NI Talks with Customers

From YouTube videos that teach you how to drive a car with your iPhone to answering support questions via @LabVIEW on Twitter to engaging in meaningful dialog with customers on Facebook, National Instruments likes to “play where our customers play.”

This is part of the reason why we have an active presence on sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  By engaging users “where they play,” we build REAL relationships with them and not just push out information.  We become a valuable, trusted advisor and have some fun too!

We also have two ways to talk to users on the NI Developer Community – blogs and groups.

NI technical blogs are extremely popular. Our developer community houses more than 60 employee and community-written blogs that provide insight on a wide variety of topics ranging from the latest news to software best practices and “sweet” customer applications. John Pasquarette, vice president of software marketing, even shares product roadmaps and other insights into the LabVIEW platform in his blog Inside LabVIEW.  But blogs are more than just pushing out information.  We engage in valuable chats our users using the blogging platform.

The NI community also has more than 200 online technical groups based on product interest, geographic location, industry, and application area. Groups are a great way for our members to network and share relevant technical documents. Some of our most popular LabVIEW groups are for members interested in large application development and do-it-yourself applications.

Overall, these activities have helped drive marketing goals.  Beyond “fans, follower, and readers” we measure “actionable conversations” in social media to help connect the conversations happening off the domain with real business objectives – like increasing awareness and loyalty of new and existing products.

How are you talking with your customers?