Online Customer Communities…Be Careful What You Wish For

Setting Objectives for Customer Communities

Embarking on customer engagement online seems overwhelming at first – there are just so many possible ways of proceeding.

Keeping clear about objectives and priorities – as obvious as this might seem – is the best advice from our experience. The objective essentially becomes the conversation and shapes the audience or community.

Possible objectives broadly fall into two categories - insight and engagement. 

Detailed objectives might be as follows:

• Identify new trends in the marketplace 
• Innovate products or services
• Develop new ideas for existing customer programs
• Test new marketing ideas or programs
• Support product launches
• Improve customer processes
• Understand customer segmentation more deeply
• Develop word-of-mouth programs
• Collaborate more effectively with field representatives or channel organisations
• Keep your customer culture consistent  

Note the last two take a broader view of customer - tackling customer facing staff or channel partners.

For some inspiration on objectives and approaches, see Eight great applications win Forrester Groundswell Awards

Once you have identified the objective and the target community - useful reality checks are:

• Is the potential community large enough to achieve the objectives?
• Are there sufficient topics of interest to maintain engagement?    

You may ultimately want to run multiple communities with logical links between them - eg providing opportunities for more engaged members to move into communities with more interactive options or topics that match their profiling.  

Engagement for engagement’s sake is a risky path whatever the longer-term objectives might be. Whilst this might excite the creative urge of your Digital Agency - if you start without an end in mind, chances are that your efforts will flounder.

Any experience with this? Please let us know!