Company: KPN
Entry submitted by: Lourens Reijgersberg, Hugo de Vries, and Thomas Pel (ThomasPel) Social Innovations Manager
Community: KPN Community (http://forum.kpn.com)
Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch
KPN is a leading Dutch provider of ICT services. With a wide range of products and services, we operate with different brands many different customer groups – both at home and abroad. From prepaid calling in the US, to interactive HD television in the Netherlands.
The goal of our Community promotion
At the close of 2014 the KPN Community team got together and aimed to achieve a number of goals simultaneously in the first quarter of 2015. All of these goals would prove to be beneficial for both our customers as well as our peers in other departments.
To support the communication of our brand message and to maximize conversation surrounding the added value of KPN services of products we would set out to develop a fresh version of the KPN Blog which would include a new design and a number of new features, which included commenting via Facebook, whatsapp sharing and a clear categorization by connecting with the company wide / marketing content strategy.
To make sure our customers got a community experience which would beat their expectations, we developed a customized theme header. This ensured they wouldn’t miss out on relevant, new or trending content from any part of the community (eg. Forum, blog, co-creation platform or even the TKB). Relevancy was the key goal here, so the theme header would function contextual and content would be relevant to the environment you are in. Theme header would also function as a bridge between different parts of the community and connect them in a seamless way.
At last, but certainly not least, the new blog had to be fully mobile supported to service the mobile traffic which was already about 70% of the total traffic of the blog. This was an important pre-requisite in this endeavor and had to be executed in a way that would rival the most popular Dutch blogs.
Our strategy
The strategy of executing this many innovations simultaneously was to go live with a big bang and overwhelm the community with a lot of added value at once. This was set for the Easter weekend at the beginning of april and ingenuously combined with an ‘Easter egg hunt’ which was promoted via our external social channels. This ‘hunt’ would take our customers through the entire platform and playfully introduce them to all the added value that was now available.
At the same time a co-creation project started specifically aimed at the mobile environment. Customers we’re encouraged to suggest new features and uncover bugs that we might have missed. After all, even though we are a telco we simply don’t have all the handhelds at our disposal .. but the community does!
Meanwhile the theme header would be populated with content that was partially handpicked by community members, thereby making sure that the highlighted content was supported by the community.
Our results
Despite only happening a couple of weeks ago, we are already seeing some very promising results from the innovations and the promotions that we used to launch them.
The first blogpost on the new blog received 16 comments in the first days it was live, which was huge compared to the average 1 or 2 comments that most of the ‘old’ blogs used to receive. This is accredited both the easter egg promotion which directed a lot of people from Facebook directly into the blog post and the Facebook comments which are now possible.
The content that was highlighted in the theme header saw on average a 40% uplift in visits compared to content that wasn’t. This was especially true for blog and TKB content highlighted in the heavy trafficked parts of the forum.
As mentioned before, these promotions have taken place very recently, so we’re expecting most of the results to follow in the next few months.
Our video
