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Three months ago we started a small experiment with one of our online communities at FreshNetworks. The site had been in seeding phase for about 10 weeks and was starting to get some activity and some real traction, there were loyal members and real conversations starting to grow. At this stage we wanted to grow the number of members and also to grow the quality of the contributions to the site. There are a number of ways you can do this, but one of the real benefits of online communities is the ability to drive natural, organic, search. We wanted to test this and to start to build an ROI model for brands.

We decided to put paid and organic search head-to-head. To devote a modest sum to Google AdWords and also to monitor the organic search on the site. We didn’t spend any more time than usual optimising the content on the site, with the community manager working to organise content and correct spelling but not to make sure that user-generated content was keyword-rich. We wanted to do a real test – putting real organic search against paid search.The experiment is to run for six months and we are now halfway through this.

My hypothesis was that organic search would take time to grow and that at the three-month stage we would still be seeing significantly better results for paid search – higher traffic, more conversions to signing up, greater loyalty and deeper, longer visits. Then during the second three months of the experiment I’d expect organic search to really take the lead and over the six months this to be the clear winner.

Things never work out quite like you expect them to. And in this case they are actually much more interesting.

We’re going to be working on this experiment for another three months so we don’t want to reveal too many details, but initial results are, in part, as expected, but in other areas really not:

• More visits to the online community come from paid search than from organic search (although if we take just the last month then this is reversed). In total about 1.5 times as many visits came from paid search as from organic search in the last three months
• But, those coming from organic search are more likely to sign-up to become members of the community. The difference is marginal at the moment, but there is a clear trend to higher conversion rates for organic search visits
• Those coming from organic search are spending much more time on the site and visiting many more pages per visit. In fact time on site is almost three times as long for organic search as paid search, and they visit almost twice as many pages per visit
• Finally, those users that first came to the site by organic search are more likely to become active Members of the online community.

So the results are not quite what I expected, but a clear trend is developing. Whilst paid search delivers more search traffic (although this balance is changing) the quality of organic search is significantly better. Traffic to the site is important, but in an online community people signing-up, spending time on the community and actively contributing is much more interesting. For this, organic search seems to be significantly better.

Stay tuned for the final results of the experiment in three months time when we should be able to show the real power of organic search. These initial results are exciting.

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Some more reading

• Three fremium strategies (vator.tv)
• What Sweet Search has to say about the future of SEO (tynansanger.com)
• PPC Myths (seodoz.com)

I have to admit that I’m not a regular reader of Psychologies magazine, thankfully my colleague Louisa saw this month’s copy and pointed me in the direction of an article on online update junkies.

There’s lots of discussion of Twitter and social media at the moment and people are now spending more time on social media sites than email. These sites don’t just offer us a way of doing old things in new ways, they also let us do completely new things. This includes updating people of what you’re doing and thinking – status updates. The Psychologies article asks:

Does it seem strange that we would want to share every last mundane dot and excruciating comma? ‘Only up to a point’, says internet psychologist Graham Jones. ‘Away from the internet, we do it all the time without noticing much; we drop phrases like “sorry I’m a bit late but I had to feed the cat” into our conversation – it helps other people build up a picture of who we are’.

I agree that the benefit of status updates (and micro-blogging) is that it provides a service that just wasn’t possible before. In a fairly non-intrusive manner, you can now build a more rounded picture of the people you know or the people with whom you share similar interests. This is a really exciting development as it offers something that just couldn’t be done before – letting  people, who want to, know what’s happening in your life. There is no compulsion to read and no compulsion to reveal things about yourself, but you can if you want.

What is most interesting is to observe how this new facility changes our own behaviour. For those people that are providing us with updates on our life, Psychologies highlights what it is calling ‘status update anxiety’:

For the most part, sites such as Twitter and Facebook are meant purely for entertainment and a mild diversion. However, in the most extreme of cases, the endless tabulating of facts, feelings, roads not taken, and salads not eaten is getting in the way of, well, actually living – so much so that some of us are developing a new syndrome, Status Update Anxiety.

Whilst this may be true for some people, I suspect the ability to life stream (as this is called) is a great way for people to communicate. As with the reason people write reviews, people don’t necessarily update their statuses to inform other people but as an outlet for themselves. They want to write rather than be read, they want to document their lives for the process of doing it rather than because others want to read it.

Status update anxiety? Maybe some people do have it. But I think status updates offer a new service to people, the ability to express themselves and an outlet for their thoughts and behaviours. That is probably reason enough for them to do it, and probably is of real value to them.

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Some more reading

• The Multi – Conversational Web (socialmediatoday.com)
• Do You Make These Social Media Mistakes? (cathystucker.com)
• The Disappearance of “Social Media” (brandimpact.wordpress.com)
• Jacob Morgan: Social Media Translated into the Real World (mpdailyfix.com)
• What I Know About Twitter (technologizer.com)

For this week’s instalment in our series of online community examples we turn to the financial services industry.

Online communities in the financial services industry

There’s no escaping the fact that the financial services industry has been hit hard by the current economic climate. But like any industry at the moment, now is a great time to innovate in the way financial services companies communicate with and engage their customers. There are some really informed examples of social media by financial services brands and below are three great case studies of online communities in the industry from around the world.

Royal Bank of Canada Next Great Innovator

Since 2007, the Royal Bank of Canada has been running the Next Great Innovator Challenge, an online competition for university and college students across Canada to suggest an innovation for the financial services industry. The competition runs on an online community site that invites those taking part to submit their ideas, and to comment on and vote for those that others have submitted. This turns the competition into an example of real consumer co-creation. Allowing consumers to work together with each other to suggest and refine ideas that will change the financial services industry in Canada.

