FreshNetworks Blog

A report from Synovate, a market research firm, suggests that more than half of adults across the world don’t know what a social network is. The study was based on surveys with 13,000 people between 18 and 65 in 17 countries* and investigated online behaviour and attitudes.

Of all the findings, one that I have seen reported a few times is the figure that 42% of respondents said they knew what social networks are. This leaves 58% who either responded ‘No’ (they don’t know what social networks are) or ‘Don’t know’ (they’re not sure). Without access to the actual wording of the question it is difficult to know for sure, but we can say that more than half of adults in the survey were not confident in their knowledge of what a social network is. They might not know at all or they might just not be sure.

There is some variance by nation, with 89% of Dutch respondents and 70% of Americans knowing what a social network is, much higher than the overall average. This means that in some regions the numbers must have been much lower. I would be interested to compare these country-by-country numbers with both internet access rates and actual membership of a social network. I would be interested in seeing if we could identify a correlation between access, awareness and membership and expect that in areas with high access have high awareness and vice-versa.

Overall membership in the Synovate survey stood at 26% of all adults (so about six out of every ten adults who know what social networks are). Again there is a variance between countries with high membership rates (the Netherlands again at 49% and the United Arab Emirates at 46%) and those with lower rates. Such variance is not to be surprised and, to some extent, is structural in the nature of the networks themselves. They grow and become more popular based on the network effect, so in some countries we would expect to see more people joining because more of their friends have. It is probably just that the UAE and Netherlands are more socially connected or areas where networking is more important than you find elsewhere.

So what do we learn from this survey. The figures are useful to have. It does not surprise me that a relatively large proportion of people don’t know what social networking is. In the UK only about 70% of people have access to the internet, and it would be unrealistic to expect those with no access to the internet to have paid much attention to what online social networks are. The analysis of access, awareness and membership would certainly help to make our understanding of these figures more clear and informed.

But with more than one in every four adults in the 17 markets studied a member of a social network, one thing is clear - they are a real and powerful resource for marketers and brands and the need for brands to engage people online will continue to grow.

* Countries in the study: Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Taiwan, UAE, USA

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?

Advertising Age has today reported on an interview with Mike Murphy, VP-media sales at Facebook. Mike is talking about their newest mechanism for brands to connect to Facebook users.

An aside:
Some people have a go at Facebook for trying so many different ad models. I certainly don’t hold this against them. Right now, they:

1. have advertisers reporting poor returns when using current Facebook ad services
2. are burning cash at a rate of around $150M this year to keep the party going
3. are in a social networking marketplace which is changing very quickly, for which no one has yet figured out the best way to sell users or their eyeballs to advertisers

As a result they need to innovate FAST. Throwing mud at the wall is not the most elegant solution (and as seen with Beacon, it can be dangerous) but it’s a perfectly credible strategy in Web2.0 world where users and advertisers are prepared to try out new things.

Now back to Mike Murphy. So apparently he’s said Facebook is attempting to solve the demand-creation side (i.e. “this is HOT, get one”) of the online advertising equation as opposed to the demand-fulfilment side (i.e. search ads and text links). So that means Facebook hopes to be great at getting you to want a Nike track top because your friend just bought one, commented on one or became a “friend of Nike”. I can totally see how Facebook is well suited to this and why it can work. It’s ironic that a company leading an online revolution is reverting to old-style PUSH advertising: “getting people to buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have” but he makes a good point, saying: “the web as a whole hasn’t done a good job creating value on the demand-generation side,”

Facebook has no choice but to veer in this direction because it is a pure social network. Users visit to chat with friends and extend their off-line social lives. Users do not spend time on Facebook when they are tying to decide what car to buy or which hotel to stay at. And that’s exactly why Facebook adverts tend to get poor response and clickthroughs.

It’s a great shame for Facebook and marketeers alike that the site is not a good platform for supporting demand-fulfilment. But that’s because people are simply in a different mindset when looking for something they know they want vs chatting to friends about who they hooked up with last night. Jeremiah Owyang makes this point here using some research from Forester.

This debate goes to the heart of why we, at FreshNetworks, often advocate branded online communities over Facebook advertising campaigns. An online community is not the same as a social network and people do visit online communities when in the demand-fulfilment mind-set. For example they visit Amazon to read book reviews, Tripadvisor to read hotel reviews and thousands of other communities where comments have been posted on every product from nail clippers to luxury yachts.

