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Brand aid: Creating opportunities in your customer community
June 12, 2009
Copyright © 2009 PRSA. All rights reserved.
The following Digital Dialogue column appears in the June 2009 issue of PR Tactics
By Ryan Zuk, APR
With the aid of its online customer community, Pitney Bowes, which provides mail and document management products to more than 2 million customers globally, saves thousands of dollars in customer phone support costs each year.
The community is a central location for information about the U.S. Postal Service’s annual postage rate increases. These are details that Pitney Bowes would otherwise need to share with customers through more expensive means like mail or personal phone calls.
“Calls from customers about updating their postage meters have always spiked in May,” says Mike Hardy, Pitney Bowes strategic communications manager. “This led to the creation of our community. After listening to how customers discussed their concerns online, we wrote responses in their language — not our jargon. Rate change calls are now virtually nonexistent.”
While this example is specific to customer support, the resulting goodwill has opened up new communication opportunities for Pitney Bowes. “We evolved from this initial success to thought-leadership activities,” he says.
According to Hardy, the company’s bi-monthly “Ask The Experts” forums generate compelling content that showcases its knowledge, attract potential customer and media attention — and can increase its Web traffic by nearly 10 times its average rate.
Customers, in their own words
Susan Etlinger, vice president of the San Francisco-based Horn Group, says that communities give companies like Pitney Bowes and their communication departments something that they didn’t have before — a personal view of customers.
“Communities tell us what matters most to customers,” Etlinger says. “[PR professionals] can use this information to educate colleagues and clients about how their brands are perceived in the real world. The honest dialogue found [within] communities and social networks can be quite revealing.”
Creating messages without this knowledge is a risk in the social networking age. Communities, created with platforms from vendors such as Communispace and Lithium Technologies (Pitney Bowes’ vendor), can help practitioners research what to say and how to say it.
Pitney Bowes, for example, sells postage meters that need annual updating when rates increase. “We initially posted topics about how to change postage meter presets on our community page, but we were still flooded with support calls,” says Hardy. “Then we observed customers on the community saying ‘my meter still says 41 cents, what do I do?’ and realized that we needed to rephrase our topics in customer terms. As soon as we did, the phone stopped ringing.”
You can identify actionable PR opportunities within your own organization’s customer community or in other online communities that discuss your brands. Some of these include:
• Capturing feedback in discussion threads that have story-pitching potential. A customer may be using your product in an interesting way that you haven’t yet discovered, or a new feature or service may address unmet customer needs.
• Empowering community members with product details in advance — on private discussion boards if necessary — to generate goodwill for a launch. At the launch, open up this content for community discussion and impress visiting media. During this process, you’ll likely develop new and relevant customer references.
• Identifying and addressing customer concerns before a crisis erupts. Or, in the midst of crisis, your community can be a central location to direct press for timely updates.
PR practitioners need to outfit their organizations with today’s social tools so that they’re ready if there is a crisis, or when an opportunity requiring immediate action is identified. Etlinger points to the Motrin Moms and Domino’s pizza Web incidents as proof of the concept.
“People won’t wait for responses these days, and stories quickly become distorted if you don’t have channels like communities, Twitter accounts, blogs and YouTube in place to voice your views,” Etlinger says. “It’s wise to build these now, rather than let necessity be the mother of invention.”
Ryan Zuk, APR, is a media and analyst relations professional and Phoenix PRSA Chapter member. Zuk can be reached at ryanzuk@gmail.com and @ryanzuk on Twitter. He also blogs at criticalmasspr.com
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