The online community also performs a number of other functions. It is a way for the Royal Bank of Canada to share its ideas and information about innovation, business change and the financial services industry. They are using the challenge as a way to reach those often turned-off by discussions about financial services (university and college students) and then engages them through the online community. This site is a great way of getting new ideas into the business, engaging an often difficult-to-inspire audience and also to build relationships with people who will potentially be valuable customers to the bank in the future.

HSBC Business Network

The HSBC Business Network is an online community for both customers and non-customers, allowing businesses and entrepreneurs to share information with and gain information from their peers. It is a good example of brands using online communities to provide a service that compliments and enhances their existing product portfolio. Here they are providing business advice and networking opportunities, not something that HSBC has previously offered on this scale, but something that it is very possible for them to do using online communities.

The site has gathered over 1,000 members since the start of 2008, and like any peer-to-peer advice and support community it’s value will really depend on the growth of its member base and then on these members being active in the community itself. The forum areas are currently popular and active and reflect both ongoing business and entrepreneurial concerns (such as how to manage staff) and topical talking points (cash collection in the credit crunch). It would be great to see these grow with time and also to see how HSBC use the resource they have created.

Online communities in the financial services industry offer a great opportunity for peer advice and support to be combined with expert commentary from the organisation itself. Leveraging this expertise and mixing it with user discussions and comments can be a great way for the organisation to grow and build the size and value of the community, position itself as an expert in the area, and to learn from (and with) its consumers)

Wesabe

Wesabe is a money-management site and online community for people who want to share advice about personal finance decisions. It combines the kind of money-management tools you get in Quicken or Microsoft Money but adds a social layer on top of this.

Users can add tags to their frequent purchases and become a ‘fan’, ‘user’ or ‘captive’ of the service or product. They can find other users in a similar situation and share advice and information with them to help them improve their financial decision-making. The social media element of the site also allows peer-to-peer financial advice, tips and information. And this is shown as relevant based on each users own situation and information they have entered into their profile.

Wesabe is a great site and a great example of adding a social layer to an existing service. Money management tools are useful from an organisational perspective. By adding the social layer and letting people in similar circumstances find, interact and share advice with each other the site becomes a lot more useful. It stops being just an organisational tool and starts being a real service that they are gaining from.

As with the HSBC example, this online community shows how using peer advice and support can be successful for organisations in the financial services industry. Online communities offer a way for people in similar situations to find each other and  to support each other. Whilst you might not know somebody personally in the same situation as you, an online community can help you to find them and then for you t o help and support each other.

See all our Online Community Examples

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Again this week, Twitter has been high on the media agenda. As is always the case during a time of innovation, brands are experimenting with lots of different ways of using Twitter. Some successfully and some less so. Time will tell which are the most appropriate and which have the highest return on investment, but it is worth all brands learning the basics of Twitter usage for marketing purposes and in particular for PR.

That’s why Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks is Corinne Weisgerber‘s presentation on Twitter for PR. Not only is the  presentation a clear and comprehensive introduction to Twitter, it also includes case studies of how things can go wrong and right for brands using Twitter (with the cases of Comcast and JetBlue).

Weisgerber details eight ways in which Twitter should be used by brands and begins to detail how they should act for each one:

1. Tracking
2. Monitoring
3. Live-reporting
4. Journalism
5. Activism
6. Public Relations
7. Political Communications
8. Crisis Communications

We wrote earlier this week about how brands should use social media marketing instead of email. And any brand looking to innovate with Twitter should consider each of these eight areas in its social media strategy. Weisgerber’s presentation is a great introduction to what you should consider (and it contains video so is best viewed with the sound on).

Twitter for PR (Keynote and Youtube version)

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Some more reading

• Twitter spam, the under loved and Qwitters (kevin.lexblog.com)
• Twitter PR from the Financial Times (chrisabraham.com)
• How and Why to Launch a Business Presence on Twitter – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership (tsurch.com)
• Tesco tunes in to the art of Twitter (telegraph.co.uk)
• Twitter as a brand-builder: Three examples (news.cnet.com)
• You are a brand on Twitter. Get on the list! (techburgh.com)

I was the expert blogger in this week’s edition of Management Today on innovation in business. Having written about the Nielsen Global Faces and Networked Places report earlier this week, I decided to build on this post about how social networks and online communities are more popular than email.

The report from Nielsen clearly highlights the growth in consumer use of social media – it is now visited more regularly than email with one out of eleven minutes worldwide (one in every six minutes in the UK) spent on these sites. This is for structural and behavioural reasons – people using different sites for different purposes, and people using social networks and online communities to find and connect with people rather than just sending mail – but what can business learn from this change in consumer behaviour. Well, probably a lot. As I write in the Management Today article:

When I speak at marketing conferences, I like to ask the audience whether they spend more on email marketing or on social media. The answer is almost always email, and this is a shame. Not only are social networks and online communities increasingly part of everyday life, they can also be a better way of engaging customers. Email is very much in the ‘push’ marketing category, while online communities and social networks engage people. Most importantly, they encourage peer-to-peer marketing, which we know people trust more than messages from any brand.

In the current economic climate, businesses should innovate to stay ahead of their competition. This is a great time for trying new things and an even better time for adapting and changing the way we behave to better meet what our customers want and what our customers do. They are using social media more than email and doing thanks to both changes in technology and changes in their own behaviour. We should adapt our own approach to marketing to and engaging with customers to capitalise on this change

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Some more reading

• Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses (freshnetworks.com)
• Social Networking Surpasses Email Popularity (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Social Networking and Blogs Surpass Email in Popularity (searchenginewatch.com)
• Social Networking – No Longer Just For The Kids (collaboratemarketing.com)
• The global reach of member communities (social media) (thisisherd.com)