Intercontinental Hotels Private Customer Communities

Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) have been working with Communispace, the private community company, to build on-going relationships with 300 elite customers, who provide feedback and insights into all things IHG.

The private communities have provided IHG with the opportunity to

  • raise over 3,000 questions within the community
  • provide a platform for peer to peer customer engagement resulting in a further 7,000 questions being asked and answered by the community
  • listen to and learn from the customers
  • provide tactical feedback on campaigns and messaging
  • provide strategic feedback on new product development and customer experience
  • facilitate sharing of member generated content ie photos, views, opinions and questions
  • provided internal education for senior executives as to the value of developing and running hosted customer communities

Following the continued success of the private communities, IHG have developed an external public community called Priority Club Connect, where priority club members can share their photos and travel blogs with other members. This has a growing number of members and participants.

InterContinental Hotels Group: Inside Out: How Private Communities Catalyzed Our Social Media Efforts, presented by Nick Ayres from GasPedal and SocialMedia.org on Vimeo.

    Social Business Strategy Development

    The Altimeter Report identified 4 internal requirements common to organisations who they perceived to be advanced in the implementation of social business projects:

    1. Baseline Governance and Re-enforcement: Established  and reinforced a corporate social media policy that allows employees to participate professionally
    2. Enterprise-wide response Processes: Defined processes for rapid workflow and engagement with customers in social media
    3. On-going Education Program and Best Practice Sharing: Fostered a culture of learning through on-going social media education Leadership from a dedicated and shared central hub: Organised in a scalable formation, with a cross functional “center of excellence”

    The full report is below.

    The Purple Spinnaker Social Business Framework provides organisations with a social business strategy framework and an operational implementation process which helps organisations to:

    1. Develop their first social business strategy
    2. Provide a framework for existing social business strategies
    3. Develop an internal education program for all levels within the organisation

    As, with all social business strategies, the core of the framework is based on listening, learning, engaging and growing your business:

    To support our framework, we have identified the key workstreams a business needs to manage to develop and implement their social business strategy:

    Central to the success of your social business strategy is putting a team in place, which combines an internal social business leader with executive level support and the identification and engagemnt of external partners who can help you:

    1. Develop your company and/or projects social business framework
    2. Land the social business strategy into the operations of the business

    Social business strategies are adding value to companies across all industries today, but we are in the infancy of this area of business and as we see more successes, then we will see the evolution of the framework and also more experienced and skilled professionals leading and managing these projects.

    Today, it is still a bit of trial and error, but if you dont try you dont learn anything!

    Altimeter Social Business Readiness: How advanced Companies Prepare internally:

    Social Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare

    View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang