FreshNetworks Blog

There are four types of brands online, and you can distinguish between them by listening to and analysing the conversations about the brands. This is an insightful takeaway from one of the most interesting presentations at the Social Media Marketing 2010 conference in London earlier in June. The presentation from web monitoring company Synthesio presented these four types of brand, showed the nature of conversations about them online and then showed some best practice examples of how such brands can engage online.

Given that we’re a social media agency, and we’ve just published our Social Media Monitoring 2010 review , we were interested by these four types of brand. We certainly recognise some and the types and the characteristics of them. The full presentation is at the bottom of this post, but Synthesio’s four types of brands online are:

1. The Boring Brand

The boring brand does not generate spontaneous interest in it – insurance, home cleaning products and some FMCG brands can typically fall into this category. Whilst there is an average level of buzz about the brand the conversations rarely express positive or negative sentiment, presence online tends to be low and there are few long conversations about the brand.

A great example of where a typically boring brand has been turned around is Compare the Meerkat. You can also often generate interest in these brands by focusing not on the product itself but on other elements of the experience, such as the Keep Britain Biking site for Devitt Insurance.

2. The Functional Brand

Functional brands go beyond the name or image of the brand, the products they represent have to deliver a certain level of service or experience – mobile phone companies or business hotels would be typical examples. These brands have a high volume of buzz, and a relatively high proportion of these are expressing positive or negative sentiment. They also have a high presence in social media, but the conversations still tend to be more descriptive than discursive. There are typically a lot of individual comments about the brand rather than long discussions and debates online.

3. The Exciting Brand

Exciting brands are ones that people desire and that signal much about consumers who buy them. Apple would be a typical brand in this type. These brands generate a lot of buzz, although much of it is neutral in nature (people discussing the brand rather than expressing an opinion either way). The brands have high presence in social media and also tend to attract discussions between people rather than just a lot of individual comments.

The best thing for such brands to do is to find a way to nurture this enthusiasm and these conversations. The best such brands will turn these volume of conversations into positive word of mouth and value for them.

4. The Vital Brand

Vital brands are ones that concern issues you really care about, concerns and needs that are important to you. Health and environmental brands are typically in this category. They attract a lot of buzz online, although this tends not to be overly positive or negative in sentiment. There is a high presence in social media and a very high proportion of comments are discussions between people online rather than just isolated comments.

Do you recognise your brand as being one of these four? Is this a good way of segmenting brands online based on discussions about them?

There is more than you might think in common between designing social media tools and online communities and doing a triathlon. When I first took up triathlon I hadn’t a clue how it worked. I knew it involved three sports, swimming, cycling and running, in that order, but I had no idea of the logistics of transitioning from one to the other: how to set out my gear, the fastest way to transition, what to put on and in what order. It was daunting. So how did I learn? I watched others. The more races I participated in, the more I learnt and the quicker I got. As I progressed I picked up new tips, became more efficient, paired it down to what I needed to know and as a result saw my performance improving.

No longer an observer I was now an active participant.

Social interaction is pretty similar. When you are using social media tools and online communities you’re not sure what to expect, you might think it’s not for you or you may feel nervous about participating. You might start as an observer, taking a look around, see what others are saying. Then you may start to recognise familiar features and design patterns (although you might not necessarily call them this!) and you begin to formulate how you might proceed. It’s only when you find a subject that is of interest to you that you might start to actually engage and begin your social interaction journey.

So how do we make this journey easier for users? With social interaction people are no longer just consuming content they are interacting and creating it. They have a variety of ways they can do this, through blogs, forums, questions and answers, debates, ideas, and competitions. Then there are the numerous ways in which these are presented, take blogs for example, we can show the title, the date of the post, who wrote it, a content teaser (an extract of the main article), an image, social properties, such as the number of views and comments, and social actions, such as rate, comment, share, subscribe, report, like and tweet. Some blogs show all of these, some show only a few – but which are the important ones – how do we give the user enough to show that there is interaction taking place and make them in turn want to interact without swamping them with loads of data so that the user experience is not impaired?

