Using Private Online Communities to Engage Customers

Heather,
When are you going to do an in-depth profile on innovation and product development achieved through public CGM? Regarding your Communispace piece, you also should talk to Laurent Flores at CRMMetrix; you would be very impressed.
Max

Heather, take a look at Blogtronix!

Blogtronix Secure Enterprise Blogging, Wikis, Corporate Social Networking
http://www.blogtronix.com/

It seems one of the great strengths of these communities isn't only the input they can give, but the diminishing of the line between management levels that slow or stop the flow of information.

These types of communities can be accessed by manangement if they want and give a picture of how things are that may never reach their ears in the company structure.

Heather--

Received BW today, read your story and marked it for response -- but, no e-mail address

You, or maybe it was Steve, have done this before -- written about the success of Internet Communities/Forums -- remember Intuit?? So, why do you continue to pursue the Blog with comment route when Forums have proven to be so beneficial??

BTW, how does Communispace become a Startup -- a note on their web site says "225+ Communities built since 1999"??

Doug Skoglund

PS: Also, you might be interested in a slightly different approach -- Off-Line Forums --

http://nationalcomputerassociation.com.

How does one get permission from Business Week to publish a copy of your story as a demonstration??

Interesting blog and article. This blog pointed me to the article, which is all too brief, because it brings up interesting questions.

How long do the communities go on?
Number of people per community?
Dropout rate?
Cost?
Impact of members contributions versus the viral marketing that the companies get as the community members become viral marketers and evangelists?
Is this just for big companies? How would small ones do the same thing with their own blogs, message boards, etc.?

Your graph about having members post relevant images to show their feelings about a product or topic or themselves reminded me of an important and favorite book, How Customers Think, essential insights into the mind of the market, by Gerald Zaltman, Harvard Business School Press, 2003. The reader reviews at Amazon.com give you an idea of the content of the book. Wonder how many businesses are using his approach?

btw, have you seen the Amazon beta plog. An author writes a personal blog that comes to you if you have searched for or bought related books. You can reply in comments. My first plog is about a new book on networking by sales people. I asked for a review copy. :)

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. We're supposed to have a blog conference soon, Doug, so I'll bring up the idea of forums.

Donald, great questions! The communities are usually 300 to 500 people each. Communispace sets them up initially to run 3 months, to see how they are going, but they can run for years. Still, people do drop out or the company asks Communispace to refresh them with new folks.

I can't remember what the droput rate is, but it didn't seem too high. Have to check my notes at work.

They cost around $200,000. I believe that cost is per year.

And....I didn't really ask the question about the impact of the community in terms of evangelism v. viral marketing, or about whether this is just for big companies, but those are very good ones.

The plogs idea is a really strong one. I hadn't seen it yet. Will have to check it out.

Clearly online communities are a great opportunity for companies to get real feedback and advice, but I think what was missed was that these types of communities can be the holy grail for marketers: "A person like me" has become the most trusted source for information about a company or product. Marketers would do well to create an environment for their customers to interact - and we're chock full of web 2.0 tools to make it happen. When marketers think about how to leverage social networking in their marketing initiatives, it should look like more this --- a place for interaction and collaboration --- and less like a corporate profile on MySpace!

I wanted to respond to Gary Bourgeault's posting about how communities can help hard wire the voice of the customer directly into companies without getting bogged down in layers of corporate bureaucracy or message mediation.

Gary, you’ve put your finger on a really important dynamic that we at Communispace have also observed.

Traditional forms of market research consist of a company asking a question and, after the panel or focus group has been recruited, the instrument designed, and the data digested, an answer emerges a month later.

In contrast, because communities enable a continuous, long-term relationship between companies and customers, management benefits from almost instantaneous feedback and insights derived both from consumer-to-consumer conversations and from the issues that members feel empowered to bring to raise directly with the corporate sponsor.

Heather, take a look at Wordframe!

http://wordframe.com/