Large-scale community management : Working with Orange

Reading @MiChmski this morning, I found an interesting case study published by Synthesio which is the social media monitoring company she works for as a community manager.

They recently won a Forrester Groundswell Award for this project involving Orange, the number one carrier/internet provider in France. For this type of highly visible brand, most of the buzz (apparently 70% in this case) is coming from specialized forums and concerns technical problems.

 

They had smart approach: Rather than reinventing the wheel and trying to recreate their online community by building a branded social network, Orange with Synthesio identified key forums and asked the administrators the authorization to officially join in. Then they assigned technical support staff to work there and participate in conversations requiring their expertise.

 

Now that social CRM is becoming an increasingly popular topic among online marketers, that's one innovative way of handling customer service to remember. And it certainly provides valuable information for product R&D.