always be a cost involved with running and improving the community
It never takes less time - the MomConnection team do a series of monthly, quarterly, semi-annually and annually activities to maintain the community and membership
Encourage shared ownership - the team talked about shared ownership between the client and agency
Respect your panel [sic] - they engage in direct contact with members and have named individuals dealing with them
A real community isn’t in it for the money - if you build a real community you won’t need to incentivise them to take part
Make the most on evolving needs to innovate - listen to the ideas of community members and the client on how to evolve the community
Stay focused on the client’s goals - make sure they get out what they want but also that they make the most of the community
Speed breeds success - the online research community format is built for quick turnaround research and so build tools and processes to support this
What are your thoughts on these as the ten main lessons for online research communities. I’m looking forward to debating them with the rest of the team at FreshNetworks when I’m back in the office, but reflecting on them today I think there are areas I would expand on. The ‘never gets cheaper’ and ‘never takes less time’ may be true but from our experience, although there may always be a cost and time invovled in managing the community this does not have to increase proportionately to the increased size of the community. If you get things right at the start you can scale the community with a relatively decreasing cost per member. I also agree with the need to encourage shared ownership, but we would rephrase this, saying the community owns the community and so the client needs to be part of that to make the most of it.
Anyway - more on some of these things in my presentation tomorrow. I’ll right about it afterwards.
It seems that major events were the impetus for most steps forward the BBC has taken in engagement. At yesterday’s Social Media Influence conference in London, Pete Clifton, Head of Editorial Development for Multi-Media Journalism at the BBC, spoke about the lessons they had learnt and the steps taken. And to me it seemed that major events were the catalyst for much of this change.
Event 1: The 1997 General Election Campaign
The BBC news website grew out of an experiment during the 1997 General Election in the UK - an important time and a major campaign which saw the Conservative Party being replaced by Tony Blair’s New Labour after 18 years in power. The BBC put up a few pages to cover the event as an experiment of how news could work online. The plan was to take this down over the summer following the campaign, but a second event stopped this.
Event 2: The death of Diana, Princess of Wales
Just as the site was to be wound-down, a second event occured that would also merit from some special treatment online. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales in the summer of 1997 led the BBC news team to set up a second set of pages - updating these and letting viewers email in their tributes and opinions. The first interactive news article on the BBC’s site was born and the site was not taken down. The importance of news online was realised and so the full BBC news site launched later that year.
Event 3: 7/7 bombings in London
By 2005, the BBC News website was well used and formed an integral part of the channel’s news outlet. The events of 7th July of that year in London helped in the shift of perception from multi-media news being something that sat apart from main editorial activities to something more integrated. When news-wire and London Underground reports were still reporting a power surge on the tube network, and nobody really knew what was happening, BBC News received an email containing a picture of a bus where one of the bombs had exploded and an eye-witness account of the events. Interacting with viewers through multi-media and online was now making the news. In fact the opening sequence on the main TV news bulletin the following evening was entirely UGC - videos shot on mobile phones from inside trapped Underground carriages.
These major events seem to have shaped the BBC’s activities and strategy for news online. In fact it is now an integrated part of the news offering and will soon no longer be a separate team, but will sit with the rest of the newsroom.
The hospital wanted to improve morale and the satisfaction level among staff. Their solution was relatively cheap and made good use of social media. They installed screens in kiosks across the hospital and choose a handful of bloggers from different departments in the hospital. These were trained in how to write short (50 word) blog posts about what they were doing and what was going on in their department. They blogged during their day and they posts were streamed live to the screens. Letting everybody in the hospital know what was going on and helping them to connect with others and feel a collective sense of pride in what they were doing.
This example was apparently very successful. It was relatively cheap, engaged staff and, critically, involved a period of training to mean that those who were doing the blogging felt comfortable and able to do so. Great example!
Talking about consumer feedback and measuring it online he showed that not only is most feedback still emailed directly to the brand (54% of cases) but 55% of people would go first to a company website or blog to get information, and not somebody else’s site. In this context therefore, it is critical that you not only have a compelling and informative website (to increase the use people get from visiting it) but also that you listen and respond to comments and feedback you get (to encourage this kind of engagement).
