Daemon Group Blog

Communities: to build or not to build

Posted on 20. Mar, 2010 by Lachlan Hibbert-Wells in Social Media

Last week the Daemon Digital team attended ad:tech Sydney, a two day conference covering all things digital including advertising, PR, communications, eCommerce and everything in between. The speakers represented both agencies and brands who shared case studies, ideas and experiences that delivered conflicting results, once again proving that any marketer hoping for a cookie cutter approach to their digital strategy will be sorely disappointed.

A quick browse through industry blogs and you’ll find one of the more contested issues concerns community development – to build or not to build. Do you create a community in which you can talk to your customers in a public forum in direct response to their queries or issues? Or, is it better to approach your customer within their preferred environments where the conversation already exists (with or without you)? We were pleased to hear two conflicting yet successful approaches from prominent local brands, the result of considered and targeted strategies.

Nicole Lesson, Manager Online Customer Experience, Qantas Airways

Nicole went head to head with two agency directors in the first day session “How can marketers take more responsibility for their digital strategy”. After hearing the agencies fire off with statements like “most companies are shit at strategy”, Nicole calmly retaliated that marketers had tired of the short term, brief by brief approach they often received from agencies, eager to offer microsites for their customers and encouraging engagement in purpose built networks.

Qantas believed this wasn’t necessarily the best approach to meet their objectives and in developing their strategy they sought to answer these key questions: Who are our customers? Where are they interacting and can we join the conversation? Nicole conceded that interruption marketing is not dead you just need to find ways to engage first and then offer constructive interruptions. She hammered home the importance of listening to what customers are saying in all of their conversations in the digital space.

We need to go to the customer where they are, not insist they always come to us

Embrance trial and error on digital – this is evolution

Define and agree on success with your agency

Monty Hamilton, Head of Online, UBank

Following a positive introduction to UBank’s business model during the CEO panel, Monty continued the discussion on day two in  “Unexpected Pioneers: How The Financial Services Industry Have Shaped And Influenced The Digital Media Space”. Monty explained some of the activity that they are currently undertaking in the Twitter and Facebook space and demonstrated this further in responses to tweets and blogs during and after the conference.

UBank’s approach is very much to create the digital communities and then encourage customers to interact, giving UBank the opportunity to respond to questions/issues and information requests in a timely fashion. This approach seems to be working out for them at the moment however the question was raised as to how you manage this as the volume of customer enquiries and issues increases beyond your resourcing capabilities. The vast majority of complaints and customer service issues are still being dealt with via more traditional call centres and therefore the digital space does not suffer from high volumes of enquiries.

Dialogue online humanises direct person to computer relationship

Social as market research is more effective than one way glass

Join the discussion don’t just listen to it

Head to head

Monty explained that if your customers have taken time to contact you then you should take the time to respond to them. Is this a realistic goal with the potential huge number of daily interactions in this space? Nicole also points out that maybe it isn’t necessary to respond to each individual comment.

Your social media strategy may turn out to be to not have a vocal presence in social media. At Daemon Digital we cringe when we hear anything along the lines of “I think we need one of those Facebook pages” or “everyone’s on Twitter so we need to be too”. Digital communication extends much further than the popular social networks or iPhone applications often thrown into marketing plans to tick the social media box and what we loved about ad:tech was the presentation of opinions and experiences from every angle.

Nicole summed up our position perfectly when she said ‘there are no digital strategies but communication strategy with digital as a tool’ which emphasises the importance of a tailored strategy to engage, listen and communicate with your audience. It is the knowledge and experience of the specific relationship between your company and your market that will determine the direction of your strategy, not the success or otherwise of unrelated campaigns just because they too live online.

by Mandi Bateson and Katy Daniells

Tags: adtech, adtech sydney, community development, community management, digital communications strategy, digital marketing, Qantas, social media, UBank