FreshNetworks Blog

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in June.

1. Gordon Brown’s YouTube trauma

Our most popular post for two months in a row, Charlie Osmond examines Gordon Brown’s use of YouTube to make policy announcements and why it isn’t always the best medium. There can sometimes seem to be a temptation to use social media to convey a message, but whether it’s marketing, communications, PR or engaging your customers, there’s a place for social media and a time that another route is more appropriate.

2. Build your own community or go where people are? Do both

Another popular post over the last couple of months, examining the debate about whether brands should engage customers where they are online (and so in social networks) or build their own site to bring them to (a branded online community). Here we look at the Hub and Spoke Model of Social Media Engagement. Showing how the most effective thing for any brand to do is to do both.

3. Dell makes $3 million on Twitter. What can we learn?

Dell has reportedly made $2 million in sales directly from their @DellOutlet Twitter stream, and a further $1 million from sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere. That’s $50 in revenue for every Twitter follower they have. In this post we look at three reasons why Dell has been so successful with Twitter and what others can learn.

4. How organisations can use Twitter – some examples

A presentation of three different ways that organisations are using Twitter and some ideas of how other organisations can do the same. Putting a public face on the brand, like Ford. Segmenting and targeting different groups, like Dell. Or using Twitter as a gateway to a broader social media engagement strategy.

5. People are fed up of joining brand pages on Facebook

Research from the Internet Advertising Bureau suggests that people are becoming increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages and install branded applications on their Facebook page or in other social networks. We look at what this means for brands and marketers trying to engage customers in social networks.

The real power of all the user-generated content and ideas that result from an increasing use of social media depends on our being able to find it. It’s no use to have millions upon millions of comments added each day if we can’t find them, or if we can’t sort for the ones most relevant to us at a particular moment.

This is, of course, not a new problem. Information from the earliest Medieval libraries to today’s online communities and social networks has needed sorting, categorising and cataloguing so that we  can find it successfully. Twitter users have a simple way of helping to sort data – the hashtag.

The concept is simple. A short code is added to the end of a Tweet to associate it with others – this then lets people search for everything on this  subject. So, for example, if you were tweeting at this weekend’s Glastonbury music festival in the UK then you could add the code #glastonbury to your tweet. If you wanted to search for what’s happening then you just need to search for everything with this code.

Hashtags are great for events and are a really effective way of associating related tweets with each other. But they are quite limited. As a means of sorting and cataloguing data they are very simple, perhaps too simple.

This became quite clear over the last couple of weeks with the use of the hashtag #iranelection. The tag was originally used by people in Iran who were tweeting updates about what was happening. Others in Iran were able to find out about  events, protests and developments by tracking these updates. The hashtag wasn’t the most used on Twitter but it was serving it’s purpose. Then it suddenly became popular, very popular. And that’s when you start to see the weaknesses of this way of organising information.

The #iranelection hashtag started being used by people not in Iran searching for information or merely expressing concern for or interest in what was happening in the country. The tweets from people on the ground were much less easy to find with hundreds of tweets from well wishers mixed in there. Information was much more difficult to find as the hashtag became more popular.

Whilst simple, the hashtag has limitations associated with this. One of the real challenges for Twitter (and indeed for many other social media sites) is finding ways to sort, file and catalogue information in a way that makes it easy for others to find. This is not easy – in part it depends on the fundamental structure of the site itself, and in part on the ways in which users use the site.

The ideal might be a way to filter content by type, by user information and by a series of categories. But this requires that you gather more profiling information than many of these sites do (or indeed than many users would want to give) and providing a way to categorise both at a parent and child level, which is complicated from an information architecture perspective. Resolving this is the real challenge of social media – finding a way to search for and discover information we want. It is this that will really show the benefits that social media can bring.

Some more reading

• Social Media and #IranElection | bigMETHOD (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• How to Search Twitter (olago.wordpress.com)
• Twitter numbers up thanks to Iran (thisisherd.com)
• Iran Twitter: Why The Movement Adopted This Medium (huffingtonpost.com)
• Iran, Twitter and the value of new media (sluggerotoole.com)
• ‘It’s Hot in Iran’ Is Latest Tech PR Gimmick (gawker.com)

Image by WolfS♡ul via Flickr

I have friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter. There is a temptation to think that these are two names for essentially the same thing. That Facebook and Twitter have just chosen different terms to describe the same thing in order to differentiate their offerings, distinguish their brands. But actually there are some fundamental differences between ‘friend’ and ‘follow’, and the two concepts signal very different types of site and user experience.

