Collaboration Community Investment

The retailer must be prepared to invest in the consumer collaboration community in order for this community to succeed.  This community will become critical to the success of the retailer’s sales channel by providing the community area for consumers to return and engage with both other consumers and the retailer.  The investments required to support the community are both financial and resources (people’s time and expertise mainly) and fortunately for the retailer the financial investment can be limited through the use of free or subscription cloud technology and services.  

The investments in resources can be minimized through the incremental expansion of the current team supporting the social media channels.  This is the most effective and efficient use of resources available to the retailer.  You should already have a team supporting the social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Instagram and Pinterest.  The consumer community should be viewed as an extension of the same skills utilized to support the social media and will bring these tools and technologies under one umbrella where the consumer community becomes the ‘glue’ that binds the other social media activities.  This will consolidate the skills and the support into one team and will provide some cohesion and extend the social media support.

While the support can be consolidated into the existing team supporting social media, this does not complete the resource investment.  Generally speaking the social media team is managed within the marketing organization.  This makes complete sense because of the types of interaction and the promotion of both products and the brand.  Incorporating the consumer community into this team will require the close interaction and coordination with the sales channel and the extended supply chain.  This addition of the consumer community produces a truly cross organization framework and platform that must be supported across the entire organization.  

This produces a new investment requirement from sales, product development and the extended supply chain that was not previously required.  This is another investment of people and skills from these channels that will be a net add to the investment.  These additional requirements will, however, provide two key additional benefits; the cross organization awareness and coordination of activities.  These activities benefit from the consumer community data collect while also producing organizational communication and agility benefits.  These benefits are a significant and provide a framework for long term growth and benefits.  This will require though the commitment and support of leadership in order to maintain the required investment because the natural tendency for any organization is to revert back to its original behavior and focus on internal activities rather than  cross organization activities.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Collaboration Community Growth

A growth strategy is a critical success factor for your consumer collaboration community to be successful and meet its value opportunities.  The value opportunities will change over time and the growth strategy will provide the guideposts to follow to achieve the potential.  The success of the consumer community will be very fragile to begin with and will require a great deal of patience, coordination and flexibility and the growth strategy provides the framework to build your success.  Just because you can offer or support a service does not mean that it should be offered or should be a long term service.

You cannot simply allow the community practices and development to haphazardly develop down paths without guidance and direction.  The growth strategy provides this guidance that identifies a set of objectives to measure the direction and also measurements that can be used to determine the potential and eventually success objectives for each of the services and offerings. Setting out the strategy in the beginning allows for a standard measurement and guide forward during the community development.  This strategy outlines how to measure along with a definition of goals that should be supported by the services and community.

It is important when entering any new type of engagement that you clearly understand and define your entry and exit criteria before you begin and the collaboration consumer community is no different.  In fact I would say that because of the participants and the changing services and technology it is critical that you have these definitions in place when you start.  It is also important that you realize from the beginning that because of the discontinuous change and speed of the change that your growth strategy must be flexible in order to meet the changing demands of the community.  This does not mean that you should be continuously changing your strategy, it does mean though that you should be continuously reviewing your strategy to ensure that it remains meaningful and continues to support your objectives.  

Your growth strategy is a key factor to the success of your consumer collaboration community and this growth strategy also plays a key role in the continuous improvement program that must be a central process supporting your consumer community.  These two tools provide the linchpins to the continued success of the community by providing guidance and measurements to confirm your direction and the value returned.  Never underestimate the importance of a guide and measurement tools in supporting your community.  These tools do not have a great cost to implement or maintain however they provide a great return and help to ensure the success of your community.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Collaboration Community Program Management

The coordination and planning required for support of the consumer collaboration community can be very complicated and yet it is not necessarily complicated unless you make it complicated.  The challenge requires focus and this is what the program management practice provides quite frankly.  Program management brings the practice and capabilities together that are required to work across platforms and business practices.  The consumer collaboration community requires support across business practices and provides input across business practices and it is very important that the retailer does not underestimate the importance or the requirements.

It is important to put in place the process and methods early in the life of the consumer collaboration community.  It will be much harder to put these methods into place after the fact and potentially re-work or reorganize process and methods, it is always easier to start off with the appropriate methods than to re-engineer the process after the fact and this is no different.  The program management practice in this case is especially important because of the integration opportunities with both internal organization processes and external partner data sharing opportunities.  Since I am suggesting that the basis of the consumer community be cloud services and technology there must be a process in place that evaluates and coordinates the implementation of these services and technology.  I believe the program management practice methodology is the best practice to support the community, organization and external partner opportunities and requirements.

People, process and technology must be the focus and the mantra for the success of the consumer community and the integration across the retail organization and external partners.  This will be an extremely time consuming practice to implement and maintain and this is where the program management practice will show it greatest value.  I have said that the support of internal leadership is critical to the success of the consumer community and the cost can be minimized through use of cloud technologies and services.  The one greatest factor of support from leadership will be the support, encouragement and patience to allow the program management practices to succeed with this initiative.  The greatest investment requirement, in my opinion, from leadership is this patience and support to allow the consumer community to grow through the initial start up trials and build the participation and community spirit that will bring success to this initiative.  

The consumer community is a long term investment from the retail leadership, as some say it is a marathon and not a sprint.  This means that the retail leadership cannot impose short term hard financial return on the initiative. The reason why I suggest that the initiative should be supported via cloud technology and services is to limit the investment required to the time of people in the organization.  This limited hard dollar investment should reduce the demands for immediate return and allow the community to build and grow, allowing the community to find its value and develop the base and attraction to participate and become a member of the community.  The organic growth of the community will provide the best foundation for the long term success and value that can be derived from the community.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?