Last night, there was a very enjoyable and insightful gathering for the first London Co-Creation Hub drinks evening (see each member here: Face Group, Farm, Opticom and of course thrudigital). After several short presentations, which will be on slideshare soon, a conversation emerged between several brands and agencies.

The key points of debate were:

• Isn’t openness opposed to the commercial aims of companies?
• How does this affect a research/IP-driven company, who is by necessity private?
• Where is the line between public and private, and does it move?
• Does defining the purpose of engagement bring greater meaning to open conversation with customers?

Below the next section of rambling (please skip if time is short, but hey… its a Friday), I want to answer these questions with an easy-to-use but research-driven framework. (And for even more time-constrained people, just look at these summaries: left & right).

As a company, our general opinion is that

1. Openness wins. And companies will continue to open up. Social-media enabled co-creation is a key facilitator of this.
2. A campaign-based approach to marketing must move to an ongoing conversation-based approach, to facilitate the new expectations of consumers and capitalise on the deepness of interaction that this engenders.

Having said that, I do understand that some organisations have elements of their business that WILL NOT open up, or become subject to pubic opinion. And that is completely acceptable. As Ian Green from No. 10 Downing Street pointed out last night, he tweets and blogs all day long about the activities of the Prime Minister, but there is a clear expectation. Although he will post as the human face of No. 10, with details of Ministerial engagements and duties, he will not be broadcasting details of conversations, especially sensitive ones.

Brands are coming (by necessity) to this same realisation. Openness wins, BUT it doesn’t mean that you have to open everything to the public.

As emerged from further discussion, Apple is a great example of a company that is HIGHLY secretive about one aspect of its research and development (the hardware), yet very open about another (anyone can build an application for their hardware). So, as a brand, it is vital to identify the most suitable and effective areas for openness and social media engagement.

Neilsen’s research into social media opportunities for enterprise (2009) identified 5 areas of an organisation that will benefit most from social media-enabled implementation in 2010.  There is no ‘one fix’ for every company. No one way of engaging that works for everyone. But I have NEVER yet found a company that cannot benefit in measurable ways from a social media engagement/co-creation strategy that operates in at least one (usually at least three) of the following business areas.

The good stuff

Customer Support

Probably the most obvious win for many brands and customer support is a huge cost line for product-driven business and even the most traditional manager pricks up his ears at the cost savings and service delivery improvements that can be achieved.

Social media is now an established channel for customer support. If you aren’t responding there, you can bet your brand reputation that others are. People love the immediacy and ease of sending off a tweet, writing a query on a forum, or googling for an answer to their product issue. The beauty about customer support systems that use social media platforms is that there is a powerful opportunity for crowd-sourcing, customer service issues. Allowing fans to solve other customer’s problems, give advice, and make recommendations for best courses of action might sound scary from a brand perspective. but in addition to reducing support costs and improving customer service, it can also build a much more approachable  brand, with deeper and more meaningful customer relationships.

Insight & Research

One of the key points that I presented yesterday, was that the new media environment rewards (and perhaps will even require) companies to become more customer-centric. Understanding what your fans, general customer base, and the market as a whole want and need is vital for creating products and services that lead the market. By observing general trends beyond the specific remit of your role or position in the market, holistic and forward-looking strategies can be formed.

This goes far beyond the “focus group” approach that has been adopted in the past, although it doesn’t necessarily replace that. Distilling what the market is saying about your company and your competitors, over time, can give you superb (and statistically significant) insight into your competitive positioning and evolving brand perception.  And because what the market is saying is now trackable and public, you can be sure that even if you are not listening and gaining insight from it, your competitors are!

Product Development

At the London Co-creation Hub, one of the key uses for co-creation (doing things with people, not at people) is for product or service development. Now, since this is the area that sparked debate last night, with several brands defending a disengaged process due to security and competition concerns, let’s unpack the issues.

Yes, many elements of product research and development must be kept private, so that the company can build and maintain a competitive advantage. This is especially important in a world where unlicensed product copies can appear within days, from the very sophisticated factory operations in China and elsewhere. Firstly, no one is arguing that all R&D should be done in a goldfish-bowl with everyone looking on. However, as a point of interest, there are companies that have done this successfully, betting that the buy-in and loyalty that is built from an open product-development process will surpass the danger of other companies replicating (cue future blog post with a case study…).

