FreshNetworks Blog

Earlier this year, we posted about research from Universal McCann looking at the impact of social media. Thanks to Simon at Curiously Persistent, I came across some new and equally interesting research from the team their. This time they look at the influence we have online, how we respond and react to other people, and how user-generated content informs our decision making.

This is a timely piece of research, as we posted last week, 25 million US adults base their purchasing decisions on social media. The Universal McCann research looks into this behaviour in more detail.

I won’t try to summarise the whole thing here, but it has become required reading at FreshNetworks. For us the research is particularly useful in highlighting how and why people are using social media and online communities to effect change across a range of domains, from politics to shopping. The data on which these conclusions are based are worth exploring in more detail but the message for brands is clear: we’re in a new world of transparency.

In this world, it is easier for people to have their voice heard and to hear the voices of others. Everybody matters and everybody can be part of an exchange with each other and with a brand. Brands need social media strategies to reach out to these people and to truly engage in these new transparent terms. Scary stuff at times, but there are some great examples of where this has worked (and if you want to see some jump to the end of the presentation below).

Some more reading

• Research and Markets: As the Number of Business Users of Social …
• The Consumer and Social Media
• Scientists Use Social Media
• If You’re Not Participating in Social Media
• More than Half of US Adults Text, Blog, Otherwise Use Social Media
• Social Media Rapidly Going Mainstream

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…

Dina - Diary owner helped by microfinance from CFS on Vimeo.

Related articles by Zemanta

• WeAreMedia Module 5: Social Networks (and widgets) for Community Building, Taking Action and/or Fundraising
• Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
• When pictures speak a thousand words

We’ve written in the past about how to measure ROI in online communities. It’s a subject we return to often with our clients at FreshNetworks. The online communities that we build for them all tie into over-riding business aims, and so measuring the impact is important. We can, of course, measure specific insights that they get from the community, the benefit of  the qualitative information internally, the benefit that support communities have or any uplift in sales from the community. But there is a holy grail in online communities and indeed across social media - measuring ROI at a granular level; identifying influential members, recognising that these may not be those who post most.

In previous posts, I’ve suggested that what we need to do is develop a weighting that could be applied to individual members showing how important and influential they are. An analysis of the quality (not quantity) of their connections and of their connections’ own connections. A difficult and time-consuming task. And one that Google may have solved.

The latest edition of Business Week reports that Google has a patent pending on technology that measures influence in social networks. It apparently measures both the direct influence people have in terms of volume of connections, but also how successful your posts and feeds depending on how many people open, read and forward them.

The new technology could track not just how many friends you have on Facebook but how many friends your friends have. Well-connected chums make you particularly influential. The tracking system also would follow how frequently people post things on each other’s sites. It could even rate how successful somebody is in getting friends to read a news story or watch a video clip, according to people familiar with the patent filing.

It will be intriguing to see how this technology develops and what Google use it for. The measurement of influence online is of critical importance to brands, marketers and advertisers alike. Brands want to know how influential people who talk about their brand are, or how influential the people in their online community are. Marketers want to find these influential people and focus on what they are saying and what brands are saying to them. Advertisers can use this information to help target ads across social networks.

Of course, there must also be a benefit for Google. Given that their attempts at running their own social networks have not had the same success in sheer numbers as the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Hi5, Google is looking for other opportunities to capitalise upon this growing trend. They’re doing what they’ve done to the web - they don’t provide all the content they just offer a great way to search and prioritise it. So Google could become the Google of social media.

Some more reading

• So How Do You Measure ROI of Online Communities?
• Social Media ROI: Be Careful What You Promise (Part Two)
• Facebook Grows, but Where’s the Profit?

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

Subscribe to updates

Some more reading

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

Two pieces of research out this week highlight the fact that social media is truly entering the mainstream. The Technorati State 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.

Some more reading

• Blog growth slows; more bloggers are bringing home the bacon
• Technorati Releases State of the Blogosphere 2008 Report
• Most Bloggers Want to Make Money on their Blog - Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008: What and Why of Blogging
• Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Report - 2008
• Confirmed: The blogosphere is mainstream
• Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
• Nearly 70% of Online Adults Use Social Media, Often Research Products
• 68% of Online Americans Visit Communities, Blogs, Social Networks… What Do The Rest Do?

An article in this week’s Economist looks at how science and scientific debate is being changed by the rise of social media tools. In the days before the Internet, a peer-reviewed scientific journal was the best (and maybe only) way to get your opinions and ideas heard by a large number of people. The process of reviewing and publishing articles was long, meaning that the time from idea to publication can be quite significant. As the Economist puts it:

With luck a paper will be published several months after being submitted; many languish for over a year because of bans on multiple submissions. This hampers scientific progress, especially in nascent fields where new discoveries abound. When a paper does get published, the easiest way to debate it is to submit another paper, with all the tedium that entails.

