Conversation Marketing Resources Resource Center 

This company provides quick-to-implement tools designed to generate feedback from your customers. These tools include hosted ratings and reviews, user-generated content (for example, giving customers the option to ask for or fill in gaps where more info is needed in your product copy) and moderated discussion forums. One very cool tool is called SyndicateVoice, which bundles up your ongoing reviews and uses them to improve your organic search marketing program by syndicating the reviews via RSS feeds to shopping sites and search engines. At the site you will also find a very informative blog and hundreds of research snippets and factoids about the power of using ratings and reviews as marketing tools. The company has dozens of clients, including QVC, Home Depot, CompUSA, Burpee, Dell and Overstock.com.

This company has turned Pay-As-You-Go wireless phones and services aimed at the 25-and-under youth market into a total lifestyle experience. To market to this demographic, Boost Mobile offers almost endless opportunities to participate and personalize your wireless lifestyle. These things include offering special limited edition phones, ringtones and games. Boost creates action and urban sports events such as the Boost Mobile Pro of Surf world championship and the Boost Mobile Elite 24, where the top 24 high school basketball players in the country get together for a game. They have car shows and concerts that showcase emerging alternative bands. We were especially intrigued by the Boost Mobile RockCorps, which encourages customers to do community service. Participants earn a ticket to a concert for every four hours of service they perform for a local nonprofit group. The key to participatory marketing on such a major scale is that every activity and touchpoint is carefully designed by Boost Mobile to authentically resonate with their target audience.

Communispace creates and manages private online communities for dozens of Fortune 1000 companies, including Avon, Bank of America, Bristol Meyers Squibb, Colgate-Palmolive, Kellogg's, McDonalds and Whirlpool. These communities can be configured to "talk" from company to customer, customer to company and/or customer to customer through surveys, chats, threaded discussions, multimedia galleries and the like. Clients have used their communities to build customer loyalty by creating "brand fans", to get feedback from customers early on in product development cycles, to generate taglines or other customer-collaborative activities and/or to conduct research.

One CPG client, for example, fielded 120 research projects in 10 months for 1/10th the cost of a traditional one-issue focus group. GlaxoSmithKline has an ongoing dialogue with women who struggle with weight loss issues to help develop and market a weight loss pill. Hewlett-Packard has a virtual "advisory board" of digital photography enthusiasts who share ideas, frustrations and opinions with one another and with hundreds of HP employees. Marketers take note – the voice of the consumer is your most valuable resource.

ConsumerSearch (which is a service from About.com, a part of The New York Times Company) is basically a search engine for the best product reviews to be found across the Web. Categories include office, sports and leisure, automotive, kitchen, computers and the like. Let's say you are in the market for kitchen knives. Click into the category or conduct a search and you will find links to 33 review sources, plus a short summary of what each source offers. In this case, there are expert-authored reviews in publications such as Cook's Illustrated, Consumer Reports, Fine Cooking and the Wall Street Journal as well as links to consumer/owner reviews from sources such as ePinions.com and Amazon.com. Reviews are rated based on a score that takes into consideration source credibility, methodology, the expertise of the reviewers and a weeding out of blatant self-serving content.

CoolChaser offers no-cost templates to MySpace members that enable them to easily create a personalized, nicely designed profile page with all the bells and whistles a MySpace fan would want. Here's the interesting part... while many of the templates are nonbranded designs in various color palettes and styles, there are also corporate-sponsored templates to choose from. Why, you ask, would a member want to use a corporate-branded design? That's the million dollar question, and the place where CoolChaser logically makes their money. One early adopter was Toyota Tundra, which allowed members to create a customized Tundra photo for their profile page. In most of the Toyota-branded pages we could find at MySpace, the member's Tundra photo was an enormous background image behind the boxes and fields where the member puts his or her name, photo and links to various things. The boxes and fields were translucent so you could see the Tundra photo behind them. This is a very interesting participatory branding concept that needs to be ultra cool to resonate with the MySpace generation.

It's one thing for consumers to post reviews of products and services to review sites like ePinions; it's entirely another (some might say courageous) thing to allow customers to do so on your own website. Crutchfield, a purveyor of cameras, home theater systems and the like, hosts forums and blogs where customers can share opinions about Crutchfield products and learn from one another's experiences and recommendations. Peruse any of the (at the time of writing) 5,625 threads and 6,699 posts that 1,577 members had created, and you will see a corporate-sponsored community in action.

A few choice contributions include:

1. Hi. Just installed the SIR-KEN1 to the KDC-X891 HU and it won't read it. I can't seem to get "sat" to come up as a source. Everything else works and all connections are correct. Am I missing something really simple or is there a programming trick? Everybody says these are compatible. Thanks for the help.
2. I was wondering if I would need a capacitor in my car. My lights really don't start dim till I turn it up to 30 and it goes to 35. I've got my Sub level at +7 now and it goes to +15. Bass level is at -8 and my amps gain is set to normal. I'm gonna need a 1.2 farad or higher capacitor, but they're kinda pricy...
3. I assembled my iTunes library of 4,000+ tunes from a variety of different sources. As a result, the volume levels varied greatly from track to track, making for a less-than-ideal listening experience. iTunes provided a simple fix that works for most of these problems...

Benefits to Crutchfield are real-time and honest feedback about their products and services. In addition, Crutchfield employees have the opportunity to step right into the community and offer answers or suggestions, which they promise to do within two days of any appropriate post.

Years ago, Oddcast created the concept of talking characters that you could embed into your website. Back then they seemed very futuristic and avatar-esque. Well, their time has come, and more than 8,000 companies of all stripes are using Oddcast VHost to create brand-appropriate, customized conversational characters that interact with their site visitors. Taking things a step further, companies can also use the technology to allow site visitors to create their own characters from a predetermined template, often with hilarious results.

For example, at CareerBuilder.com, the Age-O-Matic application powered by Oddcast allows you to upload a current photo or choose one from a gallery. Your photo is then aged 20 years into the future to show you what your "soul-sucking job" will do to you if remain unhappily employed. Similar fun interactions can be found from American Express (create a commercial with Ellen Degeneres and her animal crew), Doritos, vitaminwater, Dial SoftScrub, General Motors and more. What's the point of all this fun and games? Visitors who've created customized characters are encouraged to email them to friends, post them on their websites, blogs or MySpace profiles, etc. In other words, they're incented to market for the company thanks to an entertaining interaction. The site is a must-visit for hilarious examples of the technology as well as its talking case studies.

At the time of writing, the hip, hot and happening trend among banking institutions was the ability to create your own personalized bank card, either by picking your favorite photo from a selection of categories such as sports teams or dog breeds, or by uploading or creating your photo of choice to be printed on your card. Serverside Group is one company that offers this technology behind the scenes to companies like as ING, Capital One and Visa.

For example, the MINI Platinum Visa Card actually allows customers to create their own customized MINI Cooper as the photo to place on their cards. They then extend the conversation with an online Owners Lounge, where MINI aficionados can connect with motoring clubs across the land. Industry analysts say owning one of these personalized credit cards encourages customers to spend more. (As a matter of fact, this editor fell in love with Chase Bank One's partnership with the American Kennel Club and actually applied for a card based upon the fact that it could be imprinted with her beloved Chinese Crested dog breed photo.)