Fan communities can be incredibly powerful word-of-mouth machines. A fan community brought Harley-Davidson back from the brink of bankruptcy, inspired hundreds of thousands of people to carry Maker’s Mark ambassador cards and got many people talking about what they do with orange-handled scissors.
Building one takes hard work and a long-term commitment. But if you pull it off, you can create amazing, sustainable word of mouth that will carry you through good times and bad.
An expert at doing this is Spike Jones, and he shared a bunch of tips on how to do it at our last Word of Mouth event.
A few of his big ideas:
- Take time to do the research. Great communities help their customers accomplish something. Yours might help them get a better job, learn something new or simply meet people like them. So do your homework and find the big problem or fantastic goal your community can help people accomplish.
When you deliver more than 15 million packages a day to more than 6 million customers, you need to have a great customer-support system.
To better help customers, UPS is doing a pretty amazing thing: It’s using customer-support channels in social media to proactively and reactively offer support in real time.
In her BlogWell presentation, UPS’ Debbie Curtis-Magley explained how the company started the program and a bunch of lessons learned along the way. A few of her big ideas:
- Create a single place for customers to go. Early on, UPS had multiple personalized Twitter handles, but this didn’t scale. The company launched @UPSHelp to streamline everything.
- Making customers happy through social media gets amplified. When customers come back and thank UPS for its customer service, that adds up to great exposure. Since the company launched the program, UPS has accumulated more than 1 million positive impressions from grateful replies.
- Let experts lead the way.
Georgia-Pacific manufactures more tissue, pulp, paper, packaging and building products than just about anyone. It has more than 40,000 employees across North America, South America and Europe.
In August, Meg Fligg and her team were exploring ways they could use social media to connect with college students. They discovered that next to football, students love talking about jobs — and jobs happen to be something Georgia-Pacific has a lot of.
But where to start? Should they use existing Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to start promoting openings? Should they start new ones?
In her BlogWell presentation, Fligg walked us through all of the challenges they faced and how they’re making it work. A few of her take-aways:
- Go where students already are. In the middle of trying to figure out how to best use their existing communities, Fligg and her team had an epiphany: The schools they were targeting already had online communities.
Coca-Cola has more than 500 brands in 206 countries. That’s a lot of customers, and it means a whole lot of conversations.
But what do you focus on? Which conversations matter? Who’s influencing the conversation? How do you get this information to the people who can do something about it? And what tools can help you do all this?
In her BlogWell presentation, Coca-Cola’s Natalie Johnson walked through all of these big questions and shared how, as one of the most-talked-about companies on Earth, the beverage-maker is able to learn so much from online conversations.
A few of her big ideas:
- Better focus means better listening. Johnson and her team focused their tools on a few key topics for each of Coca-Cola’s brands. These topics range from music to sports — and with their tools, they’re able to measure these critical conversations in more than 32 languages.
- Make sure everyone’s using the same numbers.
DeVry University has been around since the 1930s, and though it has more than 80,000 undergraduate students across 90 campuses, it faced an awareness problem. People weren’t familiar with the school or its academic programs.
To turn this around, in coordination with its 80th birthday, DeVry set out to establish a sustainable word-of-mouth movement to celebrate its success. The university wanted to instill pride among its students and alumni — but that’s challenging when you don’t have a mascot or a sports program.
To make it happen, DeVry’s social media team established the DriVen Class community to inspire students to realize their potential and to encourage one another. At our recent BlogWell conference, Justin Gillmar, Laura Dagys and Chase Fritchle walked us through how they did it. (read more…)
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