For B2B companies, the use of social network for building communities is a key part of the social marketing strategy. A company hosted community for users of its product provides an excellent way for a company to engage its customers, monitor the conversation, receive feedback and learn from its customers. The information that a company learns about its own product, how it is used, and customer requirements through online communities allows the company to make incremental improvements and design better products in the future.
Online communities are a faster and more efficient means of communicating with customers than traditional user group meetings, trade shows and conferences. The use of communities should be a key component of customer relationship management (CRM) because it engages the customers, present a platform for them to provide feedback, and monitors customer satisfaction, all key components of CRM. Although it is difficult to quantify some of the communications and feedbacks received through online communities, or calculate ROI of online communites, the relationship that are build up with customers are invaluable for future sales and marketing.
It is also interesting to note that companies who are afraid of reviews and open communications in communities fail to realize that a larger percentage of communications and reviews tend to be positive rather than negative. Also some negative communications increase trust in the forum and users will not feel that it is just another marketing channel for the company. The build up of trust in an online community is critical if active discussion of issues is desired. Furthermore, only an active and real discussion forum can provide honest feedback and learning opportunities for the company.
Due to the development of Web 2.0, innovative and efficient communication methods appear. But in my opinion, the community for customers to express their thoughts are also very useful for B2C companies. How is your idea? do you think that compared with B2C companies, B2B would be benefited more through community way?
ReplyDeleteI do think that in the B2B world, there is actual realtionship and community being formed through social marketing communities. This is because the community of users are smaller and the number of customers in the B2B world is also smaller. So a community of users can actually have a bigger influence on future sales potential for a company's products. In the B2C world, there can be lots of reviews, discussion and feedback, but the relationship is superficial simply because of the sheer number of consumers.
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