FreshNetworks Blog

I’m at the Retail Business Show today, meeting people and attending talks and presentations on social media and online branding. I love events like this – they are great sources of inspiration and new ideas and also help to reinforce things you think yourself. Today has helped with the latter – Matthew Yeomans from Custom Communication said something that we truly believe at FreshNetworks: that customers have really good ideas.

His talk on social media and brand reputation online showed ways that brands can interact online and also some successful (and less successful) uses of social media and other new ways of doing things. Two great examples that show good and bad use of the online space by brands come from different sectors and different countries: Nokia and Sony. Both thought it would be great to increase their presence online and thought that it would be powerful if they could leverage their brand advocates to help with this. In fact they both had a very similar idea – get their brand advocates to use blogs and diaries to show positive interactions with their product. The problem is one did it well and another less so.

Nokia’s idea was to find the most active Nokia bloggers online, give them the newest Nokia phone and send them on a round-the-world trip on condition that they blog daily and send back photos and videos sent with the phone. The site (Urbanista Diaries) has the blogs and photos and is using these in marketing – running ‘where was this photo taken’ competitions as a second wave word of mouth campaign. It works – Nokia is upfront about what they’re doing. They use real customers to blog and produce content and have an engagement strategy that continues the campaign.

Sony was less successful. The launch of the PSP was accompanied by a blog that purported to be from users of the product. It wasn’t; the blog was actually being run by journalists who were blogging as if they were the PSP’s target consumer group. This was discovered and spread rapidly online. To their credit Sony took down the site and after just a day and all they were doing was running what could have been a powerful word of mouth marketing campaign. Perhaps they were nervous of letting their actual customers do the blogging and so they wanted to control what was said, and how their brand was portrayed online.

These examples show both that customers have good ideas but that firms can sometimes be nervous about harnessing customers online. The Nokia blog enabled Nokia and other consumers to see how an expert interacted with their product, the kind of photos and videos they could take and other advantages of the product that may not have been discovered without this. The Sony experience shows that firms can be reluctant to actively harness their own consumers online; perhaps nervous about what they might say (remember: customer opinions can be bad as well as good) and about launching something they had little or no control over.

There is a need to provide a means by which customers can share their ideas but also in a way that’s harnessed by the brand. Some are happy to let their customer ideas feed directly into marketing campaigns and activities online (as in the Nokia example) whereas others might want to keep the ideas private, in a way that the brands can control and harness but without the risk that their image may be tarnished externally. This is where private social networks are powerful – the ability to create an innovations lab that is invitation only and that firms can use to test their ideas, getting and responding to feedback (good or bad!). These can be strong communities – you recruit your most active online commentators from a broad or specific consumer segment and tell them that what they are saying and commenting on is feeding directly into your brand’s innovation process. The results are incredible!

We’re actually talking about private social networks later this afternoon at the Retail Business Show and I’ll be posting the slides here another time.