There is a basic and fundamental difference between these two ways of getting to know people in social networks and online communities. To ‘friend’ is a two-way process; it requires both parties to agree that they want to connect with each other. To ‘follow’, on the other hand, is where one party finds somebody they are interested in and tracks them, with no need for the followee to give their consent. So friending is two-way and following is one-way.

At FreshNetworks, we build online communities with both types of connection. Which one you use, if any, leads to a very different user experience, and suits a different type of site.

To friend

Friending suits sites where we are interested in personal connections. Where we expect people to identify others like them, that they share experiences with, are in a similar situation to, or have similar interests to. Both parties are interested in connecting and so both have to feel that there would be a benefit from this. It is a high-intensity connection.

Friending allows users to follow what each other are doing – they may be interested in the same discussions and so want to know when their ‘friend’ has added something. It allows users to navigate their way around the online community based on the activity of a smaller selection of people they have connected with. At its most developed, friending allows a user to create their own sub-community of people that they feel close to and are connected with.

Friending really works when you are building a community with persona types who really want to share their experience with individuals across a range of topics and areas of the site. Where people are going to be able to quickly identify people they want to connect with in this way. Either by showing shared areas of interest, concerns or ideas. They want to engage with each other and that is what friending helps them to do.

To follow

By contrast, following is a low-intensity connection. It suits sites which are very much content-led with discussions, reviews or ideas take priority over the individuals who suggest them. One user needs to identify that they are interested in the content that another user has posted and that they want to be informed of all other posts that they make. The are less interested in engaging with the other user, sharing ideas and discussions with them, or even conversing with them directly. They are more interested in the content the other user creates and wants to read more of it.

Following is great for search. It allows users of the online community to select people whose content they admire and then build a large feed of such content. They might then use this feed to find out what is new, as an entry point into the community and the discussions.

Following really works when you are looking to build discussions on specific topics and want people to gravitate towards one set of discussions rather than another. It can be great when building a community around product reviews as users are typically more interested in certain types of product. It is also great for sites where there are a number of different discussion types and certain users are only interested in certain ones. But following works less well where you are tying to engage people across the content, and critically engage people with each other.

Image by coleydude via Flickr

Some people follow me on Twitter, where I invariably write about work-related things and my interests in social media, marketing, branding, online and such like. Other people are friends with me on Facebook, where they get to know what I did this weekend, can see pictures of me in a bar in East London and know all about my upcoming holiday plans. Still more people are contacts on LinkedIn where they know when I change job roles, qualifications or publications and speaking engagements.

I use each of these three social networks for different reasons. And different people follow me on them. Because of the nature the sites, and the people that follow me I talk about different things and so somebody following me on any of them only gets to see one part of my life. This is probably true of everybody online and is the reasons that many people question whether you can really make friends or get to know people online, in social networks or online communities.

The question of whether you can really become friends with somebody probably depends on individuals and their own personal concept of friendship. Perhaps the more useful question is whether we can really get to know people online.

This is certainly something that we discuss a lot with clients at FreshNetworks when designing online communities for clients – should a particular community allow members to become ‘friends’ with each other or not, should it allow them to ‘follow’ other members. We often debate whether this kind of function is valuable, and whilst it isn’t in all cases, in many it is. Why? Because online communities are about ideas and shared experiences. They are places where people share their thoughts and opinions, they share something of themselves and so people can connect through these ideas. You can read what people say and learn what they are interested in, care about, think and do. We actually get to know an awful lot about them.

So in online communities, at least, it is possible to get to know people quite well, particularly as concerns the subject area of the particular online community. Whether you become friends with these people probably depends on your own criteria for friendship.

Image by ToniVC via Flickr

I’ve read a few posts and articles this week discussing a report from showing that Facebook users spend more time on site than Twitter’s. These articles make the assumption that increased time-on-site is a good thing; that it is a sign of greater engagement and involvement with the site.

It is certainly true for social networks that there are significant benefits to be gained from increasing time-on-site. Perhaps not for the immediate benefits of greater engagement, but more because it is a sign of the increasingly important role that any particular social network is playing in a user’s life. We’ve written in the past how Facebook’s valuation is possibly related to a shift in our use of the internet to put social networks at the heart of a user’s experience. And in this context, time on site is important.

