New startup Croking is a quick and transparent channel for you to voice your opinions and ideas with others directly to any business. The social community allows people to share experiences and ideas about brands, in a short and simple way. As you state your opinions you watch it gain traction within the Croking community, the more valuable your contributions are the more valuable you become to the community with your own influence ratings rising, thereby increasing your visibility as a thought leader.
Much like Klout, but directly for branding, the community allows businesses to listen and respond to their consumers directly. Brands gain a forum to jump-start their consumer centric innovation – by identifying and fulfilling the most urgent needs of their end-users. While your thoughts and ideas about any brand are transparently channeled into the Croking community, making you feel heard, because brands get to respond directly to you.
Once you’ve signed up, you enter a brand’s name along with your opinion or idea and the mood that relates to the comment. Each submission is known as a “Croke” after which the community interacts with each Croke through discussions, agreement and disagreement selection, or social sharing. As more people discuss or agree with your submission, your influence score increases, thus identifying you as a thought leader or not. Best yet, if a brand responds to your submission the community gets to rate the response. No longer can a brand just share loops of nonsense, rather the community actually gets to state and respond back if it was excellent, good, bad or just average.
The platform is very well designed and a simple to use product, but it’s hard to say it will gain steam when LinkedIn Pages, Facebook Pages and other brand centric interaction tools exist. All be it Croking, currently in beta, does offer much more tools to help gauge brand opinion, however other than influence scores there doesn’t seem to be much other incentives to share ideas. Even still it is by far the best web application we’ve received for consumer feedback to date, we hope it catches on as a forum for brand discussion and feedback because everything else just seems lacking compared to the Croking application.