FreshNetworks Blog

I’m four days into my visit to the Web Mission 09 conference, and things just keep getting better! Today we went to ‘Plug and Play’ – a business incubator based in Silicon Valley. For those of you that haven’t heard of business incubators, they’re basically offices that host and nurture young start ups. There is nothing like it in the UK, and seeing one in action was a great opportunity for those of us based in Europe. Plug and Play has three locations in California; we visited the main site in Silicon Valley, which hosts up to 50 start ups. I can say without any hesitation that for those starting-up this seems to be the perfect way to fast track your development, raise funds, make connections, and ultimately create a successful business.

Being based in The Valley obviously increases your chances of succeeding, and Plug and Play provides loads of services and support to those who have come here. We were talked through these offerings by Saeed Amini, the larger-than-life President of Plug and Play, who before Plug and Play built up ALPS into a $150M water bottling business. Having found his own success, he founded Plug and Play to help other aspiring entrepreneurs and start-ups track their success. Judging from what I saw, he’s created a great facility that will do just that.

If you’re wondering how to get involved – it’s pretty straight forward. For 3 months rent at the facility, you get:

• Loads of business connections
• Up to 30 meetings in that time
• 2 networking events a week
• Licensing, partnerships or M&A with the corporate partners
• Introductions to VCs
• Advice from entrepreneurs in residence
• Data
• IT consulting

Plug and Play is reaching out to European companies at the moment to provide them with a greater chance of succeeding in the US. Europeans can come over on a work visa for one or two years, or on a business development tour for a few months as long as you’re not getting paid. Alternatively, once you have a company established in the UK for 12 months, you can get an L1 to work here.

Still hesitating? Just think about the community of 220 start-ups that did and increased their chance of success three times over; and don’t’ forget the $700M that has been raised so far. Sixteen of the firms have also been invested in by Saeed himself. On average, 5 start ups are funded a month, there are 60 own investments and over 100 individual angel start ups – so you’d be in good company.

With that bit of inspiration behind me i’m gearing up to head to the Web 2.0 Expo tomorrow where it’ll be social media and more social media. Can’t wait to chat to more people about the FreshNetworks take on the many benefits of online communities. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.

I was the expert blogger in this week’s edition of Management Today on innovation in business. Having written about the Nielsen Global Faces and Networked Places report earlier this week, I decided to build on this post about how social networks and online communities are more popular than email.

The report from Nielsen clearly highlights the growth in consumer use of social media – it is now visited more regularly than email with one out of eleven minutes worldwide (one in every six minutes in the UK) spent on these sites. This is for structural and behavioural reasons – people using different sites for different purposes, and people using social networks and online communities to find and connect with people rather than just sending mail – but what can business learn from this change in consumer behaviour. Well, probably a lot. As I write in the Management Today article:

When I speak at marketing conferences, I like to ask the audience whether they spend more on email marketing or on social media. The answer is almost always email, and this is a shame. Not only are social networks and online communities increasingly part of everyday life, they can also be a better way of engaging customers. Email is very much in the ‘push’ marketing category, while online communities and social networks engage people. Most importantly, they encourage peer-to-peer marketing, which we know people trust more than messages from any brand.

In the current economic climate, businesses should innovate to stay ahead of their competition. This is a great time for trying new things and an even better time for adapting and changing the way we behave to better meet what our customers want and what our customers do. They are using social media more than email and doing thanks to both changes in technology and changes in their own behaviour. We should adapt our own approach to marketing to and engaging with customers to capitalise on this change

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Some more reading

• Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses (freshnetworks.com)
• Social Networking Surpasses Email Popularity (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Social Networking and Blogs Surpass Email in Popularity (searchenginewatch.com)
• Social Networking – No Longer Just For The Kids (collaboratemarketing.com)
• The global reach of member communities (social media) (thisisherd.com)

We’ve posted in the past about the use of social media in Russia, when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev launched a video blog. But data from TNS shows that use of social media and social networking in the country is widespread, making it the fourth largest market in Europe for social networking behind the UK, Germany and France. The January Web Index for TNS shows that two leading social networks in Russia are witnessing the kind of acceleration in growth that we have seen in other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

One of the main social networks in Russia, Odnoklassniki (Одноклассники) is reporting 30 million registered users. The site, which (as the name suggests) connects classmates is used in both Russia and the Ukraine and attracts 8 million visitors each day. VKontakte (В контакте) is Odnoklassniki’s biggest competitor with a reported 28 million registered users and 1.4 billion page views each day and 13.09 million visitors each month.

