FreshNetworks Blog

Every year thousands of people think they’ve Got Talent or believe they can win The X-Factor. Every year the producers of these shows delight in showing how deluded most contestants are. So why is it that below-average people think they are above-average? Before I get onto the answer I should explain why I am writing about this.

I’m a big fan of podcasts. I find it hard to fit in reading a newspaper these days. As a result the radio and podcasts tend to be my main line to the outside world. One of my favourites is Tim Harford’s More or Less podcast for BBC’s Radio4 for three key reasons:

1. He’s great at presenting numbers and statistics in an appealing way. He’s written a couple of excellent books: The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life and is also an journialist for the FT.
2. I am an engineer at heart, so there’s nothing I enjoy more than the occasional mathematical/statistical conundrum to get get my brain ticking.
3. This podcast is all about getting beneath the statistics that we hear/read about everyday. The first company I started, straight out of university, was the research business, FreshMinds. So being a self-taught researcher I am constantly infuriated by the way statistics are misinterpreted and misunderstood by the media. It’s not simply a case of tyring to sell newspapers, it’s also a general lack of understanding that creates hyperbole and false headlines. Tim’s podcasts put the stats back in their place.

I frequently send emails to the researchers at FreshMinds telling them that this is required reading for anyone who uses numbers to help inform decision making. If that’s you, then please do check it out: More or Less .

Anyway, this morning, during a run around Hyde Park I managed to catch up with two episodes: Forecasting the Future and Poisonous Pork and it was the former that got me thinking about The X-Factor:

In this podcast they explain why forecasters are in general little more accurate with their predictions than a monkey throwing darts and also give a simple explanation of the Lake Wobegon Effect. This is the name given to the tendency for us all to believe we’re better than average. In particular they discussed an experiment involving two groups. The first contained 50 drivers who had been in accidents (most of whom had been found to be at fault by the courts) and the second, control group was 50 normal drivers of similar ages. Despite their accidents, individuals from the first group, remained just as likely to call themselves “better than average drivers” as the control.

This is an important issue in the research world. People often misrepresent their actions and capabilities when asked. It is perhaps why so many people think they can sing, when they can’t and it’s a good reminder of the importance of ethnographic or observational research – measuring what people actually do, rather than what they claim. And the link to social media (that’s why you’re reading this blog, right?) is that watching people take part in a research community over a long-period of time can help you better understand the bias and misreporting inherent in any data you collect.

Poisonous Pork

The second episode, Poisonous Pork also had a few great items. Best of all was the proof (if it were needed) that we humans are no good at making decisions based on a proper understanding of risk, they discuss a recent pork scare that led to 100,000 Irish pigs being destroyed. The action was taken due to concerns about dioxins in the pork. However given the amount of sausages you’d have to eat to be at risk from dioxin poisoning, the fat in the sausages is actually a more significant health risk than the dioxins that caused the scare.

The twist at the end of the tail was that a Professor of Food Safety was interviewed. He proudly explained how he was able to test some pork sausages from his fridge and prove there was no risk. But then was forced to admit on air that his wife had thrown them out as they preferred not to “take a risk if they didn’t have to”.

Thus proving that you don’t have to be a deluded talent show contestant to act irrationally.

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Some more reading

• The Brand is in Your Head

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.

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Some more reading

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

Image via Wikipedia

London announces social media strategy for 2012 Olympic Games

This week came the first announcements of the social media strategy that will accompany London’s 2012 Olympic Games. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) will work with the sponsors of the Games to launch a social media campaign in the run-up to the games in three years time as part of it’s campaign to get younger people to get involved in both the Games and sport more generally.

They are currently negotiating the involvement of the various official sponsors, and Adidas will be the first to launch a project as part of the campaign. Their involvement will include what is called an “online sports activation project”, a set of online social media activities, and presence in social networks, that will sit alongside a campaign offering free gyms to London schools and communities.

According to Alex Balfour, head of new media at LOCOG:

“The main driver for it will be around social values. It will be focused less on the people who are already active in sport or aspire to be lead sports people and more on those who have some interest but don’t see the social rewards in it.”

So what can we learn from this?

The announcements to date seem to be focusing on ways to engage younger audiences, through online communities and social networks. They appear to be building social media elements into their broader projects to encourage mass participation in sport and hope that this will help their drive to get young people involved.

This is undoubtedly a laudable effort. It is great to use the focus that the Olympic games provide to encourage and promote sport; and especially to motivate younger people to get involved. Social media undoubtedly has a significant role to play in any activities like this and I look forward to what I hope are well-planned and well-executed activities online. The Olympics is a big deal, and it deserves great and innovative use of social media.

