FreshNetworks Blog

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Today I was speaking at the MRS Online Methods conference on London – a great day with people sharing ideas on online research and how to engage customers online.

I was speaking specifically about how online research communities are actually just online communities that people use for research but that they should also use for other things (PR, marketing, customer service, innovation…the list goes on). And about how the client can, and indeed should, get involved in the process. It’s when you don’t do this when online communities fail to live up to their promise. We need to think community first and research second, rather than just tagging a forum onto your online survey. That’s when you get the real benefits and when you start having some fun.

The presentation I gave is below. As always these things are better presented but the point should still come through clearly. Thinking just about an online research community misses out on the big opportunity. An online community is a direct line to your customers. Research is a great place to start with this but you need to think bigger.

To make the most of this the client has to get involved:

1. Add value to the community by being a visible part of it, either to respond to specific points, join discussions naturally or even to take a major role in community management
2. Incentivise the responses but don’t do this with money. A good community is a vibrant social environment; adding money into this turns things into a market. It changes the dynamic to the detriment of the community itself. Think of what else you can give people. Think about what knowledge and ideas you can trade for their ideas
3. Make sure you represent the community in the business and that your brand is making full benefit of the powerful resource it now has

Some more reading

• Customer service is the new marketing (freshnetworks.com)
• Pricing, WOM, PR Efforts Get Recession Boost (marketingvox.com)
• One Hell of an OCM List of Responsibilities (chrisabraham.com)
• Marketer // Customer (conversationagent.com)

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We posted last week about how customers sometimes do not know what they want. About how they cannot always articulate what they think, or how they are not always aware of what the opportunities and options might be. There is a third reason why it can be difficult to work with customers on co-creation – because they are not always aware of what decisions they make and why they make them. We are not, it turns out, as rational as we might think, or hope.

At FreshNetworks, we are fans of the work of Dan Ariely. There is a lot in his research in behavioural economics that has real resonance and application to online communities and co-creation. From incentivisation (and why paying people is a bad way to motivate them) to why we declare our preference for one product over another. There is much here for us to learn both about how people will behave in online communities, but also how we should design them to get the best and most useful set of insights for brands.

The video below is a great introduction to rationality and why our decisions are not always as much in our control as we might think. As Ariely says, we wake up in the morning and we feel that we make our decisions. But this is not true; in practice many of these decisions do not reside in us. So if you want to know why consumers behave as they do and how we can work with them in online communities then this is a good starting point.

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

The video comes from the great series of TED videos. There are some other really great talks and presentations there that are worth watching.

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An online community takes effort and often time to plan, build, seed and grow. You need to work hard to make sure you get the business objectives right, work out who you are going to engage and how to engage them, and then work with them to seed and grow the community with them.

That’s why it’s a shame when this effort goes to waste. When your online community fails to live up to its promise.

So how do you make sure this doesn’t happen to you? That you don’t waste your online community?

Here are four ways that we have often seen the opportunities that online communities offer being wasted, and some thoughts on how to avoid suffering the same fate.

1. You just aren’t present in the conversations

An online community is a dialogue, you work with and alongside the other members of the community on a shared interest, issue, topic or problem. It is no good just asking questions and expecting answers. Nor is it any good just sitting and watching what others say. You must be part of the conversations. Talking to people and exchanging ideas with them.

The biggest danger of not doing this is that the community members will become disillusioned. They will start questioning whether you are even listening and the conversations and debates will stop being about the original subjects and start being about you. This makes a very intimidating environment for new community members and so you will find that a small bunch of members take over.

The solution is simple. Talk to your members. Ask them questions, answer theirs and give your own opinion. Enjoy your community and enjoy talking to the other community members. They’ll respond to you taking part and you, they and the community as a whole will benefit.

2. There’s no link back to the organisation

A branded online community, or one that is clearly from a particular organisation must be connected into that same organisation. Community members will quickly lose interest if they think that nobody is listening to and feeding back on what they are saying. They will uncover a community manager who is unable to connect them into the organisation or represent the organisation in the community.

A real connection is needed to make the most of your online community and this can often mean enacting real change in your organisation. If you are using it to its full potential, an online community should be a way of getting the customer voice deep inside your organisation. You should be talking about the online community in meetings right up to, and including, the Board meeting. This is the way your customers are heard in the organisation, and the way your organisation can talk to its customers. Make sure you do.

3. You are not encouraging organic conversations

Too many online communities appear to have a fixed purpose or objective and only encourage people to take part on this. They may be communities based on media share, and not encourage discussions or forusm. They may be online research communities that do not nurture organic discussions on broader topics or between research activities.

Often the most useful benefit that you will gain from your online community will come from the areas and discussions you least expect. The topics you didn’t initially focus on or the debates and discussions that your community members start themselves. Organic conversations are where things get exciting. They are where new ideas can really come from and where the community can truly come to life. Make sure you don’t stifle them.

4. You moderate every contribution before it goes on the site

There is a time and a place for pre-moderation, reviewing and approving every piece of content before it goes on the community. But in most cases this isn’t needed. There is nothing more frustrating for a user than arriving on a community site, finding interesting topics and discussions, registering and then adding their own thoughts only for these not to appear on the site. Many of these users will leave, frustrated, and never return.

Pre-moderation can be deadly. It should be handled with care and used only where other means are not possible or appropriate. Trust your community members to be responsible in their discussions and they will trust you back

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We’re going through quite a momentous period of change in the UK at the moment. Slowly but surely, the analogue TV signal is being turned off. In it’s place we have digital TV. This is a huge change, not just because people need new equipment to receive the new signal, but also because this change lets us consumer television in the way we have always wanted.

No longer do I have to start watching a programme on the hour. No more must I be in on a Wednesday night to catch the latest episode of The Apprentice. No longer is my TV schedule dictated to me by the broadcasters. They may think I want to watch game shows on a Saturday evening, every Saturday evening. But perhaps I don’t. Digital TV gives the possibility for real choice and control over what you watch and when you watch it.

This reflects a change in consumer behaviour we are seeing across media. When users (consumers) are given the chance to personalise and control their own experience, they use this. This is natural – not everybody wants to do the same things in exactly the same way. And so whether it’s allowing you to personalise a site’s homepage (as with the BBC), tag content in a way that makes sense to you, or choose what you want to see when, personalisation is key.

When we are planning and designing online communities with our clients we work hard to understand the target audience, the people we hope will be members of the community and benefit from being a part of it. However, it is important that some degree of control and personalisation is given to the user – be that letting them arrange their own profile page, choosing which view they see when they join the community, or just giving them an easy and simple way to navigate the site according to the content that matters to them most. Finding ways to allow this kind of personalisation (be it simple or complex) will enhance the community member’s experience. And watching and analysing how people personalise their experience helps us to understand them more too.

Users like personalisation. They like to have some control over how they navigate and use the online community. As their other media consumption becomes more tailored and within their control, their expectations here will only increase.

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A common debate among those working in marketing and social media is between engaging people on your own domain – in an online community that you build and manage yourself – and engaging people where they are – out in social networks like Facebook and MySpace or on YouTube, external blogs or forums.

There is, of course, a place for both of these things – engaging people in social networks can often be more suitable for campaign-based activities. For generating discussion and buzz about a specific campaign and to engage people on a relatively short-term basis. Your own online community, on the other hand, is better suited to real engagement – something that is long-term and sustainable rather than a one-off hit.

But in many cases this either/or debate seems rather strange to those of us at FreshNetworks. We think the answer is quite simple – use both.

The hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement

There are many reasons to engage people in social networks, where they are. And there are many reasons to engage people on your own online community or other site. In fact the best way to build a sustainable approach to marketing and engagement using social media is to do both. These two types of site are useful for different things and are used by consumers in different ways.

Social networks are great for reaching out to people. Posting videos or content, joining discussions or finding where people are. They are less good, however, at building lasting, long-term and sustainable engagement. And less good at contributing to long-term business strategy aims.

If you find somebody posting videos about your product in YouTube then this is a sign that they care about you, your product and what they do. They probably would do much more if you gave them a chance.  But it’s not easy to send them from YouTube to a discussion on a forum and then to join a group in Facebook (for example). You end up distributing all your engagement across social sites. You have little influence or control over these and your make the user-experience quite messy. You also miss out on all the benefits you should be getting of them being on your site – being able to ask them for (and use) profiling information, analyse what they do and say and create secure areas where you can talk to these engaged people about new product developments or other, more confidential things.

That’s why it’s best to have both. You cannot (and indeed shouldn’t) try to stop people talking about your brand in social networks. You should encourage it, give them information, tools and content to help amplify the word of mouth they create. But you should also create a space for them to come back to. This is the hub-and-spoke approach to social media engagement. You engage people where they are but provide a place for them to come to, a way for you to get all these enthusiastic and passionate people together.

It’s only then that you will start to get the most benefit from them, when you move beyond buzz and into real engagement.

Some more reading

• Social Media For Non Profits (slideshare.net)
• People are fed up of joining brand pages on Facebook (freshnetworks.com)
• Social Media Marketing Budgets on the Rise (mashable.com)
• Insights Qualitativos 2.0: Social Network Advertising Problem (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• FIR Interview: Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research (nevillehobson.com)