These statistics are impressive and firmly place Russia as the fourth biggest market in Europe for social networking. The total number of users of both of these sites is remarkable given that in 2008, Russia’s overall internet population was reported to be just 33 million people. It is true that internet access is increasing rapidly in Russia, and the growth of social networks is accompanying this. When people go online for the first time they appear to be joining and using social networks almost immediately.

This behaviour teaches us much about innovation in online uses. Many people talk about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and the progression there has been from one to the other. For those regions with the fastest growth in internet access, such distinctions become less useful. For these newly connected individuals, they only know one version of the Web. One that includes social networks, social media and online communities. For them it’s less that the internet has changed and they can now do new things, but more that they’ve always been able to connect, share, discuss and meet people online. It’s in these markets that I would expect to see some of the biggest innovations in online use, and the Russian social networking market is certainly one to watch.

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Some more reading

• Russian Social Network Comes Up with a Very Creative Approach to Competition (profy.com)
• International Users Not Only Exist, They Are Also Willing to Pay (profy.com)
• Odnoklassniki.ru Shows New Ways To Monetize Social Networks
• vkontakte.ru впервые обогнал odnoklassniki.ru по посещаемости
• Контакт с аудиторией

My young niece got a great set of books for Christmas – reprints of books from a 1970’s series of books for children called How it works…. My favourite is the book on the Computer as it shows us quite how far we’ve come in such a short period of time. Just take a look at this picture of a ‘Small digital computer designed for the businessman’.

The changes that have happened in technology are striking, we’ve been through a real revolution in my lifetime and continue to do so. Sometimes these bigger, more substantive changes can get lost, hidden behind (albeit useful) debates on whether changes will happen in the way we use Twitter in 2009, and suchlike.

So this week, the recommended reading at FreshNetworks is a great video over at Picol on the History of the Internet. It’s easy to forget the changes that have taken place and how we have moved forward at such a rate since the 1950s. When we talk about social media, online communities or any use that we make of the Internet, it is good to remember how we got where we are. This video is a great reminder.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

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Some more reading

• The History of the Internet
• Spring Cleaning in Social Media
• Let’s Stop Swooning Over Social Media
• Another example of good use of video in online communities

For the final in our series of Five things to do in 2009, I thought we’d go back to basics. Today we’re going to look at five ways you can engage your customers in 2009. One of the real benefits for brands of using social media or of building an online community, is that it can build sustainable engagement with your customers. Here are five ways to get this engagement.

1. Be active about asking your customers for their opinion

Too often firms don’t ask customers what they think. They may give ways for them to contact the brand, tell them their opinions or call them with compliments or complaints. But this is all very passive. Brands need to be actively asking their customers what they think. You need to go to them, not the other way round. For the customer, being asked what they think makes them feel special, part of our organisation and valued. A simple task such as calling your ten top clients in the first week in January will give you new insights into what you are doing right (and wrong) and will make ten more loyal customers. You then need to think about how you do this long term and on a much larger basis.

2. Make it easy for customers to complain

There are many ways that customers can raise their complaints about you and your products. They can tell you directly, post their thoughts on their blog, write to a newspaper, talk to all their friends…the options are endless. As a brand you should be able to feel in control of these complaints. Nobody likes to hear that their customers are unhappy, but it is much better for them to do this in a space where you have right or reply and you can even learn from these complaints. If you don’t provide a way for people to complain they will still do it, except you won’t know where and won’t be able to respond.

3. When you ask your customers something, make sure you respond

There’s nothing worse than being asked for your opinion and then not hearing what people think about it or if they are going to do anything having heard it. When you ask customers questions, or ask them to complain you must respond. Closing the feedback loop will make them feel valued and make them realise that you are actually listening to what they are saying. This will encourage them to continue to engage with you and, by knowing what and how you think, it will make their contributions more focused and productive from your perspective.

4. Deal with customers in public

Only some of your customers are going to want to talk to you and give you their opinions, and an even smaller proportion are going to want to complain. But all of your customers will want to know that you are an organisation that listens and responds. They want to know that if they were to have an idea or some feedback, that you would take it on board; and if they were to have a complaint that you would deal with it. There is a huge benefit to engaging with your customers openly and in public. If they can see you resolving a customers problem they will have greater respect for you as a business that cares about it’s customers. If they see you giving feedback they will know that you’re an organisation that listens to and focuses on the needs of its customers. Respond, and respond publicly; this is where an online community can really pay dividends.

