The real prompt for this is that we’ve been talking a lot about ‘we’ at FreshNetworks over the last few weeks. Across the team we seem to be helping quite a few client with co-creation and innovation at the moment - getting their customers to input into or lead innovations in everything from the position and marketing of a B2B telecommunications product to improving and tailoring experiences for a leisure client.

The concept of ‘we’ is one that intrigues me. There is an undoubted power to ‘I’. People like hearing personal stories and experiences, and we see in our online communities that such stories can get better reactions and greater responses. However, the power of ‘we’ is greater - people collaborating on an idea or innovation, working with each other to further improve and advance the previous thought.

Iterating and refining an idea is one of the best ways of bring in different view-points and peer reviewing the concept as it develops. We find that getting brands involved in this process can be illuminating - for the consumer, the brand and the idea. Good innovation and co-creation comes from getting people with different skills, experiences and understanding of the product or brand together. They each add something to the process and can bring their expertise and experience to the subject.

One of the best introductions to the ‘we’ experience that I’ve seen comes from Marieke Schoenmaker. The slides below are a great introduction to the subject, and the case studies at the end of the deck (including Nike+ and Zopa) are world-leading examples of the power of we.

Some more reading

• Ignore the Consumer?
• So How Do You Measure ROI of Online Communities?
• Nike’s Branded Storytelling Showcases Innovation
• Social Media + Company = Are you ready to innovate?

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A few months ago the BBC launched its Topics in the UK - a first step towards this kind of thematic organisation across their site. Taking content from across its site, this section organises things by themes - first it was places, then people and now some subjects too. So whether you want to find out about Hong Kong, Nicolas Sarkozy or the Edinburgh Festival you can see all of the BBC’s content in one place. From TV programmes to editorial content, news or background information on subjects.

This is a really good use of the vast and constantly changing content that the BBC has at its disposal and makes a fantastic resource for the user. Rather than having to use the search function we can now find information grouped by themes we are interested in.

A report in the New York Times over the weekend suggest that a similar thematic structure is to be launched by Business Week. But their Business Exchange pages are going a step further than the BBC:

Each Business Exchange topic page links to articles and blog posts from myriad other sources, including BusinessWeek’s competitors, with the contents updated automatically by a Web crawler. Nearly all traditional news organizations offer only their own material, spurning the role of aggregator as an invitation to readers to leave their sites.

This is an exciting step. As a reader I don’t necessarily mind where the content has come from, as long as it is clear to me when I read it. Online communities work well when they combine expert or editorial content with user generated content or input from other areas. Users want to see everything abotu a subject rather than having to hunt information down from a number of areas.

We often find that this kind of aggregation can be a good thing for the editorial content. It is this that binds together the other content and adds comment on it. The extra content acts as colour, exploring tangential areas or exploring some areas in more more depth. Thematic based information structure helps the reader, and it can certainly help the content providers too.

Some more reading

• Topic Pages to Be Hub of New BusinessWeek Site
• BusinessWeek Launching Topic Pages; Rejoices
• Business Week Creates Business Exchange
• Social Media: Strategies in Content and Commerce
• Your Website Shouldn’t Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication

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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

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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

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One famous brand ambassador in particular takes every opportunity to tell us about the brand. Sounds great, the kind of endorsement many brands dream of. The only problem is that this particular brand ambassador is not completely wanted by the brand.

Kendra Wilkinson, a Playboy cover model, television star and one of Hugh Hefner’s three live-in girlfriends, professes deep love for the Olive Garden Italian restaurant chain [...] To the consternation of Olive Garden’s marketers, who have spent millions crafting the franchise’s family-friendly image, the 23-year-old adult-entertainment star and aspiring real-estate mogul repeatedly uses her spotlight to rave about its midprice eateries

Ms Wilkinson’s brand advocacy is strong and she uses a mix of traditional and social media to spread her thoughts on the brand. Pictures and endorsements on her MySpace page are particularly effective as she has more than 730,000 friends. On one hand Olive Garden is getting the benefit of the kind of amplification of brand advocacy that you get in social media. But for them, this advocacy may not come from somebody they want associated with the brand.

