FreshNetworks Blog

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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 djfoobarmatt via Flickr

We highlighted Mayo Clinic in a recent post of examples of online communities in healthcare. They are doing great things with blogs, podcasts, video and online communities. That’s why this week’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks is a great presentation from Lee Aase, Manager, Syndication and Social Media at Mayo Clinic. He looks at how the use of social media at Mayo Clinic has progressed and, in particular how it has helped to spread word-of-mouth.

The presentation highlights an important for those of us who work in social media – technology really should be invisible. Whilst the technology you use must meet your needs and aims it isn’t the most important factor in making your use of social media a success. Of much more importance is how you use it, the way in which you encourage people to engage with you and the quality of the content, comments and conversations that you have on your site.

Whether your technology costs zero dollars, or many hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is the way you use it and the way you manage the conversations and engagement that will make a difference.

Some more reading

• Social media experience at Mayo Clinic (fastforwardblog.com)
• Sharing Mayo Clinic Goes to Facebook and other Social Networks (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• Mayo Clinic launches new culture blog (tissuepathology.typepad.com)
• How Mayo Clinic utilizes Web 2.0 (ivor-kovic.com)
• Health Care Meets Social Networking (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• FIR Interview: Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic (nevillehobson.com)

Image by ★ maize via Flickr

One of the real benefits of social media is that it means that it can now make good financial and business sense to engage just a relatively small group of people, either online or offline. Traditionally, brands often needed to reach a large audience to make a marketing or advertising campaign viable. The best campaigns would get advertising slots during the most popular prime time TV shows, or pay for space in the biggest circulation newspaper for their target market. Big was good. Reach was good and getting yourself in front of as many people as possible was good.

None of this has really changed. It’s still important to get your brand and your marketing in front of as possible, but now rather than getting  this reach with your original message you can get it from people sharing, responding to or embedding your content. And we know that people trust peers much more than brands or ‘experts’ so the impact of getting reach in this way should be significantly better.

All of this is good news for us. Why? Because it now means that it makes financial and business sense to do activities and campaigns that target a small group of people. And this explains exactly why T-Mobile has spent what must be a not inconsiderable amount of money on entertaining just a few thousand people in Trafalgar Square last week. For those people it was, no doubt, an incredible experience. A free performance and event put on just for them and made possible by them. Not just because they were the ones singing (and so creating the content) but also because they would all be instrumental in the distribution of the content. Telling their friends about what happened, taking photos and videos and uploading them to social networks and online communities. So this was crowd-sourced content and crowd-sourced distribution.

And what can we learn from this? Well there’s nothing wrong with engaging a small group of people or putting effort, time and money into doing so. In fact if you enable them to share and spread what they have experienced, then you will probably get a greater return on investment than if you had just tried to engage the large group in the first place.

And for those people who take part in the event or experience, it can be something very special and very rewarding. The key is to make sure they get value from what they do, that they enjoy it.

Some more reading

• T-Mobile: Social Media Superstar? (markevanstech.com)
• ‘Hey Jude’ Singalong (buzzfeed.com)
• New T-Mobile “flash mob” ad in Trafalgar Sqaure (ameliatorode.typepad.com)
• T-Mobile Trafalgar Square Karaoke ‘Flash Mob’ (nickburcher.com)
• Everybody Sing Along! (ithinkheblogs.com)
• Trafalgar Square T-Mobile Karaoke Flash Mob (viralblog.com)

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 April.

1. What Susan Boyle teaches us about social media

In less than a week, a church volunteer from a village in Scotland became the most viral video ever online. It was the most popular topic on Twitter, the most viewed video on YouTube and one of the most discussed topic online and offline across the world. What made this video particularly interesting is that, ostensibly at least, it wasn’t designed to be a branded viral video. It was popular for a simple reason – the content was good. Of course making good content (and indeed predicting what content might be good) is not as easy as we might hope.

