FreshNetworks Blog

Habbo, the world’s largest teenage online community, has recently celebrated its tenth birthday, proving that sustainable success can be achieved with online communities.

The first version of Habbo was rolled out in August 2000, followed by an English-language beta version in January 2001. Ten years on, Habbo (previously known as “Habbo Hotel”) has a staggering 176 million registered users, with 15 million unique visitors per month.  In the UK alone it reaches 15% of the total teenage audience and receives more than 1.1 million unique visitors per month.

So what lies behind Habbo’s success?

Timo Soininen, the Chief Executive of Habbo’s parent company, Sulake, has said that Habbo’s continuing success is down to keeping “the service fresh and relevant by frequently introducing new features and gaming elements, arranging engaging campaigns, enriching the virtual economy and payment models and nurturing the community.”

What Soininen seems to be saying is that the Habbo community continues to thrive because of careful, considered online community management and innovative content. Keeping up with cutting edge social and digital trends helps to keep the young audience engaged.

It’s likely that Habbo also benefits from Sulake’s expertise, as the social entertainment company often carry out in-depth market research, listening and analysis to gain insights into the the needs of its audience and to understand the type of material they will engage with. This is probably also the reason why social gaming and social entertainment is a key driver in shaping and developing the community.

Some of Habbo’s success can also be attributed to the intelligent joint marketing activities it has carried out with teen-friendly consumer brands like Cheetos, or, more recently Capri-Sun, where on-pack advertising encourages consumers to visit Habbo.co.uk where they can access ‘The Capri Sun Summer Theme Park’ branded room.

Habbo has also entered partnerships with media brands such as MTV and Myspace, helping to promote the site amongst its key target audience. And with Habbo’s own annual survey of 49,000 teenage users proving the claim that 32% of teenagers would never pay for content online, the fact that membership to Habbo is free is an additional way of enticing teenagers to sign up.

And the community continues to grow as these statistics from June 2010 show:

• 172 million avatars created
• 3 million new characters created each month
• 120 million user-created rooms
• Average user session lasts 42 minutes

Read more of our Social Media Case Studies

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

As part of the social media agency work we’re doing in the education sector, I recently ran a brainstorming session with a group of 11-15 year old students and their teachers. We were exploring and testing some ideas we have been working on, but also looking at their use of social media and social networks. These kind of sessions are critical when planning any use of social media as a brand. You need to think not as yourselves but through the eyes of the people we are trying to engage in social media otherwise there is a danger that you will develop a solution for the people planning it and not the people you want to use it.

With these 11-15 year olds this is particularly important. We cannot, and must not, translate our own use of social media and the ways we would like to be engaged online to the young people we are trying to target. They use social media very differently and will react very differently to brands online. The same is, of course, true of any consumer base – it is most likely the case that your target audience is not fairly reflected by the people you have working for you. So thinking about your audience and considering your social media strategy through their eyes is critical. You can, of course, also always learn a lot by spending time with users.

I certainly learned a lot from my time with these 11-15 year olds and thought I’d share some of these observations here. I should make a huge caveat that these observations are certainly not representative of all students of that age, and shouldn’t be taken as such. But they shine a light on how this age range is using social media and prompts further questions and reflections for us all about these social media tools and how we all use them.

1. Facebook is a personal organiser and a bragging tool

For the group we talked to, Facebook was the ultimate personal organiser. It is here that they collected the friends they met at school, at clubs outside school, on holiday or people from their family. They used Facebook as a way to keep in touch with these people, to find out what they were doing and, for many, as the main way they communicated with them. Facebook chat was used by them much more than the likes of MSN or text messages, and Facebook messages were used much more than email. Facebook was described as the place where they kept their friends and a means of talking to them.

But once they had these groups of friends, they liked to use Facebook as a bragging tool and a way of showing the affinity they had with these friends. They talked about creating groups for something they were interested in and then aiming to get all their friends to join – not to interact with each other in the group, but so that their group would get more ‘Likes’ than similar ones. They were using Facebook to amass and to showcase their social status. And their was a symbiotic nature to this – the friends who were Liking these groups were doing so with the aim of getting more pages and groups on their profile than their friends. This social status (or ‘bragging’) works both ways for these young people – those who create groups want lots of people to ‘Like’ them, and those who ‘Like’ groups want to get more things they like as badges on their profile.

These observations offer important learnings for brands looking to engage young people in Facebook. They may have lots of friends but they may not be ‘Liking’ your brand page because they want to interact with you but because they want to show their friends just how many things they ‘Like’. The key is not jut to create pages they can passively ‘Like’ but to work with their desire to gain more friends and to show their social status online as a way to engage them.

2. YouTube is for music

YouTube is, for many, their second most used search engine after Google. They use it to find content and to share content with people they know, and people they don’t know but with whom they share interests. It is a vibrant social media tool and a growing community.

There are a lot of video creators and video bloggers out there, and a lot of them are young, as a quick search of videos will show you, but for the 11-15 year olds we had in a room, YouTube was for one thing. Music. And particularly to view, and to share music videos with their friends at a time that suited them, rather than waiting for the video to be shown on MTV or another music channel. They used it as a way for them to control their own access to professional content, rather than as a way to find and connect with others online though user-generated content.

For brands the message here is clear – these young people are looking for quality content on YouTube and using as a way for them to control and manage their own viewing of it. They will share this content with all their friends on Facebook in a way that will benefit your own brand but are less likely to create content themselves or to use the videos themselves as a mechanism to talk to and to interact with peers.

