I’d venture to estimate that well over 95% of the social business discussion and content revolves around the big public social networks, while only a few experts are writing about how organizations can use online customer and member communities.

If you do a few minutes of digging online, you’ll come across the “either/or” discussions. This is an artificial juxtaposition that breaks down whether organizations should use public social networks OR a private online community, when it reality companies don’t have to choose one or the other. Organization can (and often should) be using both, for different purposes. The conversation is not made clearer by technology companies or consultants that have a preference for (or financial stake in) one approach over the other.

Socious has offered tips to help companies and membership organizations avoid using public social networks and private online communities for the wrong tactics. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn are very good for what they are intended to do. Private online customer or member communities have the features and functionality add a great deal to your product, support, and marketing strategies. Mixing these up can quickly lead to a heap of frustration and performance issues.

Today, I want to take the conversation a step further and lay out exactly how public and private social networks can work together. The following at three big ways to capitalize on the characteristics of your public social network channels to strengthen your online community strategy.

#1) Driving Members to the Community

As I have mentioned, private online communities and sites like Facebook and LinkedIn serve very different purposes for an organization. They are available to different audiences, have distinct features, and address different goals. However, successful organizations are finding way to use their public social networks to increase engagement in their private online customer or member community.

First, it is vital to understand the importance of setting up processes to drive people back to your private online community. You could create an online community full of highly relevant value, but that is only half of the equation. Your target audience, whether it is made up of prospects, customers, members, or partners, is busy.

Developing community management processes to bring members back to the community to get that value is critical to sustain activity in your community. These tactics will involve the tools in your social community software, like the built-in email marketing system and personalized content alerts, but should also take advantage of public social networks.

To better convey this point to your executives and social business team, imagine a wagon wheel or any hub and spoke model.  The center is your online community website. The spokes are all of your social media outposts.

In the same way that public social networks are used in content marketing strategies to drive people to your website, you can use tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to bring people back to your community or make non-members aware of the value in your online customer or member community.

#2) Content Curation and Discussion Topics

One of the top reasons that people join your online customer or member community is for one-stop access to content, discussions, and experts that can help then do their jobs.

As you know, while your community is most acitve inside your private social network, your industry is active all across the web. Systematically monitoring Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ (and maybe Facebook) is an efficient way to stay on top of industry trends, research, and breaking news.

You can then select the articles, videos, infographics, and other social media to bring into your community. Successful ideas for using information you came across on public social networks in your private community include:

• Framing news in a blog post with your reaction and thoughtful questions to spur conversation
• Using an article on industry best practices to start a discussion in your forums
• Adding a report to the document library

Tip: Use the segmentation that you set up in your online community platform to share content with only those audience to which it is relevant.

#3) Recruiting New Members or Customers

As you scan public social networks for topics, hastags, and keywords, you will undoubtedly come across smart people that you are not familiar with. You may think to yourself, “That person really knows what they are talking about. They could add value to my community.” or “This person is in my industry, but it not a member of my community.”

Check your membership database or CRM system to make sure this prospect is not already a customer or member, and then invite them to learn about and join your organization, or at least participate in the community.

Tip: If your online community is for paying members or customer only, work with your online community software provider to set up a free area of your community for prospective community members. Make sure it has enough content and activity for that segment of your private social network to be valuable for your prospects, so that they eventually move down the path to becoming a full member of the community.

Public and Private Social Networking Takeaway

When a vast majority of the social business information on the web revolves around public social networks, it can be difficult find validation for your customer community strategy. However, you know that public and private social networks serve very different purposes, so steer clear of people who try to convince you that it is an “either/or” discussion. You know better.

Both the big social networks and your private online community are important, but together they produce powerful results (think 1+1=3). Organizations are increasingly turning to private online communities to strengthen relationships with prospects, customers, members, and partners. Why not boost the performance of your social business strategy by incorporating your reach on the big social networks, starting with the simple tactics listed in this article?

In reality, predictive analytics is not scary at all. Here is a great video explanation from Dr. Eric Siegel, founder of Predictive Analytics World and author of the new book “Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die.”

What is Predictive Analytics?

Predictive analytics is the use of historical performance data under specific conditions to predict a future result with a high degree of certainty so that you can take actions now to affect those results.

What does that mean in the real world?

Take your customers in your online customer community for a example. Assume that 80% of your customers continue doing business with you year over year. If you learned that of the customers who accessed your online customer community once a month, 85% of those customers renewed their contracts with your company. Then, you learned that you retain 97% of the customers who asked a question, started a discussion, or responded to a thread in your online customer community.

Using the data in this simplified example, you can predict that your average customer retention rate will increase if you can drive more of your customers to participate in your online customer community. That basic predictive model combines demographic, transactional, and social/behavioral data to help you make smarter business decisions.

If you take the profile of someone who exhibits a behavior that you want customers to take, you can overlay that on top of current and future customer data to identify which customers are more likely to take the action that you want them to take. This is the core of social crm (customer relationships management).

How is Predictive Analytics Being Used in Business Intelligence?

Putting aside your unpopularity at most social gatherings, predictive analytics is very exciting. Applied to any part of life or business, predictive data is the closest you will get to a crystal ball. Imagine the possibilities – business strategies, elections, sports, college enrollment, and investment outcomes. Predictive models are being used in all of these environments today…and they are being use to generate winners.

How Social Networks Help Predictive Models

Social networks have accelerated the usefulness and accessibility of predictive data for most organizations. Whereas, predictive models used to rely mainly on in-person, event, phone, email, and anonymous website interactions to compile a behavioral profile of specific audiences, social networks offer another dimension of peer-to-company and peer-to-peer activity. Social data enables companies to micro target with more accuracy using many-to-many conversations, rather than just linear person-to-company communication.

However, tracking and analyzing the entirety of your ecosystem (customer, members, prospects, advocates, partners, etc.) on the social web can feel like trying to swallow the ocean. There are very sophisticated tools available for processing this kind of information. However, it can take an extensive investment in personell and technology to bring the strategy to fruition.

Why Private Online Communities Are the Key for Many Companies?

For many businesses and membership organizations, private online communities present a more rich and manageable environment for capitalizing on predictive modeling. Online customer communities act as a microcosm of the entire internet. The closed environment enables customers to do more, from watching tips and tricks videos to submitting product enhancements to participating in forum and listserv discussions.

While your target audience has more ways to share ideas, get support, and provide feedback, private social networks offer your organization better tracking of the social activity compared with monitoring public social networks.

In this example, we’ll look again at customer retention, a popular business intelligence model that uses predictive analytics. By examining your online customer community data, you can create a profile (demographic and behavioral) of the customers that stopped doing business with you (transactional) last year. By also looking at the social activity of customers that did renew or make additional purchases, you can determine which social activities in your customer community were done or not done exclusively by customers that you lost.

Let’s assume that the following three behaviors were in the profiles of customers that were lost:

• Asked a question in discussion forums and did not get a response
• Did not register for any customer events
• Opened less than 5% of the emails sent from your online customer community

Next, identify all of the current customers that fit that profile. There is a high degree of probability that these customers are at risk for ending their relationship with you.

Identifying customers that may need special attention to keep them as customers is just one example of how organizations use predictive analytics from their online customer or member communities. Other models include:

• Which customers are advocates in the market or would be good candidates for your customer reference program?
• Which members are more likely to attend the annual conference?
• Which customers are more likely to purchasing a certain product or service?
• Which prospects are more likely to respond to a specific marketing campaign?
• Which customers are good upsell opportunities?
• Which donors are more likely to give again?

These are just some common scenarios. If a specific audience uses your private online community, you can design a predictive analytics model for getting better results in practically any business strategy.

How to Use Predictive Analysis in Your Online Customer Community to do Amazing Things

Step #1) Start With Outcomes

Which behaviors do you want to predict? It is important to start with the outcomes that you would like to predict. The result of this initial discovery process gives you the questions that you are going to ask into your “crystal ball.” It is the foundation for the next three steps.

During this step, you’ll also want to determine the actions that you can take once you identify a specific segment of your ecosystem. For instance, if you are looking for customers that you would like to partner with to expand your customer reference program, lay out a preliminary roadmap for how you will approach the target list of customers.

Step #2) Set Up Profiles

Which demographic information, transactional data, and social activity were common and unique to people who exhibited that behavior? In this step, you’ll examine the common characteristics and activity of those people who have, in the past, demonstrated the behavior which you are after.

In the customer reference program example, you might use your online community software to research the social activity of your best known customer advocates. Did they answer questions posed by other customers in the discussion forums? Do they maintain a blog in your community? Do they access the community several times a week?

This is a very important step. Since your customer, member, or prospect profiles layout the behavioral roadmap that you base the other steps on, this step deserve extra rigorous analysis. If you don’t correlate your target audience and outcomes correctly, you may end up pinpointing and promoting an activity that has no bearing on the results you want.

Step #3) Track Behaviors

Take the profile you set up in the previous step and overlay it onto existing customers, members, prospects, etc. In this step, you’ll generate lists of online community members that fit that profile. Using your online community software platform, you can group members of the community according to specific social, transaction, or demographic data.

If you are seeking to identify new potential customer advocates, compile a list of current customers that meet the social, transactional, or demographic criteria that you established in step 2.

This process will leave you with two buckets of online community members – people who fit the profile and people who don’t fit the profile. Each of these lists can then be analyzed further to discern degrees of strength in meeting a specific profile’s social, transactional, and demographic criteria.

Step #4) Establish Paths and Proactive Actions

Now, you have these two groups of people, it is time to take action. For those prospects, customers, or members that fit one of the profiles you set up, it is time to follow through on the action plan you developed in step #1.

This might mean that you launch campaigns to reach out to “at-risk” customers. This might mean that you target your event marketing toward customers or members that are more likely to register and attend. It might mean that you have your next recruitment class for your customer reference program.

Sometimes, these are positive actions, like further engaging customer advocates. Other times, your action plan will consist of proactive steps to prevent bad things from happening, such as losing sales, customers, or partners.

In addition to personally reaching out to people if necessary, this process also involves adjusting your community management processes. Set up paths for each of these groups to take to move from one bucket to the other.

For an example, if you learn that customers that access into your online customer community once a month buy twice as much, establish paths that customers can take to access your online customer community more often. This could be a combination of customer experience, usability, marketing campaigns, and one-on-one outreach. The goal is to make it as easy as possible to move from one bucket (customers who do not access your online community at least once a month) to the other bucket (customers that do access your online community at east once a month).

Predictive Analytics in Online Communities Takeaway

Strategies behind online customer and member communities are shifting rapidly. While an active online community is still a major differentiator, what you do with the data in your community is becoming the most important element of your social crm strategy.

There are endless ways to use predictive analytics in customer acquisition, retention, and engagement. As you read through the steps in the article, you’ll notice that the main component in data. You must have the data to be able to build your organization’s predictive models.

Most online community software has the ability to capture behavioral data. In you don’t yet have your online customer community set up, select a platform that has enough features to allow you to use data to delineate between those members that exhibit the behaviors you want and those that don’t. It may be difficult to tell the difference with more basic online community systems. According to Dr. Eric Siegel, if you have more data, you have more opportunities to learn.

Many of the technology companies that you know by name host online communities for their partner networks. These private online communities help to strengthen several types of partner relationships, including:

• Managed services and outsourcing partners
• Resellers
• Distributors
• Suppliers
• Consultants
• Vendors that serve customers
• Technology solution partners
• Referral partners

Why Do Organizations Invest In Partner Management?

According to a conversation that I recently had with B2B technology research firm, SiriusDecisions, over 50% of their customers’ revenue comes through their partner channels. That is a significant chunk of their business that relies on motivated and informed partners.

Many user groups, associations, and other membership organizations rely on partner communities to create lucrative sponsorship packages in their gated online communities. The flexibility and added features of these vendor programs provide more value to both their vendor partners and their members than traditional sponsorship packages.

Though helping customers find more success with your products or services is the most well-known use of online community technology in the enterprise, partner communities have long played an important role in business growth. Sometimes partner communities are included in an organization’s online customer community platform. Other times, they stand alone.

Not All Partner Relationships Are the Same

Segmentation built into most online community software is designed to handle multiple sub-communities accessing the community at once. For instance, you can have channel partners that sell you product through their sales and marketing channels accessing one area of the community and vendor partners that rely on your company to help drum up business by giving them exposure to your customers in the community as well. Their paths may never cross if your strategy calls for it.

Partner Networks Are Still Online Communities

While partner and supplier communities have different audiences, strategies, and content than online customer communities, many of the same community management principles apply. You still need to create value in the community so that partners have a reason to visit. Communities need to be private and exclusive. And you need to have community management processes in place to bring partners back the community consistently.

Why Are Online Partner Communities Important?

Partner strategies can be one of your most effective approaches to growing your business. The people in your partner organizations like you, know your products, and have a vested interest in seeing your market share increase. If you manage your partner community correctly and treat them well, partners offer an army of educated and energetic supporters that can reach deep into your market to promote your products and services.

I have seen companies engage partners to impact many different business goals, including:

• Increasing revenue by selling more of your solution through the channel, referrals, or word-of-mouth marketing
• Controlling support costs by providing answers to existing customers in your online customer community
• Improving market advocacy by spreading your content, buzz, and product news throughout their networks

Components of a Killer Online Partner Community or Partner Social Network

As with all social business platforms, online partner network communities vary greatly from ecosystem to ecosystem. With online community software having hundreds of features, businesses are able to shape their partner communities around their specific strategies and goals, now and as the community evolves.

However, there are common themes of successful online partner communities. The three major ingredients are below.

#1) Business Development

Vendors, suppliers, and other companies mainly invest time and resources in a partnership with your organization for one reason – to generate revenue.

Although they may love your people and products, partners cozy up to your company to make money. Your online partner community is like a Swiss Army Knife for making sure that your partners have the tools, techniques, and information they need to successfully bring your product or service to market.

