FreshNetworks Blog

We wrote last week about the rise of social web literacy – how people are having to get used to a new way of communicating and a new way of using language to share information and ideas. It’s not just the technology and tools available to us that are different, the real change comes when people use these tools, adapting what they say and how they say it.

In short, as we make more use of social media, be it personal or for business, we need to hone our social web literacy. We need to practice and develop how we communicate. How do you enter a discussion in a forum? How should your brand talk differently in social media to in other, more traditional, media? How do you engage people online?

At FreshNetworks we work with brands who are engaging strategically online often for the first time. We help them to improve their social web literacy so that they get the most out of these interactions. And we find the following three steps are a simple and easy way for people to do just this.

1. Write comments

In social media and, particularly, in online communities, people share and develop ideas based on a common area of interest, concern or a goal. They may not know each other, but will happily share thoughts with each other to develop an idea or solve a problem.

A great first step to improve your social web literacy is to get involved in discussions just like this. Find a news article, blog post or forum topic that you are interested in and comment on it. Subscribe to updates so that you can follow what others say and make a conscious effort to go back to the same discussion and develop what you said first time around.

By entering these kind of discussions you will learn how people discuss and debate in comments and forums. By taking part you will start to develop your own style in forums, learn how to respond to people politely and how to express your opinion even when others may not agree with you

2. Use Twitter (even if nobody follows you)

There are many benefits of Twitter, but one clear benefit is the focus that comes from 140 characters. Having to express yourself in such a short space is a great way of learning the kind of direct and concise language that often works well in social media. The restrictions that this character limit brings means that you need to think carefully about exactly what you want to say and how you want to say it. How do you express your opinion in such a short space, without being unnecessarily ambiguous or causing offense.

Getting used to expressing yourself like this is a great way of developing your social web literacy skills. That’s why we encourage clients to start using Twitter (even if nobody follows them). It’s a way of learning a new way of expressing yourself and the impact that a restriction on message length can bring. Many people are comfortable expressing themselves at length, when they have time to set out their opinion, ideas and supporting information. Conveying a similar idea in a very short message is a skill that is good to develop.

3. Get tagging

One aspect of social web literacy is developing the skills to tag and categorise information. Social media involves users organising information for themselves and for others. And how this information is organised dictates how easily it can then be found by others. Tagging content and then using these tags to find information relevant to you is a great way of accessing the vast quantities of information that is available online. One of the best ways to learn and experience how this works is to get involved and do it. To get tagging.

Set up an account with Delicious, and bookmark content your see and enjoy online. Choose relevant tags for this content and then see what else others have tagged in the same way. Learn and refine how you use tags, using more or less and choosing your words carefully. Learn how to tag content in a way that is useful for you and for other users. Find out what tagging typologies work for you and why.

As we’ve written before, right now, in the current economic climate, it’s a great time for brands to innovate. In fact it is those brands and organisations who innovate now who are more likely to be on a faster growth trajectory when the economy starts to improve.

The big question for many organisations is exactly how to innovate, how to carve out the time needed to think about the future and how best to work on new ideas, how best to co-create. Whether you are doing an offline event or working in an online community, there is a lot of commonality in how to build a great innovation process. This presentation from Guy Kawasaki at Cisco Live last week presents ten steps to great innovation.

The steps are summarised below but you should really watch the video to see how Guy presents and explains them. There’s something that everybody can learn here, and so it’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week.

1. Make meaning
2. Make a mantra (not a mission statement)
3. Jump to the next curve
4. Roll the dice
5. Don’t worry, be crappy
6. Let 100 flowers blossom
7. Polarize people
8. Churn, baby, churn
9. Follow the 10-20-30 rule
10. Don’t let the bozos get you down

Image by Darren Hester via Flickr

The promise of co-creation is that getting customers involved in the innovation process, and letting them inform the design of new products, will mean that you develop a product that is better suited to their needs and will ultimately perform better in the market. Of course, it is not always this simple. Often customers don’t know what they want. They can’t necessarily articulate how they would design the ideal product, nor can they say what is wrong with the existing product. They may never have articulated what they like nor what they dislike, but this doesn’t mean that the product isn’t perfect.

Over the weekend, the New York Times looked at this very subject following revelations from ex-Google visual designer, Douglas Bowman. In an unusual move, Bowman explained on his blog the reason he had left Google. As the New York Times discussed, his description of the design process at Google raises a number of questions:

Can a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want?

