FreshNetworks Blog

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Some people follow me on Twitter, where I invariably write about work-related things and my interests in social media, marketing, branding, online and such like. Other people are friends with me on Facebook, where they get to know what I did this weekend, can see pictures of me in a bar in East London and know all about my upcoming holiday plans. Still more people are contacts on LinkedIn where they know when I change job roles, qualifications or publications and speaking engagements.

I use each of these three social networks for different reasons. And different people follow me on them. Because of the nature the sites, and the people that follow me I talk about different things and so somebody following me on any of them only gets to see one part of my life. This is probably true of everybody online and is the reasons that many people question whether you can really make friends or get to know people online, in social networks or online communities.

The question of whether you can really become friends with somebody probably depends on individuals and their own personal concept of friendship. Perhaps the more useful question is whether we can really get to know people online.

This is certainly something that we discuss a lot with clients at FreshNetworks when designing online communities for clients – should a particular community allow members to become ‘friends’ with each other or not, should it allow them to ‘follow’ other members. We often debate whether this kind of function is valuable, and whilst it isn’t in all cases, in many it is. Why? Because online communities are about ideas and shared experiences. They are places where people share their thoughts and opinions, they share something of themselves and so people can connect through these ideas. You can read what people say and learn what they are interested in, care about, think and do. We actually get to know an awful lot about them.

So in online communities, at least, it is possible to get to know people quite well, particularly as concerns the subject area of the particular online community. Whether you become friends with these people probably depends on your own criteria for friendship.

Image by youngrobv (Rob & Ale) via Flickr

There has been a lot of talk over the last year of Obama’s election as the first social media election. And it is certainly true that there is much we can all learn from how Obama used social media as a candidate during the election process. But over the last couple of days we’ve seen another use of social media in elections – reporting on the fallout from the election results in Iran.

The presidential election in Iran was held on the 12th June, between incumbent Ahmadinejad and rival Mousavi. The result was a landslide for Ahmadinejad, and opposition supporters have since been protesting the results. There has been mixed coverage of this in traditional media – with many criticising CNN for its coverage, and the BBC seemingly blocked in Iran as a result of its reports on what is happening.

It is in social media that the wealth and depth of information is to be found. And some of this is quite remarkable:

• Twitter is perhaps the best place to follow what is happening in real time (#iranelection). And it is also the source of some particularly unique insights, such as the Tweet from Mousavi saying that he had been placed under house arrest.
• Blogs allow coverage in more detailed form from bloggers both inside and outside Iran and from all parts of the political spectrum
• YouTube is a source of video content from inside Iran, often in a raw and unfiltered manner.
• Flickr is building a library of user-created images of riots and the aftermath of the election.

In all, the amount of information that is being shared about what happened, and is currently happening in Iran is huge. People are creating content and, thanks to efficient search, others are able to find it.

If Obama’s use of social media showed how candidates can harness it to support their own campaign, and to build their own brand, the case of the Iranian elections shows how the public can use social media to express their own opinion and to show what is happening.

One of the real developments that we are experiencing at the moment online is a exponential proliferation of information. Cases like the aftermath of the Iranian election are a great example of this. We can follow things in real-time thanks to services like Twitter, but we are also documenting the events for the future and doing so through the words, voices, eyes and ears of users themselves. Perhaps that is equally important.

Image by Balakov via Flickr

We’ve touched on metrics before, and how understanding what you need to measure can help you understand how healthy your online community really is.

Metrics are vital. Understanding the who, what, where, why and how many of your online community is vital. Understanding if you’re doing your company some good (or bad), is vital. Setting KPIs is vital and knowing whether you’re hitting them, is vital. Metrics are vital.

Putting qualitative and quantitative measurements to the back of your mind – or worse, not considering them at all – is a little like setting up a restaurant, cooking a load of food, and not looking to see if anyone’s eating it.

Recording, reporting and analysing your data is as much a part of community managing as keeping the spam out and the conversation going.

But what should you record?

