What brands need to learn about true fans

February 5, 2012 By

Are you watching the Super Bowl tonight between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants? I’ll be watching at least some of it, but my main interest in the NFL was in the in 90′s, watching Troy Aikman and the Dallas Cowboys in whatever coverage was available in the UK.

By contrast, I was on the edge of my seat during the Ireland – Wales match in the Six Nations Rugby today. And [spoiler alert] being a passionate Ireland supporter (The two manifestations of my Irish ancestry are in rugby and whiskey), the end result was a bit of a kick in the teeth.

Chatting with a friend, I was struck by the difference between the ‘fan of a game’, as I am with the NFL, and he is with rugby, and the ‘true fan’ of a team. Watching a match as a fan of a sport can be quite relaxing, as you can enjoy an entertaining game without investing your own emotion. Watching as a fan of a team is a stressful rollercoaster of emotions which often ends in disappointment.

The Agony of Defeat

In fact, even when your team wins, it can be so stressful than you have little memory of the event, which was certainly true when I watched Chelsea win the 1997 FA Cup Final against Middlesborough, which was the first major victory for the team in 27 years, and the first in my lifetime. As I walked home from the pub after watching the game and people asked about it, I could remember the score, but not even who had scored. And that’s including a goal after just 42 seconds which remained a record for 12 years!

 

What brands need to know about their true fans

Here’s the important point for brands, and it isn’t about pricing season tickets, or how to sell hats and scarves. It’s the fact that the majority of fans will continue to follow their team with passion and enthusiasm despite the fact that they won’t win. Statistically, 99% of the teams in any competition will end up losing at some point, and will have lost the previous year, and the year before that, and potentially for many years before.

Brands always want to portray their best side, hiding flaws and imperfections in the belief that this breeds success, rather than some kind of marketing uncanny valley.

More perfect than Helvetica

The belief has always been that brands need to portray themselves as perfectly better than their competitors to attract customers, and because any flaw leads to complaints.

But that’s not the case – it’s how you react to any problems. The main complaints about brands via the internet are not that they screwed up – it’s that they don’t respond, react, or solve their screw-ups.

If you’re brave enough to talk about your problems, failures and mistakes with honesty and how you’ve solved them, it works. Talk to all the community managers who meet with their communities and find that explaining the reason behind common issues results in those communities becoming staunch defenders of them.

There are fans in the world who have spent decades following teams in lower leagues and divisions with extremely little chance of success, and will make great sacrifices to support them day-in and day-out. Wouldn’t you like customers like that?

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Why size isn’t everything – at least for communities…

August 4, 2011 By

I made a note to respond to a recent post by David Cushman, in which he talks about the value formula applied to cities by a theoretical physicist, and applies it to social networks and particularly Google +.

The money quote is:

“…it can be understood by a single magic number: 1.15. Each time the population of a city increases by 100 per cent (in other words doubles) the social and economic factors scale up by 115 per cent.
“So, if you compare a city with a population of one million people to a city of two million, then instead of the larger city having twice as many restaurants, concert halls, libraries and schools, you find instead an extra 15 per cent on top of what you’d expect. Even salaries are affected by this curious ratio…”
And David then applies the same thinking to social networks, to prove that overall size is more important than growth rate in creating overall value. Which isn’t wrong exactly, but it did leave me feeling uneasy, and trying to work out why I felt the need to disagree.
And here’s why – it’s about personal perspective. If you’re a social network or community owner, then the application of the value theory makes sense, and from an overall perspective, then the rise tide lifts all your individual ships up.
But from the perspective of an individual member of that community, the value you get isn’t just tied to the economic levels of the overall group, or the overall utility of the network as laid out in Reed’s Law.

Why size doesn’t matter for the individual

So here’s why overall size isn’t the biggest factor in the value of a community or social network – a city may have an overall rise in economic growth and communal resources in line with the overall size, but there are still economic and status differences between individuals. And these tend to be centred around particular areas and neighbourhoods.

plus size skinny jeans

Photo by arimoore on Flickr (CC Licence)

And it’s the rise or fall of my neighbourhood which impacts me most – whether that’s house prices, new community services etc. Even then, my own standard of living may not rise or fall in line with everyone else .

