1. Libraries are the Hubs of Strong Communities

Walk into your local library and observe the diversity. In one corner, you have kids’ story time. Along the back wall, you might have high school and college students studying in small reading rooms. There are classes down the hall teaching social media or tax preparation. Oh look, the mayor is here to casually discuss local civic issues, an older couple is reading the newspaper by the fireplace, and tutors are still trying to teach students how to find “X”. You can feel the strong pulse of community.

Community managers should strive to build a diverse online community. Make your community a destination where people come to learn, relax, feel safe, or simply “belong”.

2. Libraries Must Be Contextually Relevant

Modern libraries have rows of desktop computers and strong WiFi signals for patrons who bring their own devices. They allow you to download eBooks and checkout Blu-Ray DVDs. You can find a few newspapers for the current day, and you can browse consumer guides for current products. Walk the software development aisle, and you will see books on Java, C#, PHP, how to build a blog on WordPress, and Agile project methodologies.

Community managers must captivate their audience DAILY. Poll the community for reaction on the latest news, technological advancements, or social issues. Crowdsource ideas for the next product release. Share pictures that capture the best moments of TODAY! Go ahead and put away your presentation on how to login to Compuserve – it is no longer contextually relevant.

3. Libraries Must Cross-Sell Their Programs

A young mother who shows up for kids’ story time might be interested in those free “interior design on a budget” classes. That high school kid, who might be using the library computers because his family can’t afford one, could really benefit from the weekend career fair and “how to apply for college scholarships” seminar. The elderly gentleman reading the newspaper would love to be a mentor for the young adult outreach program you are starting.

Community managers are tasked with informing their communities about ALL of their company’s offerings – in an unobtrusive manner that informs and educates without slamming a sales pitch down their throats. Community members want to do business with you, but they first have to know your offerings.

4. Libraries Must be Accessible to ALL Patrons

I love libraries! As a kid growing up on the wrong side of the rural tracks, with no money to buy books, the local library was my salvation! I used to check out 5-6 books on each trip to town. I am now a grandfather that has lived in six communities as an adult – and I applied for my library card within a month of moving to each of those communities. I enjoy walking the stacks, and I still get excited discovering new authors.

I was not a “high value” patron as a kid. I didn’t pay taxes, and perhaps I was occasionally in the company of some shady characters (small towns love their gossip). But that library was of highest value to me! It was a place to go to dream…to begin to wonder “what if”…to start making those dreams a reality through reading. Those librarians were some of the kindest, non-judgmental people I ever met. They would help me find any resource, and then they would take an interest and supplement my findings with new resources.

Libraries and librarians were foundational in making me a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen…now supporting his local library!

Community managers need to maintain that same non-biased kindness and willingness to serve. Do not just cater to the “paying customers” or those who you view as high-value prospects. The lurking window-shopper may prove to be your strongest brand advocate if you just show that their place in the community is as secure and important as everybody else’s.

5. Libraries Must Appeal to Wealthy Patrons

All patrons are high value – I once read a book that said your intrinsic value is always 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 – but not all patrons have high value in their wallets. Library improvements are still driven by available tax revenue, so their tax base needs to know about library outreach programs, seminars, and upgrades that include new computers and media choices. Then wealthy patrons need to take the “long view” and realize they are part of a community that is bigger than themselves. I am a definite capitalist, but when it comes to education I think that the well-off should embrace providing educational resources for the community. That student on free-and-reduced lunch that is using the library computer…could be the next Mark Zuckerburg if given the opportunity. At the very least, that student will be casting votes for elected officials that determine the entitlement programs you might be counting on in your golden years!

Community managers must be inclusive for all community members. However, mind-share and resultant revenue drive the bottom line. Use your online communities to find ideal candidates for product development focus groups and beta offerings. Offer “free trials” in return for permission to include the prospect in a case study.

Did you grow up loving a local library? Do you still use the library, or have you moved on to downloading books from Amazon onto your mobile device? Do you see parallels between your local library and good online community management?

Here is the YouTube video from the referenced #cmgrhangout.

Photo Credit: Andreas F. Borchert [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de, CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Below are five steps to help you create the foundation of your online community and gain more leads for your business.

Step 1: Perfect your brand image and company mission. Four words from my advertising professor in college will forever resound in my head when thinking about branding and ad campaigns:

“What are the benefits?”

Your brand image and mission should showcase the benefits of your business. Additionally, every piece of media you produce should answer the question “What are the benefits?” for your target audience.

• While this step seems like a no-brainer, it’s critical to complete before you proceed.
• Build your online presence based on your company’s mission statement and the benefits of your company or product.

Step 2: Follow influencers in your niche on Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and/or Facebook. You may discover your brand has the most conversations on Twitter, or that a Pinterest account isn’t really necessary. Pick which social media outlets best fit your target audience. Where do they hang out? Where do they get their information? For instance, if you own a jewelry or clothing business, you definitely should be on Pinterest because of its style inspiration and influence.

• Follow influencers, customers and other companies in your niche or around your geographical area. Start by checking your ‘Who to Follow’ suggestions on Twitter. Other great tools to help you are We Follow and Follower Wonk.
• Write a concise and cohesive bio for each social media platform you create. Include your business information: website, geographical location and contact information.

Step 3: Start building your community on social media.

• Send personal messages to some of your friends on Facebook to Like your page or follow you on Twitter. But be careful—few things are worse than getting bombarded by irrelevant marketing efforts. Ask other members of the company do the same with their friends, but don’t attempt to mandate it.
• Send an email to your existing client list asking them to Like your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter so they can stay current with your company’s happenings and industry news. Again: What is the benefit for them in following you or liking your page? Give them incentives.
• Another great option to create buzz is to host an event or promotion to gain traffic to your Facebook page. You could partner with other businesses in the area as well: A new caterer in the area may give you a discounted rate to feature their food at your event. Or, you could partner with a foundation to raise money for them at your event. With all of these aspects combined, a local publication would surely want to feature your event!
• Host a digital event by creating your own hashtag for your company and running a Twitter chat or a Google+ hangout.

Step 4: Post relevant and interesting information on your social media accounts. If your company has a blog, it’s important to not just regurgitate what’s already on your blog on social media. You’ll need to post other relevant information from other reputable sources.

• When sharing your company’s blog posts on Twitter, your Facebook page or Google+ account, make sure to use the correct language and tools.
• It’s okay to share the same content on all your social media platforms, but the way you present it should differ.
• Post relevant information outside of your own company’s blog content.
• When constructing your brand image and voice on social media, follow the Rule of Thirds to make sure you’re covering your bases and remaining dynamic:
  • ​1/3 of your social sharing should be about your business
  • 1/3 should be about industry topics and trends
  • 1/3 should be about you or other interesting and funny news or events

Step 5: InterACTION with your followers. People follow you because of who you are. Sure, they’re interested in what you tweet or share, but they want to know you have a personality and are willing and eager to interact and hear from them.

• Reply to your followers. Retweet them when it’s relevant to your brand and add your own comment in the retweet.
• Create lists on Twitter for specific niches if you don’t want to follow everyone. You should follow someone who contributes to your knowledgebase and is helpful and insightful. Just because I like to run doesn’t mean I’m going to follow every runner on Twitter, but maybe I’ll put a ton of them into a list that I can quickly check without clogging my news feed.
• Use humor. Share funny photos, funny news items and funny internal photos. People like to know that you are human, engaging, witty and helpful.
• Find hashtags around your brand and use them. For instance, if you’re in the travel industry, you could use #TravelTuesday to find new potential community members. Use hashtags to engage in Twitter and Google+ chats that are relevant to your brand.

Follow these five steps and you’ll be well on your way to building an online community on any social media platform you choose. Each step will take some time and research, but in the end, you’ll build a community that interacts with you and cares about what you share with them. Remember that each step will need to be repeated to keep your social community current and organized.

What has been the most difficult step for your business when creating your online community?

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.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

In my last Biznology post, I suggested that Amazon would be a better model for your internal social platform than the obvious choice of Facebook. After all, Facebook plays a simple “eyeballs” game–the more people spend time on it, the better–while Amazon only realizes business value when actual financial transactions occur. If users are just browsing but not buying, Amazon would be in big trouble. Likewise, the success of your internal social business platform cannot be measured by simply counting number of users, page views or the amount of time your employees spend there.

Naturally, if nobody is visiting or posting content, and the platform feels like a virtual desert, something is very wrong. But having lots of activity there does not mean necessarily you are actually achieving any business value. If all conversations in your social intranet are Facebook-like (i.e., that familiar “what-is-up-not-much” kind of interactions), it may actually be removing business value by adding distraction to a work routine already overflowing with noise over signal. To better understand where the business value is, and to shape its usage to maximize that value, try to see your social platform as an internal Amazon site, but with a twist: instead of moving retail goods such as books and electronics, you are actually moving information. Yes, that’s right: your social platform is not “Facebook for the Enterprise”, but it’s rather the enabler of an efficient internal information marketplace.

Marketplaces in the real world are fascinating places to visit. From the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul to the Boqueria in Barcelona, there are no better places to visualize what transactions are in their essence. You can see in those places all the principles one would learn during an MBA degree playing live in your face: price elasticity, the 3 Cs, the 4 Ps, negotiation techniques, present value, future value, brand equity, you name it. That model evolved and was dressed with new clothes in the form of modern shopping malls and stock exchanges and online retailers, but the essence of it remains the same. It’s a perpetual game of supply and demand, where the consumers’ needs and the providers’ ability to match or surpass those needs are always changing towards an optimum balance.

Now think about your own organization. There’s an invisible marketplace there, where instead of fruits, or jewellery, or carpets, you have information being traded all the time. However, the way we trade or move that information today is reminiscent of prehistoric bartering practices. The “collective corporation” knows everything that’s needed to run its business, but that knowledge is fragmented in a million pieces.

Each individual in that ecosystem (employees, clients, business partners and competitors) owns only a very small subset of those pieces, and a vague idea about who has the other pieces of the puzzle. In most corporations today, if we have a question and don’t know who knows the answer, we’re stuck. In order to put those pieces together, we use brute force, as they may pretty much reside anywhere. We call meetings, use the phone, search our intranet or the Internet, send emails out, read manuals, in the hope to find and glue together disparate, atomic pieces of information scattered through the fabric of our organizational structure. We spend a lot of our working lives in meetings, or processing emails, or reading incomprehensible policies and procedures essentially because we are missing a catalyzer to make information flow more easily from where it resides to where it is needed. We are missing the network of synapses to enable the cohesive, comprehensive thinking necessary to make the best decisions we can in our jobs.

Social business platforms may be the fundamental piece missing in this framework. In their current incarnations, they are still very raw, and unable to bridge that gap completely, but you can already see how they are starting to unleash information from those disconnected pockets and move them more efficiently. Social business platforms should not be seen as replacements for subject matter experts, email, phone, meetings, SharePoint sites, network drives and intranets. They should be positioned as the network of highways that will link all those islands of information, by linking content to content, people to people, content to people and people to content.

Many of the social platforms commercially available right now suffer of an identity crisis: they want to be “Facebook for the enterprise”, but don’t want to look frivolous. They want to be all things for all needs, and just end up being offering uneven and incomplete solutions. Some of them allow lots of ways to capture knowledge, but have poor search capabilities. Others make very easy to create a network of contacts by mimicking the Facebook patterns, but give you nothing more than an infinite number of flat walls to digitize conversations, fragmenting the knowledge even further. Finally, some are advertised as the be-all and end-all solution for collaboration and communications, and sell the illusion that they will replace email, meetings, intranets, people or business processes. Well, good luck with that.

By understanding and fulfilling their role as enablers of efficient information marketplaces, social platforms can become as transformational to organizations as the introduction of currency, the development of trade routes, or advances in the forms of transportation were for the history of commerce. It’s a long journey, but definitely a worthwhile one.

It got me thinking that we talk a lot about the role of the community manager. It might be time to stop thinking about them as another FTE and start thinking about them as investments. The world of finance tells us that a good investment is one that results in a yield greater than the initial investment and continues to do so over time. Using this standard, community managers really are a good investment. Their “yield” can be seen when you take a strategic approach to community management.

Your community management strategy should take into consideration your strategic business goals and how the community can advance them. Two of the many areas where community managers make a measurable difference are service and sales.

Customer/Member Service

Your community manager can focus on reducing the number of service or support calls by monitoring common questions and developing content to address these. Also, the community manager can develop and support members within the community to provide peer counsel and resolution of issues. No matter the size of your organization, the ability to reduce the time and personnel spent on support is a great yield. In addition, a fast response from the community is a great boost to customer/member satisfaction.

Sales

Your community manager can also monitor community dialogue and activity to generate sales leads via online touch points like blog posts, eBooks and webinars. This strategic approach involves asking questions, listening effectively to needs and concerns and helping to position products and services as a solution. They can also feed this intelligence to other parts of your organization and engage them in responsive action. While you want the sales support aspects of your community manager to be subtle, the ability to monitor community activity and dialogue from a sales perspective and act on the resulting insights is a great community management yield.

When you consider other areas where your community manager and community management strategy can deliver results, like product creation, brand advocacy and customer recruitment, then the ROI is clear. And, if you have a community manager but are not getting the ROI you need, perhaps they just need some training. Check out the great on-demand education that WOMMA offers on community management. I may be biased because our team helped create this with the great folks at The Community Roundtable, but these community management training sessions cover both contextual topics like market trends, strategy, metrics, measurement and culture, as well as specific business use cases like social customer support, internal community building, community in government and more.

I believe that a great community strategy and a well-trained community manager can deliver measurable and lasting results for an organization. But like any investment, you have to nurture your community manager and have a responsive and scalable strategy in order to get the “yield” you need.

With around 72% of consumers stating that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and the user base of the internet and social media creeping up by the hour, it is time that businesses begin to harness the power of a successful online community.

Developing a powerful online community provides you with the perfect platform to both promote and engage with your customers, providing significant benefits for your business:

Selling without the “Sell”

Invested and engaged customers are a brilliant asset when marketing your business: when you have a new product or service, a site with a successful online community can encourage discussion and debate about the services you offer without having to go for the hard sell.

Answer questions and give advice

When you want useful and truthful feedback on your products, where better to look for people than in your ready-built online community? Ask questions, answer questions, encourage other users to interact with one another and gauge feedback.

In addition to encouraging engagement in this manner, introducing dedicated question and answer platforms or message boards on your actual website is a great way to continually create unique, highly relevant content.

Increase your Content Reach

A successful online community can significantly lower the barrier many online marketers face when attempting to syndicate content; if you have thousands of interested Twitter followers or an engaged and active onsite forum, the possibilities of your content to being seen increase dramatically. In turn, this boosts your chance of gaining vital links and promotion without having to send a single email.

Encourage customer interaction

Communities are inherently social – as the internet matures, social content and social signals are going to become increasingly important.

By their very nature, online communities are social hubs through which to connect and engage with customers in addition to them connecting with one another. The discussions and social proof that can be developed from this are a great way to develop both customer engagement and your social profile.

Long Tail Search Content

Q and A platforms and online forums not only provide fresh content they also help drive traffic to your site from long tail search queries.

A question posted by a community user may often take the form of a long tail search i.e. ‘How do I use promotional gifts at a conference?’ This question will be answered by either another community user or an employee of the company with a relevant, moderated answer.

A long tail search query in this manner will likely be echoed by numerous individuals, near enough asking the exact same question. They will end up on your site, find a highly relevant, useful answer and will likely engage in the community or stay and browse, potentially becoming a future customer.

Fresh Content

Fresh content is king; regularly updating the fresh content on your site is essential when attempting to climb up the all important search engine rankings. Online forums or Q and A platforms are extremely beneficial in regards to this; with careful moderation, they will continually provide fresh and relevant content for your site.

Build Brand Loyalty

Engagement in an enjoyable and interactive online community breeds familiarity. Developing this favourable association with your company will increase your customers loyalty and trust.

Social Signals

Online communities are inherently social and all the signs point towards social signals becoming increasingly important in the future of SEO. Having these key social signals already linked to your site and your brand will put you in a very powerful position for the future.

Reviews and feedback

In terms of SEO and online engagement, great content launched into a social community can end up as fantastic link bait with very little outreach.

What form can your online community take?

Online communities can take many guises, but the benefits that they can afford for your business are numerous, making the time and effort to develop your online community extremely worthwhile when forming a successful marketing strategy.

Many people assume an online community must have certain features, such as a forum or message board, but in fact an online community can appear in many guises, dependent upon your industry and where the foundations of your community lay.

• Forums and Q & A
• Newsletters/ Emails
• Social Media
• Blog Comments
• Message boards

Creating an online community can be a significant amount of work and expertise but the subsequent rewards make it all beneficial, here are a few key reasons that online communities can be essential and brilliant for promoting your company and increasing the stance of your online marketing.

Examples of Successful Communities:

• Forums: i.e. Money Saving Expert
• Question & Answer platforms: i.e. SEO Moz Q and A
• Social Networks: i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+
• Gaming Networks: i.e. Gamers Portal
• Social News: i.e. Reddit, Digg

  

When you think about that day did you notice that more people wanted to talk to you? Your boss lingered longer at your doorway for a chat or a complete stranger complimented you. People just seemed to want to be around you.

Now, think a day where NOTHING is going right. You’re late for work. You got into a fight with your honey. The principle called because your kid dropped the F-bomb in class. You just can’t seem to catch a break. There is negative cloud hanging around you like the dirt cloud around Pigpen from the Peanuts comic.

On that day, when you are seething with negativity. How did people react to you? Did they seem to avoid you? Just say what they need to say to you and get out of your way? Did strangers on the street avoid your gaze?

Why does this happen?

Push-pull effect of communication

Our communication magnetizes people towards us or propels them away. This is what I called push-pull effect of communication. Anytime you open your mouth you are either going to pull people toward your orbit or push them out of a 12-story window.

As a speaker, leader, business owner or manager, it is your job to magnetize people toward you. You want to pull them in. You need to engage your audience. It’s all about creating an environment of positivity that people thrive in. When you are positive, people are pulled to you. You’re immediately more charismatic and the person everyone wants to be around.

Here are 3 ways to infuse your communication with positivity even if you don’t feel sparkling with positivity at the moment.

1. Smile

I know it’s hard when you are having a crap day to smile, but just the act of smiling actually makes you feel better. As a speaker, I have no-good, very bad, awful days and have to speak. As I take the stage, I make sure I greet my audience with the best smile I can muster. They smile back – and I’m already feeling better.

Greeting people with a smile says that you are friendly and open to communication. It’s also a nice way to uplift someone’s else spirit when they are having a bad day.

2. Eye contact

See people. Really see them. Look them in the eye. At the core, people want to be acknowledged. They want to know they are important to you. When you are chatting, put down the laptop, smart phone or Kindle and make eye contact.

The Heath brothers in their bestseller, Switch, discuss a manager who had an open door policy with her employees. They could come in whenever they wanted to and get her help. Naturally, she received high marks on her review for openness and communication, right? Wrong. Her workers would come in and she stared at her computer the whole time. Ouch. She didn’t look at them when they were speaking. When she rearranged her office, so she could be facing her employees without distraction – her communication marks skyrocketed.

Everyone just wants to be seen.

3. Listen – really listen

People want to been seen and heard. As a leader, there comes a time when you have to shut up and listen to your employees. Be present. Focus on what is being said. If your mind begins to wander, re-focus on what the other person is saying. If you’re thinking about how to respond to what’s being said, you’re not listening. Tune in!

If you are a speaker, take advantage of the opportunity to listen to people’s stories and questions after the presentation. Be interactive during the presentation. Take questions during your presentation. The opportunity for you to listen to your audience makes them feel heard. It also provides you with valuable feedback!

Positive communication make you sparkle as a leader, speaker or just a plain old human being. Smiling, eye contact and listening are crucial components of infusing sparkling positivity into how you speak. What is your best tip to be more engaging and draw people in? Share your inspired thoughts below.

photo by: Lel4nd

My fascination with Argentina’s obsession with  Eva Perón, First Lady of Argentina (1946-1952) started shortly after I landed in the airport where her image was distinctly present.  I was only vaguely aware of her and my data was largely fueled by the Madonna musical, a South American history scholar I was not. So, I endeavored to learn more about this women of great interest and learned Perón came from humble means, became a radio actor, and eventually the second wife of President Juan Perón.  She is credited with being the voice of the people, the inspiration behind the Argentinean’s women’s movement, and developed countless programs to aid low-middle class people. She died very young, more than 50 years ago.

However, despite the lengthy time passage since her death, there are patronages to her honor all throughout the city (and I mean all throughout the city – as in everywhere!).  From museums dedicated to her life, to her face being illuminated on the Ministry of Work high-rise building (this installation happened in 2011), to flags of her on street corners and apartment balconies.

Why does she retain the ability to captivate a nation, controversial as she was?  What did she do for Argentina that prevents her from fading in the way so many icons eventually do? Wandering around her museum, I pondered the artifacts to glean a better understand of her.

What I discovered was that Eva Perón was a community builder, extraordinaire. Her undeniably amazing contribution was her power to convene. She brought together a country of disenfranchised people, enabled them to unify around their collective needs.  She gave voice to groups and helped them represent themselves.  She learned about her people and tried to reach them all: orphans, elderly, women, victims of foreign war.   Through her, the country was stronger, more resilient.  And, she listened to her community – a lot.  She walked among them and ensured when a program was developed that it was meaningful to those it intended to serve. She ensured that her service of community was evergreen.

When you look at her offerings the essence of her activities will sound very familiar to many community builders.  After all, Isn’t using the power to convene really what community building is about – online or offline?

When I think back to some of the online communities I have been involved with, the memorable moments happen when the community was able to create/support a federated, representative voice of a group…To be bigger than an individual member could be alone.  In some cases, like with Cambridge Information Network (CIN)  groups of CIOs came together online to grapple with big ideas like what does the invention of the World Wide Web really mean (yes, this was the 1990’s)? In other cases, like with the WEGOHealth online community, health care advocates are supported in their quest to share their stories and help inform healthcare about their needs. And, sometimes, even in B2B communities, it gets personal.  For example, there was a time when Computerworld’s CIO community ComputerWorld Executive Suite rallied together online to organize technical assistance to NYC companies during the aftermath of 9/11.  These are all examples big and small, where, with the help of a community builder, groups were supported and great things resulted.

