Online Brand Communities: Advantages & Challenges

This is our third and final installment of the online brand community series. If you haven’t already, read the first two posts, Understand What Drives Customers and Outcomes & Results.

Continuing with our closer look at the paper titled Managing Brands and Customer Engagement in Online Brand Communities published in the Journal of Service Management, we’ll now examine the advantages, challenges and goals of engaging customers online.

How do your customers find you? Online? Obviously.

Rarely do I make a purchase without doing a bit of research online.

Can I find it cheaper?
What did others think of the purchase?
Are there alternatives?
Does the company utilize ethical business practices?
Is customer support responsive?

There a lot of questions to be asked!

Anticipating that your customers are going to seek answers online, you should use every tool you have to meet them in that space.

Now, once they find your online presence, are your customers compelled to stay? That’s up to you.

Building and managing an online brand community gives you and your customers a level ground to meet each other’s needs. After you’ve determined what your customers are seeking, you can create an online interface to attract, please, and keep your customers interested and returning.

But successful online brand communities are not easy to achieve. Many challenges exist in the initial set up and along the road. However, these challenges should not be a deterrent and are quickly outweighed by the numerous advantages of engaging your customers.

Advantages for your business

Once you have an active customer base engaging in your online brand community, you will have instant and continuous feedback. This invaluable market research can assist you and your team in choosing where you allocate human and capital resources, how you update and improve your product, and what products you develop for the future.

Research also shows that online brand communities cause companies to have better cross-department collaboration. Open and public comments can be seen by the entire company and make it easier for the technical and sales team members to hear the voice of the customers and develop cohesive strategies.

Online brand communities also strengthen the brand itself, giving the brand a face, a shape, and a story. This gives your customers the opportunity to associate your company with more than just the purchased item. The community breathes life into the company’s brand.

But why is any of this important?

It drives sales.

Again and again the study shows that an online brand community can influence sales by having a “positive impact on immediate purchase intention” and “retaining both experienced and novice consumers”.

Challenges of managing an online brand community

The dreaded bad review, unrelated negative comment thread, or vacant participation altogether…

Remember when I said that the community breathes life into the brand? Well sometimes that community can spit on the brand too.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s all sunshine and rainbows. Managing an online brand community means you’ll also have to manage the challenges that come with an open and public forum.

Here’s what to look out for:

Anti-brand comments and anti-brand communities

Someone will be dissatisfied and someone dissatisfied will get online and write about it. This could be directly on your site, on social media, or in extreme cases a site created just to be anti-your-brand.

Negative associations

I used to live in Washington, DC. During tourist seasons the city became bloated with slow-walking people crowding the sidewalks and metro. Even though I wanted to sternly tell the high school class, group of seniors, family of five with two strollers, whatever, to leave room for those of us trying to get to work, I couldn’t bring myself to ruin what could be those individuals only time to see their country’s Capitol. I would imagine someone’s memory of looking upon the Washington Monument being interrupted by my impatient words – and that wasn’t an association I wanted for my city.

But not everyone on the internet is as nice as I am to tourists.

Whatever content is floating around in your online brand community will be associated with your brand. Moderating your community is tricky. Moderate too much, and it looks like biased censorship. Moderate too little, and the brand could quickly become less than family friendly.

Allocating resources

Even with SaaS companies and free lancers ready to lend a hand (for a price), pulling off a polished online brand community takes a lot of time and effort.

Quality is a large component of any successful online brand community, and quality doesn’t come easily. You’ll need to make sure every effort has the resources to be done properly, which limits how much you can achieve.

Engaging consumers (who have plenty of distractions)

Without some sort of stake in the matter, consumers are not likely to engage. Online brand communities perform better when there is a sense of “co-ownership” between the consumers and the company.

Achieve this sense of “co-ownership” occurs when there is a mutual relationship between the company and the customer to nurture and grow the brand.

Let me put it this way: your customers will not be invested in the online brand community that only asks them to leave comments on a coupon.

Instead you should find innovative ways to ask for their participation and make their participation mean something.

Don’t be discouraged

Every time I have complained to my grandfather about how hard something was (piano lessons were a big one for me) he would say “If it were easy, I’d be able to do it.”

The benefits of managing an online brand community far outweigh the effort it takes to overcome the challenges. Facing and overcoming these challenges is what can set you apart from your competition.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the research.

RumbleTalk for your community

I took an interest in this research because at RumbleTalk, we are all about online brand communities. This is the whole reasons our company exists.