So what should a brand do if it gets an unwanted brand ambassador, and should they even worry about who is enthusiastic about them? In reality there is very little that you can do. Brand ambassadors are great - they enjoy your product and are willing to go and tell lots and lots of people about it without you having to do a thing (except continue to give them the great product you make anyway). You can really benefit from them, we know that people are much more likely to trust real people than they are a brand and so when these real people recommend your brand the power is great.

The problem is that you do have no control over the situation. You can’t control who will really enjoy your brand, and you can’t control which of these people will be passionate enough to tell other people. So maybe you shouldn’t try. Maybe you should do what Starbucks do, and never comment publicly about who may or may not have been pictured with your product. Let them get on and do their thing and talk about your brand if they want to.

What you can do, however, is work actively to find advocates and amplify their word of mouth. Your brand advocates can be very separate from the brand itself - but they are really passionate about you and so engaging them can bring real benefits. These people truly believe in your brand, they want to belong to it and want to go and bear witness, telling other people about it. Though you can’t control them, what you can do is to equip them with the tools to do this. The means to tell people and to pass on their brand advocacy.

You can’t choose who your brand ambassadors are, but amplifying the word of mouth of all these people will be only positive for your brand. And it will mean that it is not just the more famous ambassadors who are widely associated with your brand, others will too.

Some more reading

• Olive Garden Would Prefer to No Longer be Playmate’s ‘Soul Food’ [No Accounting For Taste]
• Olive Garden Shuns Playboy Endorsement; Sticks To Breadsticks [Public Relations]
• What Happens When a Big Breasted Blonde Offers an Unsolicited Endorsement of a Family Restaurant Chain
• Playboy’s ‘Girls of Olive Garden’ Pictorial Likely to Be Served Lukewarm, In Need of Flavoring [Service With A Smile]

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The website is built on WordPress, and that should be the first indication of its mission and aim. News items look like blog posts and the feel of the site is much more social than the previous version (which felt like a traditional corporate site). When we talk about online communities at FreshNetworks, we talk about issue-centred navigation with calls to action. This kind of layout is typical of social sites, and even though the new Number10 site isn’t a community in the way that we would understand it, it does use this issue-based, call-to-action approach. The options you have are a mix of editorial content (News and History) with more social content (communicate, Meet the PM and Number 10 TV). For the user there is no distinction between the two types of content - they are presented equally and side-by-side.

This is also seen in the way the site pulls in feeds from Flickr, and Twitter on the homepage. This has the dual benefit of bringing a constantly changing source of media for the site and meaning that all the previous social media activities are being brought together.

So, do these changes mean that the site is a success? The answer is obviously not clear-cut. The building-blocks are now in place for a great, social portal into the Prime Minister’s office. The mix of editorial and social content and the use of media and feeds means that people will feel more like insiders. The website is less a place people go to to find out information and more one where they go to interact. This development is to be encouraged. The real sign of success will be how the site is managed, whether content is actively and continually created, whether the Flickr albums will update frequently and, ultimately the levels of user-interaction that are allowed. Giving people that feeling of being an insider is great; they will now want to talk to you directly.

Some more reading

• Brown’s website is Web2.0tastic
• Prime Minister, meet Flickr and Twitter
• New 10 Downing Street website launched
• Number10.gov.uk Launches
• New 10 Downing Street site runs WordPress

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Companies that are deriving business value from these tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice.

Web 2.0 tools are starting to enter the mainstream in business, those who trial them find them beneficial and want to look at ways they can use these tools across their business, helping them meet multiple aims.

If you’re interested in some of the detail of the McKinsey study, I’d suggest you go to the article on their site here (you will need to sign-up, although it is free). However, for me the most interesting findings are:

• More community-based tools are growing in their use. In 2008, 34% of businesses studies used blogs (compared with 21% in 2007); 32% used wikis (compared with 24% in 2007)
• Web 2.0 tools are popular both for internal purposes (94% of firms studied) and for interfacing with customers (87% of firms studied). When they are being used for the latter purpose, this is primarily to improve service to existing customers and then as an acquisition tool
• Blogs were more popular in Asia-Pacific and India; social networking particularly popular in North America and China; and, mash-ups and rating more popular in Europe
• The biggest barriers to using Web 2.0 tools are a lack of understanding of the financial benefits (28% of respondents), internal cultural barriers (22%) and lack of skills (17%)

This last point, the barriers to adoption, show the areas where we as an industry need to focus our efforts to help clients. We have written before on this blog about measurement and ROI in online communities and in social media (see posts here, here and here) and it seems that this is the biggest barrier that firms need support with. Perhaps as these firms move from trialling the use of new tools, to using them for specific business purposes, the measurement of how they contribute to these will be easier.

