After reading chapter 8 from the “groundswell”, we might have a better understanding that the groundswell support is way better than the traditional support ways. According to those numbers that mentioned from the groundswell, the companies need to spent a lot on the support for their products or services. Once the companies get touch in with the groundswell support and do it well after they completely mastered how to use it, it will bring a lot of benefits to the companies, not only reduce the cost of a company and it also makes the companies more efficient.
After reading the materials from the groundswell, we can easily find out that if the companies are getting start with the groundswell support, it is very important and necessary to build a good community for support itself. However, how do we build a good community for support? The groundswell did really detail some of the suggestions to the companies for building their community for support. They are as follows:
- Start small, but plan for a large presence.
- Reach our to your most active customers.
- Plan to drive traffic to your community.
- Build in a reputation system.
- Let your customers lead you.
(Li & Bernoff, 2011, p.174-176)
For those high-tech companies like Apple, it is very important that they better get start their product lines small, they need to be focused on a few things instead of too much product lines and try to avoid too complex. The customers for Apple, they better know how does the community work, so the company needs to find out those people who are Apple’s most active customers. Once the company open up a online support community like Facebook, Twitter or Myspace, they have to make links on their official website to the community’s web address, if do so, it will bring to the company’s support community a lot of traffic and attention. About build in a reputation system, it is truly important that if the company does build a good reputation system that allowed customers to participate and behave in a right place, this will give the company like Apple more credible advice. As we know that Apple has been trying to develop personality and convenient products all the time, the opinions from those customers are quite useful that Apple can develop better products and provide better services.
Reference:
Li, C. & Bernoff, J. (2011) Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing
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