FreshNetworks Blog

At FreshNetworks, we work very much in Research 2.0. Our sister company, FreshMinds, has been market research agency of the year here in the UK for the last couple of years and some of our communities are specifically designed for research. It was interesting, therefore, to listen to a great presentation from Guillaume Weill at CRM Metrix on his take on what Research 2.0 is.

For Guillaume, Research 2.0 is letting brands finally converse with their customers. They talk to them (advertising) and listem (market research) but don’t actually engage with them. In fact Guillaume would say that brands talk 50 times more than they listen as global advertising spend is about 50 times the spend on market research.

To start to converse, Guillaume things that market research companies need to shift from a vertical view of the world to a horizontal one. He defines these as follows:

To acheive this, Guillaume recommends that brands and market research agencies:

• use the potential of online conversations to listen to their customers
• analyse these conversations in a new way - allowing customers to comment on and refine others’ contributions
• converse more often with their consumers, ideally leaving the conversation on all the time

This all makes sense and is similar to what we have been saying for a while and wrote in our white paper earlier this year (see post here).

So what does this all add up to? Guillaume thinks that Research 2.0 allows you to get the same quality of results but more quickly. This is where we disagree. We think that the quality and depth of insight you can get from a well managed conversation with your customers can be qualitatively different to traditional research techniques. Taking qualitative methods online can revolutionise the depth of insight you get and the ability to bring your customers inside your business.

If you want to find out how we’d do this then feel free to get in touch of course!

Emmanuel Vivier gave a really detailed and great view of word of mouth marketing. For him we have entered the Consumer 2.0 era - for marketeers the time when you could control people is over. They have become immune to advertising spam and are facing death by choice. You have to be cleverer about how you target people and how you use word of mouth. So Emmanuel’s eight best practice ideas are:

1. Create products that are so good that people want to talk about them

• As Martin Oetting from trnd had said earlier this can either be because the product itself requires word of mouth (no point having a fax machine or using Skype if nobody you know does), or because the product is striking and makes people want to talk about it

2. If your product is not cool, offer great and attractive content for free

• Why has Kinder always given out toys with it’s eggs? Because the chocolate itself isn’t great but people buy it for the additional gift.
• In France Bonux, a dishwasher powder, used to give out free toys for a similar reason - to encourage sales by pester-power. It now gives a free mp3 download with every purchase from it’s site tulaseuou.com.

3. Don’t sponsor the entertainment, be the entertainment

• Lots of great examples here and a real trend at the moment. A good one is Burger King, who made and sold (admittedly rather good) computer games that you could buy for $3.99 with any meal in store. They sold over three million copies. Advertising that the consumer pays you to see!

4. Let consumers participate in making your marketing

• As well as cocreation tools, a real opportunity here is to leverage user-generated content (UGC). As Emmanuel admits, most UGC is not very good. But volumes are high and some is.
• The French radio station Skyrock launched a blogging platform a few years ago and took a significant share of the market. They saw this fitting with their role as a media organisation who helped people to stay up to date. Blogging now contributes 50% of their revenue and also provides the content for their web presence.

5. Provide a service to the community

• This is what Nike have done with iPod. Creating a joint campaign which includes an ability for you to use your iPod, nike trainers and a website (here) to track and record how much exercise you do and to keep up with your training schedule.

6. Make it easy for people to forward your message

• Make it something they want to forward and then let them do it easily.

7. Surprise your audience

• People notice things that are different, especially in the world where we are drowning in advertising. BBC World did this with a series of billboards which allowed people to text to vote in a question - with the results updating on the billboard immediately. Questions included things like were the US troops in Iraq liberators or occupiers. Challenging stuff (see here).

8. Turn bloggers into brand champions

• As previous people at the conference had said - if people are writing about your brand, and they’re well read, then you really should be engaging them. Provide special content for them and they’ll spread it for you.

Another interesting issue raised by Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach of Edelman PR was his view that word of mouth is an outcome and not a strategy. He cites the example of viral videos and the fact that usually viewers can remember the video and the concept but not the brand. Unfortunately for Wolfgang, he spoke after a presentation showing a couple of really memorable branded viral spots, but the point still stands.

For me this is perhaps a wider issue with the way we think about word of mouth. Too many people focus on it as a push mechanism. Measurements often focus on the number of people who the campaign pushes out to and not the number of people to whom they then spread word of mouth. We concentrate more on the givers of word of mouth than the receivers. Perhaps something we should build on here - it might reveal some interesting observations.

A great presentation from Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach, Head of Social Media Europe for Edelman PR. Too much to squeeze into one post, but he talked in particular about the baby monitor principle and how this, for him, describes the change in communications that we are seeing.

The story goes something like this…

Children know that if they cry, their parents will come. Before the baby monitor you ahd to get out of bed, walk along the corridor and check to see if the baby was crying or not. It took a while for you to get the answer to your question. But with the baby monitor you just need to switch it on and you can bring your baby to you; you get the answer to your question straight away.

This is true of communication. Previously you had to go out to find your customers and then listen to see if they were talking about you. Now you just to switch on the metaphorical baby monitor that the web offers and you can listen directly.

A neat explanation!

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Olivier Creiche from Six Apart thinks there are four specific opportunities for buzz and social media; four ways that firms can make the most out of giving power to people through blogs, forums and communities.

• e-commerce. Olivier feels that people don’t talk about this enough, and about how you can use social networks as an e-commerce mechanism. The best known example of this is Amazon who, reportedly, make about 25% of their sales from such distributed e-commerce. Their model is simple - applications on peoples’ networks allow them to say what books they like, they’ve read and they want to read. Amazon provides the thumbnail pictures of the books and when you click on one it takes you to the Amazon site to buy online. If you’ve not seen this application then my bookshelf is below:

• Join the conversation using the same means. If you want to engage people online you need to use the same means that they do. This could mean blogging. It’s important to note that companies don’t blog, individuals do. So if you have a corporate blog it’s important that it’s clear who is writing it and that their individual voice shines through.
• Advertising. In an environment where we know who people are and can gather lots of information about them, advertising can be more targeted, and charged to a brand at a premium.
• Community interaction. There is a huge benefit to watching a community grow, to working with it and letting it do some of your leg work for you.

In order to make the most of these four areas, Olivier suggests a set of guidelines for a brand or marketing agency to adopt:

• Influence the influencers
• Be ready to lose some content
• Be authentic
• It’s not about you; it’s about them
• Provide value to users
• Maintain the dialogue

The last of these is critical - if you start engaging with people online you need a plan for what you will do with them in the future. You can’t (and shouldn’t) just abandon them.

A short session from Fred Cavazza. For him, social means share. Online everybody has something to say, you cannot hide from it. The only question really is if you want to be inside or outside; to join the conversation or to let others talk about it without you.

In this environment, information is a commodity, everything is free and as a brand or a marketeer, if you don’t engage then people won’t respond.

Experimentation is key - Dell did this with their Ideastorm, and it paid off. Others do it and even if it doesn’t work, they’ve joined the conversation and are able to adjust and ammend their social media strategy. They firms that will fail are those who don’t engage at all.

A few tips from Xavier des Horts at Nokia about how to grow a blogging culture, and particularly how to make sure that any external social media marketing or communications that a business does is as successful as possible.

Nokia have just launched their new public facing social media site (Nokia Conversations). For Xavier, social media like this is communications as opposed to advertising. He thinks that the success of an external use of blogs, for example, relies on successful internal use of such tools. You need to build a blogging culture in the business, a four-part process:

1. Encourage and enable people internally to blog themselves - this can be internal and is also a great way of dealing with knowledge sharing problems.
2. Build external social media relationships - Xavier admitted to searching every couple of hours on Google Blog Search for Nokia to see what was being discussed. He responds to these personally where relevant as part of the process of building strong relationships with others externally.
3. Build networks of contacts - just as traditional PR would brief press, you should find who the influential bloggers, writers and commentators are in your area and feed them news and developments.
4. Do all of this honestly - as a business, to be successful with social media you need to be open honest and respectful. Otherwise people will find you out and that will have the counter-effect of what you set out to do (remember Wal-Marting Across America)

Finally - where does blogging and social media sit in a firm’s communication’s strategy? For Xavier there are three main parts to a firm’s external voice. The formal statements (such as on a press site), the marketing message (on the main corporate website) and the stories. It is the latter which blogging can do so well, and that many firms are yet to realise the benefits of.

There are many benefits to social media, but Jay Stevens from MySpace showed that in a US study 45% of users of social networks said that they “made life more exciting”. This comment shows one thing - that through social networks you can build deeper emotional connections with people. Deeper because social networks are not a substitute for real life, but they enhance it.

For Stevens, the real use of social networks is yet to come. He notes three trends that are major developments in this space:

1. Personalisation - from the BBC homepage to MySpace we’ve seen that ajax and widgets are making it easier for people to make their online experience personal. The critical next step for social networks is to find ways for one user to use the same network for multiple reasons - personal, work, dating. Essential for the success of this will be homepage personalisation - a good social network is one that each individual feels as though they own.
2. Portability - for Stevens this means both the ability to access content from multiple devices, but also to add content any time any place. The ‘post’ functionality of MySpace and ’share’ for Facebook are starting to make this possible.
3. Collaboration - the future is going to be open APIs and developer applications. Something that Facebook is leading the way in at the moment.

Mark Beth Kemp from Forrester thinks that the lifetime value of a customer is no longer enough. Both this and the ROI model are deficient because they don’t take account of customer dynamics.

One interesting example she gave was about the launch of the Wii. They wanted to launch a games console that appealed to an expanded market and to sell the benefits of gaming. One critical barrier they saw was the difficulty of persuading parents of children (specifically mums) that this was a new games console that kids should enjoy using. They turned this barrier into an opportunity and launched the alpha mums programme. Finding the most active mums online and seeding them with the product. These mums were encouraged to host parties where other mums could try the Wii. The result was incredible and shows the power of harnessing customer dynamics. One alpha mum alone sold 200 consoles to her email contacts.

For Mary Beth, your new high value customers are not those who spend the most with you over their lifetime. It’s more complex. The highest value comes from your Ambassadors - those who spend a relatively large amount personally and also have a lot of social value - they have a lot of contacts and have influence over these people. Finding exactly who these people are can be complex although really it just relies on finding out where they socialise (online or offline) and how many people they are in contact with there. This gives you their reach. You can then calculate how valuable their recommendations are likely to be and that gives you a crude measure of social value. Perhaps a developing but more useful measure for marketeers.

Alan Kimmel, Professor of Marketing at ESCP-EAP, kicked off the day with a session about the old and new worlds of marketing. How communication used to be easy (you got the 4 Ps right and the rest followed) but this is no longer the case.For him we are moving from a consuming species to a connecting species and marketing needs to shift to recognise this. But with two main caveats:

1. Traditional media aren’t dead
2. We need to make sure not to oversell new marketing techniques

One example of this would be the false emphasis some people put on WOM and the thought that if you can target one super connected person the rest will follow. This just oversimplifies the situation - it’s as much about the environment as the person and as much about the people that receive and respond to word of mouth as those who instigate it.

So new marketing techniques are not making things easier. I suppose that was a bit over-optimistic to hope for…