Some of the ideas that I have seen in practice include:

• How-to blogs and video libraries with selling tips
• Partner forums where they can discussion strategies
• Partner newsletters targeting specific partner-types or product segments

If you partner network is part of your online customer community, you can also provide:

• Access to help provide answers in customer discussion forums (This can be configured so that partners can respond to customer questions, but not start new discussions.)
• Partner-focused discussion forums where customers can ask questions to and about vendors
• Vendor resource libraries where customers can get specs and videos about partner’s products
• Seachable partner and vendor directories

The main business development focus behind managing channel relationships in a private partner social network is to identify what your partners need to sell you solution and provide relevant and insightful information to meet that need on a consistent basis.

#2) Support

Your customers are not the only stakeholders in your ecosystem that need product support. Though it is a different kind of customer service, a thriving partner network might need just as much support as your customer base to be successful.

Along with traditional support ticketing systems, customers have online customer communities to share solutions and get help from their peers. Though it is much less known, partners need a similar level of support. Here are some of the most common channel support features in online partner communities.

• Support forums and listservs (away from the eyes of customers) where partners can ask questions and get answers from employees, experts, and other partners
• Document and video libraries with how-tos and other product tips
• Mobile community apps so that partners can get support in the field, such as on a client’s site

Even if those in your channel are fierce competitors, they will often help each other solve product challenges and offer advice on specific market problems – all while building loyalty to your company and products.

Customer Community Tip: Partners are also a great source of support for your customers. By hosting your customer community and your partner community in separate (sometimes overlapping) areas on the same online community software platform, you have the opportunity to enable partners to help customers solve their problems. Both the nature of self-policing online communities and security settings in your social technology permit partners to help support customers without becoming a spammy nuisance.

#3) Feedback

You partner network can be one your company’s most important product management tools. They exist outside the walls of your company and are often closer to the market than your product development team. Partners can not only deliver a vast amount of product input from existing and prospective customers, they have ideas for improving your distribution strategy, messaging, and channel processes.

Tips for using your online community software to get market data and feedback from your partner network include:

• Set up private partner advisory boards in your online community where product executives and channel managers can engage your partners.
• Integrate partner management professionals into your community management processes so that they can analyze partner activity to address concern and connect partners with questions with people that have answers.
• Use the product idea tracking features in your online community to crowdsource features and product enhancements from your partner community.
• Conduct live or virtual partner events through your online community’s event management tools.

It is important not to overlook your partners’ understanding of your customers’ problems and preferences. While partner relationships often take a backseat to customer engagement strategies, many businesses gain a competitive advantage by looking to partners to be their eyes and ears in the market.

Online Partner Community Takeaway

Channels and partner relationships are a major tool for businesses to grow rapidly and control operational costs. In the same way that online customer communities are a big part of the future of customer relationship management, online partner communities are proving to be a critical part of building stronger and sustainable partner networks.

While you will configure your private partner social network to your specific partners and company during the online community software implementation process, you can build from the framework of business development, support, and feedback. This outline is also an excellent aid in communicating your partner strategy to stakeholders.

However, the key is identifying the right earth-friendly policies and operational changes for your specific organization. What makes an effective and executive-friendly “green” strategy? To get your senior management on board, your plan to get greener must:

1. Benefit the organization
2. Helps customers or members
3. Reduce consumption of energy, paper, fuel, etc.

Some conservation plans address one or two of these principles, but the most sustainable green initiatives tackle all three. This is where online community software comes into play.

Since it is both at the center of your customer relationship strategy already and can have a direct impact in your company’s performance, your online customer or member community should play a central role in your green initiative.

Here are eight ways that your company or membership organization can use your online community platform to celebrate Earth Day today and throughout the year.

Way #1 Share Documents Online

Increasingly companies are moving support documentation and other files into their online customer or member communities where customers can share additional tips, provide feedback, and ask questions.

Private online community software enables organizations to control who has access to particular documents – from small working groups or committees to entire customer segments. This granular access lends itself to moving more of your knowledge base and group collaboration online both for security purposes (only the appropriate people can see each document) and to ensure that each customer is only getting information that is relevant to them.

Company Goal:

• Lowering support costs
• Boosting customer satisfaction

Customer Goal:

• Finding accurate and up-to-date information faster

Green Goal:

• Cutting down on paper usage and fuel consumption from documentation delivery

Way #2 Hold Meetings Online

In-person meetings are not considered very earth-friendly, even if you provide those little branded notebooks on recycled paper. Costs to the environment include everything from fuel for travel to paper for handouts.

Reduce your carbon footprint by holding private internal meetings in your online community platform.  You can either use the built-in events calendar to invite specific attendees to a real-time web meeting or set up a private community where you can use discussions, shared documents, and wikis to hold the “meeting” over a 24 hour period.

Company Goal:

• Reducing the cost of in-person meetings without losing the collaboration

Customer Goal:

• Getting involved in product, advocacy, and other decisions without the time and monetary costs of travel

Green Goal:

• Eliminating fuel needed to travel and reams of paper used in handout and binders

Way #3 Use Mobile Event Apps

Cut down or eliminate the amount of paper you give out at customer events and conferences by using your online community software’s mobile event apps. The mobile conference and events apps build into your online community software’s event management system enable attendees to manage their agendas, view handouts and speaker presentations, get event updates (e.g. room changes), and a host of other social activities – all without using a single piece of paper.

Company Goal:

• Decreasing the cost of printing at events

Customer Goal:

• More accurate, personalized, and interactive options for participating at events

Green Goal:

• Eliminating paper consumption and printing energy usage

Way #4 Start a Green Group

Getting greener is not just a concern of your organization. I’m guessing that it is on the minds of many of your customers or members. Start a “green group” in your online customer or member community that can discuss how your organization and your industry can do more to support the environment.

Identify a group of volunteer leaders to help create and curate content, as well as evangelize the group to other customers or members. If this sub-community gains traction, it could make a difference with getting innovative executives to champion change or it could become the basis for a panel discussion at your next conference.

Company Goal:

• Improving customer engagement
• Getting product and service feedback

Customer Goal:

• Leadership opportunities
• Collaborating on an important cause
• Making a difference in your product and industry

Green Goal:

• Elevating green initiatives within the customer community or membership
• Making changes in business operations to implement more earth-friendly practices

Way #5 Share Earth Day Tips

Sometimes people are more likely to act if you separate the deciding what needs to get done from the doing itself. One of the simplest ways to celebrate Earth Day inside your online community is to help your customers, partners, or members take green steps themselves. With busy people spending much of their week in the trenches, they might welcome actionable tips for things that their businesses can do to be greener.

Use your online community software to produce a series blog posts or add videos to your online community’s media library with tips for how your customers or members can incorporate more earth-friendly approaches into their businesses. Encourage your customers or members to add their own tips in the comments areas and rate their favorite pointers.

Company Goal:

• Increasing customer loyalty
• Raising the value customers place on their relationship with you

Customer Goal:

• Go green without having to do all of the thinking and doing

Green Goal:

• More organizations will take steps to reduce their carbon footprint and resource consumption

Way #6 Create a Checklist

In the same vein as the tip above, use your online community software’s document libraries to add a checklist for your specific industry that includes ways to conserve energy and other resources. Promote the checklist to your customers and make it easy for them share it outside your private customer community.

Company Goal:

• Attracting positive public relations attention
• Drawing appreciation from customers

Customer Goal:

• Finding easy approaches to bring green initiatives to their organizations

Green Goal:

• Proliferation of earth-friendly actions

Way #7 Conduct Online Translations

Though most everyone wants to support the postal service, snail mail is one of the least green methods of conducting business. Think about all of the paper being pushed in your customer transactions – invoice printing and mailing, payment mailing, payment processing and hand copy storage, etc.

Your online community software enables your organization to move many of those transactions online. This includes dues payments and membership renewal invoicing for associations and user groups, event registration, and product purchases in the online store.

Company Goal:

• Lowering transaction costs
• Increasing margins on products, events, and membership

Customer Goal:

• Faster transactions with better history tracking and documentation

Green Goal:

• Reducing paper usage, energy consumption from printing, and fuel for delivery

Way #8 Launch Virtual Products

Your online community software’s ecommerce platform enables you to sell virtual products that your customers or members can download. This eliminates packaging and shipping costs, as well as other resource consumption.

To celebrate Earth Day, evaluate which of your physical products you can convert to digital downloads. You can either replace the physical items with your virtual products or sell them alongside your physical goods.

In addition to converting existing products, brainstorm new downloadable offerings to sell in your customer community’s online store. Virtual products could include videos, ebooks, manuals, audio recording, and other content that your customers or members need to do their jobs.

Company Goal:

• Improving the margin on product sales
• Increasing the number of products to sell

Customer Goal:

• Getting products faster
• Having options for which format to receive the content product

Green Goal:

• Reducing environmental costs associated with producing and shipping physical goods

Online Community Software Take Away

New social platforms with a broad reach into your customer base and a wide variety of built-in tools, like your online community software platform, can play a big role in your green initiatives. As you read in the tips above, using your online community software to do right by the environment can also lower operational costs, increase customer loyalty, and bring customers closer to the product development process.

If you are effectively able to engage customers around common earth-friendly goals, you may even want to create a press release and use your other public relations channels to get some positive media attention for your strategy.

I recommend starting small. Use the survey tools in your online community software to measure the interest of specific customer or member segments. Then, decide which of the approaches listed above would garner the most engagement on which to build a green strategy that benefits your organization, helps your customers or members, and supports the environment.

Your Turn

How are you using online community software and other social tools to celebrate Earth Day throughout the year?

image credit: Corey Matsumoto

Regardless of whether the organization has an online customer community or not, or whether it is a big business or a nonprofit membership organization (like an association or user group), how to increase customer engagement is by far one of the top challenges that businesspeople face.

Before we get into a couple of ways to increase customer engagement for businesses that serve other businesses, let’s look at why organizations make solving this challenge is a priority.

Why Are Customer Engagement and Online Communities Important To B2B Companies?

Engagement is the fuel behind any number of business initiatives.

If you want your market to know something, they have to have a certain level of engagement with your organization for that information to break through into their busy lives. If you want your customers to do something, like spread the word about your company, they must be engaged at some level to understand what you want them to do and why.

I’ve written about many of the real benefits that companies are reaping when customer or member engagement play a central role in their customer relationship strategies.

They range from lower customer support costs to increased sales through competitive advantages and better customer advocacy. When members are engaged, organizations also experience higher event attendance, more leniency when they screw up, and better data by which they make market-driven product decisions.

How to Increase Business-To-Business Customer Engagement

Think about the words of legendary Harvard Business School marketing professor, Theodore Levitt:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

In other words, customers don’t want your product. They want to solve a problem. When keeping customers engaged, it is important to understand that customers don’t want to join a private social network. They want to be successful in their jobs.

Just as customers are not naturally interested in your product or service, customers are not naturally drawn to your online customer community. Many customers are busy with their own jobs and other areas of their lives, so stopping to jump into the online community can often be difficult. However, there are things you can to to make your customer community more relevant and a better fit with your customers’ priorities.

Many of the tactics surrounding customer engagement are dependent your customers, your company, and the specific behavioral data coming out of your private online community. Today, I’m going to give you two frameworks that lend themselves to a myriad of online community planning and community management activities.

Here are two ways that you can increase business-to-business customer engagement:

Tip #1) Help Your Customers Be Successful.

Customer engagement can be a very “pavlovian” cycle. Like any of us, your customers will respond to what works and disregard things that don’t deliver rewards.

The trick here is to identify what it is that will make your customers successful and proactively help make that happen. To find out what it is that will make your customers successful with your products, services, or membership:

• Conduct in-person or phone interviews
• Confirm what you hear in the interviews with online surveys
• Get data from the discussions and comments in your private online community

Tip #2) Listen And Respond To As Many Posts, Questions, Etc. As You Can.

After making sure that your online community is aligned with your customer’s or member’s biggest problems, the ’24-Hour Rule’ is a top priority for communities that want a boost.

This means that you put community management processes in place to make sure you identify questions and discussions initiated by members and craft a helpful response (that sometimes spurs further discussion among the members).

Responding within 24 hours, makes your customers and other members of the community feel heard, supported, and part of an active conversation. The member who asked the question or make the contribution will feel more comfortable participating, as will others who see active discussions in the community.

You will notice that community members will often respond to a discussion thread that is already running more often than they will initiate new discussions. It is important that your online community software alert you about new responses in ongoing discussion threads, as well as new content that is posted in the community.

On the flip side, if your customers or members start a discussion in your community and don’t get a response from anyone, there is a much higher chance that they will get the impression that the community is not worth their time.

B2B Customer Engagement Takeaway

Align your private online community with what will help customers reach their goals. Show them that the customer community is active and will be there to support them.

Creating a plan and conducting active following these two strategies are proven to boost ongoing engage and, in turn, may play a big part in growing your sales with new and existing customers, controlling your support costs, and increasing customer satisfaction.

In a recent article, Marisa Peacock lays out 6 elements of successful online communities. The piece includes a great infographic that highlights these building blocks.

According the post, the main elements of successful online communities are:

Culture

How can you match the community-based customer experience to the rest of your brand? It is important that the positioning of your online community, as well as the content and interactions that your customers or members find there, match what you want your organization to be known for in the minds of your target audiences.

Metrics

What should you be measuring to tell you how to manage your online community? It is not enough to have metrics. You must take pains to ensure you are measuring the right things. Data-driven community management is at the center of successful online customer or member communities.

Transparency

Can your target audience trust you to provide the value that they want from your online community? This may include disarming honesty, leaving your sales hat at the door, or access to the straight story from executives.

Engagement

Which activities in the community would make it a success? All activity in your online community does not carry the same weight. Different actions hold different meaning related to your organization’s goals and the health of the community. Identify and foster the behaviors that are most beneficial to the long-term value of the online community.

Value

How is the online community going to benefit your organization, as well as your customers or members? Your private online community should be aligned with the most important problems of your customer base and your organization.

Conversations

Does participation in your online community involve two-way discussions? While “lurker” can find value in browsing the online community anonymously, it is the discussions and contributions that will lead to increased engagement and value.

