Monday, October 13, 2008

Customer Communities - Another Customer Touchpoint

Looking for a non-intrusive touch points through which information about customer demographics, preferences, and lifestyles can be directly observed? Communities are a great way to do this and a very valuable resource for your customer marketing efforts. Here are some ways that I have used our support community site for reference activities:
- I spent some time looking for positive comments by customers. Some customers gave their companies and location so it was easy to contact them about becoming customer references.
- Once we needed a press quote and so we posted an article about feedback for a new feature. We didn't end up finding a customer but we got some leads that could have easily panned out if we would have had more time.
- I get Google Alerts for all things LANDesk and one time a customer posted a question on the community site. I immediately knew it was him and emailed him an answer versus posting it on the site. He was quite pleased that I proactively emailed him the answer.
- Use the community to find leads for your customer reference program. I looked at the biggest contributors to see who was already in my reference program and a few that were passionate about LANDesk that I invited them to become part of it!

One caution here - Most customers will not post too much on your support site if you are going to use it for a marketing tool so proceed carefully and wisely!

Read more about about using communities to build your brand online:
http://prashant-onlinemedia.blogspot.com/2008/10/brand-building-online.html

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