Online Communications

Moving to guillaumedugardier.com

I am now definitely going back to Wordpress on www.guillaumedugardier.com, this blog here will remain as archives.

Facebook should help brands identify inactive fans

Running after fans or likers just for the sake of volume is not a final objective, everyone knows it. There are many ways to develop a community on Facebook, more specifically to work on engagement rate and, yes, sometimes, it make sense to work also on scale. FMCG brands like ours with pages as Ferrero Rocher, Nutella, Tic Tac are dealing every day with these issues: creating a qualitative experience for our fans, providing them relevant content, developing genuine interactions, sometimes services, and of course, what they are requesting so often, contest and coupons.

More complicated than the question of growing a community and developing interaction rates is the big never addressed question of inactive fans. How could we get them out of the page ? Why should we...? If a fan leaves a page without "unliking" it, which means that either he hides the updates in his feed, or he never gets back on the page, never interact in anyway nor read anything about our brand, nevertheless, he remains as an official fan in the global countdown. But do we want to keep him as a fan if, from his own point of view, keeping in touch with us is worthless...? How could we focus only on "active fans" rather than "generic fans" ? And would it bring more value to our community ?

There are several consequences for us in this issue, managers of big international or national pages... Let's take the case of our Ferrero Rocher International 16 millions fans page. Although they all decide alone to join the page and brought it at this amazing level - we did not invest anything in FBK Ads for this page, most of them just left the page as it was not manage initially by the brand, and then because it took us so much time to start really managing it correctly. Having the internal organisation ready to manage these kind of page is not that easy to achieve, but it's another topic for another post. So the situation as it is today, is that these fans have joined the page in the last 3-5 years, and no update has been made since that time in order to identify the active ones versus the inactive ones. This feature does not exist yet. You can join as many pages as you want, no matter if you don't ever visit them again, you're in the numbers of the page. Except if you take the action to "unlike" it. What probably 90% of people never do.

How can we manage correctly a FBK page if we do not know how many people are there ? All the performances ratio are wrong, the engagement rate also (PTY) as so many fans have left since a long time, the reach is dramatically low compared to the global volume of fans, the socio-demographics are wrong, well, there is nothing useful left for us. We don't know who really is in front of us in the community of our brand.

We need Facebook to develop a feature which will allow us to have a precise visibility on the active fans, let's say those who have been connected in the last 3 months with our page at least once no matter how. And we should be able to send inactive fans a message to ask them whether they are still interested by our brands, or whether they want to unlike us, and to force this in case of no answer. Because without this update on the real status of the fans structure, we won't be able to develop an adapted engagement program, we won't be in line with our fans expectations. We simply don't know who we are talking with. And for 16 millions fans pages, this can not last.

Webit 2012 Istanbul

In few weeks (10th october) I'll participate at Webit 2012 in Istanbul. Long time I've not been able to escape to participate to such an amazing conference, I think the last one was LEWEB11 in Paris. The most important for me there are the connections with pairs working on the same issues as mine, and sometimes also vendors of innovative online platforms...

The keynote topic I've proposed is following: "Social Media for FMCG brands or the absurd rush for the biggest community".

Working on this topic since several years, I do now have some strong convictions on how to define a social media strategy, how to support brands objective and how to bring concrete metrics in the loop to allow ROI oriented converstations...

Looking forward to getting live reactions there...

Back to blogging, as in 2004.

After a break on blogging and a deeper involvment in microblogging an social media, it's I think a good time for me to get back to my first blog and  start again exchanges on some of the issues I am dealing with in my business life as  head of interactive media  @ Ferrero.

We do have some big pages to manage on FBK, Ferrero Rocher, Nutella, some new interesting one in France as Tic Tac, Kinder, our Club-Kinder CRM program is also requesting a lot of attention and efforts... Some of these programs may definitely be good topics to walk the talk and see what other would want to say about them.

I also feel the need to escape from the daily overwhelming routine and seek for new thoughts, different point of views, and to learn again, hoepfully as much as when I did start here. The nine years which separate this post from the very first one are probably going to bring a new dimension, let's see how it's going to look like...;o)

Tracking PR Thoughts

Well, it's not that easy to find the good place to stay at in this permanently fast moving Web 2.0 environment...;o) I am now based on Webjam, probably for the next year at least...;o)

My new blog as of the 13th december 06 is here.

Launch of the new PR Thoughts

I am moving my blog on a new URL: www.prthoughts.net

Please update your blogroll and RSS subscription, and come and join me there at PR Thoughts V2.

The story of the move is told there.

A new blog soon !

I am actually finalizing my new blog that will be hosted on www.prthougths.xxx and will be revealed soon ! ;o)
For this reason, I am posting since today on the new one to have some content ready before I leave www.prthoughts.com as an open archive.

Stay tuned, I'll announce the official new URL in the very next days.

By the way, I am not going to publish it thanks to SquareSpace that I've been testing for several days, I have to say that I have not found it so intuitive and efficient as I was told it was. This might probably be due to my strong Typepad culture, I might not have been able to fit with it's spirit and to get use to it's mechanism. I have to say that I've been a bit lost with it's "module" feature, I haven't found it so easy to use at all.
Probably someone who is not used to any weblogging solution but begins in the blogosphere will have less issues adopting it. But not in my case.

Reading Philippe's post, who got Forrester's last report, it is interesting to see the Top 3 most used enterprise blogging plateforms in the world:
1. iUpload
2. Movable Type & WordPress
3. Telligent Systems, Traction Software, TypePad and Drupal.

Well, the choice I made for my new blog is in this Top 3.....;o)

Technorati Tags: forrester, iupload, squarespace

links for 2006-07-01

• PR community action on social media press release
• Silicon Valley Watcher--Tom Foremski on the business and culture of innovation
  Tom Foremsky to ask for the renewal of the press release as we know it
• Chris Heuer’s Idea Engine » Blog Archive » New Media Release Standard from the Community
  Creating a standard around this idea of New Media release

Discovering Second Life

I made my first steps within Second Life this evening, trying to understand the rules of this new world... I've been chating with several people from the US, Germany and Japan, quite brievely I have to say, it's amazing how you meet people in this virtual world.

My first visit was for Podcast Island, below is a picture of me in front of the Casino, I'll share my next experimentation soon here.

Technorati Tags: second life

End of PR Week Forum

That's it, it' s the end of PR Week Forum in Wales today, I am using the last hours of the wifi network that has been set up here to do this post, it has been a great Forum, and my blog is the most appropriate channel (in my views...) to thanks PR Week for having inviting me to handle those 2 workshops on "The rise and rise of weblogs".

By the way, in this week issue, PR Week has a interesting article coming from the PR and New Media conference that they organized recently, with quotes from Peter Bale, editorial editor of the Times Online, explaining why communities like MSN and Yahoo! also becomes their competitors, such as The Guardian and other MSM - from his point of view.

Interesting also to know about the Times Online's Sounds podcast, containing interviews with bands and some of their tracks, sponsored by Sony Ericsson, and which had notched up 170 000 downloads since January...

Back to Paris now...

Technorati Tags: prweek

links for 2006-06-27

• PR Thoughts
  10 reasons for broadcaster to podcast
  (tags: podcasting podcast)

Oooops, I've been re-instaling del.icio.us Firefox extension, and unfortunately made it wrong... But geeeh, what a lot of available extensions now, it's impressive, it's definitely worth having a look !

10 good reasons for Broadcaster to podcast

I spent few hours today with the management and marcom team of an international broadcasting company which invited me to have a discussion with them on podcasting/video podcasting.
As you can easily imagine, I love to do some evangelism on this topic and the discussion has been very exciting. Prior to get in the meeting, I've been thinking about 10 good reasons for broadcaster to enter the podcast world:

Podcasting is....

• A good way to give a second life to a huge amount of content that would directely becomes archives
• An opportunity to create and develop a new audience which might become a new community for the brand
• A way to prepare an evolution to "Television on Internet"
• Generating new traffic on the corporate web (podcasters and bloggers will link to the new available podcast)
• Providing a new form of content, for a younger audience
• Generating some rare content, available only and exclusively through the podcast
• Making some buzz to launch new TV shows: give pieces of exclusive previews through the podcast to give a flavour of it prior to the big launch
• A new source of revenu: you can have sponsors for your podcast (allocine is the first in France having been including ads in the show)
• Generate excitement for existing shows by producing "best of XYZ"
• An interesting way to reach niche audiences that would not normally be reachable for financial means

By the way, if you are interested in Web 2.0 topics, we have a great podcast in France produced by LCI (our CNN), called "Plein écran" (means full screen) that is definitely worth watching ! iTunes feed available here.

Launch your Talkcast

Have you heard about Talkcast ? "A live or recorded multi-person conversation, discussion group, talk show or podcast, led by a host with active participants and listeners" ?

If you're interested by this form of online voice discussion group, then you should have a look to this new service available since the 16th of june, TalkShoe.

It's an amazing way to host conversations and invite several people to join on a debate, which becomes available as podcast after the show ! The service is free for now and it seems like you can make money from it by hosting talk cast.

I created an account and I will definitely give it a try rather sooner than later, I have already an idea of what could be my first talk show....o) Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: talkshoe

Secrets behind MySpace's success

I was seeking for some informations on successful social network when I found this post from Robert Scoble relating part of a discussion he had with Aber Whitcomb, CTO of MySpace.

Some of the reasons which have made the success of MySpace are:

1) They made sure influentials in Hollywood (stars, bands) were among the first users.
2) They listen to their users and add features frequently (usually noticeable new features every week).
3) They let the users tell them what to do. He mentioned that other services, like Friendster, tried to tell their users what not to do.
4) When MySpace visitors first log on they already had a friend: the founder Tom. That was in contrast to other services where you had to work to find your first friend. His page also gave you a template to get started.

Definitely arguments to bare in mind if you're willing to launch your "MySpace"....

Technorati Tags: myspace