Demand-creation is very important for growing any business. I do hope that Facebook’s new propositions successfully help marketeers achieve it. I am sure they will. However FriendFeed and Open Social will in time provide a replication of the benefits of this new Facebook model across a broader audience. As a result, it is far better for brands to focus on an online community that can provide the basis for both demand-fulfilment and demand-creation activities. For me that’s why a branded online community beats a Facebook advertising campaign in the majority of cases.

Some more reading

• Facebook Proposes ‘Engagement Ads,’ Educates Marketers
• What Facebook’s New ‘Engagement Advertising’ Means to Brands
• Do Privacy and Advertising Mesh?
• FriendFeed Adds Widgets; Its Path to Mainstream?

I own quite a few books. They’re on bookcases as you walk into my flat, on a table in the corner of the living room, and some are still in boxes waiting to be unpacked. Today I got a new book and this one was free.

A few weeks ago, I accepted an invite on Facebook for I wouldn’t say no to a free book from Faber. The premise is that each month they will give away a few copies of a book (or books) to the first people to email them after they put up the details on Facebook. One evening I was working late, saw a Facebook update and emailed them. I wasn’t expecting anything until I was told today that I was getting a copy of Churchill’s Wizards sent to me this week. Great stuff.

Of course what Faber are doing here is using Facebook to spread word of mouth for their new releases, and using free product to seed discussions. I’m contributing to it here and in fact doing exactly what they want me to do by writing about it. I may even write about the book itself when it arrives and I read it - not sure it’s exactly my thing but I tend to read anything I have so looking forward to finding out something new and, with luck, being impressed.

A look at the product page shows them seeding conversations about other products - telling us about the new Paul Auster novel and giving us an extract. The page is succeeding in building a group of fans, possibly drawn by the free book offers, and then seeding them with content and ideas to take elsewhere.

A nice tactic in Facebook and a good way of starting and seeding product-based word of mouth. Of course Faber can still only use this as a medium through which to push their messging and alert people to new content and new product. It’s difficult to really engage people in Facebook, they rely on people like me to get the book and then, hopefully blog about it or spread the word through our other online and offline networks. They don’t know anything about me nor are they able to gather profiling data to market to me. They don’t provide means for me to talk with the other people who got the book and share ideas - possibly in an online reading group.

This is because, great as Facebook is, it really isn’t designed for this kind of engagement and interaction. For that you really need to build an online community or add community elements into your site, rather than capitalising upon the reach of social networks. You need to provide a space for these kind of conversations, amplifying the word of mouth and building ongoing advocacy, rather than achieving the valuable but potentially limited word of mouth buzz that you can achieve in a social network.

Of course, I’m chuffed that I’m getting a free book, so no complaints from me!

Some more reading

• Communities = more than the sum of their social media parts
• Review: Man in the Dark by Paul Auster
• Guidelines For Brands Using Twitter
• Eight Considerations to Help Branded Communities Succeed

There was an interesting piece in this weekend’s FT, in the Q&A section (see here). A reader asks if the ‘contact lists’ held by his employees on LinkedIn are actually owned by his business.

This is a timely question and one that I suspect many employers would be interested in. LinkedIn, and other social networks, are being increasingly used for business networking. Either by individuals of their own initiative or through encouragement from their employer.

The former case is becoming particularly common. We’ve noted before that people use different social networks for different purposes (see post here) and it’s becoming commonplace for people to want a place where they can network with their business colleagues online, in the same way that they might use Facebook, MySpace, Flickr or another service to network with friends.

We also see the latter case. Employees specifically encouraging their staff to  build large networks on LinkedIn and the like, then to use these networks as a route to sales, or as a source of new candidates for roles. It is this latter case that the FT question was about, and the response from the lawyer may come as a surprise to many people who build up their contacts in this way.

I think you have a strong argument that you do own the “database” of contacts, particularly as the internet medium through which the sites are accessed are owned by you and the networking is done as part and parcel of the employees’ contractual duties.

The argument is that a database of contacts that an employee builds up as part of their job role will belong to the employer they are working for at the time. In these cases the database would be held on the employer premises (or more likely on their network). The lawyer suggests that contacts built up through LinkedIn could be no different, especially as they have been built during company time and through the firm’s resources (a firm laptop maybe or via the firm’s network connection).

In this case the entire contact set would be owned by the employer, much in the same way that, theoretically at least, your Rolodex and business-card collection is also owned by your employer.

Of course it would be interesting to see what would ever happen if a case like this came to trial, I suspect it may not be as easy as this to ascertain ownership of a social network contacts list.

Some more reading

• Not friends anymore
• Growth of Social Networks is also good for your Job Health
• LinkedIn, Your Personal Brand and creating more buzz!
• What Does “Friend” Mean?
• The new employee connection: Social networking behind the firewall
• Your Take Roundup::People Get Picky on Adding Friends on Social Media Sites

I’ve been travelling around the country this weekend, visiting relatives, and as I browsed the magazines at Nottingham station on my way back to London today I noticed something strange. A magazine devoted entirely to Facebook. With a few minutes to spare before my train, I picked up the magazine. It offers a “complete guide to social networking” and includes things like a step-by-step guide of setting up a profile and famous Facebookers.

I have to admit to being a little baffled by this magazine. I wasn’t quite sure who it was aimed at and why they might buy it. Social networking and online communities are a very different sort of media, they allow you to do old things in new ways and to do completely new things. They also change rapidly. Facebook, for instance, has changed a lot over the last few weeks and changes to security and processes are ongoing.

Print, by it’s very nature, is out-of-date when it is published. There is a time-delay between composing a piece and it being in the hands of a reader. Social networks and web 2.0 reduces this time-delay to near-zero. So how, then, could a magazine be a useful source of information and help on a social network like Facebook?

I really am at a loss.

Some more reading

• Which Social Portal Will Be Yours?
• Communities = more than the sum of their social media parts
• Social Ad Networks: Win, Lose, or Draw?
• 10 Family-Friendly Social Networking Sites for You

A few days ago, I wrote about how the 2008 Beijing Olympics should be the perfect area for social media coverage of the event itself (see post here). Social media is also being used by many big brands to capitalise upon the Games.

The very reasons we identified for social media coverage of the Games, are being capitalised upon by some big brands, whether or not they are official sponsors.

Here is a couple of some of the best:

• McDonald’s has built a viral game called The Lost Ring, where the player uncovers the history of the Olympics (adventures in Ancient Greece and all).  It’s a subtle marketing tool for McDonald’s. Their branding is not present in the game and they are pitched more as a sponsor. The terms of the game state: “McDonald’s is proud to sponsor The Lost Ring and bring the spirit of the Olympic Games to people around the world.”
• Lenovo is the more obvious backer of Voices of the Olympic Games. Their site contains blogs from some 100 athletes at this year’s Games and the branding is prominent. The product is also heavily positioned - the site stating that the athletes were provided “new [Lenovo] Ideapad laptops and video cameras to capture their experiences.”

These examples contrast very different approaches. McDonald’s are creating an experience that people will enjoy and will no doubt ensure that people know who it is that is behind the game. This is a subtle way of marketing. They capitalise upon the enthusiasm for both the Olympic Games and for social media to create and experience people will buy into and enjoy. That they may later associate it with McDonald’s is part of the strategy, but this shows social media fitting into a total marketing strategy for the brand during the Games.

Lenovo on the other hand is really branding social media activities. It has given product and a platform to some athletes and is branding their output. This approach is more overt and although it will raise awareness of the product and the brand it is not really doing anything different to it’s other sponsorship of the Games. Lenovo’s branding is all over the Games and is on the blogs too. This is less of strategic social media marketing and more a branding exercise across all media.

Both approaches will be successful. The Olympic Games are a marketers dream - the audiences are huge and the passion is great. Using social media to enhance the experience of the Games (either by providing entertainment and games, or by providing branded content) can only be a positive thing.

Some more reading

• Social media and the 2008 Olympic Games
• Why the Olympics should be the perfect social media event
• Olympics: BBC promises ‘cornucopia of content’
• Beijing Olympics: Opening ceremony fuels internet traffic surge
• How Some Covered the Opening Ceremony

I watched about an hour of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics live yesterday. It was perfectly timed to coincide with lunch in London and so I sat at my desk and watched live streaming thanks to the BBC. At the same time I was following what other people around the world thought about it on Twitter. And later in the afternoon I looked at photos on Flickr and saw what my friends thought on Facebook.

I suspect my experience was not alone - whereas in previous years my main source of Olympic news and events was the television and the thoughts and opinions of reporters and commentators. This year I suspect I will follow it more through other people and through social media.

This isn’t just because of the time difference - most of the action will be in the morning and early-afternoon UK time so I’ll be at work, in front of a computer but not a TV. This is because if there were ever a perfect candidate for coverage in social networks, online communities and social media, then the Olympics surely must be it.