Secondly, even when a brand’s core product research is private, there are always less sensitive areas that can be communicated and co-created. Perhaps the service element of the business needs work and could use customer engagement and conversation. Or incremental improvements to an existing product. Or a new approach to environmental packaging. Or new ways of using the product can be found. Et cetera.

Reputation Management

There are now an abundance of social media monitoring tools in the marketplace,  and although creating lots of data might be all the rage now, creating insight is where the real value lies. There are robust technological approaches to monitoring conversations across the web, identifying those that are most influential, classifying them according to topics, geographies and other attributes, and analysing them for insight.

Conversations are happening all around the web, with or without you. Whether viewed from a crisis-management perspective, or from a more general public relations remit, it is vital that every brand is at least listening. In fact, research by Trendmonitor shows that the mere fact of demonstrating you are listening increases brand perception considerably, even if you never do anything with that insight!

Marketing

It is often the marketing department that experiments first with social media; seeing the buzz and the potential opportunity for reach, engagement, and even (that horrifically overused word) ‘viral’ promotion. The media and advertising industries are in upheaval, with brands realising that they can now speak to customers directly, as well as through media channels and advertising campaigns. This proximity of audience means that brands can build direct and deep customer relationships, if they are willing to spend the time to engage. So let’s touch on 3 ways to approach co-created marketing.

1. Firstly, we have the opportunity for brands to engage fans in the actual creative process. What better way to ensure a message resonates with its audience, than by allowing the opinion leaders in that audience to float ideas and discuss the creative delivery? There are many brands already doing this, from crowd-sourcing ideas through virtual communities, through to actually commissioning and utilising videos produced by fans of the brand as advertisements on other channels.
2. Beyond the idea generation and creative process, there are massive opportunities for cost-effective distribution, if fans are engaged with the campaign that is being delivered. Whether described as ‘friend recommendations’, ‘word-of-mouth’, or ‘social referrals’, enabling and empowering your customers to actually deliver the brand message brings true authenticity and weight to the conversation.
3. And finally, an area which hasn’t been fully explored, but is just around the corner, is targeting and segmentation based on the customer’s social media footprint. Yes, customers can help create the campaigns, deliver the campaigns, but also decide to allow brand’s access to their profile data so that better and more relevant conversations can arise. Think it of eCRM 2.0. An easy way to start is by monitoring social media for an “intent to purchase”. Then engaging. Simples.

The obligatory call to action

If you are interested in finding out about any of the above, please do get in touch (or @andjdavies on Twitter). Between the partners of the London Co-Creation Hub. We have experience in addressing each of the above business areas.

When prospective clients ask what we can do, sometimes its difficult to explain, because “social media” brings different value to different parts of the organisation. For the PR team, it might be reducing the cost of traditional PR by engaging leading bloggers. For the customer service team it might be about finding out the problems customers are having with your products. For the product team, it might be about bringing 1000 customers together in a private community to co-create a new product design. For the executive team, it might be about delivering high-level reports giving insight on the competitive positioning of the organisation in the minds of the masses. And I could go on…

Social media is not a tool, and it is not even a new playground. Often its not “social”, and sometimes it hardly involves “media”. It is not a hat that one person in the organisation can wear, and take off when they go home. Its a term that is pathetically indefinable, and certainly overused. But as many organisations are starting to find out, this new landscape, where messages are not broadcast but conversational by default, where the market is comprised of millions of publishers not just consumers, where networks and groups are almost instantly creating, and dissolved, around topics both mainstream and niche.

What it requires from organisations is not a new campaign, but change. Every social media project we have been involved in has required a change of process, structure, or behaviour by the organisation in order to be most effective. Yes, its difficult. But companies all over the world are managing it.

Exciting times.

With all of the announcements that have come out of the f8 conference, the one impression I am left with is that although Facebook might now be an internet juggernaut, it has not grown out of the ability to iterate quickly with new products. The volume of Facebook’s product changes are huge and incredibly important, and they step on some not inconsiderable toes.

