SWR3 is Germany’s favorite radio station, daily reaching 3.82 million people across the country. The program is accessible through FM, cable, the Astra satellite or web radio - so, theoretically, you can listen to your SWR3 everywhere there is internet. But that’s not all. The station also offers a social community to its listeners and fans, dubbed “SWR3land.de”, German for SWR3 country. Currently, there are 39139 members and 1246 groups online there.

Those groups are searchable by activity or by number of participants. Additionally, there are photos, forums, blogs, a chat and a studio webcam available to users. The groups are mostly topical, e.g. fan groups of certain shows and their hosts or numerous groups for lovers of cats, bbq or travel. Among the more unusual ones are one for singles, one to combat smoking and a continuous, user driven story about a character called Alfon Erbsengrill. This group actually is among the most active at the moment. It was started in June 2009 and already features 54 pages of forum posts, together making up one huge story - or fairy tale, as the original poster calls it.

This example shows the whole point of creating a social community and at the same time demonstrates what is needed for it to succeed: People need to be motivated to participate and fill the community with life - and thus be positively inclined towards the brand behind the community. Such a favorable opinion creates positive word-to-mouth advertising, or viral marketing, if you will.

Now, how to make this happen? Well, first of all the platform needs to be as open as possible, i.e. leave people room to express themselves and use the community in the way they want. Because who better to know which topics the users might be interested in than the users themselves? Nevertheless, there are certain to be some fail-safe, premier topics a company can create in order to seed activity in the community. In the case of a radio station these would obviously be fan groups of its signature shows, like SWR3’s “Wirby & Zeus” show for example. Reference the community group in your show, host “bring your own content” competitions, ask for listeners opinions and so on. Once the community gets under way, more groups will start to sprout and the users will “take over management” of the community content and activity.

What else is out there? The very popular KIIS-FM, from Los Angeles, also lets its listeners sign up online. The KIIS VIP club isn’t really a social community, though, more a straightforward means for marketing and marketing research. Users can earn points by participating in surveys, listening to the station and referring friends. Points can then be traded in for special prizes and promotions. In short, there isn’t much interactivity or user generated content. America’s most popular radio station, talk radio WABC from New York, offers a similar insider club, where people benefit from promotions and special alerts in exchange for their personal information. Additionally, WABC has an official fan site on Facebook, though only 1798 fans, which doesn’t even come close to the numbers of SWR3!

So, what can businesses learn from SWR3land.de? Well, certainly that it helps to have a positive and distinct brand to serve as a label for the community. But THE winning arguments for a community are its openness and the liberty of use it offers to users, as opposed to being “just” another marketing platform. People tend to notice this and are more inclined to participate if they feel that their efforts and opinions are genuinely appreciated. And that’s what viral marketing is all about. If people feel they are being coaxed into providing free advertisment or buying stuff, however, they won’t take part and the community won’t work.

Did you know that (depending which survey you read) between 25 and 54 per cent of the US companies block social networking sites such as Facebook at work. Eight per cent also fire employees for posting criticism of the company outside of work. That is one way to handle such problems, but in fact that is both wasting talent and squandering an important opportunity. The cause is misunderstanding that different generations work differently.

Companies are right to have concerns about how employees use work time and about activities that affect their brand. However, most of the time, the employee’s intention is not destructive - if it is, then there certainly is a need to act. But in the typical case the issue is not a breakdown in trust, poor work attitude or even inefficiency, but just different perceptions and habits. Young, highly social employees need to be thought of and treated differently.  There’s been quite a lot of research on this over the last year or two, particularly comparing “baby boomers” (now aged in their 40s to 60s) and generation Y,  aka “millennials” or the “net generation”. A company with a good mix of ages can gain from the strengths of both generations - but only with knowledge and careful management. Here are the key findings of the research:

