Five Reasons Why Customer Collaboration is the Future of Facebook MarketingBy Ri ley GibsonCo-founder & CEO, Napkin Labs

-- www.napkinlabs.com -- - info@napkinlabs.com -

© 2012 Napkin Labs, Inc.

© 2012 Napkin Labs, Inc.

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Overview

Facebook has emerged as the central

platform for brands to cultivate

communities that power real word of

mouth, awareness, loyalty, insights,

and even innovation. However, the real

opportunity is being missed. Facebook is

designed to be a networking service that

connects people and empowers sharing and

collaboration. It’s no place for traditional

marketing that consistently pushes

messaging, sweepstakes, and promotions.

This paper reveals five reasons why

collaboration with consumers on Facebook

is the future of marketing. It also covers

how to make the switch to a

collaborative strategy and gives real-

world examples of this strategy in

action.

The future of Facebook marketing

requires a major shift in thinking. Most

brands are focused on the acquisition of

“Likes” as their success metric. However,

research shows that a “Like” alone isn’t

all that valuable. A recent AdAge study

concluded that less than 1% of fans who

“Liked” a page actually engaged with

the brand.1 The real value in Facebook

marketing is to keep brands top of mind

and to build user loyalty. This requires rich

customer engagement over time.

In order to map the future of Facebook

marketing, we need to understand the

platform’s context. People use Facebook

for social interaction, to get updates from

friends and other things they care about. As

with any social setting, audiences are less

responsive to interruption marketing on

Facebook. In fact, it’s estimated that only

16% of brand posts are seen by Facebook

users. We’ve become adept at blocking

marketing messages on Facebook because

they disrupt our reason for being there.

Consider traditional media channels.

Audiences are generally there to be

entertained or informed (TV, radio, print,

non-social online) or are looking for a

distraction (billboards.) In these contexts,

interruption marketing is less disruptive

or even welcome. But in a social setting,

interruption marketing is about as welcome

as a person who talks incessantly about

themselves at a cocktail party.

For this reason, social marketing should

be rooted in collaboration and co-creation.

This sets the stage for building a passionate

brand community. When users are given

the tools to co-create with a brand, and with

each other, they become invested in the

community and are transformed into an

army of advocates.

Here are the five reasons why

collaboration on Facebook is the

future of marketing:

1. Collaboration gives your fans a reason to come back

Facebook Timeline provides a visual diary

of your brand from its founding to the

present, a great way to introduce your

User-generated content produces 90% higher engagement than

brand-generated content.

Modify Watches consistently engages fans in sharing their ideas, stories, and photos.

1 http://adage.com/article/digital/study-1-facebook-fans-engage-brands/232351/

© 2012 Napkin Labs, Inc.

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brand, but not a reason to return to your

brand page. This is where collaboration

comes in. By providing a range of tools on

your Timeline page that enable the sharing

of ideas, suggestions, photos and stories,

users become part of the brand experience.

They return to see the responses to their

submissions and to share their contributions

with friends.

According to Facebook’s Best Practices,

on average, user-generated content (UGC)

produces 90% higher engagement than

brand-generated content.2 To realize the

benefit of Facebook marketing, it’s critical to

put fans at the center of your strategy and

provide the tools for collaboration.

2. A brand’s meaning is now defined by the sum of its customer’s voices

Social media is changing how brands are

created, sustained, and grown. The brand

may still control the message, but customers

now control the brand’s meaning.

Coca-Cola, consistently ranked one of the

world’s top brands and largest traditional

advertisers, has noticed that customer

stories online far outnumber stories

generated by the brand itself. They recently

announced that by the year 2020, they will

have phased out traditional marketing in

favor of social engagement marketing. This

shift in strategy already has Coke examining

their Share of Conversation (SC) metric

ahead of every other measure of marketing

success.3 Coke also projects that they will

double unit sales at the same time they

make the shift to social.

It’s clear that customer engagement and

community building need to become top

priorities. This will require specific online

tools to enable brands to host, catalyze,

promote and distribute user-generated

stories and ideas in order to define

and build their brands into the future.

Facebook’s size, social and open graphs, and

sharing tools make it the ideal medium for

this transformation.

Companies that form communities on

Facebook, gather ideas, and continually

ask for feedback and suggestions will

undoubtedly power their brands into

the future and continue to control their

message.

3. Customers embrace and advocate for what they have a hand in shaping

The internet revolution is disintegrating

barriers to entry for a wide range of

industries. It has empowered globalization,

access to capital, and the democratization of

media. It’s also been an ongoing disruptive

force to most traditional brands. Gillette

had a nearly untouchable business with

their “Razor-Razorblade” model. This model

Coca-Cola collects and shares fan stories on Facebook to promote the brand through the eyes and words of their fans.

2 https://www.facebook.com/business/fmc/guides/bestpractices3 Content 2020: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LerdMmWjU_E&feature=player_embedded

© 2012 Napkin Labs, Inc.

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allows them to sell razors at a discount but

the dependent product, razorblade refills, at

a premium.

Recently, a start-up called DollarShaveClub.

com flipped Gillette’s model on its head.

DSC offers a subscription service that sends

blades to your door at a fraction of the price.

Their main marketing channel is social buzz

thanks to a low cost, quirky YouTube video

that cost a few thousand dollars to produce

but generated over four million views in its

first week.4

Lower barriers also mean more competition,

which has created a growing focus on

customer loyalty. Soon, adding customer

collaboration and fan engagement tools is

going to be a competitive requirement for

retaining and growing existing customers.

