facebook and beyond: lessons for brand engagement with social customers

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we help companies unlock the passion of their customers. The Lithium Social Customer Suite allows brands to build vibrant customer communities that:

lithium.com | © 2012 Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved

contents

1 executive summary

2 Facebook and brand communities - what are they good for?

4 success/failure and future needs

5 next generation social support

7 organizational ownership

9 conclusion

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As recently as two or three years ago, the idea that brands

would provide a social channel for their customers to

engage with them was controversial, even radical. Now it’s

convention. Facebook is a big reason for this change. As

of this writing, 56 percent of Fortune 500 companies host

Facebook pages, and that number is growing daily.

Since social customer programs were controversial just

two years ago, many of those companies are new to the

experience of engaging with social customers and are looking

to answer the question, “What do we do next?”

Brands that have engaged with social customers in other

channels can help us answer this question. Lithium’s

clients have considerable experience with social customer

engagement through brand communities and Facebook

pages. Lithium conducted a survey of its clients to better

understand how they see the role of Facebook (and other

social media outlets) in their overall engagement strategy.

The results provide an interesting glimpse into the different

roles played by different social media channels, and

potentially into how they will converge in the future.

Some highlights include:

• On the whole, respondents rated their communities as more successful than Facebook at activities that require trust: peer-to-peer engagement and providing pre-and-post sales purchase support; Facebook was seen as more successful in disseminating marketing messages.

• The two channels were seen as roughly equal in their ability to create brand awareness. Clients who have initiated brand communities see awareness benefits as particularly salient in the first year, suggesting that “newness” of an engagement channel is in itself a big driver of awareness.

• The ability for customers to submit and discuss ideas for product or service improvement is the biggest downstream benefit of social customer engagement for clients who have developed brand communities. Clients who consider their Facebook efforts less successful are particularly interested in bringing this capability to Facebook in a more structured fashion.

After Peak Facebook

As Facebook itself approaches full penetration of its core

markets and its members start to regularize their behavior,

historic growth rates for participation in corporate Facebook

pages will slow. Call it “peak Facebook.” Recent surveys

have also shown that existing consumers’ engagement with

corporate Facebook pages may be tenuous and fading. For

example, 81% of those who have become fans of a brand

have abandoned at least one such relationship because of

“irrelevant, voluminous, or boring” marketing messages.

This suggests that marketers who are committed to using

Facebook to foster relationships with social customers will

need to invent or adopt sophisticated long-term strategies for

customer engagement. Fortunately, many of the techniques

learned in brand communities can carry over into Facebook.

executive summary

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Facebook and brand communities - what are they good for?

One of the first questions we see from brands developing a

social customer strategy is, “Do I need both a brand community

and Facebook, and if so, what role does each one play?”

The answer to this question always depends on

circumstances and business requirements, but given that our

audience has experience with both venues, we have a very

good sense of the role that each one plays.

Figure 1 compares the brand community’s perceived effectiveness with the Facebook page’s perceived effectiveness in 10 different areas.

The first thing to note is that the one area where Facebook

shines is in outbound messaging. Because Facebook offers

outstanding reach and many brands use it as a publishing

platform for periodic updates, its prowess as a vehicle for

disseminating marketing messages is not surprising. Social

media marketing vendor Vitrue has computed that a fan

base of 1 million translates into $3.6 million in equivalent

media per year, and brands such as Coca-Cola already see

more unique visitors to their Facebook page than they do

to their company web site. In these situations, Facebook

represents a means of message dissemination that

compares favorably to advertising on a cost-per-impression

basis.Interestingly, however, Facebook was not cited as

significantly more effective than a brand community in

creating brand awareness, or creating goodwill for the brand

in social channels. Given the Facebook platform’s reach and

viral features, one might have expected higher scores for

Facebook’s ability to increase brand awareness, but there are

several reasons why the scores may be lower than expected:

• Brand awareness is still largely campaign driven, and a Facebook page alone does not constitute a campaign.

