Should Online Communities be part of Word of Mouth Programs

As a member of the Word of Mouth Association, I feel a little internal conflict writing this.

So here’s my confession: I think word of mouth programs and online communities have similar goals, such as getting users to recommend their products, but ‘how’ they achieve these goals is vastly different. Very different.

And I prefer to approach things the way (I think) a good Online Community manager should approach them…

Online community managers should focus on create a good customer experience!!

Whereas Word of Mouth explicitly tries to influence customers, online communities try to implicitly influence users (customers, prospects, small businesses, etc.). So what does implicitly influence mean? Basically, I look at our job at Intuit is to build the infrastructure to facilitate online interaction (via discussion boards, blogs, podcasts, etc.). And explicitly means ‘encouraging users to promote your products.’

In other words, if you create a great user experience (leveraging all the tools, processes and learning we have at Intuit) and a great product, hopefully users will recommend and promote you.

All of this fits in the philosophy for how to manage our QuickBooks and Quicken Online Communities. We basically do not allow any solicitation on the site, except in a restricted area. So, wouldn’t we be contradicting ourselves if we tried to sell on the community site and didn’t let the real owners of the community site, our users, promote their goods and services.

Thoughts?

Social Bookmarks: