This week FreshNetworks is ‘blogger of the week‘ at Social Media Today, a site that brings together “the web’s best thinkers on social media and Web 2.0″. It’s great to be recognised in this way, and Social Media Today itself is an interesting online community. They have almost 2,500 members and editorially choose posts from a range of blogs to bring, each day, a selection of the best that is out there on social media.
Social Media Today is a great site. A good way into some of the more prolific bloggers and the latest debates and ideas in social media and Web 2.0. I recommend you all take a look, and not just because they made us blogger of the week!
The Co-operative has a long history of building sustainable consumer engagement in the UK. Long before Tesco or Sainsbury had loyalty cards in the UK, I remember at home as a child collecting stamps every time we did our weekly grocery shopping, and when the book was filled we could claim money off. At that stage my parents could also have had a say in the way the local branch was run - suggesting ideas and voting on ones to carry through to action. A real example of engagement on a local level.
Of course nowadays, engagement like this can be done on a much broader level and impact the business much more fundamentally than just the local store level. Working with online communities and leveraging the benefits of social media, brands can engage people more deeply. This is what the Co-operative Bank is aiming to do with its new blog, GoodWithMoney.
GoodWithMoney is a recent launch, with only a few days of posts. It is covering the bank’s efforts in micro-financing and the only posts that exist at the moment cover a current trip to visit organisations and businesses they are supporting in Bosnia. I have lots of questions about this blog (do they intend to keep it running or is it just a short term CSR or PR effort, how often will they update, is it designed to engage customers on an ongoing basis, how will they encourage interaction), but there is one thing I love already: their use of video.
We’ve written before about how powerful video can be in an online community, and how we work a lot with video in online communities we build at FreshNetworks. But the GoodWithMoney site is a really good case in point. Each blog post includes a relatively short paragraph or two updating us on what they have been doing, but it is the videos where things really come to life. A subject like micro-financing can be difficult to understand, what brings it to life are the real stories of real people. Video is a much more engaging way of conveying these types of stories. People come to life and feel more real. If one of the aims of online communities is to build a real connection between brand and consumer, then video is a great way of achieving this.
Video’s also great if it can be shared - it let’s you get your message out on other sites and bring people back into the community. As I’m doing right now…
Two pieces of research out this week highlight the fact that social media is truly entering the mainstream. The TechnoratiState of the Blogosphere 2008 report shows that three-quarters of active Internet users globally read blogs, and 184 million people have set up a blog. If the blogosphere were a country, it would be the sixth biggest in the world, just smaller than Brazil.
Then today came research from MarketTools showing that 70% of US adults visit blogs, social networks, online communities or other social media. And 42% report that their use of these sites and tools has increased in the last six months.
Both of these reports show that social media is more and more forming a part of people’s lives. With three quarters of global Internet users, and 70% of all US adults visiting social media sites it truly now is the mainstream.
What is interesting is to delve a little deeper in the MarketTools report and to understand why people are using sites like this. When we build online communities for clients, we spend a lot of time understand why the potential communities members would interact, what they like to do online and how this matches with our, and our client’s aims for the online community. The MarketTools research adds to our overall understanding here.
A third of respondents said that they use social media for product research, a telling statistic. With increasing numbers of brands integrating a social layer into their online presence it is reassuring to hear that almost one in four US adults uses social media to help decide what they will buy. And almost half of those who did use social media in this way said that it had a direct impact on the purchase decision.
So we are looking at an online environment where use of social media really has reached the mainstream. 70% of US adults visit social media sites. A third of these (so 23% of all US adults) research products online and 47% of these (11% of all US adults) say this directly impacts decision making. That’s about 25 million adults in the US making their purchase decisions on the basis of social media.
These statistics show that, for the US at least, social media is mainstream and something that all brands need to be making the most of. It would be interesting to see the same statistics repeated for Europe so that we can start to put a figure on the size of the opportunity for brands here. Our anecdotal evidence of working with brands across Europe at FreshNetworks suggests that the figures may not be far behind those in the US.
