FreshNetworks Blog

Mass customisation is at one end of the co-creation spectrum – each product is customised for the particular customer who is purchasing it. Unlike what we often think of as co-creation, the individual customer does not influence the product for others. But they co-create their own product with the brand to deliver a customised version.

There has often been an element of mass customisation in higher-value products (such as cars or houses). But the internet has allowed mass customisation on a broader scale and for a wider-range of products. Brands can work with customers to co-create certain elements of their product or sometimes more fundamental aspects of the product itself.

Dell allows customers to customise every single product it sells. This is co-creation on a very individual stage – each customer choosing from a set of options to customise and create their own perfect machine. Whilst this approach doesn’t mean that every computer is different it does dramatically increase the options and configurations open to the consumer. And it allows the consumer to work with the brand on the final design and assembly stage of the product to create something that is right for them. Levis on the other hand does allow a customisation process by which, in theory, no two pairs of jeans need ever be the same.

Mass customisation has only become a viable means of co-creating with consumers once the process can essentially become self-serve. The design of the manufacturing process is such that the customer can guide and control the final assembly stages and influence what their product looks like. They can work with the suggestions and process that the brand has laid out to achieve this.

Of course, this is really ‘co-creation lite’. Whilst it allows for customers to work with brands to tailor and refine their own product it does not input into product design of the brand experience of others. Whatever great combinations and suggestions that people have to customise their own product there is usually no overt and direct mechanism for this design to be replicated across the brand and made available to others.

There are examples of organisations that do this. Allow people to customise their own product but then work with others to decide which are appropriate for a wider production and a wider audience. This is stronger co-creation and will be the focus of our next installment in the Co-Creation Series.

Some more reading

• Guide on Niche Product Creation
• Distributed Mass Customization: Is Etsy the Next eBay?
• Guidelines: One size fits all or eventual move to mass customization?

At FreshNetworks we spend a long time working with clients on the organisation of information in online communities. You can have the best content in the world, but if you can’t find it, then it’s of no use. You need to work hard to organise information thematically and make it easier for people to find what they want.

A few months ago the BBC launched its Topics in the UK – a first step towards this kind of thematic organisation across their site. Taking content from across its site, this section organises things by themes – first it was places, then people and now some subjects too. So whether you want to find out about Hong Kong, Nicolas Sarkozy or the Edinburgh Festival you can see all of the BBC’s content in one place. From TV programmes to editorial content, news or background information on subjects.

This is a really good use of the vast and constantly changing content that the BBC has at its disposal and makes a fantastic resource for the user. Rather than having to use the search function we can now find information grouped by themes we are interested in.

A report in the New York Times over the weekend suggest that a similar thematic structure is to be launched by Business Week. But their Business Exchange pages are going a step further than the BBC:

Each Business Exchange topic page links to articles and blog posts from myriad other sources, including BusinessWeek’s competitors, with the contents updated automatically by a Web crawler. Nearly all traditional news organizations offer only their own material, spurning the role of aggregator as an invitation to readers to leave their sites.

This is an exciting step. As a reader I don’t necessarily mind where the content has come from, as long as it is clear to me when I read it. Online communities work well when they combine expert or editorial content with user generated content or input from other areas. Users want to see everything abotu a subject rather than having to hunt information down from a number of areas.

We often find that this kind of aggregation can be a good thing for the editorial content. It is this that binds together the other content and adds comment on it. The extra content acts as colour, exploring tangential areas or exploring some areas in more more depth. Thematic based information structure helps the reader, and it can certainly help the content providers too.

Some more reading

• Topic Pages to Be Hub of New BusinessWeek Site
• BusinessWeek Launching Topic Pages; Rejoices
• Business Week Creates Business Exchange
• Social Media: Strategies in Content and Commerce
• Your Website Shouldn’t Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication

I’ve been travelling around the country this weekend, visiting relatives, and as I browsed the magazines at Nottingham station on my way back to London today I noticed something strange. A magazine devoted entirely to Facebook. With a few minutes to spare before my train, I picked up the magazine. It offers a “complete guide to social networking” and includes things like a step-by-step guide of setting up a profile and famous Facebookers.

I have to admit to being a little baffled by this magazine. I wasn’t quite sure who it was aimed at and why they might buy it. Social networking and online communities are a very different sort of media, they allow you to do old things in new ways and to do completely new things. They also change rapidly. Facebook, for instance, has changed a lot over the last few weeks and changes to security and processes are ongoing.

Print, by it’s very nature, is out-of-date when it is published. There is a time-delay between composing a piece and it being in the hands of a reader. Social networks and web 2.0 reduces this time-delay to near-zero. So how, then, could a magazine be a useful source of information and help on a social network like Facebook?

I really am at a loss.

Some more reading

• Which Social Portal Will Be Yours?
• Communities = more than the sum of their social media parts
• Social Ad Networks: Win, Lose, or Draw?
• 10 Family-Friendly Social Networking Sites for You

The latest edition of the McKinsey Quarterly includes the results from their global survey of Web 2.0 in firms. The survey documents the developments that we see at FreshNetworks – more firms are using more Web 2.0 tools for more complex business purposes. McKinsey go even further, noting that a significant finding from this year’s survey is that:

Companies that are deriving business value from these tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice.

Web 2.0 tools are starting to enter the mainstream in business, those who trial them find them beneficial and want to look at ways they can use these tools across their business, helping them meet multiple aims.

If you’re interested in some of the detail of the McKinsey study, I’d suggest you go to the article on their site here (you will need to sign-up, although it is free). However, for me the most interesting findings are:

• More community-based tools are growing in their use. In 2008, 34% of businesses studies used blogs (compared with 21% in 2007); 32% used wikis (compared with 24% in 2007)
• Web 2.0 tools are popular both for internal purposes (94% of firms studied) and for interfacing with customers (87% of firms studied). When they are being used for the latter purpose, this is primarily to improve service to existing customers and then as an acquisition tool
• Blogs were more popular in Asia-Pacific and India; social networking particularly popular in North America and China; and, mash-ups and rating more popular in Europe
• The biggest barriers to using Web 2.0 tools are a lack of understanding of the financial benefits (28% of respondents), internal cultural barriers (22%) and lack of skills (17%)

This last point, the barriers to adoption, show the areas where we as an industry need to focus our efforts to help clients. We have written before on this blog about measurement and ROI in online communities and in social media (see posts here, here and here) and it seems that this is the biggest barrier that firms need support with. Perhaps as these firms move from trialling the use of new tools, to using them for specific business purposes, the measurement of how they contribute to these will be easier.

Some more reading

• Are Social Media Jobs Here to Stay?
• Web 2.0 Design and Internet Marketing
• Analysis: McKinsey’s enterprise web 2.0 survey
• Gartner throws weight behind enterprise Web 2.0

A couple of days ago I blogged about some of the emerging analysis of online communities and their benefits from the Deloitte and Beeline Labs 2008 Tribalization of Business Study. I’ve  now seen the full slide deck and have posted this below.

For me, perhaps the most shocking statistic in this study continues to be that 34% of the communities studied did not have somebody charged with managing them. One of the things that people can easily overlook with online communities is that, although technology is important, these are social environments and so the social structure needs to be set up and then managed correctly. A good community manager is critical and when paired with an effective strategy and good technology it can make a community really fly.

I should also add that whilst the social aspects are important, so is technology. In fact another revealing statistic from the study is that almost one in ten of the communities studied had more than ten community managers. With good technology and an effective strategy you can really make this process more efficient. Meaning that a community can grow significantly, without a concomitant increase in bodies managing the community.

Anyway, here are the slides

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