Social Media: Online Community Portals

In my previous internships I had the opportunity to work closely with the social media department at National Instruments. This department worked closely with tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, online communities, and YouTube.  Each of these different tools served a different purpose for the company, and many were so new that they were in the experimental stages. The idea was, let’s try something once and see what happens; if it ends up doing good, we’ll keep it up, if it ends up doing poorly, let’s try something else.

            

One of the projects I completed was launched at our national sales conference in August. Essentially at this conference thousands of engineers (who were typically customers) from across the globe would come to hear about the latest NI releases, and as a marketer we wanted to gather as much information about these people as possible. By gathering this information we hoped to gain insight into their specific needs, perceptions, and concerns. Through this information we would be able to tailor our marketing campaigns in such a way as to most appeal to them. This could be done on a global level, but the goal was to possibly shift to a one-to-one marketing campaign for each customer in attendance.

            

In order to do this, the company felt a fun, interactive way to get customers involved with National Instruments, while still getting access to their basic information would be through social media. A few ideas were tossed around before finally a two-step approach was selected. At the conference we set up a “booth” that had a large flat-screen television that was displaying a National Instruments Google Map.  Customers would come to the booth and take a picture, put in a goofy message, and pinpoint where they were originally from on Google Maps.  The picture would then be projected onto the television at the specific geographic location they plugged in, and the Google Map would bounce around on a continuous loop.  The catch was, when the customers did this, they had to agree to join a National Instruments community portal, and to do that they had to create a National Instruments profile (if they didn’t already have one).

            

Our goal was to get about 250 customers to participate in the booth. The social media intern and I managed to get close to 350 customers to enter into the community.  The next step was focused upon this community portal. This community was a website that allowed the customers to network together through discussion boards, email the group, create events, upload pictures, ask questions, and essentially work much like a LinkedIn website.  While my internship ended before I could see the full effects of the community’s success, I had seen how other National Instruments communities worked.

            

Our marketing teams would monitor these sites daily to see what types of questions were being asked, if suggestions were being made, or if any of the customers seemed dissatisfied. Sometimes, the marketers would even post a question themselves to see the types of responses they could get from customers. By collecting these insights, the marketers were able to put together different plans that incorporated the types of marketing best accepted by these people. In addition, by joining the community, the customers opted in to getting emails from the community page. Therefore, the marketers could send out emails about upcoming product launches, events, tradeshows, awards we received, etc. Essentially it was an excellent way to keep our customers up to date on everything the company was doing. At the same time, it served as a tool for the marketers to gather data and insights from some of our most active customers, and use this to modify the marketing campaigns.

            

One of the most remarkable uses of a community portal I saw at National Instruments was done through a company-wide community. Anybody could join this online community who was interested in National Instruments (i.e. they didn’t have to necessarily be a customer). On this community, an R&D engineer got approval to run a contest online. The contest basically posed the question, what would you do to improve LabVIEW (our graphical user interface product). The entrants with the best ideas would have their features incorporated into the new release as well as be featured at the National Instruments sales conference.  Hundreds of submissions were made, and 10-12 ideas were finally incorporated. The insights these customers gave not only helped the R&D department to improve our product features; they sparked more online communication outside the realm of the contest. Therefore, not only did the community prove successful with R&D in this case, the marketers monitoring the site gather insights that helped them determine everything from future marketing tactics to the best way to acknowledge these contest winners.