Company: upc cablecom GmbH
Entry submitted by: Oliver Lutz (Project Manager Social)
Community: upc cablecom Community
Lithy category: Marketing Champion
upc cablecom is a leading provider of communication and entertainment in Switzerland. Almost 1.4 million customers place their trust in the company’s various products for television, Internet, telephony and mobile.
The regional organisation for Austria/Switzerland generated revenue of CHF 1.7 billion in 2015 with more than 2,500 employees. upc cablecom has a strong parent company behind it in Liberty Global, which is headquartered in the UK.
Our unique promotion
upc cablecom had been running a community on an outdated platform for about 4 years. This platform was extremely limited in terms of moderation capabilities, gamification and features. Community moderators were faced with highly negative sentiment which could not be dealt with properly.
Lithium community was launched in June 2015 for upc. Target was to provide a scalable technology layer which could be used to further develop social activities. Expected benefit for the business was to provide an integrated state-of-the-art social and community technology for ease of use and effectiveness.
Specific goals we wanted to achieve (business case):
Quantitative:
- Increase NPS
- Decrease support cost
Qualitative:
- Improve sentiment drastically
- Go personal, human connection, adapt tonality, show the faces behind the company.
- Solidify the connections with our customers
- Increase internal awareness for social / community
Our strategy and tactics for community promotion
Based on our overall social strategy we defined tactics to gain the objectives listed above.
Tactics:
- Go personal and become truly social
- Surprise your customer – build human connections for the brand.
- Show presence onsite and offsite
- Try as much as you can, take up what works, abandon what does not work!
Since launch in June 2015 we worked on the following areas:
- Sweepstakes
- Videos
- Blog
- Community Live Talks
- Live Events
- Super Hero Programme
- Newsletters, personal letters
1) SWEEPSTAKES:
Push registration sweepstake
Target: Push registrations
Newsletter campaign for our customers in order to increase registration rate of the support community.
Customer activity: Register and tell us why you deserve the new iphone 6s.
Prize: iphone 6s
Halloween sweepstake
Target: Increase awareness and usage, create fun-factors
For Halloween we organized a sweepstake on tickets for the most exclusive Halloween party in Switzerland.
Customer activity: Tell us what your favorite horror movie is….
Sweepstake article in the blog
We produced a self-ironic YouTube Video (see chapter “Videos”) where we created a context between Halloween and a buggy product feature.
New avatars created for Halloween
Especially for the occasion of Halloween we extended the avatar offering with a range of “spooky avatars”.
2) VIDEOS
We produced a number of homemade low-budget videos on different topics.
Examples:
Community promotional video
Promoting the community. Video was used as TrueView campaign during 3 weeks and was published on YouTube. Main actor of the video clip is a community moderator. One of our community super users acted within this clip as well.
The „making-of” this video was published in one of our blog articles.
Halloween Video
Self-ironic spooky Halloween video with reference to a buggy feature of one of our products.
Connect Box unboxing Video
Production of an unboxing video for a newly launched modem.
The product manager presented the new product. Users could ask questions online.
3) BLOG
Target: Content Marketing; drive traffic!
We kicked off a blog in parallel with the community launch. Blog articles are produced
on a regular basis and drive traffic to the community and to our website.
4) LIVE TALKS
Target: Increase engagement, drive traffic
To become even more personal we introduced a Community Live Talk on a bi-monthly basis. We are discussing specific topics with internal or external experts live. We got engaged on senior management level and brought senior management into our live talks. Users can ask questions upfront or during the live-session.
WLAN Live Talk
5) LIVE EVENTS
Target: Increase engagement
For this year’s big company event we raffled tickets within the community. This generated a lot of interest and we had many community members on-site during the event. They got special treatment before, during and after the event and were really enthusiastic about it.
Live Ticker
In parallel, community guys organized a live ticker during the event which was broadcasted via our community blog.
6) SUPERUSER PROGRAMME
Target: Strengthen peer-to-peer support
We launched a new superuser programme this spring. Superusers are the fuel of our community and we rely highly on them in terms of peer to peer support. The relationship has been intensified over the past months. Our superusers love the programme and the appreciation which comes with it.
7) NEWSLETTERS/ PERSONAL LETTERS
Newsletters
Target: Drive engagement
A community newsletter is being sent out on a monthly basis to all registered users.
We promote relevant topics and make sure that customers perceive us as number 1 source for relevant support information.
Personal letters
Towards the end of the year we sent personal letters to the most active users of the community and said „Thank you“ for their engagement and their contributions..
Moreover, we produced a small video explaining with what we had been busy with during 2015.
Our results
- Sweepstakes
- Videos
- Blog
- Community Live Talks
- Live Events
- Superuser Programme
- Newsletters, personal letters
1. Sweepstakes
Push registration sweepstake
- 290 new registrations
- over 350 participants
Halloween avatars & sweepstake
- More than 100 users changed their avatar to one out of the Halloween range.
- Very positive feedback on the self-ironic video
2. Videos
Community Promoclip
- Over 36’000 views on YouTube.
- Very positive feedback on YouTube & within the Community
- The YouTube Trueview-campaign performed clearly over the Google Benchmarks.
Connect Box unboxing:
- Top position in the (Google) SERPs for the product name
- 70 comments/questions on the new modem within the blog
- 8000 views on YouTube (without further promotion)
- 230 participants in the competition
- Very positive feedback on the personal style of the announcement
3. Blog
130 articles, 760 comments, 80’000 page views, 430 kudos since launch
4. Community Live Talks
- Over 40 questions raised by Community members upfront and during the talk
- High senior management attention
- Based on the results of our community live talks senior management decided to use the live talk format for internal communications as well.
5. Live Event & Liveticker
- High interest in the 20 seats
- Over 3000 page views blog visits (LiveTicker) during the event
- Very positive feedback (external & internal)
- High interest in the 20 seats
- Over 3000 page views blog visits (LiveTicker) during the Event
- Very positive feedback (external & internal)
6. Superuser programme
- Programme was kicked off with 4 superheroes
- Continuous exchange via Superhero board and Skype
- Personal meetings on a regular basis
7.Newsletters and personal letters
Newsletters
- Open Rate ca. 35%, Click Rate ca. 20%,
- Resulting in a regular increase of contributions (Boards & Blogs)
Personal letters
- Intensified relationship with the top users