engagement - TheWayoftheWeb

What brands need to learn about true fans

February 5, 2012 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

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.

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.

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 Dan Thornton 5 Comments

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.

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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Filed Under: community, social networks Tagged With: engagement, growth rates, online communities, size, value

Rare engagement and Kinect Sports

October 17, 2010 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

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.

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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Filed Under: events, social media marketing, Videogames, xbox 360 Tagged With: #kinectsportsday, engagement, kinect, kinect sports, preview, rare, xbox 360

Twitter is the best source for users to engage with video

August 4, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

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).

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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