When using and designing these features we need to ensure that the appropriate features are chosen to enable successful engagement.

Today’s Social Media Marketing 2010 conference (search for #smmuk10 on Twitter) was a great mix of theory and case studies, presentations and debates, clients and the odd social media agency. We presented on why ongoing engagement is worth more than buzz and showcased our work in the retail industry with T.M.Lewin and Jimmy Choo.

In the final session of the day, I took part in a panel discussion on trends in social media and the areas where social media marketing will develop in the next 12 to 18 months. The panel debated and sourced ideas and then used the audience to vote for the ideas that the collective wisdom of clients and agencies in the room thought were the important trends to watch. The top three trends are below (and I’m rather pleased that my suggestion about geolocation tools made it to the top spot!)

Trend 1: Geolocation tools and the convergence of online and offline experiences

We’ve written before that we think 2010 is the year of location-based social media tools and geolocation is certainly becoming a much talked about issue at conferences and with clients. At this conference we presented our own case study of CatchAChoo, the trainer-hunt we developed and ran for Jimmy Choo using Foursquare and Twitter. There is also a lot of benefit that businesses can gain from working with Foursquare and other tools as they develop (even small businesses as this case study shows).

Geolocation is an interesting development. There is a much-recounted (but rarely-cited) statistic that says that 80% of all data 0nline has a geolocational element to it. But in most cases this data isn’t used. The steady rise of smart-phones (with their in-built GPS systems) will make this data more useful to users and easier for people to add to. It’s a trend to watch and for brands to capitalise on where relevant for their social media strategy. Geolocation tools are growing, and brands can benefit hugely from them.

Trend 2: Increased focus on ROI

There was a prediction that clients will increasingly focus on (and have to prove) the value or ROI of the work they do in social media. And so they should. Brands should not be using social media unless they have a clear view of what they want to achieve – the business aims that social media can contribute to. And when they start to use social media tools they should be ruthless in their measurement of success. This is critical because it shows that brands are thinking about social media in the right way and for the right reasons. Success and ROI is rarely a measure of how many people ‘Like’ you on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter. Real ROI comes from showing the impact your work has had against real business aims – increased sales, reduced cost of new customer acquisition, new ideas into the business. Real needs, real measures and a real focus on ROI.T

Trend 3: Consumer resistance to brands on social media

An emerging trend, associated to the privacy debate, was thought to be increasing resistance from consumers about brands engaging with them in social media. The real trend here is a need for brands to use social media and engage people in the right way. Trying to engage people in Facebook is often not the right answer. Infact Facebook is a place where people are often talking and sharing with friends and connections and don’t want to be interrupted by a brand. Better to choose the right place to engage in the right way. If not then consumers may start to filter out brands and brand messages and exert more control over their own experiences online.

What are your thoughts on these trends? Is Geolocation the next (or current) big thing?

Starbucks is the most popular brand on Facebook when ranked by the number of people who ‘Like’ a brand (’Fans’ as they used to be called). Over 7.5 million people like the coffee chain on Facebook, almost 2 million more than like the second most popular brand, Coca-Cola.

This data comes from Famecount which ranks brands (and people) based on the number of people who follow, like or friend them in social networks. It shows that food and drink brands are in each of the top five places, with fashion brands making up most of the remaining places in the top ten. Consumers are interested in what these brands are doing, or at least want to flag their interest in the brand or product on their own Facebook profile.

The top ten brands on Facebook (Global)

*Note: figures updated where relevant to be correct as of June 10 2010

Do the number of Facebook Likes matter?

Data like this is great for understanding user behaviour in Facebook. Showing us for which brands, and for which type of brands, users are more likely to click to say that they ‘Like’ it. However, for the brand, does the number of people who like you on Facebook matter? Not always.

The number of people who like you on Facebook is not the most important measure on Facebook. A more powerful measure is the number who engage with the brand. Liking a brand is an easy step and people do it for many reasons. At one end of the engagement spectrum because they want to hear from and exchange ideas with the brand. At the other end of the spectrum because they just want this ‘Like’ recorded as a badge on their Facebook profile. They may have no intention (or indeed desire) to engage at all with the brand.

