FreshNetworks Blog

So far in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we’ve looked at the kind of depth of insight your can get from profile information, the discussions on the site and the language people use, ratings and voting and from photos and photo-based activities. For the penultimate post in the series we want to look at a different type of activity that you can run in your online community – discussion events.

The nature of online communities typically lends them to asynchronous discussions, with forums often the centre of the community and the most vibrant and popular parts. In fact, this is one of the real benefits of online communities – they foster debates, discussions and support between people who are disparate temporally and geographically. However, sometimes there can be real benefit from getting members of your online community onto the site at the same time to take part in a discussion event.

As an online community matures, you will find that people start to adopt patterns of use. Some people will always talk about and comment on the same subjects, some people will talk in conversations with their friends, and many members will show clear patterns of use. They will go to the community at the same time during the week and will do similar things when they are there. This pattern of behaviour is one that should be capitalised upon from an insight perspective. If you have a group of your members coming onto the site at the same time every week, then this is a great opportunity to engage them in a new way. Rather than having them discussing things asynchronously, use your existing features to run a discussion event.

As with most things online community, it’s best to start small. Watch when people are most likely to be on your site and then advertise a discussion event to match one of these times – a Tuesday evening chat session, for example. Choose a subject that’s topical and related to the theme of the community and invite people to come onto a forum thread and discuss it for half an hour. The first time you might get a handful of people, but persist. Run them regularly and more and more people will come. Before long you’ll find that this is used as a real catalyst for discussions for the rest of the week. You can get a depth of insight from a range of your community members on a topic that you choose at a time that you choose it. You can then help to direct the community on an ongoing basis by regular, targeted weekly chat sessions.

If you want to really maximise the benefit you get from these sessions you should report back to the rest of the community what went on, what was said and what you think of it. You’ll gain a depth of insight and reinforce a sense of community that can really help to continue to grow and develop a community, even when it’s reached maturity

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Some more reading

• A Presentation About Community, By The Community (and me) (almostalwaysthinking.com)
• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community (freshnetworks.com)

Yesterday we posted about statistics from MarketingSherpa showing that a lack of knowledge hampers social media marketing, with 46% of firms who had not adopted social media marketing citing a lack on internal understanding as their main hindrance. Another set of statistics from MarketingSherpa paints a more positive outlook for social media agencies.

In September 2008, just as we were recognising the full potential of the economic downturn in which we now find ourselves, they surveyed almost 400 firms asking them about their marketing spend for 2009. Which lines would increase and which lines would decrease.

A total of 48% of the firms interviewed predicted that their spending on social media would increase in 2009, with just 20% predicting a decrease. This compares with print advertising, where just 4% predicted an increase and 60% a decrease, and Radio / TV ads which saw a dramatic 83% of companies predicting a decrease in expenditure in 2009.

This data supports what many others are seeing: social media agencies and social media marketing could boom during the economic downturn. Part of this is due to the positive growth trajectory that the social media business was on before the economic downturn. The industry was growing anyway, and so even in an economic downturn we would expect some level of growth to continue. But the industry is feeling more buoyant and optimistic than that.

Today we at FreshNetworks are reporting a strong 2008 with good performance, client wins and the release of version 2.6 of our online community platform. For us, the social media and online communities markets in Europe feel very positive at the moment. Firms are recognising the need for closer engagement with the customers, want to use online research communities for a greater depth of insight and want to innovate and stay ahead of their competitors.

We think that 2009 is going to be an exciting year for the social media marketing industry, and for online communities in particular. We expect to at least double in size by the year end and will be releasing version 3.0 of our platform during the year. Many others that we know and speak to in the industry are also feeling confident and whilst some industries are suffering from the current economic conditions, it’s important to remember that not all will.

So the economic downturn is not bad news for the social media marketing industry. In fact for some it could be a real catalyst for growth in demand with these services being more in demand, and traditional marketing and media contracting. Should be exciting times ahead.

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• Some reasons for optimism (oxyfish.com)
• Reconsidering the advertising industry (freshnetworks.com)
• There’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a Savvy Marketer (socialmediatoday.com)
• The TV Watch: For Hard Times, Softer Sells (nytimes.com)
• UK recession: Credit crisis will bring television boom (telegraph.co.uk)
• File this lesson away for the next recession (RexBlog.com)
• What does the recession mean for the MR industry?

