FreshNetworks Blog

Last year we wrote about the case of the Virgin Atlantic employees who were sacked for talking about customers (and indeed their employers) in social networks, and why you should be careful what you say on Facebook. At the time we wrote that:

…we’ve probably all talked about work gossip, probably with a small group of friends, privately in a bar or over dinner. What these Virgin employees did may have felt just like that – they were in a group with their friends sharing work gossip. The problem is that unlike that secluded table in the bar or restaurant, they were talking in a very public place. Perhaps the most public of places. This was their mistake.

This week had seen more cases in the UK of employees using social networks to talk about their employers and in particular their customers. With employees at supermarket chain Tesco posting reportedly abusive comments about customers in groups on Facebook. This raises a number of issues about how employers should react and when something stops being a personal or seemingly light-hearted discussion and starts being offensive in some real way.

Today I was interviewed by BBC Radio 4‘s You and Yours programme about this very issue. About what employers should do when their employees are talking about customers in social networks. About how they might set up their own online communities as both an outlet for these opinions and as a source of innovation and co-creation. And about why even if employees do talk about customers online, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If you didn’t catch the show then do listen to the segment below.

[audio:youandyours20090122.mp3]

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Some more reading

• Social Networking Begins With You
• British Airways’ Staffers Ridicule Customers
• Why you should be careful what you say on Facebook
• Waitrose staff post abusive messages about customers on internet
• Facebook Now Nearly Twice The Size Of MySpace Worldwide
• Facebook message about night out ‘betrays’ man who phoned in sick for work

It’s been a while since I discovered a new web service that I immediately fell in love with. There are so many things to try, but so few hit me as a massive winner from the start. Spotify just did.

A friend sent me an invite to their Beta and I was sceptical at first. Anything that asks me to download an application makes me hesitate. Moreover, the information on their site was sparse. It wasn’t until I googled and read a Guardian article that I decide to have a go.

Within 60 seconds I’d signed up and downloaded and was ready to start listening. I clicked on one of their “new” singles – Royksopp, Happy to Hear, and immediately found myself with a smile on my face. A great process, free music and best of all I’d discovered a new song that I immediately loved. Although, to be fair, that was mostly because the sample was taken from an album I’d almost forgotten: The Clones of Dr.Funkenstein by Parliament.

So how does it work?

Spotify is just like iTunes. It has a vast database of music. Probably 90% of what most people might ever want to listen to (I checked and they had the original Parliament track) . After a quick download you have instant access to all this music. You can browse by track or listen to a play list.

What’s cool about Spotify is the business model. For years people have predicted a move by consumers away from owning music to paying a monthly fee for unlimited streaming. Whilst I’ve been happy to believe this might be destination, I’ve never understood how consumers would move from today’s habits to monthly fees. After all it took Sky years and very expensive sporting rights to entice people to pay for TV on a monthly basis. I have a large music collection – whenever I hear music I like, I buy it. So the idea of paying a monthly fee when it would take me over a year of listening all day every day to my own music before having to repeat a track, seemed unnecessary.

Spotify are offering the endpoint (all the music you want for a monthly fee) but more improtantly they are also offering two routes to help get you there. There’s a good old fashioned freemiumservice – you can listen to all the music you want for free, but you’ll be forced to hear a 30-second ad every 25 minutes (just like commercial radio, with less advertising). Alternatively you can pay for one day’s free music for 99c.

This is exactly the sort of kick that’s needed to change the way I listen to music. You can get an invite here

Could it be any better?

Yes. There is one problem. The developers have clearly focused their efforts on the listening experience and securing music rights. Clearly that’s the right place to start. But what they need next is a better way to find new music.

I’ve always been a fan of iLike (which got even better after the Facebook masses were introduced to it back in May 2007) and have also used Last.fm and iTunes to find new music. I find the online community aspects of these services are the best way to discover “songs you might like”. I remember listening to Pandora before the arrival of the Web2.0 music sites. Despite a sophisticated algorithms that attempted to judge what I liked in the music I listened to, it’s ability to correctly predict what I’d enjoy was poor.

Forget the clever maths, the best way to recommend me music is to find what people with similar tastes also listen to. And that’s what’s great about iLike and the others. Every couple of months I spend a few hours listening to the “music that I don’t own” which ”people like me” listen to on a regular basis. To date that’s been the best way for me to uncover new artists.

Spotify is crying out for a similar online community angle. Despite the service being less than a week old, the online community is already organising itself. There’s a user-created Facebook app for sharing Spotify playlists and around 10 websites that users have created for the same purpose.

Good luck with the development. This is an excellent idea, well executed.

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Some more reading

• Ten Social Music Sites that Let You Listen, Share and Enjoy Music
• Pandora vs Mufin: A Head to Head Music Melee
• Audio here, there, but not quite everywhere
• Music streaming service Spotify wins early fans
• Music recommendation, based on sound

We’ve already looked at the insight you can get from profile data and focused discussion in online communities. For the third in our series of how to get insight from online communities we are going to look not at what people say, but how they say it.