I found the Coca-Cola Conversations blog for the first time today, reading a post about how Coca-Cola first sponsored the Olympics games 80 years ago today. The blog is written by Phil Mooney, the “historian/archivest” of Coca-Cola, with the aim of
sharing information on a wide variety of topics, ranging from brand history to the value of collectibles
The blog asks people to comment and enter into a dialogue, and there is some exchange there. But reading this blog reminded me that corporate blogs, and indeed social media, can be used in very different ways by different organisations. This blog isn’t about new product developments or service advice; it’s about the history and heritage of the brand. And it seems to serve it’s purpose very well.
There are a few things that seem to make for a successful corporate blog:
A named and dedicated (main) contributor - when you are using social media as an organisation it’s important that you enter into the social and personal nature of the medium. The blog shouldn’t be from a brand because a brand can’t write. People want to know who is writing what they are reading - they will build a bond with them as they read more and more of their posts and so a face and a name are critical
Regular updating - companies develop and change quickly, and a consumer’s experience with your product will also be regular. The nature of social media encourages regular engagement and people expect this. It’s critical that you update your blog regularly. There is nothing worse than going to a brand’s blog and finding the last post was a few days or a few weeks ago.
Find ways to bring your consumers inside the business - this is something I think Coca-Cola Conversations does well. Corporate blogs should provide a way for their readers to feel more like insiders in the business. You should learn things that are not available elsewhere and as a community of readers feel that you are getting exclusive information as well as learning more about the organisation. This is why the brand history and heritage aspect of the blog work really well - you can find out more about Coca-Cola and feel like a true insider by reading the blog.
Each of these are important, but I think the latter is most important in terms of building engagement through the blog. Whilst the content that you post might be interesting and you may be doing it on a regular basis, creating an environment where people feel that they are insiders by reading the blog will have real benefits. People will want to come back and read more because the more they know about the brand and organisation the more they want to know more. They’ll also feel more comfortable commenting because you are encouraging and creating an atmosphere of sharing and discovering.
Of course creating this atmosphere is not easy. Coca-Cola Conversations does it well, as do other brands, and some of the lessons from this exercise would be good for others to apply. Perhaps the first stage is to find the one thing you can truly engage people on and that you can write regularly about. Isolate this and you have the beginnings of a real corporate blogging and social media strategy.
Today’s Financial Times has an interesting article on the value of C-Suite bloggers - asking what the value is of them blogging. Why should CEOs and their peers start a blog and can you really measure ROI. The article is based on an issue that many people who work in social media and social networks are discussing: how to measure the benefits realised from the costs of engaging people in this way.
However, there is the problem of that seductive term, social media. One common characteristic of social media, networking and blogging activities is that they appear to cost money with apparently no concrete return. In fact, some people might argue that social media usually turns out to be synonymous with expensive and time consuming and no clear benefit for the company.
I’m not sure I quite agree with the implication at the end of this article. For one thing, blogging doesn’t need to be expensive. Obviously the cost in time for a more senior blogger is greater than that for a more junior one, but a good and engaging blog could just have regular and very short posts. David Milliband, the UK Foreign Secretary, manages to achieve this very well in his posts on his Foreign and Commonwealth blog. I suspect the real expense comes when the executive herself doesn’t blog, but a PR agency is engaged to do this for them.
Whilst many PR agencies are great, and there can be a real value to them running a brand blog, I think that running a CEO blog in this way isn’t appropriate. At FreshNetworks, we find that the most successful activities in social media are ones based on honesty and transparency. And open and transparent approaches need not be expensive.
This still leaves the question of value. The FT article discusses how blogging can be a great way of communicating with customers. And we know from our experience that real and transparent communication like this can be really engaging. Putting a financial figure on this benefit is not easy to do. But their are times when the value of blogging is truly apparent.
While this question is difficult to answer, a blog that focuses on a precisely identified target group allows you to get opportunity costs under control. In times of crisis, for instance, the blogging CEO can try to set facts straight online if need be.
The benefit to British Airways of having an established and well-read blog from Willie Walsh during the Terminal 5 crisis at Heathrow earlier this year would have been huge.
Building a blog is building a resource. The effort you put it makes it there when you need it. A blog should be part of any businesses communications tool-kit. It’s an easy way to get content out, to make your voice and opinion be heard and to provide a space where you can start to engage with people, in normal times and times of crisis.