In fact both of these elements are about thinking that your web presence is less about just marketing (pushing out a message) and more about engaging. Alex stressed that it’s important to make your website personal. This can be as simple as using personal phrases (such as “Meet us” or “Get involved”), to exploiting video on our site or integrating some community elements (such as blogs or forums).
For Alex, every product should have a video and every brand can have a community. Videos are the easiest thing to spread virally or embed. And he thinks that there is a community element to every product - people need it in their daily lives or they wouldn’t buy it.
For me, this shows that the best way of monitoring and controlling your brand’s image online is to be proactive - much of the key to success is probably something brands themselves can control.
For the final session of the day I attended a seminar on whether our educational institutions living up to the innovation demands of the 21st century. The end of the day is always a tricky session and a bizarrely-shaped room didn’t help matters, but I couldn’t help but feel we never got to the meat of an exciting and radical topic.
I have worked with a lot of education clients in my previous roles and have always been struck by how traditional the structure is. Just taking schools as an example, the pattern of a day is still pretty much the same as it was 100 years ago - pupils arrive, listen to a teacher or read a book, make notes and answer questions and leave. They all go to the same building, and I bet school days typically start and end at the same time the always did, with a bell marking the same number of breaks.
Now compare this with the experiences of a modern workplace. Companies and the environments they create have changed radically in the last 100 years. The same is not true of our education establishments, many of which pride themselves on offering the same level and type of education that they have done for tens or hundreds of years. I went to a university that was proud of just that!
It’s not that this doesn’t work, or that things should change for the sake of it. Rather that the education system is not making the most of the creativity tools and social media that we see in the business world and social enterprise.
In work that I have done in the past we have developed innovative structures for education. We know that a real barrier to education for those with low skill levels or on low incomes is having to travel to a school or college - they either can’t afford the time or money to get there or feel intimidated by being in an ‘institution’. Why not, then, take education to them? Build small and localised learning studios that people can attend. Link them together through the internet and social media to create small studios that truly feel part of a larger (if virtual) organisation. There are pockets of innovation like this but nothing substantial and sustained.
Instead we’re Building Schools for the Future. As one colleague in the education sector once said to me “We risk knocking down old Victorian buildings to just build a cleaner, shinier modern replica in their place.”
I think the education system isn’t making the most of tools to support innovation and it’s a pity the discussion didn’t get here today. Perhaps it was the end of day blues and the bizarre room. I know at least one of the panellists, Andy Powell the Chief Executive of the Edge Foundation is passionate about change in education and making it more appropriate to the needs of learners. Sadly an open and detailed debate on these issues too often never emerges.
The afternoon sees a series of large seminars (we must have had close to 800+ people in the first one). The discussion was about whether social networks were the new cities and much of the debate centered on how these two crucibles of humankind compare and how they each deal with similar issues. The panel included the Richard Leese (Leader of Manchester City Council), Michael Birch (founder of Bebo.com) and Jon Gisby (Director of New Media and Technology at Channel Four). With Charles Leadbeater in the chair it looked set to be an interesting and informed debate.
For Leese there was no doubt that virtual worlds were not a replacement for real ones - you need cities and need to encourage and facilitate innovation and creativity by creating physical spaces that support this. If you do this and encourage people to the city then it will flourish. Whilst this point wasn’t made directly during the session, I think this also describes perfectly how you create a successful social network.
Birch explained how the early stages of Bebo.com were tough work. Creating an environment that people wanted to come to online and then getting the first few members who joined the site to take part and return. There are thousands of social networks out there, but only some reach the stage of maturity where they are vibrant and successful. The process of creating inviting spaces and then nurturing the first people to join you seem similar across cities and social networks.
Perhaps this returns to a theme that we saw earlier in the day. Whether you are building a city like Manchester or a social network like Bebo.com, you are dealing with the same commodity - human beings. We are social creatures and in both cases you want to create a network of these creatures, limited either geographically (in the case of the city) or by their online activity (in the case of a social network).
