Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category.
Day Two of SXSW and one of the most interesting sessions we’ve been to so far was ‘Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized?’ including Brett Slatkin from Google, Dare Obasanjo from Microsoft and Scott Raymond from Gowalla among others.
Rather than regurgitate the content of the session, we’ve included our low-tech hand-drawn notes from the session below.
SXSW: Real-time web session notes
SXSW image by benjamin ellis
This week I’m going to be reporting from the South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin Texas. SXSW is World’s largest digital and interactive festival/trade-show/conference/party/event/get-together. Around 20,000 people will be joining me in Austin to uncover the latest thinking in digital and, I suspect, to network like nutters.
I’ve been looking for an excuse to make it to SXSW for years. A few months ago my prayers were answered and FreshNetworks was picked by UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) to be one of 40 companies chosen to represent the UK at the festival. The grandly titled Digital Mission aims to help UK digital companies expand internationally and develop overseas business relationships.
The list of events is monsterous. It’s taken me a few hours to get my itinerary in order. I suspect I have fallen into classic SXSW-newbie mistake of trying to plan out a perfect route between each session to ensure a schedule that optimises my time here. I’ll probably find the plan goes in the bin half-way through day1 one.
Some frantic session planning on the plane
Here are just three of the sessions I am looking forward to:
And finally, one of the delights of coming to SXSW as part of the Digital Mission is the opportunity to spend lots of time with other UK entrepreneurs. I have always found that spending time with peers not only gives me new ideas, but also (because I’m rather competitive) it tends to raise the level of my personal ambition.
There are a few companies that I am especially interested in learning more about:
Let me know if you want me to bring you anything back from Texas.
Media140 Social meetup in London
Almost every event organsier talks about creating an engaged and involved audience. Sadly it rarely happens.
On Thursday I spoke at the Media140, a Social Media Meetup in London. The event was mostly dominated by Social Media agencies and consultants. There was a lively atmosphere, a loud shouty man and most of all, lots of energetic interaction.
I am still trying to work out exactly what the magic formula was. Perhaps because only a hardcore bunch made it through the snow; so they were determined to speak up. Or maybe it was the free drinks that created a positive and friendly Twitter back-channel from the off.
So what can event organisers, searching for elusive interaction, learn from the Media140 event? One factor that definitely made a difference was the style and approach of Guy Stephens (Carphone Warehouse) and Richard Baker (formerly General Manager, Virgin Trains). They kicked things off with an informal open conversation about Social Media. And they brought two key things to the debate:
1. A specific angle, social media for customer service, in which they had clear expertise
2. An openness to debate. Their style was non-lecturing, they didn’t pretend to know all the answers and it was clear they wanted to be challenged and learn from the audience.
Perhaps it’s something about Social Media – we’re all learning together – that makes interaction more likely. But clearly personal style goes a long way. And I suspect it’s especially important to make sure your first speakers have the right tone.
If you’re working in social media in London then I recommend you sign up for the next Media140 Meetup Thanks @andegregson and @KatePickering for organising it and for @Guy1067 and @Richard_Baker for the engaging conversation on Social Media for Customer Service.
Oh and my favourite Social Media takeaway of the event was that Social Media Agencies need organisational change management skills as much as they need marketing, PR or customer service capabilities.
Image courtesy of Iain Weir
Image by Getty Images via DaylifePresentations from Facebook and MySpace at the Marketing 2.0 conference caused something of a stir – first of all for getting both on stage at the same time, and second as Damien Vincent from Facebook, having only just joined them from MySpace, seemed to momentarily forget who he was working for.
But the content of their presentations was interesting, if only to see how both organisations approach selling their marketing potential to brands. Of particular interest was a set of statistics shown by Olivier Hascot from MySpace, based on surveys in the UK. They found that:
These could be impressive statistics for MySpace and would no doubt interest any advertise looking to raise both brand awareness and customer spend in the current economic climate. But I’d like to understand a little bit more about them. I’d like to know if the suggested cause and effect (that being a Brand Friend on MySpace led to greater brand awareness and higher customer spend) is actually the case, or if something else is at play.
As acquisition statistics, these do look impressive. If, as a brand, I could get 40% higher brand awareness among non-customers, and 22% higher spend from new customers by being friends with them on MySpace, there would be no question that this would be a good idea. However, I suspect this is not what’s happening.
Consider a brand advocate or even just a regular purchaser of your brand’s products. I imagine that it is these people who are likely to befriend you on MySpace. It is also these people who are likely to both have your brand at the forefront of their mind when out shopping, and spend more with you as a result. So rather than these two outcomes being a result of a consumer being your Brand Friend on MySpace, it could be that all three outcomes (higher brand awareness, higher spend and being a friend) are a result of them being a regular customer or even a brand advocate.
