FreshNetworks Blog

A great example of using social media to gain an insight into the brand comes from Southwest, an airline in the US. Their blog, NutsAboutSouthwest, has just been relaunched with much more of a community feel. You can watch YouTube videos to get an insider’s view of their reservations team, take part in polls, comment on posts and post your own videos and photos.

The site serves to give customers an insight into the business. It is specifically not the place to raise personal customer service questions and in fact appears to be much more of an insight tool than a customer service one. The blog posts are used by internal staff to ask questions of their customers; getting immediate and sometimes detailed feedback. If they want they could then use this to go into wider testing in a focus group or survey, or they could just use this toe-in-the-water method to gauge what their customers are thinking.

The site is great and capturing customer information and insight in this way can have real benefits to brands. My one criticism would be the decision to moderate the site quite so heavily. Moderation is important, but it should not be at the expense of allowing members to shape and build their own community. The site only reaches it’s full potential when the members feel that they have some ownership of the community. Moderation can hinder this.

Rather than think just of moderation, it’s important to make sure you manage an online community like this correctly. You establish rules and pick enthusiastic members who will help you to keep order and encourage others to take part. Moderation is a police role. Management is more like a good host at a party. They make sure that people know where things are, introduce people with common interests, and also deal with situations before they might get out of hand.

The Southwest site is great and something I’d love to see more brands adopting, but a site like this only truly flourishes when you manage it rather than just moderate it.

Following up on our posts about what British Airways should have done during the T5 fiasco at Heathrow (see posts here and here), I notice today that American Airlines are doing what we advised BA to do.

Last Friday they quietly launched an online blog, AA Conversation, as a way to keep in touch with customers online. The blog only has a few entries so far and is basic. Its success needs to be judged on how it is used in the longer term but the first signs are very encouraging. It contains service update information and critically offers explanations for why delays and cancellations have happened.

This kind of medium is a great way to engage and inform passengers about what has happened. The blog also allows you to include more detail than you could in an announcement or a brief section on the existing website. It’s a great way to make sure that as much information as possible reaches the passengers online.

Keen users will follow the blog by RSS, others can just sign up for updates by email. Comments are encouraged and are flowing in.

One to watch – this could be managed badly and not used, or it could become a model of how airlines inform and engage with their passengers. Giving them information they need and allowing them the right of reply they want. This has to be better than the photocopied letter that BA handed out to people during the T5 fiasco. Let’s hope American Airways put in the time and effort to make this blog really work – that has to be a good development for all air travellers

This morning we spent some time with Robert East, Professor of Consumer Behaviour at Kingston University. His research focuses on word of mouth and brand loyalty and we spent the morning talking about how you can measure these things and in particular critiqued the Net Promoter Score as an approach to this.

One of the outcomes from the session was an initial set of five principals to bear in mind when trying to measure word of mouth. We’re going to be bouncing these around and building on them internally at FreshNetworks, but if you have any comments or can add to the debate let me know:

1. Don’t confuse word of mouth with satisfaction – only a small proportion of word of mouth is prompted by a satisfactory or dissatisfactory experience
2. Measuring word of mouth by the likelihood to talk (positively or negatively) about a brand misses the critical element – the impact the word of mouth has. A better measure is based around how people act when they receive word of mouth (positive or negative) – how this changes their propensity to purchase
3. Anybody can be an advocate and pass on positive word of mouth. It’s more important to activate the whole user base than to try to find a particularly segment of advocates
4. The world is just more positive than negative – that’s the way people think about things. So you should expect more positive word of mouth than negative
5. One size doesn’t fit all – people are just more likely to talk about some products than others. Recommendations are more important for a dentist than they are for a supermarket. So you can only compare brands at the category level; indeed a different measurement tool may be needed by category

Thanks to Social Media Playground for a post this week about the Forrester Research Marketing Forum 2008, and in particular the discussion about engagement being the new key metric for businesses to know and understand (see post here).

Forrester put forward a model for measuring engagement based on the “Four I’s”:

• Involvement: KPIs including site visitors, time spent, page views
• Interaction: the volume of contributions to blogs, UGC, reviews
• Intimacy: survey-based measures of consumer attitudes, perception and feeling about the brand
• Influence: the weight of the consumer, how likely they are to recommend the brand or be advocates

These measures taken together can then be used to understand and assess the levels of engagement a customer has with the brand. For us, the interesting element here is the Influence measure – this seems to take the metric out of being a simple measure of how one customer engages with a brand to be a measure of the value of this engagement. A highly engaged customer who is also highly networked is of more value than one who is less well networked.

When you think of word of mouth and advocacy, this becomes a much more valuable measure!

Download an excerpt from the Forrester paper here.

Last week I wrote a post about the new white paper from Satmetrix which claims it can prove the econmic benefit of all of this word of mouth. They can put a price on the value of word of mouth – with those who are advocates spending about 25% more than detractors for the B2C computer hardware market they use as an example. However the true value of word of mouth is probably more complicated than this.

Last year, an article in the Harvard Business Review explored the value of word of mouth and concluded that the value of an individual advocate was not in the amount of money they themselves spent, but the amount spent by those to whom they recommend your brand. The Semantix report also discusses this aspect and attempts to put a figure on it.

Using the same B2C computer hardware example, Semantix calculate how many more customers positive word of mouth generates and how many existing customers negative word of mouth will cost you. The results support the much quoted theory that people discuss a bad experience more than a good one. An Advocate will generate 0.5 customers for your product, whereas each Detractor will cost you 0.84 customers.

The benefit of converting Detractors to Advocates is therefore huge. Not just the 25% extra revenue generated from the individual themselves but rather than costing you customers they also generate new ones – the net effect will be 1.34 new customers for your brand. Converting Detractors to Advocates is therefore critical for any brand.