As ever, it’s a ‘piece of string’ subject. There are some established standards when recording any web traffic, of course:

• Hits
• Unique visitors
• Page views
• Time spent on site
• Pages per visit
• Entry points
• Exit points
• Most popular sections
• Most popular pages
• Referrers

And some fairly obvious community specific standards:

• Number of members
• Number of active members
• Number of blogs/posts/comments/images

But here’s where it starts to get interesting. Given that all online communities are basically a similar beast (a group of people brought together in one online space and communicating in a variety of ways), you’d think the list of key metrics would be pretty defined. You’d be wrong.

Lucy McElhinney, Community Manager at UKfamily.co.uk, has a couple of favourite stats. She tweets:

Return visitors – to gauge lurker/reader engagement, Active members (the number of members who ‘did’ something in the last month)

Ooh, and obviously advertising like the page views per visit metric as in communities it’s normally so high.

Ratios are also very telling. As well as the basics, Adam Cranfield, Digital Media Manager at CIMA likes to know the “ratio of responses to discussions,” and “ratio of comments to blogs.” He also introduces a lovely turn of phrase that I’m going to steal wholeheartedly: nuggets.

Also, I want to measure ‘nuggets’ – new knowledge, useful to the company, gained through the community.

Reporting on the current health and vitality of a community – especially when you’re community managing on behalf of a brand – is more than just a numbers game. ROI is more than just financial.

Great stories from the community can form positive PR activity; feedback (negative and positive) can inform improvements to customer services and spread learning about best practice throughout the company.

And as community manager, you are the gatekeeper to all this knowledge. Through recording it, filtering it and reporting it, you can affect real change. Frank van Gemeren, Game Producer and owner of Frag-em says you should pay attention to negative sentiment within the community:

There’s always action=reaction, so a lot of negativity means there’s something going wrong on some level, be it community involvement or policies, support, the actual product, or future expectations of your target audience.

For Frank, it’s not just about numbers:

I believe more in the qualitative arguments than in quantity. While quantity can be used to measure popularity and brand recognition, which is important for PR, you won’t build up a healthy, loyal community with a lot of hype and then failing to meet the expectations. That’s where the negativity comes in.

As with moderation and launching before it, monitoring stats and activity is not something to ‘just do’, something to just have a go at and see what sticks. If you are serious about creating a valuable, worthwhile community, you need to think about recording and reporting metrics and activity before you’ve received even one visitor.

As we’ve said before so many times, planning is the key. Really thinking about what you want from your community proposition and how you will measure if you have it, is essential.

Newsletter metrics

So what happens when you communicate with members outside of the community platform, through newsletters or mailshots?

At FreshNetworks we’re increasingly working to co-ordinate and strategically plan all newsletter communication in the most effective way for the members and the brand owners. There is a lot more fragility in the relationship here.

Why?

Mainly because unlike communicating within your community, where members have chosen to come to the space you have provided, here you are pushing your content into their domain. Their private space.

If you do it badly, intrusively, it could result not just in an unsubscribe from the mailing list, but a reaction on or an exodus from the community.

Put simply: You need to be as certain as possible how best to use newsletters. You need to know what works. And what doesn’t.

Newsletter metrics are a whole other blog post (and one we hope to bring you soon) but one lovely little formula I want to highlight is the Disaffection Index, first mooted in a 2005 MediaPost article:

Rather than unsubscribe/delivered, the Disaffection Index (DI) is calculated by dividing unsubscribes by the response rate: unsubcribes/unique clicks

Calculated this way, the DI tells you how many people either a) clicked on your email for the sole purpose of getting off your list or b) were so dissatisfied with the payoff (promise vs. delivery) that they chose to unsubscribe.

It’s simple maths but it’s packed with insight:

DI = (unsubscribes / unique click) *100

More on this to come…

Some more reading

• Is time-on-site a useful measure for online communities? (freshnetworks.com)
• Building the business case for online communities (freshnetworks.com)
• Social Media Measurement – Without Myopia (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Are You Measuring the Right Things? (thecustomercollective.com)

Image by Alex\ via Flickr

There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter so far this year – starting with the incredible growth in number of Twitter users to more recent discussions about a Harvard Business Review report that 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of activity. In all these discussions there is a significant debate about how to monetise Twitter – how they can make money from it. Most agree that Twitter is currently not monetised, at least not by Twitter itself. But Dell tell a different story. This week they revealed that they have made a total of $2 million in sales thanks directly to @DellOutlet, and a further $1 million in sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere.

