Interview with eHarmony CEO Greg Waldorf
Posted May 20th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli
In today’s Market Edge show on WebmasterRadio, Larry Weber discusses eHarmony’s experience building a successful online community with their CEO Greg Waldorf.
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Posts filed under 'Online Communities'
The Success of Blue Shirt Nation
Posted March 4th, 2008 by Adam
In a recent post, Gary Koelling of Best Buy talks about Blue Shirt Nation, an employee community he developed with counterpart Steve Bendt. The idea was to create a place where employees could talk to each other. Through the chatter, they hoped to tap into insights that would improve customer service and marketing within the stores.
With little funding behind the site (built for free with open source software), Koelling and Bendt set out upon building the community. Following the June 2006 launch, they visited Best Buys around the country and talked to employees about the site. They used employee insights to improve the community. They encouraged users to join and post about what they liked (and disliked) about the site. In facilitating the dialogue, they began to address the biggest complaint that employees had: “My opinion doesn’t matter”.
The community now includes 20,000 members and has been influential in affecting changes to the email policy, improving enrollments in the 401k program and setting up systems for employees to communicate between shifts. In his post, Koelling calls the success a “fluke”. Building a community is not easy and it takes time. Even then, not every community will succeed. But Koelling and Bendt made the most of the opportunity by listening to employees and treating them like valuable members of the Best Buy family. By empowering them to get involved with their feedback (positive or negative), it addressed their biggest concern – that their opinion did not matter. Employees now felt a sense of ownership in the community; it wasn’t just another form of “corporate-speak”.
And it paid off. Best Buy now has a community teeming with opportunities to improve the customer experience and employees engaged in helping them get there.
GM Goes From Blog to Community
Posted February 12th, 2008 by admin
General Motors first delved into social media with the GM Fast Lanes Blog, a success by most standards of corporate blogging. GM is posting, podcasting and even Twittering regularly, and people are commenting. But apparently all this is just a warm up. Recently they’ve decided to build upon the open dialogue principles of their first blog by creating GMnext, a new online community focused around technology, innovation and collaboration.
Adding Your Story
Once you register you can participate in the GMnext community in many ways. GM invites people to help them tell a story by contributing content through guest posts on the blog, videos, photos and even the GMnext Wiki. Frank Oresnik, a Chevy truck owner, reached the million mile mark on his 1991 Chevy Silverado and posted his compelling stories on the GMnext blog. The story was recently covered in CNet, NPR, AP and several other news sources.
The community is divided by Stories, Thoughts, Videos, Photos, Events, Chat, Podcasts and Feeds. Content within these sections is labeled by categories aimed at communicating automotive innovation: Design, Technology, Green, Ideas and Reach.
Bob Lutz, Chairman, GM North America recently introduced a rather unique community feature called Our Thoughts/Your Thoughts in which a GM executive offers his thoughts along side a post by a third party source. Larry Burns VP, GM R&D and writer/director Chris Paine went face to face about GM’s approach on global energy issues in the first dual post. There are 120 comments so far.
The video section is designed similar to YouTube with a way of sorting through clips by Most Viewed, Highest Ranked and Newest. You can rate and comment on videos, bookmark them and explore links and other multimedia related to the video. You can tune in for a live talk through the Chat section with Carl Zipfel HUMMER Director of Exterior Design on February 14th at 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST.
GMnext shows a true commitment for taking the corporation-to-consumer conversation to the next level. After seeing success with Fast Lanes, they identified an opportunity to further leverage social media to involve the masses in the creation of the GM story. I learned tons about GM and their proactive position in innovative technologies while writing this post – more than I have from the years of commercials and Transformers product placements. Hopefully their commitment to innovation and their ability to communicate it will turn around this classic American company from its 2007 losses.
My New Year’s Resolution
Posted January 4th, 2008 by Scott
2008 has finally arrived! Now it’s time to get up off the couch and commit to your resolutions. My first and foremost commitment is dedicating more time to my footprint in social media. Yes it’s true, I work for a social media marketing company and KNOW the value and necessity of taking part in the everyday blog-to-blog discussions and infamous social networks. But the truth of the matter is in 2007 I did the same thing that many others out there did, I OBSERVED. The start of 2008 is the perfect time to act on our “research” from last year.
I know what I need to do. Do you? If not, here are a few ways that you can get yourself and your business involved in online conversations:
1. Monitor the conversations going on about you, your company and your products. Utilize RSS feeds like Google Reader to help you monitor the day-to-day conversations.
2. Contribute to blog posts via comments, participate in online communities and forums, and share your own opinions within consumer review sites. Monitor your brand (Technorati and Google Blog Search can help with that) – if you’re being talked about, whether positive or negative, get involved in the conversation. Let your customers know their voices are being heard. Often enough some of the biggest critics will become advocates because you acknowledge their complaints.
3. Sign up and create profiles for all the major social networks (Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). Since we live in a world where it’s not what you know but rather who you know, expand your network and reconnect with old friends and colleagues.
4. Take the plunge and START A BLOG! There are loads of platforms available (Wordpress, TypePad, etc.) where you can sign up and have your own blog up and running in minutes!
Keep in mind the web is rapidly evolving – putting off what you could do with social media today until tomorrow could leave you up to your neck in catch up work 
.
Best of Luck in ‘08!