FreshNetworks Blog

My young niece got a great set of books for Christmas – reprints of books from a 1970′s series of books for children called How it works…. My favourite is the book on the Computer as it shows us quite how far we’ve come in such a short period of time. Just take a look at this picture of a ‘Small digital computer designed for the businessman’.

The changes that have happened in technology are striking, we’ve been through a real revolution in my lifetime and continue to do so. Sometimes these bigger, more substantive changes can get lost, hidden behind (albeit useful) debates on whether changes will happen in the way we use Twitter in 2009, and suchlike.

So this week, the recommended reading at FreshNetworks is a great video over at Picol on the History of the Internet. It’s easy to forget the changes that have taken place and how we have moved forward at such a rate since the 1950s. When we talk about social media, online communities or any use that we make of the Internet, it is good to remember how we got where we are. This video is a great reminder.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

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Some more reading

• The History of the Internet
• Spring Cleaning in Social Media
• Let’s Stop Swooning Over Social Media
• Another example of good use of video in online communities

It’s been a busy week for news this week, but one thing that struck me was the amount of discussion in the press in the UK about Twitter.  It started with the broadsheets: on Tuesday, the Guardian asked What are you doing and then on Wednesday the Independent asked Why are we still hearing so much about Twitter. But perhaps today’s article was most interesting, when the Sun asked if you Fancy a twitter with Britney.

The fact that the Sun is now talking about Twitter has great significance for its uptake. Whilst the Guardian and Independent have been talking about Twitter for sometime, they have a combined  distribution of just over half a million readers. The Sun on the other hand is the UK’s best read newspaper, with over 2.5 million people reading it every day. It has been proven to provoke strong emotions and have great influence – from their iconic front-page on the day of the elections in 1992 which many claim contributed to the defeat of the Labour party, to the fact that many people in Liverpool still boycott the newspaper after their reporting of a tragedy in 1989. The Sun is perhaps one of the most influential and widely read newspapers in the UK.

So why does this matter and what does it have to do with Twitter?

Whilst many people may be using Twitter, it only becomes really useful as a social media tool when it starts to meet mass adoption. Just like the first fax machine, or the first use of email, Twitter and other social media tools become more useful and more rewarding the more people that use them. They will only really come into their own when they stop being niche and start being popular. To date, I don’t think that Twitter has been ‘popular’ in this, and the common, meaning of the word. It has been something that a large group of people have used and got benefit from, but this group has to some extent been restricted or limited – people who share certain interests or common characteristics of some kind.

The fact that the Sun is now reporting about Twitter suggests that it is starting to gain the kind of mass, or popular, influence that will see it really come of age. Other suggestions of this mass influence include reports that Jonathan Ross, a recently controversial comedian and chat show host in the UK, will use Twitter as part of his Friday Night with Jonathan Ross show when it begins again in a couple of weeks. This is a show that regularly receives around 5 million viewers, perhaps one of the most watched chat shows in the UK.

Social media tools become most useful when they become popular and mainstream. We know that this is happening when they are talked about and used in mainstream media. Twitter seems to have taken a big leap forward in this regard in the UK this week. Perhaps 2009 will be the year it makes it.

Update: Discussion on SocialMediaToday

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Some more reading

• Twitter is not chat
• Is Plurk a bigger whale than Twitter?
• Twitter and Facebook / Apples and oranges
• Twitter set for its mainstream telly moment on Jonathan Ross’s comeback show
• Twitter in UK newspapers – micro-blogging hits the mainstream
• Twitter celebrities Barack Obama and Britney Spears joined by Church of England bishop
• Clarkson on Twitter?

Sony crowd-sources name for new online community

Sony this week launched a beta version of it’s new online community this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The site combines company blogs with videos, photos and polls as well as allowing users to create profiles; it’s a site for users to engage with Sony as a brand and as a company. They’re using the site at the Show both to report on product launches but also to allow people to engage with their bloggers and content. From the perspective of launching an online community, many of the usual criteria appear to be met. The community is missing just one thing: a name.

Sony are looking to co-create the name for their online community, working with those people who are first to use and try the site both to get feedback on the content and the interactions, but also to suggest a name for the community. As their chief blogger and senior vice president of corporate communications, Rick Clancy, says:

We want to get feedback from users and also we thought it would be great to reach out to users for suggestions on a name for the site. My favorite so far is ‘Sony No Baloney,’ which I used for the very first blog post, but some of my colleagues disagree. Hopefully, the community members themselves can suggest something more clever.

So what can we learn from this?

There are many things right about how Sony are launching their online community. Getting the strategy and launch right can really help to maximise the chances of success, including:

• seeding the community with content and members even before the beta launch
• bringing together the ways the company interacts – making the user experience simple and not making them do work to find out where to interact
• launching  alongside an event – capitalising upon the PR the event will bring and also establishing the clear relationship between the online and offline community of consumers – they are the same people after all, just engaging in different ways
• using the first members to help you finalise and develop the community

By working with these first members to co-create the name for the online community itself, Sony is allowing them to have real input into a significant part of the community member experience – what the community is actually called. There are many ways to engage community members and confer a feeling of ownership of the community too them, but I particularly like the idea of getting them to name the site. Naming conventions in society are important – those who help to name something feel ownership of and responsibility for it. By getting these first community members to work together to name the site they will create a set of people who feel responsibility for the success of the site and who want to work to make it a success.

