Authentic Buzz

I’ve recently been spending some time with team from the BBC World Service. They asked me to come in and make some suggestions about their email mailing list – BBC Email Network.

It’s very easy to decry traditional e-communications, but a mailing list is a great way to keep people in touch with what you do. It’s also technology that’s easily trackable, giving you details about delivery and open rates as well as decent demographic data of your subscribers. Used well, it’s an excellent opportunity to develop a relationship with your consumers. Done badly, it becomes annoying spam.

Thankfully the World Service has the right idea, creating new and exclusive content for the subscribers as well as providing functional information about schedules and programmes. There’s also great focus on the content with a dedicated employee working on creating unique video and audio material.

Amongst other things, I spent some time with them looking at the entry points for subscriptions, how to describe the content to potential users as well as techniques for testing phraseology to increase open rates. We also spent some time looking at objectives for the network and exploring opportunities to give it a personal feel and make it more club-like. The special content for subscribers already provides real added value, but we also wanted to make the Email Network feel more connected to the World Service, rather than be just a weekly marketing push.

As well as looking at how we generate and respond to responses from the group we also wanted to experiment with some social network aspects to help build that relationship with the listeners. With producer Phil Smith and Editor Steve Martin already Facebook users we were keen to use that network to reinforce the value created by the Email Network.

Using some clever data management techniques we were able to identify Facebook users within a test section of the Email Network subscribers. We weren’t sure how many from our sample would be members of Facebook, but it turned out to be around 400 users. We then talked to one of the station’s presenters, Gareth Mitchell, who presents Digital Planet to see whether he would be willing to open up his own Facebook profile to Email Network subscribers and become an online public face of the World Service. He agreed and created a group for BBC Email Network Subscribers.

It was important that we persuaded someone who was already a Facebook user, as we wanted his profile (and updates) to be truthful and authentic and develop a relationship with his listener ‘friends’.

Gareth then invited the listeners we had identified as Facebook users to become his friend. Within 24 hours about a third of those requested had signed up, many also spontaneously joined the BBC Email Network group, the others will get a request to later in the week. It has also been nice to see the response he’s had on his ‘wall’ and also the emails he’s had directly from listeners.

The great thing about using a social network like Facebook is that your friends see some of your activity on the network. So the friends of Gareth’s friends (keep up at the back!) will see them joining and interacting with the World Service. This is a great reach builder for the station and likely to encourage people to trial the network. With Gareth as ‘host’ there’s also good encouragement for new people who stop by to join the Email Network and interact with other World Service content. Facebook was also a good choice, in this instance as the BBC World Service aims to attract well-educated internationalists in their 20s and 30s – a demographic served by Facebook well.

As the Editor, Steve Martin, said in an email to me: “in global broadcasting it’s very easy to be distracted by the immense reach figures, but every one of our 183 million listeners has made a separate personal decision to be with the BBC. That’s why I’m keen to nurture individual connections with listeners wherever we can.”

Using a social network in this way has been a great experiment for the World Service and is a great example of taking the conversation to listeners rather than merely hope they come to you. As an international broadcaster the World Service is used to taking content to new locations where there are listeners, and what’s Facebook really, than another location where listeners live.

I’ve just got back from Glastonbury (after a brief soujorn to Manchester) so i’m a little tired. It was however quite interesting to see people’s use of technology on site.

One of the most popular areas was the Orange Chill and Charge tent, a place where visitors could re-charge their mobiles, go online and listen to special sets from artists. There were hundreds of different points for all the different phone types and it was jammed packed, all the time. Most of the people hooked up were those with the more feature-intensive phones that drained batteries quite quickly.

It was also interesting to see the websites that everyone was logged on to (well, you had to do something whilst you sat waiting for the juice to flow). I would say about 50% of the usage was to Facebook, with the rest a combination of MySpace, email sites and BBC articles on Glastonbury.

The whole Orange installation was managed by Cake and facilitated incredibly well. They managed to create a really great atmosphere for all mobile users (as they supported all networks) under intense pressure (and mud!).

I thought Glasto was also a good opportunity to practice what I preach and so recorded a video blog live to YouTube, and sent some pics to Flickr. Also popping up in my mobile feed reader were live blogs from friends David and Nick. No doubt something lots of people did. I think this kind of mobile access throws up lots of interesting questions about the nature of ‘access’ and worth a more thought out blog post when I’m not quite as tired.

Authentic Buzz has commissioned a poll of 500 London Facebook users asking their opinion on the new London 2012 logo. A whopping 64% thought it was terrible, with a further 18% thinking it was poor.

The ease of which social network users can disseminate opinions online is a massive problem for new brands. The value of an expensive marketing campaign can be destroyed in hours if a bad write up flows through the users on sites like Facebook. The content for all of these sites are driven by friends, so a ringing endorsement or poor review instantly becomes the prevailing opinion for many users.

The new London Olympic logo has already incensed many Facebook users with hundreds of groups appearing demanding that the Organising Committee revert to their old version.

Big companies ignore social networks at their peril and need to ensure their marketing messages are authentic and inclusive to get on side a huge number of these influencing consumers.

I was on Radio 2 this afternoon talking to Stuart Maconie about Facebook and Social Media generally. Describing web2.0 in a sentence is quite tough…

Anyway in the segment it was revealled that Sally Traffic (the high priestess of travel) had a group. Now, it was quite a small one with just a few users, then by the end of the record loads more fans joined up. Now, that’s no great suprise as a drivetime on Radio 2 is a massive show with millions of listeners.

But for me it highlighted how when you engage with someone in an environment that they’re comfortable in (in this case users of Facebook), that you instantly reap the rewards. There were no web addresses given out, or links from Radio 2 online, just through informal discussion a load of people were activiated and they joined in.

Over the next 24 hours those people, through the newsfeed, will alert hundreds of other people (their friends) about Sally and Radio 2. They have endorsed it and told their friends about it.

Media is still often obsessed with control - it stems from the old relationship people had of ‘tuning in’. I think it’s actually more interesting to look at your objectives and think about how they can still be met (and targets beaten) if you cede away control and work to do interesting things within your audiences lives.

One of the lovely things about Facebook has been its less intensive advertising. There’s been some banners but it’s mostly been more promotions based marketing where features (like Holiday Centre) have been sponsored or Groups that allow you to opt-in to connect to some activity (like the new JT film Alpha Dog).

Facebook has grown as a student network. Up until a few months ago you could only get on if you had a .ac.uk or .edu email address. This meant they were pretty much ignored by mainstream-media as no-one could really get on and have a look. However during this time they’ve signed-up millions of users and have an amazingly high penetration into the student market - all of which seem to love the service.

This more grass-roots approached allows them to embark on a micro-marketing opportunities. Users can buy ‘flyers’ for $5 which get you 10,000 impressions if you’re a student and 2,500 impressions if you’re not. These allow individual campuses to be targeted giving some interesting commercial opportunities to arise.

Trendcatching’s pointed out one company that’s taken advantage of these - Boso. Boso is an “online marketplace where students can trade their second-hand stuff with other students, quickly and easily.” They use flyers to remark on current news and entertainment stories to provoke reasons for students to sample their site. It’s a classic piece of brand building that gives the site a personality and encourage trial in a crowded marketplace.

Disappointingly though it seems that since Friday Facebook has bit the bullet and signed up to a number of ad-networks generating banners on every page. Disappointingly they’re not particularly targeted and have included those seemingly social-network standard-issue ones for smilies. Something that has created a Facebook group dedicated to “Get those fucking talking smileys off facebook!!” It will be interesting to see if this changes over the coming weeks and months.