FreshNetworks Blog

I’m at the Communities 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. It’s such a beautiful and diverse city and sadly not enough time to explore (sigh).

One of the hot topics raised at the ROI symposium was the thorny issue of getting internal buy in for your online community from across departments and management levels. At FreshNetworks a lot of the early work with our clients is around supporting the project sponsor to achieve this. It’s often the hardest part of getting an online community started and even when you are rolling, how do you keep the visibility of it high to ensure continued investment?

I’ve been struck by the number of passionate mavericks I’ve met who ‘just knew’ their company should be starting a dialogue with customers (or employees) and could see the benefits a mile away even if they couldn’t quantify them. Euan Semple started the BBC intranet on a box under his desk and the seasoned community practitioner Dawn Lacallade (previously Lead Stormchaser at Dell and now at solarwinds) tirelessly waded through the politics at Dell to extol the benefits of the early Dell communities. Many social media projects start as skunkworks projects and sometimes this is the only way to gather the evidence that the demand and the benefits are there. I’m all in favour of piloting, learning and evolving but there can be some pitfalls:

• you may end up with multiple communities targeting the same people, creating real confusion for your customers
• as social media people leave the company, community ghost towns will appear as no-one knew about all the cul-de-sacs of conversations existed and there’s no-one to carry on the conversation
• social media enthusiasts may be good at Twitter but they may not understand how to manage risk. Online communities can impact all areas of the business and there is nothing worse for a customer who has made the effort to talk to you than getting no response back from the brand.

So here are some tips from Dawn about how she used her powers of persuasion at Dell (at solarwinds everything they do starts with ‘how do we involve customers in this’ so I gather life is less complicated for her now!). I’ve added to the list from some of our experiences at FreshNetworks too.

1. Amongst the other skills you need as a community manager, you need to develop your sales skills! Equip yourself with loads of great case studies to convince stakeholder of the value to the business. They are unlikely to respond to words like blog, wiki – only to phrases like customer retention and cost reduction!
2. Identify all the key stakeholders in the business (i.e. those that give you money, those that can vote on what you are about to do and those that are likely to give you grief!)
3. Meet/call/survey these people to understand the priorities of the business and each department. At FreshNetworks we try to encourage setting up a cross-functional team to attend at least a half day workshop, including directors. It’s amazing how many epiphany moments happen when people are sharing ideas with each other and often the biggest cynics walk away as converts and later evangelize the project. Play back to the group what phase 1 is going to cover and what it’s not to set expectations.
4. Prioritise the objectives and work out the business KPIs for the community. Use the language of your stakeholders. If the KPIs don’t contribute to departmental goals you are unlikely to get support for the project. KPIs include things like ‘reduce acquisition costs’ not ‘number of top contributors’. The latter is an essential metric for managing a community but unlikely to mean much to a management team under pressure to deliver their quarterly targets! And finally remember – value is fluid. I met Tina Card this week, another driven community manager from Scottrade who told me their community is producing benefits that hadn’t even envisaged at the outset.
5. Test the business readiness. Is the company committed to investing in the medium term to develop the community to maturity and value? Have you thought through the internal process changes that might be required to respond to say an ideas community?
6. Launch a beta then work hard to play back the results to your stakeholders. And never stop doing this, get in front of Execs on a regular basis. There are a lot of repetitive tasks involved in managing a community and marketing people particularly are not used to this as they live in a campaign-based world.

We’d love to hear about your experiences so we can continue to add to the list!

Some more reading

• Three Things About Social Media Every Business Should Know (mediabullseye.com)
• FASTforward’09 Interview: Euan Semple, independent advisor on social computing (fastforwardblog.com)
• Build your own community or go where people are? Do both (freshnetworks.com)

Last year we wrote about the case of the Virgin Atlantic employees who were sacked for talking about customers (and indeed their employers) in social networks, and why you should be careful what you say on Facebook. At the time we wrote that:

…we’ve probably all talked about work gossip, probably with a small group of friends, privately in a bar or over dinner. What these Virgin employees did may have felt just like that – they were in a group with their friends sharing work gossip. The problem is that unlike that secluded table in the bar or restaurant, they were talking in a very public place. Perhaps the most public of places. This was their mistake.

This week had seen more cases in the UK of employees using social networks to talk about their employers and in particular their customers. With employees at supermarket chain Tesco posting reportedly abusive comments about customers in groups on Facebook. This raises a number of issues about how employers should react and when something stops being a personal or seemingly light-hearted discussion and starts being offensive in some real way.

Today I was interviewed by BBC Radio 4‘s You and Yours programme about this very issue. About what employers should do when their employees are talking about customers in social networks. About how they might set up their own online communities as both an outlet for these opinions and as a source of innovation and co-creation. And about why even if employees do talk about customers online, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If you didn’t catch the show then do listen to the segment below.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Social Networking Begins With You
• British Airways’ Staffers Ridicule Customers
• Why you should be careful what you say on Facebook
• Waitrose staff post abusive messages about customers on internet
• Facebook Now Nearly Twice The Size Of MySpace Worldwide
• Facebook message about night out ‘betrays’ man who phoned in sick for work

Every year thousands of people think they’ve Got Talent or believe they can win The X-Factor. Every year the producers of these shows delight in showing how deluded most contestants are. So why is it that below-average people think they are above-average? Before I get onto the answer I should explain why I am writing about this.

I’m a big fan of podcasts. I find it hard to fit in reading a newspaper these days. As a result the radio and podcasts tend to be my main line to the outside world. One of my favourites is Tim Harford’s More or Less podcast for BBC’s Radio4 for three key reasons:

1. He’s great at presenting numbers and statistics in an appealing way. He’s written a couple of excellent books: The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life and is also an journialist for the FT.
2. I am an engineer at heart, so there’s nothing I enjoy more than the occasional mathematical/statistical conundrum to get get my brain ticking.
3. This podcast is all about getting beneath the statistics that we hear/read about everyday. The first company I started, straight out of university, was the research business, FreshMinds. So being a self-taught researcher I am constantly infuriated by the way statistics are misinterpreted and misunderstood by the media. It’s not simply a case of tyring to sell newspapers, it’s also a general lack of understanding that creates hyperbole and false headlines. Tim’s podcasts put the stats back in their place.

I frequently send emails to the researchers at FreshMinds telling them that this is required reading for anyone who uses numbers to help inform decision making. If that’s you, then please do check it out: More or Less .

Anyway, this morning, during a run around Hyde Park I managed to catch up with two episodes: Forecasting the Future and Poisonous Pork and it was the former that got me thinking about The X-Factor:

In this podcast they explain why forecasters are in general little more accurate with their predictions than a monkey throwing darts and also give a simple explanation of the Lake Wobegon Effect. This is the name given to the tendency for us all to believe we’re better than average. In particular they discussed an experiment involving two groups. The first contained 50 drivers who had been in accidents (most of whom had been found to be at fault by the courts) and the second, control group was 50 normal drivers of similar ages. Despite their accidents, individuals from the first group, remained just as likely to call themselves “better than average drivers” as the control.

This is an important issue in the research world. People often misrepresent their actions and capabilities when asked. It is perhaps why so many people think they can sing, when they can’t and it’s a good reminder of the importance of ethnographic or observational research – measuring what people actually do, rather than what they claim. And the link to social media (that’s why you’re reading this blog, right?) is that watching people take part in a research community over a long-period of time can help you better understand the bias and misreporting inherent in any data you collect.

Poisonous Pork

The second episode, Poisonous Pork also had a few great items. Best of all was the proof (if it were needed) that we humans are no good at making decisions based on a proper understanding of risk, they discuss a recent pork scare that led to 100,000 Irish pigs being destroyed. The action was taken due to concerns about dioxins in the pork. However given the amount of sausages you’d have to eat to be at risk from dioxin poisoning, the fat in the sausages is actually a more significant health risk than the dioxins that caused the scare.

The twist at the end of the tail was that a Professor of Food Safety was interviewed. He proudly explained how he was able to test some pork sausages from his fridge and prove there was no risk. But then was forced to admit on air that his wife had thrown them out as they preferred not to “take a risk if they didn’t have to”.

Thus proving that you don’t have to be a deluded talent show contestant to act irrationally.

