How to Ignore Your Best Customers, the TiVo Way (Part 1)

We're big TiVo fans, and have been for three years.

There's tens of thousands of us who evangelize the company's precedent-setting digital video recorder and how it has changed our lives. Online, 40,000 of TiVo's customers have self-organized the TiVo Community forum, which we joined a year ago. The group is Beyond Thunderdome-loyal.

Browse the forums and you will find spirited discussions on topics as varied as these:

• Why TiVo customers often take over for a hapless retail store salesperson
  
  
• How-to guides on the best ways to convince a loved one to buy and keep a TiVo
  
  
• The May 2004 conference in Las Vegas for TiVo enthusiasts that forum members are organizing

For most companies, a self-organized community of 40,000 passionate fans is unfathomable—a Holy Grail and marketing nirvana that many wish for but few attain. How does TiVo embrace this community of highly affiliated volunteer salespeople?

It doesn't.

TiVo monitors the group with a few staff members. But they're not active, cheerleading participants helping whip the group into a sustained frenzy with over-the-top support and community-building activities. They're more like hall monitors. In many ways, TiVo considers this deep bench of volunteer salespeople as “the lunatic fringe” to be monitored, not engaged.

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Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba are the authors of Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force.