2. Engage different consumers in different ways – why segmentation is key

The most popular of our posts from the Marketing 2.0 Conference in Paris looked at how and why segmentation adds value to marketing and to the way you engage your customers. We look at the case of LEGO and the segments that they use, how they deal with each of these segments separately and the value this brings to the business.

3. The best market researchers to follow on Twitter

Twitter was a popular topic again in April, with more people using it and more people talking about it. Finding the appropriate people to follow can sometimes be difficult, which is why this post (based on a poll of Twitter users by Research Reinvented) is popular. The top market researcher’s to follow on Twitter as nominated and voted for by other Twitter users (I’m in the list @mattrhodes).

4. Top 20 UK marketing blogs (numbers 11-20)

The first of two posts that listed the top 20 marketing blogs in the UK according to Ad Age. There are some great blogs in there and Charlie has built an RSS feed of all of the blogs in the list. As with all listings like this, things change. The good news for us here at FreshNetworks is that since this post we’ve moved from the 20th to the 10th best marketing and media blog in the UK. Happy times!

5. The Net Promoter Score and the value of Promoters

Many big brands and organisations use the Net Promoter Score as a way of measuring how happy their customers are with them. Rather than asking this question directly, it asks them whether they would be prepared to refer the brand to a friend. This requires a deeper level of thought and commitment and is seen by many as a better measure of satisfaction. This post looked at two case studies (one from LEGO and another from US network providers) to show the real, revenue value of Promoters and why businesses should focus their efforts on them.

It seems that people are dancing in train stations across Europe. From ’spontaneous’ dancing in the UK to a full-blown rendition of Do-Re-Mi from the Sound of Music in Antwerp, Belgium. Of course none of these were actually spontaneous. They were well rehearsed, well planned and well executed. The UK dancing was actually an advert for T-Mobile; and the dancing in Belgium was promoting a TV show called “In Search of Maria” (op zoek naar maria).

So these original videos were professionally produced, filmed and seeded. The majority of the dancers were professional (although, especially in the T-Mobile version there are claims that lots of bystanders joined in) and the scenes had been choreographed for months. But that’s not the end of the story. What’s particularly fascinating about these videos is not the originals (good as they are) but the reactions they promote. And in particular the number of copy-cat videos that are now on YouTube. Members of the public making their own versions of the videos. Learning the moves, copying them and then posting them for everybody to see.

This is a pattern we see repeated often in social media. Videos can become be popular and widely spread (such as the case with Susan Boyle last week) but perhaps the more striking videos are those which also prompt people to copy and respond to them. From people dancing with the song lyrics written onto their bodies to people copying perhaps one of the original homemade viral hits – the Numa Numa guy. People copy others online.

So what can we learn from this? Three main things come to mind – each of them valuable for brands engaging in social media and those of us involved in building and managing online communities.

1. People model behaviour online – use this to your advantage. The trend of copying the dances in these videos highlights a behaviour we see in our online communities at FreshNetworks. People model behaviour online – if your first members put up profile pictures, everybody will do; if you set a style of writing comments or responding to questions, others will use this too; and if you upload media of any kind you will find people upload similar things. This is due both to people sometimes needing and wanting an example to follow, and people wanting to contribute to the community in a meaningful and constructive way – a way that others do. Once you know this there are huge implications for how you seed, grow and manage any online community.
2. You can do things with small groups and have big impact. These videos were all produced with a relatively small initial audience – the people in the station. A lot of money and time was spent on perfecting this experience for them. Allowing them to video it, tell their friends and talk about they had seen. Although the videos have since been used in elaborate advertising campaigns, it is this original, small group of people who are most important. They feel special – they were the first to see, know and do something. They were able to spread the word themselves and tell other people what they had seen. With social media and online communities you don’t have to get a big audience first time. In fact is can be best not to. Make a small group of people feel special and they will spread the word for you.
3. People like things that make them smile. The commonality across many of the videos copied online is that they make people smile. They’re fun and rewarding. People want to be part of the ritual and experience some of the delight for themselves. That’s why they copy the videos and why they spread them. So think always – how do you make your community members smile.