BONUS: 7^th Characteristic of Successful Online Communities

When I talk to social business and member engagement professionals about content that they have produced, they often ask if they have missed something. I believe that they are honestly looking for feedback and to engage in a social dialog that builds upon their ideas.

In this case, the list is not missing something. However, there are important elements that must be highlighted. It is hard to capture and explain all of the characteristics of a successful online community in one blog post or infographic. Entire books are published on the topic each month.

If asked, I’d want this list to include a point about the systems needed to bring people back to the online community. Having an online community that provides measurable value, conversations, transparency, and engagement is wonderful. However, these elements can be no match for the attention spans of busy customers or members.

Use the email engine built into your online community software to set up automated and manual emails that provide relevant information to different customer or member segments to bring them back to the community and highlight engagement opportunities that pertain to them.

Your Turn

In your experience, how does this list stack up? Which is the most important characteristic? Did the list miss anything? Add your thoughts in the comments below.

This modern proverb has different implications for you than it does for the audiences that you are trying to reach. Thinking about how you invest your time can give you insight into your priorities. Thinking about how your customers or members get a return on their investment of time can be humbling.

• Why would they invest the time in using your product or service?
• Why would they invest the time in joining your membership organization?
• Why would they invest time in reading your content?
• Why would they invest the time in participating in your customer or member community?

This pillar of time management was made clear in a recent presentation by product design and marketing consultant, Etienne Garbugli. Unlike time management tips that describe a single way to get more done, these hacks can be used by everyone and are grounded in the reality of our often chaotic lives.

As you flip though these slides, think about the tips both for yourself and through the eyes of your customers or members.

26 Time Management Hacks I Wish I’d Known at 20 from Etienne Garbugli

Customer and Members Have a Choice About Where to Spend Their Time

One time management tip has special significance for businesses or membership organizations that are planning to create a private online community for their customers or members.

If you see your customer’s time as merely hours in the day, you have a minimal incentive to make your online customer or member community a remarkably valuable resource for your target audience. It is easy to lose focus on creating an experience where your customers come to rely on your online community to do their jobs and advance their careers.

What would happen if your customers see their time valued at $1,000/hour? The disconnect between how your target audience sees their time and the value they get from your community would sink your private online community quickly. If your customers or members took this time management advice to heart and walked around thinking that their time is valued at $1,000 per hour, then your online community better create enough value to make it worth their time.

If you needed to recoup $500 of value every 30 minutes that you spend in an online community, what would that private social network look like?

• What problems would it solve for you?
• How fresh, profound, and actionable would the ideas and content be?
• How easily would you expect to find answers and connect with experts?

Online Customer or Member Community Takeaway

Even though you know that most of your customers’ time is not worth $1,000 per hour, many of them feel like it is. Their lives are busy and time is limited. Some of them may even have read the 26 time management hacks above and are actively using them.

Regardless of whether your community serves hobbyists, low-skilled workers, IT specialists, or professionals that actually do bill at over $200/hour, you’ll be well served by developing an acute focus on creating your organization’s private online community in a way that provides overwhelming value to your target audience.

It is a proven approach to generate participation, encourage return visits, and create long-term advocates for your company and community. Ask yourself and your team the following question:

Is your private online community providing enough value to entice your customers or members to participate in the community rather than make $1,000 an hour doing something else?

Ask this question during the online community planning process, as well as throughout the community’s lifecycle.

However, like all products and services, my marketing software and its provider are not perfect. A recent attempt at sharing a new feature with customers turned into a less than positive exchange.

Negative public comments from existing customers can be harmful to a company. They have the opposite effect of the customer advocates B2B businesses work so hard to develop.

We live in an age where people look for products with five out of five ratings on Amazon and glowing Yelp reviews. For three and four star ratings, buyers decipher the comments and reviews to see if the reason for the downgrade is something that they can live with.

Often times, buyers comb through reviews, blog comments, and discussions on social networks not to find out which product they should buy, but to look for reasons not to buy a specific product or flaws that they may have overlooked.

The Story of Customer Communication Gone Bad

Big product announcement! My marketing software provider posted on their product blog that they have added really cool A/B testing to the built-in email functionality. But wait! This seemingly basic marketing functionality is only available in the most expensive of their three packages. Socious pays for the middle tier marketing software package.

I, along with several other customers, chimed in with our discontent. Customer feedback ranged from questioning the decision to add A/B testing to only their top tier offering to seeking alternative email marketing software that integrated with this company’s other features.

The Good News: Their customers are engaged.

The Bad News: Their customers were not happy.

The Even Worse News: Their customers were documenting their unhappiness in a public forum.

The discussion occurring in the comments of this blog post did not get better for this company when they tried to explain their stance. The lesson here – if you customers, who understand your products well enough to ask questions on product-related blog posts, think that your company made a poor decision, clarifying your position has the potential to make the situation worst.

In the end, the representative from the software provider said that their customers should contact their account manager to get the software they need for their marketing strategy. Even if the company took this feedback and made the decision to include A/B testing in their middle tier package, this discussion still happened and these comments are still out there for prospective customers evaluating their solution, the media, and competitors to see.

How Online Customer Community Software Could Have Helped

You start out with an exciting product announcement meant to delight your bigger customers. You end up with less than thrilled customers and an ugly conversation on your product blog.

This is where online customer communities come in. These private social platforms are used by an increasing number of B2B companies to bring customers, employees, and partners together for the success and satisfaction of their customers.

Companies not only use the data from their social crm strategy to close sales faster, capitalize on upsell opportunities, and increase customer advocacy, they also use them to address customer concerns in a secure environment before those concerns go public.

Here are three ways that my marketing software provider could have benefited from an online customer community in this situation:

In the Privacy of Their Own “Home”

Though I understand that businesses write public product blogs for the SEO, news, and industry leadership value, the engagement that can be stirred up by this kind of one-size-fits-all customer communication approach can be a double-edged sword. Customers will sing your praises when you get it right and customers will tear you down when you disappoint them.

Engaging your customers in your private online customer community enables both you and your customers to have two-way conversations without the world watching. If customers are unsettled by a decision you make, representatives from your organization can have that conversation with your customer community without worrying about creating negative perceptions among prospective customers and others in the public sphere.

Segmentation Equates to Better Relationships

A critical part of customer communication is segmentation. Online customer communities allow companies to provide more relevant information to specific customer groups based on demographics (who they are), transactional data (the products and services they use), and social behavior (what they have done in the community).

There are better ways to get middle-tier customers to upgrade and new customers to come on board. The interaction described above would have gone differently for the company if they were able to send the announcement to only the customers using the product that to which announcement pertained.  They could have still made the announcement on their public blog for SEO and positioning reasons. They could have also included a mention of the update to their middle and lower tier customers inside their customer community to better entice this audience to upgrade.

The difference is that an online customer community would have allowed this software vendor to create different messages and expose them to different audiences. Rather than one blanket announcement, they could have made bigger strides with each of their target audiences – resulting in better awareness in the market, happier mid-tier customers, and ecstatic enterprise-level customers.

Instead, they have pleased their top-tier customers and left a trail of less than thrilled middle-tier customers for all to see.

Proactive Account Management

In the situation above, the conversation slowed when the company representative told customers that the account management team said to “tell you and others really interested in this update to give your account manager a call.” From a public relations perspective, this was their attempt to end debate on the blog and get the conversation out of the public light as soon as possible.

Rather than telling frustrated customers to call someone else in the company and maybe they can help, businesses that use online customer communities give account managers access to their customer’s activity in the community. They can see when a customer is happy, struggling with a question, or voicing their discontent. They can then reach out to those customers that have serious concerns individually using their existing relationships with them.

Private online communities provide the opportunity to be proactive about customer problems and negative feedback before it snowballs into a customer mutiny.

Private Online Customer Community Takeaway

This post takes on the following questions:

Do B2B companies run the risk of public brand damage if they primarily communicate with customers on blogs available to the public and search engines?

It is not always going to end badly for businesses. In fact, most businesses (including my marketing software provider) will receive a very high percentage of conflict-free, positive comments on the public product blogs.

However, since this will not always be the case, there is a better way to keep customers engaged, communicate company or product news, and get into product-related discussions.

Business-to-business companies have to work with different realities than consumer companies, including:

• B2B companies are not always to going to make the right decisions for all customers.
• B2B businesses often have complex products that can frustrate customers at times.
• B2B businesses rely on long term relationships with customers.
• B2B customers need positive and negative feedback to continue to add market-driven innovation to their solutions.

All of these things go on and will continue to go on. As they do, online customer communities help B2B companies avoid the turbulent discussions that come with having engaged customers from occurring in public where prospective customers, the media, and competitors can see them.

Companies use customer community platforms to help them create a more attractive customer experience by encouraging in-depth product discussions, providing more relevant information to specific customer segments, and helping support professionals be more proactive.

In one common example, when we discuss their strategy and how the organization plans on incorporating the online member or customer community into its overall strategy, the question-asker becomes a little flustered in describing the business problems they are trying to solve and just says, “We want something like Facebook for our customers,” or “We want a private Facebook for our members.”

Due to much larger levels of online and offline media coverage for public social networks compared with private online communities, these parallels and questions are perfectly understandable. People point out the most prominent feature of a public social network, the “wall” or news feed, and ask, “Can you give us something like that?”

This post explores the implications of focusing on social networking-type features like a “wall” and how incorporating a “wall” into your online customer or member community might impact your results. There is a science behind creating thriving online communities and there is a lot of data as to what makes an online community successful and what does not.

Social Networks vs. Online Communities

Social networks are not online communities. Sure, they share several common traits. They both exist online, they are places where people discover content and other people, and they both fall within the blurry lines that define social business platforms. However, it is important for business people to recognize the major differences between social networks and online communities.

Social Networks: Individual People or Companies

Social network platforms, first and foremost, encourage connections and interactions between people.

Online Communities: Shared Interests, Goals, and Values

Online communities focus on bringing people together around interests, professions, products, and causes.

This brings us back to one very important distinction – the “wall” vs. the group.

Does Your Online Community Need “Walls” or Groups?

In social networks, the “wall” is the central news feed that displays a chronological listing of updates and messages from the people and organizations that you follow. For instance, when you log into Facebook, you see the photos from your cousin’s wedding, a new sale at your favorite clothing store, and a message from your best friend asking about getting together next weekend.

Like the offline communities that we live in, online communities are not built primarily around individual connections. While it is true we have our own networks in our offline lives, communities and movements are built around shared interested and values. Offline, we build communities around hobbies, jobs, our kids’ schools, churches, volunteer organizations, and other interests.

For this reason, online communities, whether they are online customer communities for companies and online member communities for nonprofit organizations, focus on niche online groups more than they focus on “walls” for each individual member of the community.

In online communities, customers or members have access to specific groups based on things like their status in the organization (i.e. customer advisory board member), product segment or membership type (i.e. student members), or individual interest (i.e. an international issues group).

Individualism vs. Common Goals

Social networks run on individualism. Facebook even thrives when the number of users decreases. Since social networks are based on many-to-many connections, they are not as exposed to the rules of the “chicken and the egg model of online community success.” This rule that says that:

Customers or members need to use your community in order for others to see it as a benefit of doing business with you (or of membership). And people need to see it as a benefit of doing business with you (or of membership) so that they use it.

A majority of people that belong to a public or private social network could ignore it for a few months and the social network would still endure because the individual connections are still intact.

Communities, on the other hand, need activity to survive. They need members of the community to start discussions and respond to discussions. The need people to create content and then they need others to comment on, rank, and share that content.

If online customer or member communities were structured in the way that social networks are, each individual would have to connect with every other individual to stay up on, and participate in, conversations on each other’s “walls” pertaining the entire community or their specific segment of the community.

It Comes Down to Where the Action Happens

Online communities still have activity feeds where you can see updates from the people that you follow. They still have “favorites” features and personalized alerts so that you can get custom views of the topics, groups, and discussions that you are interested in when you login or open your email. You can still track content, discussions, and people of interest in online communities.

Members of an online community can stay just as connected as they can in a social network. However, in online communities, that action happens in groups rather than on individual “walls.”

This is not to say that individual customers and members can’t connect or contact one another in online communities. The difference is that the focus is not on individual “walls.” It is on group discussions, file-sharing, and collaboration over products and issues.

Online Communities vs. Social Networks: People Use Them Differently

Think about why people use social networks. According to a Pew Research Center’s 2011 report, people mainly use social networks to stay in touch with friends and family. The “wall” or news feed-style set up of many major social networks fit well with this by putting the emphasis on personal connections.

Now, think about why people use private online communities. They are seeking answers, helping others, and just “belonging” to a community of peers.

In a 2012 study by the Society of New Communications Research (SNCR), called The Social Mind, research indicates that nearly 80% of people belong to private online communities to “help others by sharing information, ideas, and experience.” 66% of the respondents to the study said that they are members of online communities in order to “participate in a professional community of colleagues and peers.”

Both the reasons that people use social networks and the reasons that people participate in online communities are valid. However, the core structure and differences between the two make each a strong fit for the way that people use them.

Are “Walls” or Groups Better for Social Density and Why Does It Matter?

Online Communities need to maintain a high degree of social density to succeed both initially and over time. Social density is the measure by which activity is concentrated in the community.

According to top online community consultant and educator, Richard Millington:

“If your social density is too low (i.e. you spread the same level of interactions over too many places to host them, such as forum categories, chat rooms, status updates, twitter etc…) the community feels empty. It takes longer to get a response to your posts. Members get bored and leave.”

If activity begets activity and spreading activity across members’ individual “walls” can lead to serious tactical problems in your community, then it makes sense to focus everyone’s updates, comments, and content into only a few areas to make it clear to everyone in the community where the action and value are.

If your community is in its initial stages or is seeing a slowdown in activity, avoid providing too many places where people can participate. Spreading out the areas where community members can get in on the activity dilutes the social density of your community. Members will see less activity in any given groups.

