FreshNetworks Blog

When a good friend moved to Australia last year, he left me a book they knew I liked, You Can Find Inspiration in Everything. It’s a great book, if only because it emphasises something that I truly believe: good design really matters. If you combine good design with inspirational content then you have a significantly better product that you might otherwise have had.

Recently I received a copy of another book that emphasises this: Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company from Robert Brunner (who set the groundwork for much of Apple’s design) and Stewart Emery. The book shows how firms can get significant competitive advantage from good design, and how a design-driven business can help you to meet your customer’s needs more often. It is at times quite practical, showing how to develop design-driven techniques for managing and growing a business. Useful stuff in it’s own right, but I’ve been reflecting on what both of these books can teach us about how to build and manage online communities.

At FreshNetworks, spend a lot of time when we are working on a new online community with clients to understand the very people that the community will be aimed at. It’s important to understand these people in quite some detail, including what their interaction with the brand is and how and why they would want to engage online. Part of this process is to explore their habits and behaviours, and the benefit is to make all decisions and base all discussions in the shoes of these people.

With this real understanding of the people the community is aimed at we can develop content and features that will appeal to them and help to achieve our client’s objectives. We can also work on the design of the site. The appropriate content and features are important, but it is the design that will make people want to explore the community and find out what is going on. When somebody first lands on the site they need to combination of appropriate and striking content with good design to make them want to engage.

So spending time on design is important in online communities and that’s why no two communities we produce look the same. Making changes to the look and feel is an important tool we have when we’re planning and building the community. People react and respond to design and we have to get it right. And it’s only by understanding who we are trying to attract that we can do this.

Some more reading

• Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
• Social Media Tools Don’t Matter
• Meet the designer of Amazon’s Kindle [Robert Brunner]
• At Last! PC Industry Gets Serious About Good Design
• Designers Need to Be 3 People at the Same Time!
• Jonathan Ive on Apple’s Industrial Design Strategy

Today we’re kicking off a regular post updating you every Friday on the latest news on how brands and businesses are using social media: our weekly brands and social media diary. We kick-off this week with British Airways.

British Airways launches online community

This week saw the pre-launch of a British Airways online community: Metrotwin. The site is invite-only at the moment, but you can add yourself to the list on the homepage and contact them through Twitter @Metrotwin.

The idea of the site is to take the concept of ‘town twinning’ to the very local level, providing recommendations on restaurants, events, shops, bars and other things in neighbourhoods across both cities. The benefit for BA is obvious, as Chris Davies, their Digital Marketing Manager states:

We fly more people between London and New York than anyone else. Creating a community website about the best of what’s on offer in the two cities we know best is a credible and useful tool.

From the press-releases and coverage so far the site is designed to help people navigate the range of recommendations and reviews on the web to help members of the community find the best things quickly. The site lets users review and rate recommendations, create their own profile and find ‘twins’. They can also follow other members’ recommendations. The features seem designed to foster a community that combines expert and user reviews and uses co-creation to source the best recommendations in both cities.

The benefits for BA are clear. In an increasingly challenging market, airlines need to retain their most profitable customers. And the business travel route between London and New York must be one of the most profitable routes out there. There is a clear gap in the market online for detailed peer-review sites specifically aimed at people making business trips to these cities. So if they get it right, I suspect this site will work.

So what can we learn from this?

The air industry is facing difficult times, the increasing price of oil and the Open Skies agreement are both hitting transatlantic carriers - increasing costs and increasing competition. What BA are doing here is something that all brands could learn from during difficult times. Their aim is to increase customer retention and their approach is to make their engagement with them sustainable. Rather than them being customers who buy individual experiences with BA (single flights), they want to create an ongoing experience.

At FreshNetworks we are working with a number of clients in the travel industry at the moment, and the aim in each of these is to create and provide a service that truly extends the experience beyond just individual trips. When designing and building online communities, it is important to work on what both the brand wants from the community, but also why a member would take part and what they want to do there. With Metrotwin, BA are providing a real service to their customers, and this should be central to any social media strategy a brand follows.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

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Some more reading

• BA Metrotwin first impressions - inside the British Airways London-New York new social network

The written word is great. You can express ideas in many ways, you can enter into an exchange with people, you can tell them what you think and hear what they say. But online, video is just more engaging. You just have to look at the power and reach of YouTube and growth of the Flickr community to understand the demand and use of media-sharing functions online.