I’m always impressed with the creative ways companies use group chats to build their community and improve their brand. We’ve seen our group chats used in numerous fields from churches to financial traders and everything in between.

We provide a community building tool, for more information check out our homepage here.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the research, how it applies to your online presence. I’m listening.

Posted on March 6, 2016October 2, 2016 by Editor

Online Brand Communities: Outcomes and Results

Last week we looked what motivates customers to engage in an online brand community. If you haven’t already, go back and read that blog post here.

The success of any business, be it online or brick and mortar, depends on customers trusting and returning to the brand.

Bill Gates has been quoted saying,

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”

So use the digital town square to build trust and commitment with your customers!

Simply having a website with your business’s information isn’t enough. I consider static websites to be the equivalent of a highway billboard in a deserted town. Sure, it can give your company exposure but that’s the end of it. A billboard or informational website won’t increase your customer’s satisfaction.

Instead, you need to have people in the digital town square to talk about your brand and your product. That is, you need to have people interact and be personally involved with your online brand community to humanize your brand.

There are many ways to do this, including group chats which is what RumbleTalk promotes, but today’s article is the outcomes of managing an online brand community.

Reading through the study’s section about outcomes, I pictured a cycle to describe the customer’s perspective and a spiral to describe the brand’s perspective.

Cycle of Customer Engagement

We all generally agree returning customers are essential to the success of a business.

Harnessing the power of online tools to build an online brand community can lead to happy and returning customers. This is how it works:

cycle of online communities

From a customer’s perspective, as discussed in my previous post, engaging in an online community occurs in order to gain something. For the sake of this example we’ll say the customer is trying to gain knowledge about the product.

When the customer’s expectations for gaining knowledge have been met (or if you’re doing it right, exceeded) their level of satisfaction with your product or brand is increased.

Increased satisfaction creates a higher sense of loyalty to the product or brand.

And this loyalty encourages future customer-brand engagement.

Because this loyal customer is now contributing more to your online brand community, the community as a whole now shares this customer’s perspective and insight which enriches the collective knowledge to generate higher satisfaction.

And the cycle continues increasing the quantity (and hopefully quality) of information about your product and strengthening the customer’s loyalty towards your brand.

The outcome for the online brand community, as observed by researches, is continuing participation, a sense of satisfaction for the customers, and greater trust and commitment to the brand.

Spiral of Growth

Returning customers are necessary, but let’s not forget that new customers also grow profits.

The spiral of outcomes for managing an online brand community begins with the same four steps included in the cycle. But rather than feeding back into a cycle the spiral illustrates the growth that occurs in the online brand community and consequently the business.

growth of online brand communities

The process starts with engaging a customer online, the customer gains product knowledge, becomes satisfied with the product and brand, and the satisfaction increases brand loyalty.

Then, the customer increases engagement with the online brand community and this is where the cycle shifts outward to become a growing spiral.

The online brand community has more activity and engagement than previously which increases the amount of product knowledge to be gained. The value of the online brand community improves which amounts to greater trustworthiness among the online brand community.

When customers know they can trust the online brand community, their trust can be translated to commitment to the brand. This loyalty brings in more customers as the community members recommend the brand, and the brand’s reputation becomes known.

The outcome for the brand itself is higher brand commitment, spirited brand engagement, and brand satisfaction and loyalty, all of which give way to more and better customers.

Should you build an online brand community?

When your competitors are only a few clicks away from stealing away a paying customer, businesses should allocate resources towards building and engaging in an online brand community to enhance their customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Next week, I’ll be writing my final post regarding research of online brand communities. Want more now? You can read the full literature review here.

Posted on February 28, 2016October 13, 2021 by Editor

All the Reasons You Need Chat Security Using HTTPS

RumbleTalk’s customers trust our group chat to be private and secure. We understand that social stock trading, exclusive clubs, and other private online communities prioritize security so we’ve made it our priority to engineer advanced security features into our service.
In this post we will focus on the SSL/TLS security layer. But, did you know that using secured connections is good for more than just security?
We will discuss the multiple benefits of using secured connections and how you can better secure your group chat.
Why do you need to care about HTTPS?

Well, let me explain. SSL/TLS and HTTPS have been an industry standard for a long time but is becoming increasingly more important.

Previously, security was only a concern to those who wanted to ensure their online data was kept in strict confidentiality. Today, more and more platforms are looking at the security of websites and web apps to determine if it should be rewarded with better search rankings or functionality at all.

Simply put, if your website is not properly secured it could be ignored or not work.

