FreshNetworks Blog

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Today I was speaking at the MRS Online Methods conference on London – a great day with people sharing ideas on online research and how to engage customers online.

I was speaking specifically about how online research communities are actually just online communities that people use for research but that they should also use for other things (PR, marketing, customer service, innovation…the list goes on). And about how the client can, and indeed should, get involved in the process. It’s when you don’t do this when online communities fail to live up to their promise. We need to think community first and research second, rather than just tagging a forum onto your online survey. That’s when you get the real benefits and when you start having some fun.

The presentation I gave is below. As always these things are better presented but the point should still come through clearly. Thinking just about an online research community misses out on the big opportunity. An online community is a direct line to your customers. Research is a great place to start with this but you need to think bigger.

To make the most of this the client has to get involved:

1. Add value to the community by being a visible part of it, either to respond to specific points, join discussions naturally or even to take a major role in community management
2. Incentivise the responses but don’t do this with money. A good community is a vibrant social environment; adding money into this turns things into a market. It changes the dynamic to the detriment of the community itself. Think of what else you can give people. Think about what knowledge and ideas you can trade for their ideas
3. Make sure you represent the community in the business and that your brand is making full benefit of the powerful resource it now has

Some more reading

• Customer service is the new marketing (freshnetworks.com)
• Pricing, WOM, PR Efforts Get Recession Boost (marketingvox.com)
• One Hell of an OCM List of Responsibilities (chrisabraham.com)
• Marketer // Customer (conversationagent.com)

It’s almost Spring and time for another Online Community Manager meet-up in London, in association with e-mint, the Association of Online Community Professionals. The event we organised in November was well attended with a great bunch of online community managers, social media strategists (and many other job titles) getting together for a few drinks and a chat.

At FreshNetworks we know that good community management is critical. We’ve worked with clients who have launched communities without them, and whilst they may be able to drive traffic to the site, they lack the kind of real engagement and direction you get from a community with that good party host in place. The more communities that organisations and brands launch, the more important this kind of role becomes.

We need to capture best practice and share ideas; debate and discuss terms and techniques; and work together to make sure we help promote and improve the quality of online communities. And the best way to do this is for us all to share and learn from each other.

Whilst there’s no point changing a winning formula, we are adding a speaker into the Spring event. We can’t say too much about who it is just yet, but we’re excited already. We’re also sponsoring the location and will put some money behind the bar to pay for what should be a fair few drinks and snacks before the tab runs out.

It would be great to get as many people who are interested in community management as possible along. Come for the whole evening or just pop in to say hello.

When is it happening? Wednesday 15th April from 6.30pm

Whereabouts? The Square Pig, 30-32 Proctor Street, Holborn, London, WC1R 4QG (we’ll be downstairs) map

How do I sign up? Just click below or go to the Eventbrite page

What else do I need to know? We’re using the Twitter hash tag #emint

Last month I was asked if I would speak at as new conference in the UK focused on online research. The MRS and Research Magazine were looking to bring together different practitioners (both clients and agencies) to share best practice and case studies in online research. The Online Methods conference will be held on the 3rd June in central London, and I’m speaking about online research communities, specifically about how to work with clients to grow and manage them.

For too long, the online research industry has been focused on one thing: quantitative research. There has been a significant shift from telephone (CATI) research to online research over the last few years. Both panel-based and more adhoc quantitative research is being successfully delivered online. The ability to build and reach a range of people with these surveys is helping both the quality and the cost-effectiveness of this kind of research. But in the last few years, online research methodologies have moved far beyond just quantitative research.

Qualitative and ethnographic research have typically been difficult and relatively expensive. They have involved recruiting and then spending time with specific individuals who meet our criteria, and getting a volume and range of responses has often been prohibitively expensive. Developments online have changed this. Online communities and social media have really changed the face of market research, allowing us to both do old things in new ways and to do completely new things. If done correctly, it is now easier than ever to conduct qualitative or ethnographic research with a wide and often disparate respondent base. You can observe and analyse people in their social context, and get insight into not just what they think but also why they think it.

