FreshNetworks Blog

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in June.

1. Gordon Brown’s YouTube trauma

Our most popular post for two months in a row, Charlie Osmond examines Gordon Brown’s use of YouTube to make policy announcements and why it isn’t always the best medium. There can sometimes seem to be a temptation to use social media to convey a message, but whether it’s marketing, communications, PR or engaging your customers, there’s a place for social media and a time that another route is more appropriate.

2. Build your own community or go where people are? Do both

Another popular post over the last couple of months, examining the debate about whether brands should engage customers where they are online (and so in social networks) or build their own site to bring them to (a branded online community). Here we look at the Hub and Spoke Model of Social Media Engagement. Showing how the most effective thing for any brand to do is to do both.

3. Dell makes $3 million on Twitter. What can we learn?

Dell has reportedly made $2 million in sales directly from their @DellOutlet Twitter stream, and a further $1 million from sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere. That’s $50 in revenue for every Twitter follower they have. In this post we look at three reasons why Dell has been so successful with Twitter and what others can learn.

4. How organisations can use Twitter – some examples

A presentation of three different ways that organisations are using Twitter and some ideas of how other organisations can do the same. Putting a public face on the brand, like Ford. Segmenting and targeting different groups, like Dell. Or using Twitter as a gateway to a broader social media engagement strategy.

5. People are fed up of joining brand pages on Facebook

Research from the Internet Advertising Bureau suggests that people are becoming increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages and install branded applications on their Facebook page or in other social networks. We look at what this means for brands and marketers trying to engage customers in social networks.

Image by Alex\ via Flickr

There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter so far this year – starting with the incredible growth in number of Twitter users to more recent discussions about a Harvard Business Review report that 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of activity. In all these discussions there is a significant debate about how to monetise Twitter – how they can make money from it. Most agree that Twitter is currently not monetised, at least not by Twitter itself. But Dell tell a different story. This week they revealed that they have made a total of $2 million in sales thanks directly to @DellOutlet, and a further $1 million in sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere.

So at least somebody is monetising Twitter, and quite successfully too. How is Dell doing it? What is the secret to their success?

Dell sells refurbished computers through @DellOutlet and has about 600,000 followers. And whilst $3 million revenue is a relatively small proportion of Dell’s overall sales, this does mean that they have taken an average or $5 for every follower they have on Twitter. A pretty impressive amount. If @aplusk could realise this kind of revenue per follower, he would make over $10 million. Even my few thousand followers at @mattrhodes would earn me almost $15,000 if I could realise revenue from Twitter in the same way that Dell can.

So how does Dell do it? The way it uses @DellOutlet is, like many of the the best ideas online, simple. They message their followers with deals, special offers and discounts. This is a form of real-time coupons – Dell can alert people to offers and discounts as they arise. And change the offers immediately when they sell out.

People love a bargain, they love feeling that they are the first to know something, and they love a personal connection and interaction. It is the combination of all three of these in @DellOutlet that makes it so successful.

• Dell’s approach to Twitter fosters a personal connection – rather than have a single corporate Twitter account, they segment their followers by having different accounts for different customers with different needs and interests. Those following are interested in what that particular Twitter account has to offer and will feel that it is meeting their needs.
• The use of a real-time update system like Twitter allows for offers to be promoted when they occur. It offers an immediate notification of any offer or discount and as such those who follow @DellOutlet are the first to know about deals.
• Through @DellOutlet, people can find out about genuinely good deals.

It is these three things together that make for Dell’s successful monetisation of Twitter. It’s a relatively simple formula that many businesses could adopt. Perhaps the more interesting aspect of this story is that whilst Dell uses Twitter to generate $3 million in revenue from its followers, Twitter itself asks for none of this revenue.

Some more reading

• Twitter is Not Your Average Social Network (mashable.com)
• What the Dell? Twitter Followers Get Bonuses (montysmegamarketing.com)
• Twitter to offer Facebook Page-like features for companies (or what)? (venturebeat.com)
• Dell Provides Exclusive Deal Offers on Twitter (shoppingblog.com)
• Dell joins those who ‘get’ Twitter marketing – who’s next? [VIDEO] (inquisitr.com)
• Dell Starts Offering Exclusive Discounts Through Twitter (techcrunch.com)

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 night I went to see Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired magazine, who was speaking at the ICA in London prior to publicising his new book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

We’ve written about crowdsourcing and co-creation at some length recently, and it’s an area of keen interest for all of us at FreshNetworks. Howe’s talk looked at the concept but also at its effect on various aspects of our life, from online design, merging concepts into businesses and even influencing political movements. He was really the first person to really take on the concept of gathering a group of people together online and realizing how this ‘crowd’ or ‘community’ could be harnessed to deliver innovation or insight into an idea, a brand, or simply to answer a question that might be stumping boffins in a particular company.