Bowman’s suggestion is that that answer to all of these questions is “yes”. That Google relies too much on data, as a proxy of customer input, and not enough on design skills alone. As the New York Times article report:

Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.

This kind of user-input into the design process is what many think of when they think of working with their customers on new product development and design. They think of presenting a number of options to customers (or indeed to potential customers) and then asking them to evaluate each one and choose the one they prefer (or in this case to take their use of a particular design as a proxy for this choice). Of course, this is not necessarily the best way of co-creating with your customers.

Rather than asking people what they think about a particular set of designs they prefer (or which they use most), you can often get a more useful level of insight by engaging with them. Don’t ask them about solutions to a problem but observe what they discuss and say about the problems themselves.

Imagine you are a company designing kitchen equipment. You could involve your customers in the design and innovation process in one of three ways:

1. Ask them what they want – ask what new equipment, tools or gadgets would make their life in the kitchen easier or allow them to do new things
2. Ask them to choose between a set of prototypes – present a set of potential new products to them and ask them to choose which they want.
3. Ask them to talk about what they do in the kitchen, what equipment they use and what problems they have

The last of these is most likely to produce the most insightful outcomes. Rather than asking people to get involved in the actual prototype products themselves, or to tell you what they want, get them involved further up the innovation funnel. Engage them and talk to them about what they use in the kitchen – what makes their lives easier, what would they like to be able to prepare and cook but can’t. Don’t talk to them about the equipment that, you hope, will solve their problems. Talk to them about their problems themselves.

By watching what people do you can then interpret this and begin a design process based on this information and this engagement. Then, rather than just presenting three options to people of potential new designs, you can approach them based on what they have discussed before: “there was a lot of discussion about x, here are some ways we think we could help with that. What do you think?”

This kind of engagement is where online communities really come to their fore. They let you engage your customer in a sustainable way. You can get to know them, their lives and the problems and challenges they face. It isn’t just a short-term process to “do some co-creation”, rather it is long-term engagement that fundamentally changes the way you innovate and develop new products.

Customers sometimes do not know what they want. It’s a fact. They do, however, know how they use what they have, the problems they face and the things they would like to be simplified. Understand what they do know rather than forcing themselves to make choices about things they don’t.

Some more reading

• Design: it’s not all about you. (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• Design Or Data? Ex-Googler Spills All After Landing At Twitter [Design] (gizmodo.com)
• Google designer leaves, blaming data-centrism (news.cnet.com)

In the latest Technology Quarterly in this week’s edition of the Economist, there is an article about reviews online. This piece explores well why people read and trust reviews, and the value of both positive and negative reviews. John McAteer, Google’s retail industry director is quoted as saying:

No one trusts all positive reviews

For him you need some negative reviews as well as everybody knows that no product could per perfect. And this is certainly true. In fact, negative reviews can help people decide if a product might be for them, especially if they don’t associate themselves with the negative reviewer (“it wasn’t for them, but it might be for me”).

The article also looks at the value of having multiple reviews and cites a great experiment conducted by Bazaarvoice showing how products with more than ten reviews saw “drastically” higher conversion rate both for the products actually reviewed and for other products from the same brand.

So the value of reviews to brands and customers is clear. What is explored in less depth in the article is why people would write reviews in the first place. The example of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Amazon is cited, which has over 3,200 reviews. Why, the article asks, would people continue to write reviews? They quote Clay Shirky in response to this:

Mr Shirky suggests that in many cases, writing a review is more like writing fan mail (or hate mail) for a product, and the people who post them do not really expect it to be read.

I think this issue needs to be explored in more depth. There are a number of reasons people might write a review:

1. They are paid to do so (as per the recent case of Belkin hiring people to rate their products five star)
2. They are forced to do so in order to gain some other incentive (TopTable requires you to rate restaurants you have been to in order to gain points for their loyalty scheme)
3. They write reviews to increase their standing in a community (where, perhaps more reviews give them more credibility or access to more features in the online community)
4. They write reviews because they want to look good / impressive / intelligent amongst their peers
5. They write reviews because they had benefit from some and they want others to benefit in the same way from their advice
6. They write reviews because they have something to say

I am sure there are examples of all six out there – from people gaining financially or socially from the review, through people wanting to share their knowledge, to people just wanting to air their opinion (whether or not people read). But, I suspect people write reviews more for the reasons at the bottom of the list than at the top. And it is certain that the reasons nearer the bottom of the list lead to more genuine reviews.

Why do people write reviews? Well most likely because they are given the opportunity to voice their opinion. They want want to help others or may just have something to say. But once we give them the chance of doing so they will. That’s one of the real benefits of social media. It encourages us all to share our thoughts and opinions and then gives us other tools so we can sort these and only the most interesting or relevant rise to the top. Give people the chance to write a review and many will do just for the chance to air their views. Show the benefit they can get from reviews and even more will write their own. Allow voting on reviews or promotion of good reviews and you will get a higher quality of comments in return.

In social media people model behaviour. They want to express themselves and if you give them the tools and permission to do so, and you show them how to express themselves then they will do. You really don’t need to pay or incentivise them, in fact this can generate a lot of much lower quality reviews. What you do need to do is understand your customers, why they might want to review and how. Then offer them the ability to do what they want to do anyway.

Reviews are useful. They increase conversion, time spent on site and have a positive halo effect for other, associated, products. And people want to write the reviews in the first place. You just need to get the social architecture right so they feel they can.

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Some more reading

• Do You Trust User Reviews on the Web? (technologizer.com)
• Belkin Responds to Fake User Review Charges (technologizer.com)

For the final in our series of Five things to do in 2009, I thought we’d go back to basics. Today we’re going to look at five ways you can engage your customers in 2009. One of the real benefits for brands of using social media or of building an online community, is that it can build sustainable engagement with your customers. Here are five ways to get this engagement.

1. Be active about asking your customers for their opinion

Too often firms don’t ask customers what they think. They may give ways for them to contact the brand, tell them their opinions or call them with compliments or complaints. But this is all very passive. Brands need to be actively asking their customers what they think. You need to go to them, not the other way round. For the customer, being asked what they think makes them feel special, part of our organisation and valued. A simple task such as calling your ten top clients in the first week in January will give you new insights into what you are doing right (and wrong) and will make ten more loyal customers. You then need to think about how you do this long term and on a much larger basis.

2. Make it easy for customers to complain

There are many ways that customers can raise their complaints about you and your products. They can tell you directly, post their thoughts on their blog, write to a newspaper, talk to all their friends…the options are endless. As a brand you should be able to feel in control of these complaints. Nobody likes to hear that their customers are unhappy, but it is much better for them to do this in a space where you have right or reply and you can even learn from these complaints. If you don’t provide a way for people to complain they will still do it, except you won’t know where and won’t be able to respond.

3. When you ask your customers something, make sure you respond

There’s nothing worse than being asked for your opinion and then not hearing what people think about it or if they are going to do anything having heard it. When you ask customers questions, or ask them to complain you must respond. Closing the feedback loop will make them feel valued and make them realise that you are actually listening to what they are saying. This will encourage them to continue to engage with you and, by knowing what and how you think, it will make their contributions more focused and productive from your perspective.

4. Deal with customers in public

Only some of your customers are going to want to talk to you and give you their opinions, and an even smaller proportion are going to want to complain. But all of your customers will want to know that you are an organisation that listens and responds. They want to know that if they were to have an idea or some feedback, that you would take it on board; and if they were to have a complaint that you would deal with it. There is a huge benefit to engaging with your customers openly and in public. If they can see you resolving a customers problem they will have greater respect for you as a business that cares about it’s customers. If they see you giving feedback they will know that you’re an organisation that listens to and focuses on the needs of its customers. Respond, and respond publicly; this is where an online community can really pay dividends.

5. Realise that engagement is not a campaign

Unlike other activities, engaging your customers cannot be run as a campaign. It is not about creating a number of advocates for a product launch or about having a conversation with some of your customers for two months. Engagement needs to be ongoing; sustained and sustainable. Once you start to listen to and close the feedback with your customers you must keep doing this. Of course, the benefits you get will be vast and wide-ranging, so most brands won’t want to stop engaging!

Read all of our Five Things to Do in 2009 posts

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Some more reading

• Criticism Is Good
• Big questions for social media strategy
• Success Beckons the Social Media-Driven Enterprise
• Five things your brand should ask about social media in 2009