FreshNetworks Blog

I’m at the Communities 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. It’s such a beautiful and diverse city and sadly not enough time to explore (sigh).

One of the hot topics raised at the ROI symposium was the thorny issue of getting internal buy in for your online community from across departments and management levels. At FreshNetworks a lot of the early work with our clients is around supporting the project sponsor to achieve this. It’s often the hardest part of getting an online community started and even when you are rolling, how do you keep the visibility of it high to ensure continued investment?

I’ve been struck by the number of passionate mavericks I’ve met who ‘just knew’ their company should be starting a dialogue with customers (or employees) and could see the benefits a mile away even if they couldn’t quantify them. Euan Semple started the BBC intranet on a box under his desk and the seasoned community practitioner Dawn Lacallade (previously Lead Stormchaser at Dell and now at solarwinds) tirelessly waded through the politics at Dell to extol the benefits of the early Dell communities. Many social media projects start as skunkworks projects and sometimes this is the only way to gather the evidence that the demand and the benefits are there. I’m all in favour of piloting, learning and evolving but there can be some pitfalls:

• you may end up with multiple communities targeting the same people, creating real confusion for your customers
• as social media people leave the company, community ghost towns will appear as no-one knew about all the cul-de-sacs of conversations existed and there’s no-one to carry on the conversation
• social media enthusiasts may be good at Twitter but they may not understand how to manage risk. Online communities can impact all areas of the business and there is nothing worse for a customer who has made the effort to talk to you than getting no response back from the brand.

So here are some tips from Dawn about how she used her powers of persuasion at Dell (at solarwinds everything they do starts with ‘how do we involve customers in this’ so I gather life is less complicated for her now!). I’ve added to the list from some of our experiences at FreshNetworks too.

1. Amongst the other skills you need as a community manager, you need to develop your sales skills! Equip yourself with loads of great case studies to convince stakeholder of the value to the business. They are unlikely to respond to words like blog, wiki – only to phrases like customer retention and cost reduction!
2. Identify all the key stakeholders in the business (i.e. those that give you money, those that can vote on what you are about to do and those that are likely to give you grief!)
3. Meet/call/survey these people to understand the priorities of the business and each department. At FreshNetworks we try to encourage setting up a cross-functional team to attend at least a half day workshop, including directors. It’s amazing how many epiphany moments happen when people are sharing ideas with each other and often the biggest cynics walk away as converts and later evangelize the project. Play back to the group what phase 1 is going to cover and what it’s not to set expectations.
4. Prioritise the objectives and work out the business KPIs for the community. Use the language of your stakeholders. If the KPIs don’t contribute to departmental goals you are unlikely to get support for the project. KPIs include things like ‘reduce acquisition costs’ not ‘number of top contributors’. The latter is an essential metric for managing a community but unlikely to mean much to a management team under pressure to deliver their quarterly targets! And finally remember – value is fluid. I met Tina Card this week, another driven community manager from Scottrade who told me their community is producing benefits that hadn’t even envisaged at the outset.
5. Test the business readiness. Is the company committed to investing in the medium term to develop the community to maturity and value? Have you thought through the internal process changes that might be required to respond to say an ideas community?
6. Launch a beta then work hard to play back the results to your stakeholders. And never stop doing this, get in front of Execs on a regular basis. There are a lot of repetitive tasks involved in managing a community and marketing people particularly are not used to this as they live in a campaign-based world.

We’d love to hear about your experiences so we can continue to add to the list!

Some more reading

• Three Things About Social Media Every Business Should Know (mediabullseye.com)
• FASTforward’09 Interview: Euan Semple, independent advisor on social computing (fastforwardblog.com)
• Build your own community or go where people are? Do both (freshnetworks.com)

Image by manfrys via Flickr

People are often comparing Twitter with Facebook. They’re wrong to do this. Facebook is about connections, friends and contacts. Twitter is not about this at all. It’s about information and search.

The real value of Facebook is when you have a group of friends with who you share ideas, experiences and content. Twitter, on the other hand is not really built for connecting with people – its real value comes from the comments and contributions that are added to its database and that can then be searched.

That’s why I’ve always preferred to compare Twitter with Google. On Google I search for information and get a set of results based on which sites score most highly in their algorithm. On Twitter I search for information and get a set of results based on which links are most often read and forwarded by other users. Google produces mathematical search results. Twitter produces UGC ones. Until now.

ZDNet is reporting that Google has soft-launched public comments on search results:

Google’s Searchology press conference unveiled a boatload of new features including different ways to visualize results, better support for semantic markup, and more. But when I was looking at the results page, I noticed a little comment icon. There was no mention of this.

The article goes on to describe how some users can now comment on search results and this is made pubilc to others. I cannot see this yet and so it is probably being rolled-out across the user-base slowly.

This is a huge change and shows that Google is taking seriously the potential threat of Twitter and other UGC search sources. Allowing users to comment on search results really could combine a solid algorithm with user’s own expertise. And we know that people are more likely to trust peers when making purchase decisions, so why not when searching online too.

There is obviously a lot to know about how this might work – who can comment, are these comments moderated (and if so how and by whom, will rating of sites be included too, how will Google cope when many thousands of people review one site. But these will no doubt be resolved as people start to comment on search results and use these to inform their own search.

For now we just know that UGC search is serious business. Twitter has integrated search into its main page and now google is allowing comments on it’s own search results. This really does show the power of social media. Once an algorithm would show the those results that were mathematically best suited to our query. Now users influence this – either by searching user content and links on Twitter or, perhaps, the potential for comments on Google itself.

Exciting times.

Image by MattRhodes via Flickr

A common debate among those working in marketing and social media is between engaging people on your own domain – in an online community that you build and manage yourself – and engaging people where they are – out in social networks like Facebook and MySpace or on YouTube, external blogs or forums.

There is, of course, a place for both of these things – engaging people in social networks can often be more suitable for campaign-based activities. For generating discussion and buzz about a specific campaign and to engage people on a relatively short-term basis. Your own online community, on the other hand, is better suited to real engagement – something that is long-term and sustainable rather than a one-off hit.

But in many cases this either/or debate seems rather strange to those of us at FreshNetworks. We think the answer is quite simple – use both.

The hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement

There are many reasons to engage people in social networks, where they are. And there are many reasons to engage people on your own online community or other site. In fact the best way to build a sustainable approach to marketing and engagement using social media is to do both. These two types of site are useful for different things and are used by consumers in different ways.

Social networks are great for reaching out to people. Posting videos or content, joining discussions or finding where people are. They are less good, however, at building lasting, long-term and sustainable engagement. And less good at contributing to long-term business strategy aims.

If you find somebody posting videos about your product in YouTube then this is a sign that they care about you, your product and what they do. They probably would do much more if you gave them a chance.  But it’s not easy to send them from YouTube to a discussion on a forum and then to join a group in Facebook (for example). You end up distributing all your engagement across social sites. You have little influence or control over these and your make the user-experience quite messy. You also miss out on all the benefits you should be getting of them being on your site – being able to ask them for (and use) profiling information, analyse what they do and say and create secure areas where you can talk to these engaged people about new product developments or other, more confidential things.

That’s why it’s best to have both. You cannot (and indeed shouldn’t) try to stop people talking about your brand in social networks. You should encourage it, give them information, tools and content to help amplify the word of mouth they create. But you should also create a space for them to come back to. This is the hub-and-spoke approach to social media engagement. You engage people where they are but provide a place for them to come to, a way for you to get all these enthusiastic and passionate people together.

It’s only then that you will start to get the most benefit from them, when you move beyond buzz and into real engagement.

Some more reading

• Social Media For Non Profits (slideshare.net)
• People are fed up of joining brand pages on Facebook (freshnetworks.com)
• Social Media Marketing Budgets on the Rise (mashable.com)
• Insights Qualitativos 2.0: Social Network Advertising Problem (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• FIR Interview: Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research (nevillehobson.com)

Image by DavidDMuir via Flickr

Last week we ran the first event as part of our Social Media Training series – focused on the retail industry and attracting speakers including James from ASOS, Joanne Jacobs and our own Helen. The session was focused particularly on what those in retail could and should be doing in the current economic climate to use social media to help them build advocacy, innovate, gain insights from consumers and involve them in the business.

There are some great case studies of social media being used well in retail (and we’ve given some examples of online communities in the retail industry before) but, as with other industries, also cases of social media and online communities not living up to their promise. The session showed what works when you engage people online, a case study of how ASOS have built and launched their new community ASOS Life and a great presentation from Joanne Jacobs on how to build and monetise online communities.

The presentations provoked plenty of discussion and reaction. We’re running more events in our Social Media Training seminar series, if you’re interested in finding out more, coming along or even speaking then do let us know.

Image by Darren Hester via Flickr

The promise of co-creation is that getting customers involved in the innovation process, and letting them inform the design of new products, will mean that you develop a product that is better suited to their needs and will ultimately perform better in the market. Of course, it is not always this simple. Often customers don’t know what they want. They can’t necessarily articulate how they would design the ideal product, nor can they say what is wrong with the existing product. They may never have articulated what they like nor what they dislike, but this doesn’t mean that the product isn’t perfect.

Over the weekend, the New York Times looked at this very subject following revelations from ex-Google visual designer, Douglas Bowman. In an unusual move, Bowman explained on his blog the reason he had left Google. As the New York Times discussed, his description of the design process at Google raises a number of questions:

Can a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want?

Bowman’s suggestion is that that answer to all of these questions is “yes”. That Google relies too much on data, as a proxy of customer input, and not enough on design skills alone. As the New York Times article report:

Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.

This kind of user-input into the design process is what many think of when they think of working with their customers on new product development and design. They think of presenting a number of options to customers (or indeed to potential customers) and then asking them to evaluate each one and choose the one they prefer (or in this case to take their use of a particular design as a proxy for this choice). Of course, this is not necessarily the best way of co-creating with your customers.

Rather than asking people what they think about a particular set of designs they prefer (or which they use most), you can often get a more useful level of insight by engaging with them. Don’t ask them about solutions to a problem but observe what they discuss and say about the problems themselves.

Imagine you are a company designing kitchen equipment. You could involve your customers in the design and innovation process in one of three ways:

1. Ask them what they want – ask what new equipment, tools or gadgets would make their life in the kitchen easier or allow them to do new things
2. Ask them to choose between a set of prototypes – present a set of potential new products to them and ask them to choose which they want.
3. Ask them to talk about what they do in the kitchen, what equipment they use and what problems they have

The last of these is most likely to produce the most insightful outcomes. Rather than asking people to get involved in the actual prototype products themselves, or to tell you what they want, get them involved further up the innovation funnel. Engage them and talk to them about what they use in the kitchen – what makes their lives easier, what would they like to be able to prepare and cook but can’t. Don’t talk to them about the equipment that, you hope, will solve their problems. Talk to them about their problems themselves.

By watching what people do you can then interpret this and begin a design process based on this information and this engagement. Then, rather than just presenting three options to people of potential new designs, you can approach them based on what they have discussed before: “there was a lot of discussion about x, here are some ways we think we could help with that. What do you think?”

This kind of engagement is where online communities really come to their fore. They let you engage your customer in a sustainable way. You can get to know them, their lives and the problems and challenges they face. It isn’t just a short-term process to “do some co-creation”, rather it is long-term engagement that fundamentally changes the way you innovate and develop new products.

Customers sometimes do not know what they want. It’s a fact. They do, however, know how they use what they have, the problems they face and the things they would like to be simplified. Understand what they do know rather than forcing themselves to make choices about things they don’t.

Some more reading

• Design: it’s not all about you. (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• Design Or Data? Ex-Googler Spills All After Landing At Twitter [Design] (gizmodo.com)
• Google designer leaves, blaming data-centrism (news.cnet.com)