FreshNetworks Blog

“Why would customers want to create content for our brand?” is a question we commonly come across at FreshNetworks. The truthful answer is often  “They don’t”. In fact, the question is the wrong one altogether.

Customers don’t want to create content for your brand and we see this with many unsuccessful uses of social media by brands. But customers will create content, and they will do it in a way that is really beneficial for you and your brand, but they are not necessarily doing it to help you.

Understanding motivation for doing anything is important, and this is especially true of social media. You may want consumers to show you lots of photos of exactly how they pack their children’s lunchboxes so that you can better design what you sell to them. Or you may want them to comment on and Like your posts on your Facebook page so that they and their friends will be kept up to date with what your brand is doing. But their motivation for doing this will rarely (if ever) be to help your brand. They are likely to do it for other reasons, and it is these that you need to uncover, before you plan any tactic or campaign, if it is really going to work.

There are many reasons people will choose to engage with you online, and many reasons that they will help you to achieve the aims that you have with your use of social media. The important step is to explore first of all who it is you want to engage in social media, and then to answer to simple (well actually not so simple) questions:

1. How engaged are they with us right now
2. What do they want from us

Probably exploring current relationships and motivations will let you understand what kind of engagement you can have with people in social media. This is not a one-way relationship; you can’t ask them to do something for you and then expect them to do it. You have to ask them to do something because they want to, something where it is clear what’s in it for them.

It may be that your target audience is looking for advice on how to pack the healthiest lunch for their children, or that they are looking for new ideas of what to feed them. Understanding this helps you to curate an environment in social media where they will be happy to do what you want (send you a photo of the lunchbox so you can better design what you are selling to them) but also provide them with what they want. You can provide experts on nutrition who will compare before-and-after shots of lunchboxes, or you could get mums to share their favourite lunchbox recipes. In both these cases the photos are gathered, just as you need for you brand, but not because you ask for them. Rather, because you engage with people online and they benefit too.

People do not always want to create content for your brand. They do, however, have many other needs that will lead to the same outcome for you. Proper time spent planning and investigating who you are looking to engage and what their motivation is is time well spent. It will help you to understand what both parties will get out of any engagement, and help to ensure that your campaign is not one of the many examples of social media where people really don’t want to engage with you.

The photo in this post is from the great Things real people don’t say about advertising

Online community reviews and comments are increasingly being used in (and by) traditional media. In the last 24 hours I was struck by four examples of traditional media using comments from online communities or social networks. The user-generated content from social networks was showcased in  TV (Sky News), Newspaper (Financial Times) and on two adverts (one TV and one outdoor).

It started yesterday at 11.30am when I was catching a train back to London from Milton Keynes. With winter approaching, I couldn’t resist reading an advert for skiing in Banff. What really caught my attention was the review at the top of the poster:

“TripAdvisor.com calls it the #1 ski getaway!”

In case you don’t know, TripAdvisor is the web’s most popular online travel community, with over 30 million reviews from anyone who cares to write one. Banff was picked out as number one based on the popularity of Banff on the site and the traveller ratings by the community. This makes the review far more powerful in my opinion (and clearly also in the opinion of the Banff Tourist Board) than a review from an traditional newspaper or magazine.

This was the first time I’d consciously noticed reviews of an online network being used in such traditional media as a billboard. What was more surprising was the number of other instances I noticed the smae thing happening in across other media.

The city lawyer, the intern and the strip club
Whilst sitting on the train I was listening to a podcast The City lawyer, the intern and the strip club. I love podcasts and Lucy Kellaway, a columnist at the Financial Times, produces one of my favourites. In this one Lucy discusses the community comments that had been posted on the Times websites and the FT websites about a lawyer.

“Simply stunning”, “Please please see this film”
Having returned to the office I started to prepare for a meeting. This led me to a blog where I chanced upon another recent example of user generated comment being used in advertising. This example has already created quite a stir. Last week, Disney brought out posters for their new film, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and rather than using quotes from established film critics they picked out the best quotes from random members of the IMDB.com movie community website.

As an aside, some people think Disney should not use quotes from unknown bloggers such as Mjavfc1 and Theedge-4 as the reviews may be false and originate from Disney staff. I disagree. Assuming Disney are publishing in good faith (and it would break UK law for them to disguise their own work) then why not amplify fans’ word of mouth? For me the only reason why Disney should not cherry pick user reviews is that cherry-picking flies in the face of the ethos of user reviews – the value of Amazon reviews comes in seeing all comments, the good and the bad, and then gauging who you want to listen to.

The stories you’ve been talking about on our website
Anyway, back to the story. I finished my day off with a quick trip to the gym and a run on the treadmill. Keen not to miss any news about the latest financial powerhouse to have gone under, I tuned in to Sky News. After a few announcements they had a 5 minute segment about “the stories you’ve been talking about on our website”. The fourth and final example of UGC and consumer comments made on social networks or online communities being used in tradtional media.

We’d love to hear of any other good examples of UGC or community conversations being used in traditional media. If you notice any, please let us know.

