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. By creating this community Chococo hope to gain customer feedback through the site.

Online communities like this are rapidly becoming  a major part of corporate marketing programmes by allowing companies to cut the cost of using market research firms and communicate directly with their customers.

Chococo already has a Facebook page, but co-founder Claire Burnet said this new strategy will give them higher quality feedback.

Burnet says: “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.”