Bringing Facebook Groups into Focus
When considering the next stages of evolution for its e-commerce platform, Zoovy had a lot of ideas from its customers. "Many customers had written in with questions and opinions," recalled Zoovy founder and CEO Brian Horakh, "but they weren't all in agreement. Normally we interview each one and then sift through what they want, but this time we wanted to hold a focus group with some leading clients."
The problem was that Zoovy has hundreds of SMB customers scattered around the country, so getting a decent number of them in one place at one time was going to be difficult.
The obvious solution was to hold the meeting online, but to do so, Zoovy turned to a not-so-obvious place: Facebook.
"I had all the clients Friend me, and I set up a private group," recounted Horakh. "Besides the customers, I invited some consultants and some of our employees." The results were amazing, according to Horakh, who said he'd never seen customers participate to such a degree.
"They appreciated seeing what others asked for," he said. "And they were very active. The minute they signed on, they started participating. I anticipated a three-month conversation, but all the questions were answered in 10 days."
Horakh attributed much of the success to the fact that most people are already familiar with Facebook, and they already have a system for notifications. The lack of anonymity helped, too: "In private group, with people's identity attached, you don't run into a lot of the problems you have with other messaging systems," he said.
I asked Horakh whether he'd considered any of the other business-oriented social networking platforms, and he said he hadn't. "A lot of of the other ones are Facebook plug-ins anyway," he said. "We make an effort to familiarize our customers with Facebook, so using it makes sense. Besides, it's free -- it's hard to compete with free." And in fact, during our conversation, I looked up one of the other services I was familiar with, Socialwok, only to find that they'd terminated their service in July.
Indeed, it's hard to compete with free.
Not that Facebook Groups are the answer to every meeting, Horakh was quick to add. "You have to consider who your audience is and what they're going to be comfortable with," he advised. "You don't have moderator capabilities, for example. In our case, I wasn't looking for moderation -- I was looking for Wild West."
Zoovy held its customer focus group last month. The company is just starting preparations for another group, this time to discuss what Horakh calls "marketplace optimization" (the equivalent of SEO for online marketplaces). This time, he said, it will be open to the public.
