Examples of community
Take a peek at a few companies who have excelled at building community with their customers.
It can be challenge to see how you can implement these ideas in your company, to see how building community can help you to get new customers and retain existing ones. Here are a few companies who have put community to work for them.
Dell IdeaStorm - community driven direction
In 1984, Michael Dell had an unprecedented idea – bypass the middleman and sell custom-built PCs directly to customers. Twenty three years later, Dell has taken this idea of direct communication even further with Dell IdeaStorm. IdeaStorm represents a new way to listen to customers on how to build the best products and services. It is an online community where customers can post their ideas on technology and Dell products, services and operations. The community will vote for the best ideas and discuss the ideas with other users. Dell shares the ideas throughout its organization to trigger new thoughts and evolve everything that is done at the company. Not only are ideas submitted, but Dell provides feedback about which ideas are actually implemented.
We are at our best when we are hearing directly from our customers. We listen, learn and then improve and innovate based on what our customers want. It’s one of the real advantages of being a direct company.
Michael Dell, Dell Chairman and CEO
Threadless - Community driven T-shirt design
Unlike most offline companies, the majority of Web 2.0 businesses are based on a foundation of community. T-shirt design site Threadless has grown to 750,000 registered users in five years by letting its community guide the company's direction. The business is based on user-submitted designs getting voted on by others. The most popular designs get made and are sold on the site. Threadless has made both large and small changes to its approach based on customer feedback. Last year, a user who never bought anything from the site suggested that Threadless should change its e-mail newsletters to show just the design, rather than the full T-shirt, and the company quickly made this change. It also created a critique section for designers to get feedback after the realized that people had been using their Threadless blogs for this.
For a great review about what makes Threadless so special, check out this post over at 37signals.
The community changes the brand to suit them. We don't have expectations of what Threadless will be. We just manage the parameters.
Jeffrey Kalmikoff, CCO of Threadless parent company, Skinnycorp
iStockPhoto - Member-generated image bank
Only a few years ago if you were interested in getting professional quality images you would need to spend hundreds of dollars per photo using a professional photographer or studio. Today iStockphoto offers a collection of over 3 million professional quality images for prices as low as $ 1. They have managed to do this by allowing anyone to upload their own pictures and earn royalties as the pictures are purchased. The service is extremely simple and user-friendly: you register up for free, search images by keywords, select the ones you are interested in, pay and download them. iStockPhoto has been so successful that in 2006, Getty images aquired them for $50 million (USD).
I believe that the model of crowdsourcing can be viable for many industries... The possibilities are endless.
Bruce Livingstone, iStockphoto Founder and CEO