Subscribe to updates from this blog

Some more reading

• The Brand is in Your Head

At FreshNetworks we spend a long time working with clients on the organisation of information in online communities. You can have the best content in the world, but if you can’t find it, then it’s of no use. You need to work hard to organise information thematically and make it easier for people to find what they want.

A few months ago the BBC launched its Topics in the UK – a first step towards this kind of thematic organisation across their site. Taking content from across its site, this section organises things by themes – first it was places, then people and now some subjects too. So whether you want to find out about Hong Kong, Nicolas Sarkozy or the Edinburgh Festival you can see all of the BBC’s content in one place. From TV programmes to editorial content, news or background information on subjects.

This is a really good use of the vast and constantly changing content that the BBC has at its disposal and makes a fantastic resource for the user. Rather than having to use the search function we can now find information grouped by themes we are interested in.

A report in the New York Times over the weekend suggest that a similar thematic structure is to be launched by Business Week. But their Business Exchange pages are going a step further than the BBC:

Each Business Exchange topic page links to articles and blog posts from myriad other sources, including BusinessWeek’s competitors, with the contents updated automatically by a Web crawler. Nearly all traditional news organizations offer only their own material, spurning the role of aggregator as an invitation to readers to leave their sites.

This is an exciting step. As a reader I don’t necessarily mind where the content has come from, as long as it is clear to me when I read it. Online communities work well when they combine expert or editorial content with user generated content or input from other areas. Users want to see everything abotu a subject rather than having to hunt information down from a number of areas.

We often find that this kind of aggregation can be a good thing for the editorial content. It is this that binds together the other content and adds comment on it. The extra content acts as colour, exploring tangential areas or exploring some areas in more more depth. Thematic based information structure helps the reader, and it can certainly help the content providers too.

Some more reading

• Topic Pages to Be Hub of New BusinessWeek Site
• BusinessWeek Launching Topic Pages; Rejoices
• Business Week Creates Business Exchange
• Social Media: Strategies in Content and Commerce
• Your Website Shouldn’t Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication

A few days ago, I wrote about how the 2008 Beijing Olympics should be the perfect area for social media coverage of the event itself (see post here). Social media is also being used by many big brands to capitalise upon the Games.

The very reasons we identified for social media coverage of the Games, are being capitalised upon by some big brands, whether or not they are official sponsors.

Here is a couple of some of the best:

• McDonald’s has built a viral game called The Lost Ring, where the player uncovers the history of the Olympics (adventures in Ancient Greece and all).  It’s a subtle marketing tool for McDonald’s. Their branding is not present in the game and they are pitched more as a sponsor. The terms of the game state: “McDonald’s is proud to sponsor The Lost Ring and bring the spirit of the Olympic Games to people around the world.”
• Lenovo is the more obvious backer of Voices of the Olympic Games. Their site contains blogs from some 100 athletes at this year’s Games and the branding is prominent. The product is also heavily positioned – the site stating that the athletes were provided “new [Lenovo] Ideapad laptops and video cameras to capture their experiences.”

These examples contrast very different approaches. McDonald’s are creating an experience that people will enjoy and will no doubt ensure that people know who it is that is behind the game. This is a subtle way of marketing. They capitalise upon the enthusiasm for both the Olympic Games and for social media to create and experience people will buy into and enjoy. That they may later associate it with McDonald’s is part of the strategy, but this shows social media fitting into a total marketing strategy for the brand during the Games.

Lenovo on the other hand is really branding social media activities. It has given product and a platform to some athletes and is branding their output. This approach is more overt and although it will raise awareness of the product and the brand it is not really doing anything different to it’s other sponsorship of the Games. Lenovo’s branding is all over the Games and is on the blogs too. This is less of strategic social media marketing and more a branding exercise across all media.

Both approaches will be successful. The Olympic Games are a marketers dream – the audiences are huge and the passion is great. Using social media to enhance the experience of the Games (either by providing entertainment and games, or by providing branded content) can only be a positive thing.

Some more reading

• Social media and the 2008 Olympic Games
• Why the Olympics should be the perfect social media event
• Olympics: BBC promises ‘cornucopia of content’
• Beijing Olympics: Opening ceremony fuels internet traffic surge
• How Some Covered the Opening Ceremony