FreshNetworks Blog

A number of speakers at the Marketing 2.0 conference (including myself) made analogies (explicitly or implicitly) to games or gaming when talking about their social media strategies. I think that this is a good analogy and very relevant to understanding what we do when we are building and managing online communities at FreshNetworks, and how to motivate people to take part in them.

Most social media strategies, and indeed most online communities that we build, hope to increase a consumer’s engagement with (and exposure to) the brand. This can often mean trying to increase the amount of time spend on site, or increasing the frequency and recency of visit. We see all three of these increase in our online communities (often quite substantially) when compared with other territories that the brand controls online. But to achieve this we need to offer the consumer something compelling, and to some extent enter into a game with them.

This may be in a very traditional sense, and some of the best online support communities that I know of are powered using a similar techniques to those you find in games. Rewarding those who give valuable answers to lots of questions with access to special parts of the site, new challenges to take part in and special avatars so that others can see their position. But in most other online communities this very overt application of gaming techniques would not be as successful. However, there is still much we can learn.

We want to engage people, increase the amount of time they spend with us and the benefits they receive. They want to be entertained, to share their thoughts, to learn and to be heard. To satisfy both sides we can take an influence from games and gaming:

• Provide people with new activities to do – Games are based on levels, when you complete one set of activities another opens up, keeping people involved and engaged. The same should be true in an online community. When somebody completes a task we should be providing them with something else to do. If they have uploaded a photo we should be showing them a forum discussion to tell us more, or a set of photos they might be interested in commenting on. We can show them something they might want to do and a new challenge to take part in.

• Reveal the community slowly – In a game, as people progress through levels the features available to them increase. In an online community, this approach is also successful; we don’t want people to see all that the community has to offer at once. They may be overwhelmed by the variety of things to do and it can be easier to release content and features more slowly to new members. But it is also good for members to feel a sense of discovery, to find new features the longer they spend on the site and to feel to some extent rewarded each time they come back.

• Allow people to play at their own level – Some of the best games are so successful because people can play at their own level. If they are expert gamers or just amateurs, they can enjoy and feel rewarded by spending time with the game. The same is true in an online community. Some people are never going to start a new conversation or propose a new idea. But they may want to vote for a video they like or answer a poll. Allow people to engage with the brand on whatever level is appropriate to them and allow them to benefit from this engagement, at whatever level it is.

• Make it fun – Games are fun and online communities should be too. They should be diverting and provide stimulation and excitement for those participating. When you’re building and managing you online community always ask yourself: how are we making this a fun place to be?

Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.

Some more reading

• Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities (beth.typepad.com)
• Social media and B2B marketing (nevillehobson.com)

After spending yesterday morning at Plug and Play, the Web Mission 09 team spent the afternoon meeting with some Silicon Valley investors. Each firm had a five-minute slot in which to pitch their idea. It certainly felt rather dragon’s-den like, with the key difference being the entrepreneurs on Web Mission 09 tend to be running businesses which are already successful and have clients, products and traction in their market.

The highlight of the pitching came from Simon Campbell of ViaPost. He went for a full-on re-enactment of Steve Ballmer’s famous “I love this company” speech and it certainly got some attention.

That evening we had a night off from formal events. I managed to get tickets to see Gavin DeGraw play the Great American Music Hall. It’s a lovely venue and proved to be a great night out. Oh and if you’re a DeGraw fan, you can hear his new album early on Spotify, the web’s best music service.

This morning was one of the most discussed sessions of the week: a full day at Oracle getting an insider’s view on their Enterprise2.0 developments and plans. Highlights included finding out about Beehive, Oracle’s Collaborative Enterprise Platform, an insight into their Social CRM offering and one-to-one meetings with the Global head of M&A.

Beehive is a central plank in Oracle’s social and collaboration strategy. It provides enterprise customers with team collaboration tools (blogs, discussions, tags and wikis) and tools for synchronous collaboration (conferencing, presence, instant chat and voice chat). They are pitching it against a host of Microsoft tools and claimed that a deployment for a 5,000 person firm would save a company 54% on hardware costs and 70% on software if buying Microsoft.

I had to rush back early to San Fran. I’d left it a little late and decided that rather then wait for a cab I should walk to the train station. Crossing over yet another 5-lane dual carriage-way I noticed a sign to San Fran and decided, for the first time in 15 years, to see what would happen if I tried to hitch a lift back to the city. Within ten seconds a car stopped for me.

By co-incidence it was driven by a software developer who built the Imbee, a Social Network for kids with strong parental supervision capabilities. Even more of a co-incidence, Imbee, like our own community platform, is based on Drupal, the open-source modular framework and content management system. So we spent a happy 35 minutes discussing the 100,000 strong Drupal developer community. He even dropped me off at my door. Thank you.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.

There are many examples of big brands in social media (in fact you can find a whole range across different industries in our online community examples), but at the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris it was great to hear some real case studies from the people behind these strategies and campaigns.

Two presentations that particularly stood out were from Scott Monty at Ford and Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines. Both have a strong history of customer engagement and have been, to some extent, pioneers in their use of social media and online communities. And both of their presentations were refreshing in terms of the information they shared. For me, four core themes came from what they said:

1. It’s about people not firms – social media is about people engaging with people, and firms that want to engage with them all also need a personal touch. You should put faces on the individual people who make up your brand and let people see and engage with them. Of course, from the brand’s perspective it is best to do this is a way that is sustainable even when the individuals leave the firm.
2. Make things public – social media is a about sharing and it provides a real platform for firms to share their knowledge and information. In fact, Scott Monty told us that Ford, as part of its social media strategy, shared with the public anything that used to appear on its intranet that was not commercially sensitive. This seems to be a great approach – social media and online communities are about openness and honesty. Brands who are open and honest will be most successful.
3. Connect with people where they are already – don’t make it difficult for people to find and connect with your brand. Rather provide them a route, a way to connect with you. As Scott Monty said “every obstacle we put in the way closes a distribution channel”. The best examples of social media marketing, and the best online communities also engage people where they are – be that on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or blogs. They engage them and then provide an easy route for them to engagement.
4. Provide a place for people to go to – whilst engaging people where they are is important, you need to provide something for them to do once you have engaged them and the best examples of big brands in social media provide a place for these people to go to. An online community, web site or other activity that you drive people to where they can really engage with you on a site that you provide and where you benefit from the engagement as much as the consumer does.

Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.

Some more reading

• Social Media Marketing: Time Trap or Opportunity Magnet? New Study Reveals the Answers (buildabetterblog.com)
• Big brands on Twitter (wheelontheweb.wordpress.com)
• Innovators in Social Media (businessweek.com)

I’m four days into my visit to the Web Mission 09 conference, and things just keep getting better! Today we went to ‘Plug and Play’ – a business incubator based in Silicon Valley. For those of you that haven’t heard of business incubators, they’re basically offices that host and nurture young start ups. There is nothing like it in the UK, and seeing one in action was a great opportunity for those of us based in Europe. Plug and Play has three locations in California; we visited the main site in Silicon Valley, which hosts up to 50 start ups. I can say without any hesitation that for those starting-up this seems to be the perfect way to fast track your development, raise funds, make connections, and ultimately create a successful business.

Being based in The Valley obviously increases your chances of succeeding, and Plug and Play provides loads of services and support to those who have come here. We were talked through these offerings by Saeed Amini, the larger-than-life President of Plug and Play, who before Plug and Play built up ALPS into a $150M water bottling business. Having found his own success, he founded Plug and Play to help other aspiring entrepreneurs and start-ups track their success. Judging from what I saw, he’s created a great facility that will do just that.

If you’re wondering how to get involved – it’s pretty straight forward. For 3 months rent at the facility, you get:

• Loads of business connections
• Up to 30 meetings in that time
• 2 networking events a week
• Licensing, partnerships or M&A with the corporate partners
• Introductions to VCs
• Advice from entrepreneurs in residence
• Data
• IT consulting

Plug and Play is reaching out to European companies at the moment to provide them with a greater chance of succeeding in the US. Europeans can come over on a work visa for one or two years, or on a business development tour for a few months as long as you’re not getting paid. Alternatively, once you have a company established in the UK for 12 months, you can get an L1 to work here.

Still hesitating? Just think about the community of 220 start-ups that did and increased their chance of success three times over; and don’t’ forget the $700M that has been raised so far. Sixteen of the firms have also been invested in by Saeed himself. On average, 5 start ups are funded a month, there are 60 own investments and over 100 individual angel start ups – so you’d be in good company.

With that bit of inspiration behind me i’m gearing up to head to the Web 2.0 Expo tomorrow where it’ll be social media and more social media. Can’t wait to chat to more people about the FreshNetworks take on the many benefits of online communities. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.

Whether you use the Net Promoter Score or not yourself, you will undoubtedly have come across this ‘single number everybody needs to know’. On one level it is a calculation that takes into account how strongly people would be likely to promote your brand and returns a single score, expressed as a percentage. On another level, it is an entire approach to business and interacting with your customers that leads to the calculation of this score.

The score itself is what most people are interested in – the difference, expressed in a percentage, between those people who are very likely to recommend your brand and those people  and the beauty of it is that it can reflect the different levels of engagement and loyalty that customers feel to different types of brand. A luxury hotel chain, for example, should be expecting a Net Promoter Score of about +70%, an airline shouldn’t expect one higher than +10%, and a cable TV company needs to prepare for a score below -5% (yes, scores can be negative).

At the Marketing 2.0 conference we were lucky to hear from both Richard Owen of Satmetrix (the people behind the NPS) and Conny Kelcher from LEGO (a fervent user of the NPS). Both were able to highlight exactly what the benefit of Promoters is, in hard cash.

Conny’s example looked purely at revenue generated by the individual themselves, and clearly showed that Promoters spend more than Detractors and so it makes good business sense to improve your NPS. Looking at expenditure on LEGO, over the same time period customer spend was as follows:

• Promoters spent 208 Euros
• Fence Sitters spent 165 Euros
• Detractors spent 136 Euros

So, for LEGO, a Promoter will spend 53% more on their product than a Detractor.

Richard, quoting a study of network providers in the US, looked at this in more detail. He considered not just direct spend that the individual makes on the product, but the total contribution they make to the brand – including from recommending others (or indeed otherwise). When looked at like this, the average lifetime value for the network providers was as follows:

• Each Promoter brings an additional $693 in revenue
• Each Detractor is responsible for $1,495 in lost revenue

So the difference between a Promoter and a Detractor was almost $2,200. For Richard this showed that sometimes it can make business sense to buy your Detractors out of their contract with you. Overall it shows that Promoters are a category worth keeping and worth growing.

Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.

Some more reading

• NPS is Growing Up (adaptivepath.com)
• Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction (startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com)