Should CEOs be blogging? Yes, undoubtedly. Maybe not full-time if they can’t, maybe sharing the blog with others in the business. But the evidence is that running a successful blog returns value in terms of engagement. And the higher the level of the blogger the more interest it is likely to attract.
There are many reasons people write blogs and many reasons people read them. The best are when somebody knows something that isn’t easily or widely known by others, or where you want a particular view on things.
Getting news from Zimbabwe is not easy at the moment. The next round of Presidential elections is next weekend and although there are reports in the press and on TV, these are often limited. In fact many Western journalists are not allowed to report from the country so too often we’ve seen people in South Africa, standing on the border with Zimbabwe and telling us what’s going on in the country.
In this environment, where there is a depth of real insight from inside the country, blogs have come into their own. They’re a way for people to report what is happening to them and in their environment. A way for others to spead news of what’s happening and to inform and engage people in the country and outside. Blogs are never as independent or objective as news reports. But they’re not really news. They’re a way for you to get inside an event, inside a country and read one person’s view on what is really happening.
As I’ve written before about the US election campaign (see post here), I tend to take a more scatter gun approach to tracking events in blogs. Searching for terms when I want an update and reading a range of recent posts from different people. But with the Zimbabwe situation there are a couple of sources I’m following regularly. They’re each a slightly different type of blog and I read them for different reasons.
This is Zimbabwe is from Sokwanele, a Civic Action Group. Its updates are factual and report arrests of members of the opposition. The blog is used to report where people are held, and to get information out to other Zimbabweans and others. They also act as an aggregator of news on Zimbabwe for people to read in one place and are a good overview of what’s actually happening on the ground. They also have a Twitter feed which reports on events in real time: @sowanele.
The UK High Commission in Harare is blogging about their experiences in the country. This is part of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s policy of corporate blogging. The entries are insightful and offer a unique view on what’s happening in the country. A recent post about a trip to the town of Zaka is definitely worth a read (see the post here). This blog is based on personal experiences but is written by British and Zimbabwean employees of the British High Commission and so their access to events is different and their opinions are informed by their professional experience and roles. It’s a great source.
Both of these shows the ways blogs are used and the power they have both in disseminating information but also, critically for uniting people who have common interests.
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!
In the original article, Business Week marvelled how in a world where you could set up an account and be posting your ideas to the world in less than ten minutes, companies needed to stay on top of the rise in blogging. “Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out,” the article warned, so business should “Catch up…or catch you later.”
Revisit that article three years later, Business Week sees that they missed something they couldn’t predict. After all only a quarter of the US population even reads a blog once a month. Their spread has been less prolific than the growth of social networks which people now use to share information. New applications and sites appear each week targetting a specific or more wide-ranging part of the population. Only a few people actually want to blog; many more want to use these new tools to stay in touch, share content and forge relationships.
It is these social connectors, and not just blogs, that are having the biggest impact on companies.
Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It’s as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides.
As Business Week points out, this is worrying for companies - they worry about lack of control. But there is a significant upside to this proliferation of social connectors. Collaboration, the ability to work together and talk together about issues, being able to watch what people discuss and get direct feedback from customers. Social media and social networks are truly changing the way that companies behave, inside and outside. BT use wikis for all internal projects - allowing people across the business (and across the world) to work in the same space on a new piece of code, a new marketing strategy or a map of mobile stations. And it’s well reported that P&G uses online social networks and online communities to develop and to test new product concepts and designs.
The tools that companies have to make the most of social media are changing, and Business Week think that they are now the future. I have to agree. In part. I think there is a real value to blogging as part of the social media toolkit that a company employs. But it can’t exist in isolation and needs to be just one element of a strategy to make the most of the emerging and growing opportunities that social media offers.
The biggest question that I hear from people who are new to the use of social media is what the tools are that they can use and when should they use them. Today’s lesson starts to look at these and in particular will look at four types of tool, which get increasingly more complex: blogs, forums, social networks and online communities.
Blogs
A blog is a website that has regularly updated commentary - either on an individual’s life, a business, a sector or any subject. Many people think that it is just an online diary, but really it can be much more than that. Blogs are ways for one person or one team of person to regularly develop and communicate their opinions. They can connect with other blogs to start to form an exchange and to develop ideas with others.