A new report out this week suggests that the biggest hindrance in the adoption of social media is a lack of knowledge. The statistics, from MarketingSherpa, look at the barriers that organisations cite as having stopped them from adopting social media marketing techniques in their firm.

Of the 1,886 firms interviewed who had not embraced social media as a marketing tool, 46% cited a lack of knowledgeable staff as being a significant reason for this. The second most popular response was an inability to measure ROI, with 43% of firms claiming that this was preventing them from adopting social media marketing.

That these two reasons are cited by firms are not a surprise to us at FreshNetworks. We know that clients sometimes need support getting up to speed with the latest changes and developments in social media and how it can help marketing. This isn’t surprising. Things are changing quickly in social media, as we’ve seen in the UK over the last two weeks where a number of popular TV and radio figures have started using Twitter as a part of their shows, thus propelling it into the mainstream. It can be difficult for firms who are busy focusing on their own plans, products and direction to step back and take in the changes as they are happening. Even more so in the current economic climate.

ROI is also a serious issue for marketers, again even more so now when they need to maximise the impact of every piece of spending. There is a lot of discussion of measurement in social media. At one end of the spectrum are people who think that measuring web traffic and statistics gives you a real insight into what people are doing in social media. At the other end are those who think that a firm should be more business-focused, establish a set of objectives for their use of social media and then measure against these. We tend to think that a mix of the two is the best solution. No business should embark on a social media marketing plan without some very clear business objectives in mind. One of our clients wants to increase repeat purchase, for example; another wants to create a target number of new ideas for their product team. Alongside these business objectives are a set of community measures and metrics that make sure we’re on track to achieve what we want.

So, it’s not a surprise that lack of knowledge and lack of clarity of ROI are the two biggest stumbling blocks for firms embarking on social media marketing. But they really shouldn’t be.

And if you’re one of these firms that’s thinking about adopting social media marketing, we’re here to help. We’ve got a wealth of articles, reading, case studies and posts on both topics so take a look and see if we can help.

• Worried you don’t know enough about social media? Check out our articles on social media and online communities. You might also like our Social Media Beginners series and our regular Social Media Diary.
• Not sure about ROI? Our Social Media Diary will probably help too. As might our posts on measurement and ROI.

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Some more reading

• What Now? Build Your Brand. (altitudebranding.com)
• Stop Talking, Start Doing (mediabullseye.com)
• 4 of 10 Social Media Commandments: Quality to Preference (kylelacy.com)
• Some reasons for optimism (oxyfish.com)
• Business media: trends for 2009 (businessmedia.co.uk)

Enterprise rent-a-car have a legendary reputation for customer service. What I didn’t realise is just how large a role market research played in helping them grow and maintain that reputation.

Last year I attended an excellent conference – Wavelength 100.  I guess it’s a UK version of TED, their stated aim being to connect “visionary companies making a difference in the world through business”.

The delegates and speakers were a fascinating mix. In my first session I struck up a conversation with Peder Kolind who I happened to be next to. It turned out that having set up one of the world’s largest security firms he sold up to kick off six philanthropic projects in Nicaragua. Later, at lunch, I found myself sitting between Martin Narey who used to run the prison service and is now CEO of Barnados and Mark Addlestone who runs Beaverbrooks the jeweller – a family business that has been in the top 10 of the Times and FT Best Companies to Work for lists for four years in a row.

It was one of those days where you couldn’t help but feel in awe of your surroundings and rather small by comparison.

Anyway, the conference was excellent. I didn’t get to see all the sessions so I have been catching up on those I missed buy listening to their podcasts – which you can find on iTunes under “Wavelength 100 Listen Again“. Last night I had the pleasure of listening to Donna Miller, HR Director Europe at Enterprise-Rent-a-Car.

It’s a fascinating story.  Enterprise was founded in 1957 by Jack Taylor. Given that one of my other businesses is the recruitment consultancy, FreshMinds Talent, I knew about their policy of hiring graduates and investing deeply in their development. What I did not know about was how they had developed their customer satisfaction research over time.

Donna talks about how the firm came to realise the old truism: what is measured is done. She explains the evolution of a simple set of research questions around customer satisfaction and the importance attributed to the results of these surveys. At Enterprise, you can’t get a promotion unless your customers rate your service as excellent. That rule works all the way to the top of this $9Bn company. So even if you’re running a huge team across many sites and producing great profits, you’re promotion is still bound by your customer satisfaction scores.

