Having spent the first 10 years of my career working in Direct Marketing, I am well versed in the idea of marketing as a campaign. 

The process is:

1. Client briefs agency “we need to sell 2,000 mortgages this quarter”
2. Creative staff work on the design and data planners work back from that 2,000 figure (with expected response rates and conversion rates) to identify how many prospects need to be contacted/exposed to the ad.  If they are more sophisticated, they will have data (triggers, profiles and predictive models) to help them identify the best prospects.
3. Campaign is launched and after a period of time, the number of new mortgages is calculated
4. The agency can calculate the ROI from the campaign and then rest easy with a G&T at the nearest swanky bar

I’m a firm believer in “what gets measured, gets better” and so I often suggest to clients that they not only track the quantitative side of their relationship with customers (value, recency), but the qualitative side as well (satisfaction, attitudes, advocacy and ideas).  This could include gathering comments from the multitude of customer touchpoints including call centres, your Facebook page, online community site (or any form of social functionality within your brand

Making sense of large quantities of customer verbatims has been a challenge for researchers for many years and more recently for people working in social media.  This includes everything from questions that have opened ended “Other” responses to paragraphs of customer verbatims that describe their response to a question, reason for a particular NPS score, innovative idea (for co-creation with a brand) or even complaint.

The corporate world has long known the power of the voice of the customer.  This started decades ago with traditional paper feedback forms but has evolved to include Net Promoter programs (that measure advocacy), customer satisfaction surveys and online communities that all give your customers a voice.  Now thanks to the prevalence of social media in Australia, listening to the blogosphere can inform you almost instantly of your successes and failings.  And, if integrated with your CRM system, y

There are many reasons why an online community could fail to deliver results for a brand.  The most common reasons are that the brand has difficulty getting customers to engage and that the brand is unable to collaborate with customers effectively.

If you have an online community that is not delivering results and you decide to close it down, it is important to plan the closing of the community with the same vigour as the launch.

The following 2 steps summarise our recommended approach:

1. Change Management

When organisations are considering whether to build a branded online community, the most common reason I hear for deciding against this strategy is a concern about opening their brand up to criticism.
 
We agree that providing a platform for your customers to complain in public is a risk but this needs to be balanced with the risk of not providing the platform.  The proliferation of social networks and forums that provide this platform means that these complaints are already out there and this negative word of mouth can be very powerful.