FreshNetworks Blog

Imagine if you could know who visits your cafe or shop on a regular basis. You will, of course, recognise many of these people. The man with the glasses who comes in most mornings for a flat white (that’s me by the way). The two women who always have lunch on a Thursday. Or the family who bring their children on a Saturday. You will recognise some regulars and you will no doubt speak to them and start to get to know them. Social media can help you do this more, and can, perhaps importantly, help you target people who visit sometimes but not yet regularly. This is where geolocation-based social media tools such as Foursquare come into play.

Foursquare is social media tool that lets users say where they are by ‘checking in’ at locations. You earn points for doing this and can see who else has checked-in here. If the location you are at is not yet on Foursquare then you can add details about it and plot it on a map. You earn points and get badges (status) the more times you check in and the person who visits somewhere more regularly becomes its Mayor.

I have been using Foursquare recently and, for example, might check in to the Fleet River Bakery just round the corner from my office when I get breakfast in the morning. Or I might check into Selfridges on Oxford Street in London when I’m shopping at the weekend. I am not yet Mayor of anywhere, but could become the Mayor of any of these places if I visit it most regularly. This is a small but growing tool, and it being joined by more and more geolocation-based social media tools that can be a real benefit to businesses.

Let’s take the Fleet River Bakery as an example. As a small bakery and cafe in central London they face a lot of competition (there are probably about ten similar venues nearby) but they are very popular with queues round the corner at lunchtime. Some people will be regulars and other will visit from time to time. On Foursquare, Fleet River has a profile, whether they set it up or not, and people who go there can check in – putting their details on this profile. For the guys at Fleet River this could be a powerful data resource. If they can attract people to visit them and check in on Foursquare then they can start to see who is visiting them, how often and when. But it can also be a powerful peer-to-peer marketing tool. On Foursquare your friends are told where you are. So when somebody checks in at the cafe their friends will learn where they are and so learn about Fleet River, where they are and what they do. They will also know that their friends go there and, as we know, peer-to-peer recommendation are much more important than anything a brand can say.

Using new and growing tools like Foursquare can be really powerful for small businesses. And if you work with these tools you will get even more out of them. Perhaps on the boards outside Fleet River they should say who the Mayor currently is, and perhaps even offer him or her a free coffee when they next come in. Or maybe offer exclusive discount, or a free cookie, to anybody on Foursquare who checks in.

There is a lot you can do to help people market your small business for you. Much of it free and just making use of the social media tools that are out there.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Image via Wikipedia

People trust peers, even if they don’t know them. This is the observation behind the success of online communities from TripAdvisor to reviews on Amazon or indeed any one of the many examples of online communities that are growing and flourishing. We trust these strangers-cum-peers with important decisions in our live – from which hotel to book for our annual holiday, to support on medical or financial decisions. And some trust these strangers-cum-peers so much that they even lend money to them.

We know that people trust the advice and recommendations of peers. They connect through their content, their stories and their experiences. If somebody tells us about their life then we know more about them, we can empathise with them and understand better the decisions they tell us that they make. The more we get to know people the more we can assess the level at which we trust their thoughts and their stories. We learn more information about them and this lets us evaluate their thoughts and the relevance of these to us.

And it works – we can get to know people online only through their conversations and ideas. In fact it makes it easier for us to find people like us. They no longer have to be near us or ever met us in person. The ideas alone are enough to connect us.

One example of the level at which we are able to build relationships of trust online is shown by the peer-to-peer micro-lending sites, such as Kiva or Zopa. These sites rely on individuals needing a loan finding others with money to lend. As a lender you obviously need to feel that the organisation behind the scheme has a strong background and a low default rate. But when it comes to actually lending your own money to an individual it is the relationship you can build with that person themselves that counts.

You can’t talk to them or meet them. Rather you have to rely on their stories, ideas and contributions online. You get to know them by what they tell you and what they reveal to you. You find people with whom you can empathise or understand. And through these ides and stories alone you can make a decision to lend them money.

