FreshNetworks Blog

At FreshNetworks we work with a lot of large brands and organisations, helping them to use social media and online communities to engage their customers, stakeholders and other people. Small businesses often think that they don’t have the resources or the demand for a social media agency or to even need to engage their customers and other online. This is very often not true, in fact more often than not the opposite is the case.

Small businesses can benefit hugely from using social media to engage people online. It can help them to reach people in a very cost effective manner. It can let them have a presence online that is bigger than their size might suggest they are. And it can let them have a voice and share their opinions and knowledge on subjects relevant to their products and services.

We’ve written before about how any business can get started in social media, about the four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media:

• Step One:  Do you know what people are saying about you? Buzz tracking, social media monitoring, the power of understanding who is talking about you where and why, and some great free tools for any brand to use
• Step Two: What do you want to achieve? Working out your brand’s aims and objectives (and making these measurable) is the single most important factor in a successful social media strategy. Do this before you think about technology.
• Step Three: Have a go and experiment with social media Once you have clear objectives that are measurable it’s time to get going. Try things out and experiment, but make sure you do them where you know you will have the greatest chance of achieving these aims and engaging the people you want to engage.
• Step Four: Track and evaluate the success you are having When you are using social media tools it is essential that you are measuring and tracking your performance against these aims. Measurement is critical and assessing the benefit you are having will help you to refine and improve your strategy overall.

The same is true for small businesses, they should know what is being said about them, plan what they want to achieve and then experiment and measure success. Over the next week, we are going to discuss four different tools that small businesses can use. All of them free and all helping in different ways to meet different aims and objectives. From blogging to  Foursquare we’ll give real practical tips on social media for small businesses.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Most big brands track what their customers (and also often what their non-customers) think. Brand tracking is a well established and developed market research tool that often feeds directly into performance metrics for the marketing department or the firm as a whole. Typically this brand tracker has been developed over a number of years and measures a small amount of quantitative factors, building a time-series data set that will let the firm show how the attitude towards its brand has changed (or stayed the same) over a period of time.

Brand trackers are incredibly useful. They allow you to identify if and when there is a change in attitudes towards your brand. Are people less trusting of your brand now than they were previously? Do they have a more positive attitude towards you than they did six months ago? A regular and well managed brand tracker can identify these changes in customer and consumer attitude and can highlight these to brands.

What many brand trackers can’t tell you, however, is why or how these changes happen.

Quantitative data, such as brand tracking, is best when accompanied by qualitative data. The quantitative tells you the what and the when; the qualitative tells you the why and the how. One way that you can understand the why and the how of changes in brand perception is to run focus groups. We’ve spoken about the limitations of focus groups before, and the danger with using these in this case is that you investigate a change after it has happen. You notice in the Q2 brand tracker that positive attitudes towards your brand are down on the same period last year and so you launch some focus groups to investigate why. But these groups happen many months after consumers attitudes have change and so real understanding is difficult to gain.

This is where online research communities can really come into their own. They offer real-time qualitative research. You can watch how customers discuss and respond to your brand and detect changes of opinion as they happen. Overlaying this with the quantitative data from a brand tracker will let you see when attitudes change and immediately look at the qualitative conversations and insight to understand why.

If most brands currently dow some form of qualitative brand tracking, I would expect more and more of them to pair this with the kind of real-time qualitative insight you can gain from online research communities. To date brands have had to second guess why attitudes have changed, with online research communities they can really know.

Some more reading

• What do consumers think about your logo?
• How to create brand authenticity
• Brand and Branding – A Fundamental Difference
• one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies

A report in Business Week highlights the growing and increasingly large proportion of shopping in the UK. Online now accounts for 20p in every pound spent on shopping in the UK and the IMRG Capgemini E-Retail Sales Index reports that UK shoppers spent more than £26.5bn online in the first six months of 2008 alone. Online is big business for retail in the UK.

This statistic shows the power and growth of online as a transactional channel and with the current economic downturn reports suggest that even more people will go online to find the best value products. This change in shopping behaviour needs to be matched by a change in how retailers build their businesses and also a change in how they use online.

Shoppers use the online channel for two purposes – to get information or to purchase product. If 20% of retail spend involves the latter I would expect an even higher proportion of retail spend to begin with research online. This means that companies who will benefit from this shift in online shopping need to prepare to cater for this growing online traffic.

We’ve written before about the power of reviews on ecommerce site. 83% of consumers say that an online review would influence their purchase decision, and 61% would specifically hunt down such reviews online before making a purchase. With more people going online to shop, the importance of reviews is growing. And with most consumers likely to visit a brand’s own website first when they’re looking for information brands need to be ready to provide this information themselves.

