FreshNetworks Blog

Here’s an idea I’ve ignored for a decade – virtual business cards.

Mashable just posted a list of 7 fantastic iphone business card apps. I had almost forgotten how in the late 90s there was a big expectation among early adopters that we’d all be switching from physical business cards to electronic ones.

I remember learning how to exchange business card details using my Palm V5. But I never used it. I never used it because it made people think I was weird, it took ages to try to connect and was just far more complicated than handing over a small card with my details.

Occasionally I exchange phone numbers accross mobile phones, but I can’t see the good old-fashioned business card being replaced by iPhone apps. If for no other reason than most people don’t have iPhones.

Am I missing something? Are the days of business-cards numbered for a good reason? Is social media going to kill the card?

Image by gerlos via Flickr

To continue our dedication to Promoting Community Management, FreshNetworks is launching a new community management series. The posts will be aimed at existing community managers, those new to the role and anyone who wonders what a community manager is, does and should do.

Previously we’ve looked at community management from various angles, and you can read through just some of the entries from this year

• Why your online community should work offline as well
• The ten commandments of managing online communities
• How word of mouth grows online communities
• Defining community management – a starting point

On the back of this, our new community management series will look at:

Introduction to community management

The what, who and why of community management. We’ll look at the weird lingo, the essential skills and the history.

Champions, active users and trolls

Who is using your online community and why. What is the 90-9-1 rule and does it still stand? What are your members doing on – and to – your community. How to recognise community champions, how to encourage active users and damage control when dealing with trolls and troublemakers.

Growth of a community

What constitutes a healthy community, how big is big and how big should you aim to be? How can you grow your community and encourage conversation?

Moderation and safety

What are the risks to your company or name, health and happiness? Why moderate and what are the options? What are the big no-nos that you must always stamp on and how to handle the tough calls.

Community metrics

What can you measure and, more importantly, what should you measure? What does it all mean and who should you share the data with? What lessons can be learnt across your business?

We’ll be kicking  things off next week, so let us know about anything else you’d like us to include.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management

We return this week to our series of Online Community Examples. There is a lot of talk about the way ‘old’ and ‘new’ media combine – how newspapers are using Twitter and how television broadcasters and production companies are working with online media. So this week we take a look specifically at examples of online communities in the TV industry

Online communities in the TV industry

The TV industry has a relatively long history of online communities – both fan sites and sites sponsored by the brand itself. People like to discuss both within the fantasy of a programme (fan plot lines, character diaries and so forth) and also discuss the content itself – evaluating what happened, talking about the acting, new characters or a twist in the plot. What is more, there is a real rise in people discussing TV programmes whilst they are being broadcast – people combining the online community experience and the TV experience simultaneously. This industry is fertile ground for online community examples, as the three case studies below show.

Rate My Space

HGTV in the US set up their Rate My Space online community to accompany their broadcast schedule which, as their full name suggests is Home and Garden Television. The concept was originally very simple. Users could upload an image and brief description of a room or part of their house that had been renovated. Others could then vote for or comment on these images.

As we’ve discussed before, simple concepts can often be the best ones in online communities, and so it proved in this case. HGTV wanted to both generate engagement and discussions with it’s viewers, and to use the increased volumes of content to increase revenue from advertising on the site. And from an outside perspective they seem to have done both quite successfully. Just looking at the site you can see the speed at which images have views, votes and comments – the engagement they have created and the interest in the site is huge. And also there are reports of considerably increased traffic and advertising revenue from those parts of their site that have online community elements.

A further sign of the success of Rate My Space as an online community site is that it has now spun off a TV programme of it’s own. Users are asked to pick rooms on the site that inspire them and then a designer will come to their home and use elements from these to make over a room in their house. So an online community grew out of the broadcast element, and then a new broadcast element grew out of the online community.

Heroes

Heroes is a well-known case study of how a range of online community and social network tools can be used to support a TV show. It is also a good example of how a hub and spoke approach to social media strategy can be the most successful. As well as a central hub (NBC’s Heroes site) they had presences in a range of spokes – other social networks and sites where viewers and fans might be. This approach allowed them to engage with users in a place and in a manner that was appropriate to them, but also to bring them back to their own site where they could share their interest for the show and meet people like them.

The range of spokes employed by Heroes was extensive and impressive, from the Ninth Wonder fan site, through social networks like Facebook and MySpace, to widgets, games and a Wiki that explained everything Heroes. The benefit of this approach for them was that it enabled them to reach out to people where they were, often in very active fan sites, and then bring them back to their own territory where they could interact with them and get value from this. They also worked the other way – letting those on their site take widgets and content out to their other social networks and communities and spread the word for the show.

This shows that sometimes, in fact in our experience more often than not, a standalone online community does not get the most benefit possible from your target audience. You need to work with the other discussions and online communities out there and build a hub and spoke model of engagement. Engage where people are but as a way to bring them back to your site, where you can both get most benefit.

The Sex Education Show

Channel 4 in the UK has run two frank and educational series on sex and sexuality as part of their public service remit. The first, the Sex Education Show, gave advice and information on sex issues. The second, the Sex Education Show vs Porn, looked at how the portrayal of sex in porn compares with real life experiences. Both shows were successful and both were accompanied by a strong online community: Sexperience.

The subject matter of the programme was clearly sensitive, but also highly suited to an online medium. Subjects that can seem sensitive or difficult to discuss face-to-face can be much easier to talk about online. Especially in an online community where you know you are with people like you. You have the benefit of the level of anonymity that online can bring, with the reassurance and community feeling that you get in a well-nurtured online community. And this is why on Sexperience you get a range of discussions that would not happen elsewhere – discussions on penis size, premature ejaculation, and sexually transmitted diseases.

An online community can be a safe place and can be a place for people to share information, ask questions and suggest answers on a common theme, subject or issue. The Sexperience site does this well – encouraging and nurturing discussions on sensitive subjects alongside videos, blogs and forums that support this content. Factual programmes and in particular programmes that deal with more sensitive issues or subject matters are prime targets for successful online communities. You can add real value and real service, and you can encourage people to engage at a level they might not otherwise.

See all our Online Community Examples

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Image by ★ maize via Flickr

One of the real benefits of social media is that it means that it can now make good financial and business sense to engage just a relatively small group of people, either online or offline. Traditionally, brands often needed to reach a large audience to make a marketing or advertising campaign viable. The best campaigns would get advertising slots during the most popular prime time TV shows, or pay for space in the biggest circulation newspaper for their target market. Big was good. Reach was good and getting yourself in front of as many people as possible was good.

None of this has really changed. It’s still important to get your brand and your marketing in front of as possible, but now rather than getting  this reach with your original message you can get it from people sharing, responding to or embedding your content. And we know that people trust peers much more than brands or ‘experts’ so the impact of getting reach in this way should be significantly better.

All of this is good news for us. Why? Because it now means that it makes financial and business sense to do activities and campaigns that target a small group of people. And this explains exactly why T-Mobile has spent what must be a not inconsiderable amount of money on entertaining just a few thousand people in Trafalgar Square last week. For those people it was, no doubt, an incredible experience. A free performance and event put on just for them and made possible by them. Not just because they were the ones singing (and so creating the content) but also because they would all be instrumental in the distribution of the content. Telling their friends about what happened, taking photos and videos and uploading them to social networks and online communities. So this was crowd-sourced content and crowd-sourced distribution.

And what can we learn from this? Well there’s nothing wrong with engaging a small group of people or putting effort, time and money into doing so. In fact if you enable them to share and spread what they have experienced, then you will probably get a greater return on investment than if you had just tried to engage the large group in the first place.

And for those people who take part in the event or experience, it can be something very special and very rewarding. The key is to make sure they get value from what they do, that they enjoy it.

Some more reading

• T-Mobile: Social Media Superstar? (markevanstech.com)
• ‘Hey Jude’ Singalong (buzzfeed.com)
• New T-Mobile “flash mob” ad in Trafalgar Sqaure (ameliatorode.typepad.com)
• T-Mobile Trafalgar Square Karaoke ‘Flash Mob’ (nickburcher.com)
• Everybody Sing Along! (ithinkheblogs.com)
• Trafalgar Square T-Mobile Karaoke Flash Mob (viralblog.com)

Image by FredArmitage via Flickr

For any brand using social media, an important first stage is to find out what people are saying about you online and then monitor these discussions and conversations. You can build on these, engage the people talking about you and learn from what they say.

We’ve looked before at how to react if somebody writes about your brand online. Today’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks looks not at how to respond but the types of conversations themselves. The presentation below, from David Alston of Radian6 looks first at the worries and objections that people can have to using social media, and then moves on to the ten conversations to listen for in social media:

• The complaint
• The compliment
• The problem
• The question or inquiry
• The campaign impact
• The crisis
• The competitor
• The crowd
• The influencer
• The point of need

Search for conversations about your brand today and see which of these conversations you find.

Some more reading

• Understanding the Social Process (crystalware.wordpress.com)
• Monitoring and Measuring Social Media (ducttapemarketing.com)
• The Future of Social Media Monitoring (readwriteweb.com)