FreshNetworks Blog

At 3pm GMT on 17th Feburary, Charlie Osmond will be giving a webinar about social media and the financial services sector.

Hosted by Val-Pierre Genton from BrightTALK, Charlie will speak about developing a social media strategy and will give tips and advice on measuring and tracking ROI.

If you would like to attend the webinar visit this blog post and click on the “Attend” button at 3pm GMT on 17th Feb.

Cupcake courtesy of our very own @genbosch

Here at FreshNetworks we are fortunate to have several keen bakers in our team, and we love it when cupcakes, cookies and brownies appear in the office.

Sharing baked treats is a fine example of the social power of food – something which Arla Foods butter brand Lurpak has taken into account with their latest social media activity.

Lurpak has adopted a similar approach to that of Wrigley’s Extra by creating several social opportunities for food lovers to share their creations and recommendations.

Bake Club

The Lurpak Facebook page states that “The First Rule about Bake Club is to tell everyone about Bake Club”, offering a clear call to action. The purpose of the club is for groups to create a baking rota, where automated reminders are sent out to the next baker in line with a reminder ahead of time. The members are then encouraged to upload a photo of their creation, which can then be rated.

Photos can be viewed in the gallery, and they are also automatically posted to the Lurpak Flickr gallery – which is ideal for sharing with off-site members (our client Jimmy Choo would perhaps love this cake). At the time of writing the site had just under 11,000 members and 1,400 photos available on Flickr.

Good Food Finder

In keeping with the message that “Good food deserves Lurpak” the company has created a resource for food lovers to share and recommend their favourite places to find great ingredients. Both the Lurpak website and Facebook page  prominently promote their recently launched iPhone app – which we have tried out.

The app provides a very useful, portable resource, especially when using GPS information to show where to buy quality ingredients nearby – particularly useful if you are in an unfamiliar area. One drawback is that none of the entries we came across  have any comments, so it’s only acting as a user-submitted directory for now.  At present, there is no personal profile information available either and having a real person behind a listing would give more authenticity.

Brands offering staple food products or ingredients require creative approaches to differentiating themselves from their competitors. With this in mind, Lurpak’s “Bake Club” and “Good Food Finder” both demonstrate how social media can generate greater brand awareness and interaction by offering a platform for customers to share their experiences, even if only indirectly connected to the product.

Image courtesy of wangruwei

Social media competition in China is beginning to heat up. Facebook and Groupon are looking at engaging the Chinese market as soon as possible and it looks like 2011 will be the pivotal year for Chinese social media.

As Chinese networks emerge and develop, it’s crucial to protect your brand and develop your presence among Chinese ‘netizens’*:

1. Develop your brand strategy

Think about how you want your brand to be perceived online in China. It’s possible that when you take your brand to China, or develop an extant brand image in that market space, you’ll want to be perceived somewhat differently than in European or American markets.

Capitalise on your similarities, differences and novelties. Look at what other brands have been doing and are currently doing and see what lessons can be learned from successes and mistakes.

2. Start monitoring Chinese Internet trends

• Baidu, which holds about 76% of the Chinese search market, looks set to aggressively expand its social services profile  (and has made a start with its Baidu Beat English service).
• ChinaSmack is  great for monitoring Chinese Internet vocabulary, Internet memes and viral videos – one recent meme involves punning on the word ‘GeiLi’ (‘Gives power’). Something that is ‘Geilivable’ is cool or great.

3. Protect your brand’s trademarks

If somebody is posting as your brand on social networking sites, you want it to be you. Protect your trademarks by registering now on the most popular networks:

• Tencent WeiBo – China’s leading microblogging service with over 100 million registered members.
• Sina WeiBo – China’s second microblogging service with an official reach of over  50 million members.
• Ren Ren – Positioning itself as China’s answer to Facebook with over 22 million active users.
• TuDou – China’s leading video service ranked 11^th in China’s traffic rankings according to Alexa.

4. Create a brand persona to engage on Chinese forums and blogs

Like online communities in Europe and the US, Chinese ‘netizens’ love to engage. Find ways to make your brand fun and interesting. Create interesting pictures, videos and interactive content and present it to Chinese communities.

