Impulse contact

The Impulse Contact.

Marketing and retail companies alike are generally smart folks, and everything they do is for a reason. one example of this is the idea of the "impulse buy".  When you go to any store these days be it in the checkout line or by the register sometimes even surrounding area. There are a variety of other small things that they are hoping to entice you with and hope you buy. These can be higher profit items or just generally small ticket items they hope you will just throw in with your purchase to increase profit. 

They are "impulse" buys because you don't go to the store looking for them, they are typically not on your list. but you see them, and on an impulse you buy them. Companies make these items very easily accessible, and convenient. Thus making the barrier to purchase small and the likelihood of purchase higher.

Some quick links for further reading on this..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase

http://www.kindredmedia.com.au/info/tempting_shopping/199/1

I would like to correlate this idea to something i would consider an important point in

• Social Media
• Customer service
• General community

Many times i have been in a situation where i wished i could ask a quick question or make a comment to a company. Sometimes even an idea to improve something.  However, I would not be willing to take the time to call them, write a letter, sit on hold, try to find what to do or who to call. So i never did.  But as a company who would truly be interested to hear my feedback, my complaint, my compliment or the like, would you miss this opportunity?

If so. Enter in social media.

If I run a company and i have a presence on Facebook, or twitter, and i prominently promote it. I Ensure people know its there and SHOW people I am listening. I have just enabled "the Impulse contact"

If you follow the premise that typically customer contact is good, and the more contact i have with a customer the more likely they are to be a happy customer, more likely to be a repeat customer, more likely be be a referral or fan. If so I need to ensure i give people every opportunity and every avenue to be "touched" or interacted with. 

So you are involved with social media and being out there listening, waiting for people to talk about you.. That's great.  But you can also use it as a quick connect for easy quick access to the impulse contact.

As an example I could be on a southwest flight or in this case (while i am typing this) waiting for Southwest flight 125 en route to Ohio. and notice how awesome the gate area is and how much i love the chairs with outlets and USB hubs and think. WOW this rocks.  I can quickly go to twitter and say @southwestair I LOVE THIS. Thank you, or maybe tell them that this is the first time i have tried the business select and i am liking it so far. 

This could be feedback that i am sure @southwestair would love to get. they now have real direct empirical evidence that some of the investments they have made recently are working and are improving their customer experience.  Chances are that if they were not on twitter and made it SOO easy for me to provide that feedback that i would not have given it.  Southwest is putting themselves out there and are in the channels that i use.  They are participating in a genre that i am comfortable with and not forcing me to use the one they want.  I am not being directed to a specific feedback channel rather i am being given the options and i can participate in the southwest conversation in a manner I CHOSE.

I for one think that is a FANTASTIC way of doing business. If your company TRULY values this type of feedback, and you WANT to interact with your customers. Then just having a phone number and email address is NOT ENOUGH.  You must expand your presence and use of social media. You can use social media to benefit you and your customers in innumerable ways.  But you have to be willing to get out there and figure it out.

What do you think?

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome here. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Or you can email me directly chris dot geier at Gmail.com

The underground beginnings

In my previous blog I told you how i started the idea and planning process of the K2 community.  Now it is time to tell the story of K2 underground.

When we started to plan out what we wanted in a community site, and figure out how that manifested itself in a platform decision.

I had a list of technical requirement list i used at the time as follows:

1. Support Blogging functionality
2. Separate “Areas” for classes of users.  “Insiders” “Partners” etc
3. Content targeting based on based on user preferences.
4. Ability to support rating posts, articles, blogs, uploads etc.
5. Ability to mark forum items as solved, answered etc.
   1. Search through forum for unanswered questions and or posts
6. Points system, different points accumulated raise levels different membership levels amounts to different rights and status on the site.
7. Ability to establish user profiles, to provide a self overview and points accumulated.
   1. Moderators of the site should also be able to give points or take them away. 
   2. Advanced Profile support for personalization.
8. Ability to link internally to other posts, copying one post to another and giving it credit.
9. Private message support for members to contact each other
10. Reporting for:
    1. Most active threads
    2. Most popular posts
    3. Newest posts
    4. Top rated posts
11. Events Section to post upcoming events
    1. Ability to sort by time or location or type such as on line or in person etc.
    2. Ability to publish event postings for Live Meetings etc.

Overall I really wanted to enable to community on its own to adapt and grow and not have it limited by the technology we use.  Nor would i want to tell the community how to work or what parameters to use. Based on this we needed to ensure that the platform we chose had to be very flexible, and configurable.  Based on that and the above requirements we chose Community Sever over SharePoint.  It would take too long to bring SharePoint up to the point that Community Server was. Primarily in terms of membership, points, and forums.  (mainly forums)

During the design and envisioning phase we had several Primary areas of focus:

User Group Area

We wanted to establish a separate or sub-area within the site to act as a hosting area for various user groups. The goal being to allow members of the broad community to establish sub-communities on their own.  Being a part of this sub-community will allow them to have discussions, post announcements, agendas, minutes from past events and allow them to connect virtually with other members.  Members of these user groups can also post to a more general announcement board on the main site.

Presence awareness

When you hit the home page of the site, users should be able to see who else is logged on. How many others are currently on the site etc.  Future additions will allow users to IM them.  Initial version will just allow for PM.

Blogging
The site will have a Separate section for blogs, that should be easily browse able and utilize “content TAGS” for ease of search.   Initially we chose that only K2 employees and Insiders would be allowed to have a blog. In future revisions we opened this up to partners but had no takers.

File Sharing
Each individual post can contain an attachment with example code etc. However there will be a self service file sharing area where users can upload their own little creations. These will also be rated and can be fuel for the points system.

Now that most of the techie stuff is out of the way, we needed to establish some site policies, visions, rules etc.  We wanted to have a site/community that encouraged discussion and participation and have that be the driving goal. To first to attempt to get the conversation going, and encourage people to jump in.  To achieve this we came up with the following:

1) Encourage newer users--especially those who've been active askers--to start trying to answer questions We will do this by making sure that the moderators are not always the Ones Who Know All.
2) We will give tips to the community on how to answer questions
3) At any opportunity we will ensure that people know it's OK to guess a little, as long as they ADMIT they're guessing
4) The site will Adopt a near-zero-tolerance "Be Nice" policy when people are posting to the site and or answering questions.  We will not allow other participants (especially the more advanced users) to slam anyone's answer.

So what does all this mean?  All of this boils down to a couple easy things. I wanted create the best community site possible.  A community site that people got a ton of use from, one that truly benefits those who participate.  The community also could use the site for a variety of reasons and not just for raw K2 technical discussion. But as a way to interact with others in their preferable way on their preferable topics.  This is not all there is to it, there is lots more. I love to talk about this and my experiences in the K2 community so there will be more to come soon

What do you think? What would you do differently?

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome here. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Or you can email me directly chris dot geier at Gmail.com