But in an online community, where we are interested in shared ideas and experience rather than share of time online, is time-on-site a useful measure of engagement?

As a health measure, we use time-on-site a lot at FreshNetworks, it is useful to measure and monitor over time and together with other health measures (such as number of unique users, depth of visit and frequency of visit). But a greater time-on-site does not, in itself, mean a better online community. We are more interested in the share of ideas than the share of time online. We want people to join, benefit from and, if they wish, add to the debates and conversations in the community. We want their contributions, even if they only spend a small amount of time on the site itself. Online communities are about shared ideas and interests – we want people who add to them.

So time-on-site is a useful health measure, but it does not necessarily determine the success of your online community. That’s why we think that the success of your online community should be tied to specific business objectives, and not to relatively arbitrary measures such as time-on-site and unique visitors. We have very successful online communities with only a hundred members, and very successful ones where people visit less often or for less time. It’s about establishing your business objectives and then working to maximise your share of ideas and share of insight. Not fighting to get more time spent on your site if that time is not productive or helping you reach your aims.

Some more reading

• Metrics and intuition (thisisherd.com)
• Forget Social Media Measurement. Get Back to the Basics. (kylelacy.com)
• ROI-Return On Influence (directmarketingobservations.com)

Image by spud murphy via Flickr

Hi I’m Nick – the FreshNetworks marketing intern. Sadly, my time as an intern at FreshNetworks is quickly drawing to a close so I thought it might be of interest to talk a bit about what I’ve learnt – particularly around social media. Even though I may not have known it before, social media has had a huge impact on my life. Here are four things I’ve learnt during my internship:

Web 2.0 is part of an internet revolution…
So what is Web 2.0? A meaningless marketing buzzword, tech jargon for computer geeks, or an internet revolution? I never really understood the full meaning of the phrase. However since being here I have definitely gleaned a clearer definition. Web 2.0 refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in ways previously unavailable. On the web, people can publish whatever they want, when they want and this has led to the growth of social networking sites, wikis, support forums and online communities. My answer now? Internet revolution.

Could I live without social media?
Being part of the Nintendo generation I’ve grown up with the worldwide web so I’m an avid user of web 2.0 and social media; sharing photos on facebook, discussing my travelling plans on tripadvisor.com, providing feedback on ebay, downloading an mp3 and finding out how to fix a computer problem through online forums. The ability of the internet to allow users to share and discuss information has definitely been beneficial to web surfers like me. No doubt I’ve taken social media for granted up until now, but now I realise that without it my life would surely have been much less productive, organised and social!

Social media can make companies $$$
Next week I jet off to do the typical backpackers route – Thailand, Cambodia & Vietnam. The unbiased, user-generated content provided by Tripadvisor.com has been an invaluable planning tool – yet another benefit of social media. But I was fascinated to learn that this website generates its owners (Expedia) a third of their revenue. And here I was thinking it was just for fun.

Word-of-mouth is four times as trusted as TV advertising…
Word-of-mouth is the most trusted decision-making tool for consumers. And today, more and more people use the web for word-of-mouth – reading other users reviews and comments on particular products and services. In fact, online communities are increasingly a first choice for this sort of research. As a result, marketers are adapting their campaigns to allow for this change in consumer behaviour; it makes a lot of sense, as online communities allow one person’s recommendation to reach thousands around the world.
Without me knowing it, social media has become and integral part of my life. Could I live without social media? Probably not, but at least now I know it!

Some more reading

• Should schools ban social media practice and education? – ZooLoo … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• What IS a Social Media Expert? (growmap.com)
• Using Social Media As A Sales Tool (kylelacy.com)

Image by escapedtowisconsin via Flickr

By paying $200m a 1.96% stake in Facebook, Russian investors Digital Sky Technology put a $10bn price tag on the social networking site. There has been much discussion today about whether Facebook is actually worth this amount of money. Whether the social networking site can realise enough revenue to make this a viable valuation. In essence they are asking why would somebody pay $10bn for Facebook.

Of course, this is, to some extent, a fallacious question. Investors in Facebook are unlikely to be basing their decisions on what Facebook currently is, but on what it will become. They are taking a gamble, as any investor does, on the future development and position of social networks online (and of the role of Facebook in this space).

So, where could the value come from Facebook? Rather than debate the opportunities for realising advertising revenue, I suspect the real value comes from looking at the way the internet is developing. We’ve seen a constant increase in the amount of time that people spend in social networks – we know that they are spending more time in social networks than in email. The role of social networks is changing, and it is in this change that investors may be seeing the potential return from the likes of Facebook.

Social networks have developed in the last few years from being sites that people visited when they wanted to find and connect with old school friends (for example), to sites through which people begin to manage and co-ordinate their social lives. And as these sites become ever more important in this role, they take on a greater importance in the online mix. We find and keep in touch with our friends through sites like Facebook. We plan events and record our lives. They have moved from being sites that we visit irregularly to places where we spend an ever increasing amount of our time online.

Social networks are developing to become the critical destination online for many people. Their share of time online has increased and will continue to increase. And alongside this will increase another measure – the share of ideas. It is the value of both of these that investors are considering.

The internet and online services are central to our lives and social networks are playing an increasingly pivotal role in this. The value in sites like Facebook is not potential revenue from advertising or even from the data they hold on members. The value is to be poised to capitalise upon the growing importance and central role that these sites will play in our online lives (and indeed the continuing growth of importance that online plays in our lives overall).

So people are investing in the future. But they are also investing in the potential future development and role of social networks. Sites like Facebook are to become an even more central part of our entire online experience and of our offline lives too. This is a powerful role that investors want to be part of.

Some more reading

• Is Facebook Really Worth $10 Billion? (blogs.wsj.com)
• Facebook Raises $200M; Now Valued at $10 Billion (mashable.com)
• From Russia with Cash – Facebook Gets $200 Million (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Facebook too confusing for older folks? (vator.tv)

Image by MattRhodes via Flickr

A common debate among those working in marketing and social media is between engaging people on your own domain – in an online community that you build and manage yourself – and engaging people where they are – out in social networks like Facebook and MySpace or on YouTube, external blogs or forums.

There is, of course, a place for both of these things – engaging people in social networks can often be more suitable for campaign-based activities. For generating discussion and buzz about a specific campaign and to engage people on a relatively short-term basis. Your own online community, on the other hand, is better suited to real engagement – something that is long-term and sustainable rather than a one-off hit.

But in many cases this either/or debate seems rather strange to those of us at FreshNetworks. We think the answer is quite simple – use both.

The hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement

There are many reasons to engage people in social networks, where they are. And there are many reasons to engage people on your own online community or other site. In fact the best way to build a sustainable approach to marketing and engagement using social media is to do both. These two types of site are useful for different things and are used by consumers in different ways.

Social networks are great for reaching out to people. Posting videos or content, joining discussions or finding where people are. They are less good, however, at building lasting, long-term and sustainable engagement. And less good at contributing to long-term business strategy aims.

If you find somebody posting videos about your product in YouTube then this is a sign that they care about you, your product and what they do. They probably would do much more if you gave them a chance.  But it’s not easy to send them from YouTube to a discussion on a forum and then to join a group in Facebook (for example). You end up distributing all your engagement across social sites. You have little influence or control over these and your make the user-experience quite messy. You also miss out on all the benefits you should be getting of them being on your site – being able to ask them for (and use) profiling information, analyse what they do and say and create secure areas where you can talk to these engaged people about new product developments or other, more confidential things.

That’s why it’s best to have both. You cannot (and indeed shouldn’t) try to stop people talking about your brand in social networks. You should encourage it, give them information, tools and content to help amplify the word of mouth they create. But you should also create a space for them to come back to. This is the hub-and-spoke approach to social media engagement. You engage people where they are but provide a place for them to come to, a way for you to get all these enthusiastic and passionate people together.

It’s only then that you will start to get the most benefit from them, when you move beyond buzz and into real engagement.

Some more reading

• Social Media For Non Profits (slideshare.net)
• People are fed up of joining brand pages on Facebook (freshnetworks.com)
• Social Media Marketing Budgets on the Rise (mashable.com)
• Insights Qualitativos 2.0: Social Network Advertising Problem (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• FIR Interview: Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research (nevillehobson.com)

Research released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK suggests that people are growing increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages or install brand applications in Facebook and other social networks. The research found that almost two in every three of the 2,000 respondents to the survey were fed up with the constant requests to join groups and try new applications.