If this is the case, then it could be that social networks, at least the Fans and Pages bits of them, are strategies for retention of existing customers rather than acquisition of new ones. Would you become a Friend or a Fan of Nutella if you didn’t like that particular chocolate spread? Probably not. You are much more likely to join them in this way if you are already a customer, and probably one that is willing to attach themselves (and their social network profile) to your brand.
So from this perspective, activities in social networks are probably best focused on customer retention. Letting your most loyal or enthusiastic customers become your friend so that you keep your brand at the forefront of their mind and they ultimately spend more with you.
Of course, there may be some brands where social networks are a perfect hunting ground for acquisition targets, but I would expect this to be restricted to more aspirational brands or products. Whilst I might not become a fan of Nutella if I wasn’t already a customer, there is a high chance I might become one of the new Peugeot 308 before I have actually bought one. But this is because I am willing to attach the aspiration towards this brand to my profile. This is probably unlikely with most products.
Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.
It’s been a busy week at FreshNetworks, with Charlie on Web Mission 09 in San Francisco and me in Paris for the Marketing 2.0 Conference. A great chance to meet people and also to learn, and this week’s Required Reading for the team is one of the presentations given in Paris.
Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach from Edelman presented about word-of-mouth and why it is important to brands. What I like most about this presentation is the emphasis that it places on word-of-mouth not being about technology. Too often, discussions on word-of-mouth revert to the mechanisms by which people hope this will be transmitted – by widgets, social networks or online communities.
Technology is, of course, important, but word-of-mouth is actually a social function. It’s about people trusting and respecting your brand so much that they are willing to put their reputation in line with it – recommending it to friends and peers. It’s about people doing your advertising for you and about helping you gain penetration in markets you could never reach effectively with traditional advertising. And perhaps most importantly, it’s about the outcome, not the process. Word-of-mouth is only useful when people act on what they hear.
Online communities are about engagement, between consumers and between them and the brand. They bring huge benefits for and brand or organisation, from rich insights through innovation and ideas to word of mouth and advocacy. The question we are often asked is why the consumers would take part. Why would they take part in your online community.
My presentation at the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris earlier this week addressed this very issue and discussed different ways in which you can incentivise people to take part and which of these we have found to be most successful at FreshNetworks.
We’ve discussed incentives in online communities before and the simple truth is that if you are building an online community that is about long-term engagement and real dialogue then they don’t necessarily have the impact you want. Online communities are about social interactions and social dynamics. Once you pay people or incentivise them to take part (by giving them, for example, vouchers or entry into a prize draw for completing a minimum number of actions each month) you shift the member’s mindset from this social one into a market one. They make a judgement on what you are giving them and how much effort they are willing to expend for this. And the end result is typically that you don’t get the kind of involvement that you want. Some people may do slightly more, but these will be fairly transactional contributions. And you may even dissuade some people from doing as much as they would otherwise.
There is a definite benefit in online communities to real feedback from the brand. You are not leading the online community but taking part in it alongside all of the other members. With this in mind you should take part and respond to people in your online community. Feedback is essential and an online community won’t work, won’t grow and won’t meet your objectives if you don’t take part. It should be seen as a normal part of community management, and the way that you reward people for their comments and contributions. They want to know you’re listening and responding so do this.
Over and above the importance of listening and responding, there is a real power of using the expertise that is inside every organisation to give something back to your community members. All organisations are experts in something – you may be an insurance company that has a lot of information to help home-owners, or you may be a travel firm that has expertise in travel and making the most of your holiday. Whatever your brand and whatever your product you will have expertise that your customers can use. And there is real power in this. By putting yourself forward as experts you are giving people an insight into your brand and an opportunity to engage directly with you. By answering questions from community members, you are incentivising them within a social dynamic rather than giving them money and making their behaviours more transactional. And video brings all of this to life a lot more.
At the conference, I presented a video we have made to showcase how you can use expertise in a community, and you can see this here:
Social media in action – Using expertise in online communities
So our advice is simple. Don’t incentivise people with money or anything equivalent to this. Rather involve yourself in the community – give them feedback and leverage your internal expertise. It’s the best way to launch, grow and build a real online community.
Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.
A number of speakers at the Marketing 2.0 conference (including myself) made analogies (explicitly or implicitly) to games or gaming when talking about their social media strategies. I think that this is a good analogy and very relevant to understanding what we do when we are building and managing online communities at FreshNetworks, and how to motivate people to take part in them.
Most social media strategies, and indeed most online communities that we build, hope to increase a consumer’s engagement with (and exposure to) the brand. This can often mean trying to increase the amount of time spend on site, or increasing the frequency and recency of visit. We see all three of these increase in our online communities (often quite substantially) when compared with other territories that the brand controls online. But to achieve this we need to offer the consumer something compelling, and to some extent enter into a game with them.
This may be in a very traditional sense, and some of the best online support communities that I know of are powered using a similar techniques to those you find in games. Rewarding those who give valuable answers to lots of questions with access to special parts of the site, new challenges to take part in and special avatars so that others can see their position. But in most other online communities this very overt application of gaming techniques would not be as successful. However, there is still much we can learn.
We want to engage people, increase the amount of time they spend with us and the benefits they receive. They want to be entertained, to share their thoughts, to learn and to be heard. To satisfy both sides we can take an influence from games and gaming:
Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.
Image via WikipediaThere are many examples of big brands in social media (in fact you can find a whole range across different industries in our online community examples), but at the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris it was great to hear some real case studies from the people behind these strategies and campaigns.
Two presentations that particularly stood out were from Scott Monty at Ford and Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines. Both have a strong history of customer engagement and have been, to some extent, pioneers in their use of social media and online communities. And both of their presentations were refreshing in terms of the information they shared. For me, four core themes came from what they said:
Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.
Whether you use the Net Promoter Score or not yourself, you will undoubtedly have come across this ‘single number everybody needs to know’. On one level it is a calculation that takes into account how strongly people would be likely to promote your brand and returns a single score, expressed as a percentage. On another level, it is an entire approach to business and interacting with your customers that leads to the calculation of this score.
The score itself is what most people are interested in – the difference, expressed in a percentage, between those people who are very likely to recommend your brand and those people and the beauty of it is that it can reflect the different levels of engagement and loyalty that customers feel to different types of brand. A luxury hotel chain, for example, should be expecting a Net Promoter Score of about +70%, an airline shouldn’t expect one higher than +10%, and a cable TV company needs to prepare for a score below -5% (yes, scores can be negative).
At the Marketing 2.0 conference we were lucky to hear from both Richard Owen of Satmetrix (the people behind the NPS) and Conny Kelcher from LEGO (a fervent user of the NPS). Both were able to highlight exactly what the benefit of Promoters is, in hard cash.
Conny’s example looked purely at revenue generated by the individual themselves, and clearly showed that Promoters spend more than Detractors and so it makes good business sense to improve your NPS. Looking at expenditure on LEGO, over the same time period customer spend was as follows:
So, for LEGO, a Promoter will spend 53% more on their product than a Detractor.
Richard, quoting a study of network providers in the US, looked at this in more detail. He considered not just direct spend that the individual makes on the product, but the total contribution they make to the brand – including from recommending others (or indeed otherwise). When looked at like this, the average lifetime value for the network providers was as follows:
So the difference between a Promoter and a Detractor was almost $2,200. For Richard this showed that sometimes it can make business sense to buy your Detractors out of their contract with you. Overall it shows that Promoters are a category worth keeping and worth growing.
Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.
Image via WikipediaOne of the first speakers at the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris was Conny Kalcher from LEGO, and if anything her presentation was an example of how good segmentation and really understanding your different consumer persona types can make a real difference to a successful social media strategy.
At LEGO, the core target is a young boy, and they group their customers into six groups
These six types of customers are defined based on the strength and depth of their relationship with the brand – from having no experience with the brand to being actively involved in it not just as a product but as a business. There are fewer Lead Users than there are Covered Households and when volume and closeness to the brand are combined like this it lends itself to neat segmentation of the marketing (and indeed the social media strategy).
Indeed LEGO uses a different approach for the top three segments than for the bottom three. This is the cut-off point at which customers become truly engaged. They are not just entering into a transactional relationship, but they actually care about the brand. LEGO uses social media to work with these three segments – from co-creating online with the Lead Users to engaging the Connected Community and 1:1 Community in online communities and social networks. These are, perhaps, the easiest and best people to engage and empower online and so the most efficient use of social media. They are the people LEGO wants to feel special, and the people they want to test new ideas and products with. They are also the people to keep engaged and close to the brand – the people who will spend most and be your biggest advocates.
Proper customer segmentation and persona profiling helps you to understand how your customers differ and how their needs differ. Social media and online communities let you treat different people in different ways and also to engage with them in the way they want to be engaged with.
Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.