FreshNetworks Blog

Enterprise rent-a-car have a legendary reputation for customer service. What I didn’t realise is just how large a role market research played in helping them grow and maintain that reputation.

Last year I attended an excellent conference – Wavelength 100.  I guess it’s a UK version of TED, their stated aim being to connect “visionary companies making a difference in the world through business”.

The delegates and speakers were a fascinating mix. In my first session I struck up a conversation with Peder Kolind who I happened to be next to. It turned out that having set up one of the world’s largest security firms he sold up to kick off six philanthropic projects in Nicaragua. Later, at lunch, I found myself sitting between Martin Narey who used to run the prison service and is now CEO of Barnados and Mark Addlestone who runs Beaverbrooks the jeweller – a family business that has been in the top 10 of the Times and FT Best Companies to Work for lists for four years in a row.

It was one of those days where you couldn’t help but feel in awe of your surroundings and rather small by comparison.

Anyway, the conference was excellent. I didn’t get to see all the sessions so I have been catching up on those I missed buy listening to their podcasts – which you can find on iTunes under “Wavelength 100 Listen Again“. Last night I had the pleasure of listening to Donna Miller, HR Director Europe at Enterprise-Rent-a-Car.

It’s a fascinating story.  Enterprise was founded in 1957 by Jack Taylor. Given that one of my other businesses is the recruitment consultancy, FreshMinds Talent, I knew about their policy of hiring graduates and investing deeply in their development. What I did not know about was how they had developed their customer satisfaction research over time.

Donna talks about how the firm came to realise the old truism: what is measured is done. She explains the evolution of a simple set of research questions around customer satisfaction and the importance attributed to the results of these surveys. At Enterprise, you can’t get a promotion unless your customers rate your service as excellent. That rule works all the way to the top of this $9Bn company. So even if you’re running a huge team across many sites and producing great profits, you’re promotion is still bound by your customer satisfaction scores.

Well worth a listen. And if you go to iTunes to get the Enterprise podcast, I also recommend:

- MyC4 – a superb social enterprise where anyone can loan money to African SMEs to help them invest and grow. You can start with just £5. It’s also an example of online community building for charities

- Southwest Airlines – a firm renowned for their outstanding people management. it has a very strong internal sense of community

- Middelfart Sparekasse – Hans shares a few fascinating stories about how this Danish Building Society has developed a strong community feeling and incredibly loyal workforce

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Some more reading

• Customer Service Is Public Relations (davefleet.com)
• Voice of the Customer: Service Based Differentiation Matters (seomashup.blogspot.com)

Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr

An article in today’s Daily Telegraph in London (Networking site cashes in on friends) reports that Facebook has plans to monetise in a way that it has been unable to do to date. It’s not advertising or charging for premium services. Rather Facebook is going to get it’s money from a rather more prosaic source: the market research industry.

The social network is trialling features that would allow firms to survey its 150 million members to find out their thoughts on their product or market, get insight into their lives or test new concepts with them. In fact they could test just about anything they wanted. And given the fact that Facebook collects vast volumes of profiling information, they would allow this research to be targeted based on location, gender, age, and just about anything.

The company has been demonstrating the benefits of its new polling feature (called Egnagement Ads) over the last week to some of the most influential business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It asked a range of questions to Facebook members and were able to feed responses back to those at the Forum pretty much in real time. Engagement Ads are also being trialled at the moment by two firms: CareerBuilder, a global graduate recruitment firm, and AT&T.

As Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s global markets director, said to the Telegraph:

I had tonnes of people saying ‘this could be so incredible for our business’. It takes a very long time to do a focus group, and businesses often don’t have the luxury of time. I think they liked the instant responses.

We’ve written before on this blog about why Facebook really can’t be your online research community. Facebook, and indeed other social networks, isn’t suited to getting the depth of qualitative information that you can get from an online research community. As we wrote at the time:

It’s only in a research community that you can really make sure you get the most out of the discussions and debates [...] do you have right of response and an ability to enter into an equal discussion with other members [...] can you build and analyse the profiling data you get from the members and the vast backlog of their contributions and opinions [and] do you have a set of members who are their to engage and interact directly with the brand and there to support you

Perhaps what Engagement Ads more closely represents is a large online research panel. With firms able to buy questions and target a particular set of respondents based on their screening criteria. Even here, there are some concerns about Facebook. Panel providers spend a lot of time screening participants. They hold the same data on every participant and are therefore able to screen respondents fairly and comprehensively. The problem with Facebook is that it just does not collect data in the same way. As a member, I can opt what data I give them. I don’t have to tell them my age, my location or even my gender. So if somebody wanted to poll men aged 25-34 in London, England, Facebook might not approach me, even though I fulfill all those criteria. Respondents are therefore biased towards those who are willing to reveal this profiling data, rather than being a fair and random sample.

But of course, Facebook has a significant advantage. Size. With 150 million members, spread across the globe, it doesn’t matter if a proportion (even a large proportion) havent’ filled in their profiling information and so are excluded from the sample. There will be more than enough respondents available to get the responses they need. And to get them quickly.

So if Facebook is to use Engagement Ads as a market research tool then it won’t be tuning into an online research community. It won’t even compete fully with online panel providers. But it will offer something new to the market – a vast, rapid-response and (potentially) relatively cheap way of testing opinion and getting a flavour of what people think. For more depth of insight, however, firms are probably going to have to look to other sources.

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Some more reading

• Facebook’s Monetization Plan? Polls. And Lots Of Them (mashable.com)
• Facebook offers up users as marketing tool (guardian.co.uk)
• Facebook begins testing ad-driven polls (venturebeat.com)
• Facebook Polls Bring Reality To Davos Elite (ajax-blog.com)
• Mark Zuckerberg, WEF, and the Sentiment Engine (allfacebook.com)
• Not in Davos? Get Your Opinion Heard, Via Facebook (mashable.com)
• Facebook (NOT) Rolling Out New Product Research Service (Updated) (allfacebook.com)
• Facebook is NO ‘Market Research tool’ ! Telegraph misinterprets FB (techpluto.com)
• Newsflash: Facebook Not “Cashing In On Friends” (ajax-blog.com)

Our last post in our series on getting insight from online communities looked at the benefit you can get from photo uploads. We are going to stay with this area today but look at how you can maximise the insight benefits you get from photos (and indeed from other media) by running specific photo-based activities, by encouraging comments, ratings and responses to photos.

Online communities can sometimes be daunting when people join for the first time, or when we allow them to do new things or promote new features. People need to be shown what to do, they need to be encouraged. That’s one of the reasons we believe in promoting community management – a good community manager is part of the community and can help to introduce new features and parts of the site, and to encourage activity.

A great way of encouraging participation on the community and focusing so that it is of use to you is to run activities. Many communities have galleries, with no focus or direction to what photos should be uploaded, those that are better are those that are:

1. clear about why you should upload a photograph
2. include some element of activity or competition-based incentive (such as “over the next month we want you all to upload a picture of your favourite room in your house”)
3. allow rating and comments – not everybody will want to upload a photograph but they may want to comment on those already there, and others may just want to rate their favourite photos (or indeed, the ones they like least)
4. include tagging – allowing users to tag and sort photos will mean that they organise your galleries for you and make it easier to find content and related items

These steps are best as part of a concerted effort to increase photo-activity on your online community and will work best if you focus attention and encourage photos for a particular purpose or on a particular issue. People will know what they’re doing and why they’re uploading photos and then comment, rate, respond and organise them for you.

You’ll also get a wealth of insight. From the photos people choose to upload to the comments they get or the way they’re tagged. And because you’ve focused all this activity on one area or problem you’ll get a depth of insight too.

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Some more reading

• Do we need to incentivise participation in online communities? (freshnetworks.com)
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them (freshnetworks.com)

We’re halfway through our series highlighting ten ways of getting insight from online communities. We’ve looked already at ways of making the most of the profiling data, conversations, language people use, and ratings. In this post, we’re going to look at how allowing (and even encouraging) photo uploads can be a real source of insight in your online community.

Many online communities are very text-based. They are based on conversations, and the forum is the central area of the community where most activity takes place. But given the increasingly media-rich nature of the Internet, this is something of a shame. Some people just don’t express themselves as well in words as they do in other media. Sometimes a photo can convey an opinion or start a discussion. And sometimes a collection of photos allow people to work together on a problem, issue or problem.

