FreshNetworks Blog

I’ve spent the day talking about online communities. At the WOM UK Espresso briefing this morning and then with a client until now. So returning to my desk it was great to see updates of two new online communities that have launched. One for US brokers, Charles Schwab, and the other for UK high street retailer, New Look.

For Charles Schwab, the online community is a benefit to its active clients. It has created Schwab Trading Community for it’s active trading clients to, reportedly, do four things:

1. Participate in timely discussions on both short and long-term investing topics
2. Swap information, ideas and trading experiences
3. Connect with other traders to make trading more fun by learning from each other
4. Gain access to Schwab and third party trading experts both informally and via a series of blogs, tutorials and live webinars

The New Look community is different. MyLook, as the community is called, will be for a select group of customers to help with business issues. As they say:

MyLook allows customers to share their views, suggest improvements to the brand and give opinions on the latest trends through surveys and forums on the site.

The insights gained will be presented to the board to shape the brand’s direction and strategy.

These two communities highlight well the very different purposes brands can use communities for and the different ways in which they then execute their plans.

• Charles Schwab is an example of a community that rewards loyal and regular customers – providing services that would be of use to them while extending their brand experience and building advocacy and word of mouth for the brand.
• New Look is an example of an online research community, it is private and invite-only. Building a community of customers to test new business ideas and to get feedback.

Whilst these are both online communities they are very different, they will probably use very different features, be attracting different types of people and be managed in different ways.

They are, of course, aimed at different types of people from brands in very different sectors. For me that just shows how online communities can be used by a wide range of brands to reach a wide range of people.

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