5. Assess the content you use to engage

Don’t be afraid to engage. At the same time, be wary of the risks of some forms of content. Avoid politics, overt sexuality and extreme violence. These are themes that can put you on a wrong footing with the Chinese authorities and Chinese ‘netizens’. Instead, look for ways to associate your brand with fun, happiness, good-living and either China or the West depending on the brand image you’re aiming for.

6. Use the offline world to help engage online

Thousands of Internet-savvy Chinese students flock to the UK, the rest of Europe and the US each year. Find ways to engage with them offline and you’ll reap the benefits online as they engage with online Chinese communities.

*A ‘netizen’ is a commonly used translation of ‘网民’ (lit. ‘Net People’)

Image by Jeremy Brooks via Flickr

Almost twelve times as many US firms block employee access to Facebook as block access to Playboy.com. The social networking site is the most blocked site at work – with 14.2% of all US workplaces blocking access. This is about six times as many as block access to Twitter (2.3%) and twelve times as many as block access to porn site Playboy.com according to an analysis of 2010 by Web service OpenDNS.

These statistics are based only on those sites that are blocked specifically by name – when you look at categories that are bl0cked outright, pornography and sexuality categories are blocked by over 80% of all workplaces. However, Facebook is held up on its own as a site that employees should be blocked from accessing. This trend for access to social networks to be blocked in the workplace is not new, nor is it surprising. It is, however, a sign that many firms are yet to fully embrace social media across their business.

Many workplaces, obviously, choose to control employees’ access to the Internet usually on grounds of productivity. “We don’t want employees spending all their time on Facebook or msn messenger”, the argument would go. Of course, in an era of smart-phones with quasi-unlimited access to the Internet, employees can spend as much time as they like at their desks browsing Facebook, chatting online and accessing other sites from their mobile.

But blocking sites like Facebook in the workplace is an indicator of more than just a lack of trust, or a need to stop employees from procrastinating during working hours. It is also a sign of how social the business is. We know businesses in the UK where employees are the only ones who are unable to access their brand’s successful Facebook page. Or brands where their employees are unable to view the videos they have created or the social media campaign they are running. This seems like a bizarre set of behaviours and serves to separate employees from the your brand in social media.

Employees should be the biggest advocates of your brand. They should be the ones you are engaging through social media and who represent your brand with what they say and do on social networks and other sites. Whilst encouraging employees to use Facebook rather than do their job is probably a step too far, an environment that acknowledges and respects the opportunities of social media will better prepare the whole business for how to use social media across the brand. If your employees are comfortable with social networks, and you don’t make the sites unattainable by blocking access to them, then you will find it easier to introduce social media across your business.

As perverse as it may seem to some, training you staff in social media (just as you would train them in other communication skills), is your best way of embedding social media across your organisation. You will find it easier to develop social media activities that actually work and to embed them across their organisation. You certainly won’t find this from Playboy.com.

Image courtesy of Shoot

It is tempting to focus soley on moderation when discussing online community management, but without driving discussion in the first place, a community manager will have nothing to moderate.

Here are five things every community manager should do to encourage discussion in an online community.

1. Use mixed media

Using different types of media always produces good engagement results. Images and picture galleries often generate the best engagement online and this is certainly the case for the Facebook pages we manage here at FreshNetworks.

2. Keep the community informed about latest updates

One simple tool to add to an online community is a “latest activity” box on the homepage. Members of one of the closed communities I manage regularly comment on how useful this tool is for quickly navigating the site and for keeping up to date with recent activity.

3. Email newsletters

By far the largest driver of traffic to the communities I manage are the weekly email newsletter updates I send. They highlight conversations that are important to the brand and in the early lifecycle of a community the email updates are particularly important in developing a relationship with community members.

4. One to one contact

Contacting users on an individual basis is a fantastic way of building  good foundations. Thank them for performing actions, suggest content they may like or point them towards new activities in order to build long-term engagement.

5. Ask questions that matter to the community

Asking simple questions is recognised as a good way of generating discussion. However, this only works if the questions you ask are relevant to your audience. Take the time to understand what your audience react to and then plan around this.

Using these tactics are just a few of the many ways that you can encourage discussion in an online community. What works best for you?