If it isn’t clear to an employee how he or she will benefit from collaborating with others on an internal community, most will simply not engage. Add to that the fear of asking a ’stupid question’, not giving the ‘right answer’, or being ignored when asking a question and internal communities often quickly grind to a halt.

We use a simple slogan when we help enterprises set up communities: ‘People Doing Things Together.’ When setting up a community, you need to go into a great level of detail defining this and make sure they valuable. The definitions can be generalizations or actual examples. The more focused, the easier it will be to show potential users ‘what’s in it for them’ and get them engaged.

Some examples:

• Product managers ask for available market research for a new concept they have.
• Marketeers test a new proposition amongst peers.
• R&D tests the market potential of a new application with marketing and sales colleagues all over the world.
• Controllers share and discuss their annual budgeting spreadsheets to get best practices for next years budgeting rounds.
• HR searches the community for a person suitable for a certain role based on expertise and experience shown in peoples’ community activities.
• A product manager wants to make a manufacturing investment but his market will not give him sufficient revenue to justify the investment. He asks product managers in other markets for their potential revenue. Their combined markets may justify the investment.
• An insurance product manager in Belgium asks his colleagues in The Netherlands if they have implemented a specific coverage in their insurance, and if they have how it was done and what the result was.
• Before testing his new campaign in an expensive survey, a marketeer tests the campaign, at no costs, in his own organization.

No related posts.

“Blending the best of social networking and online shopping, social shopping sites are creating environments that allow consumers to create lists of products from retailers, comment and rate them, take polls that help them make purchase decisions and, most importantly, share the products and their opinions with other consumers—in the end, affecting online retailers’ sales in both positive and unexpected ways. The success of these sites is based in several key truths: shopping is often a social
event, people like to get opinions on items they’re considering, and they get ideas from a variety of retailers and, now, an entire world of consumers.

Sites like Stylehive.com, Kaboodle.com and ThisNext.com are taking the lead in a whole new
commerce-driven social media movement that we call ‘Social Shopping.’

According to the report retailers can start doing the following 6 things today:

“1- Provide more meaningful cross-sells
Consumers are often skeptical of products that are presented as cross-sells and up-sells from a retailer-specific point of view. They question their intent and origination. Leverage tag clouds and relationships established by consumers as a way to add validity to your cross-sells.

2- Offer tools that support consumers’ need to consider items
Our retailing research has resulted in a common finding over and over—”The shopping cart is where I put items I’ve already decided to buy.” What do consumers do with the items they’re still considering? Currently, e-commerce sites support viewing a single item at a time. Provide a place for customers to store items they’re considering just as they do in-store as they carry items with them while shopping.

3- Allow consumers to play
Seamless approaches to finding and viewing items are key. Allowing customers to mix, match and compare in a wholly interactive manner will quickly become the norm. Some examples include: Like.com’s feature that allows customers to key in on a single feature of an item and view more like it; Etsy.com’s feature that allows customers to view the assortment based on color family; or Endless.com’s visual approach to faceted navigation. New interaction models are yet to be realized.

4- Support multi-dimensional product comparison
Product comparison tools, while valuable, are primarily one dimensional—focusing on the hard-line facts of the products e.g., technical specifications. Add new dimensions to product comparison tools by leveraging consumer reviews and aspects of the product that are more emotional and functional rather than specification-based.

5- Leverage content from select social shopping sites
Explore methods for incorporating user-generated lists and comments into your retail site in an effort to support existing customer reviews. As these social shopping sites move toward monetizing their environments, retailers may have the ability to develop relationships that allow them to grow existing content bases.

6- Create a stand-alone checkout process
Checkout processes are traditionally laden with features—some offering expedited processes, for example, one-click and stored information. Consider leveraging expedited, lightweight checkout processes that allow consumers to complete their purchases from aggregator sites, like Shopzilla, with low-involvement interactions.”

No related posts.