It’s been a busy week at FreshNetworks, with Charlie on Web Mission 09 in San Francisco and me in Paris for the Marketing 2.0 Conference. A great chance to meet people and also to learn, and this week’s Required Reading for the team is one of the presentations given in Paris.

Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach from Edelman presented about word-of-mouth and why it is important to brands. What I like most about this presentation is the emphasis that it places on word-of-mouth not being about technology. Too often, discussions on word-of-mouth revert to the mechanisms by which people hope this will be transmitted – by widgets, social networks or online communities.

Technology is, of course, important, but word-of-mouth is actually a social function. It’s about people trusting and respecting your brand so much that they are willing to put their reputation in line with it – recommending it to friends and peers. It’s about people doing your advertising for you and about helping you gain penetration in markets you could never reach effectively with traditional advertising. And perhaps most importantly, it’s about the outcome, not the process. Word-of-mouth is only useful when people act on what they hear.

Some more reading

• Branding in the age of social media (freshnetworks.com)
• Engage different consumers in different ways – why segmentation is key (freshnetworks.com)

Ratings and reviews lie. Simple, subtle lies, but lies all the same. And I suspect most people will never know.

This is Part2 in a series about Ratings and Reviews. To read Part1 click on: Introduction to Ratings and Reviews

“Professional” reviews

The first time I realized what a con ratings could be was when I visited Dubai. I was travelling with a group of friends and one of them booked the hotels. It was quite a surprise to hear we’d booked into a 5-star hotel for what seemed like a 3-star price. It transpired that this was not because my friend had negotiated a great deal, but because hotel stars in Dubai are dispersed as liberally as banking bonuses. Dubai is the land of the 7-star hotel and I’m afraid that has nothing to do with the Burj Al Arab being better than the 5-star Carlyle in New York or Cipriani in Venice.

Thankfully, one of the great things about online consumer-generated Ratings and Reviews is their potential to overwhelm organisational bias assuming a large number of “real people” comment. However even apparently unbiased people give biased reviews. Alongside a trick of averages, these biases help cloud the validity of ratings and reviews. 

So how do online ratings and reviews lie?

There are four key ways in which ratings and reviews lie. There may be more but these are the ones that jump out at me.

1. There is no “zero” score.
Ask most people “When is a product good or bad?” and they’ll say above 2.5 is good and below 2.5 is bad. The assumption is that 2.5 is the mean average score that can be awarded. However that’s simply not the case. The vast majority of five-point scales force you to allocate 1,2,3,4,or 5 stars. If you thought a product or service was rubbish, you cannot give it zero; that does not count as a rating. As a result the mean score that can be awarded is 3 not 2.5. This is great for retailers who have ratings and reviews on their site as most items will appear to be better than average even when they are not.

2. Self-selection bias in ratings and reviews
There are three kinds of purchase bias that add to “the lie”. The first is self-selection bias. Ask me to rate the restaurant behind my office and I won’t. I’ve never eaten there because I don’t like the way it looks. As a result I have selected myself out of being able to review its food or service.

Thus, ratings and reviews’ second lie comes from the self-selection bias inherent in the need for people to have experienced a product or service before rating it. I know that restaurants which sell all you can eat buffets for £3.50 serve poor quality meat, so I’m not going to buy and I’m not going to review. The people who do review are those who for a given product or service had a reasonable expectation that it would fulfill their needs when making the purchase. Hence the group of potential reviewers is biased from the outset.

3. Choice-supportive bias
The second type of purchase bias comes post-purchase. Choice-supportive bias describes our tendency to recall positive feelings or memories to the choice we made. We tend to remember the positive things about the options we chose more than we remember the positive attributes of the alternatives we did not select.

4. Post-purchase rationalization
The third and final purchase bias is post-purchase rationalisation. This bias comes from our tendency to retrospectively justify our decisions as rational ones. We humans prefer to feel that we made good selections not poor ones. So if you ask me whether or not I liked a product that I just spent my hard earned money on, you’re going to get a positive review more frequently than you get a negative one – we like to feel our past choices have been rational and well made.

It is the sum of these biases that results in an average five-star review of 4.3. That’s a long distance from 2.5.

Despite the lies, Ratings and Reviews are great

I’ve had a bit of a go at Ratings and Reviews, but that does not stop me from liking them. They are excellent tools for online retailers and they do a great service to customers. Just like a review on the back-cover of a book or a politician’s statistics, we should always treat claims with care. And so long as that’s done everyone still stands to benefit. For one thing, if ratings and reviews are considered on a relative basis (as is often the case) then the absolute number does not matter in the least.

And let’s be honest, right now, anything that encourages people to buy more is a good thing for the economy and for all of us.

What do you think?

Last year we reported on the 2008 Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris, this year we’re returning to Paris for the 2009 conference and this year we’re speaking. The Marketing 2.0 conference is a high-paced two days discussing the latest developments, case studies and thinking in social media and word of mouth marketing.

I will be speaking about using online communities specifically as engagement tools. Presenting some examples of how we have helped brands to engage their customers (or their target customers) and concentrating on ways in which you can leverage the expertise and knowledge that sits inside any brand to build this type of engagement. Sharing this expertise with your customers and using it to

1. engage them in a way you haven’t before and make them feel part of the company
2. position the brand as thought-leaders in their space
3. reward customers for their loyalty

Online communities are a great way to engage customers, and they let you extend the brand experience that they have. You may just manufacture an FMCG product, but by leveraging the expertise inside your firm and offering this to your customers using online communities you are offering them a real service. It’s not about marketing to them it’s about engaging them.

More on this in Paris later this month.

Marketing 2.0 Conference, Paris, March 30-31

Alongside FreshNetworks, a wealth of great speakers are on the agenda for the conference,  including:

• International brands with great stories to tell, including Lego, Virgin, Nokia, Ford, Nike and L’Oréal
• Social media players, including Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Ebay, MySpace, Netvibes, SlideShare, Dailymotion, JustinTV, SixAppart and Slide
• And analysts from firms, including Forrester, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Critical Mass, Edelman and pourquoitucours

For more information about the conference click here.

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Some more reading

• The Most Innovative Companies in Advertising & Marketing (scotttesta.com)
• Une conférence sur le Marketing 2.0 le 30 mars prochain à Paris
• Marketing 2.0
• Marketing 2.0 et réseaux sociaux

This has been a great week at FreshNetworks for one of the online communities that we have built and manage for a client. The community had not yet been publicly launched, in fact it was in semi-private beta until the new year whilst we’ve been seeding some activity. Over the last two weeks we started to grow the community and this week that growth happened. In fact in a matter of days we saw an increase in members from just a few hundred to many thousands.

This growth was a result of the way we grow and manage our communities during these  early stages. A delicate time  when you are trying to get traction whilst also growing the community to meet the needs and adapt with every new member to join. We know that this is the stage at which you can really get things right (and of course get them wrong) and that this is a process where a great community management team really adds value. It’s why we believe that promoting community management is important, and indeed why it can often be best to seed a community before opening the doors publicly.

So what led to this week’s growth? The community in question is yet to be publicly launched and the exact nature and client isn’t important to the story except to say that the community attracts a mainly female audience, and a slightly older age-range.

When thinking of an online community we never think of it in isolation. It’s part of an online ecosystem and working with this is important. Other sites will be discussing the same or similar issues, there may be blogs and unofficial communities for the same brand, there may be Facebook groups or pages or presence on other social networks. All of these are valid places for discussion and each will have a unique proposition to offer. We never launch a community that we don’t think would work and spend a lot of time working on the positioning and value the community adds. After we’ve done this we can successfully work with these other parts of the ecosystem, joining conversations and seeding insights from our community. When a brand launches an online community it should be thought of as playing  a central role in this ecosystem, and the community manager promotes the community within this.