This is, of course, a great thing. People wanting small amounts of money that can make a real difference to their lives. And because we can now connect them online this is possible on a much more peer-to-peer basis. Of course, it also shows the power of online communities and our ability to connect with people through shared ideas and discussions. Whilst I might be willing to lend money to somebody like this, I probably wouldn’t be willing to lend money to the person that I see on my way into work everyday but have never spoken to, and know nothing about.

Online communities allow us to find and connect with people through ideas. Through sharing ideas in this way we really get to know them, and really start to trust them. And that’s why online communities can be really powerful.

Image by manfrys via Flickr

People are often comparing Twitter with Facebook. They’re wrong to do this. Facebook is about connections, friends and contacts. Twitter is not about this at all. It’s about information and search.

The real value of Facebook is when you have a group of friends with who you share ideas, experiences and content. Twitter, on the other hand is not really built for connecting with people – its real value comes from the comments and contributions that are added to its database and that can then be searched.

That’s why I’ve always preferred to compare Twitter with Google. On Google I search for information and get a set of results based on which sites score most highly in their algorithm. On Twitter I search for information and get a set of results based on which links are most often read and forwarded by other users. Google produces mathematical search results. Twitter produces UGC ones. Until now.

ZDNet is reporting that Google has soft-launched public comments on search results:

Google’s Searchology press conference unveiled a boatload of new features including different ways to visualize results, better support for semantic markup, and more. But when I was looking at the results page, I noticed a little comment icon. There was no mention of this.

The article goes on to describe how some users can now comment on search results and this is made pubilc to others. I cannot see this yet and so it is probably being rolled-out across the user-base slowly.

This is a huge change and shows that Google is taking seriously the potential threat of Twitter and other UGC search sources. Allowing users to comment on search results really could combine a solid algorithm with user’s own expertise. And we know that people are more likely to trust peers when making purchase decisions, so why not when searching online too.

There is obviously a lot to know about how this might work – who can comment, are these comments moderated (and if so how and by whom, will rating of sites be included too, how will Google cope when many thousands of people review one site. But these will no doubt be resolved as people start to comment on search results and use these to inform their own search.

For now we just know that UGC search is serious business. Twitter has integrated search into its main page and now google is allowing comments on it’s own search results. This really does show the power of social media. Once an algorithm would show the those results that were mathematically best suited to our query. Now users influence this – either by searching user content and links on Twitter or, perhaps, the potential for comments on Google itself.

Exciting times.

In February this year a survey on the market research industry in 2009 showed two very different pictures. The research, sponsored by online-oriented companies Cambiar, MRops and Peanut Labs, found that whilst clients and agencies alike predicted a small growth in the market of about 1%, this did not tell the full story. Although they saw the market growing slightly in 2009, they thought that the proportion of work that was brought inhouse would increase significantly.

There are a number of reasons for clients bringing research inhouse. The current economic climate is making organisations review external contracts more thoroughly and spend money more carefully, and also making employers use their own staff in the most efficient way possible. So rather than paying  external agencies to do some tasks, clients are using their internal teams instead.

But even without the current economic climate there are deeper reasons for this move inhouse. The survey showed that one in five clients would use social media and social networks to generate sample, and that one in three clients intended to build their own branded community for research. The use of social media as part of the research process is changing the role of agency and client and changing the range of tools and methodologies available to us all. It can seem to make it easier for us all to do research, find people, watch what they are discussing and ask them questions.

We wrote yesterday about the promise of online research communities, and how too often they don’t quite live up to this. Whilst social media is empowering clients and agencies alike to do research in different ways, there is still a role for both. A good online research community is not just about asking the right questions, it’s about engaging people, building a real community that is vibrant and active and ready to contribute to research, innovation, word-of-mouth and in many other ways.

To do this isn’t easy. Whilst social media may make access to people and the ability to build a community site easier, it does not make motivating, moderating, and working with community members any easier. In fact it adds a whole range of new problems. How do you design a community that really meets your business needs? How do you find and engage the people you want to? How do you grow and build members, conversations, activities and word-of-mouth? How do you make sure that the brand is represented well in the community, and that the community is represented well in the organisation? How do you deal with negative discussions as well as positive ones?