Well worth a listen. And if you go to iTunes to get the Enterprise podcast, I also recommend:

- MyC4 – a superb social enterprise where anyone can loan money to African SMEs to help them invest and grow. You can start with just £5. It’s also an example of online community building for charities

- Southwest Airlines – a firm renowned for their outstanding people management. it has a very strong internal sense of community

- Middelfart Sparekasse – Hans shares a few fascinating stories about how this Danish Building Society has developed a strong community feeling and incredibly loyal workforce

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Some more reading

• Customer Service Is Public Relations (davefleet.com)
• Voice of the Customer: Service Based Differentiation Matters (seomashup.blogspot.com)

Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr

An article in today’s Daily Telegraph in London (Networking site cashes in on friends) reports that Facebook has plans to monetise in a way that it has been unable to do to date. It’s not advertising or charging for premium services. Rather Facebook is going to get it’s money from a rather more prosaic source: the market research industry.

The social network is trialling features that would allow firms to survey its 150 million members to find out their thoughts on their product or market, get insight into their lives or test new concepts with them. In fact they could test just about anything they wanted. And given the fact that Facebook collects vast volumes of profiling information, they would allow this research to be targeted based on location, gender, age, and just about anything.

The company has been demonstrating the benefits of its new polling feature (called Egnagement Ads) over the last week to some of the most influential business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It asked a range of questions to Facebook members and were able to feed responses back to those at the Forum pretty much in real time. Engagement Ads are also being trialled at the moment by two firms: CareerBuilder, a global graduate recruitment firm, and AT&T.

As Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s global markets director, said to the Telegraph:

I had tonnes of people saying ‘this could be so incredible for our business’. It takes a very long time to do a focus group, and businesses often don’t have the luxury of time. I think they liked the instant responses.

We’ve written before on this blog about why Facebook really can’t be your online research community. Facebook, and indeed other social networks, isn’t suited to getting the depth of qualitative information that you can get from an online research community. As we wrote at the time:

It’s only in a research community that you can really make sure you get the most out of the discussions and debates [...] do you have right of response and an ability to enter into an equal discussion with other members [...] can you build and analyse the profiling data you get from the members and the vast backlog of their contributions and opinions [and] do you have a set of members who are their to engage and interact directly with the brand and there to support you

Perhaps what Engagement Ads more closely represents is a large online research panel. With firms able to buy questions and target a particular set of respondents based on their screening criteria. Even here, there are some concerns about Facebook. Panel providers spend a lot of time screening participants. They hold the same data on every participant and are therefore able to screen respondents fairly and comprehensively. The problem with Facebook is that it just does not collect data in the same way. As a member, I can opt what data I give them. I don’t have to tell them my age, my location or even my gender. So if somebody wanted to poll men aged 25-34 in London, England, Facebook might not approach me, even though I fulfill all those criteria. Respondents are therefore biased towards those who are willing to reveal this profiling data, rather than being a fair and random sample.

But of course, Facebook has a significant advantage. Size. With 150 million members, spread across the globe, it doesn’t matter if a proportion (even a large proportion) havent’ filled in their profiling information and so are excluded from the sample. There will be more than enough respondents available to get the responses they need. And to get them quickly.

So if Facebook is to use Engagement Ads as a market research tool then it won’t be tuning into an online research community. It won’t even compete fully with online panel providers. But it will offer something new to the market – a vast, rapid-response and (potentially) relatively cheap way of testing opinion and getting a flavour of what people think. For more depth of insight, however, firms are probably going to have to look to other sources.

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Some more reading

• Facebook’s Monetization Plan? Polls. And Lots Of Them (mashable.com)
• Facebook offers up users as marketing tool (guardian.co.uk)
• Facebook begins testing ad-driven polls (venturebeat.com)
• Facebook Polls Bring Reality To Davos Elite (ajax-blog.com)
• Mark Zuckerberg, WEF, and the Sentiment Engine (allfacebook.com)
• Not in Davos? Get Your Opinion Heard, Via Facebook (mashable.com)
• Facebook (NOT) Rolling Out New Product Research Service (Updated) (allfacebook.com)
• Facebook is NO ‘Market Research tool’ ! Telegraph misinterprets FB (techpluto.com)
• Newsflash: Facebook Not “Cashing In On Friends” (ajax-blog.com)