Online CommunitiesOnline communities are a powerful engagement resource. They gather consumers and other stakeholders onto a shared space, so your brands interact with them in a more informal and spontaneous way than focus groups or customer surveys, at a fraction of the cost.
With online communities you overcome geographical and scale barriers, anyone on the planet is able to engage with your brand and products, providing precious feedback from his/her experience with them. This feedback could be in the form of feelings, suggestions, comments, thanks, new ideas. Equally important, they could also be a source for early warnings about potential issues with distribution, communications or competitors movements.
Combined with web analytics, they provide demographic information that is vital for product segmentation and campaigns planning. SMBs are now able to develop advanced research studies at an affordable cost, freeing resources for other actions, such as advertisement.
Online communities could also synergize with other customer centric processes, as when an online community designate key members as ambassadors, to provide peer support and word-of-mouth marketing, generating significant cost reductions. This however needs to be a company-supervised action, as brand presence must not be delegated.
Online communities also enable unique business models, where the community is the product, such as thematic portals or collaborative environments.
Our solution for Online Communities
The key advantage for running your own online community, is that you own it, the interactions and feedback generated stay within your community website and do not flow to a network where your business is just another user. This feedback could then be used for market research. At the same time, your business could be fully assured that every applicable regulation is followed, such as data privacy.
Our solution could be inserted into an existing website, or we could develop them as a new site in itself if the company wishes to do so. This is normally the case when large communities are expected or due to company policy or specific regulations.
Our online communities solutions sinergize with the major social networks like Facebook and Twitter. We do not compete against them, on the contrary we embrace and synergize with them. For example users could enrol at your community using their Facebook or Twitter credentials, and inherit from them profile information such as name, picture and wall post. At the same time, whenever a user interacts on your community, this could be replicated onto Facebook or Twitter automatically.
The technologies we work with support all the major features of modern social networks, like:
- User profiles, in our case you can choose what information you want to ask for, what is mandatory and what is optiona.
- User Groups
- Debates / Forums
- Sharing photos and videos, which could be linked from major portals such as youtube, so the users does not need to reload anything.
- Express spontaneous feedback on the different community objects such as “like” and “send to friend”
- Comments
- Featured users and objects (e.g. designate ambassadors or “member of the month”)
- User ranges
- Reward points so their interactoins could be rewarded and exchanged, and engagement is encouraged.
The technologies we work with are open source and extensible. Special purpose applications, such as advanced surveys, brand games giving reward points and other marketing activations could be easily deployed.
We apply a pragmatic approach to technology. We work with several proven platforms, for which we have developed significant intellectual capital, processes and procedures. We developed a skillful team of professional that implement these technologies on a daily basis. Depending on your project requirements, budget and goals, we would choose the most appropriate mix for your case and discuss with you about the reasons behind it.
If you woud like to implement an online community now or would like to discuss further its suitability for your business, please to contact us, we’d be glad to partner with you in this amazing journey.
