How Communities Help Shape Companies

Due to the growth of Indonesia's Internet users, industry practitioners are no longer coming from only the companies and the business owners but also from the various communities across many different segments that take advantage of what the Internet offers. Members of communities who often represent market movements clearly demonstrate their appeal to a number of high profile global tech companies to assist them in their expansion efforts in Indonesia.

In a horizontal marketing concept, the consumers are the central actors who will decide whether they want to consume a product based on information from their trusted friends, partners, or families, and not from the companies themselves. Therefore, in the interest of the companies, the interaction between companies and consumers must be increasingly horizontal. Question is, how can this concept be implemented in Indonesia?

Several big players, like Nokia, BlackBerry, and Baidu, are known to use this horizontal marketing concept, in which the interaction between those companies with their consumers becomes intensified. Take BlackBerry Jam Camp which offers student developers  a pathway to the professional scene or Nokia'sDVLUP Porting Day.

In this regard, the companies make use of those events as a media to educate consumers as well as allow exchange of information between each other. The companies only act as connector and facilitator; consumers would voluntarily spread the information to their trusted persons afterward.

Like Nokia and Blackberry, China's Baidu helps shape its users’ communities by doing positive and useful activities. An example can be seen through Baidu PowerUP, which was designed as a celebration of technology aimed at introducing the latest in tech among the people to become solutions to life's daily issues. Another example is the thematic Nobar in the Sky event which accommodated the 2014 FIFA World Cup event as well as Miss Soccer contest which sought to discover young female product ambassadors to represent Baidu's youth segment.

Those events and activities do not only help companies improving their brand awareness, but also widen their personal engagements as well, which will ease their efforts to establish themselves in the market. Rather than investing loads of money on mass media promotion, it would be much more effective for the companies to build positive images of themselves by shaping communities. It would be a strategic move for Indonesian market, since the country has abundant human resources, especially for startups that may use communities as their free public relation media.

Disclosure: This writing is supported by Baidu Indonesia

[translation by Rifki Aria Nugraha]

[Header image: Shutterstock]