You can get real insight from allowing people to upload photos, and even more from encouraging them. Hotel reviews on TripAdvisor are significantly more meaningful when you have visitor photos to accompany their reviews. If your online community was about a product or service, then finding out how people actually use it would be of real use – photos of where they store your product in their kitchen for example would give you a real insight into peoples’ lives. A community for a holiday firm could get real insight from photos of guests on holiday. A community about home improvement could be much more powerful with photos of peoples’ rooms or houses. In fact pretty much any community could benefit from photos.

There are really three levels of insight you can get from photos:

1. Understanding why people choose to upload the photos – what photos do they upload? Are some users more likely to upload photos than others? Do the photos that are currently in the gallery influence the photos people upload? Understanding these motivations gives you insight into your community members.
2. Analysing what people upload photos of – if you run a community for a holiday firm do people usually upload photos of people, the accommodation, the weather or the scenery? This probably gives you a real insight into what they associated with their holiday. People are going to upload photos that they feel reflects the aim or objective of the online community. Analysing what photos they choose to upload will give you real insight into their attitude towards the issue.
3. Observing what reaction the photos get – do people discuss photos that are uploaded? Do they post photos in response to those already on the site or is each photo upload a fairly extant experience? Are the community members using the photos to tell a story or solve a problem together or is each using it to illustrate their own point.

A photo upload is a source of lots of insight. Into the community member and the community as a whole. Into what they think about the subject or issue at the heart of the online community. Into what their real lives are like.

Photos can, of course, give you more insight. If you encourage and allow comments and voting on photos you can get much more insight. We’ll be talking about this in the next instalment of getting insight from online communities.

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Some more reading

• Social Media: it’s bigger than you might think (freshnetworks.com)
• The Ad Man Answers #53 (mjroseblog.typepad.com)
• Traditional media is spreading community messages (freshnetworks.com)

We return to our series on getting insight from online communities with a look at how you can get insight from those members of your online community who may not want to begin posts or be regular commenters in public forums. We’ve looked already in the series at the information you can get from profiling data, discussions and the language people use online. Today we want to look at how you can get insights from ratings and votes.

It’s a commonly accepted fact within online communities that many of your community members and visitors will not want to initiate or publicly respond to public discussions. They are happy reading the content and are important as without all these readers, those who do contribute would have no reason to do so. This behaviour is encapsulated in the 90-9-1 rule: in any community of 100 people, 90 will be readers, 9 will edit and add to content and just 1 will initiate discussions or add new content. The best communities find ways to make the most of each of these types of people, recognising that different people behave in different ways and accommodating that.

Most online communities allow people to vote for or rate content – say that you like a certain post or rate a photo or other piece of content out of five. However, too often these tools are overlooked as sources of insight. This is a shame. For those 90 people out of every 100 who are unlikely to contribute to discussions publicly, votes and ratings are ways of letting them have their say. Making this easy to do and encouraging people to rate or vote for content will maximise the benefit you will get from it from an insight perspective.

Whilst such ratings and votings shouldn’t be thought of as representative of the community, they can capture the collective wisdom of the members. If you want to know how important a discussion is, looking at how many people voted for that thread, or at its average rating, is a way of helping you to understand the mass of opinion. If lots of people have voted for it, or rated it highly, then this is a great sign that it’s a discussion you should be reading and digesting.

In a more proactive sense, you can use voting and rating alongside comments as part of a process of co-creation. Getting people to comment on photos, articles, concepts or any piece of content will capture the opinions from a proportion of your community members. Encouraging them to vote too will allow more people to have a voice.

Voting and rating is often used as an engagement tool in online communities, but it can also be a source of valuable insight. See how people rate the different discussions, or the votes that different pieces of content get. You’ll learn something new.

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Some more reading

• Howard Rheingold: Online Social Networks
• Polling, Opinion and Q&A; Sites are Redefining Social Networking
• Solving real world problems through online social networks

We’ve already looked at the insight you can get from profile data and focused discussion in online communities. For the third in our series of how to get insight from online communities we are going to look not at what people say, but how they say it.

Communities drive discussions, be those the organic discussions that will begin between members, or discussions prompted by questions, content or other stimulus from the community manager. There is a lot that we can learn about the community members from how they respond in these discussions. What they say, the ideas they give and the opinions they express. But often overlooked is to examine the language they use.