5. Realise that engagement is not a campaign

Unlike other activities, engaging your customers cannot be run as a campaign. It is not about creating a number of advocates for a product launch or about having a conversation with some of your customers for two months. Engagement needs to be ongoing; sustained and sustainable. Once you start to listen to and close the feedback with your customers you must keep doing this. Of course, the benefits you get will be vast and wide-ranging, so most brands won’t want to stop engaging!

Read all of our Five Things to Do in 2009 posts

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Some more reading

• Criticism Is Good
• Big questions for social media strategy
• Success Beckons the Social Media-Driven Enterprise
• Five things your brand should ask about social media in 2009

It’s almost Christmas, and for  the penultimate in our Five things to do in 2009 series, I wanted to focus on one specific use brands can make of social media: online research communities. Of the communities we build and manage at FreshNetworks, many are specifically built for research. Even those that are not usually end up offering valuable insight into what consumers think. This insight is something every brand can benefit from, so today here are Five ways to use an online research community in 2009.

1. Get customers involved in your business

It’s often said that the cleverest people don’t work for you. And it’s certainly true that customers and consumers are likely to have quite extensive experience of your products, and how they are actually used. If you want to test a new idea, find out how people are using your product or find out about how you are different to your competitors, then the best way can be to ask these people who know best. An online research community can act as a customer voice and empower internal teams with customer input and insight. If you have a question, however small it may seem, you can get feedback from your online research community, often overnight, and be able to represent the customer inside your business.

2. Innovate with your customers

We’ve posted before about the power of co-creation and of innovating with your customers. An online research community can be a great way of both getting new ideas organically, and of working with your customers on innovation and co-creation. The format means that you can have ongoing discussions with them and involve them throughout the innovation process, rather than just testing ideas at specific stages. Bringing together internal experts and others with your customers can also have a powerful outcome, and in our experience always brings to your brand ideas you might never have thought of before.

3. Find out how your customers interact

Traditional market research has often considered the customer as a respondent – an isolated being who can answer questions about their habits and behaviours. This is a false construct and misses the most important aspect of any market decision – the social context. It is difficult to truly understand the ‘why’ of market research using traditional methods – we  know what people do and think but not why. All we can usually do is ask them what they think the why is. With an online research community it is easier to observe the conversations people have, how they discuss your product or competitor products. How do they advise other people, how do they explain their decisions and opinions, what do they choose to discuss. Answers to all these questions can come from observing what they do and how they talk to their peers. Just watching your online research community can sometimes be an enlightening thing to do.

4. Learn the language your customers use

Too many brands and products are hindered by the language that is used to describe it. We often find that customers use a very different vocabulary to the one that brands use. This can be very difficult to explore and understand using traditional methods. It’s only in an online research community can you analyse and draw insight from the language people use. And then you can ask them why they use this language and not the one that you do. Perhaps the most powerful finding from one of our online research communities this year was that a global telecoms firm was talking about its product in a way none of it’s customers understood.

5. Find answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask

Traditional market research offers great ways to find answers to questions. It’s less good at getting answers to those questions you never thought to ask in the first place. By building a community of customers and then using this for research and insight you will generate organic discussions and debates alongside any activities you run. These discussions will let you understand what your customers talk to each other about, what they really think about your product and how they really talk about. You will be able to see what matters to them most and what they think about it. And most importantly they will ask questions. A well managed online community will see community members generating ideas and debates with each other. If you are using this community for research then you will be able to benefit from these questions, and the answers others give. You’ll know the answer to things that are important to your customers, but that you probably never thought to ask

Read all of our Five Things to Do in 2009 posts

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Some more reading

• Want to improve your community in 2009? Ask your members.
• How to build an online research community: a podcast
• How the market research industry should embrace communities
• What can you do today that can empower your customer using social media?
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community

As Josiah Bartlet in the West Wing once said “This time of the year there should be a hot line you can call with questions about cooking turkey. A special 800 number where the phones are staffed by experts”. There have been many comparisons drawn between the Bartlett administration on our screens and the potential Obama administration that comes into power next year. But with Obama’s use of social media (stories of him abandoning his BlackBerry aside) I would imagine he wouldn’t be calling for a hot line, but for texts, blogs and online communities. It turns out Butterball beat him to it.