A new study from ExpoTV shows that 55% of consumers want an ongoing dialogue with brands. The study investigates how brands and consumers interact, and in particular how consumers want brands to engage them. And the results are exciting. In addition to the 55% wanting an ongoing dialogue, 89% of respondents said they would feel more loyal to a brand if they were invited to take part in a feedback group

These results mirror our own experiences, where involving people in a true feedback process has positive impacts on loyalty and advocacy. The ExpoTV survey looks into this in more depth and shows also how consumers will spread this positive message.

Of those who have a positive experience, 92% said they would recommend the brand to somebody else. Perhaps more striking from the perspective of generating buzz, 60% of people said they would tell 10 people or more about a brand they liked and a third would tell 20 people or more. There is a lot of willingness to create buzz and word-of-mouth for a brand that you like. There is a real strengthening of positive feelings when a brand engages a consumer. And there is a real willingness on the part of the consumer to take part in such engagement.

These are the building blocks of a really successful word-of-mouth and advocacy campaign. People want to be engaged and if you do it, this will only have a positive impact on feelings towards the brand.

For every 100 consumers about 55 want to engage with you. And nine out of ten of those that you engage would feel more positive about you as a result. So from any group of 100 customers that you try to engage in a feedback group or online community, 50 would be more loyal to the brand as a result.

From these 50 people, about a third (or 16 people) would tell more than ten people about the brand (so at least 160 people from our group) and another third would tell more than 20 people (so at least 320 people from our group). So as a conservative estimate from those 100 people you try to engage:

• 50 of the original 100 become more loyal to the brand, and tell a further
• 480 other people about how positive they feel about the brand.

This survey helps us to understand motivation for taking part in an online community or feedback group, and the benefits it will cause.

As a conservative estimate, these results suggest that for every 100 people you try to engage in an online community, 50 will leave more loyal to the brand and a further 480 people will hear about this loyalty through word-of mouth. That’s a huge impact for engaging a relatively small number of people.

There is a real willingness on the part of the consumer to engage with brands, and a real and demonstrable benefit to the brand of them doing this.

When people think of user-generated content they often think of the media or publishing. Videos on YouTube, spoofing TV shows or films, and content responding to and expanding upon journalistic or editorial articles abound. But UGC is certainly not limited to these areas. In fact it can work best on any topic where some individuals will have developed a specific interest in or knowledge of the area.

The medical industry is one that sees a lot of UGC. A search on YouTube finds thousands of videos of people talking about their illnesses, from cancer sufferers to people with bullemia. Support groups are flourishing and people are finding that sharing experiences and content online is sometimes easier than face-to-face. Talking about your experiences to video and uploading this to YouTube for others to respond to and comment on is probably easier than discussing it in real life. The internet and social networks probably offer access to a greater number of fellow-sufferers than even a local support group might offer.

Beyond support, people can use social media and user-generated content to help understand their illnesses. The supposed danger here is that people will self-diagnose and that this may be incorrect. At the same time, you’d expect that privacy issues would prevent any meaningful and useful exchange of ideas. But in fact, user-generated medical content is a vibrant example of how the social networking and online communities can be powerful for exchanging information.

A report by Jupiter Research in 2007 showed that 20% of Americans turn to others online for information about medical issues. They are clearly not shy of seeking or giving advice, even on more personal issues. They use sites such as OrganizedWisdom, a Wiki-style community, to share information they have and get information they need.

The concern over the accuracy of this information still stands, with worries about non-medical professionals sharing information that people use to self-diagnose. But research by the British Medical Journal in 2004 found that in the online support communities it studied only 6% of content was incorrect. If this replicated across all medical content online then it would probably be among some of the more accurate user-generated content on the internet.

User-generated medical content shows that people are willing to share and are accurate when they do so. Even in a more niche and potentially risky area such as medical advice and disgnosis, the quality and usefulness of user-generated content is high.

With a little extra time on my hands this bank-holiday weekend, I thought I’d check out what’s new on YouTube. Wading past a fantastic dance-off video’s by ACDC and the Levi backflip guys I stumbled upon one of Radiohead‘s many digital marketing activities.

In case you don’t know them, Radiohead are one of the best bands to come out of the UK in the last 20 years. And they have embraced the internet with real vigour. Their last album, In Rainbows, was released online on a “pay-what-you-like” basis and in addition to selling 1.2 million copies this way, the album recently won a prestigious Best Album award in the UK.

To go with the album, they created a video-making competition. They asked for people to pick a track from the album and then create their own video to go with it. There are some cash rewards, but given the quality of the videos produced (and the time it must have taken to produce them) it’s clear that people are entering for the prestige and the desire to create and show their skills. To share their creations with other fans, or merely to show their support for their favourite band.

This is a fantastic way to increase engagement with and loyalty to the band. If you create a film, you know it’s going to be seen and voted on by other fans, but more importantly by the band. It’s also a way of allowing the fans to put their own stamp on a song (Radiohead’s music is particularly suited to this as each song can be interpreted in thousands of ways).

But what I really love about this marketing activity is that by generating loads of UGC videos it’s getting the songs out there and listened to by more and more people. I have just listened to one song three times – with a different video interpretation each time.

Measuring the ROI and value of social media activities is difficult and still in its infancy, but just the saving of the advertising costs needed to create this kind of exposure is huge.

Some examples

To see the quality and value of the amateur videos produced just look at the three below, all made by amateur fans as part of the online video-making competition.