What makes the generations different

• Generation Y like to share personal information and thoughts on social networking sites and make little distinction between company and personal stuff. Baby boomers  are more cautious.
• Generation Y often judge people’s abilities by their technical competence. For baby boomers, technical competence is more of an add-on.
• Baby boomers tend to perceive knowledge as a useful card to hold onto until needed - a private source of power. Millennials gain kudos by sharing it.
• For baby boomers, who had been brought up with a linear, teacher fronted learning style, knowledge is assessed by coherence and depth. Generation Y prefer to learn by selecting from a mass of information, and judged it more by relevance than coherence.
• Generation Y’ers are attracted to jobs by how interesting they are. Can they be creative, use their own technology, express themselves? Job-hopping is seen as normal. Baby boomers, on the other hand, are more likely to look at the overall employment package, and pay more attention to the promotion ladder.
• Generation Y are particularly intolerant of being told  “This is the way we do it. We’ve always done it this way” and like to experiment: new is good. For baby boomers, experimentation is what you do when the normal methods have been tried and found wanting.

Now a certain amount of this is simply differences that have characterised the generations for centuries. But there are deeper differences. Millennials have not learned about the world from books, but from the Internet. What they have been learning is changing year by year, requiring a different and more flexible attitude to knowledge.

Working together

The main thing is to value the different generations within the company so each learns from each other. How would that work in practice?

1. Safety vs. self-expression - employees need an outlet to share experiences and be creative but be aware of consequences for the company of careless online behaviour (they of course also need to understand and adhere to well deisgned policies).
2. Internet time is not downtime - many creative and younger employees use all kinds of resources for information. Imposing rigid rules about how to use the Internet at work will feel too restrictive and insulting, will stifle creativity and create resentment. If an employee wants to do a good job, they need the tools that suit them.
3. Balance different knowledge bases - wikis need to work alongside accumulated specialist knowledge in formal documents, and companies should not forget the institutional knowledge that senior employees have - which can be sorely missed when they leave.
4. Be transparent - being explicit about differences in work attitudes and openly seeking practices that make good use of all talent will motivate employees and increase their productivity and creativity.

The banking services branch of the Swiss Post, PostFinance, has recently launched “EventManager“, an educational game for kids and youths between 14 and 20. Its goal is to educate young people on how to be responsible consumers and manage their own finances. It’s designed along the latest didactic insights, conveys financial knowledge in an understandable way and is mainly meant to be used by teachers during class.

How does it work?
Students are asked to plan and run an event, real or fictional, using EventManager. In doing so, they develop knowledge and competencies related to running projects. Initially, you have to create your group or join an existing one. Then there are three different rounds of play: Budgeting, Financing, Investing. Each of these educational modules offers different clips for participants to watch, e.g. “account types“ or “my budget“. The idea is for students to work on these educational modules and clips and prepare for the event manager job. To give feedback and check on progress, there are five test questions to be answered afterwords. And then the actual game starts: Firstly, the event has to be planned by booking artists and providing infrastructure. Then the whole thing is run and, finally, the results of the job are analyzed and feedback is given.

I think that this is an interesting project, as it isn’t your typical one-size-fits-all social community.  Still, it shows the main ideas behind using social media for business purposes:

• interactivity; students budget, plan and run their own events, fictional or real
• entertainment; students are educated by guiding them through a game instead of just a textbook lesson
• benefit; educational software usually costs something while EventManager is free, making it easy to use for teachers
• viral; of course, PostFinance’s logo is there, but the game itself does not bear the typical hallmarks of a marketing campaign, giving credence to PostFinance’s claim of primarily wanting to educate young people on consumption and money.

What’s your take? Please comment here or send me a tweet.

Swiss energy and energy service company Alpiq has just launched a community-based website at www.immergenugstrom.ch (immer genug Strom means “always enough electrical current”), and at first glance this is a really nice initiative. There is a forum, a TV channel, surveys and lots of content. Quite a big move for a company of this kind in Switzerland, or at least at first glance. But, being Swiss, it is also a bit conservative, and actually not as social as it looks. So the good news is that it is a first, here; the bad news that it’s not all there and others will do it better, or maybe not at all if it doesn’t work!

What is nice about the site? For one thing, the design is nice and the separation into different content and activities is good. For another, there is lots of content, e.g. lots of videos to see on the “TV” link. So what doesn’t work? Well, the problem is that it is not a full-on social site. The “forum” section is not fully-featured, much more like the comments list on a blog site. There are four “threads” — basically just a paragraph with comments, and no user-generated threads. On what looks like a community video page, the videos are from their four in-house “Strom Scouts”. The TV page is a page full of short videos and clips, with no live content. They videos are all good for a job, but there is no shared comment feature — the “comment” button leads to a normal “contact us” page with no mention of moderation or what would be done with the comment. The Q&A section is a very nice FAQ page, but again with nothing user-generated.

Now, I suspect the half measures are partly because it’s a trial run, and partly because this is a very technical area so Alpiq are probably wondering about the role of user-generated content. But its attractive content and one or two real social features are more than offset by the lack of full social media tools that will get users generating content — and energy is a topic that positively invites this content. If it does not come from users, you end up doing it all yourself and not getting their active engagement, so where is the real point? I think this site will end up in disappointment for Alpiq, which would be a pity as it is in some sense in the right direction. However, what bothers me most is that other utilities and service providers may look at this venture as an example for social media in this part of the world and draw completely the wrong conclusions. There is little doubt now that social media works, but it has to be done in a wholeheartedly social way.

So why did it turn out like this? Overall it looks like it was done and driven by IT departments with some oversight from Marcom and the - financial - blessing from management, plus one staged video clip done by the CEO. The results show the shortcomings of this compartmentalized approach. Real success depends on a business-centred planning approach. To do social media well you need to have sales, marketing, operational, and often HR and other departments involved, doing excellent planning that cuts across the departments. Not something where IT companies or even PR companies excel, as they both miss important parts — and may well not even have noticed the site’s deficiencies.

Twitter’s main audience is adults rather than teens - that’s been known for a while, and figures from Nielsen now confirm this. What I find interesting about this is not that Twitter should be doing more to attract teens, as some people seem to suggest, but rather that is shows what Twitter is good at. Twitter’s service has been quite a blank canvas in many ways, with people using it however they want, and a huge number of third party apps tweaking and adding features such as groups and search, to name just a couple. So to show a large adult following confirms that a very large number of people - particularly in the US and the UK - find it useful.

So why adults, mainly? A good blog post from Ben Parr at Mashable discusses some reasons behind this, and I think puts the main reasons well (and has lots of good comments). To summarise and add a little of my own point of view, it’s not primarily a venue for chatting with friends and sharing pictures, music and videos. It’s more of a broadcasting platform where celebrities, news organisations and companies try to entertain and update an audience. Like a very big, lightweight, multiple RSS service. Twitter is also very much an open community, and young people tend more to stay within communities they know. It’s also a great platform for sharing and developing knowledge rather than getting a quick overview from answers.com, wikipedia and so on. So, to put it in a nutshell, most teenagers get what they want elsewhere, and more easily.

Which, given Twitter’s overall popularity, is hardly a problem. The age profile is actually an advantage for Twitter, I think. One of MySpace’s problems is that a younger audience gets older fast, and their habits change. Having an audience mostly in middle adulthood is perfect for customer retention and the service’s long-term stability. Additionally, the fact that a lot of people use the service professionally means there are opportunities for paid premium content and services.

I think what surprises many people about Twittter’s age profile is that it’s pretty new. Young people tend to be early adopters, and are well understood by developers of social media applications, who are often also young. But actually, despite its youth, Twitter is now well established, in its maturity rather than early adoption phase. Who uses a mature product depends on who needs it. In this case, the wider community. Granted, it still hasn’t settled on a long-term business model, and it’s a relatively new entrant to a relatively new set of social technologies, but it should be taken seriously, and recognized for what it is - which is now much clearer.

Not for the first time, a giant corporation is attracted by the value proposition for online marketing, but gets caught disrespecting its rules, and loses the positive impact it was looking for. According to a recent Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article Vodafone is reputed to be spending up to €200 million on persuading young people (”Generation Upload”) via placards and via the Web (YouTube, Twitter, etc), to use their mobile phone as their primary Internet access device at all times of day. But they are openly paying bloggers to promote them. One of these bloggers, Sascha Lobo (pictured), has up to now opposed Vodafone’s stance of supporting government proposals about restricting internet access, and his involvement is causing a real storm.

Some of the other criticisms of the campaign in the article:

1. “Generation Upload”  consists mostly of people who’ve uploaded one or two videos in their lives. So is the market really there? At some point, probably, but via paid-for access on their mobile phone? The evidence is at best equivocal - even iPhone users predominantly use wifi access rather than mobile internet.

2.  It’s not at all clear what the value proposition is - the campaign seems to be mostly about image projection. According to Tobias Langner, Professor of Marketing at the University of Wuppertal, getting people to spend more time online is best served by making the tariff more competitive - particularly difficult if ROI means covering a massive advertising campaign.

3. How will glossy posters in train stations convince an audience defined by its adherence to the web?

The fundamental principle in online marketing is authenticity -  products and presence that inspire people to blog about you, not paying them to do so. Vodafone has not convinced yet with its offering, and is paying for blogs, both of which are likely to provoke criticism. But even criticism provides an opportunity for positive engagement. Is that opportunity taken well? This is the comment that Fritz Joussen, CEO of Vodafone Deutschland, made in response to critical blog posts:

“We’re talking about 500 blog contributions, and we make products for 40 million customers. I’m happy to talk with bloggers about our products, but not to discuss my view of the world.” (my translation). In a few weeks Vodafone may realise that they don’t want all the flak that is coming their way and follow the golden rules - listen respectfully, admit problems, be positive, engage. But I’m not betting on it yet.

I’d like to draw your attention to a very interesting report, recently published by Wetpaint and Altimeter: “The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged? - ENGAGEMENTdb Ranking the Top 100 Global Brands”. The report tries to objectively evaluate marketing efforts in social media by quantifying the depth of a company’s engagement in different social media channels.

The key findings:
The report finds four different types among the surveyed companies, depending on the quantity of channels they use and the depth of their relative engagement in those channels. Furthermore, and now it gets really interesting, the report manages to show a certain positive correlation between social media engagement and financial performance. The authors relativize their findings (maybe they were a little scared by their own success?), but still.

Some details:

Overall, Starbucks gets the highest score, followed by Dell and eBay, while Allianz, AIG, Wrigley and Mercedes-Benz have an almost non-existing social media engagement (p.23-25). Judging by industry  averages, the report shows that technology and media firms are the most engaged in social media, while financial or food and beverage firms lack both in channel quantity and engagement depth (p.4).
Additionally to these quantitative results, the report also includes four case studies, trying to establish best practices in social media engagement by showing what Starbucks, Toyota, SAP and Dell do.

What do you think? Do the results match your own perception or is there something the report misses? Tell us on Twitter!

We have used Filtrbox quite a bit to monitor blogs and news, and been impressed with the customization and flexibility that take it well beyond what you can get with Google alerts. They’ve now stepped up their paid for service, Filtrbox G2 further, offering a bunch of new features including Twitter monitoring, blogs and social media mentions, and customizable levels of reporting and analysis to name just a few.

Along with location-based and other mobile apps, social network search and real-time search of Twitter and other streams, Google is no longer the only touchstone in search, and companies can miss important, even potentially crucial, conversations by ignoring others - Amazon, for example, recently was slow to pick up on a storm of criticism created by its policy on homosexual themes because it didn’t take Twitter seriously enough.

Of course you can combine tools such as FriendFeed (for Twitter and social networking site content) and IceRocket (for blogs), but at the moment this looks to me like the best stand-alone solution short of signing up with all-round social media software or services like those offered by Jive, Leverage or Telligent, who include monitoring in the package.

Orbit, whose annual show for Swiss ICT companies attracted 247 businesses in 2007, has just announced that it is closing down, as a number of exhibitors, including ERP vendor Sage, pulled out this year, and visitor numbers plummeted. In Switzerland, geography has always been very important and there is still an emphasis on both physical events and on social and family connections, but it looks as though here, too, trade shows are struggling The country was a late entrant into web marketing in general — but now this seems to be changing as online events grow in importance and functionality at a lower cost.

Recognizing this, “Community 36“, a new Swiss ICT community venture has just launched, replacing the 4-day Orbit show with a 36-hour non-stop version, plus year-round talks, an online community, and a lounge in Zurich. I’m a bit puzzled about it as yet. The two day show with all-night party in the middle I think will be a format many will not take seriously. I certainly wouldn’t be keen to go on the second day! And when I looked at the website, I couldn’t see any actual online events or content actually listed, so it looks to me like what Awareness Networks, in its guide to corporate trends in social media marketing refers to as “build it first, and they will come” — something that they warn against! However, this is a small country where people tend to know each other anyway, so perhaps it could work. A web community where a major attraction is membership of a real-life lounge still seems odd, though.

I think this slightly weird offering reflects a common problem in the way many Europeans think about social media marketing. In the US, where geography is  a big barrier, it just makes sense. But here, many people still have no gut feeling for it. At the moment, SMM sometimes gets talked about as a kind of buzzy add-on to marcom and PR, which is a misunderstanding. The focus should rather be on using technologies to organize and integrate existing marketing, sales and customer support activities, to provide more two-way communication, and improve and extend delivery of content. That can also mean new activities and channels, but arising organically. A high-level view touting the ideas of collaboration, reach, online presence, innovation is fine, as these are potential benefits, but the danger is of losing sight of the basics. These are simply making more of existing expertise, customer relationships and content, and involving customers and prospects more closely. In the end, that means tangible business benefits that can be measured, and this is what will really drive the adoption of SMM.

As always, it feels too early to go back to work. But it’s also the right time to look ahead and get on with the year. A lot of companies have delayed their market budgeting and planning till the new year to see how the land lies, so now’s also a good time to look at the industry environment and what marketing and PR are going to be most cost-effective. Our CEO Ralf Haller recently wrote his predictions for what will be hot in product marketing in 2009, and what not, and I think he’s spot on. So rather than making my own, here are three from other industry experts that I found interesting.

1. Business social networking to grow

Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis in a group podcast for Briefings Direct:

The first one for me is vendors tackling enterprise-plus-consumer based social networks, a blended view of those. Enterprise-focused vendors are going to do more than simply sink info from public sites like Facebook. They’re going to take that information and build into or out from the enterprise into those social networks and drive information from those. It’s going to become a two-way street.

You’re going to see folks like Facebook, and most notably, LinkedIn, working in the other direction themselves, and with third parties, to develop enterprise-bound social networks. Look for those to emerge next year.

And from Drupal CEO Dries Buytaert
Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time.

2. Brands get promoted directly via microblogging & social networking

From The Marketing Consigliere:

Brands will use Twitter and some people will tolerate push communication.
Just as the original commercial Internet “pioneers” were eclipsed by corporate suits in regard to the continued development and exploitation of the Internet, brands will become a more dominant player in this tool. While the Innovators and Early Adopters who embraced Twitter may feel their “find” has been violated, this is just another stage in the product life cycle as the Early Majority and Late Majority get on board. Many of these later adopters will be complacent with one-way messaging, just as they have been while using other media…

As B2B buyers become less reluctant to use “consumer” apps in their daily work routine, they will accept this relatively new form of blogging as the primary means of communication with their vendors. (Personally, I doubt we will see Twitter etc. being the primary means in Europe this year, but interesting that it is taking off so fast in the US. )

3. New market entrants make fast impact using online marketing

From Joe McKendrick, also for Briefings Direct:

We are going to see folks — maybe IT people, or people who work for vendors and have been laid off — have the ability to start their own business at a very low cost of entry. On the flip side of that, the whole social-networking and cloud-computing phenomena, companies have these tools as well to employ low-cost methods to reach their markets and to interact with their customers. We’re going to see a lot more of that as well. A marketing campaign doesn’t have to cost $200,000 to reach your customers. You can use the social network, the Web 2.0 tools, to interact and collaborate and find out what’s going on in your markets at a very relatively low cost.