Fans of the chocolates from The Purbeck Chocolate Co will be encouraged to interact with Chococo staff and fellow customers with the use of online forums, discussion groups, surveys and polls.
The site will be hosted by Comment Technologies, and all content and data generated from the site will be analysed using its built-in business intelligence and reporting tools, allowing Chococo to gain customer feedback through the site.
Nick Ratcliffe, Comment Technologies managing director, said he believed that online communities would soon be at the heart of corporate marketing programmes, as they allow companies to bypass the use of market research firms and communicate directly with their customers.
Ratcliffe said: "Now we can offer them the opportunity not only to ask questions directly, but to host discussions among their customers.
"Aside from the obvious loyalty benefit of drawing customers together regularly in a branded community, the information that will come out of it is of immense value. We are already in discussions not only with retailers but also with media owners and trade and government bodies."
Chococo already has a Facebook page, but co-founder Claire Burnet said this new strategy will give them higher quality feedback.
Burnet said: "Bringing the community onto our own website allows us to offer a much more robust and high quality forum in which we can engage with people.
"It also means that we have exclusive access to all the marketing data, so our customer feedback and new ideas come directly to us rather than being in a generic public social networking environment."
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