How Branded Social Communities Help Sony Increase Consumer Engagement, Loyalty, Advocacy, and Sales

As one of the world's foremost brand marketers, Sony has been a pioneer in giving consumers control over the brand experience through social networks, online videos, and the blogosphere. But with such a strong brand image, Sony also clearly understands the potential for misinformation, brand erosion, and loss of sales to competitors when deploying progressive, socially-based marketing methods to engage consumers online. With this challenge in mind, Sony needed a comprehensive, measurable, and scalable social marketing program that would produce real sales results – and could grow with customer and business needs over time. Sony chose to work with Powered to create a network of fully-managed branded online communities that would not only drive relevant consumer engagement, but build the Sony brand and bolster consumer loyalty and advocacy.

Sony's Backstage 101 learning community provides educational content focused on digital lifestyle topics such as photography, home video, personal computing, home theater, and more. Members of this community, who don't have to own Sony products to participate, engage in real-time discussions with instructors and each other to learn about everything from "How to Capture Special Family Moments in Video" to "Building Your First Web site". The community includes dozens of video, flash, and editorial tutorials, as well as a full suite of social tools such as ratings, reviews, forums, tagging, and user profiles.

Sony's Digital Darkroom sharing community complements the Backstage 101 Learning environment and allows amateur photographers, photo enthusiasts, and Sony employees to post, share, and comment on digital photographs. Consumers can challenge themselves by accepting custom assignments; rate community photos in ongoing contests; share tips and tricks with each other; "Ask Sony" about specific products or technologies; and get access to related digital photography tutorials from Backstage 101.

Sony's Frontline Community is a research community that serves as an open communications platform between the Sony product development team and its customers. Features include a blog, on which customers can comment, as well as general forums and polls. The site also gives consumers a chance to participate in weekly surveys and in-depth focus groups about Sony products. Customers are able to share their suggestions, concerns, and needs directly with Sony, which uses the feedback to improve product concepts, merchandising, marketing, and customer loyalty programs.

In line with the company's five strategic goals, Sony's online communities are paying off with high usage rates, increased insight into consumer preferences, consumer loyalty and advocacy for Sony products, and month-after-month growth in product sales. With these three networked communities, Sony has been able to achieve:

• 388% increase in the number of user engagements
• 34% growth in member registration
• 31% increase in unique visits
• 179% more repeat visits
• 90% user-satisfaction rating
• 78% of users report that they are more likely to purchase a Sony product as a result of Backstage 101
• 59% of users are likely to recommend Sony to a family member, friend, or coworker