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)

There are many examples of big brands in social media (in fact you can find a whole range across different industries in our online community examples), but at the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris it was great to hear some real case studies from the people behind these strategies and campaigns.

Two presentations that particularly stood out were from Scott Monty at Ford and Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines. Both have a strong history of customer engagement and have been, to some extent, pioneers in their use of social media and online communities. And both of their presentations were refreshing in terms of the information they shared. For me, four core themes came from what they said:

1. It’s about people not firms – social media is about people engaging with people, and firms that want to engage with them all also need a personal touch. You should put faces on the individual people who make up your brand and let people see and engage with them. Of course, from the brand’s perspective it is best to do this is a way that is sustainable even when the individuals leave the firm.
2. Make things public – social media is a about sharing and it provides a real platform for firms to share their knowledge and information. In fact, Scott Monty told us that Ford, as part of its social media strategy, shared with the public anything that used to appear on its intranet that was not commercially sensitive. This seems to be a great approach – social media and online communities are about openness and honesty. Brands who are open and honest will be most successful.
3. Connect with people where they are already – don’t make it difficult for people to find and connect with your brand. Rather provide them a route, a way to connect with you. As Scott Monty said “every obstacle we put in the way closes a distribution channel”. The best examples of social media marketing, and the best online communities also engage people where they are – be that on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or blogs. They engage them and then provide an easy route for them to engagement.
4. Provide a place for people to go to – whilst engaging people where they are is important, you need to provide something for them to do once you have engaged them and the best examples of big brands in social media provide a place for these people to go to. An online community, web site or other activity that you drive people to where they can really engage with you on a site that you provide and where you benefit from the engagement as much as the consumer does.

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

Some more reading

• Social Media Marketing: Time Trap or Opportunity Magnet? New Study Reveals the Answers (buildabetterblog.com)
• Big brands on Twitter (wheelontheweb.wordpress.com)
• Innovators in Social Media (businessweek.com)

Whether you use the Net Promoter Score or not yourself, you will undoubtedly have come across this ‘single number everybody needs to know’. On one level it is a calculation that takes into account how strongly people would be likely to promote your brand and returns a single score, expressed as a percentage. On another level, it is an entire approach to business and interacting with your customers that leads to the calculation of this score.

The score itself is what most people are interested in – the difference, expressed in a percentage, between those people who are very likely to recommend your brand and those people  and the beauty of it is that it can reflect the different levels of engagement and loyalty that customers feel to different types of brand. A luxury hotel chain, for example, should be expecting a Net Promoter Score of about +70%, an airline shouldn’t expect one higher than +10%, and a cable TV company needs to prepare for a score below -5% (yes, scores can be negative).

At the Marketing 2.0 conference we were lucky to hear from both Richard Owen of Satmetrix (the people behind the NPS) and Conny Kelcher from LEGO (a fervent user of the NPS). Both were able to highlight exactly what the benefit of Promoters is, in hard cash.

Conny’s example looked purely at revenue generated by the individual themselves, and clearly showed that Promoters spend more than Detractors and so it makes good business sense to improve your NPS. Looking at expenditure on LEGO, over the same time period customer spend was as follows:

• Promoters spent 208 Euros
• Fence Sitters spent 165 Euros
• Detractors spent 136 Euros

So, for LEGO, a Promoter will spend 53% more on their product than a Detractor.

Richard, quoting a study of network providers in the US, looked at this in more detail. He considered not just direct spend that the individual makes on the product, but the total contribution they make to the brand – including from recommending others (or indeed otherwise). When looked at like this, the average lifetime value for the network providers was as follows:

• Each Promoter brings an additional $693 in revenue
• Each Detractor is responsible for $1,495 in lost revenue

So the difference between a Promoter and a Detractor was almost $2,200. For Richard this showed that sometimes it can make business sense to buy your Detractors out of their contract with you. Overall it shows that Promoters are a category worth keeping and worth growing.

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

Some more reading

• NPS is Growing Up (adaptivepath.com)
• Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction (startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com)

Image via Wikipedia

One of the first speakers at the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris was Conny Kalcher from LEGO, and if anything her presentation was an example of how good segmentation and really understanding your different consumer persona types can make a real difference to a successful social media strategy.

At LEGO, the core target is a young boy, and they group their customers into six groups

1. Lead Users – people LEGO actively engage with on product design
2. 1:1 Community – people whose names and addresses they know
3. Connected Community – people who have bought LEGO and also been to either a LEGO shop or LEGO park
4. Active Households – people who have bought LEGO in last 12 months
5. Covered Households – people who have bought LEGO once
6. All Households – those who have never bought LEGO

These six types of customers are defined based on the strength and depth of their relationship with the brand – from having no experience with the brand to being actively involved in it not just as a product but as a business. There are fewer Lead Users than there are Covered Households and when volume and closeness to the brand are combined like this it lends itself to neat segmentation of the marketing (and indeed the social media strategy).

Indeed LEGO uses a different approach for the top three segments than for the bottom three. This is the cut-off point at which customers become truly engaged. They are not just entering into a transactional relationship, but they actually care about the brand. LEGO uses social media to work with these three segments – from co-creating online with the Lead Users to engaging the Connected Community and 1:1 Community in online communities and social networks. These are, perhaps, the easiest and best people to engage and empower online and so the most efficient use of social media. They are the people LEGO wants to feel special, and the people they want to test new ideas and products with. They are also the people to keep engaged and close to the brand – the people who will spend most and be your biggest advocates.

Proper customer segmentation and persona profiling helps you to understand how your customers differ and how their needs differ. Social media and online communities let you treat different people in different ways and also to engage with them in the way they want to be engaged with.

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

Some more reading

• Community Marketing: three things to do differently (thecustomercollective.com)
• Some brands will love the new Facebook (sharemarketing.wordpress.com)

Today’s Libération, in Paris, reports on the rise of “le Twitter” (or gazouillis as it could be in French) and in particular its use in politics. Citing a French researcher the article says that:

Politicians, already under pressures, like to think that with these new means of communication they will escape the yoke of journalism and instead establish a direct link with the public

Twitter is still in it’s infancy in France. It has only 6,000 users, as opposed to the two million French people on Facebook. But even though the take-up is small (although growing rapidly) it’s development is being accelarated by learning from how it is being used in the US.

The French researcher quoted in the article no doubt has Barack Obama and his more than 50,000 followers in his mind. But what is interesting is to compare how he is using Twitter and how it is being used by French politicians.

Obama has a large following and is using Twitter as a means of pushing out messages and feeds. Contrast this with Benoît Hamon, a French Member of the European Parliament. He is using Twitter to give updates on what he is doing, such as

I don’t understand why riot police has cordoned off the European Parliament for Sarkozy’s arrival. The strikers have always been peaceful until now.

This contrast is interesting and shows, again, how the same social media site can be used by different people for different things. Obama is using it to issue notices and updates, Hamon to give his followers a real insight into his life and observations.

Perhaps most interesting, however, is that even though Twitter is in its infancy in France it is being used in a very mature way by its politicians. This shows that being a first mover can often mean a slower adoption curve. The US took to Twitter a lot quicker but the growth of corporate, political and organisational use of the medium to engage the public has developed quite slowly. France can start higher up this curve. It can start much sooner to use social media to have a direct link with the public.

Some more reading

• Can Barack Obama Fix Twitter?
• Twitter, la nouvelle arme des politiques
• McCain Lags Behind Obama in Online Fundraising, Social Networking Popularity