FreshNetworks Blog

Agent Provocateur engages women consumers across multiple platform

Appropriately for the day before Valentine’s Day, this week saw lingerie brand, Agent Provocateur, launch a social media campaign to promote its HelloAgentProvocateur blog. As you might expect from a lingerie brand, the blog includes a range of posts from the relatively tame advice on relationships and dating, to the more provocative (appropriately enough). One recent post, for example, included a post featuring a chart of exciting and mood-killing things to say during sex.

Alongside the blog post, they’ve launched a Facebook page and also a Twitter stream allowing micro blogging from MsProvocateur. The idea, according to Scott Goodson, CEO of StrawberryFrog, the agency working on the project,

…is the first time a luxury fashion brand has launched a provocative social media campaign tying together their various data-linked platforms, like a multi-entry daily blog, Twitter feed and Facebook

With a launch tied into a new ad campaign (itself designed to coincide with Valentine’s Day), this looks like a real attempt for a co-ordinated marketing approach. Using traditional and social media and then tying together online activities with a central micro blog.

So what can we learn from this?

We wrote earlier this week about the continued growth of social networks in 2008, and in particular the tremendous growth for both Facebook and Twitter. What Agent Provocateur appear to be doing is to use the different social network tools and online community platforms to engage people in different ways.

• The blog is being used for regular posts that discuss issues of relationships, dating, and Agent Provocateur’s products in some depth. They run news and features alongside it and this really capitalises on the role that a blog can play as a content-rich information source.
• Facebook is being used to showcase content and ideas from the blog and the campaign, and to gather friends. It capitalises upon the networking aspect of Facebook by encouraging people to connect with it. This is much softer than some of the activities that take place on the blog and reflects the difficulty that brands have marketing directly in Facebook (and other social networks).
• The use of Twitter allows Agent Provocateur to bring together all of this activity and to broadcast what they are doing and saying on a regular basis. They can capture contacts in a way similar to in Facebook, but Twitter offers something really different. It’s not just a medium for releasing content (as is the case with the blog) nor on for accumulating friends and showcasing the best of what’s going on (as is the case with Facebook). Twitter allows them to actually engage.

It is rewarding to see that even with only 351 followers on Twitter, MsProvocateur is starting to engage and respond to people directly. When one follower tweated about the gifts their boyfriend had bought them, MsProvocateur responded with some thoughts on gifts that are good to buy in return.

The real value of Twitter is both in acting as a central portal to bring together and point to all social media activity, and also a true engagement tool. In fact, when brands use Twitter, it really is a case of the more you put in the more you will get out. It is worth finding people who are talking about your brand or the topics and subjects you discuss and following them. Do respond to people, give advice and  suggestions. And make this not just an overt marketing message. Really engage people and you will then reap the benefits of this activity in sales.

It’s not the use of Twitter that we like of Agent Provocateur’s campaign (although it is good), nor the topical nature of the subject. Rather it is that they are using a range of social media tools to engage people in different ways. A sensible approach.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Facebook Determined To Make Twice As Much On Gifts This Valentine’s Day (profy.com)
• How to Twitter your way to marketing success (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• The Social Media Starter Kit: Facebook (altitudebranding.com)
• Whatcha Doing? Twitter, Other Status Tools on Rise (appscout.com)
• Social network advertising…my ambivalence is showing (myventurepad.com)

Data released today from Compete.com supports what will not be a surprise to most. Facebook is the most visited social network, with nearly 1.2 billion visits in January 2009. This also represents significant growth, with visits to Facebook up 36% on December, and 256% over the previous twelve months. MySpace slipped into second place at the end of 2008 and since September of that year has been seeing visits levelling at about 810 thousand a month.

But the real news may be neither of  these sites. More dramatic is the catapulting of Twitter from 22nd most visited social network at the start of 2008, to third most visited in January. A growth of 1,227% in 12 months.

Facebook’s continued growth is certainly impressive, and their success in 2008 is probably due, at least in part, to their continued innovation during the year. They made some significant changes to the user-interface and continue to roll-out significant changes on a fairly regular basis (such as the recent introduction of the ‘I like this‘ feature). Innovation is important. As more users join the social network their needs will change and the way they want to use the site will change. With a 256% increase in visits over the last 12 months, there is no doubt that the use people want from Facebook is changing and constant innovation helps them to react and respond to this.

Twitter’s growth is an area of particular interest and comment at the moment. We posted a few weeks ago on why we think that 2009 will be the year for Twitter and that it will join the mainstream this year. It is clear that many of the people who have been using Twitter for some time now are getting great benefit from it. Their networks are growing and the uses they are making of it are growing with it. But if you compare visits to Twitter with visits to the two more popular social networks (MySpace and Facebook), it is clear that it still has a long way to grow.

With a range of very different people now starting to explore and use Twitter, from traditional mass media outlets to popular celebrities, we expect the rapid growth of the last twelve months to continue in the next twelve. If they are to be successful they need to innovate in the way that Facebook has done. Move beyond their traditional audience and explore new features, interfaces and ways of working. With this rapid scale of growth, the average Twitter user is very different now to the average user twelve months ago. In the next twelve months, the average user will change again.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Is that ’25 Things’ meme driving Facebook growth? (news.cnet.com)
• Facebook’s redesign continues to be a hit with U.S. users (venturebeat.com)
• Whee! New numbers on social network usage (news.cnet.com)
• SocComm 1 – Jeff Pulver, David Kirkpatrick and Fred Wilson discuss social networking and communications (webmetricsguru.com)
• Twitter To Begin Charging Brands For Commercial Use (socialmediatoday.com)

Some online communities are specifically built and managed as insight tools: online research communities. They are designed to help support the consumer or market research needs of the organisation behind the community. They may be public or private, but they are designed to deliver against specific research objectives and involve specific research exercises alongside the organic discussions and debates in the community.

Not all communities are online research communities, but all communities can be a useful source of insight. Just watching the conversations can be invaluable and bring real insight to any organisation, but there are ways that any community can get real insight value from the insight of your members. Over the last few weeks we’ve described eight ways of getting insight from online communities.

1. Profiling data:gathering the right information and then analysing the profiles of  your community members can bring significant understanding of the people who join your community.
2. Focused discussions: focusing the discussions in your online community make it easier for people to join the debate and also let you concentrate on those issues that are of most interest to you and likely to bring greatest insights.
3. Learn their language: the language community members use is often overlooked, but provides a real insight into their lives and their perceptions on a product, market or issue.
4. Rating and voting: not everybody in an online community wants to begin or even add to discussions, but we can start to understand what they think and get insight from them by offering and than analysing their use of different ways of communicating, such as rating an idea or voting for a piece of content.
5. Photo uploads: photos offer a real insight into what people think and also allows us to gather opinions people who are not as comfortable expressing themselves in words. What people choose to upload photos of, and the reactions to them bring real insights into the community.
6. Photo activities:by targeting photo content into specific activities, we are able to maximise the benefit we get from each upload. Get community members to upload photos on a specific theme or in response to a specific question. Isolate the most interesting photos by using rating, ranking and comments to harness the opinions of community members.
7. Discussion events:as your community matures, patterns emerge in use. One of these will be that people come to the community at similar times each evening. You can take advantage of this by offering discussion events where people discuss a different issue at a certain time each week.
8. Quick polls:any community can use some simple insight tools, and quick polls are one of these. They are a great way to get instant and top-level quantitative insight from your community, but you must make sure you word the question (and potential answers) carefully if you are going ot use them for real insight.

Of course, a greater depth of insight can be gained from a community that is designed specifically to get insight from your customers and others, and that ties straight into your internal planning, research and strategic fields. For this you need an online research community.

Read our series on Insight from Online Communities

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Networking site cashes in on friends (Telegraph) (techmeme.com)
• How to build an online research community: a podcast (freshnetworks.com)

There are many issues of identity online. For some the internet offers people the opportunity for people to represent themselves in a way that suits them. They can make themselves sound much more exciting than they really are in social networks if they so choose, talking about a band they just love and not showing certain photos that might be embarrassing from the weekend.

In online communities, it is less easy to hide behind an identity. Social networks are about ‘me’ and as such it is relatively easy to create the identity that you want to portray, showing photos, having conversations and listing things in your profile that support this. Online communities are very different, they are about ‘us’ – a shared experience, aim, theme or topic. It is not your profile that counts, but your ideas, thoughts and contributions. These are less easy to hide behind an identity that may not be completely true.

This is why the overriding principle for behaviour in online communities is to be open, honest and truthful. In doing so, we often find that people find their own voice and online identity. As an online community develops and matures, we see the members grow and develop with it, finding the way they like to act and represent themselves online.

That’s why I really enjoyed this video from Beth Dunn (via Steve Bridger) talking about her own experiences of finding her online identity. It reflects the process I think many online community members go through and is a useful insight into the development of online communities. As such it’s required reading this week at FreshNetworks.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Web Technology: Impact on Social Media and Community (socialmediatoday.com)
• Making the Most Out of Social Networking Websites (nmpnetwork.com)
• Using Social Networking Online (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• Techniques For Building Your Tribe On Twitter The Right Way (steffanantonas.com)

For the final in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we are looking at using what is very much an insight tool but that can be included in any online community: quick polls. Easy to respond to and simple on the community, getting online polls right is actually more difficult than you might think. If you want to get real insight from them, you need to know what questions to ask, and what answers to offer.

Quick polls offer a way to get high-level feedback from your community members on simple quantitative questions. You can understand what people think and can often get feedback very quickly.

There are four steps to make quick polls successful and a useful source of insight:

1. Define what you want to find out – you have only a quick poll and a limited number of words to explain what you are asking. Define a question that is actually useful to you and that is specific enough so that people understand  what they are being asked.
2. Choose your words carefully – how you ask the question is very important. You need to be clear, specific and direct. Make sure you are asking only one question otherwise it will be difficult to analyse the results.
3. Offer specific answers – in a quick poll you probably list a set of answers from which people will choose. Make sure the answers you offer are discrete and different from each other and that you offer all the combinations people will want to choose from.
4. Use the poll to spark a forum discussion – the poll itself can only tell you what people think. To find out why they think this, you should start a related forum discussion where people can discuss the poll, their answer and the issues it raises.

Quick polls can be a great opportunity to get relatively quick feedback from the community members and real insight into a question that is important to you. It’s important to make sure you make the most of this opportunity and produce data that gives you real insight.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Want to improve your community in 2009? Ask your members. (freshnetworks.com)
• A Presentation About Community, By The Community (neilperkin.typepad.com)