FreshNetworks Blog

As we’ve written before, right now, in the current economic climate, it’s a great time for brands to innovate. In fact it is those brands and organisations who innovate now who are more likely to be on a faster growth trajectory when the economy starts to improve.

The big question for many organisations is exactly how to innovate, how to carve out the time needed to think about the future and how best to work on new ideas, how best to co-create. Whether you are doing an offline event or working in an online community, there is a lot of commonality in how to build a great innovation process. This presentation from Guy Kawasaki at Cisco Live last week presents ten steps to great innovation.

The steps are summarised below but you should really watch the video to see how Guy presents and explains them. There’s something that everybody can learn here, and so it’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week.

1. Make meaning
2. Make a mantra (not a mission statement)
3. Jump to the next curve
4. Roll the dice
5. Don’t worry, be crappy
6. Let 100 flowers blossom
7. Polarize people
8. Churn, baby, churn
9. Follow the 10-20-30 rule
10. Don’t let the bozos get you down

The biggest group on Facebook are not university or college students, or even people in their 20s in their first job. According to analysis by iStrategyLabs, the biggest group of users on Facebook are 35-54 year olds. Their study of figures for the US that are publicly available to advertisers shows that over 28% of Facebook users are in this age-range, with a further 12% of users aged 55 or over. In fact the 55+ age-group is the one that has seen the largest growth in the six month to July 2009 – an impressive 514% increase in users.

So Facebook users are starting to get older. The social network that started with 18 year old students at college and university has now grown up – its users are now more reflective of the population and indeed are much older than a few years ago.

This development shows that Facebook is starting to reflect the overall Internet population and is, indeed, putting the end to such misconceptions as that social media  and social networks in particular are for “young people”. This just isn’t true. At FreshNetworks, we run online communities for diverse groups – from women with an average age of 40+, to younger communities of people in their 20s. If there is a bias in terms of who is online and participating in social media, it certainly isn’t age.

I had to privilege of seeing Craig Newmark of Craigslist taking part in a discussion at Reboot Britain on Monday.

Ostensibly talking about meeting the biggest challenges for public services now that Britain is broke, Newmark spoke about the impact that ‘little nudges’ rather than forceful do-gooding can have on people.

He compared these little acts with the “organisational inertia” that many large organisations and people in power get locked into through fear of doing it wrong.

What really stood out to me, though, were Newmark’s remarks about people and communities. And these remarks come after 14 years of Craigslist, making the Craigslist community one of the most mature across the net.

Craig Newmark’s ‘thing’ is that he calls himself the founder and customer service rep of Craigslist. He is so famous (in nerdy circles anyway) for this claim that I was staggered when an attendee yesterday asked him about this, as if it wasn’t true and in fact he had a huge team of staff. (The same excitable attendee hopped up on to speakers’ table for a photo opportunity with a befuddled Craig at the end).

But after hearing what this customer service involves, I dispute his claim slightly too. Craig Newmark is doing customer service, that’s absolutely true, but he is doing it in the role of a community manager.

He talked about ‘trolls’, and suggested that they sat within a group increasingly talked about in US politics: Noisy idiots. Dealing with this group brings you eyeball to eyeball with…

“…some of the worst of what people will say to get attention”.

And that’s something any community manager reading this will recognise.

Among his various bad jokes, he liked to drop relevant names and quotes, my favourite of which was a paraphrasing of Jon Stewart:

“You hear more from the extremists and crazy people because moderates have too much to do”.

But he kept coming back to a point that it’s very easy to overlook – especially when you’re dealing with noisy idiots – there are “very few bad guys out there”. Far more people are “interested in talking together”.

“Most people,” Newmark observed, “are inclined to do the right thing, they just need a little nudge”.

For me, this perfectly sums up community management at its best, at its most natural. Nudging people to do the right thing, clamping down on noisy idiots but recognising that most people are good and helpful and want to talk.

There’s a misconception that everybody ‘gets’ social media. That everybody is taking part. And that business, in particular, are all developing social media strategies. This just isn’t true. Whilst we have witnessed a monumental rise in social media use over the last 18 months or so, there are still some who are significantly more innovative than others. In fact we often surprise our clients are FreshNetworks by telling them that they are among the most innovative companies in Europe in their use of social media, and online communities in particular.

In July we’re starting a series looking at Why Social Media Matters and in particular how you can convince a CEO that social media is the single most important thing that their business should embrace. That’s why it was great to see a presentation from the US that looks at social media use by Fortune 100 CEOs. The findings are not a huge surprise – most CEOs are not actively using social media themselves and those who are typically work in the tech industry.

I’d love to drill down further in this area and look at use by Fortune 100 companies – even if their CEOs are not personally making active use of social media, are the companies themselves? And if they are is there a correlation between social media active CEOs and the extent to which the organisation embraces social media.

However, it’s interesting to see the level of social media adoption among the people who run some of America’s biggest businesses and that’s why the presentation is our Required Reading for this week. Clearly some work to do here.

Some more reading

• Offline Word of Mouth Still More Powerful Than Online Analogue (profy.com)
• Throwing Sheep In The Boardroom (accmanpro.com)
• Fortune-100 CEOs Remain Social-Media Hermits (marketingvox.com)
• Top CEO’s Appear to be Anti Social (Media, that is) (marketingpilgrim.com)

From HappyAbout.info

We were sent a review copy of ‘18 Rules of Community Engagement’ by Angela Connor, which contains very useful lessons for all businesses engaging with – or planning to engage with – their customers and potential customers online.

Angela Connor has boiled down a huge subject into an 18-step strategy. Think of it as an accessible masterclass by a pragmatist rather than a theoretical lecture or high-minded discussion.

Currently Managing Editor of User-Generated Content at WRAL.com, in 2007 Angela launched GOLO.com, the first online community for the top-rated television station in the state which has grown to more than 12,000 members.

Angela has a background in journalism that shines through in her written style, making it easy to follow, conversational and crisp.

Essentially, unlike some ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’ who perform a commentary, Angela has done the hard slog, learned the hard lessons and continues to grow her community day-to-day. Her thinking is fresh and grounded in reality.

Just like we do here at FreshNetworks, Connor returns again and again to the themes of interaction, engagement, conversation. Above all, the importance of getting in the mix, not performing a high-handed role from atop, but being a part of your community, regardless of what the community is formed around.

From the outset, Connor is clear:

“We are now living in the conversation age, where one-way communication is no longer acceptable or desired. People want to engage and discuss, react and interact.

“It is no longer effective to have an online presence without interaction.”

Key lessons:

•    “It takes a different kind of investment to grow community, and a major portion of that investment is TIME.”
•    Community managers need to have “a long-term strategy and a plethora of tools in your toolkit to turn lurkers into contributors and to encourage contributors to ramp it up a bit and move into the zone of those who post ‘very often.’
•    Engaging, asking questions, chatting to members and offering them something useful and interesting is all vital.
•    Look after your members and appreciate them: “stroke a few egos”.
•    Every community has its own culture and set of values.
•    Be open, honest, sharing – and accept and respond to criticism!

With this book, Angela Connor has put together a really handy overview with genuinely useful thinking points to steer community management efforts in the right direction.

Above all else, the breadth of activities she covers for community managers keeps us mindful of just how diverse a role it is, and how important it is to do it right.

ISBN: Paperback: 978-1-60005-142-5 (1-60005-142-1)
ISBN: eBook: 978-1-60005-143-2 (1-60005-143-X)
Published by Happy About®.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management.