From my experience with clients, the aspects that are common in successful online communities typically include:

1. A shared or common interest or goal
2. The subject may be broad but allows interest groups to form
3. A subject people are or can be passionate about
4. Enthusiasts and leaders who will help to shape the community
5. An experience that is or can be inherently social, that people want to share with others
6. A subject that can create strong opinions and passionate views
7. Regularly changing and updated content
8. Media and varying content types so different people can interact in different ways
9. You can be more interested in the issues as you are in the people you are discussing them with
10. An ability for the online experience to be supplemented with offline experience

The Olympics is one of those subjects that meets all of these criteria. People unite behind it and are enthusiastic on a number of levels - the Games as a whole, individual sports and individual countries. I like the event as a whole and what it stands for, but I also have my favourite sports (the cycling, rowing and track events probably my favourite in that order), I also obviously want to see a good performance from Team GB.

Many people will have strong and impassioned views on any or all of these levels. Some people are extremely passionate and would want to be leaders or enthusiasts online. But the experience is inherently social - you want to talk about it with others (as I saw yesterday on Twitter) and anything that allows you to do this would be seized upon.

The events themselves lend themselves to regularly updated content. With constant updates on results and real-time feeds on events as they happen. It’s also a very media rich event, with photo, video, audio and text coming together to describe and enhance your experience. Creating ways that you can share and experience these will increase reach and attract people.

The nature of the Games themselves suits online communities. In these people tend to unite round issues and themes rather than, necessarily, round individuals and their friends. You might want to discuss the performance in the Team Pursuit heats and share opinions with a variety of people who you don’t know but who are also passionate about that sport.

So, if I was evaluating the Olympics as a candidate for online communities or successful use of social media, I’d say the chances of success were high. Of course, I’ve written elsewhere about how even the most ideal candidate for an online community can fail if it is executed or managed badly. But the positive signs are there.

That’s why over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be watching and following the discussions on Twitter, the photos on Flickr, the videos on YouTube and the discussions in forums and communities across the Internet. It strikes me that Beijing 2008 is the first time that we will see mass use of social media to cover the games, and I’d expect that this brings out a higher quality and broader range of debate, information and coverage than ever before.

Some places you can follow the 2008 Beijing Olympic

• BBC Olympics coverage
• Qik 2008 Olympics
• Beijing Olympics 2008 YouTube Channel
• Real-time update of Olympics discussions on Twitter
• Athlete blogs (from Lenovo)
  

Some more reading

• Social media and the 2008 Olympic Games
• Olympics: BBC promises ‘cornucopia of content’
• Beijing Olympics: Opening ceremony fuels internet traffic surge
• How Some Covered the Opening Ceremony

A few weeks ago I posted about the nature of friendships and manners online and in social networks (see post here). Over the weekend I heard a conversation that made me think again about this and post a bit more.

Two people on a train from Cambridge to London were discussing Facebook. Let’s call them Mary and Simon. Mary was bemoaning how she doesn’t use it that much because she doesn’t want “people to know what I’m doing all the time”. Simon on the other hand found that he was slimming down his friendship group because he didn’t “want to know what everybody was doing all the time”.

This conversation highlighted for me a rather developed aspect of the nature of friendships in social networks. One of the features of Facebook, Twitter and other networks is the ability to constantly update what you are doing, what you have stumbled upon online, photos of events and so forth. This can be seen in two ways, the second of which is often overlooked:

1. You are sharing information with your friends - you update what you are doing, post photos and write notes that you want your friends to read. It’s a way of you keeping them up to date
2. Your friends are being shared with by you - this constant flow of updates and and information is received along with those of every other friend

In terms of how you deal with situation, there is a need for people to understand both of these and then to respond to them. As I said in my previous post, social networking manners is an emerging area and one where people are developing their own approaches to mirror their different uses of the networks.

Some people update regularly, share everything they find and will constantly tell you what they are doing. Others use the networks only report on things that they would possibly previously have done via email. Both are valid approaches but can come into conflict with each other. When a small number of your friends update regularly on everything and other very rarely, then your news feeds will be overrun by this minority.

Of course there are two ways of dealing with this - either unfriending the frequent updaters, or conversely adding even more friends so that their updates get drowned out. But perhaps the best thing to do is to reevaluate what it is you use your social networks for.

Different social networks are for different things. I update Facebook more than LinkedIn, for example, and befriend different people on each of these. Whilst my friends on Facebook may want to know about the wedding I was at over the weekend, those on LinkedIn probably don’t.

When you think about accepting friends and using social networks it worth thinking about who else you are friends with their and what, for you, the purpose of this network is.

Sharing is great, but share the right things with the right people in the right places. Some people want to be shared with regularly and others don’t. The beauty of social networks, and one of the reasons I expect that the proliferation of networks and communities will continue, is that you can go to different places to do different things.

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