And it is this engagement number that is of more use for brands. They want people who talk to them, like their posts and images, share their content and are active advocates of the brand. This means more than just ‘Liking’ the brand but doing something with it and engaging more deeply with it in Facebook. For any brand it is typically better for it to have 1 million fans, of which 5% engage with you on a regular basis, than to have 2 million fans with less than 1% engaging.

This number also shows the value of your presence in social media. It can be relatively easy for brands to build large numbers of ‘Likes’. It is less easy to get them to actually do something and to engage with you. But it is when they do that brands get real value.

So Facebook ‘Likes’ are important for brands, but actual engagement is even more important.

When working with the big banks and insurance companies, as they embrace the potential of social media, their adoption of change can be fairly slow. The highly regulated (and risk averse) financial services industry often lacks the appetite to engage in online social conversations and (they could argue) “why do we need to?”. The answer is that, if you don’t, then you get left behind. There are competitors and some new entrants already building a successful social media presence.

As an example of a new entrant, in the banking sector, I’ve been following Zopa for some time. It started in the United Kingdom, and promotes itself as the first marketplace for social lending. This means that members of the Zopa community lend and borrow money with each other, sidestepping traditional banks. The premise is that both lenders and borrowers get better rates, because Social Lending is more efficient than traditional banks, which, with large overheads, must take bigger margins on the money that passes through them.

With over 400,000 members, Zopa appears to have hit upon a successful formula, and one that is now being copied in other countries, such as Prosper in the US, Smava in Germany and Boober in the Netherlands

And because it has empowered their online community, it becomes natural for it to add the social media features that further enhance its proposition, such as frequent blogs and online conversations between its members.

Time will tell whether this business model will be successful and sustainable. But it demonstrates that a new entrant into the marketplace such as Zopa can shake-up an otherwise cautious banking industry, and maybe move them faster towards embracing social media. It’s going to happen – it’s simply a question of when.

Read all our posts about social media for financial services

At FreshNetworks, we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities, marketing and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in May.

1. Social Media Monitoring Tools – 2010 Review (intro)

Introducing the FreshNetworks social media monitoring review 2010, a series of detailed tests and analysis on seven of the leading social media monitoring tools – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. The purpose of the report is to provide an in-depth comparison of buzz tracking tools that accurately depicts their individual pros and cons.

We’ve put the tools to the test by tracking well-known international coffee company Starbucks. We compared over 19,000 online conversations, giving us some really unexpected results and highlighting some staggering differences in the way each tool performs.

2. 20 Social media speakers and experts

We’ve spoken at more social media conferences and events in the last three months than in the first three years of FreshNetworks’ existence. One of the benefits of all the talking has been the opportunity to listen to other social media speakers and experts.

We were asked to recommend a few social media speakers for events (particularly in London and the UK), so thought it might be useful to note down  some of the people who have recently impressed us and why.

3. Social media monitoring review 2010: Test 1 results

The second post from our Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series. In it we give an insight into how we have set up the comparison of the seven tools (which in itself proved rather a challenge) and the volume of online conversations that each social media monitoring tool was able to uncover. And even at this top level, it’s clear the tools are each doing something quite different…

4. Russia: the fourth largest social networking market in Europe

In a post from last year we look at data showing that Russia was the fourth largest market in Europe for social networks behind the UK, Germany and France.

5. Social media + online shopping = social shopping

Social shopping can benefit retailers in several ways, especially if it is integrated with a wider online sales strategy. In this post we look at some examples that were then built on in our social media and retail breakfast briefing.

Sentiment analysis is a complex beast. Even for humans. Consider this statement: “The hotel room is on the ground floor right by the reception”. Is that neutral, or is it positive or negative? Well the answer is probably that it is different things to different people. If you want a high room with a view away from the noise or reception the review is negative. If have mobility issues and need a room with easy access it is positive. And for many people it would just be information and so neutral. Sentiment analysis is difficult even in human analysts in ambiguous or more complex situations. For social media monitoring tools it is also complicated and not always as simple or as clear-cut as we might like or expect.