Why does security matter, beyond security?

Let’s take a step back and talk about the “Edward Snowden Effect”. In 2013, Edward Snowden, known as either a traitor or whistle blower, stole and leaked classified government documents revealing the scope of United States data collection programs. Many countries reacted by ending contracts and trade deals with the US, and people from around the world changed their own online security practices fearing (or in some cases having confirmed) their information was being collected by the NSA.

With this in mind and knowing that someone is eavesdropping, many businesses changed their policies to build trust among users that their data is secure.

Google has taken steps to reward websites that prioritize security with better search rankings. Several web app services are not recognized to operate unless they use secured connections.

Why do I need a secure chat room?

Your website may or may not be secure, but why do you need security for your chat room? Google is a huge factor in this decision.

Because Google says so #1

First, better and more complete security improves your search engine optimization (SEO). If your website is not secured your SEO will suffer. As I’ve said before, google rewards secure websites.

Because Google says so #2

Google is not just a search engine, it much, much, more. Google sets the industry standards and have the most popular web browser, Chrome. If your website is not in line with the Google’s standards, it may not work and respond with Google Chrome or other browsers following their lead.

Because Google says so #3

If you want to use live video and live audio calls using google standard communication, called WebRTC. you will need to use a secured connection. In late December chrome stopped supporting WebRTC communication using HTTP instead of the new standard, HTTPS. (more on this later)

How RumbleTalk group chat works into all of this

For years, RumbleTalk chat rooms have been equipped with the latest HTTPS/SSL technology to ensure chat security for all users.

In order to enable an HTTPS (SSL/TLs) protection for your chat security, you can follow this simple instruction:

Copy the code from your dashboard. If it contains HTTP, please change it to HTTPS. Then, your chat room will be secured and protected with our latest HTTPS/SSL technology.

Currently, our team is working on making secured connections the default option for all of our group chats. This feature will be released in the next few weeks.

Do note, HTTPS is a very fundamental layer of security. You can add various additional levels of security in the chat itself. For example, you can put the group chat behind a special area in your website for members only.

A deeper look at HTTPS/SSL

Simply said, HTTPS is a secured HTTP protocol over SSL, a Secure Socket Layer.

HTTPS/SSL is the standard for secure communication between browsers and servers. Without using this protection, all data transmitted between clients (browsers) and servers are open and visible to anyone looking. Anyone who can tap into the browser-server communication will be able to see the communication.

HTTPS provides another layer of security which encrypts communication end-to-end resulting in only the designated browser and designated web server accessing the data being transmitted between them. Attempts to eavesdrop or tamper with the communication will fail, because the HTTPS/SSL provide a security layer that protect the communication channel between server and browser.

The more advanced version of SSL is Transport Layer Security (TLS), which adds more authentication between server and browser. Both browser and server will connect with a handshake procedure, allowing verification of the server’s authenticity using a digital certificate. Therefore, you will always be sure that you are connected to the right server, and also ensure that the server is secured.

To make sure your URL is secured, check the green icon next to the URL. If it is green, you are good to go. If it is white, you might be secured but links in the chat.

You can always see whether the server is secured or not by looking at the address bar in your browser: the web address will begin with HTTPS and you will see a green lock next to the address. You can click the green lock to obtain more information regarding the server authenticity.

Barriers to HTTPS/SSL

Because of all the reasons discussed above, I can only one reason to not implement HTTPS/SSL, cost.

Sites that do not implement HTTPS/SSL are not prepared to enhance their chat security. Therefore, when they implement HTTPS/SSL, there will be additional cost and added complexities to site management.

A website needs to acquire certification and then must add another layer of security to its server-browser communication. That takes resources, adding more manpower and modification.

Furthermore, after the modification is done, there will be another cost involving bandwidth and CPU. Implementing HTTPS/SSL requires more bandwidth because of its new layer of security. It also needs a higher power server, yet another cost.

Always activate secured room for your confidential conversation

RumbleTalk group chat has been equipped with HTTPS/SSL protection, and it is advisable to activate the secured room for your private chat. Doing so will allow your customers to trust that their conversation is not being eavesdropped, ensure live video and live audio calls work properly, and improve your website’s SEO ranking with Google.

A secured room provides enhanced chat security and protection for information shared among people communicating in the chat room. Enabling secured room will activate the HTTPS/SSL protection into the chat room, adding more security and thwarting any attempt of eavesdropping or interference.

Posted on February 25, 2016October 2, 2016 by Editor