Concept Development of a Company-driven Online Community

Seismonaut has developed an online community concept for a large Århus based company, with more than 700 employees and a 2007 turnover of more than 1 billion Danish kroner.

Challenge

In an effort to establish a closer relationship with their customers, the company came to Seismonaut and wanted us to research the possibilities of creating a company-driven online community.
Over the last couple of years there has been a transformation in the way customers and companies connect online. Internet communication is no longer just one way, from company to customer, but is to a larger extent a two way street, from company to customer and back again. This trend is supported by a number of new web 2.0 tools that allow users to communicate in more dynamic ways. Transforming these new applications into value adding business models is one of our key offerings, and this was what the company wanted to explore further in order to assess how an online community could be relevant for them.

Solution

In order to conceptualize the online community we took a user centric approach and held both external workshops with customers and internal workshops with personnel from the company. The approach enables us to gain great insight into the needs of the client, which in turn ensures a high degree of quality of research.

Outcome

The result was a thorough concept development and idea catalogue for the company. This allowed them to assess the possibilities and challenges associated with an online community. As part of the concept development we created various personas and user-scenarios to ensure that the company got the highest possible level of insight into customer needs and wants regarding an online community as well as the general use of communities.