In both cases the route to success is simple:
Build an environment that is appealing to the people you are trying to attract
Make an extra special effort to attract your first members
Work with them and nurture them to ensure that they stay and attract their own networks
Allow the space to grow and develop as you get more people, and allow people to contribute to building an environment that’s right for them
An interesting panel session discussing whether collaborative innovation is something that the western world is privileged and developing countries cannot. Sam Pitroda commented that innovation has always been used to solve rich people’s problems, despite them not really having any problems at all. This may be true. Indeed the brain drain from countries such as India is in part reflecting the fact that the brightest brains in India are not solving their own domestic problems, but working in Wall Street banks.
This thesis is opposed to some extent with the oft quoted phrase amongst western politicians and leaders that we need to innovate in order to compete with the likes of India, China, Brazil and others. This view seems counter-intuitive. Global businesses, as Helen Alexander for the Economist points out, operate globally. They cooperate across boundaries and are intrinsically set up to make the best of the resources available to them, wherever they might be.
Our sister company, FreshMinds Research, did some work a couple of years ago for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK on the science and technology links that existed between India and the UK. We found that those that were most successful were often those the governments knew nothing about. Perhaps Helen Alexander was right when she said the best thing the government could do for innovation was to stay out of the way.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world and the unreasonable man persists in adapting the world to himself”.
By this definition from George Bernard Shaw, Bob Geldof would call himself an unreasonable man. And he thinks the time is ripe for innovation; we are running out of things (air, land, oil and the likes) and so we need innovation to help us adapt. Everyone can have ideas and everyone does but they don’t exist out of time - they emerge if they are applicable to the moment. This is what we’re seeing and business needs to support and push these appropriate ideas forward.
For Geldof, social entrepreneurs are the real unreasonable men. He gives the examples of Professor Mohammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, who brought micro-finance to Bangladesh. With initial loans of $5 to 27 people he has taken 100s of millions of people out of poverty. This was an innovation that was rejected by the big banks and the corporates but that has had a profound impact and change in Bangladesh and across the world.
He thinks that the UK needs to encourage this kind of entrepreneurship more. Fund research of the type Berners-Lee was talking about; research where we don’t know why we’re doing it. Geldof thinks we need to celebrate failure and the attempt at trying - without this we will not get real innovation.
“Vague but exciting” is how Tim Berners-Lee’s boss described his initial proposal for the World Wide Web. It seems like a description that applies even today. The inspiration for Berners-Lee’s work came from a book called Enquire within and upon Everything, another appropriate description for what you can do online.
Berners-Lee worked on the Web because his employers said “not yes but not no” to doing it. He thinks that this approach - giving employees some space to think or find alternative ways to solve problems - would be beneficial for most employers. We often say that the most intelligent people don’t work for us, but it’s also true that we too often don’t give those who do work for us enough space to generate new ideas.
Don’t tell them what to produce - you’re looking for new ideas, don’t give them your old ones.
You don’t always know why you are doing what you’re doing; why it will be useful. And if you do then it’s probably not research. Some companies do embrace this approach - letting employees have 10% of their week to work on their own projects (as at Google) or opening up your innovation to those outside your organisation (as P&G do with their online communities).
Bringing people together from different disciplines
Talking about his current work on web science, Berners-Lee shows how it’s important to bring together people from different disciplines. For him the web isn’t a connection between web pages or between computers but a social tool - a link between individuals. So developing and innovating in the Web you don’t need just a set of developers and coders, you need to understand people’s motivations and behaviours online and then develop tools and other innovations that support and enhance this.
As we say at FreshNetworks, getting something right online is about more than just the technology.
I was speaking on the Future of the Industry at the ESOMAR Panel Research 08 conference in Dublin last week, an international market research conference. Over the two days of the conference, a lot was said about social media and online communities (see previous posts on lessons we can learn from the team at MomConnection). Speaking in the last session on the last day is always more difficult, and I wanted to leave the people at the conference with something to think about. So I spoke about two issues we have seen develop FreshNetworks.
I’m at the 