Social Customer

Passenger Drives Customer Innovation, Insights, and Advocacy

New to our watch list, Passenger was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in New York City, Palo Alto, and Bangalore. The company’s Java-based SaaS community platform is built to support branded customer communities for customer collaboration, customer-led innovation, and customer advocacy. While Passenger does have a few B2B clients, its sweet spot is in the B2C space. Its client list, which includes adidas (see below), American Express, Chrysler, DirecTV, JC Penney, and Starbucks, illustrates that its platform can be used by just about any consumer-facing industry.

While Passenger’s clients are indeed looking for community members to act as customer advocates and brand ambassadors outside the community, they are primarily looking to get market research, product feedback, and other forms of customer insights. Its direct competitors are, therefore, Communispace (not on our watch list), HiveLive, and Spigit. It competes as well with the more general purpose community platform providers, such as Jive and Mzinga.

But more than most of its competitors, Passenger has thought through member recruitment and built the relevant processes into its platform. These include identifying, inviting, and registering customers who are the best fit for the community’s goals. While most online communities are largely a numbers game, successful market research communities have the added requirement of recruiting members who fit the desired profile (or profiles). Passenger has operationalized this requirement, which goes a long way toward ensuring its clients’ communities have not only the right number of members, but the right members (there is no value judgment here on the word “right”).

Spigit Taps into the Customer and Employee Innovation Market

Spigit, founded in 2007 and new to our watch list, showed solid results for the first half of 2009. The company reports strong customer acquisition, 100 percent to 150 percent revenue growth quarter-over-quarter, and being cash-flow positive.

Spigit is all about idea generation and management, whether those ideas come from internal or external sources. As such, it competes most directly with service providers such as Communispace (not a company we follow), and platform/service providers such as HiveLive, Lithium, and Passenger, which all have offerings specifically designed around ideas and insights.

Spigit comes in three flavors—IdeaSpigit, InnovationSpigit (see below), and PredictionSpigit—which are all built on the same Java code base. An extensive API set allows technically proficient clients to customize, extend, and integrate their Spigit system.

Why Twitter Rules (and What to Do About It)

By Patricia Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group

In the past few months, the Twitter phenomenon has reached epic proportions. Personally, I chalk this up to the malaise that is gripping us all as we struggle to make sense of both the economic crisis and the political seismic shifts that are upon us. Not content to consume news media and blogs, we now all want to make sense of it, to share our observations, and most of all to connect. So this odd 140-character microblogging platform, known as Twitter, has ballooned in importance. In the last week, the Financial Times published a full-page article about Twitter. U.S. Congresspeople tweeted during Obama’s speech to the joint houses of Congress, and Keith Olbermann’s CountDown described the Congressional "Twits tweeting," and John Stewart ran a great spoof on the new Congressional pastime of tweeting. (The software is called Twitter; the short messages you send are called “tweets.” And yes, anyone who IS anyone is doing it.) The best way to get up to speed on Twitter in my opinion is to use the Twitter How To's and links at Mashable. Feel free to drop me a note. My twitter handle is pattyinboothbay.