Even today, this is still the process followed by most scientific journals, although as the Economist article points out change is afoot.

The drawback of the journal process is that it doesn’t allow a space for public and open debate and discussion of ideas in a convenient and quick way. This isn’t necessarily their fault, that’s not what they are designed for. But there is a space in the scientific community for this kind of reviewing, commenting and evaluation of ideas, allowing groups of scientists to work together to refine and improve ideas. It sounds like the perfect place for social media - scientist blogs where their ideas can be revealed as they emerge, online communities where people can discuss and work on a shared interest or goal, wikis where multiple parties can contribute towards knowledge. The opportunities are vast and, of course, alongside the traditional peer-reviewed journals there are a plethora of such social media initiatives out their in the scientific community.

One such example, cited by the Economist, is Seed Media’s Research Blogging, a site designed to act as a hub for peer-reviewed science. The aim is to bring together in one place all of the many discussions that are happening all over the web, to allow more people to get involved in the discussions and to organise them in a way that makes it easy to search. This seems like a really effective way of integrating the benefits of social media and online community tools with the existing, peer-reviewed science.

I spoke earlier this year at a conference about how to combine editorial and user-generated content in publishing, and this approach does seem to follow some of the best practice ideas we discussed then. Allowing the expert (in this case the peer-reviewed) content to sit separately from the discussions and debates but to encourage and facilitate the latter. This is the first stage many take to fully integrating crowd-reviewing into their expert content and allowing experts and readers to interact fully in the original content.

Of course getting to this point takes time. For it to be a real success it requires a significant proportion of the target audience to be able to join in and contribute. At the moment only 35% of scientists blog, and there are sometimes perverse incentives to not join these debates. The Economist cites Jennifer Rohn, a biologist at University College London, who says that:

There is a risk that rivals will see how your work unfolds and pip you to the post in being first to publish. Blogging is all well and good for tenured staff but lower down in the academic hierarchy it is still publish or perish

So change like this may be sometime coming, but developments to maximise the use of social media and community discussions are allowing scientists to debate issues more quickly and more conveniently. Ideas can be disseminated and debated more rapidly, and that has to be a good thing.

Some more reading

• Research Journals Make It As Difficult As Possible To Openly Publish Gov’t Funded Research
• Open Source Science
• Science Journal Won’t Publish Papers Because Authors Want To Put Them On Wikipedia
• The virtualisation of ideas
• Science publication is slow
• Online peer review supplements, doesn’t replace real thing
• Congress’s copyright fight puts open access science in peril
• ResearchBlogging.Org V2 Is Officially Launched!
• Peer review: the myth of the noble scientist

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

The Wall Street Journal blog had a post last week about The Secret Behind Obama’s Nomination (it was social networks). Even though I’m not totally convinced by how much of a secret it was, I did enjoy the article and agree that Obama more than Clinton (and more than McCain) has made great use of social media.

The WSJ post discusses a lot Obama’s tactics and use of both his own site (www.my.barackobama.com) and on sites such as Facebook and MySpace. However, I want to dwell on a simple but incredibly effective aspect of Obama’s own site: it is very easy to get started. In fact it’s hard not to get started. Obama’s site is a model of how to engage people and why calls to action really work in online communities.

One issue we spend a lot of time working on when building online  communities at FreshNetworks is how to ensure and encourage participation. How do you design and build a community site which will make your target audience want to take part and then take the step to actually take part, contributing something or adding to the community in some way. The best and simplest solution is just to make it really easy for the community members to do things and to make it very clear to them what the benefits are. Obama’s site is a textbook example of how to do this and, I believe, this good online strategy and design has led to the impressive online community and support that is being spoken of.

When you first visit Obama’s website, there are two features on the landing page that power this community:

1. Calls to action: A list of very clear but very direct ways in which you can get involved in the campaign by registering to vote, hosting an event, volunteering, taking action. Whatever I might want to do, big or small, I can do from the homepage. They make no pretence that the purpose of the page is to point you in the direction of all the ways in which you can help the Obama campaign. But this makes absolute sense. If you visit the site, the chances are that you want to know more and may want to contribute in some way. By placing these very direct calls to action in such a prominent position on the homepage, they are actually making it very easy for the visitor to do exactly what they want to do on the site, without having to hunt around. It’s easy, it’s simple and best of all it’s effective.
2. Replaying my own activities: Once signed in the homepage changes. Rather than just a set of calls to action, the site lists all the activities that I could be involved in (attending a rally, hosting an event, knocking on doors, raising money) and then tells me how much of each I’ve done in the last week and the last month. This information is also available to the other members of the community. Different communities have different purposes and work for different reasons. Obama’s is a community of purpose, one where people have a common goal (to get him elected) and are working together to achieve this. In such a community, information on what individuals and the community collectively are doing to achieve this purpose is critical. And by playing it back to me on my homepage it will remind me first of what I can do to support this purpose and secondly of how I am performing.