As part of our review of social media monitoring tools we compared their automated sentiment analysis with the findings of a human analyst, looking at seven of the leading social media monitoring tools – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. And the outcome suggests that automated sentiment analysis cannot be trusted to accurately reflect and report on the sentiment of conversations online.

Understanding where automated sentiment analysis fails

On aggregate, automated sentiment analysis looks good with accuracy levels of between 70% and 80% which compares very favourably with the levels of accuracy we would expect from a human analyst. However this masks what is really going on here. In our test case on the Starbucks brand, approximately 80% of all comments we found were neutral in nature. They were mere statements of fact or information, not expressing either positivity or negativity. This volume is common to many brands and terms we have analysed we would typically expect that the majority of discussions online are neutral. These discussions are typically of less interest to a brand that wants to make a decision or perform an action on the basis of what is being said online. For brands the positive and negative conversations are of most importance and it is here that automated sentiment analysis really fails.

No tool consistently distinguishes between positive and negative conversations

When you remove the neutral statements, automated tools typically analyse sentiment incorrectly. In our tests when comparing with a human analyst, the tools were typically about 30% accurate at deciding if a statement was positive or negative. In one case the accuracy was as low as 7% and the best tool was still only 48% accurate when compared to a human. For any brand looking to use social media monitoring to help them interact with and respond to positive or negative comments this is disastrous. More often than not, a positive comment will be classified as negative or vice-versa. In fact no tool managed to get all the positive statements correctly classified. And no tool got all the negative statements right either.

Why this failing matters to brands

This real failing of automated sentiment analysis can cause real problems for brands, especially if they are basing any internal workflow or processes on the basis of your social media monitoring. For example, imagine that you send all your negative conversations to your Customer Care team to respond to where relevant. If two-thirds (or maybe more) of the ‘negative’ conversations sent over are actually positive then this process starts to break down. Perhaps more importantly, a lot of the negative conversations will never make it to the Customer Care team in the first place (having been incorrectly classified as positive). Unhappy customers don’t get routed to the right people and don’t get their problems dealt with. The complete opposite of why many of our clients want to use social media monitoring in the first place.

So what can we do

As with any test, our experiment with the Starbucks brand won’t necessarily reflect findings for every brand and term monitored online. Our test was for a relatively short time period and we only put a randomised, but relatively representative, sample of conversations through human analysis. However, even with these limitations, we were surprised by the very high level of inaccuracy shown by the social media monitoring tools investigated. For businesses looking to make decisions or perform actions on the basis of a conversation being positive or negative this is potentially quite dangerous.

Of course there is much that can be done here and over time the tools can be trained to learn and to improve how they assess conversations about a given brand. But the overall message remains: automated sentiment analysis fails in its role of helping brands to make real decisions and to react to conversations about it online.

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010.

British Airways cabin crew are on strike for the second of what could be a number of strikes this year. Last minute talks were taking place over the weekend until they broke up. And BA CEO, Willie Walsh, is blaming the collapse of the talks on Twitter. Or more specifically on the Tweets of Derek Simpson, the boss of Unite the Union, the trade union representing the cabin crew, sent whilst the negotiations were happening. These formed something of a running commentary of proceedings, with messages such as “Talks still ongoing …. Still hard going and progress hard won”, “Arguments over the 8 sacked workers” and “Fear of more sackings to come”.

Hardly the most revealing and confidential of information, but enough to frustrate Willy Walsh who, in his words:

[...] was shocked and angry when I found out that Derek was doing that. Sending out his version of events to the wider audience, that really did undermine my confidence in his desire to resolve this situation. It is a really serious issue.

The Tweets also seem to have caused disagreement among members of Simpson’s own Union. They served to broadcast not only what was being said (or at least one side of that story) but perhaps more importantly the location of the talks between the two parties. This led to militant protesters storming the talks later in the day, them being abandoned and the strike going ahead.

All because of a Tweet. Or perhaps, more accurately, all a consequence in part of this great example of hypertransparency.

