FreshNetworks Blog

We sometimes analyse things too much. We spend too much time thinking about what we’re going to do and too little time actually doing it. Don’t get me wrong – we are big believers in planning and strategy at FreshNetworks. When we are building an online community for a client we spend a lot of time on planning, more so than some might, but enough to mean that when we do launch and build the site, we know how to make it a success. At this stage the detailed planning is important – you should try to make as many decisions as possible up front, consider all outcomes and plan for what you will do in different circumstances.

But sometimes you can get too wrapped up in planning things to the smallest detail when really your time is better spent just doing it.

In an online community, copy in forums, newsletters, polls and features is important. It is one significant way in which you can engage the community members, highlight what is happening on the site and how they can benefit from and add to this. Newsletters, in particular, can be a very effective way to engage people and draw them back to certain types of online community.

There is a lot of analysis that you can do on the effectiveness of copy – do certain articles attract people more than others? Do some headlines get more click-throughs and greater time spent reading the particular article once people are there? Do some newsletters have lower unsubscribe rates? All of these are valid and really important measures. They help you to monitor the health of what you are doing and identify things that are not working. But the beauty of online communities is that they are changing and organic environments – you can benchmark what you know typically performs best, and you know what works for an individual community. But there are many unpredictable factors in an online community and with community members. Sometimes it’s best to just get things written and see what the impact is.

The benefit of having a strong online community manager is that they get to know the community and its members. They live and breath it day in and day out. They know the key members, the ones who contribute most and those who are starting to become more engaged that they want to nurture. They understand these people and what makes them tick. They take part in discussions with them and they know when these discussions have gone too far.

A good online community manager will develop an innate sense of what works for their community. They will know how to talk to them, what to talk to them about, and how to engage them in a new idea, discussion or piece of functionality. In short they will know what to write to get the impact they want.

This kind of knowledge can be augmented, refined and enhanced by statistics and measurement. But they are not a substitute for the intimate knowledge that an online community manager will have. Sometimes, rather than spend forever planning, writing, testing and rewriting copy it can be best to trust your community manger. They know what works and test and refine this knowledge with the data from what actually happens. Trust them to get it right. And trust them to get it written.

There are some great examples of brands using social media that we use a lot at FreshNetworks. Not because they necessarily get everything right, but because they show what works for them and why, and they help to give ideas and inspiration to others. We’ve looked at some such examples before with how organisations can use Twitter. The cases of Dell, Starbucks, Nike and others are great stories and there is much that we can learn.

That was why it was good to see these brands, among others, performing well in the Wetpaint and Altimeter Group report ranking the worlds Top 100 global brands based on how they engage people online.

The study gives each of these Top 100 brands a score based on their engagement across more than ten social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums. The highest score (127 points) went to Starbucks, and the top ten brands are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Yahoo! and Intel tied (85)

The report analyses the different companies and groups them into four types of brands that engage online. But for me the most interesting aspect of the report is the observation that engagement increases at an ever faster rate as brands engage in more social media channels. There is a clear and measurable benefit to brands engaging in an increasing number of places online, and through an increasing number of channels.

This supports a need for brands to have a presence in a large number of social networks – interacting there and engaging with people where they are. But whilst engaging in this ever increasing number of social media channels, it is important to provide a space where these engaged people, these brand loyalists, can be brought together. Whilst you may engage them in a photo-sharing site or a mobile social network, you benefit most when you then provide a place for them to go to. Do you build your own community or go where people are? Do both.

This is what the brands at the top of this list do best. They may have very successful engagement strategies in social media sites and channels, but they also provide their own online community. From MyStarbucksIdea, through the Dell Community and eBay Discussion Boards. It’s about both engaging where people are and providing a place for them to come to. And the most engage brands online do just this.

ENGAGEMENTdb: Most Engaged Brands On Social Media –

Some more reading

• New Study Finds Correlation Between Social Media and Financial Success
• Social Media ROI: How about an increase in revenue?
• New study: Deep brand engagement correlates with financial performance
• Study: The biggest brands on the Web

It wasn’t the invention of the printing press per se that caused a revolution; it was when everybody learned to read.

This extract from Antony Mayfield‘s excellent WOMMA presentation on social web literacy sums up nicely my thoughts on social media tools. It’s not the tools, per se, that are changing the way we communicate, share information and learn. It is users themselves who are changing – talking in different ways about different things to different people. Tools will come and go, users will develop and change with them.

From this respect, social media literacy is important. We see this in the online communities that we run at FreshNetworks – users are very familiar with some tools and less so with others. They are developing their social media literacy and use different tools in different ways depending on their experience. We also see them develop this literacy – such as has been the case of a team of first-time bloggers.

Technology should be invisible and it is the way that users use the tools that matters. You can have the greatest piece of social media technology that exists, but if people don’t know how to use it then it is of no use. At least not now.

It’s an interesting area that is often overlooked – technology is placed too often in front of users’ habits and the social structure of interactions online. For that reason, Mayfield’s presentation is Required Reading for this week.

Some more reading

• Energising word of mouth through social media
• Steve Woodruff: Getting Started with Social Networking
• Technology, newspapers, the future
• Monster vs LinkedIn vs Twitter battle heats up

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)

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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