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.

    Supporting Transient Communities with Twitter

    Over recent weeks and months there has been a significant increase in the number of Twitter users and in the various ways individuals and groups are tweeting.  One of the exciting ways to use Twitter is to be able to use the tool to harness knowledge and information from a community, large or small, which forms at a point in time.  For example, at a conference, seminar, exhibition or other educational, business or sporting event.  

    Through using #tags as a means of isolating tweets relating to a specific subject, for example #ecsm http://twitter.com/home#search?q=%23ecsm was the tag for the social media conference I was a speaker at last week in London and a friend of mine is attending a conference in San Francisco http://twitter.com/home#search?q=%23wbenc

    The communities which form around these events are transient and temporary, however the #tag allows all attendees to be connected for the duration of the event and provides a way to retain the communication about the event to all ettendees and offers an opportunity for others to access the conversation and also the links to other resources including the speakers, attendees, interested parties following the event and also links shared through twitter on the subject of the conference.

    This ability to harness knowledge and connect with individuals who are interested or participating in a subject matter enables us to filter the noise on the web and enable us to develop our knowledge and understanding of a subject through others with a similar interest.