We try to include media as much as possible in the online communities that we build and manage at FreshNetworks. We find that different community members will want to engage and express themselves in different ways, and so allowing them to do this will maximise participation. It’s also a great way to build engagement between the brand and the community - letting them see inside an organisation; video can break down the barriers between brand and customer. It’s an effective way of conveying content as it often encourages more personal and more efficient presentation of ideas. Finally, video can be easily shared and so has a great viral effect.

Somebody who we think has got the use of video right online is Gary Vaynerchuk and his daily wine blog: Wine Library TV. Gary’s enthusiasm is palpable, his knowledge about wine is significantly greater than mine, and his ideas are easy for me to take away. But what really makes his site work is that every day I can watch a short clip and learn something. Rather than read some text describing which wines go with oysters, I can just watch and learn. The videos are easy to pass on to friends and they make me feel like I am really engaging with Gary. I can see him, hear him, watch and learn his mannerisms and habits. I get to know him better than I suspect I might be able to just reading text. So, his ideas are great, the content informative and this information useful. But I suspect it is the fact that he delivers this by video that really makes Gary’s site a success.

So what can we learn about this when we are planning and building online communities? The answer is simple - use video, include video, interact with video.

If you haven’t seen Gary in action, then take a look at this video below of him in action at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

Some more reading

• Gary Vaynerchuk
• What’s the Future of Online Video? Time to Ask the Leaders (Live Stream)
• Don’t Treat Web 2.0 Like Web 1.0
• Guardian column: Gary Vaynerchuk
• Web2Open New York - Get Involved!

Last night I went to see Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired magazine, who was speaking at the ICA in London prior to publicising his new book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

We’ve written about crowdsourcing and co-creation at some length recently, and it’s an area of keen interest for all of us at FreshNetworks. Howe’s talk looked at the concept but also at its effect on various aspects of our life, from online design, merging concepts into businesses and even influencing political movements. He was really the first person to really take on the concept of gathering a group of people together online and realizing how this ‘crowd’ or ‘community’ could be harnessed to deliver innovation or insight into an idea, a brand, or simply to answer a question that might be stumping boffins in a particular company.

Walking away I reflected on what I had heard meant, especially for those of us involved in building and managing online communities. I came up with four main takeaways that I thought I would share here:

1. Any attempt at crowdsourcing must be tailored to the needs of the brand, company or problem. Technology alone will not solve the problem, but through application of tailored (and flexible) tools, supported by planning and management, communities will flourish and return benefit far outstripping the original investment.
2. Online communities offer a greater depth of insight into the thoughts and behaviour of your supporters and detractors, due to a deeper level of emotional engagement from your customers, that no survey or focus group alone can offer (for a similar cost). Companies such as Dell and Nokia have used this to grow their brands in response to the direct wishes of their customers, with great success.
3. A community is not about selling a product, it’s about communicating needs and information. Nike achieved this with Nike+, where the motive is not to sell shoes, but to generate a feeling of community, a common bond amongst its customers. The results speak for themselves, with 93% of Nike+ community members saying that they would recommend it to a friend. Friendships are built, common bonds formed and the brand is strengthened as a result.
4. Communities can deliver change. Real change, not the sort promised during a political campaign, but it can turn a brand around. Who would have thought that a t shirt art competition could turn into a community that was the seed for a multi-million pound business - Threadless anyone?

Some more reading

• SideTaker - crowdsource your private life
• Crowdsourcing Book Excerpt: The Canary in the Coal Mine
• Crowd Funding: A Different Way to Pay for the News You Want
• Wiki Textbook: Two’s Company Three’s a Crowdsource
• Q&A;: Jeff Howe on ‘crowdsourcing’
• GotATeenager? Some best practices in online community strategy
• Incentives In Online Social Communities
• Ways to Crowdsource
• So Much for Crowdsourcing

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

There was an interesting piece in the FT this weekend, discussing how the UK’s political parties could learn from their US counterparts. It is party conference season in the UK at the moment - members of each of the main political parties will be meeting at various seaside resorts around the country to discuss policy and process. They are a time when the core, keen supporters and activists get a chance to get their voices heard at the conference and at fringe events. They should also be a time when parties recruit and retain a wide base of supporters.

The FT article discusses how parties appeal to these two, often diverse, membership groups:

Keeping activists happy while remaining a credible electoral force is a tight-rope act, and technology is changing this problem in the UK and US - but in different ways.

We have written before about how Obama is using social networking and online communities in the US to build a groundswell of support. After this post, there was a discussion on e-mint, the community manager mailing list) about how politicians and political supporters in the UK are behind the US in terms of making use of social networking tools like this.

Obama’s success is in making it easy for a large community to build, each donating small amounts of money. The community is funding his campaign in this way and he is allowing this mass of smaller supporters to get involved and to be part of his movement. As the FT notes there is another advantage of building a large community of support in this way:

Being less reliant on the usual suspects also makes it easier for candidates to move towards the popular centre ground. It can only be good news if candidates are not captive to their party faithful.

In the UK, however, politicians and parties are yet to truly engage people in this way. They may allow people to become their friends on Facebook or other sites, they may ask you to make a pledge as a supporters, but there is no way in which they are really harnessing the power of the wider community. Rather, the most successful use of social networks in the UK has been by the small group of powerful activists. It is their blogs that are most read, and they who are building followers online.

So in the US, social networking has allowed the broader base of supporters to be heard and so allowed politicians to pitch to this more central ground than to more extreme views of a small number of activists. In the UK, by contrast, it is the activist supporters who are most active online, who have the most followers and attract the most support.

This difference is fundamental. For the online communities we build for brands and organisations at FreshNetworks, there are usually two broad types:

1. a group of your brand advocates, maybe as a specific online research community, to help amplify word of mouth, to reward them, or to involve them in innovation or co-creation
2. a larger group of consumers or individuals to gain insight into what they think, to help crowd-source or co-create new products, marketing or approaches, for innovation, to build advocacy or just as a way of engaging a wider group of people in a sustainable way.

UK political parties are very much in the second type, with the US in the first. Both approaches are good and valid uses of social media and online communities. Both can be successful. But in terms of building sustainable engagement across your consumer base, the latter is perhaps of more use. I’d like to see UK politicians and political parties truly engaging people in this way, in a sustainable and broad manner. As this weekend’s FT article says:

Online campaigning has been an enormous success in the US, engaging millions of people - and maybe even solving the political funding dilemma. UK parties - wrestling with the same problems - should consider their example.

Some more reading

• The dinstinction between enabling conversations and an online community. How do engagement strategies and skills differ or are similar?
• Obama’s Internet mastery noticed in Canada
• Public Opinion: Do Political Parties Still Need National Conventions?
• On the Convention: New Media Stream Into an Old Tradition
• The politics of social media
• Online Social Networks in Politics: Promise, Frustration and…
• Close Encounters Of The Republican Kind: McCainSpace Relaunches
• Survey: Record number of Americans following election via Web
• McCain Lags Behind Obama in Online Fundraising, Social Networking Popularity

A new online community was launched in the UK today. The GotATeenager site has been launched with funding from the Department of Children, Schools and Families as part of its parenting programme. It is an online community of parents, with information for them to help them as they raise their teenagers, the ability to ask questions of and get advice from other parents and between them to build a knowledge bank of questions.