Some more reading

• Are Social Media Jobs Here to Stay?
• Web 2.0 Design and Internet Marketing
• Analysis: McKinsey’s enterprise web 2.0 survey
• Gartner throws weight behind enterprise Web 2.0

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I was pondering this last night when my friend Jim sent me the trailer for his directorial debut, Eden Lake. As the UK Marketing Director of a major film company recently told me, film promotion has some particular challenges. Speed, for one: the marketing has to be so effective that penetration in the target demographic goes from 0 to 80% in about a fortnight. Flexibility is another: with the right word of mouth, a film that starts playing in only a few cinemas can build up sufficient momentum to get country-wide distribution in a matter of days.

But while film production companies might specialise in particular genres, the film distribution arms (on which they depend hugely for successful sales and marketing) usually don’t – one week it’s art-house, the next grisly horror. Since the target audience is changing all the time, it’s no wonder that their marketing is usually highly tactical, very campaign-based, and quite traditional – mainly above-the-line promotion on TV, billboards and in cinemas. Sometimes viral campaigns are thrown in, but these tend to be short-lived, fairly hit-and-miss affairs.

So how should online communities be used to promote films? By their very nature, communities take some time to grow the social bonds that make them sustainable. So aside from the multi-film franchises, few individual films have enough time in their marketing slot to generate community on their own micro-sites.

But there is an alternative: to treat the microsite as a hub, which connects the official site to the multiple other spaces where community and conversations can form. The site of upcoming Bond release Quantum of Solace has done this successfully by mixing exclusive content with links to fan sites on social networks (like MySpace and Facebook). It also has a download section to promote cross-linking with widgets that allow consumers to add features to their own social networking or blog sites. In fact, it’s exactly the same approach that we recommend to our clients when they’re building a customer community – they should see it as a space they manage that can also integrate with the other external sites they participate in.

The other advantage of this approach is that it can help distinguish the official from the user-generated content, some of which might be well-produced enough to lead to genuine confusion. Admittedly the amusing re-edit of The Shining trailer as a romantic comedy is unlikely to mislead anyone. But well-made spoof or malicious content can have adverse effects on a brand if people think it’s genuine – ask the banks, who suffer from the many phishing emails that no doubt turn up in your spam box every day. Equally if, like my friend Jim, your film is about a gang of louts targeting a young couple, you don’t want really user-generated re-enactments as part of your marketing campaign…

So when it comes to short-lived, campaign-based marketing, a central hub that links to other sites might be more appropriate than a dedicated community site. Real community takes time to form and should be sustainable – it’s a long-term relationship, not just a one night stand.

Some more reading

• Social Network Retention– How to Achieve Engagement Nirvana

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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

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When I talk to people they often cite LinkedIn as a good example, but I would think of this as much more of a social network than a community. It’s more about ‘me’ than it is about ‘us’. I know of a couple of other examples of closed online research communities for business travel and credit card firms. But I’m still looking for great examples of online communities that show how they work and allow us to compare what makes them work with  what makes communities for other audiences a success.

One example that I do know of is the Chairman’s Network, a Europe-wide network and community of C-level members in the high technology sectors. The community is both a networking, advice and information resource and a place for these people to share ideas with each other. The networks appears to have grown out of work identifying the (lack of?) networking and advice resources for Board-level people in this industry and as such an online community filled a real gap. They currently have just over 1,000 members and from what I can establish the community is quite active.

Of course, you could argue that building a community in the TMT sector is probably easier than in other sectors. However, this isn’t our experience at FreshNetworks for more junior community members, so I’m not convinced that sector is the main reason this community works. It is probably more that the community is meeting a specific need for the members (the lack of a place to meet, share and collaborate on ideas in their industry). For the target audience letting them do this at a time that fits into their busy schedule and without having to travel to meetings should be perfect. And it seems to work.

Do you know any other examples of c-level online communities?

Some more reading

• Will Your Business Opt In?
• The new employee connection: Social networking behind the firewall
• Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives
• KPIs and Metrics - More on Online Community Measurement
• Is defamation in online communities slander or libel?

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