Foursquare / Gowalla

Facebook has long been the gorilla in the location-based-networking room. Although it hasn’t previously done much, its near ubiquity means that it can leapfrog any other competitor with ease. Now Facebook has announced its first major plans in this space. And they are dramatic. Rather than simply the cellphone app (bottom-up) approach of Gowalla and Foursquare, Facebook is using RFID tags and readers (top-down) to allow check-ins.

Meebo

Meebo is a distributed Instant Messenger service which sees over 100 million uniques per month. Its Meebo Bar can be installed by any site, to allow users to chat in realtime. Its an awesome service. But now Facebook has announced a persistent Facebook toolbar that sites can install to allow users to use Facebook Chat.  Is that game over for Meebo?

Digg / TweetMeme etc

The social bookmarking space has a lot of strong players, with multiple buttons displayed by most news stories. Although each service has a loyal fanbase, their seems no reason why Facebook’s new “Like” buttons will not quickly command this area of the market. It has the largest userbase and the strongest social graph, so why wouldn’t you choose to “”Like” articles and pages using Facebook?

Glue (recommendation services)

Beyond a whole host of social bookmarking sites, there are a range of semantically-aware recommendation services, which use toolbars and buttons to allow users to rate products and content. The services, like Glue, then provide recommendations. Facebook’s new “Like” buttons really start to build up rich preference and taste data, which can be mined for user recommendations and for advertising targeting.

Social Gold (virtual currencies)

One of Facbeook’s most awaited announcements was regarding a full virtual currency, called Facebook Credits. This surely seriously undermines existing players such as Social Gold, and also opens up the pathway for Facebook to start eating at Paypal’s sandwich.

Authentication

There is no clear leader in this arena yet, with many services offering authentication, including Twitter. Facebook will basically allow third-party sites to authenticate users by their Facebook cookie, therefore removing the delicate process of notifying the user. This is a very controversial area, and Facebook will certainly have to deal with some backlash. However, they are obviously continuing to bet that the utility and ease will prove greater than the concern.

Any others I have missed?

What’s the ROI?

It’s one of the most asked questions in this field currently. And at this early stage, there are not yet firm results from social media projects in every industry. In fact, Seth Godin would tell us that if we wait for a case study, we will be too late to catch up (I disagree with that, but I also digress…). So let’s have a look at this in more detail.

Social media does cost.

Many of the tools might be free, but the time spent in using them, and especially paying an agency to use them, is certainly not. Anyone who is looking for a solution that is completely free, is probably going to be disappointed. However, it certainly does lower the cost of many activities.

Social media does takes time.

A pay-per-click campaign or magazine advert might yield immediate results, but it takes time to listen to and engage with your audience. It takes time to be accepted as part of the conversation as a valid and valuable voice. But the results are much longer lasting. That’s because the results are founded upon relationships.

Social media is hard to measure.

Some aspects are directly measurable. Costs cut. Revenue gained. The trouble is, many companies aren’t measuring these effectively anyway. So the ROI question is irrelevant until the company becomes functionally data-driven. Because social media goes way beyond a single business function and impacts process, perspectives, and cultures as well as specific campaigns, it is very difficult to calculate a cumulative effect. However, what can be measured, should be measured.

But what’s the ROI?

As Nick Tadd puts it very eloquently, “Social media is just communicating. You say 5000 words a day, yet no one tries to establish an ROI for talking!” I would take this a step further, and say that if I was in a sales meeting, or speaking at an industry event, I could theoretically place an approximate valuation on the effect of my words. But in every other circumstance, it would be a completely fruitless exercise. In just the same way, the ROI on specific social media uses and campaigns should certainly be measured. But don’t go trying to assign a revenue line to ‘talking’ in your P&L…

Why the sudden focus on ROI?

What’s the ROI on your office location? What’s the ROI on your email system? What’s the ROI on your office lobby? What’s the ROI on your phone line? Because its the new kid on the block, social media suddenly is forced to prove itself form the ground up. Again, where this is possible, go for it. But instead of trying to prove a positive six-month ROI for your CEO’s twitter account, go do something more useful for your company’s strategic success, like watching this. Only joking. Actually, go watch this awesome presentation by Olivier Blanchard on Social Media ROI.

Right, now that I’ve got that off my chest, the next post will look at the valuable opportunities available to brands. And yes, it will include some quantifications of value returned by social media investment! As in, actual numbers.

