No. 4: From "community of members" to "community of customer advocates"
Jakob Nielsen states that user participation often follows the 90-9-1 rule – i.e. 1% generate content, 9% contribute content and 90% consume content (read/observe). This is also called participation inequality. Many organizations often face the task of driving community membership and go overboard in terms of ‘acquiring’ these members. Instead, organizations should focus on how to create and expand the core set of audience (1%) and convert them into customer advocates. They are your brand ambassadors. Nurturing this core set of customer advocates can provide significant benefits to companies – Example: improved service and reduced support costs (relevant and objective response which consumers trust), relevant voice of customer input, drive better conversation rates on products etc.
In one of my earlier communities that I had established, I have found this to be critical. We had less than 5 active ‘creators’ who drove the success of the community so much so that we had more traction from my target audience on this community than on my web presence.
Comments
CellStrat recently completed the Digital Media Survey for 2010 and the team surveyed top companies in 10 different sectors to get a holistic view on the digital/ social media adoption trends in India. As per this survey, 81% companies in India said that they are creators of content, 56% said that they are just spectators as of now primarily because they are not leveraging social media fully today and thus observing the activities of others in their respective areas; while about 34% said that they are joiners. Many other insights like these have come out as a result of this survey which can be of help for corporates in India in their digital/ social media strategy formulations...
Posted by: Vishal Singhal | June 23, 2010 4:33 AM