The site appears to be set-up well. It has a number of elements that we at FreshNetworks consider to be best practice in online community strategy and design, three good examples are:

1. The site has a good and clear typology. Information is organised around key words which are used to aggregate content - be it editorial content, questions from other parents, forums discussions or any other piece of content. This clear organisation of data is critical to any successful online community and presenting user-generated content alongside editorial content shows the nature of a community - developed and grown by the community members and their content on an equal footing to the ‘editorial’ content.
2. The site lets community members build and add to knowledge. Both the questions and answers sections and other parts of the site (notably the teen slang dictionary) are added to and made more complete by the content that community members themselves add to sites. This is a real benefit of online communities. It is often the case that community members know more about specific subjects than any organisation might. Using their contributions to compile a Q&A section or to add to the bank of knowledge is a way of gathering together all knowledge in the area and delivering it back to peers. You reward the efforts of those who contribute (people enjoy seeing their own ideas recognised in this way) and you provide an even greater volume of information and ideas to other members
3. The site starts simply. The content on the site is relatively simple. There are a small number of subject areas being discussed and content is laid out clearly and simply according to these. We find that the best way to launch and build momentum for an online community is to start simple like this. Get it right for a specific subject or specific target audience and then grow from there.

But perhaps the most interesting aspects of the GotATeenager site is that it was built as a way of dealing, in a different way, with a growing and pressing need. The UK government funds a telephone hot line for parents that has been receiving about 1,000 calls a week from parents. We find in our work with companies that online communities like this can be a great way of reducing support-centre costs. This is definitely an experience that Dell has had with its communities and is an oft-cited benefit of forums and online communities. By building a resource that parents can get access to at a time that suits them, allowing them to ask questions and learn direct from other members, and letting them join and share experiences will undoubtedly reduce the number of calls to the call-centre.

In fact, our experience is that an online community like this not only reduces the number of calls to a support centre but it also, perhaps more importantly, increases the reach of the support. More people will read and learn fom the community than might be driven to call a support centre. So not only are you redirectly traffic to the online community, you are also catering for a whole new audience.

It will be interesting to watch GotATeenager. The seeding and early stages of a community are critical. You can have the best strategy and design, but it is how you nurture those early conversations and members that is critical now.

Some more reading

• OnLine Tribalism & the Future of Social Media
• Teen-busting website coming soon
• Parentline Plus networking website allows parents to discuss their teenagers
• New Social Networking site launched for Parents of Teenagers
• neighbourknowledge.com Launches Canada’s First Online Community Focused on Neighbourhoods
• SideTaker - crowdsource your private life

“Why can’t the community at large alter, and improve, and share?” A good question. The online communities we build at FreshNetworks, and the best communities that we see elsewhere on the web do allow their members to do this. It’s the power of getting people together to solve a problem, discuss their shared interests or help a brand to improve.

Stephen Fry uttered these words when talking about a specific type of online community, the open source software community. This year, 2008, is the 25th anniversary of the GNU operating system, the first operating system composed entirely of free software. Fry celebrates this and discusses the benefits that you get from letting a community of people work on a problem together.

The short video below is useful if you’re interested in GNU, open source or just in online community dynamics. For us it’s required reading.

Some more reading

• Happy Birthday to GNU
• GNU celebrates 25th anniversary
• GNU Kicks Off 25th Anniversary Celebration
• Stephen Fry Appreciation Monday - Happy Birthday GNU
• Stephen Fry video birthday card to the Free Software Foundation’s GNU project
• Freedom Fry: GNU celebrates its 25th anniversary

Spy rings, networks of spies behind enemy lines, are something we don’t hear of as much these days as during the height of the cold war. But spies still need contacts. They still need to network and they need to build and keep set of contacts that they can share information with.

It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that they are being given a social network so that they can do this.  On 22 September, the United States will launch A-Space, an online community for analysts across the US’s 16 different intelligence gathering agencies. The community is designed to provide a hub for analysts and a way for them to share information to ensure that individual pieces of intelligence are not overlooked or ignored.

The US agencies are promoting the networking and knowledge sharing aspect of A-Space. As Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, says:

It’s every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it’s much, much more. It’s a place where not only spies can meet but share data they’ve never been able to share before. This is going to give them for the first time a chance to think out loud, think in public amongst their peers, under the protection of an A-Space umbrella.

It is no surprise that an online community is being built for intelligence agencies. At FreshNetworks we are seeing a lot of firms wanting to build online communities for their internal staff as well as to engage with customers. They can be a great way for distant and remote workforces to communicate and for large and complex organisations to share knowledge and to help identify experts in certain areas. Staff anf colleagues can collaborate, share ideas and experiences and work together in the community.