So the value I get from an online community is normally made greater by an increase in connections, in terms of awareness of opportunities. And most social networks have allowed us to have huge numbers of loose connections beyond the magic Dunbar Number of the number of people we can generally manage to have stable social relationships with (between 100 and 230).

But I think that the size approach Dave has chosen is purely looking at the numbers of opportunities, the quantity of information, and the overall value.

It’s not taking into account depth of relationships, information and opportunities.

You what now?

Time for the plain English example to illustrate what my half-formed thoughts are getting at:

For the sake of argument, let’s peg Facebook at 640 million users, Twitter at 170 million and Google+ at 25 million (The first two figures are from Wikipedia and are being used by Dave – the final one is the latest report by Reuters on Google+).

I’ve got hundreds of connection on both Facebook and Google+ and thousands on Twitter.

And yet the highest value interactions I’m having in terms of in-depth knowledge sharing and information which provides direct results for me comes from a couple of small subgroups on each, and a couple of far, far smaller forums, dedicated to relevant topics such as SEO, or Blogging. Those are where I’m seeing really useful information being shared – normally on private and invite-only groups and forums.

It doesn’t matter if a city doubles in size and gains 1.15 times the total amount of restaurants. It matters if the city gains a couple of restaurants that specialise in the food I love, at a price that’s affordable, and most importantly, if those restaurants are places my trusted friends are recommending and visiting.

And that’s why I think his theory of communities and cities can only be applied in very specific ways – my experience of Google+ has been totally different, perhaps because I was fortunate to be invited and engaged by some very cool people straight away, which enabled me to set up and enjoy my own neighbourhood.

It’s why I always enjoy visiting London for work – I have some great clients and there’s a huge potential for more, plus the chance to go to a load of cool events, and meet up with lots of cool friends. But I also enjoy living outside of London and engaging with a great group of digital people locally.

 

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Rare engagement and Kinect Sports

October 17, 2010 By

I was lucky enough to be invited along to an event held by games developer Rare, to play Kinect Sports (aff link), which has been developed for the new Kinect peripheral for the Xbox. I’ll write more about the game itself at the end, but a few other things struck me about the event.

Number one, it was the first event I’ve been to without any corporate affiliation for as long as I can remember. Even when not directly related, I’ve always been able to reference my employer during introductions, etc. This time I was purely there as a fan and independent freelance something or other, which was a little strange but also nice. It also meant that I hopefully spent more time listening and asking questions.

Number two – the event itself, #kinectsportsday, was really interesting as previously Rare had a reputation for keeping itself to itself since it began, 25 years ago. And the location of the offices backs that up – out in the countryside, hidden away behind a gatehouse and winding driveway.

But this event had been created purely to let people from ‘smaller’ sites and forums, competition winners, and fans, all get a chance to not only play the game before the next chance the mainstream press will get, but also to speak to the designers and developers all day long. There were probably 40-50 guests in attendance, and probably around 10 Rare employees, which meant an awesome amount of time to chat with the people that made the various elements of the game. And there were no limits of what you could ask etc.

It was a really nice piece of engagement – not only allowing people more access than they’d ordinarily have, but also building relationships with fans and sites which will either continue to have a strong following for Rare, or could end up being the next big thing.

Put simply, I spend a lot of time telling people how great it would be to open up to your fans and consumers – engage with them, give them access, chat and talk with them etc. And Rare let me feel exactly how great it is to be on the receiving end of that as someone who actually started playing their games 25 years ago.

Kinect Sports Day at Rare

For more pics, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/badgergravling/sets/72157625177210894/

Kinect Sports and Kinect:

So for those interested in gaming as much as marketing/engagement and my own identity crisis…

I think I’m finally converted to motion games – as fun gaming,rather than a distraction during parties. And I think the main reason for that is that the Kinect doesn’t make you hold a device to track/input motion – which means that when you become immersed in a game, it seems easier for my brain to fill in the gaps and make it feel more realistic. I’d definitely say for this type of sports game, I’d pick the Kinect version over the Wii version any day.