Of course it’s not just the community manager who does this. As was shown this week. The growth came from the constant and ongoing growth work that the community management team have been doing. But the final push came when another community member picked up on some of this activity and started to talk about our community on another site. We didn’t ask them to do this, they just thought we were offering something of interest to members of a very well read forum in the UK.

The result was immediate and notable. Overnight, our membership base increased five-fold and by the weekend we had a much larger number of members than we might have expected by the end of a full year of the community. And what was perhaps more important is that these new members joined the conversations and discussions on the site. Increasing number of members is fine, but what we really want to do is to increase the value of the community to all members. And this only really happens when people take part.

So this week proved a great reminder of the value of word of mouth. How a recommendation from a peer carries significant weight and influence. The impact of that post on the external forum was much greater than if it were us or our client who had posted the same content. And we didn’t ask the member to post at all. They did it because they thought it would be a valuable post to the other forum readers, and the resulting impact suggests that it was.

Perhaps this is why word of mouth carries such influence. The person giving the word of mouth wouldn’t do so unless they thought that those receiving it would benefit from it. They make a value judgement and put their own reputation on the line with their recommendation. They’ll only do it when they truly believe it’ll add value and be well received. We can plan or seed for this, but we can create an online community that makes our members want to do this. That’s where great planning and good community management really comes in.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Encourage your employees to use Social Networking
• Body of Work: Community and Social Network Research
• Marketers On Collision Course with Consumers?

The relationship between a brand and the customer is a complex one. It can be fickle or it can be very strong, it can be two-way or it can be all take take take. Sometimes the customer has all the power – they know they want pizza but they’re not tied to a particular brand and so could make a different choice with each purchase. Other times they may be very brand loyal; they may love a brand so much they will almost always go with them. In this scenario what you often find is that the customer is significantly more passionate about the brand than the brand is about the customer.

This makes sense when you think about it. Imagine a brand like Virgin Atlantic. Lots of people like flying with them (and a few don’t, but let’s not focus on them today). Imagine they had  5,000 strongly loyal customers, people who loved flying with them and would always choose them if they could. For each of these individuals it’s a lot easier for them to be passionate about Virgin Atlantic than the other way round – they only have to be passionate about one thing, Virgin would have to be passionate about 5,000. It’s just not that easy to do this.

But being passionate matters. Traditionally there has been a concept of brand which essentially put types of consumer within a particular brand’s sphere of influence – “this is what an Abercrombie and Fitch customer looks like” was the way that many thought of things. But the consumer has much more control than this. They are really at the centre of the relationship. A brand should be thinking  of themselves as part of a consumer’s  personal brand rather than the other way around “we want to attract the kind of people who drink Innocent Smoothies and fly Virgin Atlantic”.

In this environment it’s critical that you move the relationship from give give give to something that really is two-way. You need to love your customers. Something that isn’t easy to do. People like Virgin Atlantic (and other airlines) try to do this with loyalty schemes. They reward their best (ie their highest spending customers) with perks like free access to their lounges on departure. But this doesn’t necessarily reward the customers who are most passionate about you. These may not be your biggest spenders, but they may be your most important influencers, amplifying word of mouth. They’re probably the ones who purchase your product every time they make a purchase in this category, even if that isn’t that often. But between purchases they’ll be the ones telling everybody they know how great you are.

So how do we love these people back as much as they love us. It’s not easy, but social media can really help and during the holiday season for the next month or so we’ll be showing you a few ways that you can love your customers.

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Some more reading

• Trends for 2009: Radical Transparency
• Will online communities by airlines help their brands take-off?
• Social Media + Community = a new approach to creating customer loyalty
• Web 2.0 Summit 08: Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com)
• Zappos: Above and beyond customer service