Marketing 2.0 and customer communities in the social web

Nowadays building customer communities is one of the hot topics in marketing arena. Well, in fact, always it has been marketing´s job engage customers and try to become every customer a part of its network. But, probably, it´s now, and due to social technologies when this idea comes true.

I read a very interesting book about these issues, "Marketing to the social web", written by Larry Weber, which has a very interesting subtitle: How digital customer communities build your business.

This book has lots of ideas to build, strength and evaluate these communities, but above all, I liked the process he defines to create a community. This process is based on 7 steps:

Step 1. Observe and create a customer map

Marketing is about observation, listening to customers, so...Let´s do it. Which communities are around your business?. What they are talking about?. "No matter what your size, there are digital conversations about you". Create a customer map. Even employees can be customers. Customer communities are not limited to the the folks who buy from you.

2. Recruit community members

Identify those guys who will want (desire?) to talk with you and what about: About your products?. Your brand?. Experiences?. Of course, consider the product or service you have. Low-involvement products make harder the recruitment than if you have a high-involvement product or service (look at Obama´s example). So everything is about "recruiting people to the site in the first place and keeping them engaged once you get them there".

3. Evaluate Online conduit strategies

Which is your plan to reach your target audiences?. Check your marketing notes, and put it in practice. Afterwards, choose among the big four conduit strategies: Reputation aggregators, blogging, e-communities and social networks.

4. Engage communities in conversation

"Approach this step as if you were writing a marketing plan with the target audience of customers and potential customers in mind". Social marketing (and branding) is about the dialogue the company has with its customers and potential customers and it includes BOTH the conversations you have with your customers AND (this is important) the exchanges your customers have with one another.

"...Today, however, because of the Internet, you have to think of customers as transmitters of your brand conversation. They´re already having conversations with one another about your products, anyway (...). It´s up to you to ensure that your organization participates in that conversation...".

5. Measure the community involvement

Yes, community marketing is, also, about measuring. But, first, establish your marketing goals and, afterwards, define the metrics you´ll use (mainly, qualitative metrics). For example, share of voice.

6. Promote your community to the world

The author propose a real example with Gap, and focuses on the use of search enginees.

7. Improve the community benefits

Listen, talk and improve. Above all, "listen to your users and respond to them" and "be alert to new innovationsand test them againstthe value you want to provide".

You can find more ideas in the book, like how to use the four conduit strategies I mentioned or different examples on the steps I referred.

And I wonder, what about customers communities in btob marketing?. It seems that these ideas are being applied only (or mainly) in consumer marketing, with high-involvement products. Is that true?. What can we do?.

Customer Relationship Management in Virtual Communities

Last week we were informed that Basque Governement´s Industry Department, has approved a research proposal we made in the Saiotek program. This project is about launching a Industrial Marketing Institute, where collect all the knowledge generated about the topic. The project has two main objectives, 1) generate the knowledge, by means of a research and 2) create and develop a community, where people can share knowledge.

Speaking with David, who is researching about on-line communities, we concluded that it is a great opportunity to materialize the work we are doing separately. Related with this topic I have found a paper from MSI about Customer Relationship Management in virtual communities. In this study, professor Constance Elise Porter (Notre Dame University) and professor Naveen Donthu (Georgia State University) explore how companies can use virtual communities to build relationships with consumers.

First of all they define virtual community as "an aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact based on a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially suported and/or mediated by technology and guided by certain protocols and norms". From here on, they propose a model where TRUST is the central concept. The authors hypothesize that customer perceptions about the companie`s efforts to provide quality content, to foster members embeddedness and to encourage interactions in the virtual community will foster favorable beliefs and trust the company. The resultant trust will motivate customers (relational outcomes),

- To share personal information with the company
- To cooperate on new product development
- To be more loyal

The main findings of this interesting research are:

1. There is a positive association between trust and customer behaviour, that is, customer willingness to share personal information with the virtual community sponsor, willingness to cooperate in new product development or customer loyalty.

2. Fostering member`s embeddedness has greater impact on customer beliefs than providing access to quality content. From 90´s "the content is the king" to "the embeddedness is the emperor".

3. Fostering customer`s embeddedness has favorable and unfavorable effects. Communitie`s members can see sponsor`s efforts as opportunistic even though has no significant effect on trust.

4. The mere facilitation of interaction does not produce favorable consumer beliefs about the company.

5. The study underline the importance of using new techhnologies to manage relationships with customers rather than simply generate transactions.

6. Web interventions engender customer trust. Even though managers tend to think that using a community can be seen by customers as a way to manipulate them, this is not completely true. Consumers tend to tolerate certain degree of opportunism in commercial relationships.

7. But companies must be very careful about the information provided to community members, too much emphasize on favorable information about the company can result on lower trust in the company.

And I wonder, are these findings valid to industrial customer-based communities?