FreshNetworks Blog

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You may have seen Cadbury’s new spots and stripes underwater advert. It’s the one that starts off a little like a high-resolution marine screen saver but then develops into something that resembles a mini film.

If you have watched it, did you know what it was advertising? Or did you have to follow the call-to-action at the end of the ad and visit the website URL to find out what the hell was going on?

This new campaign by Cadbury really seems to recognise something that we’ve said before -  social media doesn’t just take place online. Their advert is incomplete without referring you to their social media site (www.spotsvstripes.com). And this site would not stand alone and be as successful without the advert driving people to it.

As an official sponsor of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the thinking behind the current Cadbury campaign is to  split the nation into two teams, the spots and stripes, to compete in game play in the lead up to London 2012. All people need to do is join one of the teams by signing up on the website to begin scoring points for their chosen team.

Cadbury will encourage people to engage with the Spots v Stripes site through dedicated social media channels, like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, in combination with more traditional marketing methods  like TV and outdoor advertising in keeping with their online/offline theme. And while the site definitely plays on social gaming interaction, you can score points for offline games like running or crazy golf and can also download games from the site to play offline.

Perhaps the key sales driver for Cadbury from this whole campaign will be the introduction of a brand new product – the Challenge Bar. The Challenge Bar is a milk and white chocolate bar divided into three sections; one spotty, one stripy and one chunk in the middle which the Spot and the Stripe must play for.

The launch of this new chocolate bar will be supported by traditional offline marketing, but each Challenge Bar has one of 20 different games printed on the inside of the wrapper to get consumers playing for the “winners” chunk and driving people online to claim the points for their chosen team. The campaign will also see Cadbury touring the country in order to get the whole of the UK involved with both the Cadbury and olympic games, and, more than likely, promote the Challenge Bar.

Given that the campaign only launched last week, it remains to be seen whether this fully integrated offline and online  campaign will really take off. What is interesting to see though is that Cadbury has recognised that offline is converging with online – something that all digital marketers need to be aware of.

Read more of our Social Media Case Studies

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

Matt Rhodes at the FreshNetworks Breakfast Briefing

Another successful FreshNetworks breakfast briefing has just come to a close. This time the topic was ‘social media and retail’. The two speakers were Naomi Paget (Head of Direct Marketing at TM Lewin) and our own Matt Rhodes.

The breakfast briefing was split into three main parts. First, Naomi talked about how TM Lewin has been using social media as part of their e-commerce site and then Matt presented the results of a recent campaign we ran with Jimmy Choo. He also discussed how to take the first steps towards looking at social media from a business perspective.

First up was Naomi. She is one of our clients here at FreshNetworks and has been working with us since spring 2009.

TM Lewin: the Off the Cuff online community

TM Lewin have a very clear strategy of what they want to achieve from social media (some of these aims include things like “educate and excite customers about the brand and product, Get customer insight into our product, marketing and services and be seen as an authority on business dress”) and they now have a presence on various social media platforms including a Facebook page, YouTube channel, Twitter account and their own community ‘Off the Cuff’. The strategy is performing well against their objectives (see #FreshNetworks tweets for some of the highlights) but one thing was clear from Naomi. Internal passion is the key to success.

TM Lewin has made the most of their community because the employees utilising it have a passion to proactively engage with community members. Because of this enthusiasm, community members have direct contact with the senior management team at TM Lewin, making them feel more valued and increasing loyalty. TM Lewin is using this engagement to help spread positive messages through its current (and prospective) customer bases, gaining valuable insight and feedback on their activities.

TM Lewin has also noticed that people who enter the ecommerce site via the community are more likely to convert on their first site visit and so the community is directly attributing to sales (we can’t share the exact numbers but they are not insignificant!). It was great to hear Naomi’s talk because it highlighted the fact that social media isn’t always about the £ sign – sometimes this comes second to the other benefits that engaging with social media can offer a business.

Jimmy Choo: CatchAChoo

Next up was Matt Rhodes talking about Jimmy Choo , the CatchAChoo campaign and the importance of having a solid strategy for the foundations or all your engagement.
We have just finished running a campaign for Jimmy Choo where we organised a treasure hunt around London using Foursquare to help promote the launch of their new trainer range. There were a number of clear objectives behind this campaign (full case study coming soon) but the main reason we used this approach was because learnt from working with Jimmy Choo on a previous project that the actual purchasing of the shoes is part of the appeal, therefore using Foursquare seemed like a perfect opportunity to bridge the gap between online and offline engagement.