These and other questions are the new challenges that social media and online communities present for research. If there is a move inhouse that is not necessarily a bad thing for the industry. It may be that certain parts of the research process are taken inhouse, whereas others are left for agencies to support. Agencies can operate where they add value most and where their expertise is best put to use. Clients, for their part, can take more control or have greater influence over some parts of the process. Exactly how this relationship changes is not yet clear, but change it will.

Clients will take more things inhouse, but have greater need for agency support in new areas. To cater for this, agencies need to change and some of their traditional roles may become redundant. For me that’s the bigger story for the market research industry in 2009.

I’ll be talking about the changing client-agency relationship, and in particular how clients can manage their own online research communities at the Online Research Methods conference in London in June.

We’ve written before about the real power that online research communities can bring to a brand, and also of the way in which you can get insight from any online community. The promise of rich insight is great – real people talking to each other about your brand, market and competitors. They provide a real hub for innovation and co-creation and give you access to real-time insight. But sometimes they just don’t seem to work, they just don’t deliver what you might expect.

At FreshNetworks we have built online communities from scratch, and also worked  with organisations who have an incumbent online research community that isn’t living up to its promise. Through this experience we’ve developed the following four tips to help discover what the problem might be:

1. Do you actually have a panel, not a community?

Research panels and online research communities are very different. They work in different ways, deliver different types of research and insight and are useful for different business objectives. The biggest failing that we see with online research communities is that what you really have is a panel of people and not a community. The discussions tend to be between the brand or agency and community member, rather than peer-to-peer in the community. And you find that the majority of your traffic comes when you send an email about an activity, survey or discussion that you want people to respond to.

This can be the most difficult problem to solve. You need to think again about who you want to engage and why and  build an engagement strategy alongside your research plan.

2. Do your community members actually want to engage with you?

Wanting to engage with people in an online community is really only half of the story. There are probably lots of things that you want them to do, but do they really want to do them? And if so do they want to do them in your community?

The difference between an online research community and other forms of market research is that you want to build and grow a community of people to work with to help you for insight and research. You can’t call through a list of people until you find those who want to answer your questions. You need to build a community that targets and meets the requirements of the people you want to engage so that they will be there to answer your questions when you have them. If they don’t actually want to engage with you, this can be difficult.

3. Are you incentivising in the right way?

The topic of incentives is one much discussed in market research – should you incentivise people, for what behaviours and with what reward? Get your incentive structure wrong and you will encourage and grow the  wrong behaviours. People will only contribute to your online research community to an extent they think appropriate for what they are getting in return.

The signs that your incentivisation structure is wrong includes unusually larger churn-rates. Indeed you might see the higher rates of churn typical of a research panel, rather than the low churn rates we see in online research communities. You’ve moved people from the social context of the community to a market context where they aren’t engaging with you but transacting.

4. Are you part of your community?

The role of the brand and agency is changing with the growth of online research communities (a topic I shall be returning too at the Online Research Methods conference in London June). One major change is that rather than the agency and brand always asking the questions, and the respondent answering, the playing field is levelled somewhat. Online research communities only really work if you play a role in the community as a peer, rather than trying to lead or direct it.

You have questions to ask and activities that you want people to do, but you also need to join in the conversations. Don’t always ask questions, but answer some too. Join the forums, talk about yourself – give a face and a name to the research and the brand. This makes the experience better and fairer for everybody. And also more enjoyable for you. Where this doesn’t happen, where the agency or brand hides behind an ‘Admin’ name, or doesn’t engage in the community, you miss out on a whole range of real, rich benefits.

So, if you see an online research community that you think just isn’t living up to its promise then ask these four question of it. Of course, identifying the problem is less than half the battle. The next step is to fix it.

Some more reading

• The Best Market Researchers to Follow on Twitter (futurelab.net)
• Getting insight from online communities (freshnetworks.com)
• Maximising the insight you get from your online community (socialmediatoday.com)