We were recently asked “why bother centralizing this functionality when so much of it could be done with some viral posts to YouTube or MySpace?” Good question, simple answer: qualify vs. quantify.
Most marketers these days agree that the internet is a powerful mechanism that can be used in many ways to promote brands in a viral fashion. There are some great success stories out there, but the case studies often read as if the brand was just shocked it worked at all. There’s very little detail information on ROI, as these campaigns tend to be built as one off projects that don’t create data which integrates with the brands existing customer tracking solution at all.
The same group who asked us that “why centralize” question had just finished a viral campaign that had a 2000% greater response rate than expected. We told them how impressed and excited we were, and then asked them what we thought were some simple questions:
- Out of the massive group of people who responded, how many of them had responded to previous campaigns as well?
- How many of them returned to the campaign (which had a login feature) to check the status of their contributions?
- If you wanted to ask a simple poll type question of even a small portion of that audience, how would you go about doing so?
Of course, the answers were “we don’t know, and we’d have to start over and build a survey with our consulting firm from scratch.” That same group has now become a passionate client.
Beyond just being a sexier way to run a discussion board than your average online forum, Concrete Communities acts as a platform for centralizing the data gathered from all of these viral promotion campaigns. Be it a discussion from the forums on your own website, or a signup for more information from a Flash promotion, Concrete Communities keeps your customers from having to re-register over and over as your brand tries different ideas online. The flexibility of Concrete Communities as a web platform means we can make the site look or perform just about any way needed by the campaign, and we can even support many of these features through syndication from 3rd party sites. Our detailed and flexible statistics engine lets us track just about every action a visitor or site member can perform, all being stored against the central member database so you’ll never find yourself trying to sync excel sheets by hand.
Think of Concrete Communities as the venue for your events – the stage, the PA, admissions, vendor booths – everything that you have to worry about setting up for each show is already done. Now you’re free to focus on the content, and you can rest easy knowing the data generated by your campaign will be useful to your organization in the big picture.