At the heart of customer collaboration

is the knowledge that people embrace

what they have a hand in creating. We

don’t have to look far to find examples of

this phenomenon. The television show

American Idol has built a near religious

following around the concept of fan voting.

Another example is Domino’s Pizza’s recent

turn-around. They created “Think Oven” on

Facebook as a way to hear and reward great

customer ideas. This has resulted in tens

of thousands of engagements and millions

of ‘likes’.5 Future-focused brands like these

are not only crowdsourcing their future

products but also their brand experience.

Collaboration and co-creation go beyond

loyalty and advocacy, they are also effective

at building awareness. The sharing of

traditional brand promotions on social

networks tends to be low. However, the

propensity to share user-generated content

is much higher. Threadless,

an online community and

e-commerce website is an example

of a company that entered the

mature clothing market and

leveraged crowdsourcing and

voting to spread awareness.

As customers submit designs, they are

naturally incented to share with friends in

order to gather votes. This approach grew

Threadless from a $1,000 start-up to a

business doing an estimated $30 million in

sales within eight years.

4. Collaboration is a scalable social model thanks to peer-to-peer communities

One-to-one social conversations between a

brand and its consumers usually becomes

unmanageable as the brand grows. But

not responding isn’t an option if you want

to remain competitive. According to a Mr.

Youth study, brands ignore 50% of the social

posts about them, yet it’s widely known that

one of the biggest mistakes any brand can

make is to ignore their customers.6

This is where your army of advocates

comes in. When the brand provides

the forum, customers tend to do most

of the heavy lifting. An example of this

type of collaboration is My Starbucks

Idea. Customers are able to submit ideas,

comment, rank, vote and work with each

other to make good ideas better and

bubble the best to the top with minimal

community management required. It’s an

engaging social experience for users, and an

extremely successful and scalable program

for Starbucks.

5. Crowdsourcing fuels innovation With the rise of social media, the first

reaction from marketers was attempting to

translate traditional media strategies and

metrics into the new medium. This has

resulted in the focus on measuring “Likes,

Engagements,” and “Impressions.”

“At the heart of customer collaboration is the knowledge that people embrace what they have a hand in creating.”

Domino’s Facebook Fan Page calls out “Think Oven” application to gather ideas and feedback from customers.

4 DraftFCB Blog: http://www.draftfcbblog.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=4695 Napkin Labs Domino’s Think Oven Case Study6 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brands_ignore_nearly_50_of_consumers_facebook_post.php

© 2012 Napkin Labs, Inc.

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Community building however, broadens

the scope of business value. It provides

a window into the lives of customers and

enables the brand to keep their finger

on the pulse of the market. Humans are

natural problem solvers and since the user-

base is buying, consuming or interacting

with the product daily, they are a goldmine

of insights that can drive product or

experience improvement.

When brands use Facebook as their

collaborative medium, they are able to

gather ideas and feedback in real-time to

help inform brand strategy. New tools

and apps allow brands to host co-creation

projects designed around problem solving.

While few brands expect their users to

come up with their next big product idea,

the themes and patterns formed by the

conversations in aggregate usually contain

rich insights into unmet needs.

More brands are adopting online

collaboration as a medium for product

insights, yet many exist on destination

sites instead of platforms like Facebook.

Community managers are finding it to be

a struggle to recruit, retain and engage

users on these destination sites. So just

as more web traffic is moving to Facebook,

brand communities are migrating there as

well and turning their Facebook pages into

crowdsourcing hubs.

Conclusion

Facebook is not just another digital media

channel. Attempts to translate traditional

marketing tactics to Facebook don’t produce

results. Marketers and social media

strategists are finding they must design

customer collaboration into the heart of

their Facebook strategy. By providing

avenues for fans to engage, share stories,

ideas, and insights, brands are able to

cultivate communities that yield benefits in

real-time that also capture valuable user-

generated content that can be shared and

sponsored by the brand.

Brands will need to evolve their marketing

strategies from creators of marketing

content to providers of marketing platforms.

By enabling their consumers to share their

passion and creativity, brands can achieve

a growing Facebook fan page that is also a

market research and innovation dynamo.

Friends of fans are exposed to open graph actions and sponsored stories related to their friend sharing ideas, stories, and content with a brand.

Brands collect ideas, feedback, increase community metrics, fan count, and gather rich insights into their consumers.

Fan generated content becomes the foundation for sponsored stories that promote brand collaboration and community building.

Layers of small and more significant rewards are provided to build loyalty and engagement with fans.

Brands pose questions, projects, and prompts to spark creativity among fans.

ANATOMY OF FACEBOOK CUSTOMER COLLABORATION

FAN

© 2012 Napkin Labs, Inc.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Riley Gibson is the co-founder and CEO of Napkin Labs. Prior to founding Napkin Labs, Riley was a market research and innovation consultant at Intel and The Sterling-Rice Group where he worked with a range of Fortune 500 brands. For more thoughts on tapping online communities for crowdsourcing, check out the Napkin Labs blog: blog.napkinlabs.com

ABOUT NAPKIN LABS

Napkin Labs provides a suite of Facebook applications empowering businesses to uncover the passion and creativity of their fans. Our Facebook applications can be instantly plugged into any Facebook fan page, turning a crowd of faceless ‘likes’ into a community of brand advocates sharing ideas, insights, and their stories. For more information visit www.napkinlabs.com