To get the followup posts over the next few weeks, simply click the “add to RSS button”, follow thrudigital on Twitter, or subscribe to these posts by email by clicking the button above.

We have already established that a conversation is occurring, without your consent or control. Nice. But what should you do?

Relinquish control. Or realise you have already lost it.

Within your company’s processes, or your day-to-day activity, change your perspective and approach to one that expects and values brand mentions, whether positive or negative. It’s what people were saying anyway… just now you can eavesdrop. This might sound tough, but its a decision to place the customer at the centre of your business which will pay off.

Listen. Without reacting.

It’s kinda like the playground. Some people are not going to be saying nice things. Even well-meaning and supportive customers are going to present you in a bad light sometimes. Get over it. Controlling the message is not what’s important. Trendstream research shows that customers perception of brands improves even when you just show you are listening. For a disappointed customer, shouting into the interwebs might bring them some consolation. But for you it represents a valuable customer signal, which you should be listening to. Because soon enough, your competitors will be. So set up a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, and use a feedback form or an open customer support service to show customers you are listening.

Participate. Yes, like write something.

Whether it is just ‘friending’ vocal customers on Twitter, commenting on blog posts, or blogging yourself, start to take part in the conversation. In February, I will be participating in the second LikeMinds conference at which the topic will be “P2P.” Social media has enabled a world where classifications like B2C and B2B are less important. The important conversation is now P2P – “Person to Person.”

Add value. Create a meaningful contribution.

Your audience already has a set of behaviours online. There is already an ongoing conversation. Your target market searches for content, plays games, chats, researches, and watches funny videos. Instead of interrupting their activity to deliver an advert, why not try and add value: something eye-catching, funny, interesting, or informative. Why not aggregate the conversation? Why not deliver quality branded content? Why not provide tools for your audience? Why not provide a forum for customer service queries? Why not build a game or quiz to engage people? Why not create something that people will be interested in, discuss, and share. By engaging with your audience, and then exposing your brand by adding value, you embed your brand within the consciousness of your target market. At the end of the day, its about being present, and vocal.
In the next post will will outline the most valuable opportunities are for your brand within social media. One clue – its not all about marketing. Many business functions can benefit. Then we will start looking at successful examples of what others are doing.

To get the followup posts over the next few weeks, simply click the “add to RSS button”, follow thrudigital on Twitter, or subscribe to these posts by email by clicking below.

Social media. It can be confusing and undefined. It’s definitely a buzzword. It’s got its fair share of “gurus.” But it’s picking up sizable budgets from consumer-facing and business-to-business companies. And even at this early stage, it’s proving effective.

This first post will explore the concept. A second post will look at the ways that companies can engage. Then we will explore what are the major opportunities for brands. Finally, we will look at some case studies of industry leaders (as well as some obvious examples, I will show you a case study you won’t have seen – a small company with a small niche that has made £700k by engaging its customers). And hopefully a conversation will be sparked somewhere along the way.

So, firstly, the big question. What is social media? Rather than try and give a catch-all definition, here are the themes that underly the concept of social media. It is:

• The move from one broadcaster, to millions of voices.

• Media disseminated through social interaction.

• Where the audience is also an author.

• Enabled by very scalable and approachable technologies that facilitate the conversations.

And why should you care?

Well… this is not a fad. It is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Back in the late 90’s, brands were asking the ROI question of websites. “Is it worth it? Why should we bother?” Ten years later, having a website is not only one of the first things you do when launching a product or company, but it goes far beyond “marketing.” It is a platform for commerce, communication, research, tools, data, news, sales, and much more. The same will happen with social media in due course. It changes how businesses operate. Companies that engage early, will build competitive advantage, but in a few years, most industries will be exploiting the benefits.

The horse has bolted. Don’t bother closing the stable door.

The marketplace where you do business is now transparent, not controlled. It is consumer-driven, not product driven. It is no longer possible to broadcast messages and expect them to be swallowed by your audience, without uncontrolled conversation and feedback. Forget battling to hide your dirty laundry. It is already being examined, analysed, and discussed in minute detail, in thousands of distributed and very public conversations.

All humans have a desire for control. So this world sounds extremely worrying. And many brands are burying their heads in the sand to ignore the conversations they wish were not happening. But the upside is that in this new world your customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do, however, expect you to listen, respond, be honest, and do your utmost to serve them.

Your degree of openess, and your revenue growth, will be directly related. (Gerd Leonhard)

As a quick example to round this post off, recently we launched an application for ASOS (see site here), which aggregates the conversation around their brand, and classifies it as positive or negative. It’s a forward thinking move, which demonstrates a willingness to engage. And as well as the web version, it is now displayed on plasma screens in the lobby and cafes. This a method for enabling customers to become advocates, focus groups, marketers, product developers, and a community of interest.

The personal touch

Customers much prefer a personality to a professional facade. We are moving from a world of broadcast TV, PR-checked messages, and aloof corporate leaders, to one of scrappy, user-generated YouTube videos, public conversations with your staff on forums and blogs, and direct connection between your CEO and your customer via Twitter. Your personal face trumps your professional one.

Homework

I hope you are doing some of these already, but as a very first start, prove to yourself that there is a conversation worth engaging with online:

• Search Google, Facebook and Twitter for your brand mentions.

• Set up a Google Alert to notify you when more people mention your brand

• If you are a small company, search for related products, competitors, and topics to find out what is being said.

Over the next posts we will look at how companies, both large and small, can best engage, what the most valuable opportunities are, and successful examples of what others are doing.

To get the followup posts over the next few weeks, simply add this blog to your RSS reader, follow thrudigital on Twitter, or subscribe to these posts by email.

The reason I was prompted to write this post however isn’t because of the site’s funky javascript activity stream but the way it uses scarcity around the favouriting functionality. Limiting the amount of hearts an individual user can attribute a song has two key effects. The first is that users associate higher value with this function and how they use it. The second, which is really linked to the first, is that this has the added benefit of minimise users  gaming the system to get a particular band to the homepage meaning that, in this case, only the best tracks should be promoted to the homepage.

At thrudigital we have proposed the use of scarcity as a way of creating value when speaking to a number of clients about their projects. Often the discussion is related to whether invites a user has to give out should be limited, but also in the case of votes as we proposed for a crowdsourcing concept we presented to a client a couple of months back.

If you have any experience of using scarcity in either of these ways or any others, I’d be interested in hearing about it, so please feel free to leave a comment below.

By this point you should have a good idea of what you would like your widget to do and more importantly the audience of your widget. If you have a concept in mind for a widget that your audience will find very useful you’ll hopefully find the widget spreading by itself, but of course before this happens you have to enable people to share it and even before that you need to get people using it in the first place.

When seeding your widget they are two approaches you can take. The first is to target those who are already familiar with your brand and your service. In theory this audience should be the easiest to get using your widget because if you’ve done the correct planning, you’ve produced something relevant and useful or entertaining for them. The second approach you can take to seed your widget is to target a relevant audience who might not be familiar with you but are your target audience or are people who are actively looking for widgets.

So, to return to the first approach, how can you seed your shiny new widget with your fans? Simply, use the existing channels you have to communicate with this audience. You probably already have a popular website so make sure you promote the widget prominently on the site. Secondly, you may have a good sized email marketing list, so why not use it to promote your widget. Finally, if you have a blog, make sure you write a post about your widget.

To tie it all in nicely, it would make sense to do all these things. So, create a new page on your website where you can embed the widget and can link to from all your different activity, write a blog post with screen shots of the widget, clear instructions if any are needed and let people why you think it will be useful or entertaining. Once you’ve done this, write an email newsletter (or write a section about your new widget in an existing newsletter you have going out), create an advert or promo section on your homepage and you’re away. PR’ing a new widget wouldn’t hurt either if you’ve got the resources to do so or work with an agency who handle this for you.

Ok, so how do you reach out to new audiences with your widget? Well, think about where your audience are online. Do they read specific blogs, visit certain websites? It’s very likely that they do and because you’ve produced a widget of relevance for your audience, the authors of the blogs and publishers of the sites you’ve found are hopefully going to be keen to embed your widget on their site. Once on these sites, you should find people engaging with your widget. If you don’t think it’s possible to get these sites and blogs to embed with widgets, you might be able to buy media space for your widget on their sites if you’ve built a widget that fits IAB standard sizes.

