4 tips for building strong customer relationships using online communities

Kathy Herrmann December 2, 2008

The Internet is a good news bad news invention. The good news is that is gives companies greater outreach than we’ve ever had before and that’s beneficial either to provide or acquire services and products. The bad news about the Internet, though, is that it can create a lot of clutter.

To ensure your company and its messages are heard, you need a strong foundation that will allow your company to rise above the clutter. There are a number of strategies to accomplish this goal but, in my mind, the foundation requires a strong relationship with your customers and prospects.

One approach to construct this foundation is via online communities. Let’s talk about how....

Leverage customer influence and heighten your brand value

Kathy Herrmann September 19, 2008

In my last article, I highlighted Umair Haque's perspective of the shrinking advantage of traditional brands. However, unlike Haque, I don't believe branding value is shrinking but evolving. Today let's discuss methods in which a company can leverage the immediacy of online connectivity to maintain its branding advantages.

In my mind, it all comes down to this. For success today, a company has to be willing to listen to their customers and to work with them. And that means ceding partial control of the branding process to your customers.

If you're a marketing manager going "eep!" right about now, then you're not getting today's customer environment...

Customers connected online rewrite branding rules

Kathy Herrmann September 16, 2008

Communities of online customers are rewriting the rules of corporate branding. The reason is because they're spending more time talking with other consumers through various types of online connections than listening to companies with their traditional branding messages.

In other words, customers are wresting control of the branding message from companies. In an environment like that, how do you continue to be an influential voice for your own company and products?

We're going to talk about that today...

What can happen when you have a failure to communicate

Kathy Herrmann September 12, 2008

Growing up, a poster displaying the following quotation from Nixon adorned my wall because I loved its provocative message:

I know you think you understand what you think I said. I'm not sure you realize, though, that what I said is not what I meant.

Okay, now I don't know if the ex-pres actually said that or not but here's the point I want to make. Are you finding you need to say that your various communities, be they customers, partners, or employees?

Is your messaging being misunderstood or corrupted? ...

Resources required to maintain your successful online community

Kathy Herrmann September 9, 2008

In a previous article, we discussed some of the benefits of building an online community. Among these are the opportunity to increase the visibility of your company with your customers, partners, and employees.

Today, let's have some straight talk about the resources your company will need to grow and maintain a thriving online community. Your friendly neighborhood IT specialist can give you the skinny on your technical resource demands so let's focus today on the personnel resources you'll need to grow and maintain a success online community.

This resource is probably more important in many ways than the technical one -- but it's also the one many companies are likely to short change. Because no matter how wiz bang cool your online community site is, if you don't have people maintaining it, then your community members will abandon you and your community will die.

Kathy Herrmann

Building better businesses