FreshNetworks Blog

I’ve got an article over at iMedia Connection today: Getting your online community right from the start.

The article is based on our collective experience at FreshNetworks of building and managing online communities and suggests five ways that we think will help you get your community right from the start.

1. Remember you are building a community – get the social dynamic right before your think ‘online’
2. Start small and build rapidly – people can’t think about lots of issues at once, get a discussion going on a few topics then build rapidly
3. Seed your community first – nobody likes an empty restaurant, make sure there are some people there before you go public
4. Manage as well as moderate the community – to help grow and develop a community is much more than to moderate
5. The community owns the community; you need to be part of it – only the community really owns the community, so the brand needs to be involved

To read more go and check out the article, or look at our previous posts on online communities.

We’ve seen a lot of big brands launching community sites, or adding a social layer to their existing site, over the last 12-18 months. But research out this week suggests that 60% of the US’s largest companies will have an online community by 2010.

A report from Gartner predicts that 60% of the Fortune 1,000 will have an online community by 2010, reflecting the rapid growth in this way of interacting with and building engagement with customers. But this growth will not all be easy, with the same report suggesting that half of these online communities will consider their venture a failure.

Whether these figures turn out to be true or not, I think that we will see a significant growth in the use of online communities among the larger firms, and that some of these communities will not be as successful as the firms hope.

Gartner predict that a significant reason for these communities being less successful will be a lack of flexibility inside the firms to truly take advantage of the benefits these communities can bring. As Adam Sarner from the research firm says:

Companies will be challenged with what applications to use, who ultimately ‘owns’ an application or interaction and the management of socialisation itself, from measuring success and mitigating negative interactions to sourcing and cultural restraints

It is true that firms sometimes need to adapt to take advantage of the benefits an online community can bring. Our experience at FreshNetworks is that the online communities work best when a range of departments and functions are engaged and involved. From any successful online community you can get insight (for the research team), innovations and new ideas (for product development, brand managers or marketing), true stories and experiences from customers (for the PR or communications teams), amplified word of mouth (for the marketing team). The list continues, showing how each different part of an organisation can benefit from the online community.

We often find that it if a firm is ready and able to engage in this way that it can really bring all the advantages it is capable of bringing. Of course getting to this stage takes some time, and it can be best to let the community grow and develop in a particular area first before opening it up across a firm. But the most successful online communities will be those that do open up across the firm; and those that are less successful will  be the ones that never take this step.

Some more reading

• Gartner Challenge: Who’s Listening?
• Social media key to future business success
• Analyst: Half of ‘social media campaigns’ will flop
• Analyst: Half of ‘social media campaigns’ will flop (Caroline McCarthy/The Social)

When a good friend moved to Australia last year, he left me a book they knew I liked, You Can Find Inspiration in Everything. It’s a great book, if only because it emphasises something that I truly believe: good design really matters. If you combine good design with inspirational content then you have a significantly better product that you might otherwise have had.

Recently I received a copy of another book that emphasises this: Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company from Robert Brunner (who set the groundwork for much of Apple’s design) and Stewart Emery. The book shows how firms can get significant competitive advantage from good design, and how a design-driven business can help you to meet your customer’s needs more often. It is at times quite practical, showing how to develop design-driven techniques for managing and growing a business. Useful stuff in it’s own right, but I’ve been reflecting on what both of these books can teach us about how to build and manage online communities.

At FreshNetworks, spend a lot of time when we are working on a new online community with clients to understand the very people that the community will be aimed at. It’s important to understand these people in quite some detail, including what their interaction with the brand is and how and why they would want to engage online. Part of this process is to explore their habits and behaviours, and the benefit is to make all decisions and base all discussions in the shoes of these people.

With this real understanding of the people the community is aimed at we can develop content and features that will appeal to them and help to achieve our client’s objectives. We can also work on the design of the site. The appropriate content and features are important, but it is the design that will make people want to explore the community and find out what is going on. When somebody first lands on the site they need to combination of appropriate and striking content with good design to make them want to engage.

So spending time on design is important in online communities and that’s why no two communities we produce look the same. Making changes to the look and feel is an important tool we have when we’re planning and building the community. People react and respond to design and we have to get it right. And it’s only by understanding who we are trying to attract that we can do this.