So shopping online needs to drive retailers to provide a greater amount and greater depth of content. Reviews from other users and shoppers, information about the product and services for sale and even a place to get advice before purchasing. To capitalise upon this shift towards online shopping, retailers need to move beyond just providing a place for transactions, a directory online of products online. They need to offer a true and distinct online shopping experience, including reviews, insider information and online communities where shoppers can get information and share ideas.

The battle for customers is growing online. Those with the best and most developed online strategies will be those who succeed.

Some more reading

• U.K. Online Shopping Up 38% from Last Year
• UK internet shopping on the rise
• Online sales boom as shoppers desert high street
• Huge Surge In Online Shopping
• Revolution in store as online retail sales soar
• Consumers shun the high street for cheaper online shopping
• UK online spending continues to rise

I was at an interesting breakfast event earlier this week, organised by Rebecca Caroe discussing whether brands should be, could be or even are broadcasters. There were three presentations – one about how the BBC had started to think about their programmes more as events than just shows, one on how brands are personalising their conversations with customers and a final presentation on Honda.tv.

Andrew Howells from Zype talked through Honda’s development as a broadcaster and how they were using TV to create a further channel through which the brand could build the customer experience and engagement. How the brand moved from offering additional content during an advert (of the ‘press the red button to find out more’ variety) to having it’s own channel on some cable providers. The interruption model during adverts, it turned out, was not as successful as expected. The channel that people could view as suited them was more popular.

This observation was an interesting one to me. Before I went to the event I was concerned about the title: Should Brands be Broadcasters. In an environment where consumers have greater choice than ever over their exposure to and their discussion of brands, I think there is a danger of suggesting that they should adopt the purely one-way communication that broadcast suggests. The Honda example is good because they use a broadcast medium to allow and encourage two-way conversation and personalisation. Also, by having their own channel rather than pushing their messages to people at a time the brand chooses they are giving their customers the choice to engage when it suits them.

This is critical. As one other attendee at Wednesday’s breakfast commented – he is inundated with ‘personal’ messages to his email and phone. Brands that think they are his friend. He just deletes them all. This is an example of brands as spam. Something we have been seeing more and more of recently.

To combat this brands need to recognise that they are not automatically friends with their consumers. In fact they probable need to wait for consumers to want to be friends with the brand.

Brands also need to recognise that they can’t just push their messages out to consumers  any more. They need to allow consumers to engage on their own terms so they avoid becoming brands as spam.

Watch Wednesday’s event

If you want to watch Wednesday’s event and see the discussion for yourself, you can see the Qiks here.

It’s been a while since the last installment, so apologies for that. This time we’re going to look at a few principles for engaging people online.

1. Understand who you want to engage. The first stage is critical – know who you want to engage. This may be a certain type of consumer, your most loyal customers or maybe people you are targeting in the future. Do some work to understand these people, what makes them tick and what inspires them. What do they do online at the moment and where do they hang out? Get a real and full understanding of the people you want to engage so that you know how to approach them, what content and discussions are relevant to them, and where to find them.
2. Explore what’s in it for them. You’re engaging people and they’re engaging with you – it’s a two-way process. To make sure that you get the most out of people you need to make sure there is something in it for them. They may not be as enthusiastic to learn about your latest product as you think (or maybe just hope) they should be. Whatever you’re engaging them with, and however you’re doing it, make sure there really is something in it for them.
3. Create a space people feel comfortable in. Think of hosting a party or inviting friend over for a chat. You know that the party wouldn’t be good if the venue and atmosphere wasn’t right; or that the chat would be abrupt if the chairs were uncomfortable. Online it’s critical that you create a space that people feel comfortable in. If you are to truly engage with them you need to make sure you create a space they want to visit and then want to return to. Work on the previous two stages to get this right.
4. Be open and honest in the way you engage. Honesty is critical online. You need people to trust you and to do this in the online space it’s best to be clear and frank about who you are and what you’re doing. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not and don’t pretend you’re looking to do something you’re not. People will trust you more if you’re honest with them, and if you want this engagement to be most successful then you want them to be honest back.
5. Reward participation. Don’t reward with payment or free products, but reward by letting people know you care. They want to engage with you and will be even more motivated if you show them how this engagement is impacting you. Feedback to them any changes you make on the back of this engagement, let them inside the firm and make them a real part of the organisation. People want to help and want to feel a stronger link to a brand they love and so make the most of these feelings and use them to your advantage.

Whether you are engaging people through blogs, email newsletters, their social networks or your own online communities, these principles are critical. The online space is different to traditional means of engaging with or marketing too customers and so it’s critical that you take a new approach. Honesty really is the best policy.

Next time we’ll be looking at how you can make use of video and photos online as part of a social media strategy.