Digging deeper into the research reveals more information. When asked what they disliked most about social networks, the most popular response (with 31% of respondents citing this) was too many invites to install applications. The second most cited dislike (16% of respondents) was advertising that “isn’t relevant to me”. Remaining dislikes have relatively low incidences (such as the 5% of respondents who dislike the “addictiveness” of the social networks themselves). And 12% of respondents reported no dislikes at all.

It is the insight into the attitudes to branded content, pages and applications that is, however, most interesting from a social media marketing perspective. With so many people saying they are turned of by invites to join pages, install applications or join groups, brands need to work harder to get a consumer’s attention and to get them to engage with them.

Of course, this has never been easy. In fact, engaging people in social networks has always been difficult for brands. Social networks are very personal spaces where users go to connect with their network of friends – to share photos, plan events, keep up with what they have been doing and to message them. They are personal spaces focused on the individual user and their connections and as such can be difficult for brands to enter. People are having a personal conversation and interaction and are sometimes sceptical of the role of a brand in this space.

The most successful uses of social networks by brands are less about getting people to do things with them in this space, but using it as part of a hub-and-spoke model. Rather than a brand trying to engage people separately in Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and every other social network and forum site, it is better to use these as gateways to somewhere else. People may not want to engage with you and interact with you in Facebook, but they may be willing to find out more about you and then, if and when they want to engage, go somewhere else better designed for this.

This is really where online communities come in. If social networks are personal spaces where people connect round friends, online communities are spaces where people connect round a shared interest, idea, theme or topic. It’s much easier for brands to play in this space. To get people to engage with you, talk to them and interact with them. It’s your party that they have chosen to join, rather than being their party you have interrupted.

So this IAB survey comes as no real surprise to us at FreshNetworks. We know that social networks are difficult places for brands and it can be best to use them not as the start and end of your engagement or marketing strategy. It is better to work with social networks, and the people in them, as part of a more developed approach. Meeting people in social networks but bringing them to a place you host to really engage with them.

Some more reading

• Components of Social Media Marketing: The Moogis Case by Wyndstorm (fastforwardblog.com)
• More notes from “Social Media Marketing” (specialdee.wordpress.com)
• Social Media Marketing Industry Report (incsub.org)
• Charlene Li Predicts Social Networking Will Be Ubiquitous, ‘Like … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)

A report out this week from AT&T explores the adoption of social networking  in the workplace and the  rise of Enterprise 2.0. Based on 2,500 interviews in five countries (Great Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany) the report looks at what use is made of which tools and how this helps (or otherwise in the workplace).

The headline findings are interesting on their own and suggest a growing acceptance and usefulness of social networks and social media in the enterprise. Almost two-thirds of those responding (65%) said that social networks had increased either their efficiency at work, or the efficiency of their colleagues. But perhaps a greater sign of the power that social networks can bring to the workplace is the 63% of respondents who said that using them had enabled them to do something that they hadn’t been able to do before.

This starts to show the real power of social media – it’s not just about letting people do old things in new ways, but about facilitating completely new ways of connecting, sharing, and indeed of working.

What is most interesting, however, is to explore this data a little bit deeper, and indeed to look at the data on a country-by-country basis. Taking only the adoption of social networks as part of “everyday life at work in Europe”, the figures reveal something surprising – Great Britain lags behind the other countries in the study:

1. Germany – 72% of respondents report adoption of social networks in the workplace
2. Netherlands – 67%
3. Belgium – 65%
4. France – 62%
5. Great Britain – 59%

This positioning is surprising, not least as adoption of social networks like Facebook is higher in Great Britain than elsewhere in Europe. That rate of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 may reflect more on British working styles and habits, or indeed on the mix of industries that predominate in that country. But whatever the reasoning it would be good to see higher adoption in the UK, if only because, as this survey shows, those organisations that adopt Enterprise 2.0 can be more efficient and can let you do things you have never done before. In the current economic climate, organisations could benefit from both of these.

Some more reading

• Facebook Conquers Europe With Triple-Digit Growth (mashable.com)
• Useful Differentiation – Enterprise Social Computing vs. Everyday Use of Social Networks (fastforwardblog.com)
• Active Facebook Users By Country (radar.oreilly.com)