Bonding through shared experiences – consumer oriented community site Tokoni to offer business solutions
Cupertino, CA based social site, Tokoni, is reaching out to businesses and organizations with a new set of offerings designed to help brands connect with the community through shared experiences.
The company, founded in 2007 by two ex-eBay employees, has been operating with simple mission: provide a platform where people can share common experiences and offer support, advice, and an ear to others. Until now, Tokoni has been almost exclusively focused on individual, and not business, communities.
The initial inspiration for the site came to co-founder Mary Lou Song when she was taking a class, “I was taking a writing course, one of those where we were reading others work, and I just loved all of the stories from my fellow students. I felt like what a shame that these might get tucked away somewhere and not see the light of day. As writers we all aspire to be published someday, but it doesn’t happen for everyone. I thought there should be a place for those stories.”
Song was also a new mom and thought it important that parents have a place to share their unique challenges and life occurrences, be it mothers struggling for work-life balance, handling tantrums, or more serious subjects such as childhood illness, a struggle her brother knew personally.
“My brother and his wife were struggling with their newborn son who is allergic to everything and has a heart condition. They wanted to find people with similar experiences so that they could see what lies ahead for them. It’s different from getting medical advice from doctors. They wanted to know what its like to live with his particular heart condition.”
So, the question was, “How do we find people who have the same sort of life experiences that we have?”
Enter Tokoni.com, an ad free no-cost site where users can set up communities to discuss everything from gardening tips to erotic literature (seen only if filters are turned off).
The tenor of conversation in Tonoki communities has mirrored that of Americans (the site communities are still mostly based in the USA) in general. For example, although a site might be devoted to stay-at-home moms, those women might find themselves veering into discussions about relationships, economic hard times, and politics.
Politics, in particular, has been on the minds of many Tokoni members, so it is not surprising that when Meg Whitman looked to build an interactive community for her gubernatorial campaign, she turned to her fellow ex-eBay colleagues.
Song explains, “If you look at Meg Whitman as a brand it makes sense. What makes politics so great is talking about life stories and the impact. She was excited about her site and letting Californians talk about their lives.”
Thus far, Tokoni has been successful in avoiding the flame-throwing bouts that can drag conversations off track and into the murky world of online insults and bickering.
“That’s one of the ground rules we had in the Tokoni community,” said Song. “There is room for all different kinds of perspectives and we’re trying to keep it civil. We say it in our terms of service and put it in our participation guidelines. We have community manager who gets in to conversations and if it gets out of hand we remind each other, let’s be kind and let’s mind our manners.”
Now, the company is set to take the next step and offer white-labeled sites (or hubs) where people can share their stories about/experience with brands, companies, and organizations. Tokoni has already had some success in this area as the architect of eBay’s online community.
The company is launching Tokoni Community Platform, a branded community offering targeted toward companies and organizations. The platform enables brands to build custom community sites that can be used to build brand loyalty through shared customer stories and an interactive dialogue between company and customer.
One can imagine such sites including posts on product customizations, DIY projects, funny anecdotes, and advice. Considering the popularity of user group organizations, fan sites, and viral videos featuring brands, this appears to be a natural market for the story sharing community.
According to a statement issued by the company, “Tokoni’s platform is a complete management solution for turning social media conversations into customer insight, offering a way to optimize consumer stories and experiences to drive business and brand objectives. The resulting interactive communities provide clients and marketers with a brand-building tool that helps them truly leverage the collective voice of users to improve customer experiences and drive word of mouth on the Web. In addition, feedback and contributions can be used to inform and improve product development and marketing efforts.”
Companies and individuals can create dedicated hubs on Tokoni.com. Users can also create branded websites that, “feature stories from the company and its audiences; connect customers with various social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; and help companies mine customer feedback and stories to increase reach, improve customer experiences and inform product development.”
Happily for users, while companies, such as Twitter, are changing their terms of service to open the door for advertising, according to Mary Lou Song, Tokoni will remain ad free.
“We believe that your story page should belong to you and we do not believe that it should be cluttered by advertising. We want people to feel like their stories belong to them.”
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This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 12:41 pm and is filed under News, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Anonymous January 11th, 2010 at 5:36 am
Helzerman’s Odd Bits » Blog Archive » Bonding through shared experiences – consumer oriented community site Tokoni to offer business solutions…
Helzerman’s Odd Bits » Blog Archive » Bonding through shared experiences – consumer oriented community site Tokoni to offer business solutions…