Encouraging Community Involvement

The reason for a retailer to develop a collaborative community as an integral part of the retailer’s online presence is to ensure the participation of the members which in turn will encourage the members to purchase.  This member return and participation is the key and the retailer must be careful to focus the community on the participation and the benefits to the consumer and not a focus on product sales.  To this end, the collaborative community, and the retailer, must encourage the participation in the community management of the members and make it easy for the members to participate.  

The retailer must understand that this member participation will involve a changing level of participation from the individual members.  This will make it almost impossible for the retailer to count on the continue participation of any one member and requires the retailer to view the participation as a whole from the community and not as any one continuous level of participation from one member.  The community participation should be encouraged and measured or acted upon based on the entire community and not any one member.  This allows the community to flourish without depending on any one member.  This is important because individual members will come and go with the individual participation increasing and decreasing depending on interest and available time.  This is why the retailer must view and measure the participation from the community as a whole.  

Of course the retailer should provide the ability to easily purchase however, the focus must remain on the participation and social interaction of the members.   The first and foremost action encouraged on this site must be encouraging reaction of the members to the postings and the community conversation.  The second priority must be encouraging the participation in directing the site activities.  Then the third priority should be providing the ability to purchase.  You don’t want to make it difficult to purchase but by the same token you don’t want to focus too intensely on the purchase.  Too great of a focus on the purchase will discourage the member return and participation.  Instead focus on the social aspect of the community and the purchase will follow.

It is important to remember that community cannot depend on the continuous participation of any one member however, the community can count on the participation of the members as a group.  I believe that Amazon has learned this lesson very well, the Prime service from Amazon encourages the return of people to the community and the service focuses on the ease of participation, benefits to the consumer and community involvement.  Amazon focuses first on member retention at the site and then second makes the any purchase easy, including providing the ability to purchase from another retailer that participates in 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?

Collaboration Community Governance

The development and encouragement of the collaboration community by retailers will require a flexible governance that encourages participation in a safe and secure environment.  We’ve found over and over that a governance strategy and participation by key stakeholders, including internal and external partners is critical to the success of the community.  It is critical to the development and success of a governance strategy to develop a practice of inclusion from all stakeholders.  A collaborative community requires the support of the external stakeholders and participants and one of the best ways to develop this support is to encourage the participation of all stakeholders, internal and external, in the governance of the community.

This participation starts with framework that supports video, image and text posting to support all of the types of networking that would be of interest to consumers and community participants.  This is frankly where the cloud technologies and services can play an important role in providing and supporting the community framework.  This is important to both the success of the community and also critical to the acceptance by the retailer senior leadership.  The key point of these capabilities being that they can be delivered quickly to the community and there is a very low cost of entry.  I think that the cost is the critical aspect to retailer leadership acceptance.  This lowered cost of entry, and even more important cost of failure, can be the linchpin to the acceptance of the retailer leadership.  Of course this is not the only cost to implementing the collaboration community, however you can argue that the community can be supported by the same people that are currently supporting the social media management.

This social community provides another aspect and outlet to the social media management and engagement that should not be underplayed.  The social media management framework and governance must take into account all of the social media outlets.  In addition to coordinating the social media outlets it is important for the retailer to manage the submission of content to ensure there is no offensive content.  In addition to the content the retailer must manage the discussions, by this I mean they must manage the trolls and also the unrelated blatant marketing attempts by participants.  This, I believe, is probably the most important factor in achieving support of the consumer and the success of the community.

All of these activities require the focus and time of a team to provide the oversight required to ensure this collaborative community is safe, secure and supports the message of the retailer.  In addition the collaborative community with the outlets for a variety number and types of postings provides the retailer with the opportunity to focus their message.  

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?

Why Collaboration Community?

Why should retailers spend the time and effort to develop a collaboration community when there are already so many other community outlets for collaboration?  I think the answer to that question is to provide the retailer with an outlet to connect directly with the consumer and to provide the retailer a method to promote their products.  This can be achieved in different manners depending on the product and the customer, for instance home improvement retailers can provide how-to videos, or apparel retailers can provide fashion advice.  Both of these communities though must provide a framework that encourages the consumer to participate.  I think the community should also focus on the benefits to the consumer and not so much on sales.  

I say this because I believe the sales will come when the retailer provides a framework that demonstrates how to use the products.  The key objective of these communities is to give the consumer a reason to return to the site, if the consumer makes the community a regular habit the sales will come.  The point on which to focus in the return of the consumer to the site.  By all means the retailer should copy or incorporate links to the popular online communities there is no reason to create a new method there is only a need to encourage the consumer to return to the community.

This may seem to be at odds with the objective of retailers, which is to sell products to the consumer at a profit.  So why should the retailer want to develop a community that is focused on benefits to the consumer?  The reason is simple, the community provides a method to encourage the consumer to return and consumers returning to the retailer’s site will increase the sales.  In other words, the community provides a soft marketing opportunity for sales.  

This concept becomes even more enticing because cloud technologies and services provide a very low cost method to deliver the community.  This can be delivered in a very low cost manner utilizing the same internal resources that support the retailer’s other social media outlets.  In other words, the retailer can implement a community with practically zero dollar investment and only the investment of time from resources already supporting social networks.  This framework, with the support of consumers, can be an extremely low cost with high return value solution.  The objective of this network should be that consumers maintain the site with new content and discussions and require minimal support from the retailer.

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?