The basis of positive conversations about your company is very simple: offer strong products and decent customer service. These two drive conversations. If you do them well, conversations will boost the business; if you perform just a little below expectations, conversations will decrease the business.
Customer experience is the foundation of a Conversation Company. People love to talk about your service and your products. It is the key driver of consumer conversations.
The Conversation Company manages online conversations in three stages: observing, facilitating, and participating. Companies start by listening to consumer conversations and adding relevant comments where necessary. At the same time, they prepare content in such a way that it can easily be shared with other interested parties.
Clever companies combine online conversations with offline activities. For example, the Heineken Champions League stunt showed how the effect of small offline events can be magnified many times through social media by providing the right content in the right form. Similarly, Kraft integrated customer tweets into its offline advertisements. As a result, more than 1.5 million tweets were sent to Kraft during the campaign.
Companies should no longer focus on one-off advertising campaigns, but on the global planning and management of their content. A company must learn to think like the publisher of a newspaper. The paper with the most interesting content is read the most.
Good content is the ideal way to increase reach and maintain engagement.
The Conversation Company collaborates structurally with its customers, which increases the average level of consumer commitment. There is significant scope for creativity within this pillar.
For example, 4Food, a successful hamburger outlet in Manhattan, creates a new menu every day with the help of its customers. Using tablets placed on tables, diners design their own hamburger recipes. New concepts are displayed for other customers, and best-selling burgers are promoted via Twitter and Facebook. For each burger sold, the recipe creator earns 25 cents.
Similarly, Procter & Gamble developed Vocalpoint, a community of 350,000 mothers who help develop new product ideas. These participants also test products during the development phase, providing feedback on potential issues before products are officially launched.