Walking away I reflected on what I had heard meant, especially for those of us involved in building and managing online communities. I came up with four main takeaways that I thought I would share here:

1. Any attempt at crowdsourcing must be tailored to the needs of the brand, company or problem. Technology alone will not solve the problem, but through application of tailored (and flexible) tools, supported by planning and management, communities will flourish and return benefit far outstripping the original investment.
2. Online communities offer a greater depth of insight into the thoughts and behaviour of your supporters and detractors, due to a deeper level of emotional engagement from your customers, that no survey or focus group alone can offer (for a similar cost). Companies such as Dell and Nokia have used this to grow their brands in response to the direct wishes of their customers, with great success.
3. A community is not about selling a product, it’s about communicating needs and information. Nike achieved this with Nike+, where the motive is not to sell shoes, but to generate a feeling of community, a common bond amongst its customers. The results speak for themselves, with 93% of Nike+ community members saying that they would recommend it to a friend. Friendships are built, common bonds formed and the brand is strengthened as a result.
4. Communities can deliver change. Real change, not the sort promised during a political campaign, but it can turn a brand around. Who would have thought that a t shirt art competition could turn into a community that was the seed for a multi-million pound business – Threadless anyone?

Some more reading

• SideTaker – crowdsource your private life
• Crowdsourcing Book Excerpt: The Canary in the Coal Mine
• Crowd Funding: A Different Way to Pay for the News You Want
• Wiki Textbook: Two’s Company Three’s a Crowdsource
• Q&A;: Jeff Howe on ‘crowdsourcing’
• GotATeenager? Some best practices in online community strategy
• Incentives In Online Social Communities
• Ways to Crowdsource
• So Much for Crowdsourcing

A new online community was launched in the UK today. The GotATeenager site has been launched with funding from the Department of Children, Schools and Families as part of its parenting programme. It is an online community of parents, with information for them to help them as they raise their teenagers, the ability to ask questions of and get advice from other parents and between them to build a knowledge bank of questions.

The site appears to be set-up well. It has a number of elements that we at FreshNetworks consider to be best practice in online community strategy and design, three good examples are:

1. The site has a good and clear typology. Information is organised around key words which are used to aggregate content – be it editorial content, questions from other parents, forums discussions or any other piece of content. This clear organisation of data is critical to any successful online community and presenting user-generated content alongside editorial content shows the nature of a community – developed and grown by the community members and their content on an equal footing to the ‘editorial’ content.
2. The site lets community members build and add to knowledge. Both the questions and answers sections and other parts of the site (notably the teen slang dictionary) are added to and made more complete by the content that community members themselves add to sites. This is a real benefit of online communities. It is often the case that community members know more about specific subjects than any organisation might. Using their contributions to compile a Q&A section or to add to the bank of knowledge is a way of gathering together all knowledge in the area and delivering it back to peers. You reward the efforts of those who contribute (people enjoy seeing their own ideas recognised in this way) and you provide an even greater volume of information and ideas to other members
3. The site starts simply. The content on the site is relatively simple. There are a small number of subject areas being discussed and content is laid out clearly and simply according to these. We find that the best way to launch and build momentum for an online community is to start simple like this. Get it right for a specific subject or specific target audience and then grow from there.

But perhaps the most interesting aspects of the GotATeenager site is that it was built as a way of dealing, in a different way, with a growing and pressing need. The UK government funds a telephone hot line for parents that has been receiving about 1,000 calls a week from parents. We find in our work with companies that online communities like this can be a great way of reducing support-centre costs. This is definitely an experience that Dell has had with its communities and is an oft-cited benefit of forums and online communities. By building a resource that parents can get access to at a time that suits them, allowing them to ask questions and learn direct from other members, and letting them join and share experiences will undoubtedly reduce the number of calls to the call-centre.

In fact, our experience is that an online community like this not only reduces the number of calls to a support centre but it also, perhaps more importantly, increases the reach of the support. More people will read and learn fom the community than might be driven to call a support centre. So not only are you redirectly traffic to the online community, you are also catering for a whole new audience.

It will be interesting to watch GotATeenager. The seeding and early stages of a community are critical. You can have the best strategy and design, but it is how you nurture those early conversations and members that is critical now.

Some more reading

• OnLine Tribalism & the Future of Social Media
• Teen-busting website coming soon
• Parentline Plus networking website allows parents to discuss their teenagers
• New Social Networking site launched for Parents of Teenagers
• neighbourknowledge.com Launches Canada’s First Online Community Focused on Neighbourhoods
• SideTaker – crowdsource your private life