And part of that is down to the fact Kinect Sports is really nicely done. A total of six disciplines (Football, Bowling, Track & Field, Table Tennis, Boxing and Beach Volleyball) all contain normal versions of the sports (with single player, versus and co-operative modes), and minigame variations, which tend to be fun and frenetic.

There didn’t seem to be any lag in detecting movements and translating them on screen, graphically it looked pretty good (certainly above what would be required), and they’ve licensed enough suitable music and injected enough humour that I’d actually be tempted to play this in single player, which doesn’t happen often with party-orientated games.

I’ll write a more lengthy post concentrating on the gaming side of things for www.onlineracedriver.com now, but I think games like this are going to bridge the gap even more between games who actually own and play games, and those with a more casual interest/non-gamers as part of the overall convergence of entertainment devices. It’ll be interested to see how they continue to promote it versus the ‘celebs at home’ approach of Nintendo at the moment, as I think the Xbox platform has a lot more potential to crossover now as a media device/console/party game machine.

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Twitter is the best source for users to engage with video

August 4, 2009 By

Twitter seems to be the best source of traffic for online videos, according to a new report from online video service Tubemogul (Found via Mike Arauz).

The average time spent viewing a number of 6,763,690 video streams linked from Digg, Facebook and Twitter, from six top video sites, showed Twitter users spending 1:58 minutes watching, compared to 1:14 from Facebook and 0:58 for Digg. (Graph from the Tubemogul report).

 

image

As Tubemogul point out, Twitter allows one-sided (asynchronous) following, and therefore you can filter your incoming noise more effectively than Facebook or Digg.

But as Mike adds:

‘a network of relationships built primarily on information shared, and only secondarily on personal relationships to the other people, is a more potent information sharing network’

And I think he has a very strong point – I’m connected to family and friends on Facebook that I might have a lot of love and affection for, but it’s balanced by a constant stream of invitations to install apps I’d never touch etc.

But in general the Twitter users I follow are people whose interests are of a relevant interest to mine, and are far more likely to post things I’d like. (Speaking of things I like, Mike’s got a very effective visual way of posting which I definitely recommend).

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Twitter traffic overtakes mainstream news

May 13, 2009 By

Twitter website traffic has overtaken both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for April 2009, as picked up by PaidContent and expanded on by ReadWriteWeb.

Which is a handy stat, but….

Are we really comparing like for like, or is this as misleading as comparing print and online figures?

For starters, we’re looking at website traffic, and although publication has numerous ways to be accessed online, I’d risk assuming that Twitter’s proportion of mobile and desktop client access is greater than that of the newspaper sites – which probably means the numbers went past the paper sites long ago.

And where’s the measures of interaction for comparison? While not every Twitter user is interacting, and newspaper sites are building in increasing routes to conversations and communities, surely it’s the engagement, interaction and effectiveness of Twitter versus other sites which is of as much importance? Even when it’s breaking news, e.g. Mumbai, the ability to converse with both the source and others is built into Twitter to a far greater extent than the paper sites.

Finally for a comparison – what amount of data is being generated by the different sites?

That’s surely of major importance considering the changes happening in general searching:

First hands on test with Wolfram Alpha

Google search tools moving closer to ‘real-time’

And considering the current wave of new and improved Twitter search tools:

Scoopler

Twitscoop

Tweetmeme

Oh, and major changes to Twitter Search itself.

Whether or not the current buzz and celebrity/mainstream adoption continues, or whether a backlash increases along with the pretty high drop-out rate from people trying Twitter for the first time, it’s the levels of data and engagement which are key to the longterm success, and routes to monetization for Twitter, rather than sheer mass audience numbers. Particularly when the types of both advertiser and advertising which are going to be most effective will also be quite different from traditional publishing outlets.

