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Product Companies
Every manufacturer, distributor and retailer wants its customers to be as fiercely loyal as the people who buy iPods and Porsches. Your community can extend your company beyond employees: Invite the real product experts into the conversation

NEWSFLASH! Your employees are not the product experts: they're the experts in something entirely different: producing and selling your products. Your real experts are your customers - only they use your products every day.

The positive benefits of negative comments
Marketers think they must avoid negative comments on their company's site, but the best marketing is fixing something that's wrong, not in never having a problem. The more you fix things that go wrong, the stronger your appeal, your message, your company.

The result? The viral energy of MySpace or YouTube, but private-labeled and without the noise. Your best customers are already enthusiastic and knowledgeable, and the blogosphere has proven they're more than willing to speak out. But the big win is opening a channel to your less enthusiastic customers. Dell is spending 150 million dollars to fix the Dell Hell that they built by turning frustrated customers into enemies. Too bad they didn't start sooner with a private-label social network. If so, they would have what most organizations need:
  • Praise, Questions and Complaints, on your own site, where all comments are in a database you can link to your customer or member support system. Sure, it's public information, but it's actionable data.
  • Provide a public forum for every customer, not aggregated in a single place, like the comments posted at this Business Week article, where Dell's customers' comments imply a Business Week blessing, whether complaints are valid or not.
  • Spontaneous Interest Groups so customers can help each other with problems you're now paying less-knowledgeable people to do less competently. Here's a great article and a depiction from ZDNet:


  • Authentic Engagement with your customers. Sure, it starts out messy and uncontrollable as you clear out the accumulated frustrations. But your site will quickly fill up with real customers and heart-warming resolutions in real time.Your people, connecting with your customers, as peers. Consider the alternative. One expert put it all together:

    On the web you don’t control your message,
    but you’re welcome to participate in the
    conversation you’ve started.
  • Invitations and Points that let you reward customers and members for attracting their friends.
  • Internal Networking among your own people, engaging each other by new paths and finding internal allies and meeting your goals in ways you could never dream of.
"The elements in ORGware reflect real needs in politics and governance."
Phil Windley
 
©2006, Open Resource Group