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.

Understanding Social Conversation Data

Over the last couple of years, I have worked with a social media monitoring and online community management and market research companies and each one advocates the value of their access and ability to interpret social conversation data, however very few, if any can position themselves in the overall social conversation space. In order to highlight the different layers of social conversations which offer organisations the opportunity to filter and mine social data with the goal of extracting consumer and market insights I have developed the social conversation sphere.

The social conversation sphere highlights 6 layers of online conversations which take place across all social channels including, websites, forums, blogs, social networks, public hosted communities and private communities:

All Online Social Conversations

The largest sphere contains all online social conversations on all subjects across all channels and provides access to the broadest levels of conversation. This area can be used by an organisation to answer a broad question about their company, products, customers, and competitors, current and potential new markets.

For example an organisation may launch a new brand, product or website and after a period of time, they can carry out some broad analysis of conversations to find out customer and market perceptions based on the key themes which emerge from any and all conversation around a particular word or phrase. They may find the key messages have got across successfully and the target customer group are using the product/service as intended or they could find that a different group is using the product in a different way. All findings provide feedback and understanding for an organisation.

Social Media Monitoring tools can be used to filter conversations to narrow down the social data sets. See below for how to select social media monitoring tools.

Subject Ecosystem

The subject ecosystem contains all social data from all social channels filtered by a particular subject area, for example you may be interested in coffee, alcohol, fast food, travel or some other broad subject area. This layer of social data is refined and narrowed down by key search terms which restrict the data set to one which is relevant to this key subject area.

This is where social media monitoring and filtering tools kick in and help you identify subject, segment and market social data sets. See below for how to select social media monitoring tools.

Company/Product/Brand Ecosystem

The company, product, brand or service ecosystem contains all social data from all public social channels, both third party sites and earned ecosystems, which is filtered by a particular company, product, brand or service name. This layer of social data is refined and narrowed down by key search terms relating to your company/brand/product or service, providing the opportunity to extract insight from relevant conversations.

This is where social media monitoring and filtering tools kick in and help you identify data sets relating to your company/brand/product or service. See below for how to select social media monitoring tools.

Earned Company/Product/Brand Ecosystem

An earned ecosystem is one where a company/product/brand or service has garnered public support/engagement across third party public social networks owned and managed by organisations and individuals not associated to the company/brand/product or service. Conversations which take place on an earned ecosystem provide different types of insight to those on hosted or own public and private social networks, as many of these sites offer a level of anonymity and may have different guidelines and moderation services to those managed and hosted by a company.

An earned ecosystem property may be an industry publication or website, an independent blogger, a forum or social network run by a fan or customer, a competitor’s site or a comment on a news of blog item.

This is where social media monitoring and filtering tools kick in and help you identify data sets relating to your company/brand/product or service which take place within the earned ecosystem. See below for how to select social media monitoring tools.

Hosted, Managed and Owned Ecosystem

As more and more current and potential customers use online resources as a means to research companies, brands, products, services and individuals, there are more and more social channels to access both independent information and also platforms for more direct access to a company, brand, product, service or an individual. Companies can and do monitoring conversations across all channels, but may not respond across each and every one, but use their own platforms both on public social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and also public hosted customer communities on their own websites like Dell’s ideastorm.com, Starbucks, mystarbucksidea.com and skys help forum.

This ecosystem provides the opportunity for a company, brand, brand, product, service or individual to have the opportunity to invest more time and resources into facilitating conversations between and with existing and future customers; provide a platform to extract ideas about new products and enhancements to existing products and services and opportunity to reflect back to the community about the actions taken based on feedback in these communities.

This provides a deeper level of insight and provides a test bed for product development ideas, market and campaign messages. There are a number of companies who provide hosted online communities and forums, these include:

Lithium, buddymedia, pluck/demandmedia, liveworld, salesforce,

Private Online Customer Communities

At the heart of the social conversation sphere is private online customer communities, which provide a platform to create in depth on-going conversations with a small group of engaged customers over an extended period of time, this may be anything from a few months around a particular project or over a number of years. These communities bring together customers who are happy to participate in a range of market research activities, the output from which is fed back into an organisations market research, insight and new product development teams, influencing business, marketing and new product development decisions, de-risking innovation and accelerating the success of new product launches.

There are a number of companies who provide Private Online Customer Communities, these include:

Communispace, Vision Critical, Promise Communities, Insites Consulting, Brainjuicer, Facegroup,

Social Media Monitoring Tools

There are a range of Social Media Monitoring Tools and service providers, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses, some being more suitable for some work than others, a selection of providers include:

Radian6, SDL/SM2, sysomos, neilsen buzzmetrics, visible technologies,

The paper below provides an overview od the key features and functionality of social media monitoring tools and guidance on areas to think about when selecting them.

Selecting Social media monitoring tools

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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.

Social Commerce & Innovation in Online Travel

In a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article How Expedia Plans to Make Travel More Social Expedias vice-president of the US, Joe Megibow, discusses Expedias recognition of the value of travel bloggers and intend to introduce and their blog posts into the online experience of their travel customer.

Online travel is an industry which is best placed to benefit from developing an integrated social commerce and mobile proposition, which delivers each individual customer with a personalised service and has the potential to enhance the online experience and also combine a mix of travel content, bloggers, published content, customer reviews and local destination tour and activity providers to improve customers in destination experience.

In the spring of 2011, I met friends from Dallas in Paris for a couple of days, they were on a 5 day trip with their 2 sons and wanted to maximise the experience for all the family during their short stay. In order to do this, Laura, carried out extensive desk research from her home using both online and guidebooks she purchased about Paris, she identified a range of activities from sightseeing, guided historic walks, places to eat, drop by for a coffee and take time out to relax and from this built a great schedule which she skilfully led, with the aid of her iphone, her husbands blackberry and google maps, their 5 day trip and my couple of days with them.

This inspired me to carry out research into the online travel space, an area I have been interested in since 2001, to look for a joined up consumer experience which would have created the type of city break my friend and her family were looking for and was surprised to find that this was not available, there were vendors doing the individual areas, but there IS NO_ONE joining this all up to create a streamlined customer experience….so I met with a number of technology vendors and carried out research into what makes travel sell on line and developed a contecept called CITEZE – a social commerce and mobile citybreaks travel service which I introduced to a couple of online travel companies, who expressed some interest but no urgency to develop this new customer experience and I have to ask why?

Below is an outline of the travel concept and I welcome views and opinions and volunteers companies and/or individuals who may be interested in developing this beyond a concept…look forward to hearing from you…..

Integrated social mobile and online travel customer experience

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