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Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

April 14, 2009 By

Although hardly newspaper/print apologists, both John Duncan and Martin Langeveld have posted interesting articles trying to compare the print/online split in newspaper readership in number terms. Duncan comes in with online having 17% of page impressions on Inksniffer using the Guardian as a case study,  while Langeveld posts that only 3% of newspaper reading happens online.

While I totally agree that it’s easy to overestimate the online figures in comparison to print products, and both articles are good reality checks, I have to say that I think comparing print and online readerships directly in this way  is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.

And touting the eventual figures is very dangerous.

For starters, the readership of print titles rests on research figures for average shared readership of titles. For instance, the metrics John Duncan quotes are:

From 2007:

Average daily UK uniques for Guardian website: 270576 (after discounting overseas readers etc).

Average UK sales of Guardian/Observer: 310788

But then the UK sales figures is multiplied by 3 to take into account shared readership, becoming 932,364, on figures available by the Guardian.

Meanwhile Langeveld refers to an engagement study from the Newspaper Association of America conducted in February 2006, based on 4594 respondents to a survey.

Now shared readership definitely happens, and without being able to actually see what people do, rather than what they claim, it’s impossible to be totally accurate.

But…

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available)  it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

After all, two years ago, Facebook didn’t have 200 million users, Twitter had just launched, there was no iPhone, there was less broadband penetration in the UK, there hadn’t been events like earthquakes or Mumbai to highlight realtime information, etc, etc.

And there’s a big elephant in the news room: Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?

I can get digital news on my mobile or my PC, via text,audio or video, and via social networks, blogs, websites, link aggregators, RSS, podcasts, videocasts, and from global sources. Whether or not print titles are only seeing a small percentage of their print readership visiting them online is less relevant, than how many of those readers are getting news content online from any source.

So what can you do?

When it comes to looking at the situation now and for the future, the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends.  I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.

Just to reiterate, I don’t want to criticise John and Martin for doing what is a useful, if flawed, exercise to highlight caution in assuming that online readership is bigger than it really is, or that print readership is smaller than you might think. As I tried to comment on the Nieman Labs site (sadly it vanished into cyberspace after I submitted it), it’s the way the information is being presented that worries me.

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Offline example of social media marketing by the local Chinese takeaway

February 24, 2009 By

Back in November 2007, I wrote about a new Chinese takeaway restaurant in Peterborough which was doing a great job of making an impression by engaging with it’s consumers.

Kung Fu Kitchen explained its belief in a letter sent out with vouchers and other goodies, and then followed up meal deliveries to check everything was OK – and funnily enough, we’re still ordering regularly from them 12 months later.

Which is how we spotted something new:

kungfukitchen

(Excuse my crap photography – I was full of the Salt and Pepper chicken wings and Roast Duck curry).

It’s exactly the sort of thing being recommended by marketing experts like Chris Brogan, for example.

And the brilliant thing was that it wasn’t just a big sales pitch – the biggest spaces were given to details of Chinese New Year, the martial arts grading of the owner’s daughter, and a plea for help due to problems with the owner’s Sky system.

The details of some sales vouchers and a spicier curry after consumer feedback was approximately 1/8th of the total newsletter.

It’s no wonder they seem to be getting more and more popular – and yet they still seem to deliver great food incredibly quickly. The only strange thing is that they have an email address to contact them, but haven’t put a website up on their domain yet.

I wonder if I should offer for some free food!

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No comment needed on NUJ comment

February 20, 2009 By

Happened across this post, via Antony Mayfield.

Regardless of the actual post, what really caught my eye was in the comments by Chris Wheal:

First:

‘Let me reiterate a principle of journalism: You contact the subject of a story and put the allegations to them before you publish.

Had you done so – contacted the NUJ or me, as you know I chair the Professional Training Committee – you’d have had an explanation.

The story would have been much less interesting. It would have been: Tired NUJ training chair, angered by poor journalistic standards on blogs, asks committee to engage with bloggers to try to raise standards.’

Followed by:

‘The NUJ believes that journalistic standards should apply across all media. If that sounds out of touch, and old-fashioned then sorry, I must be a dinosaur.

The NUJ fails to police those standards as well as it would like in the tabloid press due to the powerful media owners, weak industrial relations legislation, lack of a contractual right to refuse to do unethical stories and a host of other reasons.

The NUJ fails to maintain standards in blogs because bloggers themselves rejoice in having lower standards.‘ (emphasis mine).

I’m pretty sure I don’t need to add anything, except:

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Breaking the habit of broadcast media

October 21, 2008 By
UK newspapers by franckdethier on Flickr (CC Licence)

UK newspapers by franckdethier on Flickr (CC Licence)

It’s only when you try and break a long held habit that you realise how much we’re all influenced by the way we’ve always done things. Since starting my efforts to cut down and stop smoking, I’ve managed to get to the point where I only have the occasional cigarette once the family has gone to bed – but it’s the hardest one to drop. And when I get writers block, my intake rapdily goes up because I’ve spent so long finding inspiration by getting outside and getting the hit of nicotine while my brain kicks into gear.

And I’ve also started to try and challenge the broadcast media habit of trying to get the biggest audience with the least work. For years we’ve focused on audience figures to suggest that by doing the bare minimum, you’ll reach the biggest audience.

Whereas in the modern world, we need to work harder than ever at making as much of what we do remarkable, and to pursue as many opportunities to the maximum as we can. Otherwise we’ll keep finding someone else that does!

It reminds me of a post I read earlier today, which sadly I seem to have misplaced, commenting on the problem facing the A-List of blogging. Namely, the fact that people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk are finding it hard to scale to respond on an individual level to every email, post and tweet they receive, and in effect, become mini-broadcasters.

The simple answer is that they still remain increasingly popular because they put in a huge amount of effort to stay more accessible than mainstream media. They don’t have to make time for everyone, but by attempting it as far as possible, it gives hope to those who don’t grab their attention at a particular time. It’s why I count myself fortunate to have had messages from the likes of Chris Anderson and Hugh McLeod, but I don’t bombard them with emails, or suddenly thinkg they’re my best friend and will respond to everything I do – they’ll do it if what I say is interesting and they have the time available.

The other option is to scale it, and for them to find someone as similar as possible, or someone they can trust, to work alongside them.

That’s where broadcast media should be. We still have far more resources than the top bloggers, so why not scale back on the coverage that everyone else is parroting, use link journalism, and focus on becoming closer to the spirit of individual response that blogging has fostered.

After all, it’s what we laud Zappos, Dell and Comcast for doing.

But there is a habit of resisting the idea of putting in that much effort for what will be less profit in total. Despite the fact that everything so far has shown that it’s harder to get similar levels of profit from online audiences as you would in print, radio or TV, and that the only way to really be successful is to aggregate lots and lots of individuals monetisation.

Annoyingly, the great David Armano summed this up far more succinctly.

The Corporate Social Media Curve by David Armano (http://darmano.typepad.com/)

The Corporate Social Media Curve by David Armano (http://darmano.typepad.com/)

At the point before the curve starts to dip, we need to put in the extra effort to keep that line climbing. Now if only I hadn’t needed a cigarette to think of all this!

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The tools to measure social media and community engagement

October 15, 2008 By
Tape Measure by redjar on Flickr (CC licence)

Tape Measure by redjar on Flickr (CC licence)

If only it was that simple! But to make it easier, I’ve finally started compiling a list of the tools and resources for the measurement of social media and community marketing and engagement - ranging from free to paid options, and Web Analytics to Buzz Metrics.

It’s in no way a comprehensive list, but as I was compiling material to add in to the MeasurementCamp project, I thought I might as well list it here and get comments and additions from some of the measurement mavens I know lurk in the comments!

I’m also debating whether the list would be improved by my personal opinions about the tools I’ve trialled and used, and those I continue to use – I’d be interested in peoples views for and against – although there is the caveat that I’m nowhere near the expert I’d like to be…

Anyway, comments and additions can be put in the comments on this post, the comments on the Marketing Measurement Tools page, or via email from the About page.

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