Social Customer

Online Customer Communities: Critical to Most Organizations

By Patty Seybold

There's a Catch-22 in deciding whether or not to invest in trying to nurture one or more online customer communities. The biggest issue in my mind is not, "will customers say bad things about us?" The answer to that question is, "Of course, some customers will be critical, but other customers will be complimentary. It's better to have at least some control over the conversation by hosting it, than it is to be at the mercy of the discussions customers are having elsewhere on the Internet."

The more important question, to my mind, is "will the community take hold?" Why would your customers or prospects want to converse with one another in and around your products or services? The answer is that they really don't want to talk about you or your products. They want to talk about themselves: What they are trying to do; what they care about; and, also many of them actually enjoy helping others who share similar jobs, interests and passions, it's kind of a quid pro quo. "I'll help/encourage you. You or someone else will help/encourage me."

What Kinds of Online Communities Are There?

There are many different kinds of online customer communities:

• Customer Support communities are typically the best place to start for any company that has technical products or for one that provides services to help people get things done.

Crowdsourcing Condom Advertising—Will This Work?

By Patty Seybold

You may have noticed this article in the New York Times, A Hip-Hop Contest to Promote a Brand. Trojan, the manufacturers of the Magnum brand of condoms, has grown revenues and marketshare for the Magnum brand, not through traditional advertisements, but through word of mouth: mentions in Hip-Hop music lyrics by artists such as Ludacris, Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, and Eminem. The NYT article doesn't make it clear whether the Magnum product manager engaged in product placement activities or simply fanned the flames. I suspect there may be some mutual promotion underway. ("I'll mention your product, you tell the world about my song.")

Now Magnum is building on the Hip-Hop momentum by launching a “Live Large” marketing campaign in the form of a contest soliciting more hip hop or R&B songs and lyrics from anyone, not just professional musicians.

You can go to the contest site, MagnumLiveLarge.com, download music tracks to use and/or use your own, and submit your own songs and lyrics about "living large." Fans can vote on the submissions and, of course, spread them around virally. The winner will receive a $5,000 prize and a trip to a hip-hop festival in mid-June in Atlanta, where they'll be congratulated by Ludacris.

How explicit are the lyrics likely to be? The NY Times article quoted Julian Long, a consultant for Colangelo Synergy Marketing, the agency responsible for the contest:

"We're looking for songs that encompass the Magnum lifestyle and what it means to live large — not just the size of the condom or what it’s put on but what it means to live large across the board," Mr. Long said. “We’re saying, ‘You know how to handle your business and we want to give you an opportunity to celebrate that level of understanding.'"

But we all know (as do the contest promoters) that people are much more likely to contribute and vote up sexually-oriented ditties than they are sex-free songs. Is this a problem? Perhaps, for people who find this type of lyric offensive, or if a child receives a link to an inappropriate song.

But it's a brilliant marketing strategy: Leverage an apparently grass roots phenomenon—the fact that the Magnum brand has become a popular icon among Hip-Hop artists—and build on it using the same genre. By having people contribute their own hip-hop songs, Magnum is building on the existing momentum. Contests are a good way to solicit crowdsourced contributions from creative folks who want to strut their stuff. Risqué submissions are likely to spread like wildfire, generating a lot of buzz. This is good for the brand. It's also a good way to make safe sex sexy.

Should You Build Your Next Gen Web Site on a Community Platform?

In a recent client design session, as we were discussing possibilities for designing their next generation Web 2.0 online business platform (they get 70% of their revenues via the Web), the CIO had an epiphany when he was listening to Matthew Lees describe the current crop of online community platforms. He said, “Oh my God, we could use one of THESE platforms to leapfrog our Web 2.0 development by six months! If we start with all of this rich community and social media functionality and ADD our ecommerce engine, we’ll have most of what we need! ” This was music to my ears.

For the last few years I have come to believe that online community should be at the core of MOST companies’ online platforms. It’s not an add-on. It’s the base infrastructure you should start with. After all, your customers should be at the center of your company, no??

Patty Seybold

Social Media Framework - What Is Social Media?

Despite common notions—and hype—to the contrary, social media is not purely about marketing and PR. And while some social media content can leave you scratching your head about its utility or interest to anyone, social media as a whole can provide many benefits to you and others throughout your organization.

But the starting point for thinking about social media shouldn’t be what you are trying to get out of it, but what your customers are trying to do. By beginning with your customers’ objectives (their customer scenarios), you can identify which tools from the “social media toolbox”—forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, idea engines, reviews, ratings, rankings, tagging, leader boards, and more—can help them successfully reach their goals. Then, by mapping your business unit’s objectives into this picture, you can identify those social media tools that can make you successful.

Social media does bring a new set of challenges to businesses, from its impact on organizational culture to the difficulties in finding the useful information amongst all the clutter. This report discusses these and other challenges, and provides five key recommendations to help you leverage social media throughout your organization.

What Is Social Media?

We humans are social animals. Social interactions among people have existed since the dawn of mankind, long before (to bound ahead by several millennia) the dawn of business and commerce, which we’ll loosely define as the exchange of goods and services between individuals and groups of individuals. As we are social creatures, business has always had an intrinsic social component. In business, we communicate with others, we learn from and about others, we buy from and sell to others, we barter with others, and we help and are helped by others. Supporting the flow of these interactions is information. Business has at its foundation the connection between people and information; how we get it, when we get it, what we do with it.