So at least somebody is monetising Twitter, and quite successfully too. How is Dell doing it? What is the secret to their success?

Dell sells refurbished computers through @DellOutlet and has about 600,000 followers. And whilst $3 million revenue is a relatively small proportion of Dell’s overall sales, this does mean that they have taken an average or $5 for every follower they have on Twitter. A pretty impressive amount. If @aplusk could realise this kind of revenue per follower, he would make over $10 million. Even my few thousand followers at @mattrhodes would earn me almost $15,000 if I could realise revenue from Twitter in the same way that Dell can.

So how does Dell do it? The way it uses @DellOutlet is, like many of the the best ideas online, simple. They message their followers with deals, special offers and discounts. This is a form of real-time coupons – Dell can alert people to offers and discounts as they arise. And change the offers immediately when they sell out.

People love a bargain, they love feeling that they are the first to know something, and they love a personal connection and interaction. It is the combination of all three of these in @DellOutlet that makes it so successful.

• Dell’s approach to Twitter fosters a personal connection – rather than have a single corporate Twitter account, they segment their followers by having different accounts for different customers with different needs and interests. Those following are interested in what that particular Twitter account has to offer and will feel that it is meeting their needs.
• The use of a real-time update system like Twitter allows for offers to be promoted when they occur. It offers an immediate notification of any offer or discount and as such those who follow @DellOutlet are the first to know about deals.
• Through @DellOutlet, people can find out about genuinely good deals.

It is these three things together that make for Dell’s successful monetisation of Twitter. It’s a relatively simple formula that many businesses could adopt. Perhaps the more interesting aspect of this story is that whilst Dell uses Twitter to generate $3 million in revenue from its followers, Twitter itself asks for none of this revenue.

Some more reading

• Twitter is Not Your Average Social Network (mashable.com)
• What the Dell? Twitter Followers Get Bonuses (montysmegamarketing.com)
• Twitter to offer Facebook Page-like features for companies (or what)? (venturebeat.com)
• Dell Provides Exclusive Deal Offers on Twitter (shoppingblog.com)
• Dell joins those who ‘get’ Twitter marketing – who’s next? [VIDEO] (inquisitr.com)
• Dell Starts Offering Exclusive Discounts Through Twitter (techcrunch.com)

Proctor and Gamble has had a massive impact on the way companeis use social media and online communities. Much of this is thanks to A.G.Lafley who just announced that he’s leaving his role as President and Chief Executive to become Chairman of the Board. Bob McDonald will be taking his place.

Lafley’s determination to make P&G an open innovation company has had a major effect on the business over the last 9 years and an knock-on impact on other branded goods firms. He pushed the consumer-driven innovation model that led to the creation of Connect & Develop and numerous other online communities.

Being Girl, for example, a community focussed on young women, is four times as effective per dollar spend as advertising in encouraging sampling and driving sales. It has been rolled out in 21 markets.

Over the last decade, Lafley helped the firm become one of the 10 most valuable companies on the planet. And his open innovation communities have resulted in external collaboration playing a key role in nearly 50% of their products.

As Jim McNerney, presiding director of P&G’s Board, put it  “P&G is a far more consumer-driven, externally focused and innovative company than it was a decade ago”. And it’s thank to this that so many otehr companies are now following suit with their own online communities for innovation.

Am I just a P&G fanboy? maybe. I did work there on interactive marketing back in 2000. And it was partly that experience that inspired me to start building online communities for innovaiton.  So thanks A.G. good luck in the new role.

Some more reading

• A tough job for P&G’s new CEO (money.cnn.com)
• On P&G’s Lafley: Why Step Down Now? (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• P&G’s leadership machine (money.cnn.com)