Company: StarHub
Entry submitted by: Darren Choo (darren) AVP of Social CRM
Community: StarHub Community (http://community.starhub.com/)
Lithy category: Marketing Champion
StarHub is Singapore's fully-integrated info-communications company, offering a full range of information, communications and entertainment services for both consumer and corporate markets. StarHub operates a mobile network that provides 4G, 3G and 2G services. It also manages an islandwide HFC network that delivers multi-channel pay TV services (including HDTV, Internet TV and on-demand services) as well as ultra-high speed residential broadband services. StarHub operates an extensive fixed business network that provides a wide range of data, voice and wholesale services. Over Singapore’s fibre-based Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network, StarHub offers a broad range of home and business broadband plans along with a host of advanced media-rich value-added services, such as IPTV for commercial entities.
StarHub Community activates its superfans to support its marketing strategies. Six in every 10 visitors come for its contests and user-generated marketing content instead of customer support. http://community.starhub.com/t5/Commendations-Testimonials/StarHub-Community-is-growing-and-we-have-YOU-to-thank-for-it/m-p/27176#M10
1) Beating the ZMOT Challenge
- The Social Customer believes more in actual user reviews than a brand’s marketing messages. This phenomenon—commonly known as Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)—can easily nullify the work of traditional marketing.
- To address this shift in consumer behaviour, StarHub Community generates user reviews. Lithium’s excellent SEO often surprises us with excellent search results. In fact more than half of the Community’s traffic comes from Searches. This allows StarHub to better manage ZMOT, instead of losing control to third party forums or showing no reviews at all For example, here are some HomeHub reviews: http://community.starhub.com/t5/HomeHub-Reviews/idb-p/HomeHubSurvey
2) Influencer and Content Marketing Strategy
- Traditional influencer strategy pays influential bloggers to share content with their followers. However, these blogs are off-domain and their credibility may also/often be questioned.
- Utilising Lithium’s blog function, an ordinary community blogger’s post can be promoted via the Community (using Outbrain native advertising and social syndication) and can have significant reach and effect, e.g: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Mobile-Handset-Reviews/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-Edge-Review-Changes-To-My-Smartphone/ba-p/112652. It is noteworthy that even a few ordinary commentators can greatly boost credibility, as people generally believe in actual users’ experience and reviews.
- Lithium’s Group and Ask the Expert functions allow interests groups to be formed thus creating threads for common interests and within which there is greater perceived credibility for posted user reviews, e.g http://community.starhub.com/t5/Windows-Community-Group/Welcome-to-the-Windows-Community/gpm-p/75901#M88
3) Contest Engagement Strategy
- Traditional engagement utilises expensive microsites and Facebook applications with no consolidation of the relationships/connections with the customer. Often, contestants also do not get to see other contestants’ entries as well.
- The above issues are solved using Lithium’s Contest module for photo contests, for example: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/Contest-Closed-Win-a-Trip-To-Glasgow-to-watch-the-MTV-EMAs-2014/m-p/99559#M516) and Idea Exchange module for free flow user generated content contest with an added voting mechanism (see example http://community.starhub.com/t5/Past-Hackathons/CONTEST-CLOSED-Win-passes-to-meet-Kim-Soo-Hyun-in-person/m-p/73605#M16)
Our marketing campaign
Lady First SG is a StarHub-produced, localised version of the immensely popular Taiwanese beauty variety show, Lady First (女人我最大). Each season lasted for about three months. To date, StarHub has produced two seasons in the past two years.
Female viewers in Taiwan, after watching the beauty programme, would go to the forums to discuss the beauty tips and products featured. Tapping into this insight, social TV executions were executed on StarHub Community to bring these discussions online via StarHub Community.
The first mission was to source for beauty influencers to be the experts running the forums. In the first season, we set up beauty forums by topics http://community.starhub.com/t5/Lady-First-SG/ct-p/ladyfirst and ran a contest for the top six beauty influencers to surface.
Eventually through intense competition, the top six contestants arose. Please visit http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/StarHub-Community-s-first-offline-event-Meeting-up-with-the/m-p/26076#M218 to view the offline event. Together with partnering beauty brands’ influencers, they not only generated tonnes of beauty tips, but also became beauty experts from which others could seek advice: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Ask-The-Beauty-Expert/Learn-beauty-secrets-from-the-StarHub-Community-Beauty-Brand/m-p/44331#M2
Partnering brands also ran some contests:
In the 2014 season of Lady First SG, we activated two of the original six beauty influencers. Grace Tan was commissioned to blog about each episode in English while Yuki Ng did so in Chinese. The blog entries from both ladies were not mere translations but their own interpretations of the tips after watching each episode. We ran a contest asking members to post a comment on their blog entries or ask them questions. At the same time, we ran another contest to curate beauty tips from users with a chance to win a beauty workshop: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Past-Hackathons/Contest-Closed-Beauty-Workshop-by-Xiao-Kai/m-p/79381#M1 The contests were publicized on the TV trailers as well as online media.
Campaign results
Between Grace and Yuki, there were over 64,000 views and almost 600 comments on their blog entries alone. There are over 611,000 views on the Beauty section of the community where members get to discuss beauty and fashion related matters, such as finding out where to purchase the products featured in the show and share personal tips. Users can search by episodes or beauty topics to record their comments. In fact, the search term “Lady First” on Google yields StarHub Community as a prominent result.
With combined views of 675,000 across the blogs and forums on Lady First SG and Beauty and Fashion discussions, the execution has been a great success and has greatly enriched the content consumption experience with useful online content and engaging contests. The timeless tips shared on StarHub Community also continue to bring in traffic for the Community.