At the Online Methods conference, I will be talking a little about this, but more about how these changes are causing a fundamental shift in the market research industry and in the relationship between agency and client. The old divisions no longer apply. Previously a client would commission an agency who would go away, do the research and then report back. Now clients and agencies work together, each using and playing to their own strengths. This can make online research communities very cost effective for clients and removes the barrier an agency can sometimes place between a client and their customers. There are lots of ways that online methods are changing market research, but the changes in the agency-client relationship are possibly most fundamental of all.

In a nutshell: A one day conference for buyers and suppliers of online research taking a practical and solutions-driven approach to its uses and applications.

Where? Crowne Plaza – The City, London

When? 3rd June 2009

How to book: Click here

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Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• How to build an online research community: a podcast (freshnetworks.com)
• Maximising the insight you get from your online community (freshnetworks.com)

For the third in our series of Five things to do in 2009, we are going to look at five things your brand should ask about social media in 2009. During 2008 we have seen a rapid rise in both the volume and the sophistication of how some brands are using social media. In 2009 we expect to see much more of this, with brand learning from examples of good practice and with more innovation in this area.

If you’re thinking about using social media or just interested in what it could do for your brand, here are five questions you should be asking yourself in 2009. In fact, if you’ve got some free time over the next couple of  days why not ask yourself them early and steal a march on the competition.

1. Where are people talking about our brand already?

Even if you’re not actively using any social media yourselves, your customers almost certainly are. The first step any brand should take when thinking about social media is to see how customers are talking about you right now. Who is talking and what are they saying? And are these the kind of people and the kind of discussions that you think of when you think about your brand online? It is likely that the answer to these questions is no. Not because they are the wrong people, or because they are saying the wrong things. Just because real people on the web talk about things in different ways to the way the brand does. Knowing, who is talking about you, where and how they are discussing you can be a real education and should be the first step to anybody new to social media.

2. What social media are our competitors using? What’s best practice in the industry?

It can be very difficult to think of the best use you might make of social media from scratch. Indeed, many people take their inspiration from the likes of Facebook. A better approach is to look at what your competitors are doing and what best practice in your industry might be. Look at your competitor websites, and at other sites they might be sponsoring to see what they are doing and, perhaps more importantly, what of this is working and what isn’t. An informative approach can be to look in the forums to find threads where people are talking about their experience of using the site – what do actual users like (and dislike) about competitor sites, and what can you learn from this.

3. What channels do your customers use to interact with you at the moment?

Do you take a lot of calls from customers with questions or queries? Do you have well-used email forms? Do people come to the workplace and talk to you direct? Look at these channels and then investigate what people ask or talk to you about. Are you answering lots of the same questions? Do you have queries you just can’t answer? Are you using lots of internal resource interacting with customers in this way? Most brands will find that a good use of social media can help to channel their interactions with some customers or with all customers on some issues. If you analyse and understand these interactions, you can start to plan better how to use social media to better engage with the people who matter most to you.

4. What tools have you tried yourself?

It’s difficult to understand how social media tools work if you haven’t tried them for yourself. Have you shared photos online? Do you follow people on Twitter? Have you ever contributed to a forum or commented on a video. Think about what use you have made of social media and how you have contributed your own content to the web using these tools. Maybe try one or two – join a forum discussion, comment on somebody’s photo on Flickr, or maybe follow somebody on Twitter (if you don’t know anybody feel free to start with me). You will start to understand what it feels like to use social media tools and then will be in a better position to think about which are right for your customer.

5. What business aim will this contribute to?

Brands should only be using social media where it contributes to a specific business aim, now more than ever. This might be a very hard aim (I want to increase sales through our e-commerce platform by x, or I want to gather data on y customers) or it might be a softer one (I want to generate more ideas for the business, or I want to treat all our customers like they are the really special ones). Only when your use of social media is tied to a specific aim will you be able to get it right and make it measurable. Start with a large piece of paper on which you write all of your businesses objectives and for each one brainstorm ways in which social media might help. This piece of paper should serve as the blueprint for taking your ideas forward, testing and developing them and then starting to use social media in a sensible, targeted way.

Read all of our Five Things to Do in 2009 posts

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Some more reading

• Are customers the true BFF’s?
• Don’t Rush Into Social Media
• How Can We Keep the Passionate Community Without the Risk?
• Social media brings new risks for companies and employees…
• If You Remove the Social from Social Media Tools …