Communities drive discussions, be those the organic discussions that will begin between members, or discussions prompted by questions, content or other stimulus from the community manager. There is a lot that we can learn about the community members from how they respond in these discussions. What they say, the ideas they give and the opinions they express. But often overlooked is to examine the language they use.

There is a great value to seeing and  understanding the language people use when talking to each other about issues, products and brands. Organisations often have no clear idea of the language people use, the words they choose and the way they discuss their product or talk about an issue. It is difficult and has traditionally been hard to really see how a mass of people discuss and talk about what you do. With online communities you get a real spotlight into this, not only the language people choose but how they talk about and describe things to each other.

Observing and understanding this can be really valuable. One of our clients at FreshNetworks was able to identify significant problems in it’s marketing by watching how people discussed their needs and the different products in an online community. When none of the language they used was chosen by community members we saw that there must be a problem, asked the members why they hadn’t used this language and then realigned the client’s marketing message using the language that customers were using. In this case the real insight from the online community was not so much what was said, but how it was said.

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Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009
• Crowdsourcing – does the customer know best?
• What Can Small Business Owners Learn From Obama

Yesterday we wrote about how to maximise the insight gained from profiling data in online communities. For the second in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we’re looking at how to make the most of the core of most online communities – discussions and forums.

Most communities have some form of discussion area. This may be in a traditional forum, or may be focused on media, features or other pieces of content. But the basic concept of allowing community members to discuss, debate and share ideas is a critical part of an online community. These are the spaces in which people will probably spend the most time in any online community they join and are the parts that get most involvement early on. It’s easy to see how and where to contribute and  existing discussions encourage people to add their point of view.

Whilst it’s great to allow discussions to grow and develop depending on the interests of the community members, it’s important not to overlook the power of this simple tool for insight. Many brands and organisations enjoy being able to watch how people discuss things. What their opinions are and how they express them. What language they use and what they choose to discuss. How they interact with other members and how they discuss things with each other. Forums and discussions can offer a vibrant source of insight and with a little bit of focus can be even more valuable.

To gain maximum insight from discussions and forums it is best to build them as part of a larger research process and series of activities, something that an online research community is ideal for. However, any online community can make the most of its forums and discussions from an insight perspective. It’s about how you frame and focus the discussions that go on and the four points below will help maximise the insight benefits you get:

1. Keep your discussions focused at first and build them round issues that are of specific interest to your brand or organisation. Community members find it easier to join conversations if it is obvious where they can add their opinions and so focusing on the issues of most interest to you will help them take part and help you gain insights where they are needed most.
2. Provide a space for people to discuss any other issues, and mark it specifically as such (one of our communities has a ‘Juice Bar’ specifically for this). We don’t want to discourage people who want to participate and can gain a lot from knowing what people what to discuss organically. Sometimes the best insights come in areas you couldn’t predict.
3. Make sure the brand or organisation responds to people in the forum. The best insights often come when you iterate ideas with community members. They suggest something and you tell them what your reaction is. They then respond, and it is this response which starts to yield real depth of insight you wouldn’t have got otherwise.
4. Think of ways you can use discussions for innovation or co-creation. Thinking of a new product? Start a discussion about your ideas and see what the reaction is.

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Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community
• Business media: trends for 2009
• Ted Mininni: Is Some of Nike’s Current Success Due to Its ‘Running’ Social Network?
• Blogging 101

There are many ways to get insight from online communities. Some communities are built specifically for this reason – online research communities, but all online communities offer great ways for you to gain insight into your product, brand or market, into issues and opinions, and into the people who form the community. Over the next two weeks, we’re going to be presenting ten different ways in which you can gain some basic insights from any online community, as part of our series: Insight from Online Communities.

A first, and often overlooked, area of insight is in the profiling information you gather when people join your online community. Profiles play a number of roles. They help other community members to find each other, they emphasise the public face of the community, they help those managing the community to check the identify of members (if this is needed) and they offer the community owners and managers a way to find out more about their members.

When thinking about how you design and build your online community, it is important to pay particular attention to the profiling information you capture. You need to make the most of this opportunity, but not ask so much that you will dissuade potential members. And you need to decide which of this information will be public and which is just between you and the community member.

There is considerable insight you can gather from profiling information from any community, be one with a few hundred or many thousand members. You can learn more about who your customers are, or who is interested in the subject and focus of your community. You can gather demographic information to help with segmentation, locate where people are geographically and detailed information about their use of products or their opinions about issues. But perhaps the most information can come from allowing people to tell you a little bit about them. Offering a free hand where they can write about themselves. If you then code and analyse this data you can build a valuable and rich data set which lets you understand much more about your community members.

But perhaps the most valuable role profiling data can play is to let you understand and analyse all future contributions to the online community. If you can gather and code information in profiles then you start to build up a picture of individual members and the community as a whole. This will let you analyse and understand better future contributions and conversations. Let you get much more value and insight from your online community.

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Some more reading

• Body of Work: Community and Social Network Research
• Getting insight from online communities
• Business media: trends for 2009