Hans’ Best Advice

The most important lesson for Philips is that we can build a relationship with prime audiences without owning the relationship itself. It’s more practical and successful to go where your audience is as opposed to trying to create a new community from scratch. Other key points are:

• keep it simple; and
• be open and transparent.

For instance competitors are free to join the community as long as they follow the rules. One purpose of the moderation is to keep the group clean of spam and job-hunters and interesting to the audience. Having trusted hosts and experts, and empowering internal staff to participate, makes the group even more relevant. It’s a great way for an organization to listen to customers and learn.