• Even when campaigns drive users to Facebook pages and increase the brand’s fan base, there is no guarantee that these people were new to the brand. Most users who associate with a brand page probably have a prior affinity for that brand.

community effectiveness facebook effectiveness

improves our search results

creates awareness of our brand, products, or services

allows us to communicate our marketing message effectively to customers

creates beneficial customer-to-customer engagement

empowers customers to help one another with pre-sales purchase questions

empowers customers to help one another with post-sales support questions

gives us metrics we need to assess program goals

gives us a good sense of how our customers are feeling

helps us identify particularly valuable customers

creates goodwill for our brand in social channels

Figure 1: Overall effectiveness of Facebook and brand community.

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• Finally, as we have seen through social media monitoring studies, “buzz” around brands spikes during successful campaigns, but typically returns to a steady state after

campaigns end.

One further explanation may be that our community clients

report that brand awareness benefits peak during the first

year, even as other benefits increase over time. If this holds

true across other social channels, it is possible that the fact

of starting a new program in and of itself is responsible for

increased awareness — probably because that program

involves an introductory campaign. When the shock of the

new wears off, what is left?

As it turns out, brand communities annuitize exceptionally

well. Peer-to-peer engagement and an environment where

users answer one another’s questions emerge as a corps of

devoted users forms and mobilizes. Indeed, scores rise in

these areas as communities move into their second and third

years, suggesting that communities hold their users’ interest

over the long haul.

Figure 2: Anticipated benefits versus realized benefits. Peer-to-peer buying advice and customer ideation were two benefits exceeding client expectations.

The survey tells us that benefits clients anticipated when

embarking upon a social customer program are not always

the same benefits that emerge over time. This is particularly

true in two areas: idea development, and peer-to-peer pre-

sales consulting. Customer feedback/ideation was listed

as an original purpose of a community 46% of the time, but

a realized benefit 78% of the time. Peer-to-peer pre-sales

consulting was an original purpose 13.5% of the time but a

realized benefit 27% of the time.

Both of these “downstream” benefits are most likely to emerge

as byproducts of trust among members of a community.

Brands tend to be more willing to harvest and discuss ideas for

service improvement when they trust that their customers are

ready for a sustained dialog rather than drive-by complaints.

And people are more willing to trust product recommendations

from their peers when those peers have proven themselves to

be reliably knowledgeable over time.

13.5% 27%

anticipated → → → realized

pre-sales consultation

46% 78%

anticipated → → → realized

customer feedback/ideation

Figure 2: Anticipated benefits vs realized benefits

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success/failure and future needs

To see these benefits, brands must cultivate relationships

with their social customers over the long term. While the

constraints and affordances of the Facebook platform and

brand communities differ, there is no reason why the aspects

that make brand communities deliver annuitized benefits

cannot exist in Facebook. Whether they will emerge depends

largely upon the choices that brands make about how to

engage with their customers on Facebook. And those choices

will likely depend on whether brands consider what they are

doing on Facebook successful or not.

As we can see from Figure 3, among respondents who

consider their Facebook efforts successful or very successful,

three key benefits stand out: the creation of brand awareness,

the ability to communicate marketing messages effectively,

and the fostering of goodwill in social channels. In each of the

three cases, there is a wide gap in perceived efficacy between

respondents who are happy with their Facebook efforts and

those who are not. On the other hand, even those who are

happy with their Facebook program do not consider it to be

very useful in helping users answer one another’s questions

(either pre- or post-sales) or in helping them identify

particularly valuable customers.

Figure 3: Facebook and brand community effectiveness in 10 areas, cross-tabulated by more successful and less successful overall perceptions of success

Strikingly, only about 12% of respondents who consider their

Facebook forays successful believe that it helps users answer

one another’s questions. Fewer than half thought it created

beneficial interactions of any kind among customers. At this

point in its evolution, Facebook seems to succeed or fail

for brands based on reach and the perceived goodwill that

goes along with that, rather than on elements that are

specifically social.

As we can also see from Figure 3, respondents who see

their community as successful or very successful give the

community exceptionally high marks for creating beneficial

peer-to-peer engagement, for helping customers with

questions, and for providing insight into customers’ attitudes.

Interestingly, there is basically no difference in clients’

assessment of a community’s utility for communicating

improves our search results

creates awareness of our brand, products, or services

creates beneficial customer-to-customer engagement

allows us to communicate our marketing message effectively to customers

empowers customers to help one another with pre-sales purchase questions

empowers customers to help one another with post-sales support questions

gives us metrics we need to assess program goals

gives us a good sense of how our customers are feeling

helps us identify particularly valuable customers

creates goodwill for our brand in social channels

Facebook page’s effectiveness community’s effectiveness

more successful

less successful

more successful

less successful

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outbound marketing messages between those who think

it is a roaring success and those who think it is moderately

successful. On the other hand, there is a large perceived

gap in the awareness value of a community between

those who feel it is very successful and those who feel it

less so. Perhaps one reason for this discrepancy is that

members themselves are the marketing channel in a

brand community. Even though it provides opportunities for

outbound communication—though blogs and tweets—a brand

community succeeds or fails on the basis of its ability to

create engagement.

Figure 4: Additional needs from Facebook by perceived success level with Facebook.

We can see that when Facebook isn’t seen as successful for

brands, its best benefits are still as an outbound marketing

vehicle — just not a particularly successful one. In that case,

what do brands want Facebook to do for customers that it’s

not doing? We asked respondents to rank various things that

their customers might do on Facebook that they can’t do or

can’t do well. When we correlate those rankings with the level

of success those clients are currently enjoying with Facebook,

several things stand out:

• Overwhelmingly, brands whose Facebook efforts are flagging want some way to recognize their customers’ status and achievements on Facebook — in other words, to reward good behavior. Conspicuous display of status and achievement is a deeply ingrained feature of Lithium communities and is generally seen as a prime motivator of consumer participation.

• Respondents who do not see their current Facebook efforts as successful see the ability for customers to submit ideas as substantially more important than those who are satisfied with Facebook. Again, this maps very closely to the ideation benefit we saw earlier as a downstream effect of brand communities.

• The ability to find products or services recommended by friends or colleagues is also seen as a potential area of improvement by those who are not particularly satisfied with their Facebook efforts.

51.4%50%

answer product questions

8.3%42.9%

display status or achievements

66.7%60%

search our knowledge base

50%62.9%

submit ideas for service/product improvements

58.3%60%

see the best/most useful content that others have submitted

50%42.9%

identify other customers with similar backgrounds or needs

50%60%

find products their friends or colleagues have recommended

mentions by respondents who rate their Facebook pages as less successful

mentions by respondents who rate their Facebook pages as successful

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Figure 5: Additional needs from Facebook by community success level.

As we can see from Figure 5, brands who are less successful

with communities also want to see a more prominent display

of status and achievements on Facebook. But what is perhaps

more interesting is that clients who are at higher levels of

success with brand communities are much more interested

than their peers in introducing the ability for users to find

others who resemble them, and the ability for users to locate

products that their friends and colleagues like. These are

characteristic “social networking” features.

In other words, when Facebook efforts are not successful,

brands want Facebook to behave more like a community.

When communities are successful, brands want to benefit

from Facebook’s networking features to a greater extent. If

Facebook’s potency as a generator of awareness begins to

decline over time, that trend suggests a convergence between

the interaction modes in Facebook and those of brand

communities is extremely likely.

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organizational ownership

If we see a coming convergence between the way people

interact on Facebook and the way they interact in a

brand community, it is worth asking who will lead that

convergence and how it will take place. Enterprises vary

in their determination of who owns social customer

initiatives. In some organizations, social customer initiatives

are owned by customer support or customer experience

teams. Increasingly, however, they fall under the purview of

marketing or corporate communications functions.

Figure 6: Additional requirements from Facebook by social program ownership.

As we can see from Figure 6, organizations where marketing

owns social initiatives are demanding less of Facebook

in terms of new modes of customer engagement. In fact,

ownership by marketing is more important than the perceived

success of a company’s Facebook page in determining

whether a company is interested in customers engaging

through Facebook in more involved ways. Customer support

and customer experience groups continue to be more

interested in the exchange of ideas and the answering of

product questions.

answer product questions

display status or achievements

search our knowledge base

submit ideas for service/product improvements

see the best/most useful content that others have submitted

identify other customers with similar backgrounds or needs

find products their friends or colleagues have recommended

customer support and experience groups

marketing groups

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Figure 7: Largest challenge with social customer programs, by program ownership

Marketing-led organizations’ biggest concern with social

customer programs is how to scale them. Figure 7 shows

the chief concern as scaling initiatives with (relatively) less

concern about coordination across teams and departments.

44% of marketing-led organizations cited “resources to

scale our efforts” as the biggest challenge, as against

34.4% of everyone and (9/34 - 26%) of non-marketing led

organizations. This suggests that one reason marketers are

less aggressively pursuing “deeper” engagement through

Facebook is that, unlike support or customer experience

organizations, they lack human resources — like contact

centers — that are perceived to be required to ensure that

social customers get the satisfaction they require from

engagement through Facebook. Better, perhaps, not to hold

out the promise of a sustained dialog with customers if an

organization cannot make good on that promise.

The survey shows that marketers and customer experience

are equally committed to responding to customers in brand

communities and through Facebook and Twitter. However,

it would not be surprising if Facebook’s reach threatens to

become overwhelming if customer actions on Facebook

called for a response. Indeed, perhaps one thing that

marketers have learned with online communities that they

have not (yet) learned with Facebook is that customers

themselves can be the solution — not just the cause — of

the scaling problem. Time and again, we have seen that

larger communities with a devoted core of superfans actually

require less intervention from companies than fledgling

communities. The “downstream” trust benefits pay dividends.

There is no reason why this shouldn’t be so on Facebook, but

many organizations are in earlier stages of their experience

with Facebook.

Figure 8: Requirement for ROI measurement by channel and program ownership.

A final area in which brand communities differ from other

channels for marketing-led organizations is in the need to

prove themselves through ROI metrics. As we can see from

Figure 8, marketing-led organizations generally have higher

demands for ROI, but this is particularly true for brand

communities. We suspect this is a function of the perception

that Facebook engagement is free because a Facebook page

is itself free, but also of the maturity level of Facebook as

a technology and a marketing venue. As we see increasing

convergence of social channels, we should also expect to see

demands for more sophisticated Facebook measurement

tools, and growing demands for Facebook to prove its value.

customer support and experience

marketing and corp comms

brand community

a) executive buy-inb) resources to scale our effortsc) coordination across teams and departmentsd) too many toolse) lack of agreed upon metrics and standards for successf) lack of customer interest

a

b

c

d

e

f

customer support and experience

b

c

d

e

f

marketing and comms

a) executive buy-in b) resources to scale our efforts c) coordination across teams and departments d) too many tools e) lack of agreed upon metrics and standards for success f) lack of customer interest

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Lithium social software helps the world’s most iconic brands to build brand nations—vibrant online communities of passionate social customers. Lithium helps top brands such as AT&T, Sephora, Univision, and PayPal build active online communities that turn customer passion into social media marketing ROI. For more information on how to create lasting competitive advantage with the social customer experience, visit lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own brand nation – the Lithosphere.

lithium.com | © 2012 Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved

conclusion

There are significant synergies between Facebook and brand

communities. Both offer unique marketing advantages, and

we’ve helped customers extend the reach of their brand

communities on Facebook. For its sheer size and viral

features, Facebook is generally considered more successful

at disseminating marketing messages, and is roughly equal in

its ability to create brand awareness. As we’ve seen in online

venues before, however, driving people to a social site without

providing an outlet for their needs invites a peak-and-trough

customer engagement, rather than a sustained, vital and

profitable enthusiasm. A campaign-based wave of awareness

will eventually peak and subside, and may then create

unrealistic expectations for customers. As these channels

evolve and the awareness benefits subside, marketers should

consider Facebook a useful platform for cultivating an online

presence run more like a community than a campaign.

The dividends of a well-developed Facebook presence will

ultimately depend on marketers inventing or adopting

sophisticated long-term strategies for customer engagement,

such that their Facebook presence derives its value from

peer-to-peer relationships. But those relationships also have

to be based in trust, both among customers and between

customers and the brand. Establishing this trust is a key,

long-term strategy. For instance, fostering productive

peer-to-peer relationships among customers and rewarding

positive behavior helps to create trust, as does identifying,

motivating, and highlighting your brand’s superfans. The

downstream annuities of trust and engagement only grow

when brands cultivate true, multi-directional relationships

with their social customers over the long term. The potential

ROI is tremendous.