bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

“Low barriers to entry high barriers to success”

That is, anyone can leap in due to the democratisation but success? That’s another whole ball game.

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Having my monthly coffee with Rich of GetFrank we were talking about all the learnings you get from running an online business.

It really is all about the groundswell – creating the word of mouth.

It’s less about sinking money into something and more pulling your sleeves up and getting your hands dirty.

These are the fundamentals offline as well, yet you forget the basics to be honest.

If you can take these basic principles back offline into a traditional market you can really dominate.

Imagine applying Internet Marketing 101 to staplers? fruit juice? car tyres?

Your marketing cost would be a fraction of the competition and I daresay magnitudes times more effective.

Basic concept of innovation – take a successful framework into a new context.  You could have some real fun with it – so why not give it a shot?

I have discussed somewhat about building a community to enhance customer engagement (amongst many other benefits).

Given recent conversations I’ve had there appears to be a bit of a stigma around the labour investment in building a community.

So I wanted to highlight a recent example from Vodafone New Zealand.

They launched an online forum at forum.vodafone.co.nz August 1st 2008.

Investment was:

• $150 for forum license
• 3 people engaged over a month, checking in every now and again to keep an eye on it
• Link under Help on Vodafone website and a mention on Geekzone

Results:

• 250,000 visits with an average time of just under 4 minutes.
• That’s a whooping 1 million minutes/ month.  Or the equivalent of 697 days (back to back) of attention.
• 356 registered members and ~3000 posts (till Sept 17th)

From other forum’s Vodafone has run, they have found only 1 out of 5 questions requires an official response.

Over time the forum will build a repository of information that will provide answers to users without ANY extra work by Vodafone.

Isn’t this brilliant? What a fantastic way to help your customers.  I hope this makes others stand up and give it another look.

Oh and….

If your trying to figure the ROI on that.  Compare the attention time on the forum vs the equivalent cost of having them dealing with front line staff OR cost of getting that amount of attention OR measure impact on brand loyalty OR measure the value of the feedback you receive.

You can see your return comes in many forms.  Measure what is important.

Great to see Vodafone trying new methods to help their customers, keep up the good work!