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.

    Intel Social Media Strategy

    Have just watched this video from becky brown, social media director at Intel, where she discusses their current centralised social media strategy, tools platforms and their journey to their position today.

    Intel has been developing their use of social media channels for a couple of years and understands that the majority, 80%, of the conversations around their brand and products take place on blogs and twitter.  However there was a growing use of Facebook within the business which at 250 individually created and managed pages, it was difficult to co-ordinate and manage multi market campaigns.

    Following a review of their 250 Facebook pages  and 250 Twitter handles/account  presence,  Intel took the decision to change their social media strategy from being decentralised to a centralised global strategy underpinned by

    • internal guidelines
    • training programs
    • content editorial
    • publishing schedules

    complemented by a suite of publishing Vitrue, listening, Radian6, & internal reporting tools.

    This centralised strategy allows them to listen and respond globally, locally or to individuals, based on the context of the conversation.

    Intel also use, a global community of brand ambassadors, who are identified as influencers, either throgh their online activity around the intel brand and/or range of products and are invited to join an intelambassadors program, where they are given pre-launch info about products and encourgaed to blog, comment and spread the word globally about Intel, their brand and products.

    This is the start of their emerging strategy and ince the facebook strategy is underway, the next challenge is the 350 Twitter accounts…….