FreshNetworks Blog

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

Guest post by Ben LaMothe

In June 2008 Shirley Brady joined BusinessWeek as its first community editor. In this first of a two-part interview, Shirley explains what the newly-created role of community manager means at BusinessWeek and how she engages with the magazine’s influential-yet-niche readership.

Before joining BusinessWeek, she was a writer/editor for the U.S. trade magazine CableWorld, where she launched and managed its website, Cable360.net.

Prior to that she was a writer/editor at Time Inc, working for Time in Asia (based in Hong Kong) before moving to the Time Inc mothership in New York in 1999 and working for Time and People. She’s also won awards for her work as a TV producer, writer and on-air presenter, including the Canadian public broadcaster TVOntario, Discovery Channel Asia and CNN International. She has been based in New York since 1999.

As community editor of BusinessWeek.com, what does your job entail?

Suffice to say I’m passionate about this role and truly have one of the greatest gigs in journalism! BusinessWeek is among a handful of media organizations that’s really putting resources and aligning itself to be open and responsive to readers, which is what attracted me to coming onboard last year. So what do I do, on a day-to-day basis? As part of BW’s senior management team, I manage our engagement efforts with the goal of increasing participation (quality and quantity) of participation by BW’s regular readers and online visitors. Rather than have users post comments and zoom off, we want to build loyalty by having them connect, collaborate and share – with other readers and with our journalists.

In practical terms, this entails overseeing BusinessWeek’s efforts to include readers and incorporate user-generated content (comments, suggestions, longer form opinion pieces) in BW’s journalism, elevating our readers’ participation on the same level as our journalism.

That includes soliciting reader participation in special issues, slide shows and other editorial projects; guiding BW’s journalists to respond to comments on their blogs and articles, which we feature on the “belly band” or scrolling bar on our homepage; helping point our writers to reader-suggested story ideas that they report for our “What’s Your Story Idea?” initiative; commissioning and editing “MyTake” essays from readers who’ve posted smart comments on our site, which provides more space to expand on their views, on the same level as a BW writer or contributor; produce our In Your Face series, which features thought-provoking reader comments on the BusinessWeek.com home page and across the site; produced our first list of the top 100 readers on our site (in tandem with our journalists, particularly our bloggers) and our first reader dinner, which gave us amazing feedback on our efforts from some of the most engaged (and vocal) members of our community; oversee BW’s social media outreach including Twitter ; serve as editorial liaison for the Business Exchange topic network; track and share insights into online traffic and other metrics, including BW’s reader engagement index; work with my colleagues in tech, art, interactive, edit, marketing, research and other departments to implement these initiatives and improve the user experience on our site; and in general, develop best practices and raise the bar for reader engagement and BW’s digital journalism strategy, internally and externally.

In the first year, we were pleased to see BW’s reader engagement index increase 31% with nods from PaidContent, Folio and other media brands, with John and me speaking on numerous panels and interviews such as this to discuss BW’s engagement efforts. But it’s only the beginning!

In addition to the above, I spend a great part of each day in our reader comments, across our articles and blogs, to gauge our online conversations and find/identify thoughtful commenters to follow up with. That reader zeitgeist gets fed back to our news editors and informs BW’s editorial. We don’t moderate comments on our articles (they are posted automatically unless something in our spam filter – an offensive word or a link – places a comment into the pending queue for review).

We also review any comments flagged as offensive by members of our community, and I’ll weigh in on whether a comment should be taken down. So a significant part of my job is monitoring and maintaining our standards, which helps elevate the conversation and helps make BusinessWeek.com a more engaging place for our readers to feel welcome, to share their points of view and want to come back on a regular basis.

I should add that reader engagement is by no means a one-person effort. For example, comments on our blogs are moderated by our journalists, who are encouraged to nurture their respective communities of readers who frequent their blogs.

I also work closely with BW’s online management team, news editors and channel editors to foster these efforts; Celine Keating, a veteran BW copy editor who assists me in reviewing user comments and flagging any discussions that get out of hand; Ira Sager, the online editor who manages our blogs; Francesca Di Meglio, a reporter on our Business Schoolsteam who has done a great job building our thriving b-schools community of lively MBA forums and guest writers for our MBA Journal franchise; Rebecca Reisner, who produces our popular Debate Room series (arguably, BW.com’s first foray into reader engagement); Greg Spielberg, who worked with me from January to August as our first reader-engagement intern; and BW’s business-side team (Ron Casalotti, Michelle Lockett and Maki Yamasaki) who oversee user participation and outreach on BW’s award-winning Business Exchange, which launched in Sept. 2008.

As a side note, it’s been fascinating to see how Twitter has informed our efforts and my job. Many of our readers post their Twitter handles in their comments, so we continue the conversation between our readers and journalists by being active in the conversations that bridge BusinessWeek.com and Twitter. We’ve now got more than 60 staffers just from BW editorial on Twitter; incorporated Twitter widgets on some of our blogs and within Business Exchange, which earlier this year enabled users who linked their BX profile with their Twitter accounts to simultaneously comment on both platforms – the first Twitter integration by a major media brand, as far as we’re aware. We also recently launched an official BusinessWeek Twitter feed.

In Part Two of this interview, we deal with the interaction between the Community Desk and Editors, and how Community Management in news is changing BW’s evolving strategy.

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.

Image by spud murphy via Flickr

Hi I’m Nick – the FreshNetworks marketing intern. Sadly, my time as an intern at FreshNetworks is quickly drawing to a close so I thought it might be of interest to talk a bit about what I’ve learnt – particularly around social media. Even though I may not have known it before, social media has had a huge impact on my life. Here are four things I’ve learnt during my internship:

Web 2.0 is part of an internet revolution…
So what is Web 2.0? A meaningless marketing buzzword, tech jargon for computer geeks, or an internet revolution? I never really understood the full meaning of the phrase. However since being here I have definitely gleaned a clearer definition. Web 2.0 refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in ways previously unavailable. On the web, people can publish whatever they want, when they want and this has led to the growth of social networking sites, wikis, support forums and online communities. My answer now? Internet revolution.

Could I live without social media?
Being part of the Nintendo generation I’ve grown up with the worldwide web so I’m an avid user of web 2.0 and social media; sharing photos on facebook, discussing my travelling plans on tripadvisor.com, providing feedback on ebay, downloading an mp3 and finding out how to fix a computer problem through online forums. The ability of the internet to allow users to share and discuss information has definitely been beneficial to web surfers like me. No doubt I’ve taken social media for granted up until now, but now I realise that without it my life would surely have been much less productive, organised and social!

Social media can make companies $$$
Next week I jet off to do the typical backpackers route – Thailand, Cambodia & Vietnam. The unbiased, user-generated content provided by Tripadvisor.com has been an invaluable planning tool – yet another benefit of social media. But I was fascinated to learn that this website generates its owners (Expedia) a third of their revenue. And here I was thinking it was just for fun.

Word-of-mouth is four times as trusted as TV advertising…
Word-of-mouth is the most trusted decision-making tool for consumers. And today, more and more people use the web for word-of-mouth – reading other users reviews and comments on particular products and services. In fact, online communities are increasingly a first choice for this sort of research. As a result, marketers are adapting their campaigns to allow for this change in consumer behaviour; it makes a lot of sense, as online communities allow one person’s recommendation to reach thousands around the world.
Without me knowing it, social media has become and integral part of my life. Could I live without social media? Probably not, but at least now I know it!

Some more reading

• Should schools ban social media practice and education? – ZooLoo … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• What IS a Social Media Expert? (growmap.com)
• Using Social Media As A Sales Tool (kylelacy.com)