Category: Case Study

Why Forex Trading Is Better with the Right Friends

Indigenous or not, FX Renew is a tribe worth talking about.

Tribe? Yes, tribe.

Seth Godin, best-selling author, wrote in his book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us: “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”

In this case, the shared interest is Forex trading and the way to communicate is group chat. With Godin’s tribe criteria met, FX Renew has become one of the top resources for those interested in Forex trading.

Sam Eder, owner of FX Renew, honed in on the online tribe strategy by integrating RumbleTalk group chat into his Forex trading website. Since then he has seen an increase in customers, returning customers, and the value of his community.

More About FX Renew

I recently spoke with Sam to find out how exactly RumbleTalk group chat is used in his Forex trading and signal sharing company.

My first question was, what is FX Renew?

Sam explained it like this:

FX Renew operates in the on-line Forex trading industry. We provide foreign currency traders with access to education and trade ideas from ex-bank and industry professionals.

To achieve the tribal feel, Sam needed a way to connect with FX Renew members in an instantaneous and personal way. Engaging the Forex trading community, Sam can pool the collective knowledge and share time sensitive information to members actively engaged at that moment.

Group chat has elevated FX Renew from a talk-at-you educational site to an immersive educational experience.

To better understand how this happens, I asked Sam a few more questions.

How do you use RumbleTalk group chat and how does this benefit your customers?

Our RumbleTalk chat is used as a members chat, available for access by paying customers. The key benefits of the chat are:

  • RumbleTalk has greatly enhanced our “trading tribe” by facilitating communication between our customers and our traders. This is great because it allows traders to get personalized help and support to improve their trading, and to deal with specific issues on their mind.
  • We use the chat-room to distribute bank reports. This allows traders to access information that is not generally available to the public in a timely manner.
  • We use RumbleTalk to hold live events, so traders can learn how to trade step-by-step in real time.

forex trading

And on the other side, how does having the group chat feature benefit your Forex trading business?

The benefits to the business have been the ability to communicate directly with clients leading to significantly improved customer retention. We have improved the value of our client offering leading to increased customer satisfaction.

From your perspective working with the RumbleTalk software, what feature stands out?

One of my favorite things about RumbleTalk was the speed and ease of set-up, and it is great value for the money with a return of investment of several thousand percent. The mobile version is also excellent.

What I learned

By creating an open space for experts and members to communicate, customers can ask questions, get custom answers, and develop loyalty to the tribe and a personal stake in the community.

There are a lot of free tools out there to communicate with your tribe, so why group chat?

The traditional online communication tools have limitations when it comes to building an online community:

  • a static website talks at a customer and not with the customer;
  • email is to slow and easily becomes lost in a crowded or unchecked inbox; and
  • social media spreads customer conversations between platforms and removes the incentive pay for access.

By using group chat, FX Renew easily integrated the entire conversation into one window next to Sam’s Forex trading content.

Group chat users are focused on the information at hand and aren’t distracted by off-topic emails, tweets, or notifications.

And most importantly, the conversation becomes an active experience that brings customers back.

Posted on by Editor

Video Killed the Radio Star but the Internet Saved Him

It’s hard to write about radio without feeling nostalgic: as if radio were a thing of the past that met its unfortunate doom, the ominous Internet.

Of course, this is ludicrous because radio is alive and thriving today more than ever.

And RumbleTalk was there to help.

Radio adapted to the Internet

In 1979 the Buggles were singing about the tragedy “Video killed the radio star” but more than three decades later we still listen to radio.

This premonition was as accurate as the “futuristic” glitter hair worn in their video. Thank goodness that didn’t become a thing.

Also, the irony can’t be missed that radio was probably a better marketer of their song than that video, even as humorous as it is to watch.

The song could be rewritten today to say “Internet helped the radio star”, “Internet saved the radio star”, or even “Internet advanced the radio star.”

Today, you don’t even need an AM/FM channel to host a radio show. With the right software, the Internet is a full-fledged broadcasting platform.

That’s where RumbleTalk comes in.

Internet radio shows are now using group chat to engage with listeners in ways not possible prior to the wide use of the Internet.

I remember the days of calling in to comment on the topic of the hour, hoping to be the 10th caller to win tickets to the next concert, or simply calling to request a song.

Now these interactions can all be done with RumbleTalk group chat, and further, radio listeners can chat among each other. The conversation is open and accessible, no longer delayed by the speed of the call screener.

Just look at RadioNOPE to see how group chat works for their online radio show

RadioNOPE is an Internet rock ‘n roll radio station that has been a long time RumbleTalk customer.

Their group chat is embedded throughout their website to engage listeners on their homepage or while they are visiting the page of a specific show. Listeners can talk about the songs playing or interact directly with show hosts such as with Live from the Barrage, a favorite talk show hailing from Queens.

radio group chat
But don’t take my word for it…

Here’s what Conan, founder and self described “benevolent dictator” of RadioNOPE, had to say about RumbleTalk’s influence on the Internet radio station.

RumbleTalk is an integral part of the RadioNOPE experience. As a 24/7/365 streaming radio station that is heavily curated, the dialogue between station and listener is vital. Whether it is as simple as a listener asking information about the song that is playing, or just the shared experience of listening to things together, the chat takes RadioNOPE a cut above algorithm driven experiences like Pandora and its ilk, and the interaction has an extra level of engagement and surprise behind throwing on a Spotify playlist or putting a library on “shuffle”. This is true of the music shows, as well as the talk shows on the station, none more so than with the station’s flagship show “Live from the Barrage”, where listeners react with the hosts, guests, and each other with a special lexicon of in-jokes and phrases derived from the show itself.
RumbleTalk is how we elevate a simple website into one of the most carefully curated and awesome listening experiences on the Internet.

RumbleTalk for radio

The advantages of using RumbleTalk for radio are many.

Group chat is a necessary tool for a radio show to optimize listener engagement. With RumbleTalk, radio stations have a flexible platform that is easy to use for both you and your listeners.

You can have separate group chats for each show or one seamless experience throughout, use group chat for instantaneous dialog between show hosts and listeners as well as listener-listener.

Using group chat also captures just how many active listeners the show is reaching as opposed to just passive listeners. These numbers have many useful applications and can be helpful for higher advertising revenue.

And there’s one more thing, RumbleTalk loves radio. This means that as we continue to develop our product we’ll have you in mind and create features tailored especially for radio. That’s a service that just can’t be beat.

Visit our homepage or contact support@rumbletalk.com for more information on how RumbleTalk can improve your listener engagement.

Posted on by Editor

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 by Editor