FreshNetworks Blog

A number of speakers at the Marketing 2.0 conference (including myself) made analogies (explicitly or implicitly) to games or gaming when talking about their social media strategies. I think that this is a good analogy and very relevant to understanding what we do when we are building and managing online communities at FreshNetworks, and how to motivate people to take part in them.

Most social media strategies, and indeed most online communities that we build, hope to increase a consumer’s engagement with (and exposure to) the brand. This can often mean trying to increase the amount of time spend on site, or increasing the frequency and recency of visit. We see all three of these increase in our online communities (often quite substantially) when compared with other territories that the brand controls online. But to achieve this we need to offer the consumer something compelling, and to some extent enter into a game with them.

This may be in a very traditional sense, and some of the best online support communities that I know of are powered using a similar techniques to those you find in games. Rewarding those who give valuable answers to lots of questions with access to special parts of the site, new challenges to take part in and special avatars so that others can see their position. But in most other online communities this very overt application of gaming techniques would not be as successful. However, there is still much we can learn.

We want to engage people, increase the amount of time they spend with us and the benefits they receive. They want to be entertained, to share their thoughts, to learn and to be heard. To satisfy both sides we can take an influence from games and gaming:

• Provide people with new activities to do – Games are based on levels, when you complete one set of activities another opens up, keeping people involved and engaged. The same should be true in an online community. When somebody completes a task we should be providing them with something else to do. If they have uploaded a photo we should be showing them a forum discussion to tell us more, or a set of photos they might be interested in commenting on. We can show them something they might want to do and a new challenge to take part in.

• Reveal the community slowly – In a game, as people progress through levels the features available to them increase. In an online community, this approach is also successful; we don’t want people to see all that the community has to offer at once. They may be overwhelmed by the variety of things to do and it can be easier to release content and features more slowly to new members. But it is also good for members to feel a sense of discovery, to find new features the longer they spend on the site and to feel to some extent rewarded each time they come back.

• Allow people to play at their own level – Some of the best games are so successful because people can play at their own level. If they are expert gamers or just amateurs, they can enjoy and feel rewarded by spending time with the game. The same is true in an online community. Some people are never going to start a new conversation or propose a new idea. But they may want to vote for a video they like or answer a poll. Allow people to engage with the brand on whatever level is appropriate to them and allow them to benefit from this engagement, at whatever level it is.

• Make it fun – Games are fun and online communities should be too. They should be diverting and provide stimulation and excitement for those participating. When you’re building and managing you online community always ask yourself: how are we making this a fun place to be?

Read all of our posts based on the Marketing 2.0 Conference here.

Some more reading

• Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities (beth.typepad.com)
• Social media and B2B marketing (nevillehobson.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

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

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

Next week I’m speaking at the SocialMediaInfluence conference in London on Measuring Influence and Audience online. It’s a tricky subject and looking around today I have been unable to find any examples of an approach which has been successfully and repeatedly applied.

The problem appears to be that whilst there are a whole range of metrics that we can measure in social media (see The Social Organisation blog for a fairly comprehensive list) but none of these truly gets to the crux of the problem. What we want to do is know is to measure the influence that a single blogger, commenter or video upload has. What is the value of a blog post praising Coca-Cola in terms that Coca-Cola could understand and measure. As many of our clients ask us, what’s the ROI of encouraging this kind of activity.

The answer is that it’s difficult to measure, not because we don’t have a range of metrics (we do) but because at the moment our understanding of what causes a particular post or a particular individual to be influential is limited. We can measure proxies, such as trackbacks, links to the site from other sites (and the number of links to the sites that link there). But these really only reflect an inherent influence that we still haven’t measured.

What we really want to know is how influential is everybody that is exposed to an piece of content, and how influential are all the people they influence. Of course calculating this number would be difficult if not impossible. And the information you need to gather would be huge. It really wouldn’t be worthwhile.

Which is why some more basic measure is needed. Take the sites like Dell’s Ideastorm and MyStarbucksIdea. These get peers to vote posts up or down depending how relevant they think they are. You can then migrate only the more popular posts to the front page or the top of the list. This kind of rough approach might be a crowd-sourced way of measuring influence. We know that the most popular posts are those that people in the community think the brand needs to listen to most. Perhaps this is the only measure of influence we need.

People talk about your brand everywhere online. A search in Google would find hundreds if not thousands of places where people are talking about or commenting on your brand. You could be mistaken for thinking that the rise of social media has led to people being exposed to more discussions about your brand that you don’t control. And you might think this is dangerous and get concerned about each of those hundreds or thousands of discussions.

But the mistake in this analysis is to assume that every discussion is equal. They’re not. A blog that criticises your brand but is read by hardly anybody is of very little importance to you. In fact the majority of discussions about your brand will each only have a very small audience. You don’t need to occupy yourself with them all, but rather with those which are repeatedly discussing you, or those that have significant influence.

This raises the question of how you measure influence. Aside from a very small number of well read bloggers, it is difficult at first glance to identify how influential somebody is online. You could look at how many posts they’ve made on a forum – but if nobody is reading them then that’s not a great measure.

Of more use is to measure the network effect that an individual has. How many forums or blogs are they active on and how many people read their posts on these sites? How many social networks are they a member of and how many friends do they have there?

These measures are much more useful when it comes to measuring influence – if somebody posts something about your brand how many different people will see it and how much will they trust the poster?

To some extent these measures can be made into a simple formula. Take each social network that somebody is a member of and give it a weighting for importance – so one that is more specific to your brand or product might be weighted more than a generic social network. So, taking a brand that sells baby products, a social network specifically for mums might be weighted twice as heavily as a Facebook. You can then multiply this number by the number of contacts you have on each site to get a measure of influence by site. And sum them to get a measure for the poster overall.

For example, Poster A has 100 friends on a Mum’s site (weighted 2) and 350 friends on Facebook (weighted 1) would have a total influence measure of 550. Compare this with Poster B, with 150 friends on a Mum’s site but only 70 friends on Facebook. Their influence measure would be 370.

So Poster A is about half as influential again as Poster B.

This is a good basis for a measure of influence and a way of finding the people you need to track and engage online. The problem at the moment is that the data needed to make this formula work isn’t readily available. Back to the drawing board maybe.

Thanks to Social Media Playground for a post this week about the Forrester Research Marketing Forum 2008, and in particular the discussion about engagement being the new key metric for businesses to know and understand (see post here).

Forrester put forward a model for measuring engagement based on the “Four I’s”:

• Involvement: KPIs including site visitors, time spent, page views
• Interaction: the volume of contributions to blogs, UGC, reviews
• Intimacy: survey-based measures of consumer attitudes, perception and feeling about the brand
• Influence: the weight of the consumer, how likely they are to recommend the brand or be advocates

These measures taken together can then be used to understand and assess the levels of engagement a customer has with the brand. For us, the interesting element here is the Influence measure – this seems to take the metric out of being a simple measure of how one customer engages with a brand to be a measure of the value of this engagement. A highly engaged customer who is also highly networked is of more value than one who is less well networked.

When you think of word of mouth and advocacy, this becomes a much more valuable measure!

Download an excerpt from the Forrester paper here.