Online Customer Communities, Innocent Drinks & TomTom

Last week, I attended the European Customer Experience World conference at the Hilton T5 Heathrow, and chaired the social media stream on the first day, where we had 3 great speakers, Joe McEwan, from Innocent Drinks, Jonathan Browne from Forrester and Kenneth Refsgaard from TomTom.

Each of our speakers provided insights into how different companies are creating connections with their customers through online communities, what struck me was the difference between Innocent Drinks and TomTom in their approach to creating and connecting with their customer communities.

From the start, Innocent Drinks have had a close connection with their customers, from the sale of the first bottle of their crushed fruit drinks at a Music Festival to today, where they engage with them across multiple channels, online, on their packaging and through their events like this years innocent fruit sports day in regents park.

The culture of innocent drinks is fun, collaborative and enthusiastic and it is their ability to communicate this to their customers and create emotional connections with them creating ongoing dialogue and include them in their various initiatives with great success.  The primary channels used by innocent drinks are their website, blog, facebook page, twitter feed, youtube channel, flickr and Instagram.

On the other hand TomTom is a different type of company, selling technology based products, which attracts a different kind of enthusiast and advocate than innocent drinks.  innocent drinks, have brand advocates who identify with the culture of the company, the fun lifestyle reflected in their communication, packaging and events where TomTom advocates have a keen interest in technology, what it does, how it works, the problems it solves and share their technical knowledge with each other helping to resolve product support issues.

TomTom provides a range of communication channels for their customers, their website, a hosted customer community, facebook page, twitter feed, youtube channel, linkedin careers group and google+ page, all of which are managed by the TomTom community team.  TomToms’ hosted community partner is Lithium who provide both the hosted platform plus the expertise in growing and developing an active and vibrant community.

TomTom use their social channels to communicate with and facilitate conversations between their customers as well as informing prospective employees about current opportunities and life at TomTom.

Both organisations have successfully created an engaged customer community, however both their initial approach and on-going conversations are different.  The following table highlights some of the key areas and the differences between the 2 companies:

Community   Strategy Innocent TomTom
Primary Business Goal Brand Advocacy & Marketing Customer support
Approach to growing community Organic with the business Hosted community launched on a specific date
Strategy Evolving, learn as they go Structured strategy for hosted community
Communication Channels Combined offline/packaging/online web and   social and live events Strategic Initiative – customer
Contact with Brand Direct Direct
Communication Tone Responsive and reflective of consumer   conversations Responsive – allow community to solve each   other’s problems, with TomTom support where necessary or if community slow to   respond
Primary communication direction Brand to consumer and consumer to Brand Peer to Peer – facilitate customer to customer   with internal  brand support and   knowledge
Feedback Product Feedback channel – innocent respond to   customer feedback on products – altered flavour of Thai Pot Product feedback channel – used by NPD and innovation   teams
Management Small team with access to whole company – all departments Small team – primary function is support but   can feed to others where necessary
ROI Not primary focus, as customer conversations and   accessibility of internal teams is part of company DNA ROI is related to customer support cost   savings, which are measured and reported.
Geography International site with international   communication International site with international   communication

It would be good to hear your feedback on these observations or your own experiences of creating and developing online communities, please leave a comment or contact me directly.

 

    Social Search Will Change Your Business

    Recently, Google announced changes to their search results, incorporating Google+ Circles social data into an individual’s results, there have been many reactions and conversations about this new product “Search plus Your World”.  However you view this move good bad or just confusing, it is the start of the change and merging of search and social data and it is just the beginning.

    From a business perspective this is changing the game significantly and where a number of successful online businesses who have built their online business and revenue model  based on an SEO strategy and played lip service to social, if they have not seen an impact on their bottom line, yet they will do so unless they acknowledge that the world is changing and SEO is no longer dominant and that the future is a combined strategy, with specialists in both areas, working towards the same goals.

    In the diagram below, we show the 2 current silos and the way we envisage the Social Commerce Model to evolve with SEO, social data funnels merging to support the businesses goals.

     

      US Universities accelerate their use of Social Media

      We are working with an education client and came across some interesting research from the University of Massachusetts, http://bit.ly/qfCSrB in August 2011, which demonstrates the adoption rates of one or more social media channels is almost 100%.  The chanels are used in 3 primary areas, student acquisition, on-going communication programs and gaining an insight into how students live today.  The graphs have been taken from the research report.

      The primary public social channels are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Linkedin with University hosted social tools including blogs, forums/messageboards, video blogs and podcasting.

      Social media is recognised by the universities as a key tool in the recruitment of students and also in gaining insight into the lives and online behaviour of potential, current and alumni students.

      To see the research in detail please click http://bit.ly/qfCSrB

      Do you have any examples of good university and higher education social media case studies to share?