It all started on April 15, when the ash cloud from the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland caused several European countries to close their air space. Consequently, Swiss International Airlines had to cancel all flights to and from the UK and Norway. Up until then, Swiss’s Facebook fan page had mostly served only as a marketing instrument. Fans, or customers if you will, were told about special offers, new destinations, corporate results or new website functions, for example. But when the volcanic ash crisis hit air traffic in Europe and the company’s hotlines had trouble coping with the amount of callers, the company’s Facebook team started to post updates and information there. And passengers took advantage of that. As increasing numbers of flights were cancelled, Facebook turned into a hub for customers unable to get information through Swiss’ temporarily overloaded website and/or telephone line.

Instead of having to tell each caller the same things (check if your flight is leaving at all and only come to the airport if you have a confirmation), the Facebook fan site served as a self-service support community. On such a community, customers profit from an accumulated knowledge base and can get help from other customers who might have had a similar problem or have other insider information. Only if this self-service support fails will the customer have to actually call a corporate hot-line. This frees up a lot of support resources and support operatives can use their time for the “serious cases” instead of having to answer the same basic questions again and again.

Dell, for example, has institutionalized this concept in their Social Community. They offer support forums, blogs with additional industry insights and IdeaStorm, an innovation community that lets customers post ideas on how to improve Dell’s products and services.

But, having a huge amount of information and knowledge available through the community doesn’t only free up support resources on the corporate level. It also improves a customer’s support experience, because even a skilled support operative can’t have an answer to every possible problem. If a problem is very specific and maybe not yet addressed in support handbooks or procedures, then other community members might be able to help instead. Of course, this only works if there are enough skilled community members. So key to a successful Social Support Community is to attract valuable members, give them incentives to participate, reward member efforts and maintain a helpful and open community culture. In creating a self-service Support Community and motivating customers to help each other, customers will get better help faster, feel valued and thus are positively inclined towards the company. So, not only can support costs be lowered, but such viral effects benefit the corporate image and ultimately sales, too. The power of Social Communities!

Three weeks ago Baidu’s CEO Yanhong Li introduced the “box computing” concept at the Baidu Innovation Conference 2009. As you may know the Chinese search engine giant Baidu has already overtaken Yahoo as the world’s second-largest search engine, according to Comscore.

Now what is “box computing” and what kind of functions does it offer? Basically it’s like an input field (box) being the your interface on the PC or mobile. You key in what you want to do and then Baidu identifies the search requirements, connects to relevant services running in its backend (and probably in third party services), retrieves the result and returns it to the user. The technical framework of box computing was shown here. Box computing provides a one-stop online service by intelligently identifying clients’ demands before giving optimized treatments and responses. For example, a man who wants to buy a BlackBerry in Beijing would only have to type in the sentence “Where can I buy a BlackBerry in Beijing” and then the box engine will provide a product list attached with more detailed information. After you click on the product it may lead you onto another website to finish the payment; or you can do it with Baidu. In some way it is kind of similar to the App Store model. At first, service providers submit service programs to Baidu, after verification Baidu will embed these programs with the box computing platform. Box computing is used to transform Baidu from a pure search service provider to a much broader services provider.

It has been claimed that box computing concept is not a new technical achievement and has already been realized by other search engine companies, such as WolframAlpha, Microsoft’s BING and Google Square.

In the past three Innovation Conferences Baidu focused more on marketing activities and announcements, but this time many people got the impression that Baidu wants to deliver the message that it is a technology-driven company and leader. Other experts still think though that “box computing” is only another marketing focused activity rather than a technical revolution.

There is not much concrete information about Baidu’s box computing out there right now and even on the official website you can’t find much details. In any way it’s probably a good thing, if it’s true, since it will make Chinese internet users’ life much easier. So we have to wait and see what it really is once they open it for trials…