FreshNetworks Blog

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)

We’ve posted before about how and why good design matters in online communities. We spend a lot of time at FreshNetworks understanding the audience the online community is aimed at so that we can design a community that will appeal to them and help them to achieve what we want them to do.

This process of understanding who you are trying to attract and how you want to engage them is a critical step in designing the online community. It’s a critical stage in designing any content that you want to engage people, even if it’s a PowerPoint presentation.

Last week I came across this great presentation on good design in presentation from Alex Osterwalder. It’s required reading at FreshNetworks this week, and looks at a process for designing an engaging PowerPoint presentation. I see real parallels with the way we design our communities so that they engage the relevant audience.

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We’ve seen a lot of big brands launching community sites, or adding a social layer to their existing site, over the last 12-18 months. But research out this week suggests that 60% of the US’s largest companies will have an online community by 2010.

A report from Gartner predicts that 60% of the Fortune 1,000 will have an online community by 2010, reflecting the rapid growth in this way of interacting with and building engagement with customers. But this growth will not all be easy, with the same report suggesting that half of these online communities will consider their venture a failure.

Whether these figures turn out to be true or not, I think that we will see a significant growth in the use of online communities among the larger firms, and that some of these communities will not be as successful as the firms hope.

Gartner predict that a significant reason for these communities being less successful will be a lack of flexibility inside the firms to truly take advantage of the benefits these communities can bring. As Adam Sarner from the research firm says:

Companies will be challenged with what applications to use, who ultimately ‘owns’ an application or interaction and the management of socialisation itself, from measuring success and mitigating negative interactions to sourcing and cultural restraints

It is true that firms sometimes need to adapt to take advantage of the benefits an online community can bring. Our experience at FreshNetworks is that the online communities work best when a range of departments and functions are engaged and involved. From any successful online community you can get insight (for the research team), innovations and new ideas (for product development, brand managers or marketing), true stories and experiences from customers (for the PR or communications teams), amplified word of mouth (for the marketing team). The list continues, showing how each different part of an organisation can benefit from the online community.

We often find that it if a firm is ready and able to engage in this way that it can really bring all the advantages it is capable of bringing. Of course getting to this stage takes some time, and it can be best to let the community grow and develop in a particular area first before opening it up across a firm. But the most successful online communities will be those that do open up across the firm; and those that are less successful will  be the ones that never take this step.

Some more reading

• Gartner Challenge: Who’s Listening?
• Social media key to future business success
• Analyst: Half of ‘social media campaigns’ will flop
• Analyst: Half of ‘social media campaigns’ will flop (Caroline McCarthy/The Social)

When a good friend moved to Australia last year, he left me a book they knew I liked, You Can Find Inspiration in Everything. It’s a great book, if only because it emphasises something that I truly believe: good design really matters. If you combine good design with inspirational content then you have a significantly better product that you might otherwise have had.

Recently I received a copy of another book that emphasises this: Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company from Robert Brunner (who set the groundwork for much of Apple’s design) and Stewart Emery. The book shows how firms can get significant competitive advantage from good design, and how a design-driven business can help you to meet your customer’s needs more often. It is at times quite practical, showing how to develop design-driven techniques for managing and growing a business. Useful stuff in it’s own right, but I’ve been reflecting on what both of these books can teach us about how to build and manage online communities.

At FreshNetworks, spend a lot of time when we are working on a new online community with clients to understand the very people that the community will be aimed at. It’s important to understand these people in quite some detail, including what their interaction with the brand is and how and why they would want to engage online. Part of this process is to explore their habits and behaviours, and the benefit is to make all decisions and base all discussions in the shoes of these people.

With this real understanding of the people the community is aimed at we can develop content and features that will appeal to them and help to achieve our client’s objectives. We can also work on the design of the site. The appropriate content and features are important, but it is the design that will make people want to explore the community and find out what is going on. When somebody first lands on the site they need to combination of appropriate and striking content with good design to make them want to engage.

So spending time on design is important in online communities and that’s why no two communities we produce look the same. Making changes to the look and feel is an important tool we have when we’re planning and building the community. People react and respond to design and we have to get it right. And it’s only by understanding who we are trying to attract that we can do this.

Some more reading

• Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
• Social Media Tools Don’t Matter
• Meet the designer of Amazon’s Kindle [Robert Brunner]
• At Last! PC Industry Gets Serious About Good Design
• Designers Need to Be 3 People at the Same Time!
• Jonathan Ive on Apple’s Industrial Design Strategy

Earlier this year, we posted about research from Universal McCann looking at the impact of social media. Thanks to Simon at Curiously Persistent, I came across some new and equally interesting research from the team their. This time they look at the influence we have online, how we respond and react to other people, and how user-generated content informs our decision making.

This is a timely piece of research, as we posted last week, 25 million US adults base their purchasing decisions on social media. The Universal McCann research looks into this behaviour in more detail.

I won’t try to summarise the whole thing here, but it has become required reading at FreshNetworks. For us the research is particularly useful in highlighting how and why people are using social media and online communities to effect change across a range of domains, from politics to shopping. The data on which these conclusions are based are worth exploring in more detail but the message for brands is clear: we’re in a new world of transparency.

In this world, it is easier for people to have their voice heard and to hear the voices of others. Everybody matters and everybody can be part of an exchange with each other and with a brand. Brands need social media strategies to reach out to these people and to truly engage in these new transparent terms. Scary stuff at times, but there are some great examples of where this has worked (and if you want to see some jump to the end of the presentation below).

Some more reading

• Research and Markets: As the Number of Business Users of Social …
• The Consumer and Social Media
• Scientists Use Social Media
• If You’re Not Participating in Social Media
• More than Half of US Adults Text, Blog, Otherwise Use Social Media
• Social Media Rapidly Going Mainstream