One Company, Many Feedback Communities
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, May 23, 2008
This week I tagged along on a sales call to a VP of marketing who was interested in hearing about our new Community Builder Module. Her company is a Fortune 1000 firm, and she is responsible for marketing many different brands. What was fascinating about her firm was that all of the different brands she is responsible for represent a microcosm of the different stages of online community adoption.
No Online Community - Many of her oversea brands still have websites that are "brochureware", offering product and customer service information but little else. These brands want to build online communities, and they are starting from scratch. For them, the Community Builder Module is perfect, as it can be used to rapidly launch general-purpose online communities with integrated feedback.
Existing Online Community Needing a Feedback Annex - Some of her domestic brands already have basic online communities, but these communities don't provide any feedback mechanisms; further, the brands are worried that too much orientation on feedback would distract from the main purposes of these particular communities. For these, we can use the Community Builder Module to create separate community-feedback portals and recruit community members to join this feedback community to act as advisory councils to the community.
Existing Online Community Needing Integrated Feedback - An interesting mix of her mature brands and new brands have recently rolled out or are currently rolling out new online communities to their specific customer segments. Some of these efforts are quite far along and have advanced social media capabilities built in, but again little emphasis on feedback. For these, our Community Builder Module is not appropriate - the firm has already built rich web applications for these online communities. However, EFM Community itself has a robust web-services API that we can use to integrate with these new communities; in fact, we've been doing such integration work with existing online communities with the API since 2005 and in a more custom fashion for years before that. Community members can see personalized survey invitations within their existing online portal, and EFM survey administrators can invite participants using the demographic information from the profiles of community members.
This organization has quite the mix of online communities; the only thing it is lacking today is an online community with robust feedback capabilities! Once that is in place for one brand, the other brands will be able to see directly the value that a community feedback platform offers.