Imagine the Power
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Wed, Apr 23, 2008
I read this article today that really capture what we are all about at Vovici: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_17/b4081000030457.htm?chan=magazine+channel_what%27s+next
It is great to see how major brands are beginning to take advantage of the change in our society and are utilizing technology and the internet to gather feedback and to do more effective research. Starbucks and Dell could really extend the Ideas portal from salesforce.com by taking advantage of the people that have a propensity to visit their web sites to give feedback and recruit them to join an online community panel. Let me explain further... I witnessed a perfect example of a few opportunities where Starbucks could take advantage of the Vovici platform. I was in my favorite Starbucks this weekend and reloaded my gift card. The employee did a great job to make me aware that I could now go online and load my card and attach the information to my credit card so it would never run out. Now you researchers and marketers out there picture this... had I gone to the web site destination to re-load my card and found a promotion there that said..."join the Starbucks Advisory Panel"... "earn points to give us feedback for new product and services offerings and to generally give us feedback about your experience".
Now continue to imagine... I click on that link and go to another Starbucks branded page that messages... "you are extremely important to us and we need your feedback. As an advisory panel member we would like to invite you to a survey from time to time. We promise that our survey will never be more than 10 minutes, we will show a survey progress bar on every page of the survey so you know where you are in the survey, we will share with you the results and grant you additional points in your Starbucks account." The Vovici Community platform makes this extremely easy to do and provides each panel member with their own portal page to take their surveys and track results. Online Community Panels build loyalty to the brand and give companies a method of gathering feedback and doing research like never before.
Now one more idea for your imagination for today... a few weeks have gone by and Starbucks would have thousands of people identified in the Vovici Community Panel, that have opted in to take surveys. We have asked them a few screening questions like, age, zip code, education and profession and have integrated that survey data to their gift card information via our api's. Now we know who they are, what they drink, what stores they shop at and how often they drink coffee. Imagine what could you do with that type of power We provide the most advanced technology platform for recruiting and managing online community panels and through our services team and partners help our customers recruit panel members to their online community via offline and online methods. To continue with my Starbucks example, they could recruit people from the current "ideas" portal by putting a link there to their Online Advisory Panel powered by Vovici. They could put links on their home page, on signs in their stores, on receipts etc. etc.