Collaborative Marketing

Collaborative Marketing
Accessing Internet has become a common phenomenon because innovative technologies like mobile Internet devices, Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to it anywhere and anytime.
Due to e-commerce ,efficient and low-cost advertising and commerce through the Internet, many companies have started growing at a faster rate . It is the fastest way to spread information to a vast number of people simultaneously. Shopping has been revolutionized to a great extent—for example; a person can order any electronic device online and receive it in a couple of days. The Internet has also greatly facilitated personalized marketing which allows a company to market a product to a specific person or a specific group of people more effectively than any other advertising medium. MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Twitter and Orkut are some of the online communities which allow personalized marketing for thousands of Internet users through online advertisment and also help them in making friends online. Many of these users are young teens and adolescents ranging from 13 to 25 years old. In turn, when they advertise their interests and hobbies, online marketing companies use it as information as to what those users will purchase online, and advertise their own products.
Instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills and that too at a low cost has made collaborative work much easier, with the help of collaborative software.
Internet allows not only cheap communication , but a wide reach also allowing collaborating teams to work on shared sets of documents without either accidentally overwriting each other's work or having members wait until they get "sent" documents to be able to make their contributions. Business and project teams can share calendars as well as documents and other information. Such collaboration occurs in a wide variety of areas including scientific research, software development, conference planning, political activism and creative writing. Social and political collaboration is also becoming more widespread as both Internet access and computer literacy grow. From the flash mob 'events' of the early 2000s to the use of social networking in the 2009 Iranian election protests, the Internet allows people to work together more effectively and in many more ways than was possible without it.
Customer Communities
INTRODUCTION
The advent of web based customer communities has been one of the most significant trends in Web 2.0 businesses where groups of individuals have similar ideas come together and interact about a brand or set of product and services. The existence of Communities is not only in neighborhoods or friends but also in Marketplace. Be it service establishments, Food industry or Health clubs, Communities bring about social interaction which becomes the driver of consumption. Far from the cynical marketing ploy that it can sometimes seem, customer communities often sprout up on the initiative of passionate customers. Successful examples of this include XMFan around XM Radio, HDTalking for Harley Davidson, and IKEAFANS on IKEA products.
The above mentioned communities are active and not affiliated with the businesses that the communities are focused on. Consequently, businesses are realizing that they can bring about more benefits if they attempt to promote these communities themselves, rather than waiting for public to create a group on their own.
BENEFITS OF CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES
Customer Communities can be beneficial both to the firms as well as the customers in many ways.
To Customers:
• The customers get a platform to communicate with each other.
• They are given the opportunity to share their experiences. The customers gain knowledge and experience about the product/ organization from existing customers
• Customers are able to Learn for leaders
• Customers are also encouraged to respond directly to the concerns.
To Businesses:
The 2001 McKinsey-Jupiter Media Metrix - customers of web community features generate two-thirds of sales despite accounting for only one-third of a site’s visitors
• It is been seen that over a quarter of community initiatives increased sales even while most business-sponsored customer communities struggled to achieve critical mass in terms of users.
• Customers provide feedback for strategic planning which is very crucial for any business.
• It also helps in building trust and loyalty of the customers. The ultimate customer loyalty lies in an organization creating, facilitating and encouraging customer-to-customer relationship.
• It also encourages positive word of mouth.
• The Businesses also get an opportunity to learn from its customers.
TYPES OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES
1. Consumer social networks
2. Grassroots Customer communities
3. Business-initiated customer communities

It is essential to have an understanding of motivations, expectations, participation styles, conversational modes and desired user experience to know what our customers are really looking from online communities.
WHAT IS AN EXAMPLE OF A SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER COMMUNITY?
One good example is Dell’s online community which is famously used for a corporate image turnaround last year and remains one of the most highly regarded and highly trafficked customer community properties. Another is SAP’s various customer communities, with over a million registered business and technical users and a high degree of participation.A couple of recent examples that demonstrate the kind of customer community initiatives that are emerging include Hyatt’s new Yatt’it community for frequent travelers and the decidedly back-from-near-death Member’s Project by American Express. Both are highly produced and attractive-looking communities, especially compared with the three successful grassroots communities.
WHY SHOULD THESE GROUPS MATTER TO OTHER TYPES OF BUSINESSES?
Customer Communities offer loyalty benefits to the businesses and therefore businesses have started creating corporate-sponsored communities of their own. Exclusive customer communities are created by several companies like Harley Davidson, Jeep, Winnebago and Neiman Marcus. One who owns a Harley can belong to H.O.G Club. Customers of Neiman Marcus are encouraged to join their Community: ‘In Circle’ after they have spent a certain amount at the store. This encourages social relationships with other customers around product ownership to a great extent.

WHAT IF THE FIRMS DON’T UNDERSTAND OR DEVELOP CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES?
It is recommended to the companies to create their own customer communities or else Market will create these communities on their own. For Example, United.com was created as a result of dissatisfaction with United Airlines. If communities sprout anyway, it becomes necessary for the businesses to have some control and be a part of it to avoid negative experiences on its site. Otherwise, the customer communities can sometimes take over and change the aura of the company or establishment. This is particularly true with online communities when negative comments can take over a forum or blog. In some service firms, it is possible that a group of regulars can exclude new customers.
WHAT ARE WAYS TO SUCCESSFULLY INCORPORATE SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS INTO THE MARKETING PLAN?
1. Put the needs of the community first.
Communities exist to serve the needs of their members, and in customer communities businesses can elect to become close-knit participants in good standing or keep the community at arm’s length. It is essential for the community to thrive through open conversation, honesty, trust, and candor.
2. Active community management is essential.
Customer communities lack proper management. Communities are indeed self-organizing, but like community of any kind they require active administration, management, and moderation or the community will devolve into a least common denominator environment where abuse, spam, neglect, inactivity, and poor behavior of a few go unaddressed and drive away productive participants. Well-resourced community management is apparent in every one of the successful online communities.
3. Measuring success with community requires new yardsticks.
Unique visitors are one often cited community metric that I’ve come across numerous times. Experience share is another, probably more relevant measurement that cited more often these days. But communities offer much better benefits far beyond the sheer visitor count or community size. Often the most influential members of an organization’s customer base will be active in online communities, both forming a draw for other members but also shaping community and public opinion in a forum that is mutually vouched for by the community and its sponsoring organization.
4. Customer communities do work as a marketing channel, just not in the traditional way.
It’s probably safe to say that customer communities are a solid marketing channel for an organization. But the benefits often come in unexpected ways include the community becoming a place where the latest “unofficial” news is exchanged or leaked, where visitors can expect to have non-hierarchical contact with an organization’s employee, with the attendant increased flow of oft-unapproved information, and other communication is conducted, both subversive and otherwise. Customer communities tend to project customer influence and demands deeper into an organization and create more sustained contact. And the reverse is also true, with the result being outcomes which don’t appear so much as marketing but as cooperation, mutual brainstorming, and co-development of ideas and outcomes.
5. The more the business is integrated, the better the community will work.
Customer communities in reality are joint communities of the business and the customer both. Deep involvement by both as early as possible and from many parts of the organization will create the early critical mass that can avoid the low-levels of participation seen in many organization-initiated customer communities.

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