Four steps to building a social media strategy

CatchAChoo, followed a process that was the basis of the second part of Matt Rhodes presentation – a four step guide to building social media strategy:

1. Understand what people are saying – Before you start any social media strategy you need to know who is talking, where they are talking and what they are talking about. This is an important step as it allows you to identify the needs of the people you are engaging with and how you should go about approaching them.
2. Know what you are trying to achieve – Matt used an appropriate analogy to sum up this point:“if you were going to the moon you would have a solid reason for doing so! You would just invest all your time and resources doing it for no reason”. Social media it is not as grand as flying to the moon but it does follow similar logic. If you’re going to be invest time and resources, have a clear strategy of what you want to achieve and how you will measure this.
3. Experiment – Social media tools are changing all the time so using your initial insight from step 1, keep your aims in mind but try different things out. There are no right or wrong ways to use different tools; it all depends on your audience and your business so try different things out until you are meeting your aims.
4. Ruthlessly measure the impact you are having – This is the most important stage. All your interactions however they are being undertaken should meet the aims of your initial strategy. Regular reporting will allow you to have a diverse strategy and understand what is working well (and what isn’t) so you can change your tactics to make them more beneficial to the business.

It was a great event with some really good questions and thoughts coming from the people that attended. Thanks to everyone that came and we hope that you all took something away with you (besides a load of chocolate muffins) and if you have any thoughts on what was discussed it would be great to hear your comments!

LEGO is a brand that many people are very passionate about, a brand people love and we’ve written before about how they use segmentation to engage their consumer base from children to enthusiasts in an innovative way. Now they have continued their innovative approaches to engagement and embraced social media. In a big way.

They have launched LEGO CLICK, an online community that brings together innovators, designers, artists and creative thinkers to develop new ideas related to toys. The site is designed to bring together ideas in written form, images and videos. They want to capture and catalogue ‘lightbulb moments’, ideas that are relevant to toys and to the market LEGO serves.

Unlike other ideas communities, LEGO CLICK does not (at least not yet) allow users to rank and rate the ideas. It merely allows you to suggest your idea or to share ideas that you see and like or are interested in. What makes this site particularly interesting, though, is its use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr as a way of generating content for the site and promoting participation.

The LEGO CLICK community is a great example of the hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement. Users can contribute their ideas by tweeting with the hashtag #legoclick. They can contribute images by tagging their Flickr contributions with the same tag. And they can suggest ideas by video by tagging on YouTube in the same manner.

This is an interesting use of social networks to drive content to a community. In parts it is not dissimilar to the California Governor’s use of Twitter to harvest ideas for MyIdea4CA in 2009. It relies on contributions from users of other social networks and then brings them together in a single hub where different types of content from different sources meet.

What will be interesting to watch as this site develops is the amount, and the relevance of content that is created and added to LEGO CLICK. Currently there is a lot of content being dragged into the site that is discursive about the concept rather than the kind of ideas that the site is designed to harvest. It is getting a fair bit of content that is more like this particular blog post than an idea of lightbulb moment. This is one of the real problems with using tagging and a feed from other social networks to populate any site, but an online community in particular. You could end up with a lot of irrelevant content.

One of the things that MyIdea4CA did, and that it will be interesting to look for as LEGO CLICK develops, is to use rating and even commenting in the community as a way of sorting and prioritising ideas. The most popular or interesting ideas are likely to get the most votes or comments. And so these will rise to the top on the site, leaving the less relevant comment much further down.

But even without this kind of feature, LEGO CLICK is an interesting site and itself an innovative use of social media. Really driving the hub-and-spoke engagement model. Now we just need to watch to see what happens.

Read more of our Social Media Case Studies

Vitamin Water’s latest flavour, launching in March this year, was developed and named by the brand’s Facebook fans. The black cherry and lime flavoured drink will be called ‘Connect’ and one Facebook fan, Sarah from Illinois, won $5,000 for her role in developing this new product.

The competition was interesting and unique in that it used Facebook fans to develop all aspects of the product:

• Choosing the flavour – over the summer Facebook fans were able to monitor and add to buzz about different flavours. The more chatter about a flavour online, the higher it was rated on the Facebook page. And by mid-September the most ten talked-about flavours were put to Facebook fans for them to vote for their favourite. This is a good example of using a community to help sort and rank ideas in a co-creation process. Fans couldn’t create their own flavours from scratch, but could influence the top 10 flavours and then vote for the best.
• Designing the packaging – when the flavour had been selected (in October last year), the Facebook fans were able to use the app to design the packaging – the look and feel, the blurb and colours used on the label. Fans could collaborate with up to two more Facebook friends to develop the packaging and the final winners were chosen by a panel of experts.
• Naming the product - alongside the packaging and look-and-feel, Facebook Fans were asked to name the product. The team who created the winning name would be given a prize of $5,000.

This is a great example of co-creation and working with your customers and fans to help to develop your product. Using experts from the brand at critical input stages – choosing the original flavours that could be shortlisted and then selected, and reviewing and agreeing on the winning product design and name. The community was used to help shortlist and select the flavour to be produced, and to create a range of options for the design and name of the product itself. Many brands would be anxious of allowing consumers to create a product like this, but at every stage the brand and consumers were playing different roles and doing different things. It is true that some of the best and most intelligent people don’t work for your company (whoever you are) and so working with them in a controlled but creative way like this can have great results.

And for the more than one million Fans of of the Vitamin Water Facebook Page, they feel like they have had real involvement in the development of the new product. That’s one million people who feel ownership of this product. One million potential purchasers when it launches.

Read more of our Social Media Case Studies