Understanding the social dynamics at play in online communities is important, and if you capitalise upon them you can really help maximise the potential for success at launch and whilst you grow and develop your site.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

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Some more reading

• Sony’s 2009 CES Press Conference In HD
• Live from Sony’s (first) CES 2009 press event
• Sony bolsters Web presence with social networking site
• Sony Electronics Launches Community Site
• Sony’s Social Networking Site Needs a Name
• Consumer Electronics Show: Myspace social networking site to be available through TV sets

Over the last couple of days we’ve been posting about how people behave in social networks, whether Facebook is a digital antidepressant and if we tell the truth in social networks. As human beings we want to be heard, we want our opinions to have an audience; we want people to respect us.

Online it is easy for us to do this, and even more in social networks we can portray the opinions we want people to know we have – we might not admit to liking all the music we do, or we may exaggerate just how much sport we play. It’s easier to do this online, being temporarily and geographically remote from most of the people who will read our profiles allows us to be more selective with the truth than we could be offline.

Of course, it’s not that we want to deceive or be selective with the truth. It’s just that we want to have our voices heard and care about what people think about us. Social networks are so focused on the individual profile and networks that it encourages you to portray yourself in the way you want others to see you. You want to earn the respect of others and your only way of doing this is in the way you portray yourself.

In online communities, things are different. These are not spaces focused on the profile and connections, rather on a shared and group effort, aim or ambition. In this space the desire to be heard doesn’t lead to ‘exaggeration’ on personal profiles, rather online communities provide a multitude of opportunities for our voices to be heard. Social networks are ‘me’ spaces where you can only earn respect through how you portray yourself. In online communities, an ‘us’ space, you earn respect for your ideas and contributions to that shared goal.

This means that our social nature is aligned with the aim of online communities – unsurprisingly considering these are in fact natural communities that are online.

So what does this mean for those of us who are involved in building and managing communities? Firstly we need to make sure we have thought about the aim or challenge that the community is there to solve – are we trying to create the best hotel review site in the world, provide a way for peers to support each other with health and beauty advice, or let consumers tell help a brand improve its product. What is the aim that we want people to contribute to, and then how do we make sure that people will take part in the discussions. How can we help them to promote their own ideas and thoughts in the way they naturally want to.

This is not easy to do and is why good online communities need careful and dedicated planning and strategy before launch and then good management to build and grow. We’ll be coming back to this throughout January, looking at the ways of promoting community management.

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Some more reading

• Facebook Paradox: real social or unreal social
• *Must Read* report on Social Software (Aug 2008)

Yesterday’s post, Is Facebook an antidepressant?, prompted some discussion online, and amongst the team here at FreshNetworks, about how people behave on social networks. Do people tell the truth in social networks and if not, does that matter?

If you think of your own use of social networks, or spend just a few minutes perusing somebody else’s profile,  the answer to this question will come very quickly. It’s ‘no’. We don’t tell the truth in social networks. This isn’t to say that we lie, or mislead people, it’s just that we are selective about what we say or reveal about ourselves. We may exaggerate some elements of our lives and play down others. We may choose to show some pictures, but not others. Social networks are a ‘me’ space, they become a place where we market ourselves, our own personal brand. It’s not surprising  that in this kind of space we might be selective about what we say, and present a version of ourselves that we want people to see.

We don’t tell the truth in social networks, but this doesn’t mean we lie. There is a whole spectrum of ‘untruths’ from selectively updating your status, through over-emphasising elements you choose (and under-emphasising others) to plain untruths (saying you enjoy reading Magical Realism, when really your favourite book is a trashy biography). We do this because we want to present ourselves in a way that we want others to see us. Online there is a real opportunity to build the personal brand, and so we are all becoming marketers – marketing ourselves.

So does this actually matter? Should we all try to be truthful and accurate in social networks. The truth is that it probably doesn’t. Whilst social networks are being used as networks of individuals, we are all doing the same thing – we know we don’t upload all photos (probably not those from that party, for example) and so will expect others to act in the same way. The problem comes when brands and individuals interact in this space.

Many brands treat social networks as a source of free market research. They look at what people say and use this to inform their understanding of their product, customer-base, competitors or market. This can be useful, but as with all market research it is important to acknowledge and understand the bias in this method. And the bias here is that social network encourage people to be selective with the truth (at best) or to tell untruths. This can make it very difficult to gain real insight from social networks.

What is interesting is that you don’t get the same experience in online communities – these are spaces about ‘us’ rather than ‘me’ and a different social dynamic is at play. This is why online communities (and in particular online research communities) can be more useful to brands. More on this tomorrow…

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Some more reading

• When *not* to social network
• Not all social networking sites are created equally
• Facebook Reaches 150 Million Users Worldwide
• Marketing on the Web: How to Profit From Social Networking
• Is Facebook a digital antidepressant?