So Obama’s site is effective because it makes it very clear how I can take part and add to the campaign. Once I’m signed up it tracks what I do and reminds me how I can help. It’s simple and it works. Calls to action are perhaps the single most important element to make sure you get right in your community. You need to sign-post how people can take part. Let them know what they can do and the kind of activities that you expect the community members to want to do. Links and headings should be powerful, telling you what to do and the benefits. Sites who have a strong strategy of engagement usually get this right. Those without such a strategy don’t.

Some more reading

• 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
• Online Community Numbers that Don’t Add Up

In Russia, there is a generation of people known locally as Generatsiia P (Generation P). These is the generation who grew up during a period of increasing openness to the West, when products like American soft drinks were available in shops. But there was still no choice - if you wanted a cola drink you could only buy Pepsi, not Coca-Cola. Your choice was restricted to what somebody else had decided for you. Whilst you could choose a cola based drink (and an imported one at that) over another type, your ability to choose stopped there.

I was thinking of this analogy early this week when we were talking at FreshNetworks about the benefits that social media and web 2.0 technologies bring to the way brands interact with customers. Whether for marketing, to engage them or for research, social media tools like online communities give the consumer real choice about what they interact with and when. They are in control.

With last.fm for instance, I can listen to music when I want and where, I don’t have to rely on the choice of a dj at a national station to predict what I listen to. I also don’t have to limit myself to music I personally own. I have much greater control of what I listen to, rather than relying on people to push out music at a time that suits them, I pull on this music when I want to. I have more control.

So it is also in online communities. In our communities we see people take part at a time that suits them. Some people may never use the forums but always read and comment on blog entries. Others may do neither of these things but will upload media and comment on that. When you are developing your strategy you need to recognise this and make sure you cater for the people you want to be in the community, and cater for the things they choose to do in it.

Of course this choice on the part of the community member can also be used as a benefit. In our online research communities, for example, this freedom to choose is a significant advantage over other research methods. When you expect people to answer a survey or be insightful when you call them or at the time you run a focus group, it may not be at a time that they have the insight you want. They may need time to reflect, their first answer may not be their fullest, they may work better if they get to read other responses then spend time thinking about this. Traditional research works by recognising and dealing with this. Online research communities can really capitalise upon the choice you give the respondent over when they say. They are very much in control of their responses as they can come back at any time and add to them or change them as they see fit.

This kind of choice is empowering. I can contribute to discussions when I want to. I can watch videos at a time that suits me. I can listen to the music I want, when I want to. I can chat to my friends when we’re both online. Social media allows me real choice and as such I think you get a better quality of interaction with people. By giving us the choice to take part when we want, and the means to take part how we want to, you give me all the tools I need to engage with you. You don’t decide how or why I take part, I do. You don’t just offer me Pepsi, you give me a choice of soft drinks and I choose the one I want when I want it.

Some more reading

• The Paradigm Shift of Social Media and Time Management
• Requirements for a social media network
• The Tactical Road To Enterprise 2.0
• Your own branded online community vs advertising on Facebook
• Miss Manners We Need You
• Do we really need a Facebook magazine?

You may remember a post where I highlighted a video that demonstrated what Web 2.0 was in a very visual form (see here). Well, I came across another great video from the guys at Kansas State University. Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and head of the Digital Ethnography Working Group, presents a view of YouTube from an anthropological perspective.

From exploring the fact that more content has been added to YouTube in the past six months than in a lifetime of network TV in the US, through a catagorisation of YouTube videos, this is a really informative video. It’s long (just shy of an hour) but I think time spent watching this is time well spent. Michael is a captivating speaker and manages to express things we think we know in different ways. From social media to online communities and social networks; you’ll learn something new and understand better why people are motivated to take part and contribute online.

Some more reading

• Web 2.0 …The Machine is Us/ing Us
• Serious about Social Media: Are We Losing the of Context of Our Lives?
• YouTube through an anthropologist’s eyes
• Wesch on YouTube
• Michael Wesch and the Future of Education