Interactivity?

Having interactive and conversational website is crucial for any company today. They all need to establish online tools with which customers can discuss its performance, ideas and also give critique about business behaviour. Shutting the general public out and work behind closed doors no longer works..

Most companies still are struggling with becoming more accessible and conversational with the public and do still have website that pushes information onto customers in a very propagandist fashion. A good example of this is the killer coke campaign that my group work with for our presentation. Their website is a very good example of an organisation that providers visitors with a lot of information, news, pictures, articles and other things, but no opportunity for visitor feedback or a place to discuss the issues. You'd think that an organisation that works soo hard to gain support for their cause would be a bit more conversational and interactive, and not just attack people visiting the website.

But of course there are companies that are trying to adapt a more conversational tone towards the public, Starbucks for example, have developed a My Starbucks Idea where people can come with suggestions and discuss the ones given. What is strange though is the fact that on the Starbucks website there is no links or anything advertising this new site, which makes me question how keen Starbucks actually is for customers to leave suggestions, or if it is more of a PR stunt to appear more accessible.

I think ideas like Starbucks' are really good, since it feels more that the company is actually listening to and caring about what their customers think, and are also using their ideas to develop the products to even better fit the taste of the consumers. Another example of a company like this is Dell, with its Idea storm. Here people can blog, post ideas for new products, discuss current ones, and also get a preview about what the company is currently working on.

Companies that do invest some money in making their online communication more conversational, and strives to invite customers to have opinions about their bussiness' performance will win on this in the long run. I think consumers are tired of being bombarded with information and never being able to ask questions to the people that are making the decisions. In order to keep customers happy and expand, management needs to become more visible and start talking to customers!!