Do you seek actionable insights based  on authentic customer feedback on products and/or services?

What if you had access to invaluable data concerning your ideal customers? Data that brands like Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Reddit, and others have used to become the power houses they are today? 

What if you could turn your social and consumer audience into a real-time super-sized focus group community within hours?

Seth Godin, a leading marketing expert and author of 18 books, says the future of marketing is community and the benefits are numerous. Not only do they provide insights into customers’ needs and preferences, but managed well they significantly increase customer retention and loyalty, improve reputation, propel word of mouth, lower support costs, allow for collaboration and co-creation.

At the same time as building an authentic community, there is a need for brands to remain outside of the confines of the walled gardens of the social media giants, who now want to control all of that data.

Community management begins at the very start of the customer journey- when brand and customer relationships are established. An effective community management strategy should include acquisition and content validity, social customer care, crisis management , retention and advocacy
Building valuable online communities is about fostering authenticity and member to member engagements. Whilst social listening interpretation is a key component that drives a successful community, one aspect that traditionally gets overlooked, or is managed badly, is asking. Or more specifically- social asking.

Ask and Ye Shall Find.

So what is social asking and why is it a game changer for community management?

The best person to ask is the person who coined the phrase in the first place- Dr Jillian Ney.

Jillian is the UK’s first Dr of social media and a digital behavioural scientist. She also runs the Social Intelligence Lab, a membership community for social intelligence professionals.  Over the last decade of analysing social data, she’s also been at the leading and bleeding edge of technology adoption, with unparalleled knowledge on all of the platforms claiming to solve all our insight challenges.

“ Social asking is the activation of social media audiences, by engaging them in directed dialogue to answer specific questions and uncover insight about a specific topic.

From a research perspective social listening has been billed as a method of ‘no questions research’, where no direct questions could be asked to research respondents.  Social listening and ‘no questions research’ are a new form of primary market research that uses existing data to answer market research questions. Now with ‘social asking’, we can use the power of social media to reach interested audiences, ask them a question and receive a direct answer to this question. It is a new way to conduct research online.  One that builds community, creating a new kind of online focus group, that is always on, primed, and ready to answer questions from the consumer world highlighting the appropriate language and rituals for that group.

Social asking in a basic form has been around for a while- think about the interactive polls on Facebook, Twitter, inside Instagram stories.  These are all methods of social asking, to activate audiences, engage them in a question with the aim of uncovering specific insight about a topic. Now we are seeing new technologies that build on this, activating and asking audiences, that use machine learning and AI to intelligently analyse conversation and provide immediate insights.”

Jillian Ney, Social Intelligence Lab

Zoning in on these new technologies and platforms, as we love to do, Qutee is a unique platform and a logical manifestation of social asking . We reached out to Tim Wilson, CEO and Founder of Qutee to explain the platform in more detail.

“Qutee is a social asking comments forum with AI analytics that allows you to create a super-sized focus group within hours and understand thousands of opinions in real-time. It provides a more intelligent environment for engaging your audience and collecting insights at scale. The combination of an nlp powered commenting system that allows users to filter comments instead of scrolling, world class analytics dashboard and comprehensive downloadable insights reports takes Qutee above and beyond any traditional forum, survey or social listening or social media offering.”

Tim Wilson, Qutee

We’re firm believers in being able to apply ‘so what’ to everything we position in terms of services to brand , so we asked Tim to provide context:

“Breaking things down , lets look at Qutee’s value:

vs traditional social platforms, the commenting experience for consumers is far superior as there is no need to scroll through endless sea of comments. Brands also have the ability to gather data and insights directly at scale and speed.

vs surveys, social and influencer friendly UX means greater engagement rates, and richer feedback.

vs social listening, delivers much more comprehensive real time data with no need for an expert analyst.

Vs legacy focus groups, can create super sized focus groups of 10,000’s of participants within hours .”

Tim Wilson, Qutee

So , to summarise, social asking with Qutee, enables influencers and brands to

• Create loyal, passionate consumer audiences via social or crm within hours.

• Increase consumer engagement and activation.

• Accelerate insights for product developers and marketing teams.

• Creat super-sized focus group you control, free of the data restrictions of the social media giants.
  

Online gaming- Context for Social Asking.

To provide further context- lets look at the gaming community, an industry sector that has seen massive value from social asking and AI driven community management. The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the UK’s entire entertainment market, according to a report from the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA). The industry is worth £3.86bn ($4.85bn) – more than double its value in 2007. That makes it more lucrative than video and music combined. The success is largely down to three games: Fifa, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

Since the mid-1990s online surveys have been a great way to reach and engage with your target audience. Not much has changed when you look at the offering of today’s most successful survey companies. Until now. Trends change. New industries are created. Ways of communicating and collaborating have changed. 

Community managers in the gaming industry were the first to conduct polls and surveys in a social, digital ecosystem. They didn’t just post question-based surveys. Gaming community managers went a step further and utilised a much more powerful way to gather important audience insights. Instead, they started goal-oriented discussions and observed. They were actively listening, while strategically guiding the conversation to collect valuable data. Understanding the why and how not just the what

Empowering Influencers Within The Community

Qutee is now being used by an increasing number of high profile gaming influencers as a better way to manage their comments, understand their audience and increase engagement, follower numbers and view stats.

Examples – Qutee Fifa 18

Youtube influencers CapGunTom, Homlespenguin and Oaklefish collected over 1800 comments and 2500 poll results on FIFA 18 from their FIFA 18 gamer community and in less than 48 hours identified key issues of concern within the new release.

• Influencer data stories have empowered the gaming community voice, generating global media coverage.
• Gaming influencers are successfully using Qutee to gain vital insights from their audiences, grow their channels and improve their own brand worth)

Community Management – A Better Way

To help brands on their way to better community management , we’ve put together a community-building framework for social asking, working with influencers and Qutee. We’ve mapped out, identified and are working with the right influencers in each industry sector, so you don’t have to. We know what works for them and for you.

Establishing a strong community foundation is critical when launching a new ecosystem. The most effective formula is to invite influencers within a specific niche you’re targeting. Your customers trust and value the influencers’ opinions. Their presence alone will fuel viral and authentic discussions. Partnering with influencers generates substantial ROIs for businesses, averaging a 650% return.

Next, we apply the community framework strategy by converting your ideal clients into community members. We transform those members into active posters, community heroes, and advocates. We administrate a conversion approach. It’s not growth you need to worry about when launching a new community. At least, not literally. We help you plan and host a highly converting digital environment and then scale it.

The above approach is applicable to all digital industry sectors, but in order to be able to build a community at scale and speed, the correct combination of talent, technology, and timing is required. We  have developed a powerful community-building framework, which in combination with the right AI and Influencer powered community platform, will take your business into the future of community and customer relationship management. 

We apply gamification, offers and social media outreach methodologies to start and grow massive discussions where community members with matching interests participate. For example, in industries like e-sports and social gaming , members love to be rewarded, recognised, and listed in rankings. We gamify the entire communication experience which significantly increases the number of participants and propels word of mouth growth. The backend data provided by the AI-powered community management platform allows us to reward the most active members with the highest value of contributions. 

If your’e looking at your community management requirements right now , to ensure that it continues to thrive, please reach out to us for a free consultation and assessment.