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:

Baseline Governance and Re-enforcement: Established and reinforced a corporate social media policy that allows employees to participate professionally
Enterprise-wide response Processes: Defined processes for rapid workflow and engagement with customers in social media
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:

Develop their first social business strategy
Provide a framework for existing social business strategies
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:

Develop your company and/or projects social business framework
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

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…….

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 - linkedin demographics 19th august 2011

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: