FreshNetworks Blog

It’s been another week of gloom in the business press. European airlines facing tough times, questions about the sale of banks and falling profits on the high street. Times are undoubtedly tough. Brand are facing a problem with this growing uncertainty about the economic outlook. A report out this weekend suggests that over two-thirds of British families are reigning in their spending and a similar pattern is being faced across Europe and North America.

In times like this, brands need to work harder to make sure they attract and retain consumer spending. Getting close to and understanding your customers is even more important than ever. You need to ensure that you understand what they want and that you are at the forefront of their mind when making a purchase. Sustainable engagement is critical - more than just a need for good marketing campaigns, brands to to build and maintain sustainable relationships with their customers. And they probably want to do this without spending too much money.

So in the interests of helping brands face the credit crunch and come out the other side, here are five recommendations from the team at FreshNetworks of how you can use social media to help make the most of your opportunities in the current climate and to engage your customers in a sustainable way.

1. Add product reviews to your site

If you have your products listed on your site (whether it’s an e-commerce-enabled site or not) you really should have a place for customer reviews. A rating mechanism (scoring the product out of five, for example) would be a good start, but allowing people to write reviews is best. Many firms worry about doing this and doing it openly, but reviews tend to be more positive than not (the typical score given out of five is 4.3) and the presence of reviews (be they positive or not) are reassuring for customers. In fact, a study done by FigLeaves showed that by adding reviews to their site increased conversions to sales by over 30%.

2. Involve customers as soon as possible in your decision making

You can’t afford to make a wrong decision, but you might not want to delay getting your new product or process to the market. It’s important to involve your customers to make sure that you are going in the right direction and that you are meeting a need that they have. It’s often said that the brightest people don’t work for you and some of the biggest companies recognise this by working with their customers in online research communities - testing ideas with them in real-time. Checking your plans with them as you are developing them, or watching what customers think, do and say so you can adapt your product for them. In a recent online research community that we ran for a global telecommunications firm, the community let them see the language their customers used to talk about their product and feed this into their marketing and advertising.

3. Reward your customers

Customers want to be passionate about your brand. Whatever it is you sell or do, there will be customers who care about you. You need to reward them. You need to be as passionate back to them. This is where social media can really come to the fore. Letting them be the ‘first to know, first to see, first to do’ is a great way to reward them. Create a community and release new product information to the community members first. Let them interact directly with senior staff and enter into an exchange with them (as shown by Gordon Brown in Ask the PM). Making your customers feel like part of the organisation is the best reward they can get. And using social media is the most effective way of letting them feel this.

4. Equip your advocates to amplify word of mouth

Your most passionate advocates should be doing your marketing for you. We know from research from McKinsey and Forrester Research that people are more likely to trust ‘people like me’. If you can equip your advocates with information (such as the early access to new product information proposed above) and maybe let them take it to their own social networks through widgets then you can get them to do your marketing for you. You can amplify the word of mouth by giving them information to talk about and help them spread the word about your product.

5. It’s okay to ‘join the conversation’ but you need to listen and respond

Whilst there has been a lot of talk of ‘joining the conversation’, people often don’t say what this means. If you are to truly engage your customers, you need to create a space where you can have an open and frank exchange with them. You can tell them things about your product, your brand, your intentions and developments. You can also listen to them, about their life, their thoughts on your product and the place your product plays in their life. This is a powerful exchange to create and an area where real engagement develops. What will make it a success if feedback. When you listen to your customer make sure you tell them what you think, what you are going to do based on their thoughts, and also why you might not do anything. This two-way feedback is what makes online communities work.

Some more reading

• ROI measurement + Items = YES you can measure Social Media ROI
• Understanding Gartner’s “Generation Virtual”
• The Credit Crunch - What Next?
• Financial chaos does not rule out economic recovery
• Now is the time to seize power from the markets
• What is next in debt crunch?
• Online shopping and the credit crunch

What’s the best way to promote films with online communities?

I was pondering this last night when my friend Jim sent me the trailer for his directorial debut, Eden Lake. As the UK Marketing Director of a major film company recently told me, film promotion has some particular challenges. Speed, for one: the marketing has to be so effective that penetration in the target demographic goes from 0 to 80% in about a fortnight. Flexibility is another: with the right word of mouth, a film that starts playing in only a few cinemas can build up sufficient momentum to get country-wide distribution in a matter of days.

But while film production companies might specialise in particular genres, the film distribution arms (on which they depend hugely for successful sales and marketing) usually don’t – one week it’s art-house, the next grisly horror. Since the target audience is changing all the time, it’s no wonder that their marketing is usually highly tactical, very campaign-based, and quite traditional – mainly above-the-line promotion on TV, billboards and in cinemas. Sometimes viral campaigns are thrown in, but these tend to be short-lived, fairly hit-and-miss affairs.

So how should online communities be used to promote films? By their very nature, communities take some time to grow the social bonds that make them sustainable. So aside from the multi-film franchises, few individual films have enough time in their marketing slot to generate community on their own micro-sites.