Some more reading

• Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
• Social Media Tools Don’t Matter
• Meet the designer of Amazon’s Kindle [Robert Brunner]
• At Last! PC Industry Gets Serious About Good Design
• Designers Need to Be 3 People at the Same Time!
• Jonathan Ive on Apple’s Industrial Design Strategy

Earlier this year, we posted about research from Universal McCann looking at the impact of social media. Thanks to Simon at Curiously Persistent, I came across some new and equally interesting research from the team their. This time they look at the influence we have online, how we respond and react to other people, and how user-generated content informs our decision making.

This is a timely piece of research, as we posted last week, 25 million US adults base their purchasing decisions on social media. The Universal McCann research looks into this behaviour in more detail.

I won’t try to summarise the whole thing here, but it has become required reading at FreshNetworks. For us the research is particularly useful in highlighting how and why people are using social media and online communities to effect change across a range of domains, from politics to shopping. The data on which these conclusions are based are worth exploring in more detail but the message for brands is clear: we’re in a new world of transparency.

In this world, it is easier for people to have their voice heard and to hear the voices of others. Everybody matters and everybody can be part of an exchange with each other and with a brand. Brands need social media strategies to reach out to these people and to truly engage in these new transparent terms. Scary stuff at times, but there are some great examples of where this has worked (and if you want to see some jump to the end of the presentation below).

Some more reading

• Research and Markets: As the Number of Business Users of Social …
• The Consumer and Social Media
• Scientists Use Social Media
• If You’re Not Participating in Social Media
• More than Half of US Adults Text, Blog, Otherwise Use Social Media
• Social Media Rapidly Going Mainstream

Okay, so it’s been a tricky week so far for businesses round the world. I knew it was bad when the chatter  around the coffee machine in our office on Tuesday morning wasn’t about something that was on TV last night, or about something going on in the office. It was about how they were going to face the current economic downturn. From banks failing and being taken over by the state, to falling retail spend and even reports that Britons are raiding their piggy banks, there’s only one thing on people’s minds this week

And at times like this it is interesting to see how businesses react and respond. Of course, there are the counter-cyclical industries (lawyers, accountants, take-away food, bunk beds…) but how do the rest plan and build a strategy in times like this?

For most businesses there are probably two pieces of advice:

1. Make sure you are close to your customers and that they are close to you. It should be your brand they think about when they do want to make a purchase and you should be aware of what they think and how their habits are changing.
2. Innovate to stay ahead of the game. A crisis is a great time to innovate – you have to think of ways of staying ahead of the competition, of being more efficient or of new products that you can offer. It’s true of war-time, where many of the best innovations (from the pie-chart to nylon) originate; and it’s true of business during challenging economic times.

So how do you innovate at a time like this? Well we want to innovate to mean that we continue to attract customers and meet their changing needs. We want to make sure our products are meeting essential needs and are of benefit to them. And if possible we want to make sure that we are more efficient in the way we do this so that our own costs can be controlled.

What is common across all of these aims is the need to better focus on the customer and what the customer wants. That’s why the best innovation during these times will be customer-led innovation. Rather than asking questions of customers and then going away and coming-up with ideas to meet what you find (customer-centred innovation), it’s about co-creation and really working with your customers innovate and have new ideas.

So how do you let the customer lead your innovation process? Well there are probably a few things all organisations can do:

1. Call ten of your customers from the last six months and ask them what you could do better – they’ll appreciate the personal touch and you will start to get some ideas
2. Bring together a group of customers (either offline or online) to co-create and share ideas based on specific areas you think you could improve. This will help you generate some ideas to contribute to specific areas you’ve already identified
3. Bring together a group of customers (and perhaps non-customers) in an online community where they can co-create, share ideas and innovate with you over a much longer time-scale.

This latter suggestion will be most effective in terms of identifying those innovations that are most likely to help you face the economic downturn. The benefit we see at FreshNetworks of building online innovation communities is that you get ideas in areas you had never thought of before. We’ve helped clients to reposition their product and even to just talk about it in different ways, using the language their customers use. Real customer-led innovation will shock and surprise you, because it’ll be the thing you haven’t thought of before. But in the current climate, it’s these new and effective ideas that you need.

Some more reading

• What Does the Financial Crisis Mean for Innovation? Xconomists Weigh In
• Financial crisis: The tech innovations at risk