The other key way you can seed your widget with your target audience is by identifying widget communities, of which they are many, to post your widget. Each widget platform has a community/directory site where you can feature/advertise your widget. Yahoo, Mac, Vista, iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia all have widget communities/stores/directories that users browse looking for widgets that they will find useful. In addition to these are independent widget communities like widgetbox.

So now you have your seeding strategy in mind, it’s important to think about how you can enable your users to share the widget once they’ve found it. Unsurprisingly there are several widget distribution tools that you can plug yours into which enable users to easily post the widget to their blog, social network profile or website as well as share it with friends. At thrudigital, we actually built our own widget distributor for the In Bruges widget campaign we worked on. In search of a suitable web 2-esque name we named it Widgitio but also refer to it more simply as widget distributor.

Our tool allows users to easily post a widget to popular social network profiles and the reason why we created our own for this campaign rather than use an existing platform like Clearspring or Gigya is that our distribution tool enables the user to post the widget to more prominent positions on their profiles rather than to a generic boxes widget/application that might contain any number of widgets.

Finally, now you know how to seed the widget and have built in the tools to help it spread by itself you might want to include some kind of incentive to encourage people to share it. A simple way to do this might be to offer entry into a competition for every user who installs or downloads the widget.

Where next? Well by now you should know what a widget is and how to launch one but you probably need someone to build it for you. Infact you might be looking for someone to develop a concept and a launch plan in addition to building it, so why not give us a call to chat through what we can come up with. If you’re looking for examples of our work, you can check out the widget page of our services section or alternatively you might want to have a look at our portfolio.

Probably best to start with a definition as that’s normally a good starting point, so here we go… a widget (which can also be known as a gadget) is a self-contained website/application that can be shared with friends and posted on any webpage, like a blog, social network profile or your own website.

It is also possible to create desktop widgets, which differ from a web widget in that they do not require a web browser to run, but otherwise are largely the same. Another point worth noting is that web widgets can without too much difficulty be adapted to work on mobiles which can add a new dimension to your widget.

Applications differ from widgets because they are not standalone and require an underlying platform, such as the Facebook or Bebo application platform to run. To read more about applications, please view the applications page where you can also see some examples.

So now you know what a widget is, it’s probably useful to know what can be done with a widget. Generally a widget can do anything a normal webpage can i.e. display any kind of content or data such as videos, photos, blogs & audio or any combination of these. Coupled with the ability for this content to be dynamic, controlled via an RSS feed or by CMS you are presented with a really blank canvas for your widget concept.

To help focus your ideas, I’m going to give some specific examples/guidance of what can be done.

* Create something useful
A utility widget might be a widget that delivers useful, relevant information to a user. Creating a truly useful widget concept requires an understanding of your target audience, what they do and how you can offer something (relevant to your products/service) to enhance what they do. This might be specific to the user, as in the example of the Nike+ widget given below or might be more general targeted at a group of users such as the Southwest Airlines widget also shown below. Utility widgets often have greater longevity as they fulfill a need or requirement.

Example: Nike+ and Southwest Airlines
Note: Both these widgets are desktop widgets and unfortunately we can’t claim that these are ours.

The Nike+ widget ties in with the Nike+ community site which helps users track their running activity and displays a users personal progress.

Ding, the Southwest Airlines widget delivers special offer and flight information to the users who have installed it.

* Create a game
Along with utility widgets, game widgets are often the most popular type of widget and often have greater longevity. A game widget might be relevant to your brand or company or might just be a fun game that you think users will like and will come back to play time and time again. When designing a game widget, as with any widget, it’s important to think about what can bring the user back to interact with the widget again.

* Distribute your content
Your widget could allow users to consume your content in environments away from you own site as well as sharing it with their friends. This could be the trailer for a film you’re releasing or maybe the latest/most popular videos/news/photos uploaded to your site.

Example: In Bruges Widget

The In Bruges widget promoting the release of the Universal Pictures film features photos from the film, along with a trailer and a synopsis.

Hopefully this blog post has been informative, but as mentioned at the beginning of the post, if you have any further questions please contact us. You may also find the follow post to this article useful, so please come back soon to read it.