FreshNetworks Blog

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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)

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 return this week to our series of Online Community Examples. There is a lot of talk about the way ‘old’ and ‘new’ media combine – how newspapers are using Twitter and how television broadcasters and production companies are working with online media. So this week we take a look specifically at examples of online communities in the TV industry

Online communities in the TV industry

The TV industry has a relatively long history of online communities – both fan sites and sites sponsored by the brand itself. People like to discuss both within the fantasy of a programme (fan plot lines, character diaries and so forth) and also discuss the content itself – evaluating what happened, talking about the acting, new characters or a twist in the plot. What is more, there is a real rise in people discussing TV programmes whilst they are being broadcast – people combining the online community experience and the TV experience simultaneously. This industry is fertile ground for online community examples, as the three case studies below show.

Rate My Space

HGTV in the US set up their Rate My Space online community to accompany their broadcast schedule which, as their full name suggests is Home and Garden Television. The concept was originally very simple. Users could upload an image and brief description of a room or part of their house that had been renovated. Others could then vote for or comment on these images.

As we’ve discussed before, simple concepts can often be the best ones in online communities, and so it proved in this case. HGTV wanted to both generate engagement and discussions with it’s viewers, and to use the increased volumes of content to increase revenue from advertising on the site. And from an outside perspective they seem to have done both quite successfully. Just looking at the site you can see the speed at which images have views, votes and comments – the engagement they have created and the interest in the site is huge. And also there are reports of considerably increased traffic and advertising revenue from those parts of their site that have online community elements.

A further sign of the success of Rate My Space as an online community site is that it has now spun off a TV programme of it’s own. Users are asked to pick rooms on the site that inspire them and then a designer will come to their home and use elements from these to make over a room in their house. So an online community grew out of the broadcast element, and then a new broadcast element grew out of the online community.

Heroes

Heroes is a well-known case study of how a range of online community and social network tools can be used to support a TV show. It is also a good example of how a hub and spoke approach to social media strategy can be the most successful. As well as a central hub (NBC’s Heroes site) they had presences in a range of spokes – other social networks and sites where viewers and fans might be. This approach allowed them to engage with users in a place and in a manner that was appropriate to them, but also to bring them back to their own site where they could share their interest for the show and meet people like them.

The range of spokes employed by Heroes was extensive and impressive, from the Ninth Wonder fan site, through social networks like Facebook and MySpace, to widgets, games and a Wiki that explained everything Heroes. The benefit of this approach for them was that it enabled them to reach out to people where they were, often in very active fan sites, and then bring them back to their own territory where they could interact with them and get value from this. They also worked the other way – letting those on their site take widgets and content out to their other social networks and communities and spread the word for the show.

This shows that sometimes, in fact in our experience more often than not, a standalone online community does not get the most benefit possible from your target audience. You need to work with the other discussions and online communities out there and build a hub and spoke model of engagement. Engage where people are but as a way to bring them back to your site, where you can both get most benefit.

The Sex Education Show

Channel 4 in the UK has run two frank and educational series on sex and sexuality as part of their public service remit. The first, the Sex Education Show, gave advice and information on sex issues. The second, the Sex Education Show vs Porn, looked at how the portrayal of sex in porn compares with real life experiences. Both shows were successful and both were accompanied by a strong online community: Sexperience.

The subject matter of the programme was clearly sensitive, but also highly suited to an online medium. Subjects that can seem sensitive or difficult to discuss face-to-face can be much easier to talk about online. Especially in an online community where you know you are with people like you. You have the benefit of the level of anonymity that online can bring, with the reassurance and community feeling that you get in a well-nurtured online community. And this is why on Sexperience you get a range of discussions that would not happen elsewhere – discussions on penis size, premature ejaculation, and sexually transmitted diseases.

An online community can be a safe place and can be a place for people to share information, ask questions and suggest answers on a common theme, subject or issue. The Sexperience site does this well – encouraging and nurturing discussions on sensitive subjects alongside videos, blogs and forums that support this content. Factual programmes and in particular programmes that deal with more sensitive issues or subject matters are prime targets for successful online communities. You can add real value and real service, and you can encourage people to engage at a level they might not otherwise.

See all our Online Community Examples

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One of the real benefits of social media is that it means that it can now make good financial and business sense to engage just a relatively small group of people, either online or offline. Traditionally, brands often needed to reach a large audience to make a marketing or advertising campaign viable. The best campaigns would get advertising slots during the most popular prime time TV shows, or pay for space in the biggest circulation newspaper for their target market. Big was good. Reach was good and getting yourself in front of as many people as possible was good.

None of this has really changed. It’s still important to get your brand and your marketing in front of as possible, but now rather than getting  this reach with your original message you can get it from people sharing, responding to or embedding your content. And we know that people trust peers much more than brands or ‘experts’ so the impact of getting reach in this way should be significantly better.

All of this is good news for us. Why? Because it now means that it makes financial and business sense to do activities and campaigns that target a small group of people. And this explains exactly why T-Mobile has spent what must be a not inconsiderable amount of money on entertaining just a few thousand people in Trafalgar Square last week. For those people it was, no doubt, an incredible experience. A free performance and event put on just for them and made possible by them. Not just because they were the ones singing (and so creating the content) but also because they would all be instrumental in the distribution of the content. Telling their friends about what happened, taking photos and videos and uploading them to social networks and online communities. So this was crowd-sourced content and crowd-sourced distribution.

And what can we learn from this? Well there’s nothing wrong with engaging a small group of people or putting effort, time and money into doing so. In fact if you enable them to share and spread what they have experienced, then you will probably get a greater return on investment than if you had just tried to engage the large group in the first place.

And for those people who take part in the event or experience, it can be something very special and very rewarding. The key is to make sure they get value from what they do, that they enjoy it.

Some more reading

• T-Mobile: Social Media Superstar? (markevanstech.com)
• ‘Hey Jude’ Singalong (buzzfeed.com)
• New T-Mobile “flash mob” ad in Trafalgar Sqaure (ameliatorode.typepad.com)
• T-Mobile Trafalgar Square Karaoke ‘Flash Mob’ (nickburcher.com)
• Everybody Sing Along! (ithinkheblogs.com)
• Trafalgar Square T-Mobile Karaoke Flash Mob (viralblog.com)

Image by FredArmitage via Flickr

For any brand using social media, an important first stage is to find out what people are saying about you online and then monitor these discussions and conversations. You can build on these, engage the people talking about you and learn from what they say.

We’ve looked before at how to react if somebody writes about your brand online. Today’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks looks not at how to respond but the types of conversations themselves. The presentation below, from David Alston of Radian6 looks first at the worries and objections that people can have to using social media, and then moves on to the ten conversations to listen for in social media:

• The complaint
• The compliment
• The problem
• The question or inquiry
• The campaign impact
• The crisis
• The competitor
• The crowd
• The influencer
• The point of need

Search for conversations about your brand today and see which of these conversations you find.

Some more reading

• Understanding the Social Process (crystalware.wordpress.com)
• Monitoring and Measuring Social Media (ducttapemarketing.com)
• The Future of Social Media Monitoring (readwriteweb.com)