January 2010

One of the focal points of Team Social’s activities in the Humana Innovation Center is exploring existing online communities built around health and wellness and finding relevant ways for Humana to contribute to them. We’ve been very careful to participate in these communities, learn about them and understand what people are trying to get out of them before we act. The last thing we want to do is become an interloper and disrupt a good thing.

It just so happens that I started an online community around wellness activities a little over a year ago. Twit2Fit (http://twit2fit.com) has been chronicled a bit here by Chris Hall and others. It’s a community of Twitter users whose sole purpose is to provide support and encouragement when they see a fellow Twit2Fitter in need. In exchange, they can turn to the community for the same. It began informally on Twitter with people using the hashtag #twit2fit. We (meaning me and some Twit2Fit members) launched a Ning community to support further engagement in the fall of last year.

After asking the Twit2Fit community permission to do so, I began working with the Humana’s community innovation team to develop added value for the site. It just so happened Greg Matthews had a connection to Scott Simmons, the coach and director of the American Distance Project, who was looking for some more creative ways to seek corporate support for his athletes. To make a long story short, we developed what we called a “premium content” approach for Twit2Fit, facilitated by Humana and using content from the American Distance Project to experiment with the idea.

The concept was to have professional distance runner Fasil Bizuneh, a four-time U.S. National Team member, join Twit2Fit and begin sharing his experiences training for the Nov. 1 running of the U.S. Men’s Marathon Championships via Twitter, blog posts on Twit2Fit.com and some live conversation events we’d conduct on Twitter. Simmons would also provide content, giving community members a look at professional training from the coach’s perspective.

On Oct. 17, we launched the initiative. Bizuneh finished 24th in the Championships (and 57th overall in the New York City Marathon, within which the Championships were contested) on Nov. 1. He and Simmons provided a behind-the-curtain peek at the professional athlete experience for the Twit2Fit community. We’d like to share some of the measures of the experiment with you and ask for your input on how Humana can further explore and experiment with this concept of providing added value to similar communities.

The first thing we noticed (albeit anecdotally) about the content Bizuneh and Simmons were providing was that it was different, interesting and engaging. Few of the everyday folks participating in Twit2Fit had ever been exposed to a professional regimen. From the video posts to the live Twitter conversations and blog posts, people were intrigued at the perspective.

When you drilled down to the analytics of the program, the biggest glaring hole was that the month of October (when the program was active) saw a dip in unique visitors and page views to the Twit2Fit site. Unique visitors dropped from 1,441 in September to 1,209 in October. However, if you looked deeper, you could see that while there weren’t as many people going to the site, those who were found themselves engaged.

The rest of our key metrics revealed some positive results:

• The average time on site jumped from :48 in September to 1:17 in October
• The average number of pages per visit jumped from 2.32 to 2.58 in the same time frame
• The percentage of new visitors to the site dropped from 93.3 percent to 84.5 percent, meaning more people were coming back
• 35 new members joined the community in October, above the average growth rate for the site’s existence

But it was perhaps our off-site measures that really astounded us.

• Twit2Fit was mentioned on Twitter 1,480 times prior to October 2009. It was mentioned 1,780 times in October alone, meaning the conversation impact was more than double the previous total volume in just one month.
• As expected, the conversation around Twit2Fit spiked on days when Bizuneh was answering questions in live sessions on Twitter. There were measurable increases on days of blog posts as well.
• A Google search for Twit2Fit yielded 12,000 more entries at the end of October than the beginning of the month.

Our inbound links count appeared to have dropped, though we are unsure of the validity of that measure. One would assume with increased mentions on Twitter and new entries found on a Google search inbound links would increase. We are unable to explain or account for the inconsistency there.

Our conclusion is that the effort may not have produced a higher impact on Twit2Fit.com itself, but certainly amplified the conversation and exposure of Twit2Fit in general.

Here are some ideas as to why our impact was not greater and what we must consider for doing differently in the future:

• We launched on Oct. 17 with the race in question taking place on Nov. 1. This did not provide enough lead time to drive adequate attention to the effort or build buzz or hype around Bizuneh’s efforts.
• While Bizuneh and Simmons provided valuable content many Twit2Fit members agreed was helpful, neither had built a reputation or history of providing such content prior to the effort. They were new to the community and thus faced the challenge of building relationships with community members to enhance their interest in the project. This was not just true on Twit2Fit, but also on Twitter itself.

These are some insights we have gleaned from the experiment. What we’d would really like now is your thoughts. Jump in the comments and help us with some ideas. What could Humana have done differently to made this experiment more successful? Please keep in mind that we wanted the company to add value to the community without interfering with its members’ experience. What other ways can Humana, or any company, provide value to communities like Twit2Fit in meaningful ways that aren’t obtrusive to users? What types of content and programming would make you want to join Twit2Fit or make you more willing to tell others about the community?

Pushing the thoughts even further, the community innovation team would like to engage similar communities with content and programming. What communities are out there that we could contribute value to with content or other activity? We’re eager to hear your thoughts on where we can expand beyond what we’ve done already.

Help us learn even more from this experiment. The comments are yours.

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