But there is an alternative: to treat the microsite as a hub, which connects the official site to the multiple other spaces where community and conversations can form. The site of upcoming Bond release Quantum of Solace has done this successfully by mixing exclusive content with links to fan sites on social networks (like MySpace and Facebook). It also has a download section to promote cross-linking with widgets that allow consumers to add features to their own social networking or blog sites. In fact, it’s exactly the same approach that we recommend to our clients when they’re building a customer community – they should see it as a space they manage that can also integrate with the other external sites they participate in.

The other advantage of this approach is that it can help distinguish the official from the user-generated content, some of which might be well-produced enough to lead to genuine confusion. Admittedly the amusing re-edit of The Shining trailer as a romantic comedy is unlikely to mislead anyone. But well-made spoof or malicious content can have adverse effects on a brand if people think it’s genuine – ask the banks, who suffer from the many phishing emails that no doubt turn up in your spam box every day. Equally if, like my friend Jim, your film is about a gang of louts targeting a young couple, you don’t want really user-generated re-enactments as part of your marketing campaign…

So when it comes to short-lived, campaign-based marketing, a central hub that links to other sites might be more appropriate than a dedicated community site. Real community takes time to form and should be sustainable – it’s a long-term relationship, not just a one night stand.

Some more reading

• Social Network Retention– How to Achieve Engagement Nirvana

For the last few days I’ve been privy to an interesting  example of how not to use social networks for marketing. It all started when somebody I don’t know (let’s call him John) asked to be my friend on Facebook.

I don’t know John and have never known John. It became clear that we were both members of a couple of groups and that was, I assumed, where he had got my details from. I have a fairly tight group of friends on Facebook and use it mainly to keep in touch with people I know and don’t get to see as often as I like. So I haven’t accepted his invite. I did look at his profile though and the very day he asked me to be his friend he also befriended almost 200 other people.

People are popular, but often not all at the same time like this so I wanted to find out why.

As I checked back at John’s profile, signs came with his changing statuses. First was one telling us that his new book was out in a few months and we should call his PA to reserve a copy. Next came an update about a radio interview he was doing and then came one about an event.

It may be a coincidence but it seemed as though John had found people with interests aligned with his new book and asked them to be his friend so that he could constantly market his new book through their feeds.

Clever you might think and there are lots of people (myself included) who feed their blog posts and other items through Facebook. The problem came in John’s approach to adding friends.

Over the last couple of days posts have appeared on his wall saying things like

Thanks for the ad. Who are you?

This wasn’t just spam. John is a real person who has found people with similar interests to him and asked to befriend them. This happens all the time. That John was trying to use this for marketing just highlights the complexities of using Facebook for this.

Facebook is a very personal space. It’s the place I go to to find out about my friends, post my photos and read my messages. This can be a very difficult context for brands, or anybody trying to market a product, to enter. You are interrupting a user’s experience and need to do it sensibly and sensitively. Whilst some people will be happy to receive your updates to their news-feed, others will see this as an intrusion.

Of course dealing with this is easy. Just don’t befriend them. From the marketers perspective this makes it difficult to control who you can get your message to.

Some more reading

• Facebook Marketing
• The Facebook Platform is Biased Toward “Fun” Apps
• Three Reasons To Become Friends With FriendFeed
• Social Networking - Go Where the Fish Are!

So Microsoft has entered the world of spoof ads. Charlie’s post earlier this week (here) showed one of the adverts they’ve made. Based on a ‘couple’ the ads parody the disconnect between brands (or rather advertisers) and consumers. Showing how the consumer has moved on, whilst the advertiser hasn’t. How the consumer thinks the relationship isn’t working any more, whilst the advertiser thinks it can.

They are funny ads but also they summarise the current situation quite well. Consumers have moved on; they are more informed and more empowered. Some brands and some advertising just hasn’t kept pace. The tensions show in places, things are changing and not everybody is moving at the same speed. These videos highlight that perfectly.

The guy leading the project at Microsoft is keeping a blog (here), and another of the videos is below.

I was at an interesting breakfast event earlier this week, organised by Rebecca Caroe discussing whether brands should be, could be or even are broadcasters. There were three presentations - one about how the BBC had started to think about their programmes more as events than just shows, one on how brands are personalising their conversations with customers and a final presentation on Honda.tv.

Andrew Howells from Zype talked through Honda’s development as a broadcaster and how they were using TV to create a further channel through which the brand could build the customer experience and engagement. How the brand moved from offering additional content during an advert (of the ‘press the red button to find out more’ variety) to having it’s own channel on some cable providers. The interruption model during adverts, it turned out, was not as successful as expected. The channel that people could view as suited them was more popular.

This observation was an interesting one to me. Before I went to the event I was concerned about the title: Should Brands be Broadcasters. In an environment where consumers have greater choice than ever over their exposure to and their discussion of brands, I think there is a danger of suggesting that they should adopt the purely one-way communication that broadcast suggests. The Honda example is good because they use a broadcast medium to allow and encourage two-way conversation and personalisation. Also, by having their own channel rather than pushing their messages to people at a time the brand chooses they are giving their customers the choice to engage when it suits them.

This is critical. As one other attendee at Wednesday’s breakfast commented - he is inundated with ‘personal’ messages to his email and phone. Brands that think they are his friend. He just deletes them all. This is an example of brands as spam. Something we have been seeing more and more of recently.

To combat this brands need to recognise that they are not automatically friends with their consumers. In fact they probable need to wait for consumers to want to be friends with the brand.

Brands also need to recognise that they can’t just push their messages out to consumers  any more. They need to allow consumers to engage on their own terms so they avoid becoming brands as spam.

Watch Wednesday’s event

If you want to watch Wednesday’s event and see the discussion for yourself, you can see the Qiks here.

Earlier this week, whilst the Czech Republic were playing Turkey in Euro 2008, an advert aired in prime time on UK television that cost just £6.50 to make.

The ad was the winner of a competition that Doritos had been running, getting customers to create their own adverts: You make it, we play it. The winning ad, Tribe, was conceived, designed, filmed and edited by two Doritos fans. It cost less than £10 to make (although the slot in which is aired probably cost about £45,000 to buy) - just two packs of Doritos,  two pots of salsa and some blu-tack.

Watch the ad below; it’s really rather good.

What interests me about this ad is the way Doritos successfully combined a campaign to engage customers with a real reward for their loyalty. They experimented with online engagement - getting people to visit a site and upload their own videos, and with a new form of advertising - showing a completely amateur-made ad. I love it when people try new things, the press they create is often huge and the potential of finding a real innovation is palpable.

In advertising at the moment, as in customer engagement there is a lot of innovation going on. As we’ve seen with Honda in the UK (see post here) and eBay in France (see post here) there are some great things being experimented with. In all of these instances what brands are doing is trying to turn adverts into events. Build up to the event by created activity online, and then provide a way for people to continue to engage with the brand and the advert after it has aired.

In the Doritos case, there is something else at play. Everybody who has submitted, viewed or commented upon a video during the competition feels invovled in the final outcome. They have built mass engagement, rather than just a mass of viewers. The ad, being part of this ongoing engagement process, will have a greater, lasting effect than a traditional advert would. They started to move the advert from just a push marketing message to customer engagement.

In France eBay wanted to launch a TV advertising campaign, but how do you advertise something that sells almost nothing. They wanted to promote the message eBay c’est vous (’you are eBay’) and with their agency BETC EuroRSCG, they came up with a very smart idea consistent with their brand and offering. eBay vendors could buy space within the advert to promote the products that they usually sell through the online auction platform.The campaign auctioned advert space in ten separate categories (female fashion, music instruments etc) and the winning seller had their products featured in the ad.

It’s a clever idea, and a way of bringing elements of eBay’s online concept to their offline advertising. You can see more details of the background to the eBay c’est vous campaign in the video below.

Honda believes that ‘Difficult is Worth Doing’. And with a bit of cajoling from Channel Four, they also seem to believe that innovation is worth a try.

Last week in the UK saw a live advert in prime time on a national broadcaster. Not only was the advert live, it was also quite adventurous, and rather good. At 8.10pm during a commercial break on Channel Four, a team of skydivers jumped out of a plane over Spain and spelt out the word HONDA for all of us to watch. A good concept, well realised. But for me what’s interesting is what this says about advertising and broadcasting more broadly.

Times could be challenging for traditional TV advertising in the future. Two trends are meaning that the existing models may no longer apply:

1. A shift to multi-channel and on-demand TV means that people have much more choice. It was only a few years ago that most people in the UK had, at most, five channels to choose from. By 2012 all of the UK should be on digital television with tens, if not hundreds, of options to choose from. In this environment, attracting advertising spend will be more challenging - more channels competing for the same viewers and the same advertising spend. Add to this the rise in use of hard disk recorders and on-demand TV which can let you fast-forward through commercial breaks. You need to find a way to make people want to watch your adverts. You need to be more innovative.
2. Marketing is shifting from a traditional interventionist approach - above the line advertising which is on the brand or advertiser’s terms - to an approach where marketing is more integrated into consumer’s lives, where it’s more of a conversation. You need to find new ways to engage people.

Honda’s live ad last week will be just the first of a series of different innovations in TV advertising in the near future as people experiment with new formats, and new ways of engaging the audience and making them watch.

And if you weren’t one of the 2.2 million people who saw the live Honda ad last week, here it is (look out for the special message from the cameraman).

What’s the future of Advertising? There is none.

So starts a great set of slides from Paul Isakson, about the future of marketing and advertising. Isakson’s thesis is that advertising is dead and that the future is about marketing and in particular ‘new marketing’ - where the customer is at the centre and not the brand.

This approach is one that we follow at FreshNetworks - the future of marketing is about creating brand fans, having an impact on their lives so that thye remember you. You create loyal advocates of your brand who are willing to do your marketing for you through word of mouth. To acheive this is not easy but digital methods make it easier to both engage with customers in this way, but critically also to understand what customers need and want - to gain insight.

We’re about advocacy and insight at FreshNetworks, and use new digital methods to acheive this and to explore innovations in both products and services. If you want to know more let me know. In the meantime, see Isakson’s excellent slides below.

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