Note: This is why companies and membership organizations avoid letting customers or members create their own groups. Instead, they opt for groups set up by the sponsoring organization’s community management team. When you have multiple member-created groups for the same topic, they cannibalize each other. The result? Members see less activity, which leads to less participation by those members.

Social Networks That Focus on “Walls” Might Not Make Strong Communities

Organizations that use a “wall-based” social network structure for their online community, where discussions are occurring on individual members’ personal news feed (“walls”), can seriously dilute the social density of the online groups that focus on issues, product segments, and other important topics. The way that “walls” fracture where customers or members see activity can seriously threaten the health, productivity, and long-term viability of your online community.

Why Online Communities Need Groups, Not “Walls”

Both online communities based on group collaboration and social networks predicated on individual “walls” are valuable. However, they serve very different purposes and fit very different business situations.

Private online communities, also known as communities of interest (built around shared causes, hobbies, etc.) or communities of practice (built around shared industries, professions, product usage, etc.), are fueled by activity in groups around the niche topics.

On the flip side, as I explained above, the success of social networks is driven by individual connections. Our inclination toward individualism is the reason that public social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, thrive. It is also the reason Facebook’s groups feature didn’t work and most LinkedIn groups are ineffective.

You need the shared mission of the community and the focus on sharing with, helping, and believing in the community to be front and center in customers’ or members’ minds. “Walls” on social networks are not nearly as capable of fostering this approach as online groups.

When Should You Implement a “Wall?”

Aside from public social networks, “wall” features are sometimes a good complement to an internal employee community or a social intranet solution. Individuals can quickly see updates from the people they work with without sifting through the noise of the entire organization’s daily project updates.

However, online customer communities and online member communities demand online communities, not social networks. The focus on individual “walls” not only instills the wrong culture in the community, but it can seriously delay or derail the value that the community delivers to your organization and its members.

Takeaway for Selecting an Online Community Software Platform

Are you creating a social network or an online community?

In the same way that it would be difficult to use an online community group-based model to stay  connected to friends, family, and others in your network, employing a “wall-oriented” social network model to communities of practice, communities of interest, and other peer-to-peer customer or member communities would be detrimental to the success of the community.

This article is not meant to push one approach over the other in all cases. Positioning “wall-type” news feeds at the center of your social network can be the right decision. If the purpose of your social business strategy is to primarily foster individual relationships, “walls” come with a lot of benefits.

If you are trying to bring customers or members together to support a product, rally around a cause, or take a collective action, focusing on groups in your online community makes much more sense.

Your Turn…

Please add your thoughts and experiences with online community groups and social networking “walls” in the comments below.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin

One of the keys to business growth has long been the strength and nature of the relationships an organization builds with its customers. All businesses with customers have customer relationships. They exist whether you like it or not, and whether you are focused on it or not.

This reality can be double-edged swords for companies. According to Forrester’s Customer Experience Index in 2012, only 37% of companies were rated “good” or “excellent” by their customers. This gives companies in the 37% a measurable advantage over others in their industry when it comes to customer satisfaction, market advocacy, and a joint commitment to seeing the business succeed. It leaves the remaining companies that received an “OK,” “poor,” or “very poor” rating open to losing market share to competitors that maintain better relationships with customers.

In addition to directly impacting customer retention, a solid customer relationship management (CRM) strategy can help your employees learn about market needs and customer behavior in order to deliver more helpful information and develop products that better serve your target audience.

Change is Coming Change is Here (and It is Not Stopping Any Time Soon)

Strategies for maintaining customer relationships have evolved over time. For most industries, the characteristics of today’s customers are not the same as they were twenty, ten, or even five years ago. Now, the Internet plays a major role in how customers and businesses interact. It has changed both how you can maintain relationships with your customers, as well as your customers’ expectations for how, when, and where you fit into their lives. For this reason, it is important for you to understand the modern rules for customer relationship management.

As Socious has worked with companies to implement online customer communities and social CRM strategies over the past few years, we have compiled nine realities of the customers you work with that impact business performance. Business people that internalize these rules are more likely to succeed as customer relationships in almost all industries experience a dramatic shift.

Do These Rules Influence Your Customer Relationship Management Decisions?

Rule #1 Customers Are Busy.

The amount of time a customer can spare for your business is limited and shrinking. This means you better bring tangible value and align your messages with your customers’ most important problems.

No matter how important your business is to you, communicate with customers as if your company, brand, and messages are not at the forefront of their minds at all times. Use tools and strategies to ensure that the information that your customers receive from your organization is highly relevant and makes good use of their time.

Rule #2 Customers Come With Content.

We have reached the point where each individual at a customer’s organization is a brand unto themselves. They have Twitter streams, YouTube channels, RSS blog feeds, and cloud-based photo albums. A large part of their professional lives and participation in online communities is designed to build and maintain their personal brand.

It is up to you to make sure your social CRM plan provides tools to empower customers to publish and pull in content, as well as share it with the all or certain segments of the customer community.

Rule #3 Customers Talk. Be Ready to Listen.

Customers have always talked. They advocate for your company when they are happy and they complain to anyone who will listen when they are unhappy with your organization.

In the past, customers asked questions and shared opinions at industry events, during support calls, and in user group meetings. Today, social media has created an environment where people can talk constantly. On social networks, your customers not only want to connect with friends and family, but with their favorite brands and businesses as well.

All of the social data generated by your customers in public and private social networks gives your company signals about the health of your relationship with that customer. Some of the signals are overt (e.g. a public complaint) and some are subtle (e.g. joining a specific online group in your private community).

As in any relationship, customer relationships are strongest when the customer knows that they are heard. If you can’t or don’t read your customers’ signals, the silence is easy to ignore inside the walls of your company, but it can leave a lasting negative impression on customers when they think of your company going forward.

Consumers have plenty of options for talking about your company and with your company. Listening has never been so important in strengthening customer relationships.

Rule #4 Customers Don’t Always Believe You.

A long time ago, customers would turn to businesses as the sole source of information about their products, industry, or problems. Now, those days are gone and more customers take advantage of the information available to them from a multitude of online content and social channels.

If customers aren’t confident in something that you say or do, they can go elsewhere to find out the truth. That includes media sources, other customers, your partners, and even competitors.

Rule #5 Customers Use Multiple Channels to Communicate and Seek Answers.

Our customers that use the listserv features built into their online customer communities see an average of 10% more customer engagement than those organizations that only use the browser-based community. Companies see this increase in participation result from people being able to engage with employees of the company, fellow customers, and partners from their email inbox as well as through the online community.

Customers use several technology and communication platforms to do their jobs. They may disengage from your organization if the channels in which they can reach out to you and others in your customer community don’t align with their communication preferences.

The speed at which your customers do business, heightened customer experience expectations due to the consumerization of enterprise IT, and trends in mobile access make it important to have several layers of support channels, including phone, social media and online customer communities.

Rule #6 Customers Receive a Lot of Content.

Every day, your customers have a lot of information coming in. According to the Email Statistics Report (2011-2015) by Radicati, the number of messages that the average business email account receives in a day will rise from 72 to 84 between 2011 and 2015.

In addition, customers that use search or social media to find information can get lost in the ever-expanding options online. Netcraft, an English company devoted to tracking technology on the Internet reported that there were 634 million websites in existence at the end of 2012 with 51 million of them added during that year.

The bottom line is that customers are constantly on the edge of being overwhelmed by the volume of the information they receive. In an effort to cope with this reality, many people have trained themselves to ignore seemingly unimportant messages. Your customers are not on a constant lookout for anything you might send to them, so it is important that you are sending them only highly useful content that is relevant to that individual.

Rule #7 Customers Seek Communities, Not Social Networks.

There are many differences between online communities and social networks. Communities share a purpose and common understanding of why they are there, whereas social networks are the platform that enables people to connect. Communities come together to support one another and solve problems. Social networks are just that, networks of people and companies. Both are valuable. They just serve different purposes.

When it comes to customer relationship management, strive to create an active community, not just a social network. Your customers want to succeed with your products or services. They want to know that there is a community rooting for them.

Compared to the basic experience of being connected on a social network, the support, collaboration, and engagement between customers, employees, and partners that can be found in an active customer community can naturally lead to stronger relationships with your customers.

Rule #8 Customer Actions Speak Louder Than Words.

What a customer does is a much better indicator of the health of their relationship with your organization than what they say. By combining traditional demographic and transactional data with behavioral and social data, your business can gain a better understanding of your customer priorities, their challenges, and areas where you can strengthen your relationship.

Rule #9 Customers Will Say Something.

Customers will have good and bad things to say about your brand. They are increasingly willing to voice their questions and concerns online about the industry and your products, as well as share tips. Your company has some control over where they say it and who can hear them.

Customers can voice concerns in public or they participate in your private social network for customers. They can ask questions in another one of your industry’s branded communities or they can engage in your secure customer community. They can speak up in a place where competitors can swoop in and provide solutions or they can be a leader in the private online community that your organization sponsors.

You customers will say something. It is up to you to provide the place for them to have those conversations. Otherwise, you will be forced to sit on the sidelines and watch while others in your market offer them a platform to find answers, vocalize discontent, and build community.

Social Customer Relationship Takeaway

Customer relationships and the way that customers communicate with your organization and others in the industry are evolving quickly. This change has taken some businesses by surprise and it is right in the wheelhouse for others.

Modern customer relationship management needs new strategies, processes, and technology tools. Businesses are increasingly managing this still-evolving customer relationship landscape by choosing a strategy that includes an online customer community at the center.

Evaluate your current customer management plan against the realities of modern customers listed above. Once you identify your strengths and weaknesses, you can map out the social strategies, cultural shifts, and community technology features that will help you cover your bases for the ongoing changes in customer relationship management.

“I want my online customer community to be like Facebook.”

“My customers are all on Facebook. Why can’t I just start a community there?”

These are the type of things thing that we hear from businesses and nonprofit membership organizations when they first contact Socious about launching a private social network for their customers or members.

Facebook is seen as the pinnacle of social networking. This is mainly because it has the most awareness, the most usage, and the most media coverage of all of the public social networks.

After digging deeper into their customer community strategy, most organizations understand that Facebook has a role in their marketing and customer communication plans, but Facebook and private online customer or member communities play a very different role in their business.

However, Facebook offers some very clear lessons for companies that are putting an online customer community at the center of their CRM strategy.

Using Insight from the State of Social Media Report to Make Your Private Online Community Better

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recently published data around usage of public social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. In the State of Social Media report, they highlighted the existence and causes behind Facebook fatigue – the trend toward people using Facebook less or taking an extended break from Facebook usage. Take a close look at slides 10-15.

The state of social media from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

Even with all of their cash, media attention, and innovation, Facebook is experiencing many of the pitfalls that we warn businesses, user groups, and associations about when we help them plan and launch their private customer or member communities.

Let’s examine the parallels between the reasons why people stop using Facebook and why some organizations’ private online communities don’t get traction with customers or members.

65% of the people who have taken a multi-week break from Facebook indicated reasons that involved not getting enough value from the social network to cause them to log back in.

46% of the people who have taken a multi-week break from Facebook gave reasons that could have been avoided if Facebook was able to use the right channel and value proposition (content, personalization, etc.) to keep them engaged.

These are the two biggest characteristics of unsuccessful private online communities as well. Sometimes it has to do the strategy and the organization’s focus/capabilities. Other times, the business or membership organization has selected an online community software platform that can’t provide the value and engagement features that the organization needs, and their customers or members demand.

Takeaway for Private Online Communities

Not even Facebook is infallible. Many of us have anecdotally experienced the drop in Facebook usage, but the data is validating this trend at a more rapid pace than ever.

One of the best pieces of social business advice that you can bring back to your team after reading this article is the following:

When your business, association, or user group creates a private online community to engage customers or members, work to maintain a maniacal focus on finding out what your target audience values and making that value the centerpiece of your online community.

If your customers want faster support, build your customer community around providing tips and helping customers with questions connect to customers with answers. If your association’s members care deeply about getting news about other members, create a private online community where member news is at the surface and members can easily connect.

While providing exceptional value is vital to a community’s success, don’t develop tunnel vision around it. Also keep in mind that a valuable community is nothing without a way to drive busy customers or members back to the community to get that value.  In addition to focusing on value, make sure to plan to put in place the automated and manual community processes that your technology platform needs in order to keep your target audience coming back to the community over time.

As you can see in the Pew data, even Facebook struggles with maintaining these critical elements of online community success. By keeping customer value and ongoing engagement at the center of your strategy, community management plan, and technology, your organization will be on your way down the path to preventing your customers’ or members’ Facebook fatigue from creeping into your company’s private online community.

Some people love managing online communities because the love to be social online. They thoroughly enjoy being at the center of it all. However, there is an even large group on online community managers that do it for a different reason.

These individuals love reading the data on a situation and making critical decisions to advance an organization’s priorities. Like a quarterback who reads a defense or a flight traffic controller who analyzes airplane data to advise pilots on how to their slot flights in safely, online community management teams read data from the community to make decisions and adjust processes that will improve the community’s health and contribute to achieving the sponsoring organization’s objectives.

Using Data to Identify Weaknesses in Your Private Online Community

While looking for opportunities in the community is big part of this role, analyzing qualitative and quantitative community data also involves looking out for signs of trouble. Being able to recognize and address problems will help to ensure that your private online community provides value to both your customers and your company.

Some problems can be strategic, meaning that your online community is not solving the right issues for your customers or members. Others are tactical and can most likely be corrected through more effective community management.

Once you detect that there are problems, you need to act quickly to resolve them in order to avoid entering a death spiral. With a death spiral, you see a drop in member activity that leads to a decrease in member visits (which leads to a drop in member activity leads to a decrease in member visits and so on and so on until you hit bottom). It can take up a lot of time to reverse an online community death spiral once you are in it. You may even have to go back to the beginning and start over.

The success or demise of your online community depends on a model similar to the “Chicken or the Egg” dilemma. Your members need to engage within the community so that others see it as a benefit and people need to see the community as a benefit in order to interact with it. When one or the other of these elements falls out of place, then the entire system will break down.

This is why your data is so important. If you are monitoring the right online community metrics, it is easier to quickly identify and resolve any problems that may arise. Collecting and analyzing data regularly enables you to correct issues before they snowball into larger problems instead of letting them build over the course of a few months. It also makes sure that you spot trouble before your management team brings it up.

How to Spot Trouble in Your Online Customer or Member Community

All social business analytics do not carry the same weight. If you think about online communities, what do they need to survive? They need members and activity by those members. Based on that principle, here are three signs that could spell big trouble for your online customer or member community if you don’t take action to correct it.

Trouble Sign #1) Drop in Growth

When you track your growth, you might see a decrease in the number of new members to your community. A drop in growth could stem from several sources. It is important to pinpoint the cause in this drop before you form a plan to change this trend.

It could be a marketing problem where people are not becoming aware of your private online community. Maybe fewer people are completing the registration process. In that case, you can take a second look at the sign-up and onboarding processes to see if there is any way to make it easier or faster. Perhaps, instead of sending a verification email (double opt-in style), you add a captcha to the registration page, so they can begin interacting with the community immediately.

Trouble Sign #2) Drop in Activity

Continued growth coupled with a drop in engagement in your online customer or member community can be a strong indication that there is a problem. Communities thrive when there is a high level of interaction among members. Without this, fewer people are going to see the community as a benefit of being a customer or member.

When you have people completing the registration or single sign-on processes, but failing to contribute to the community, it is a signal to you to take steps and implement processes with the specific purpose of increasing engagement. Maybe you can create content that spurs conversation, segment data better to delivery more relevant opportunities to chime in, create a mentoring program, come up with more virtual events for newcomers, or ask leading questions in the community forums for members to discuss.

Trouble Sign #3) Members Not Promoting the Community and Inviting New Members

If people do not see the benefit of being a member of your community, they are not going to join. As in any business, referral and recommendations from peers usually outperform other marketing channels. Your current members are a key source for getting new members to sign-up and continually engage with online communities.

If you see a drop in buzz and advocacy around your community, actively solicit feedback from your community’s advocates. A few open and honest conversations can replace months of guessing and frustration.

Make it easy to spread the word. Deliberately setting up a social sharing system or referral campaign can help encourage your members to actively seek new members for the community. They can tell others about the benefits of joining and will work to maintain engagement levels in order to boost the number of people taking part in the community on a regular basis.

Online Community Problems Takeaway

Online communities are living entities. Unlike a campaign where you have control until it has launched, then it’s over, online communities often involve thousands of stakeholders and need to be nurtured over many years.

I can’t underscore enough how important it is to recognize and address problems in your online community. Some problems are strategic (not solving the right problem for customers or members) and others are tactical and can be solved through better community management.

If you are planning an online customer community or an online member community keep these three trouble signs at the front of your mind as you plan for a successful launch and first year of your community.

All communities go through high points and lulls during their lifecycle. When you are keeping a close watch on important community data, such as growth and contributions, it is easier to quickly identify problems. You can use that information to formulate strategy and tactics to reverse the issues and improve the health of your private online customer or member community.

According to research from the IDC Social Software Survey, released in early 2013, building online communities is the #1 social business focus for companies.

Image credit: IDC

In his write-up, IDC’s Michael Fauscette, outlines the expansion from internal collaboration to communities where customers, employees, and partners/suppliers come together:

“In our original survey over 4 years ago, companies were very focused on using social for outbound marketing. That wasn’t a surprise, at that time marketing was leading the use of social tools and there was not yet a clear understanding of the value of the conversation over the broadcast and on the value of community and networks. In the next round of surveys the focus shifted to internal collaboration and building a knowledge sharing culture. This phase was important for broadening the scope of social and for drawing more of the employees into the activities. This in turn demonstrated to more groups inside the company how social could provide solid business benefit and opened up new processes to social activities. Last year, as companies matured in the use of social tools, the focus shifted yet again to integrated activities like drawing customers and partners into the network, solving customer issues, getting customer and partner feedback, etc. Important because it started to show the business that the future is really networked and connected.”

Whereas companies begin using social tools around internal knowledge–sharing and culture, businesses are now turning the use of social communities toward their profit centers and customer-facing operations.

However, this evolution doesn’t just apply to you. Your competitors are just as aware of the revenue potential and cost savings of online customer communities.

In competitive markets, there is a timing element that business leaders must weigh when prioritizing the development of their online customer community. The last thing you want is to be left in the dust by your competitors who are already creating community platforms of their own.

Three No Good, Very Bad Things That Can Happen When You Delay Building Your Online Customer Community

Setting Your Company Up for Competitive Disadvantage

It is no secret that companies with an active online customer community have an advantage against businesses that don’t. Your executives are not prioritizing your social business strategy in a market vacuum. Your competitors are also very aware that having a thriving customer community is a strong differentiator.

If a customer is comparing your products to that of another company, the factor that makes them choose one over the competitor could be the added value that comes from having an active community of customers, employees, and partners to support them.

Fighting for business with a competitor that touts a private customer community gives your prospective customers two kinds of signals that put your offering at a disadvantage – symbolic and practical.

During the sales cycle, the existence of an active online customer community symbolically tells your prospects that your company takes your relationship with customers seriously. It shows people that you invest in their success by providing a way to easily get support and effectively communicate with their fellow customers as well as your business.

Secondly, when competing against a competitor who markets their online customer community as part of their product offering, you face practical disadvantages. Customer communities tell prospects that they will get the support they need and always have a safety net of peers to help them overcome challenges at all hours of the day.

Online communities are by no means the only way to demonstrate your commitment to customers during their buying process, but when comparing two companies where one has a customer community and the other does not, your prospects will see clear differences in each company’s focus and approach to customer relationships.

Struggling to Generate Customer Commitment

Customers only have a finite amount of time that they can commit to online communities each day. Their time is divided among personal communities on public social networks like Facebook, communities of interest to support their hobbies and other interests such as travel, and communities that help them with their professional lives.

You want to make sure that your online customer community is on the shortlist of the ones that your target audience does make time to visit as often as possible.

Without your company’s online customer community in the mix, you are opening the door for your customers to find value in other professional communities and build relationships with other organizations, and even competitors.

When it comes to participating in online communities that provide them support and help them become more successful in their jobs, your customers will begin visiting other communities frequently and leading conversations in other discussion forums.

Building customer commitment is an important part of creating advocates in the market and increasing customer retention. The more commitment you show to your customers through on online community, the more committed they will become to your business and products.

Waiting to launch your online customer community often means that you’ll be spending more of the community’s first year trying to pry your customers away from the online communities that they have already spent time building affinity toward. In the worst case, you may find that your company is squeezed out of your own customers’ busy lives and that it will be quite some time before your customers are ready to engage in your private online community.

Not Staying Ahead of the Game

In the late 1990’s your company could get 80-90% open rates on your email marketing campaigns. Today, companies rejoice over a 15-20% open rate. As more people become accustomed to communicating via email, email marketing became a less effective differentiator and way to get people’s attention.

Companies that showed their target audiences that they could deliver value via email saw measurable success and were able to translate those relationships into dollars, even as the customer communication landscape changed. Businesses that adopted email communication later met resistance from a market that was more hesitant to read new emails and had trouble getting noticed.

Community-based customer relationship management is the future of business. According to the IDC research mentioned above, 79% of businesses have already implemented an ESN, enterprise social network (mainly internal online communities). Of that number, 28% have more than one network set up.

As indicated at the beginning of this post, businesses are now turning their focus to online customer communities. That means if you are not already planning to set up a private social network for your own customers, your company may go from staying with the pack to falling behind over the course of a year.

Setting up your online community software is only the first step. Getting your business to change its culture and change behavior around a customer community is the part that takes the most time.

Starting to plan your business’ own online customer community is vital to staying ahead of your market, your competitors, and your customers’ expectations. You cannot wait to see if the data is wrong and customer communities are just a fad that will pass. Your customers are expecting the same interaction and engagement that they get with other businesses online. The clock is ticking.

Online Customer Community Takeaway

More businesses are seeing the importance of maintaining an active online customer community. Customers have come to expect this level of interaction with all businesses, and those who aren’t keeping up will soon be overlooked.

A customer community gives you an advantage over competitors. They see that you take an interest in customer success and stay engaged with customers, making your products and services more desirable over another others in the market.

Customers are quick to commit to a brand that encourages two-way conversation and networked interactions with them and the company’s ecosystem of customers and partners. Giving them a place to go when they need questions answered or problems resolved quickly makes them more eager to stay loyal. In addition, a thriving online community keeps you ahead of the competition because you are staying on top of the latest trends and can gain continual feedback from your target customer.

It takes a village to keep a customer happy.

Branded customer communities rarely form organically, nor can the operation and success a strategy as central as a private online community ride on the shoulders of one individual. It takes a village of staff members.

When a business uses an online customer community to increase the value of doing business with the company and manage customer relationships, there are many roles that have to be filled to maintain the level of support, engagement, and benefit that your customers and executives expect.

According to a study by Altimeter, there are a variety of skills that are needed to make up an effective online community management team. The most critical include writing skills, daily customer relations, ability to work with other departments, and collecting product feedback for the company.

We work with some companies that have an entire team of people who handle these roles from multiple departments. Others have only a single community manager charged with a majority of the responsibilities.

Some organizations dedicate people to certain aspects of managing and growing their private customer or member community, while other organizations divide up community management roles among current employees by add to the workloads of those who already have full time responsibilities.

How to Approach Building an Online Community Management Team

What it takes to manage an online customer community can still be fuzzy if you are used to traditional one-to-one customer relationship management strategies. Work to avoid launching your online community strategy by filling only the basic online community management roles, like content creation and moderation, then adding responsibilities as you learn about your community. Your company and your community will make greater strides faster by understanding all of the major community management roles from the outset.

Try your best to fill these roles from the start, whether it is with one person or multiple people. If you can’t address all of these roles associated with your customer community from the start, you can then prioritize, scale back, and make plans to fill these needs over time as necessary.

The Many Roles that Employees Play in Successful Online Communities

Here are 12 of the major roles that someone needs to be responsible for when managing your online customer community:

Role #1 Publisher

The publisher is responsible for the useful, helpful content that is produced for the customer community. That means coordinating, editing (repurposing), and distributing the exclusive content that has been created specifically for your community’s target audiences.

Role #2 City Planner

Online communities require careful planning. The ‘city planner’ community management role needs to be able to identify and modify processes that will improve the customer experience and performance of your online customer community.

Role #3 Chief of Staff

This is the person who takes charge and gets the job done. They assure management that things are running as they should be and run any challenges up the flagpole when needed.

Role #4 Quarterback

In the day-to-day operations of your online community, the quarterback is the one who is responsible for calling out a play and handing the ball off to other people in the company or the community so they can carry it out. This community management role needs the authority, title, and charisma to be able to bring others together in order to carry out a successful plan of action.

Role #5 First Responder

Whenever a problem arises concerning the online community, it is vital to have someone who fills the role of the first responder – the first on the screen. If community members have issues or concerns, the first responder is the one that will come in and address those problems as quickly as possible – either publicly to the community or private to individual members. Often times, this is the role of the customer support team rather than that of a community manager.

Role #6 Capitalist

The capitalist has a deep understanding of the business strategy of the community and vested interest in the company’s overall performance. In this role, you conduct research and collect community data in order to make sure that the customer community is still aligned with the company’s goals.

Role #7 Data Geek

In organizations that sustain success over time, data drives everything. The same is true of your online customer community. Data gives you info about your members’ problems, your strengths, and your weakness. In this role, you use online community metrics to tell the story of what is going on in the community and what needs to happen to improve the community’s health.

Role #8 Fortune Teller

There is no denying that we all want to have someone close by who can predict the future. Where will our market be a year from now? What will happen if we keep doing X? If you’re wearing the ‘fortune teller’ community management hat, you will use collected community data to make market-based predictions and use that information to help the senior management team make important decisions about market strategies, product direction, and messages.

Role #9 Town Crier

It is important to have someone who is responsible for spreading the word around the community. They keep members engaged and in-the-know, as well as pass along information about upcoming opportunities that customers can take advantage of, such as training, customer events, or new resources.

Role #10 Reporter

Reporters are great at digging up information. Having a community manager that can use their strong relationships with the community to hunt down positive stories about members of the community is important. Sharing these stories is what keeps the members coming back to the community and connected to each, as well as the company.

Role #11 Recruiter

Whether you are a Fortune 500 company or a nonprofit association, volunteer leadership from your customers or members plays a large part in your online community’s lifecycle. The person playing the ‘recruiter’ community management role devotes time to seeking out leaders and volunteers among the community members in order to engage them in larger roles and enlist them in the content creation process.

Role #12 Teacher

The teacher role is important because they are responsible for training other staff members and customer leaders on how to get the most out of the community. The teacher will break down procedures and demonstrate actions so that others can learn what to do quickly and easily. The ‘teacher’ community management role is also responsible for updating training and support materials when the community changes (i.e. new discussions, new features, new customer segments, etc.).

Online Customer Community Takeaway

No matter how your company chooses to fill these roles, either with a single community manager or a team of them working together, all of these things need to be done in order to make the community a success.

We’ve found that consolidating the roles into fewer people can be beneficial since the skills applied to one area can be used in others to a greater advantage. The knowledge that is gained in one role can also be beneficial when applied to another role. However, this approach comes with risks if your core group of online community managers is prone to switching jobs.

Above all, the point it to make sure you have these roles covered. If you can’t, make sure you understand how leaving a gap in your community management plan may impact your online customer community.

Lego image by Joe Shlabotnik

Are you in this position? Your organization may be enthusiastic about the outcomes, but you are standing on the edge of an abyss, looking out over a long process that you have never undertaken before. You may be excited to get started, but don’t have a clear view of the path that leads to a thriving online community that is used and valued by customers, employees, and partners.

Once your company has decided to move forward with social software, it is critical to position your community at the center of your customer relationship or membership management strategy.

There are four key areas that need to be firing on all cylinders in order to give customers or members real value, as well as deliver returns to the company.

Key #1) Business Integration

Online community software must deliver tangible benefits for multiple departments across your company. Business processes and access to customers will become easier, which leads to increased efficiency and customer satisfaction. Examples of how online communities benefit companies include:

• Sales teams collect better data about their prospects and increase repeat business.
• Marketers identify brand advocates more easily.
• Businesses lower customer support costs while boosting customer loyalty.
• Product managers test ideas with the market more effectively.
• Public relations professionals have a platform to better handle screw-ups and industry turbulence.

Business integration is the foundation on which your online community strategy is built. The more areas of your organization that see tangible benefits from an online customer community, the higher the usage and buy-in you’ll see from stakeholders around your company.

Key #2) Technical Integration

Your organization already uses technology today. You may have a client portal, customer support ticketing platform, back-end association management software, or a learning management system. In order for your company and customers to get the most out your online community software, you need to make sure that it is compatible with these existing systems.

Examine which external websites and third-party applications make sense to integrate with your social platform. Sometimes, you may want to even build custom widgets that are specific to your online customer community. Linking your social software with your back-end systems enables your community to consume customer data from systems of record, like customer relationship management software, as well as pass social activity data back to those systems.

Having APIs that automatically updates information to other systems can help increase adoption by reducing the frustration that comes with manual processes and making your customer community an integrated part of your technology infrastructure, rather than another system hanging off the side of your website.

Key #3) Cultural Integration

This is important! If your social community software is going to be a success, then employees are going to have to rethink how they are doing their jobs and how they are going to engage with customers.

Introducing a community-based approach to employee, customer, and partner collaboration is a significant cultural shift for organizations of any size. There will be some employees in the beginning who will not be ready to jump into this change with the rest of the company. Find your core team of employees who are ready to embrace the changes and will work hard to encourage and educate others over time.

To help employees become comfortable working in an online community, set specific tasks for all employees when getting started with social community software, such as setting up profiles, uploading photos, taking surveys, and answering questions in an employee-only discussion forum.

There is too much written about this subject to cover in this article. You can learn more by checking out this video on creating a social business culture.

Key #4) Customer Experience Integration

Your customers already have their own set of expectations when it comes to interacting with your business. When adding a customer community to the center of your customer relationship management processes, it is important to keep the community experience in line with those expectations.

Take cues from your customers. Find out what they expect and how you can make their interactions more informative and helpful. You’ll be able to knock down many of the problems you may encounter by testing your customer community experience with actual customers. Their feedback will be invaluable in smoothing out your customer experience during and after the addition of an online community.

Every organization offers a unique customer experience. It is part of their product strategy. When giving your customers or member the value that comes from an online customer community, it is important to avoid alienating them by immediately presenting them with an experience that is totally different from what they have come to expect from your company.

Social Software Adoption Takeaway

Getting everyone in the company on board with your social software is a key ingredient for online community platform success. However, every department has different priorities and sees a distinct side of your business.

How can you address everyone’s needs without creating individualized training and support for your online community strategy? By planning to integrate your online community into the four areas outlined above, you can lay out an adoption strategy that supports people who are most concerned with business results, technical issues, job satisfaction, and your customer experience.

Getting a meeting with top-level executives is a great opportunity. While they are very busy people, setting up a block of time to talk to them about your online community strategy is critical to securing funding, solidifying buy-in, and setting expectations for the long haul that is community-building. You need to make sure that you are taking full advantage of it so that it is not a chance wasted.

You know all the reasons why a customer community is an essential tool for your business to grow over the next decade. It is up to you to make the executives in the C-suite see it that way too.

Here are seven tips that our customers have used to persuade senior management to invest in their online community strategy:

Use Flexibility of Online Communities to Align With Major Objectives

Online community software can be positioned at the center of a number of company goals. Look at what your organization’s objectives are and be prepared to show executives how a customer community can reinforce their business strategies and strengthen their performance. By showing them that you have done your research and understand what they need, you will establish your credibility and get a pass to continue the conversation.

Listen Carefully and Use What You Hear

C-level executives have an interesting superpower. Often times, they have more broad knowledge about your company and market that you do. So, if you come into their office with assumptions that don’t align with their understanding of the business, they can sense it right away. At best, they stop listening and in the worst case, they’ll fluster or embarrass you – setting back your project for months.

Be prepared with several questions for the executives that will validate your customer community strategy and get to the root of their problems. When you ask a specific question, stop and listen to their response carefully.

Conversations where executives do most of the explaining, answering and talking can be very valuable. If you listen strategically, you can tailor your pitch to align with their priorities when it is your turn to speak. There is no way you can come up with a solution to their problem until you fully understand their issues and problems.

Show a Clear Implementation and Management Plan

Once your executive team comes around to understanding the results that can be achieved, they’ll want to know how you’re going to make it happen and sustain it over time. Do your homework about the company’s priorities and work with your preferred online community software provider to draw up a plan that is realistic, but does not drain too many resources from other initiatives.

Be prepared to answer logistical questions that executives might have. This is not a time for pie-in-the-sky. Talk about strategies that have worked for your organization in the past and show the C-suite how your plan will get to the results they want.

Don’t Forget About Indirect Benefits

Give your executive team an idea of what they can expect from having an online customer community outside of the traditional benefits of increased sales, better customer retention, and lower support costs.

What are Some Indirect benefits of Online Customer Communities?

This could include boosting employee productivity by having a better way for employees to collaborate. Your customer community could also help your company gathering better market data to create more profitable products and services. Instead of just talking about creating repeat customers, explain how your customer community can increase the number of brand advocates out in the market. Your business will also be able to build a stronger network of engaged partners and suppliers.

Show Real ROI Projections

Executive’s business minds move quickly. As soon as they understand the basic concept of an online community, they’ll want to know how you are going to make it happen. As soon as they understand your implementation and community management plans, their minds will move on to the big picture return on investment (the oder of these may be different for your company).

Use a proven customer community ROI model and be clear about your assumptions so the expectation in the C-suite are appropriately set. Having your senior management understand the factors that go into a successful community can clear the way to get the resources you need to make the ROI model work.

Demonstrate Using Other Business Stories

Talk to current and past businesses that have implemented a private online community as a part of their customer relationship management strategy (any online community software company can point you in the right direction). Find out the specifics of their success stories, the results, and improvements that they have seen throughout the community’s lifecycle.

Point to these examples as you meet with executives so that they can get a clearer picture of the feasibility of your customer community plan through the results that various other companies have seen.

Online Customer Community Takeaway

When presenting to the C-suite, credibility is vital to telling your full story and getting the backing that you came for. Keys to developing this credibility include showing senior management that:

• You understand the business and market
• This strategy beats other strategies
• You have their interests in mind (financial and otherwise)
• You have a proven plan and have thought through the nuances

If you’ve done all the above in the proper manner, you’ll be in a much better position to get the budget, executive sponsorship, and resources you need to bring your online customer community strategy to fruition.

Customer experience is a well-known differentiator, but still few companies are on the path to doing something about it.

With an increasing number of people going online to research, buy, and seek support for products, the need for creating an exceptional online customer experience has been on a steady climb over the past decade. However, for most businesses, strategies to provide an outstanding customer experience before, during, and after a purchase are still in their infancy.

According to the 2012 Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, only 37% of companies received “good” or “excellent” customer experience index scores. A depressing 64% of businesses got a rating of “OK,” “poor,” or “very poor” from their customers.

This means that there is tremendous opportunity for companies that can create a stand-out experience for their prospects and customers.

Customer Experience is Everyone’s Job

It is now mainstream thinking that the customer experience does not end when the purchase is made or the contract is signed. It is a top job of everyone in your company to make sure your customers are successful with your products or services. The costs to acquire new customers are most often dramatically higher than the costs to keep the customers that you have.

Whether you are just trying to keep up with your customers on spreadsheets or you have joined the movement of companies and membership organizations that are using online communities to provide customers with the support, value, and access to peers that customers are demanding, the experience that your customers have when doing business with your organization and your ability to sustain the right online and mobile customer experience will only increase in importance over the next decade.

Great customer experiences are complex on the back end, but straight-forward to your customers. To create an exceptional customer experience online, ask yourself if it has these four characteristics:

Characteristic #1) Is It Sustainable?

People go to Disney World to get the customer experience and service that they expect from the Disney brand. People eat at McDonald’s because they know what the customer experience will be since it has beenthe same for years. Will you be able to always provide the same valuable experience to customers over time?

In an online customer community, that means maintaining a content plan, setting up personalized features to drive customers back to the community, and providing exceptional online customer service systems to make sure that customers receive responses to their questions and discussions.

Once you set the bar for your customer experience, customers will expect it to be the same level of experience (or better) every time. More damaging to your brand than having a mediocre customer experience is providing a poor customer experience because you could maintain it.

Assess your organization’s capabilities and keep them in mind to avoid rolling out a customer experience that cannot be sustained over time.

Characteristic #2) Is It Consistent at Times and Inconsistent at Others?

Our brains love consistency. Patterns and predictability keep us happy. So, when you are consistent about things like customer service, product quality, speedy delivery time, offering rewards, this keeps the customers satisfied.

However, as Nir Eyal pointed out in his interview with Socious, since our brains are always looking for this predictability, being confronted with a positive, but inconsistent, experience will keep us on the hook.

This is called giving customers variable rewards. It is the reason we can’t stop checking email on our phones. Sometimes, we get one worth reading and other times we don’t. If we got an important email every time, our brains would know that and we would check less frequently since we already knew what to expect.

Rather than offering customers the exact same things over and over, provide variable “rewards” for exploring and participating in your customer community. If the customer knows you will always email them the same helpful information, they will stop engaging mentally. They’ll come to expect that same content. Maybe they’ll use it, and maybe they won’t. But if you keep changing it up, offering a more diverse set of content, discounts, events, and other ways to interact, they will continue to stay engaged because they want to see what comes next.

Characteristic #3) Is It Accessible?

When selling to a busy target audience (who isn’t busy?), it is important that people are able to engage with your business easily. Whether through email, online forums, or mobile apps, your customers want to have access to your company.

For instance, if you primarily manage customers in a community-based environment, avoid a customer experience that limits access to the community by only allowing customers to login into the website to participate. Some customers may be less tech savvy, often on the go, or have security limitations that inhibit them from logging onto your private social network.

Implementing a customer experience that enables customers to engage with the people and information they need online (customer forums), from their inbox (listservs), and on their mobile devices (customer community mobile app). Each person has their own preferences for interacting with companies that they rely on, so it is important to make sure all avenues are open to them.

Characteristic #4) Is It Human?

Customers don’t engage your business because they are lonely, need attention, or want more friends. Most long-term customers engage you to get support or solve an immediate problem. Do not set things on autopilot and expect customers to enjoy the experience. In addition, avoid throwing up walls or one-size-fits-all responses to customers who need help.

Customers want to know that there is an actual person on the other side of each interaction that understands their situation and is committed to helping them get through it. While businesses, can’t afford to coddle every customer, there are things that organizations can do to show customers that they are there to support them.

If they ask a question, give them answers or connect them to someone else in the community who can help them. Listen to concerns and respond appropriately and sometimes personally. Make sure that you are doing what it takes to show them that your company cares about customer success with your products and services.

Online Customer Experience Take Away

The customer experience that you provide your customers matters. Companies with great online customer experiences rarely fall into that situation by luck. Your customer experience strategy takes planning, understanding of your customers, and the implementation of the right tools (customer community software may be right for your company or it may not be).

Use the guidelines outlines in this article to create a checklist for your organization’s customer experience. Fill the gaps in, build out, or simplify your customer experience to see a measurable impact on every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Executives must walk a tight rope on social software. It is true that there is a lot of hyperbole around social strategies. It is also a reality that businesses which don’t embrace online community platforms and other social software will get left behind. Your customers expect to be able to engage you in customer communities. You competitors are rapidly researching and implementing social business strategies as well. Where does that leave your organization?

MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte recently unveiled the results of a new social business strategy study. The data from the 3,500 respondents in 24 separate industries asked how shifts in social norms and use of social media in politics have impacted the use of social software in how they do business.

Though the study highlighted that many businesses are getting value from social software today, we are just at the beginning of the journey toward realizing the tangible value of social software, like online community platforms.

Only 18% of the respondents indicated that social software plays an important role in their business today. However, 63% of the people surveyed said that social software will be important to their business in three years.

As Tim Hood put it in his analysis of the study, there are four ways that businesses in your industry will increasingly create value using social community software:

• Marketing and customer relationships
• Thought Leadership and getting your point of view into the marketplace
• Operations (e.g. customer support)
• Innovation

The emergence of social community strategies is an evolving process. However, there will come a time when your customers, partners, and others in your industry are moving quickly and may pass you by. Given these competing time lines, how can you keep up with the pull to understand the ever-changing opportunities and challenges of social communities, along with the need to take action?

The MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte research provides some answers.

3 Ways to Stay Ahead of You Industry as It Goes Social

Keep Leadership Educated

Continue to educate your executive team about how social software is being applied in your company and market. Provide clear ideas for implementing your social business strategy, but try to avoid pushing too hard to get sign-off right away if you encounter resistance. However, keep your eye on the calendar and use stories from your customers and solid business cases to get management to act when the time comes.

Look for Quick Wins

Find places in your organization where you can integrate and analyze social data in your current environment. Your online customer community does not need to boil the ocean from the start. Find a product user group or specific customer segment that would benefit from fuller access to support and the ability to collaborate with partners, employees, and other customers to solve problem. Roll out a small, focused community to this group.

It will give your organization the experience of planning, launching, and growing a social customer community, without the stress of managing all customers in a community environment all at once. Starting with a small online customer community also serves as a quick win to help you and your management team tout the benefits and achievability of your social business strategy to others in the company.

Start Building Community Now

Online customer communities take time to grow to the point where they provide overt benefits to your business. You can’t decide to implement a private customer community today and see the benefits next month. Growing and nurturing an online customer community takes months and possibly years.

Create an online community where customers, employees, and partners get value now. Your organization will reap the strategic and tactical benefits that come with social software. Once you have a community that your stakeholders rely on, you can implement plans to derive specific business value, such as innovation or a more extensive customer advocacy program.

Social Software Takeaway

The strength of your organization’s community will be one of the most important factors in your company’s success of the next 5 years. While 18% of executives said that social software is important to their business today, that number jumps 45 points to 63% when asked if social software will be important in three years.

This data comes from your customers, your partners, and your competitors. This is your market.

Now, think about your business and your customers. Ask yourself, what other business strategy will rise in importance as much as this over the next few years? Crickets.

People are busy. If you want your target audience of customers, members, or partners to be a part of your private community, you have to get them excited about it. This does not just happen when you hang out your community’s shingle. Along with all of your skill, cunning and charm, it takes deliberate processes to generate interest in your private social network.

Here are seven tips for building awareness and engagement in your online customer or member community.

Tip #1) Use Teasers in Other Marketing Channels

Use your other social networks and your email lists to send out little glimpses of what is in store for those who join your private online community. Don’t give away too much. Just enough to make them say, “Hmm, interesting” or “I could use that,” and then give them a link so they can see the full article, video, discussion or other resource in your private online community.

Tip #2) Make the Reward Exclusive to Community Members

Customers or members who join a private community don’t want to re-read the same blog post you added to your company website this morning or find out about a contest that they already entered on your Facebook page. Think of exclusive content as a carrot and stick approach without the stick.

Providing valuable information, discussions, and access to people that your customers or members can get anywhere else makes a superb incentive to join, and return often to, your online community.

Tip #3) Position Your Community as the Hub of Customer Communication

Customers and members can tell when you online communities is an afterthought. They can tell when you’ve implemented a private social network mainly to be able to market that you have one, but it is not central to your customer management operation.

The community, content, and email tools in you online community software tools provide all that you need to reach out to your customers or members and consistently keep them engaged, but only if your target audience is exposed to the community.

Rather than managing your membership or customer base as you have for the past decade, use your online community platform to run all member or customer communication through your community. This means company announcements, support documentation, events, and promotional or training opportunities can all be found in your online customer or member community.

The more people who are exposed to your community platform, the more comfortable they will start to feel. They will begin to explore the other tools, discussions, and connections in your online community.

Tip #4) Recognize Your Members

Why do people check Facebook? The short answers is that we do it to see what is happening with our friends and family. Transpose that thinking into your private online customer community.

The customers and members in your online community want to see updates and news from around the community. Post stories about how a customer solved a specific problem with your product or features photos from your latest conference’s awards ceremony. People love to get recognition, even if it’s only something as small as an acknowledgement of their accomplishments or their 1-year anniversary as a customer.

Highlight any positive news about your community members and you will see more people who want to get in on your rewarding community both to be recognized and to recognize people that they know.

Tip #5) Make Messages Social

There are a lot of ways to communicate with customers or members – from blogs written by executives to how-to video libraries. When it comes to using those messages to keep customers engaged, you have a choice. You can keep hurling one-way messages at your customer base or you can utilize your online community software to make your messages social.

Encourage your members to rate and discuss and ask questions about every communication that you send out to the community. Get customers or members talking about the same thing and you will see how quickly that community can form.

Tip #6) Be Fanatical About Relevance

Relevancy is a cocktail with a simple recipe:

• One part “the right people”
• One part “the right information”
• One part “the right time”

Like I said earlier, people are busy and will ignore platforms that are not immediately valuable to them. Use the demographic, transactional, and behavioral data that your online community system knows about each customer to target your communication and your customer experience to provide each community member with the content and discussions that relevant to them.

Tip #7) Reach Out to Members for Help

One of the most effective ways to get customers or members interested and involved in your online community is to simply ask them for help. Avoid sending out mass emails seeking responses to discussions, but use what you know about each member to send personalize asks.

Match up discussions, articles, and other content in your community with the expertise of specific members. Then, ask those experts to chime in because they are an authority whose insight would benefit the community.

Talk to your long-time, committed members and ask them for help in reaching out to others and to contribute their own knowledge and expertise on specific topics and issues. Invite them to write a guest post, head a discussion, or answers a question from a fellow member.

Online Customer Community Takeaway

Online communities can play a significant role in customer acquisition, member retention, customer service, and product innovation. However, one of the biggest questions we get is how to get busy people interested in joining and participating in the community.

There are several steps to moving customers or members through the onboarding funnel from non-members to fully participating members. Use the strategies listed in this post to be smart about systematically tackling those early awareness and engagement phases. Online communities can be exciting for your company and your customers. However, you have to take the steps to get them to join and participate first.

These are automated emails from LinkedIn groups that I chose to belong to telling me that they have automatically unsubscribed me from the group email digest that I selected since I had not visited the group online often enough.

While I can login and re-select my preferences, I have not found the time to update my dozens of memberships. Instead, I accept that my communication stream has been cut off by a robot at LinkedIn and I’ll re-engage when (and if) I need to.

Now think about all of the businesses and membership organizations that have invested time and energy in driving their customer or members to LinkedIn groups as their primary online community for customers.

Companies that tout the size of their product’s LinkedIn groups are seeing huge drops in awareness and participation. Associations that try to squeeze ongoing member engagement out of LinkedIn groups are unable to spread their messages and stay top-of-mind with members that use LinkedIn. User groups that support users of specific products using a combination of online discussions and email digests are left with mainly the online discussions, but no way to drive members back to the discussions on LinkedIn.

This is just one example of why both companies and customers strongly dislike customer communities that are built on public social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Then, why do they go down that path in the first place?

Why Companies, User Groups, and Nonprofit Membership Organizations Build Private Online Communities on Public Social Networks

To be blunt, there are three main things that organizations like about using public social networks to build their private communities:

• Price. The technology is free.
• Ease of Use. The limited features mean that staff needs little training.
• Initial Access to Members. Organizations often see an initial spike in membership of the online community after launch with a little promotion. Although, getting real business-level results and maintaining high levels of engagement over time prove much more difficult.

However, these benefits don’t translate into long-term engagement and business-level results. As savvy social business professionals know, the cons of making Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn your online customer community significantly outweigh the pros. While public social network play a role in customer engagement, that role is not as your central online customer or member community.

Problems that Customers and Members have with Customer Communities Created in Public Social Networks

Here is a list of some of the top things that people don’t like about joining and participating in online customer or member communities that are built on public social networks.

Problem #1) You Don’t Know Who’s Watching

Not everyone is eager to share things on public social networks. One of the main reasons is that once you post an update or comment on a discussion, it is out there forever. You have limited control over who can see your activity now and in the future. Along with government regulators, journalists, and future employers, your activity is readily available to the host company, like Google or Facebook, which is interested in more than just community building.

Not knowing who is watching and reading everything that is posted can make most people leery of really sharing their concerns, questions, comments and insights.

Problem #2) Too Much Spam

A public forum is all a spammer needs to start ruining everyone’s day. People who genuinely have an interest in interacting with your organization’s community online do not want to be bombarded by posts that are full of spam, random links to other sites, or possible virus attacks.

The last thing you want is for members of your community to feel as though they can’t trust anything they click on. When your community becomes overrun with spam messages and posts, fewer people will participate and soon you have nothing but a community for spammers to gather.

Problem #3) Overblown Self-Promotion

Like spam, groups in public social networks can often become overrun by those who want to do nothing but pitch themselves to the members of your community. They are constantly asking people to “check out my blog,” or “try my new miracle detox plan.”

With communities on public social networks, you have the choice to either give up control of who is a member or take on the task of approving every individual who wants to join the group and remove them when they leave their organization. Even when you put in the time to tightly manage your group’s membership, approved members can cross the self-promotion line. Overt self-promotion quickly dilutes the value of your community.

Problem #4) Limited Functionality

With communities on public social networks, there are only so many things to do. You can leave a wall post, add comments and “like” what other people have said.” People want to actively engage with the companies and membership organizations that rely on every day. The value that customers and members need from doing business with you demands more than just a few simple tasks.

A few popular customer engagement features that public social networks don’t have include event/conference management, the ability to send targeted emails, secure file libraries, feature prioritization tools, or surveys.

Problem #5) The Organization Looks Like Everyone Else

A big part of an online community’s success comes with developing high a sense of community among your members. When the online group looks, feels, and operates like the dozens of other groups that an individual is a member of, customers and members struggle to sense the shared history and embrace the personality of the group, the as well as find value in the exclusivity of the community.

Problem #6) The Rules Change

As in the LinkedIn example at the top of this article, when you put your customer community eggs in another company’s basket, that company calls the shots. LinkedIn recently unsubscribed people from the emails they were getting from your group. What is to stop Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn from selling your community’s data or activity to advertisers or killing your most effective member engagement feature?

Your organization and your target audience need stability. Lack of consistency is a fast way to lose community members. If rules and policies on public social network communities are always changing, then you will see fewer individuals taking part.

Problem #7) Often Nobody Owns, Leads, or Guides the Community

When people think of online community, they often think of everyone chipping in to provide direction, value, and the effort needed to keep it going. However, most often, people join groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+ to receive top-shelf content and keep their finger on the pulse of their industry.

Professional and business people join communities for support and help doing their jobs. People want to know that there is someone in charge, someone from your business, who is ready to listen, interact and engage with customers. Too many organizations create an online community and then sit back and watch to see what happens. It does not work that way.

In order for the community to respond, they need something to take action around. If your customers or members are not familiar with the culture of the community and don’t get explicit encouragement to chime in, they will be a lot more hesitant to participate and eventually lose interest (or patience).

How Can You Use Public Social Networks and Private Online Communities Together?

Not creating private customer or member communities on public social networks does not mean that you can’t build an online customer community at all. Nor does it mean that you can’t utilize the community or groups features on Google+, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

The Role of Groups and Communities on Public Social Networks

Companies, user groups, and associations should still build groups in public social networks, but they should be used for marketing rather than managing customer relationships.

Creating an open community in LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+ is an excellent way to positioning your organization as a leader in the industry and build awareness of your products and services by driving people back to your website or blog. You can even engage your customers in these networks with information about what is going on in your private online customer community and send them to the private community on your domain to get the fully information or participate.

Private Online Customer or Member Community Platforms

Increasingly, businesses and membership organizations are creating secure online communities within their own websites. Along with giving companies the flexibility and functionality they need to engage customers, this approach enables organizations to integrate their community with other systems, such as CRM software, to create a better experience for customers, as well as provide better insight to the company.

Implementing a strategy that employs anyone-can-join groups on public social networks alongside your exclusive customer community platform on your domain enables you to still be where your customers and prospects are on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+, while having much more control over your data, features, privacy, and community management strategy. You also don’t need to worry about the rules of your customer community being changed by your social network software provider.

Online Customer Community Takeaway

Utilizing an online customer community is a great way to retain customers and build up a strong brand loyalty. They give your business opportunity to listen to what your customers are saying and show them that you hear them. You can be proactive and address problems before they become full-blown issues instead of only reacting when they do. You keep a close link to your customers, encouraging them to engage and interact in order to develop a stronger relationship.

While you can set up a community on Facebook or add a private group on LinkedIn to reach out to customers, there are several things that most people hate about customer communities on public social networks. These kinds of things can keep people from fully engaging in your customer community.

By utilizing a combination of online customer community software and open groups on public social networks, your organization can maintain the value and security that comes with a branded private online community, while taking advantage of a the reach of massive public social networks.

The bad news is that caluclating the return on your investment in your online customer community much more complicated. The good news in that getting the ROI for your online community is more complicated in a way that allows you to both capture the real value that your private online community brings to your organization and make improvements in your approach where necessary.

Recently, Richard Millington of the online community management consulting and training firm, FeverBee, teamed up with Socious to share his insight on measuring and improving the ROI of online communities. During the webinar, he laid out a clear way to calculate the ROI of your customer community. Here are the slides from the presentation:

Improving the Return on Investment of Online Customer Communities from Socious

Business Impact of Online Customer Communities

It is mostly common knowledge that online customer communities can have a measurable impact on the following areas of your organization’s financials:

• Increase the annual sales per customer
• Attract new customers
• Reduce support and other operational costs
• Increase productivity of employees

Each one of these metrics contributes to the return on your investment in your online community strategy. It is important to have an understanding of how you are going to calculate your community’s ROI during the customer community planning processes so that you can begin measuring the right things with active members of the community, lurkers, and customers who do not join your online community (your control group).

In this Socious webinar-on-demand, Rich outlines why measuring ROI is important, how to measure the ROI of an online customer community, and how to increase the return on your investment. Pay particular attention to the common mistakes that organizations make when measuring ROI.

The process for how to calculate the returning on investment of your online customer community is too dense for a simple blog post. I strongly encourage you to check out the video for Unleashing the ROI of Online Customer Communities.

Here are three key takeaways from the discussion that you don’t often hear about:

Measure Online Community ROI Over Time

It is important to run your ROI formula over time to get the cumulative return over the life of the community. Your private customer community could have a negative 5% ROI today, but be heading in the right direction since you had a negative 29% ROI just 3 months ago.

Online Community Costs Are Frontloaded

The costs of creating an active online community for customers or members are largely frontloaded. These include online community software, consulting, and promotion. Many of the investments are made at the beginning of the process, making the ROI during the initial phases of your customer community’s life low or negative. The lesson here is to be patient and really understand your ROI data model so that you know the performance will get better if you continue with your strategy.

Don’t Forget About the Bonuses

There are several factors not included in calculations of an online community’s return on investment. The most noticeable is the product and service innovation that comes from being closer to your market. Understanding your market’s problems more clearly can make a tremendous different in your business, as you are able to create more profitable offerings.

You can watch the full 60-minute video at Socious.com by clicking on the link below:

Unleashing the ROI of Online Customer Communities

Some community managers will see chocolates on their desk when the roll into the office, other will get kinder-than usual instant messages throughout the day, and the lucky ones might even get taken to lunch.

However, I have long thought the thanking your online community manager or showing your appreciation by buying their coffee needs to be re-thought for two reasons.

• Thanking your online community manager is something that should happen every day. Online community managers are often the lynchpins of your business.
• The good feeling of being recognized for one day is short-lived when you have one of the most important and grueling jobs in the company.

In the same way that most employees would rather like their job better than get paid more, most of the community managers that I work with would rather get more help with their jobs than be taken to lunch. You have a unique opportunity to thank your online community manager in a way that can significantly help your business at the same time.

To put some action behind this idea, here are some things you can do to both recognize your outstanding community manager and help your organization.

Business Savvy Ways to Thank Your Online Community Manager on Community Manager Appreciation Day

#1) Look Around the Community

You have been busy. When was the last time you bounced around your online community to see what is new? Start by logging in and checking on your customers and their activity in the community. Take note of what your customers and partners are asking in the discussions. Become familiar with new files and videos that have been uploaded.

You can also look at the new product feature requests. Analyze the most active parts of the community, in relation to less active topics. Taking a self-guided tour of your online customer or member community will give you an appreciation for your community manager and spark ideas for how you may be able to help them.

#2) Spread the Word

One of an online community manager’s toughest jobs is advocating for the community inside the company and spreading the word about what is going on in the community to customers, employees, and partners.

On this Community Manager Appreciation Day, make a concerted effort to talk to your colleagues about the benefits that your company is seeing as a result of your private online community and the great job your community manager is doing to bring your social business strategy to fruition. You can also take some time to reinforce the value of the community to the customers and partners that you work most closely with.

#3) Get on the Content Calendar

Online community engagement revolves around exclusive content. This takes the form of documents, articles, discussion posts, emails, and multimedia. While online community managers are responsible for the content plan to ensure that there is a consistent stream of valuable content being added to the community, the community manager usually does not write the content. That is done by other employees, partners, and members of the community.

Community managers often have to use their clout to get people to commit to producing content and meet their content deliver deadlines. Assuming that you are already meeting the deadlines to which you have committed, you could show your appreciation for your online community manager by volunteering to write more content or produce a video. The willingness to assist with a major part of their job will likely come as a breath of fresh air to your community manager.

#4) Brainstorm

Online community managers are very close to your market. Often times they see problems, trends, or opportunities that the organization does not have the capacity to address. Set up a meeting with your online community manager to listen to what they are seeing as it pertains to your role in the company and find new ways to integrate the community with your piece of the business.

This could be an eye opening experience that will show your community manager how much they are valued, as well as result in actionable ideas for improving your division’s business performance.

#5) Go to Bat for Them

In many executives’ minds, online community managers straddle the line between vital to the company and an outsider to the traditional order of things. This means that community managers need all the help and support they can get inside the organization. Talk to your community manager and find out about the tops things they need in order to be more successful in their jobs (and help the company).

It may be that they are a part-time community manager and need more non-community related tasks taken off their plate (because we all know that online community management demands full-time dedication).  It could be that a specific part of the business it underutilizing the customer community and your community manager needs assistance bringing that department into the fold. Use your connections and influence to help them move toward making those changes.

Community Manager Appreciation Day Takeaway

Obviously, a simple thank you goes a long way with your colleagues. However, it is rare that you have an opportunity to express your gratitude and benefit an integral part of your business’s success. Take a step back this Community Manager Appreciate Day and think along the lines of the suggestions above to engage your community manager in a way that will pay dividends for your organization and make their lives easier for months to come.

How much does it cost?

The same is true for online community and social crm strategies.

While all enterprise customer community platforms require some level of budget, the costs of working with each social software provider on your short list vary widely in how they are calculated.

It can be confusing to speak with multiple vendors that each have different pricing models without a basic understanding of your options and common ways that online community software providers approach providing you a cost figure. More seriously, it can be detrimental to your social business strategy if one vendor, no matter who it is, convinces you that their pricing model is the one and only option available to your company.

Assuming that your organization is going to partner with an established online community software company, rather than build your own platform from the ground up, the pros and cons of which is a whole separate discussion, it is important to understand all of your options and how they will impact your organization’s budget. While some companies mix and match pricing options into a Google-like algorithm, most online community software providers keep it simple.

3 Primary Types of Licenses for Hosted Online Community Software

Per Module Licensing or Core System with Add-Ons

In this option, different features of your online community may require special licensing, such as event management, streaming video, or mobile community apps. If you want to manage your online community membership, you may also need a license for that. Each module has a separate price.

This online community software licensing model can also be structured as core set of features with a series of add-ons to get additional functionality at a separate cost.

Per Member Licensing

This option is often mixed with the per module model above. Your organization is charged based on the number of customers, employees, and partners accessing your online community.

Tip: Make sure you do a conservative analysis if you encounter this model. While $5 per online community member per month seems reasonable, but it can quickly add up if you are managing one thousand users.

All-Inclusive Licensing

All-in-one pricing means that your organization gets all of the customer engagement functionality for a single cost – from social community features and targeted email tools to content management and event management systems.

In addition to coming loaded with a lot of valuable features, your organization can limit the features that you will launch with and then turn on new features over time. These “gifts” to customers will make you look like a hero without needing to incur costs for implementing new modules. All-inclusive online community software licenses often comes with a tied pricing structure based on how many users you’ll have using the community.

Online Community Software Costs Takeaway

Maintaining the proper licensing can cost additional money. Paying for an entire year vs. monthly may help save you money in the long run. Since you want to avoid additional costs down the down, you’ll want to get the most amount of value in the form of features and flexibility for your budget. If you can’t secure all-inclusive pricing, you might also look into getting a bundle price for the features instead of paying for individual module licenses.

Knowing how your online community platform providers’ pricing models will impact your budget now and as your social crm strategy expands will help you select the right software for your company and give you leverage in making your case to your peers and senior management.

Investing money in the cost of an online community should be done with careful planning and strategy. There are several things that every business or membership organization can do to ensure the success of its online community. You may be planning some of these already and you may find yourself playing catch up on others.

Successful online user communities don’t pop-up by chance. There are things you can put in place during your community’s infancy that will determine success down the road. When you create and implement the right plan for your user community, it stands a greater chance at thriving.

Here are five signs that your online user community will be a success in its first year:

Sign #1) You Have a Dedicated Community Manager

Many businesses and user groups with a private online customer community fail to fill one key role that will help the online community thrive: a dedicated community manager (or team of community managers). Companies that dig into what a community managers actually does on a daily basis clearly see the hole that is created when community management is a part time job for someone who is mainly evaluated on their other full time duties.

In addition to managing the community’s content plan, coordinating email, online, and in-person communication to engage specific customer groups, and analyzing the data coming out of the community to make community-wide adjustments to processes, community managers should have a seat at the strategy table to both ensure that the community is meeting the organization’s business-level goals and pipe feedback from the user base back to the senior management team.

You cannot moonlight as your company’s online community manager and expect to see positive results. Choose a single person who will be responsible for the success of the community.

Sign #2) You Have and Follow a Content Plan

Content drive people to your community. It is the logs that fuel your online community’s engagement campfire. Information is what draws people to an online community initially and inspires discussions once they are there.

With content playing such a critical role in your online user community’s success, it is important to have a content plan. Customers and members want to know that, when they join your community, they will find the help and information they need.

Developing an online community content plan begins with researching the type of content that community members want and the format that they want to consumer the information, whether its articles, blog posts, email, videos, slide shows, or forum discussions.

While a documented content plan helps the community management team get a big picture view of the value being pumped into the community, it also ensures that the content is being created by people across your company, partner network, and customer base so that the content production burden does not fall on one individual or group.

Staying current with the content you offer and consistently providing educational, insightful information is an important part of keeping members of your online user community engaged.

Sign #3) You Focus on Creating Exclusive Value

The most successful private online communities provide exclusive information and access that customers or members can’t get anywhere else. Members of your user community most often look to you for:

• Support in doing their jobs
• Solutions to challenges they have encountered during the day
• Ways to become more successful with your products or services

Just like you would with any product management exercise, ask questions via surveys and interviews to find out your customers’ or members’ most pressing problems. This will help you align your online community with what it is that they really need and what will make participation in the community an important part of their busy days.

Keep in mind that if you uncover your customers’ most pervasive and urgent problems, then stream solutions to those problems across your public social networking channels, you will dilute the social density of your private online community and wash away the reason for users to visit your online community.

Give your customers or members the exclusive value they are looking for and you will see them return time and again to participate in your community.

Sign #4) You Have the Right Tools to Keep Members Engaged

You could have the most exclusive and helpful content in the world in your online community and it will fail if your users don’t know about it. This is a common mistake when organizations select online community software. They see the active conversations, slick interface, and user-generated content, then walk away thinking that this level of social engagement happens in every community based on the existence of a super-cool private social network with unique content.

Don’t make this same mistake. Ask about the features that keep members engaged over time. These are things like a built-in email engine to target specific members based on demographic, transactional, and social data.

Make sure that your online community tools have a strong balance of both features that provide value and features that will drive members back to the community based on each member’s specific profile and interests.

Sign #5) You Track the Right Metrics and Make Adjustments Often

If you don’t know your online community data, then how can you know if it’s thriving? Take time to understand your online user community’s conversion funnel and relentlessly work to unearth your weak spots. Look at ratios such as your visit-to-login ratio and login-to-post and comment ratios in order to keep track of which actions are being taken by new visitors and active community members.

As your online user community grows, always keep one eye on your metrics. You will find areas that need improvements and catch leaks in your engagement plan much faster.

Online User Community Takeaway

A private online user community is an increasingly valuable tool for a business or membership organization to have. Aside from keeping your finger on the pulse of your target audience, it is an exceptional way to increase the value of doing business with your organization and differentiating your organization in the market.

However, the first 12 months are a critical time for any new online member or customer community. Take time during the online community planning process to do what it takes to help your community thrive by having a dedicated community manager, creating content, and providing exclusive value to members. Use the right tools to keep people interacting in the community and measure the right things to keep track of your success, as well as areas that need help.

Every week, the number of options your customers have for getting their jobs done multiplies.

The days where your company holds all of the cards are long gone. Your customers are increasingly influenced by messages from around your industry and are empowered to use the products and services that are going to best suite their specific situation.

The coming together of realities these creates an environment where retaining customers is more important to growing your business and maintaining a healthy company than at any other time in your organization’s history. There are many companies that focus more attention, time and money on earning new customers while putting customer retention on a back burner.

Most often, customer retention doesn’t become a concern until the business realizes that it is losing its current customer base. The truth that most businesses need to realize is that it is less costly to work on keeping the customers they already have than to go out and find new customers.

This is why your company should resolve to increase customer retention in the New Year. There are many things that you can do to hold onto the customers you have using your online customer community.

Resolution #1: Maintain Dialog So Customers Know You’re Listening

Customers like to know that they are being heard. Whether it’s their questions or concerns, complaints or compliments, it is important that you are responding and engaging with your customers. This is made easier with online social communities, giving you a listening post for optimum two-way communication.

It is an excellent way to stay on top of customer service issues. You can quickly (and proactively) address concerns that they have, answer questions about products and services, and give exposure to customers who leave glowing compliments about your company.

Since most raging customers can be pulled back from the edge with basic human communication, some of the most effective ways to increase customer retention are often overlooked due to their simplicity. Always be listening and to make sure your customers know that you are ready to hear them.

Resolution #2: Produce Exclusive Content and Special Offers

We all love knowing that we are getting something special, whether it’s access to unique and valuable content or receiving exclusive offers and discounts. Focus some attention on creating content that you can give your loyal customers access to, such as ebooks, newsletters, videos or how-to articles.

Giving your customers an inside look at what products are in the works is a great way to make them feel included and a valuable part of your business.

Find special offers that are only open to your current customers. These can be discount codes for customer events, early access to a new service, or even getting them a special offer with one of your strategic partners.

The segmentation and content features in your online customer community system enable you to create the feeling that being your loyal customer comes with privileges that they don’t want to miss out on.

Resolution #3: Keep Yourself at the Front of Your Customers’ Minds

When your customers have a need, you want to make sure that you are the first to come to mind when they want to fulfill those needs. To create this type of brand impression in your customers’ brains, you’ll need to go above and beyond for each and every customer.

If they ask questions about your products, respond quickly. If a problem arises, resolve it quickly. When they send you a message that praises your products, your customer service or employees, thank them right away.

Use your customer community software to send them targeted emails with content that will help them get their jobs done and use your product more successfully. Identify the type of information that each specific customer finds valuable based on their demographic info and behavior in your online community. Then, provide a steady stream of insightful and helpful information based on that profile.

Use the built-in survey system to conduct customer surveys in order to find out where you need improvements and make necessary changes. You can also hold contests using the gamification tools in your online community platform and events that keep your customers engaging and interacting with you often.

This has benefits beyond customer retention, such as upselling and other revenue opportunities. The more you do for your customers, the more likely it is that you will be the one they turn to when they need help again in the future. Take steps to make sure you are doing all you can to provide a great experience and consistent value both during and after each transaction.

Customer Retention Takeaway

Customers are important in business, but loyal customers are even more valuable. Once they have made a purchase and they are satisfied, then it is easier to turn them into repeat customers or long-term advocates.

This year, you must resolve to do more in order to keep your customers, not just increase the number of new ones. However, customer retention is rarely a transactional strategy. You can’t realize that you have a customer retention problem in July and fix it by the end of the summer. Keeping your customers is a “long game” investment that takes planning, execution, and the right customer engagement tools at the beginning of the year to see results later in the year and going forward.

To retain more customers, you will need to:

• Keep an open dialog between you and the customers
• Produce valuable and exclusive content and special offers
• Stay at the top of customers’ minds

Using your online customer community as a tool to accomplish these things can increase your success at maintaining a solid and loyal group of customers, whether there are only ten or ten thousand.

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net