Of course, I really hope that London 2012′s social media strategy goes much further than what we have seen announced so far. Whilst it is great to try to engage young people in this way, I hope they will try to engage the rest of us too! As we wrote earlier this year, the Olympics should be the perfect social media event. As we wrote at the time:

…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

A full social media strategy should look at ways to engage and involve people before, during and after the Olympic games. If Beijing this year was the first time people have been able to use social media to report on events, London in three years’ time should be the first games to fully integrate social media into the Olympic experience. That’s why I’m looking forward  to watching LOCOG’s social media strategy develop and to more elements of it being revealed. By 2012, social media will use tools we don’t even have yet in ways we can’t imagine. I hope London is ready to make the most of them.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

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Some more reading

• London 2012 will be mobile
• Olympic Games: Halfway to the opening ceremony, London 2012′s progress report

People build and join online communities for many different reasons. They may want to create and use the most comprehensive hotel review site in the world. They may want to feedback to a brand about their product. Or they may want to help other people get the most out of their mobile phone. The common thread that goes through online communities is that they are issue-, goal- or topic-focused.

Within this environment conversations and discussions flourish. People are there because they share a common interest and they want to discuss this. Some of the communities that we build and manage at FreshNetworks are online research communities. These are communities that have been specifically built as a tool for consumer or market research. They are a great tool for understanding both what people think and why they think it, allowing you to explore the social context in which decisions are made and give you an instant and enthusiastic research resource.

However, even online communities that are not specifically built for research can be a valuable source of insight. Alongside the planned research and activities you get from an online research community, any online community is a fantastically rich source of organic insight. Organisations and brands that run online communities are able to get a range of benefits, whether or not they specifically intended the community to be a source of insight, including:

• understand how customers talk about you, your market and your competitors
• see what issues are currently of most interest to them
• get reviews and feedback on your product or service, and those of your competitors
• learn the language that customers use
• know the questions and concerns that your customer base have
• find out about new competitors, new ideas and new products

All of this, and more, just from having a successful and well managed online community.

We at FreshNetworks think that there are huge benefits people can be getting from their online communities and hope that people are doing so. With this aim in mind over the next few weeks, we’re going to be sharing our thoughts and  experiences of getting insight from online communities, specifically those that were not built in the first place as a research and insight tool.

In our experience, good online communities can have a great benefit to brands. We’re going to help you make the most of them.

Read our series on Insight from Online Communities

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Do we tell the truth in social networks? Does it matter?
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them
• Why online communities benefit from our desire to be heard
• How to build an online research community: a podcast

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve written in the past about the way’s Gordon Brown is using YouTube and the role of social media in govenment websites in the UK, and of course the role social media played in Obama’s campaign in the US. Politicians can make great use of social media and online communities to engage with the public.

One real benefit of engaging people in this way is that you can focus people round a specific topic or issue, a useful tool for politicians and government. It’s also a great way to open up and bring people inside the organisation. Just as this is beneficial for brands, so it is also beneficial for organisations. That’s why it’s great to see another example of social media being used in this way, and this time one that is possibly one that is less well known: the videoblog from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Launched in October 2008, Dmitry Medvedev recorded a few experimental video blog entries before the end of last year, but it is this week that he has returned and the blog is starting to gain traction. I’ve included the latest clip below, which may only be of use to Russian speakers (although you do get to see Medvedev skiing).

In this clip he talks about sport and exercise and how important it is to people and how it plays a role in many New Years resolutions. He also tells us that he intends to ski more (hence the skiing in the clip). But of more interest is what he tells us about how his video blog will be used (apologies in advance for any mistakes in my own rough translation from the original Russian):

I would like to say a few words about how my video blog. You will know that we began to experiment with a few posts from the 7th October last year. I now want us to take your feedback and improve implement some of your suggestions. First, you asked for commenting on the site and I’m glad to say we have now got this. You can now post comments to the site and I hope you will do so. I have already listened to your feedback with great interest and look forward to reading your comments.

It is really great to see the Russian presidency engaging its citizens in this way; to see Dmitry Medvedev listening and responding to feedback in this way. Medvedev posting his video blogs and allowing people to comment and respond to them. I hope that he continues to do this and that he not only reads but also engages with the comments.

Video and social media has a significant role to play in connecting people and allowing them to engage with each other. For the Russian Government it is a way of letting its citizens inside, letting them see Medvedev as a real person and of having a dialogue with him. It will be interesting to see how this experiment continues and the response and interest they get. It has the potential to be a great success.

Update: a better (and full) translation of the video from Russia Today

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Some more reading

• Why we all love watching videos online (especially at work)
• Blogs, Vlogs and SEO
• Five ways to engage your customers in 2009
• Social Media Marketing: Video Examples Of Corporate Uses And Applications
• Russian President Medvedev a Mac User
• Is your corporate blog believable?
• Medvedev broadcasts first Kremlin podcast