For businesses, blogs can be a great way to get your message out. They are updated more often than websites typically are and can be thought of as a great alternative to the traditional newsletter mail out. Blogs, however, are about ongoing communication - so you need to update very regularly; they’re about collaboration - so it’s not just pushing a marketing message; and they’re personal - not corporate speak.
For an amusing take on blogs from the CommonCraft Show watch the video below.
Forums
Forums are a way for lots of people to discuss and contribute to an idea. If a blog is very much about the author (or authors), then a forum is about the ideas. Typically organised into topics (or threads) people post suggestions, answers or contributions which others can respond to or add to.
Forums are particularly good for groups of people with shared interests. HR professionals, doctors or entrepreneurs in a particular region would make great candidates for forums. Brands can use them to engage their customer base - with forums about their product, services or support functions. You might even think of replacing your customer service team with a moderated forum that answers queries. The key here is ‘moderated’ - too many forums have no activity on them, they need to be pertinent and well managed to survive.
Social Networks
Social networks are ways of connecting with people you know (and people they know) online - think Facebook, MySpace or Linkedin. They are about individuals, we say that they are about a ‘me’. It’s where you go to share things about your life with friends and to find things out about them: photos, stories, what you’re doing right now. You share all of these things with people through your profile.
For businesses, social networks are particularly useful if you want to track what a particular customer segment is saying and doing. Find out where they hang out online and then check in to see what they discuss and talk about. You might even find them discussing your brand. Of course, because social networks are based on individuals, it can be difficult to speak to engage people directly here without it seeming too much like you are forcing yourself and your brand on them, which is not the image you want to give.
Online communities
If social networks are about a ‘me’, then online communities are about an ‘us’. These are built around issues, themes, or even brands, and are about the common purpose of the community rather than an individual member. They’re great ways to engage customers or stakeholders and some big brands use them a lot. They can help with innovation and creating new ideas; with testing ideas and concepts or getting insight into what customers thing; and they really build advocacy and word of mouth.
Like forums, the success of an online community comes down to good management and moderation and a well planned set of activities or topics to discuss. You need a reason for people to take part - what do they get out of joining. This is where they differ from social networks, but also where they are more powerful. Social networks attract people because they want to meet friends and share information about them. Online communities are about sharing information for others.
And are they successful? Well you only have to look at Tripadvisor - and online community for travel and hotel recommendations. The site is owned by Expedia and is now the biggest source of traffic to their e-commerce site, and sees the highest conversions to sales. Impressive stuff.
We’ll be back next week with a look at User Generated Content (UGC).
Following up on our posts about what British Airways should have done during the T5 fiasco at Heathrow (see posts here and here), I notice today that American Airlines are doing what we advised BA to do.
Last Friday they quietly launched an online blog, AA Conversation, as a way to keep in touch with customers online. The blog only has a few entries so far and is basic. Its success needs to be judged on how it is used in the longer term but the first signs are very encouraging. It contains service update information and criticallyoffers explanations for why delays and cancellations have happened.
This kind of medium is a great way to engage and inform passengers about what has happened. The blog also allows you to include more detail than you could in an announcement or a brief section on the existing website. It’s a great way to make sure that as much information as possible reaches the passengers online.
Keen users will follow the blog by RSS, others can just sign up for updates by email. Comments are encouraged and are flowing in.
One to watch - this could be managed badly and not used, or it could become a model of how airlines inform and engage with their passengers. Giving them information they need and allowing them the right of reply they want. This has to be better than the photocopied letter that BA handed out to people during the T5 fiasco. Let’s hope American Airways put in the time and effort to make this blog really work - that has to be a good development for all air travellers
This week FreshNetworks is ‘blogger of the week‘ at Social Media Today, a site that brings together “the web’s best thinkers on social media and Web 2.0″. It’s great to be recognised in this way, and Social Media Today itself is an interesting online community. They have almost 2,500 members and editorially choose posts from a range of blogs to bring, each day, a selection of the best that is out there on social media.
Two pieces of research out this week highlight the fact that social media is truly entering the mainstream. The 