Living in the UK, I’ve never used the Butterball ‘Turkey Talk-line’. In fact I learnt about it first from that episode of the West Wing. But I know that what they offer is a resource for people to ring and get advice on how to cook their Thanksgiving turkey. this year they’re trying something different. Rather than just having a team of 50 experts to answer calls from some 100,000 novice chefs each year, they have started to use social media to get their advice across.

This year, they’re using blogging and ‘Turkey Texts’ to get their advice across. When they started the service in the early 1980’s, the phone was the best way of getting in touch with their target audience. Now that’s no longer the place. The means through which we communicate have changed, and also the way that we connect. We no longer just look to experts, but also to getting advice from ‘people like me’ – those who are going through the same problems at the same time. Using social media, Butterball can build on each of these trends. Consumers can now  sign up for text messages, reminding them when to take their turkey out to thaw and advising them on the temperature and time needed to cook their bird. They can read blogs from experts, participate in live chats and watch how-to videos.

I’m quite impressed with this as an example of how social media can really enhance the user’s experience. Whereas previously you had to call and get advice once, you can keep going back to the website on multiple occasions, in your own time. This builds a stronger bond with the brand – they move from people the people who gave you advice once, to the people who gave you the resource to help yourself on an ongoing basis. This is the crux of what can make an online community really work. Identifying the ways in which you can extend and enhance a consumer’s brand experience. Work out how you can help them, how you can attract them to your site more frequently and for longer, and you will gain great brand exposure, loyalty and advocacy. So good news all round.

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Some more reading

• Butterball and Gather Host Thanksgiving Web Chat and Recipe Contest
• Butterball Goes Web 2.0 With Turkey Texts, Blogs
• A New Tradition: Butterball Launches Blogs, Text Message Advice For Turkey Day

We’ve written a lot in the past about co-creation, from Mass Customisation to Community Product Design. In some of the more devloped examples of co-creating with customers crowdsourcing is common – getting feedback and ideas from customers, the people who know your product best.

The online communities that we build and manage at FreshNetworks make use of crowd-sourcing for innovation and insight. We use them to help clients create better experiences when on holiday, or to come up with ways of marketing a product better. Other brands are also making use of their crowd – from Oxfam looking for a new slogan to Starbucks wanting to improve its product – it’s a technique that is being used more and more, possibly because social media now gives us the tools and the audience to do it easily.

An article in today’s Guardian (The customer knows best) looks at how crowdsourcing is being used by brands (and has an interview with our CEO Charlie). As the article points out, getting ideas and feedback from users is not new (they cite the example of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19th century) but social media tools and, more importantly, their growth and common acceptance, is making it easier and quicker to seek ideas and opinions from customers. It’s also making it easier for smaller businesses to capitalise upon the power the crowd can bring. As the Guardian notes:

The evidence from Starbucks and P&G shows that some of the world’s biggest companies can easily engage a crowd. Smaller businesses, naturally, find it much harder to source an army of volunteers, let alone get them to engage with their brand. Recently, however, a relaunched service from Amazon – a pioneer of customer generated reviews – is creating a market that might be able connect the two. Companies subscribed to its Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) service can post simple tasks, such as image tagging, data collection, basic market research and product comparison, and offer to pay potential click-workers a few pence to complete them.

This is a real sign that crowdsourcing is becoming both more available and more widely accepted – more business (big and small) can make more use of their customers in this way.

Of course opening up your business to ideas and comments can throw up challenges – what happens if you get negativity as well as those positive useful comments we all expect. This is of course true, but as  Charlie is quoted as saying in the article:

…some companies are “definitely nervous” about this new, more open form of business, especially in terms of “opening themselves up to positive and negative criticism online and encouraging debate with their customers who aren’t happy.” He says that the evidence is to the contrary. In his experience, most people who participate online want to be positive

Crowdsourcing offers real benefits to businesses large and small and the evidence is that more and more people are experimenting with it. We expect that this kind of engagement will become even more mainstream in the coming year and even that pretty soon customers will expect to engage in this way.

Some more reading

• Lessons in community from community editors #3: Andrew Rogers, RBI
• Poptent.net – Crowdsourcing Video Platform
• Solving real world problems through online social networks
• Mechanical Turk Targets Small Business

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Oxfam crowdsources new slogan

Oxfam is looking for a new slogan. They want a poster for their Be Humankind campaign and rather than commissioning an agency to do this, they’re asking us to do it for them.

The concept is simple – you can write a slogan directly onto a billboard on their site, and then submit this as an idea. The best 14 ideas will be displayed on digital billboards around London for a day each over a two week period from next Monday.