One of the real benefits of social media tools is that they let us connect with people who share a similar interest and tell our story, share our ideas and ask questions. Twitter is a great tool that lets us reflect on and share stories about what is happening to us, what we have seen, what we think or what we find interesting. These stories are shared with anybody interested in reading them and in real time. These stories can also carry information such as the location from which they were sent.

What these social media tools lead to is a change in behaviour and communications. We share more, with more people and do so more quickly than ever before. Previously, a meeting such as this would have ended and each party released a press release giving their side of events. This release would have been written and issued after talks had ended and allow the author to reflect on the full process of talks and on the eventual outcome, and then convey this to their audience. This type of communication is reflective and allows a message to be refined and developed based on a series of discussions and decisions. Twitter is very different. It allows you to send snapshots of opinions at a point in time. Not after talks have concluded or after any decisions have been made.

This is a very different type of communication and a very different tool in the hands of people in the meeting. It means you can share an opinion formed on the basis of just a few moments of discussion. You can rely one side of a story or you can react strongly to something somebody says quickly but is then forgotten. Your messages out to the external world, those not privy to the full flow of discussion, will be difficult to interpret and evaluate as anything but a reflection on the meeting, the discussions and the potential decisions. This is a kind of hypertransparency – a powerful tool for the person sending the messages but also a difficult one. You have to think about your audience, what they will read and if they will understand what you are saying and sharing in your sporadic messages from an event. The chances are it will be difficult to portray the discussions and to share what is going on fairly of consistently. And this poses problems.

Simpson showed a great example of hypertransparency. On one hand what he was doing could be seen as a positive thing. He was sharing events in the negotiation room with members of his Union, keeping them up-to-date. Of course the reality is that his messages could only provoke a response that may not fully reflect the flow of discussion throughout the session.

So was Simpson right to send them? Hypertransparency is a dangerous thing but a growing trend. It requires the person sharing their stories to fully understand what they were doing and this new communications medium. But overall it was probably for other reasons that Simpson’s sharing on Twitter was misplaced. Sharing without the knowledge of the other people in the room could only serve to frustrate and to alienate the people he was quoting. They were playing by one set of rules (the traditional ones) and he was playing with hypertransparency. It’s not surprising they were annoyed when they found out what he was doing.

I have just typed “How do I” in Google today, and the fourth suggestion that it proposes is “…delete my Facebook account.”

There’s clearly some discontent out there. What’s the cause of these rumblings? Well, it was reported last week that there has been a significant review of security policy at Facebook HQ. Facebook user profiles are publicly accessible by default, and it seems that a growing number of commentators such as Jason Calacanis, chief executive of the question-and-answer website Malaho, are calling for a boycott of what is now a “not trustworthy” site.

And yet, this is against the backdrop that Facebook will shortly announce over 500 million users, and that’s 40% of everybody on the internet.

So, the dichotomy for businesses that have online security as a top priority, such as in the financial services or pharmaceutical industries for example, is how they should engage in social media when Facebook, the most popular of social media tools, is so open. And this question is always most loudly voiced in the Boardroom of the banks and insurers, where the decision-makers for a social media strategy will be immediate detractors because they consider the simple equation is “Social Media = Facebook”, and they can see no further!

The important resolve at the Boardroom must be that the social media strategies for banks and insurance companies should not focus upon social media tools. Instead, the message for the Boardroom is that the best uses of social media will demonstrate that it can yield amazing results without compromising security or the confidence of your customers. And to achieve this it can be better to think of more creative ways to engage people. We’ll be looking at some of these in the coming weeks.

Read all our posts about social media for financial services

Social Media Hub and Spoke

We’ve always had strong views about the best ways for companies to get value from social media.

We’ve battled against the consensus view: only fish where the fish are swimming. We’ve campaigned for recognition that people operate in different modes in different social spaces (online communities vs social networks) and as a result have always pushed the concept of an integrated social media Hub-and-Spoke model.

That’s why I was delighted to read Jeremiah Owyang’s latest post and see his excellent slide show about integrating social tools within your website.

Enjoy: