Using Private Online Communities to Engage Customer
Posted by Hendry Lee on 08/28/06 in Business Blogging, Case Studies
Heather Green of Business Week has a podcast with Kraft Food’s Yulonda Almasi and Gretchen Vorlop Waitley about how to harness the Web for customer input.
The companies team up with Communispace Corp., a startup that hosts and — surprise! — moderates the communities, although the company marketers and researches can monitor the activities and respond to the discussion accordingly.
From discussions, surveys and questions to the private online communities of customers, Kraft learned that customers didn’t feel they needed to deprive themselves or diet — what they really wanted was the ability to control how much they ate.
To cate to this, Kraft created 100 Calorie Packs, a small pack of Oreos and Ritz crackers for one-person. The result is $100 million in sales last year.
Discussions in Glaxo’s community helped shape the advertising and clear packaging for the company’s diet pill. The information they get allows them to understand about the confusion the community have around dieting.
The full story is currently still behind BusinessWeek’s firewall, but you can get the story of Kraft from their blog.
A tip: In the blog, Heather points to the article for premium subscribers, which is dated September 4, 2006. You can actually dig this information if you query Google’s cache for the specific URL.
My thoughts about blogging and online private community
Cultivating information from online communities has been quite an old technique to learn about problems in a niche market. Marketers could just jump and verify this before proceeding to create one or more products to solve the problems.
I can see the value of starting a private online community where customers and participants could interact and bind closer to each other. It is about loyalty to a specific brand too.
It sounds pretty much like a blog would do, doesn’t it?
In communities, any member can start a discussion thread or do any kind of activities they are allowed to do like uploading pictures etc., and get a small incentive for doing so.
I haven’t actually seen a blog that actually pay their readers to do so.
The value of a blog could be very similar to this, although the approaches are quite different. I believe while marketers could moderate the content of a forum, they are still more flexible when it comes to the topics the community want to talk about.
On the other hand, blogs are designed to allow global conversations that span across blogs and sites.
Both a blog and online community provide great value for companies in helping them brainstorm new products, shape packaging and even direct marketing. The cost that is relatively small compared to the benefits.
If you have heard or read about marketers who flock to social media as future communitation strategy, this story summarizes it quite accurately.
If you are genuinely interested in getting feedbacks from your customer, start looking into these tools.
Julie Wittes Schlack | Reply
Thanks for blogging about the Business Week article in which Communispace is featured. I agree – blogs and online communities are complementary means of enabling companies to better understand and connect with their customers.
To your point, blogs enable a global conversation, while Communispace communities are smaller, password-protected forums that provide a degree of intimacy, accountability, and what members describe as “safety†that can’t easily be achieved in the blogosphere.
The inherent structure of a blog also makes for a more focused but also somewhat more unilateral “conversation.†While readers can post their reactions to what has been said by bloggers (or other readers, for that matter), the site belongs to the blogger. Blog readers generally do not enter into prolonged discussions with bloggers. More often a discussion string has one or two comments, if any at all.
In contrast, a well-run community is one in which the members feel as great a sense of “ownership†as its corporate sponsor, and a company is as interested in learning from the conversations that members initiate as from the answers to the questions that it has posed.
So the savvy company is one that will follow and “mine†blogs for the macro trends and views of particularly influential (or opinionated!) bloggers, while also using communities to obtain deeper and more serendipitous insights.
Hendry Lee | Reply
Thanks Julie.
I think that was my point. Both of these tools have their own places. Both of them also leverage the power of communities, hence they are social tools.
But you said it far better than me