Thoughts

Counterpoint

A word from Ilana Fox, Community Manager, ASOS. 

Is it as much fun to shop with friends online as in-store?  We spoke to Ilana Fox of ASOS how they got the conversation started.  She developed communities for several national newspapers before moving to online fashion retailer ASOS to launch its own community platform, ASOS Life

Why did it make sense for ASOS to invest in social media and build its own community platform?

When I joined ASOS.com I was excited about enhancing the already great shopping experience that our customers have. To us, shopping is a social activity - especially when it comes to clothes. You want to ask your friends (or even the shop assistant) for their opinions if you're not sure about an outfit, and we felt that was something we could improve upon.

We have a massive presence on our fan page on Facebook, as well as on Twitter, but we really wanted to host a conversation ourselves too.

The advantages of having ASOS Life are endless - we don't miss anything our customers have to say, but we can also see metrics and integrate customers' profiles on ASOS Life with our CRM systems. We know so much more about our customers already by having our own platform, and in the future we have plans to personalise our customers' experiences even more. Without going into the technical specifics, ASOS Life will enable us to do that.

As for continued efforts in Facebook and Twitter: if anything, we've increased that since the launch of ASOS Life. We want to take part in the conversation, and we're not going to stop doing it on other social media sites.

Do you think particular sectors are more suited to social media than others, or is it more about the individual company's approach to its customers?

There's different ways companies can invest in social media - they can build and reward loyalty, provide a forum for peer support, build a marketing buzz, create excitement through UGC, obtain feedback and research... Each company's approach to social media should be different depending on what sector they're in, what they want to achieve, and what their customers would want. So many companies have - in the past - launched "social media" to be "Web 2.0" without considering what their customers actually want, and it's fallen flat. Social media - or community, as it used to be called before it became fashionable - should not be about jumping on a bandwagon.

You actively solicit ideas from users for new features and products: how important is that?

We really want to shape the future of ASOS.com through our customers' eyes, and providing an area for customers to suggest them on ASOS Life helps us to do that. We read every single idea and we keep a record of all of them. We take the ideas to the business, and if it's viable, we'll definitely do them. Sometimes we'll get ideas we can't do, and if we can't do it we'll always tell the customers why not. It's part of being transparent, which is important to us.

Many community launches struggle to get a critical mass of users and become self-supporting, but ASOS Life seems to have had a pretty active community from launch. How confident were you in advance that the people were there?

We see ASOS Life as two groups of people - customers and staff - coming together and having a conversation. Obviously everyone who works at ASOS.com was excited about our launching it, and we've had no issues in getting staff members involved... as you can see from our social media activity everyone who works here loves talking!

We were also confident about our customers using it because they already chat on social media websites, and we beta launched exclusively to them, via Twitter and Facebook. This ensured we could beta test properly and get feedback about how the site could work better. When we launched ASOS Life on the main ASOS.com site the conversation was already taking place, and rather than the majority of our customers looking at a site that was devoid of content and other customers, they saw something that was already vibrant and interesting. Nobody wants to be first to the party, and our beta testers have been amazing at welcoming the new members who join every day.

How, and when, will you know if ASOS Life is a success? Are your aims directly sales-led or more about branding and customer relationships?

The fact that we launched it and that our customers love it is definitely something I'm proud of, but like any business there need to be benefits too.

We want to increase sales, generate an environment where customers can help each other with any issues they have, raise awareness of some of the more niche areas of the site (such as Petites, Little ASOS, Maternity), introduce more personalised information to our customers, and we especially want to enhance our customers' experience of using ASOS.

Our aims are sales-led, but we're also about building customer relationships, providing space for peer-to-peer support, being a place to get style advice from our dedicated personal shopper, and overall an arena to discuss fashion, shopping, and of course, ASOS!

We have KPIs, and when we hit them, we'll be a "success"- but in my eyes, we're a success already because our customers keep coming back and love and understand what we're trying to achieve.

What advice would you give to an organisation considering an investment in social media?

• Get the buy-in from your business. Having a transparent conversation about your company is quite a culture shift for a lot of organisations. Make sure you have the backing of everyone from the top down, and that everyone's comfortable with what you're going to do, and how you're going to manage it.
• Have a dedicated team in place. We have 55 staff members chatting on Twitter - not because we employed them to do it, because they want to! However, you also need to have a robust, experienced team in place that knows how to deal with all sorts of issues that may arise in the community - from answering customer questions to what to do if there's a suicide message or a bomb threat. The team needs to know to interact online and have fun with it, but they also need to know how to manage potentially serious and harmful activity should it occur. You need to protect your brand, and your customers, and your team needs to be able to do this.
• Remember it's a conversation, and you're the host. Don't have the "build it and they will come" mentality of the dot com boom - build it and treat it like a never-ending party. You've got guests who don't know each other, everyone's standing around wondering what to do, and it's your job to make sure people talk to you and everyone else ... without being controlling!

It would be so easy to build a community like ASOS Life, think that it's going great, and then take your foot off the pedal - but the best thing about the web is that it's always evolving. Any social media platform needs to do this too: and remember, don't stop talking, communicating, and enjoying it. Working in social media is hard work, but it's also rewarding and, if you do it properly, it's a great investment in your brand.

Check out the community at http://community.asos.com/.  Get in touch if you would like to find out how a community could help you at: social@tmg.co.uk.

Published on: Aug 19, 2009 by tmgTeam & Ilana Fox Asos