Guest Post by the Society of New Communications Research

What Companies Need to Do:
- Don’t over-engineer brand stories –but companies must facilitate and manage
- Must position but the brand story will develop organically based on customer feedback
- New technologies facilitate these exchanges now in ways that are effective and viral
- Companies must re-integrate customer insights into an evolving brand story

How the Co-author Model Works – Leads to Co-Creation:
- More than simply putting customer stories or CGM on your website – baby step
- Means 360 communications and open exchange with your customers
- Requires re-integration of customers’ stories into company’s branding, communications
- Engages loyal customers to cocreate: discover, develop, deploy new products
- This can be positive or negative – ex: JetBlue’s customers push for Bill of Rights

A Few Models That Work – What Do You Think?
- Software models – open-source (Linux), Microsoft Developers’ Forum, Adobe
- Consumer products – Whole Foods, Lego, Saturn, Ikea, Jones Soda
- Tech – Yahoo! as Case Study:

Co-Authoring to Co-Creating With New Technologies:
- Give customers new tools to create and share content with you and each other: dialoguing, gleaning insights, building trust, and co-creating stories and products to strengthen brand
- Monitoring and re-integrating feedback into company positioning
- Culling research for product ideas vetted by target

How? Ways include…
- Stories, peer tips and creations with your products, contests, forums for user-generated content and product ideas, open dialogue with CEO, ask for feedback on business models, products, book (John Mackey of Whole Foods let users became coauthors of his book)

What Keeps Companies from Implementing Despite Interest
- Not sure how – still learning how the new models work
- Management support and internal processes remain issues/barriers

How to Measure Success?
- Customers engaged, increased positive customer comments, loyalty, profitability, and trust
- Product ideas generated
- The value of customer insights gleaned – critical market research