Talk to your customers – and let them talk to each other

18 Comments
by on September 24, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Brands, Marketing 2.0, Marketing.fm, Word Of Mouth
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Last week my friend Spencer Fry from Carbonmade showed me a cool activity he participates in about once a month. His company sends out a message to its users inviting them into a Drop.io chatroom to discuss Carbonmade which is an online design portfolio company, and talk to the founders. More importantly, users get a chance to talk to each other.

At first, much like any other new public forum, Spencer has to spark conversation and ask a few questions. But what follows is usually a dialogue between users of the system, or newcomers. This allows people the opportunity to meet people behind the service, but also get an idea of what really goes on before taking the plunge and becoming a paying customer.

This is a great example of loading up the top of your sales funnel.
carbonchatStarted by this tweet.

By inviting current and prospective customers to talk together you are building a brand ethos.

The beginnings of these chat rooms are always tough, like any new group, but once the conversations get started the rest is easy. You have to seed the discussion with news, updates, offers, invitations, or even soliciting feedback. Soon the conversations will happen between others in the room and you have achieved your goal.

This approach may not work for all businesses and brands, but if you can get a handful of people to click through to a chatroom once a month – you know you have interested people.

Many companies have two way communication via blogs and comments – but there is something powerful about a real time chat where you actually get to interact with the folks behind a business.

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Posted by Eric Friedman on September 24, 2009

http://www.ericgfriedman.com/2009/09/24/talk-to-your-customers-and-let-them-talk-to-each-other/

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  • http://www.spencerfry.com/ Spencer Fry

    Does anyone remember way back in the day when service websites — web hosts, etc. — use to have live chat? (I know some websites still do it, but it's not as popular as it was 5 years ago.) There'd be a little button you'd click to get live chat and talk to the support/sales people. This is kind of what inspired this new version of chat. But maintaining a 24/7 live chat presence is just too demanding and the “offline” mode is too damaging to your company. Now with Twitter we can just post out to our followers that we're available to talk to and the same goal is accomplished.

  • http://www.marketing.fm EricFriedman

    Rackspace uses this regularly and so do some other sites. Its still a great
    way to start talking to customers when they are browsing your site. I think
    your approach to the chatroom is great because its a implicit vote to come
    in and talk amongst others not just customer to company.

  • http://www.spencerfry.com/ Spencer Fry

    Yeah. The problem with Rackspace's approach is that it just doesn't work for small businesses, because you can't take the time to participate in the live chat 24/7. You'd basically be giving up your normal work to chat with your customers. Also the offline state looks really bad. Although, you can tweak that and hide the chat altogether when you're not online.

  • angelia110

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  • http://www.leveragingideas.com Sam Huleatt

    betaworks has/had a project called Firefly…not sure what became of it

  • http://www.marketing.fm EricFriedman

    I think this is great for onsite chat – but sometimes not having the
    distraction of a page and overlay for the common web surfer can do wonders
    for people that are not as tech savvy.

  • http://www.leveragingideas.com Sam Huleatt

    agreed.

  • Pingback: jonsteinberg » CarbonCrush

  • hpscole2

    Eric- what do you think about a live support button on a retail website and for support to new parents?

  • http://www.marketing.fm EricFriedman

    Its all about A/B testing and conversions – you should test it with and
    without.

  • http://www.shopPapoose.com Holly

    Well…we are not using it now. Do you recommend a particular company to use for this? I would love to give live online support since we give 24/7 phone support for breastfeeding mamas…it would be cool to reach out all over and have our site more recognized. Thoughts?

  • http://www.shopPapoose.com/ Holly

    Eric- what do you think about a live support button on a retail website and for support to new parents?

  • http://www.shopPapoose.com Holly

    Eric- what do you think about a live support button on a retail website and for support to new parents?

  • http://www.marketing.fm EricFriedman

    Its all about A/B testing and conversions – you should test it with and
    without.

  • http://www.shopPapoose.com Holly

    Well…we are not using it now. Do you recommend a particular company to use for this? I would love to give live online support since we give 24/7 phone support for breastfeeding mamas…it would be cool to reach out all over and have our site more recognized. Thoughts?

  • coetsee

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  • http://www.squidoo.com/mark-ling Mark Ling

    this is a pretty cool idea