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.

    Chevron – Corporate Marketing Linkedin Strategy Development

    Jeordan Legon of Chevron, the energy company, recently presented their corporate social linkedin centred communication strategy. Chevron, have developed and currently run a strategic corporate marketing social campaign, whose main focus is the development of a community of energy leaders on LinkedIn, which uses Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.  The project has

    Listening & Learning
    Listened to conversations for 2 years

    • Identify key community support and facilitation channel
    • Linkedin is primary channel
    • Additional Facebook, Youtube and Twitter channels

    Identify community member profiles

    • Leaders the energy industry
    • Energy industry knowledge experts
    • Energy industry business partners

    Identify key goals for community

    • High levels of engagement
    • Repeat Visits
    • relevant online discussions about energy

    Engage with community   
    When engaging with the community Chevron, identified key areas to focus on:

    • Identify key individuals to invite to community
    • Identify key subject areas
    • Energy
    • Doing business with Chevron
    • Create community guidelines
    • Create, Manage and moderate community content

    Integrate into other communication strategies
    As a TRUSTED developed and engaged community Chevron can channel campaigns through the community to drive traffic back to websites, surveys, other conversations on other channels.

    “we agree” http://bit.ly/oC5QVz

    Grow and develop
    As a trusted, community within their target audience, which is depicted in the
    chart below:

    Chevron now has an engaged community to drive their online communications
    strategy.  They combine an internal team, who are responsible for the data to day management of the community, for educating other internal teams in their use and success of social channels and are in partnership with external teams:

    • Listening insight, reporting and tools
    • Linkedin as a community platform and insight partner
    • Communications to help with individual campaigns

    To hear the full presentation and view the slides, click on the video below and review the slides at the bottom.

    BlogWell San Francisco Case Study: Chevron, presented by Jeordan Legon

      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?