22nd March 2008 by Adam - 1 Comment »
Perhaps you think you should get your 10th cup of coffee for free, or you would like free Wi-Fi access, or even a free birthday brew… whatever your suggestion, Starbucks want to hear it.
Starbucks have unveiled MyStarbucksIdea.com - a social community site aiming to give their customers a platform to share their ideas and suggestions, vote on the ideas they would most like to see in-store and find out what ideas Starbucks have actually implemented. It seems Starbucks have placed blogging and communicating with their customers at the core of their “” er, strategy.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced this week -
“We engage in millions of conversations with our customers everyday, and those conversations and ideas have helped shape the company we are today,” said Schultz. “With the launch of MyStarbucksIdea, we are extending the Starbucks community online and creating a dynamic forum that enables us to capture and act upon our customers’ best ideas.”
Starbucks seem to be doin’ it right: offering transparency for the process and what they want to do with your ideas, employee-driven content and encouraging customer engagement. If they do ‘act upon’ some of their customers ideas, it looks like Starbucks may succeed in extending the customer conversation on-line.
Regardless of how many of their customers actually choose to engage in this conversation, Starbucks are set to benefit as they gain cost-effective customer feedback, potentially improve their pubic image, and maybe even hear that gem of an idea that makes a difference to their profits.
EBay have moved to offer a greater transparency to their business operations; an interview with eBay’s new full-time blogger on CNN money suggests that eBay are truly embracing open communication channels with their customers:
New eBay recruit and social media veteran Richard Brewer-Hay will launch a blog next month that aims to give eBay’s users a direct, unfiltered communications link with the company. Can he repair the company’s battered relations with its users?
“…My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited.
It’s got to be transparent. There’s got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there’s no point in doing it in the first place. I’m going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You’re going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly.” read more…
We like Richard’s blogging ‘ethos‘. EBay already have various channels available for communicating with their customers, but this initiative seems to be different; existing blogs are written by staff members with a history at eBay, Richard has joined eBay solely for this role and appears to be enthused by the prospect of talking about a huge range of eBay’s business.
We’ll be following eBays’ latest conversation-starter with interest, as well as keeping an eye open for other businesses employing full-time bloggers to help them converse with their customers.
7th March 2008 by Adam - 1 Comment »
Dell continues to invest in it’s direct2dell blogging group, with an announcement that it has launched ‘In the Clouds‘, a blog that discusses the future of cloud computing.
Perhaps the biggest insight into how dell have adopted blogging comes from within the announcement (titled: more conversations…):
“From the beginning, the purpose of Direct2Dell has been to educate and to support our customers on a wide variety of topics that they care about. This blog has grown since those early days. And that growth has encouraged more Dell folks to want to have conversations with our customers.”
Dell’s strategy is also now including other web 2.0 channels - youtube, flickr and twitter to extend their conversation, and reach their customers in new ways.
Wal-Mart have handed over the keys for a shiny new blog to a selection of employees from their product buying department. The result is checkoutblog.com.
Wal-Mart appears to have learned after a previous attempt to enter the blogosphere was met with a negative reaction (Wal-Mart vs. the blogosphere). This time around, Wal-Mart are using real employees (who are real product buyers), asking for real feedback about products they are considering stocking or announcements they would like to make.
A good example of how a large company can develop a personable face for the interactions they want to have with their customers.