Letting people write your copy for you can be a difficult decision for brands. Most spend a lot of time and effort working on their branding, the tone of language they use and even testing slogans. But Oxfam are not worried about this. Speaking in a Guardian article earlier this week, Nick Fulcher, Brand Manager at Oxfam, says that:

We wouldn’t do it if we didn’t feel comfortable that we’d get some great stuff

Let’s just hope they do.

So what can we learn from this?

This is a great example of something we have written about a fair bit recently: co-creation. In fact, this is an example of what we call Community product design.

The interesting aspect of this campaign is that much of the discussion it has generated this week is about how difficult it can be to write slogans and there is much interest in what the content of the slogans will be and how this will fit with the brand. For me the real issue here is not about the slogans but about the process. In fact I don’t think this campaign is really about generating slogans at all, and the success of the words that actually make it onto the billboard next week will not be judged by the words themselves.

This is actually a great example of how to engage and involve people beyond their normal brand activities. The real purpose of this campaign is to find new ways of engaging new people in the  brand and, in Oxfam’s case, the issue. The use of social media in this way will generate a lot of word-of-mouth as people talk about it online and offline (an example of which being this post). People will be prompted to find out more about Oxfam and about the Be Humankind campaign long before the slogans appear on those billboards across London.

There is a real benefit to brands of innovating in this way and of using social media to co-create. We use innovation tools a lot in the online communities we build for brands at FreshNetworks, and the results can always be useful. The real engagement built, the word-of-mouth for the brand and of course the very ideas themselves. I’ll be looking out for the Oxfam slogans next week, but I suspect the success of this campaign is already known.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

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Some more reading

• You can change the world with Oxfam

Okay, so it’s been a tricky week so far for businesses round the world. I knew it was bad when the chatter  around the coffee machine in our office on Tuesday morning wasn’t about something that was on TV last night, or about something going on in the office. It was about how they were going to face the current economic downturn. From banks failing and being taken over by the state, to falling retail spend and even reports that Britons are raiding their piggy banks, there’s only one thing on people’s minds this week

And at times like this it is interesting to see how businesses react and respond. Of course, there are the counter-cyclical industries (lawyers, accountants, take-away food, bunk beds…) but how do the rest plan and build a strategy in times like this?

For most businesses there are probably two pieces of advice:

1. Make sure you are close to your customers and that they are close to you. It should be your brand they think about when they do want to make a purchase and you should be aware of what they think and how their habits are changing.
2. Innovate to stay ahead of the game. A crisis is a great time to innovate – you have to think of ways of staying ahead of the competition, of being more efficient or of new products that you can offer. It’s true of war-time, where many of the best innovations (from the pie-chart to nylon) originate; and it’s true of business during challenging economic times.

So how do you innovate at a time like this? Well we want to innovate to mean that we continue to attract customers and meet their changing needs. We want to make sure our products are meeting essential needs and are of benefit to them. And if possible we want to make sure that we are more efficient in the way we do this so that our own costs can be controlled.

What is common across all of these aims is the need to better focus on the customer and what the customer wants. That’s why the best innovation during these times will be customer-led innovation. Rather than asking questions of customers and then going away and coming-up with ideas to meet what you find (customer-centred innovation), it’s about co-creation and really working with your customers innovate and have new ideas.

So how do you let the customer lead your innovation process? Well there are probably a few things all organisations can do:

1. Call ten of your customers from the last six months and ask them what you could do better – they’ll appreciate the personal touch and you will start to get some ideas
2. Bring together a group of customers (either offline or online) to co-create and share ideas based on specific areas you think you could improve. This will help you generate some ideas to contribute to specific areas you’ve already identified
3. Bring together a group of customers (and perhaps non-customers) in an online community where they can co-create, share ideas and innovate with you over a much longer time-scale.

This latter suggestion will be most effective in terms of identifying those innovations that are most likely to help you face the economic downturn. The benefit we see at FreshNetworks of building online innovation communities is that you get ideas in areas you had never thought of before. We’ve helped clients to reposition their product and even to just talk about it in different ways, using the language their customers use. Real customer-led innovation will shock and surprise you, because it’ll be the thing you haven’t thought of before. But in the current climate, it’s these new and effective ideas that you need.

Some more reading

• What Does the Financial Crisis Mean for Innovation? Xconomists Weigh In
• Financial crisis: The tech innovations at risk