We expect to see more and more firms building these kinds of internal networks over the coming year. In the current economic climate, firms need to become and remain competitive in the global market. The best way of doing this is to start by looking into the firm itself. Identifying pockets of excellence and allowing other staff members to find them. Allowing colleagues to collaborate on projects and ideas. And allowing firms to gain insight from the conversations that employees are having.

Not all online communities will need to be as secure or secretive at A-Space. They can all be as beneficial to the firm that sets them up.

Some more reading

• Creating a ‘Facebook for spies’
• CIA, FBI embrace ‘Facebook for spies’
• CIA, FBI push ‘Facebook for spies’
• US intelligence community to begin social networking site

Image via Wikipedia

I have just read a report by O2 which looks at ‘degrees of separation‘ and shows that where once there were six degrees of separation connecting any two people on the planet, that number was now three. We are more connected than ever before, the theory goes, it is easier than ever before to build and keep a network of connections.

The original theory of six degrees of separation was developed in 1967 by US psychologist Stanley Milgram. His Small World experiment choice people in three US cities (Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita) and asked them to make a connection with people in Boston, Massachusetts. They had to send a package to the target person only by sending to people they knew and asking them to send it on to people they knew. The work showed that the number of connections needed to pass the parcel to its destination was six. Thus was born the theory of six degrees of separation, which has been tested many times, including by countless people proving that they are only six degrees from actor Kevin Bacon.

The O2 study tried to replicate this making use of modern technology rather than the postal system. The researchers asked people selected randomly in unknown destinations across the globe. The people had some connection to their target (a shared hobby, interest, sport, music or sexuality) and it was found that on average only three degrees separated the two people. O2 give an example of the connections they studied:

One of the respondents Katrina, 27 from Brighton, is a classical musician and leads a jazz band. She was asked to make contact with a Japanese jazz singer, Natsuo Murakami, halfway across the world. She contacted her record producer in Berlin via an email. He called his opposite number in Tokyo who had a register of all jazz singers in the country. Therefore making the link from Katrina to Natsuo in three personal steps.

O2 suggest that this reduction is due to people being more connected now than ever before. I think that this may be partly the case, or at least that there are now more ways in which I can stay connected with people. Whereas in Milgram’s day I could have stayed in touch only with those people I saw regularly, wrote to or had telephone numbers for and spoke to, now it is easier for me to have many ‘friends’ and to stay in touch with them. I could meet somebody once, make contact with them on Facebook or LinkedIn and keep them in my friendship group.

So to some extent it is true that we are connected to more people now than ever before, or at least that it is easier to stay in touch with people. But I think the real reason may be the fact that the O2 study looked for connection between people who shared similar interests. We have seen before that online communties and social networks help people with similar interests to connect with each other (see post here). So not only is it easier to keep in touch with people through these online communities, but they are more likely to be people that you share a common interest or experience with. I am not surprised that two musicians can find each other with only three degrees of separation, and would expect the proliferation of issue, experience and interest online communities to mean the same closeness is felt for people with other shared experiences or interests.

So social networking and increased connectivity is making us closer, but more importantly, it is making us focus more around issues and experiences rather than locations. This is really the power of online communities and something that the report from O2 shows. Our friends and connections no longer have to be based on mere geography, but can be based on experiences and interests, shared goals and passions. I may not know the people who live on my street, but I do know people who share the same interests with me. And in the end I can probably have a more meaningful friendship based on shared interests than on mere geography. It’s good to know from this O2 study that such people are now closer to me than ever before.

Some more reading

• It’s a small world, after all
• More on hyperconnectivity and six - or three - degrees of separation
• How hyperconnectivity really could eliminate degrees of separation
• ‘Six degrees of separation’ not far off: study
• Six degrees of separation theory true
• Microsoft prove there are just six degrees of separation between us
• Reducing the six degrees of separation
• Social Media Cuts Six Degrees of Separation to Three
• Six Degrees Of Separation Already Cut To Three? Not Really…
• Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon = Scientific Fact