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.