There is a great value to seeing and  understanding the language people use when talking to each other about issues, products and brands. Organisations often have no clear idea of the language people use, the words they choose and the way they discuss their product or talk about an issue. It is difficult and has traditionally been hard to really see how a mass of people discuss and talk about what you do. With online communities you get a real spotlight into this, not only the language people choose but how they talk about and describe things to each other.

Observing and understanding this can be really valuable. One of our clients at FreshNetworks was able to identify significant problems in it’s marketing by watching how people discussed their needs and the different products in an online community. When none of the language they used was chosen by community members we saw that there must be a problem, asked the members why they hadn’t used this language and then realigned the client’s marketing message using the language that customers were using. In this case the real insight from the online community was not so much what was said, but how it was said.

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Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009
• Crowdsourcing – does the customer know best?
• What Can Small Business Owners Learn From Obama

Yesterday we wrote about how to maximise the insight gained from profiling data in online communities. For the second in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we’re looking at how to make the most of the core of most online communities – discussions and forums.

Most communities have some form of discussion area. This may be in a traditional forum, or may be focused on media, features or other pieces of content. But the basic concept of allowing community members to discuss, debate and share ideas is a critical part of an online community. These are the spaces in which people will probably spend the most time in any online community they join and are the parts that get most involvement early on. It’s easy to see how and where to contribute and  existing discussions encourage people to add their point of view.

Whilst it’s great to allow discussions to grow and develop depending on the interests of the community members, it’s important not to overlook the power of this simple tool for insight. Many brands and organisations enjoy being able to watch how people discuss things. What their opinions are and how they express them. What language they use and what they choose to discuss. How they interact with other members and how they discuss things with each other. Forums and discussions can offer a vibrant source of insight and with a little bit of focus can be even more valuable.

To gain maximum insight from discussions and forums it is best to build them as part of a larger research process and series of activities, something that an online research community is ideal for. However, any online community can make the most of its forums and discussions from an insight perspective. It’s about how you frame and focus the discussions that go on and the four points below will help maximise the insight benefits you get:

1. Keep your discussions focused at first and build them round issues that are of specific interest to your brand or organisation. Community members find it easier to join conversations if it is obvious where they can add their opinions and so focusing on the issues of most interest to you will help them take part and help you gain insights where they are needed most.
2. Provide a space for people to discuss any other issues, and mark it specifically as such (one of our communities has a ‘Juice Bar’ specifically for this). We don’t want to discourage people who want to participate and can gain a lot from knowing what people what to discuss organically. Sometimes the best insights come in areas you couldn’t predict.
3. Make sure the brand or organisation responds to people in the forum. The best insights often come when you iterate ideas with community members. They suggest something and you tell them what your reaction is. They then respond, and it is this response which starts to yield real depth of insight you wouldn’t have got otherwise.
4. Think of ways you can use discussions for innovation or co-creation. Thinking of a new product? Start a discussion about your ideas and see what the reaction is.

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Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community
• Business media: trends for 2009
• Ted Mininni: Is Some of Nike’s Current Success Due to Its ‘Running’ Social Network?
• Blogging 101

There are many ways to get insight from online communities. Some communities are built specifically for this reason – online research communities, but all online communities offer great ways for you to gain insight into your product, brand or market, into issues and opinions, and into the people who form the community. Over the next two weeks, we’re going to be presenting ten different ways in which you can gain some basic insights from any online community, as part of our series: Insight from Online Communities.

A first, and often overlooked, area of insight is in the profiling information you gather when people join your online community. Profiles play a number of roles. They help other community members to find each other, they emphasise the public face of the community, they help those managing the community to check the identify of members (if this is needed) and they offer the community owners and managers a way to find out more about their members.

When thinking about how you design and build your online community, it is important to pay particular attention to the profiling information you capture. You need to make the most of this opportunity, but not ask so much that you will dissuade potential members. And you need to decide which of this information will be public and which is just between you and the community member.

There is considerable insight you can gather from profiling information from any community, be one with a few hundred or many thousand members. You can learn more about who your customers are, or who is interested in the subject and focus of your community. You can gather demographic information to help with segmentation, locate where people are geographically and detailed information about their use of products or their opinions about issues. But perhaps the most information can come from allowing people to tell you a little bit about them. Offering a free hand where they can write about themselves. If you then code and analyse this data you can build a valuable and rich data set which lets you understand much more about your community members.

But perhaps the most valuable role profiling data can play is to let you understand and analyse all future contributions to the online community. If you can gather and code information in profiles then you start to build up a picture of individual members and the community as a whole. This will let you analyse and understand better future contributions and conversations. Let you get much more value and insight from your online community.

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Some more reading

• Body of Work: Community and Social Network Research
• Getting insight from online communities
• Business media: trends for 2009

People build and join online communities for many different reasons. They may want to create and use the most comprehensive hotel review site in the world. They may want to feedback to a brand about their product. Or they may want to help other people get the most out of their mobile phone. The common thread that goes through online communities is that they are issue-, goal- or topic-focused.

Within this environment conversations and discussions flourish. People are there because they share a common interest and they want to discuss this. Some of the communities that we build and manage at FreshNetworks are online research communities. These are communities that have been specifically built as a tool for consumer or market research. They are a great tool for understanding both what people think and why they think it, allowing you to explore the social context in which decisions are made and give you an instant and enthusiastic research resource.

However, even online communities that are not specifically built for research can be a valuable source of insight. Alongside the planned research and activities you get from an online research community, any online community is a fantastically rich source of organic insight. Organisations and brands that run online communities are able to get a range of benefits, whether or not they specifically intended the community to be a source of insight, including:

• understand how customers talk about you, your market and your competitors
• see what issues are currently of most interest to them
• get reviews and feedback on your product or service, and those of your competitors
• learn the language that customers use
• know the questions and concerns that your customer base have
• find out about new competitors, new ideas and new products

All of this, and more, just from having a successful and well managed online community.

We at FreshNetworks think that there are huge benefits people can be getting from their online communities and hope that people are doing so. With this aim in mind over the next few weeks, we’re going to be sharing our thoughts and  experiences of getting insight from online communities, specifically those that were not built in the first place as a research and insight tool.

In our experience, good online communities can have a great benefit to brands. We’re going to help you make the most of them.

Read our series on Insight from Online Communities

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Do we tell the truth in social networks? Does it matter?
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them
• Why online communities benefit from our desire to be heard
• How to build an online research community: a podcast

Yesterday’s post, Is Facebook an antidepressant?, prompted some discussion online, and amongst the team here at FreshNetworks, about how people behave on social networks. Do people tell the truth in social networks and if not, does that matter?

If you think of your own use of social networks, or spend just a few minutes perusing somebody else’s profile,  the answer to this question will come very quickly. It’s ‘no’. We don’t tell the truth in social networks. This isn’t to say that we lie, or mislead people, it’s just that we are selective about what we say or reveal about ourselves. We may exaggerate some elements of our lives and play down others. We may choose to show some pictures, but not others. Social networks are a ‘me’ space, they become a place where we market ourselves, our own personal brand. It’s not surprising  that in this kind of space we might be selective about what we say, and present a version of ourselves that we want people to see.

We don’t tell the truth in social networks, but this doesn’t mean we lie. There is a whole spectrum of ‘untruths’ from selectively updating your status, through over-emphasising elements you choose (and under-emphasising others) to plain untruths (saying you enjoy reading Magical Realism, when really your favourite book is a trashy biography). We do this because we want to present ourselves in a way that we want others to see us. Online there is a real opportunity to build the personal brand, and so we are all becoming marketers – marketing ourselves.

So does this actually matter? Should we all try to be truthful and accurate in social networks. The truth is that it probably doesn’t. Whilst social networks are being used as networks of individuals, we are all doing the same thing – we know we don’t upload all photos (probably not those from that party, for example) and so will expect others to act in the same way. The problem comes when brands and individuals interact in this space.

Many brands treat social networks as a source of free market research. They look at what people say and use this to inform their understanding of their product, customer-base, competitors or market. This can be useful, but as with all market research it is important to acknowledge and understand the bias in this method. And the bias here is that social network encourage people to be selective with the truth (at best) or to tell untruths. This can make it very difficult to gain real insight from social networks.

What is interesting is that you don’t get the same experience in online communities – these are spaces about ‘us’ rather than ‘me’ and a different social dynamic is at play. This is why online communities (and in particular online research communities) can be more useful to brands. More on this tomorrow…

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Some more reading

• When *not* to social network
• Not all social networking sites are created equally
• Facebook Reaches 150 Million Users Worldwide
• Marketing on the Web: How to Profit From Social Networking
• Is Facebook a digital antidepressant?