3. They are not looking for reward

The final observation came when we talked about motivation and reward for engaging online. We were looking particularly at ways in which we could motivate them to take part in ongoing engagement with an issue we were working on. And one finding came through very clearly. These young people were not looking to be rewarded. At least not in the way some brands thought they might be. They didn’t want prizes, they didn’t want ‘goodie bags’ and in many cases they would not be interested in product from the brand themselves. Their needs were simple, and at the same time complex. They wanted reward that played to their existing networks and use of social media.

They were interested in recognition and things that they could use to increase their social status on sites such as Facebook. They wanted things to take away their – badges, content and other things that they could post to their wall to show what they were involved in. They wanted activities that encouraged them to create content or groups that could be ‘Liked’ on Facebook, or they wanted points that they could use to compare themselves against other people and show their friends.

Social networks online are fundamentally different to our offline social networks – our friends, acquaintances, colleagues and others. Offline we have distinct groups of people that we interact with in different ways, whereas online in social networks we tend to merge all of our friends into one main pool.

This great presentation from Paul Adams, head of user experience at Google, looks at how we interact offline and online and takes a sociological approach to understanding how people interact in social networks and the consequences of this. From the dangers of two groups of friends colliding to the challenges for brands in social networks, this is a great presentation and our Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week. The presentation has a lot of detail in and is worth a good look through and although these are his own findings I know from my experience studying this area that there are a lot of research papers to back up his results.

There are a few points that I think are key take always for companies looking to use social networks:

1. Social Networks are not always the best places for brands to interact. Social networks are very user centric places. All the diagrams that are in Paul Adam’s research are cantered around the user it is about their connections, their friends, their family, their swimming group etc. because of the size of the audience on social networks there is a tendency for brands to go into them and want to tell everyone about their products and services, some brands can work very well in social networks but most of the time people don’t want to be interrupted in what they are doing and there are more beneficial ways to engage.
2. The power of weak ties is decreasing. Paul Adams talks about tie strength which is based on sociological theory (see the work on Mark Granovetter on “The Strength of Weak Ties”) this theory explains the links between people in different social circles. Strong ties are the links that you have with friends and family and are thought to be most influential when a recommendation is needed. Weak ties are links that you have with people that you have an affinity to but are not in regular contact. Weak ties are important to bridge the gap between different social circles and for getting information disseminated throughout different groups on the internet. People naturally build a large network of these weak ties and the process of identifying influencers who are willing to share opinions is becoming more and more important. It’s not who you know in your network it’s how likely they are to speak about your company and be trusted.
3. People have different personalities in different areas. Everyone acts differently in different social groupings and when they are hanging out with their mates they might want to be associated with a bar or a beer or certain places but they might not want their family or co-workers knowing.

Social networks yield a high reward if companies can engage people but are a hard place for brands to get it right and are just one part of social media.

With digital marketing becoming an increasingly important part of  brand strategy, more and more “traditional” agencies are employing experienced digital marketers to ensure they win online briefs by providing clients with services that span across all marketing mediums.

However, when it comes to social media, still a relatively new part of digital marketing, is it best to employ a specialist social media agency to focus on developing and implementing an in-depth social media strategy, or is it better to look for  a one-cap-fits-all agency to provide all your marketing, advertising and digital needs?

According to Marketing magazine, brands  need to reconsider how they organise their digital activity given its increasing importance as a marketing channel.

Paul Troy, the global head of advertising and content at Barclaycard, has suggested that he will be looking for one agency to work across  all marketing activity. Perhaps he feels marketing and advertising efforts will be more joined up if he pursues just one agency. It’s likely this approach will also save him money and potentially give him more control over the agency, as the financial loss to the agency if they loose a large, cross-channel account is much greater then just a single project or campaign.

On the other hand, lots of brands, like Honda and Toyota, are sceptical about big, “jack of all trades” agencies because of their inability to keep up with digital developments, especially when it comes to social media. Toyota, for example, use specialist agencies for each marketing discipline as they feel that above-the-line agencies often focus on TV ideas first and foremost and digital doesn’t fit naturally into their strategic thinking.

So when it comes to employing agencies, in particular specialist agencies like a social media agency,  what’s the best way forward? Getting specialist agencies to work together across marketing briefs could be one way of addressing gaps in experience and knowledge while still ensuring joined up thinking across the board. Agency partnerships of this kind would also allow clients to consolidate their marketing supplier base, potentially saving costs and reducing time trying to source the correct agency for each task.

At the moment though it seems there is no definitive answer about the approach that brands and businesses should take to employing agencies.  The decision really depends on the key strategic aims of the business.

The landscape for both multi-channel and specialist agencies (particularly social media agencies) is changing fast and the best advice for brands looking for agency help is to identify the expertise that can develop and implement a strategy that will achieve key targets rather than think about the type of agency you are hiring.

Read another post about the benefits of a specialist social media agency.

An issue for many brands who are developing a social media strategy is how they translate what they do in one country into other markets in which they operate. As a European social media agency, we are very used to helping clients take a US or UK strategy and then roll this out across the rest of Europe. And in doing this we have looked at organisations who have done this well. And those who have done it badly. The usual mistake is to assume that what works in one country can be taken and implemented in another country with no changes. More often than not this is not the case.

In this week’s video post, Matt Rhodes talks about how to approach developing a European social media strategy and why what works in one country might not work in others. Matt discusses how each country in Europe has different ways of using social media, and how these influence the way strategies should be developed. He gives three areas that brands should investigate when launching social media activities across Europe:

1. The audiences are very different in each country in Europe – they behave in different ways and have different needs
2. The social media landscape is different in each country – Facebook is not always the right tool, you need to understand what is right in different markets
3. The position of a brand is different in each market – your brand may be different in different countries and your aims in each might change

As more brands are looking to develop European and even global social media strategies really understanding these issues is becoming critical. It would be great to hear about your experiences in this area so far and how you see the differences across Europe.