So, if you aspire to be Evita of your online community, there are a few lessons learned from her powerful and beloved tenure:

• Show a human face to your community – personality, passion and insight go a long way with a community.
• Bring people together in groups and help them connect with each other in meaningful ways.  Profession, title, interest, geography are all good fodder for micro-group formation provided they share a common need to connect.
• Listen to your community and understand their needs and point(s) of pain.  (Not just what you think their problems or needs may be.)
• Validate your assumption about your community with rigor and persistence.  This will help ensure any changes or new community offerings will be well received.
• Understand that one size does not fit all!  Endeavor to serve all community members in the ways that they can benefit and customize offering to different types of members.
•  Never lose sight of the community members you endeavor to serve. As Evita once said “I am only a sparrow amongst a great flock of sparrows.”

First, a shout out to Ellen van Aken for collecting intranet launch videos here. Her Sccop.it! page was a big help when researching this post. Thank you very much, Ellen!

Now onto how you can use videos during your intranet launch:

1. Teaser

Build up momentum and excitement for your intranet launch activity with a video that hints at what the intranet is about. Or you could make it completely mysterious, with a teaser video that simply says, “Something’s coming!”

Or you can keep the suspense while telling employees exactly what to expect and when throughout the intranet rollout. Here’s an example:

2. Sales pitch for the intranet

The majority of intranet launch videos are sales pitches for the new intranet. They focus on the main features and benefits of the intranet to the organization. Some are straightforward, while others go all out with a major video production. Either way can work.

3. Tour/demo/tutorial

Finally, you can use video to give staff an inside look at the intranet. This could be considered a quick tour or brief tutorial of what the intranet looks like, what its main parts are, and how to navigate their way around it.

You can use each of these types of videos during the different phases of your intranet launch: Use the teaser before your launch, the sales pitch during the launch event, and the tour/demo right after the launch to ease employees into actually using the intranet.

Take note of the various elements you can use in your intranet videos:

• screen capture

Screen capture videos are the perfect way to show users what the intranet will look like and how it will work

• interviews

Interviews are an easy way to create video. The more staff members you involve, the more interest you will generate. Aside from interviewing your CEO or intranet project manager, why not interview employees, too? Ask them what they hope to get from the intranet, for example. But remember to choose only the most interesting parts of the interview for your final video, or it will get boring.

• animation

If you have the budget for it, use animation to make your intranet launch video more fun and engaging.

• live dramatization

Again, if the budget allows, you can go all out and hire actors for a dramatic video presentation. With the right script, a live action video makes for an attention-grabbing and memorable video.

• music

Don’t forget the power of music to pique interest, create anticipation, and induce excitement among your intranet users.

Here’s my favorite intranet launch video from among Ellen’s collection. Not only does it use many of the elements I mentioned above to produce a remarkable intranet launch video, it also has many employees participating:

What does your intranet launch video look like? Post a link to it in the comments below.

Or if you don’t have a video yet, what ideas did this post give you? Do share!

Image © Shvetic | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

Are you looking for an intranet software? Download our free guide, “20 Questions: What You Should Know to Find the Best Intranet Solution for Your Organization” (No registration required)

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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.

If you are planning or already managing an online community, here are some dos and don’ts to keep in mind. Remember to put yourself in your members’ shoes and ask some hard questions.

DO

• Activate your advocate base and treat them as “special”
• Allow members to engage across multiple channels seamlessly
• Provide mission-appropriate engagement opportunities
• Put a spotlight on member participation
• Offer a mobile app so that members can take the experience with them
• Experiment with new technologies and tools
• Measure what works and what doesn’t, then make course corrections

DON’T

• Forget that community is a strong post-purchase channel for engagement
• Provide a cumbersome registration and sign-in experience
• Leave up stale content, which sends a signal that you don’t care
• Moderate every single piece of content before it gets posted
• Over-package and lose the authenticity of your user-generated content
• Ask for something and not deliver
• Just rely on Facebook alone

Who does community well?

On April 24th WOMMA and ComBlu will be hosting a webinar that explores some great community tactics employed by brands such as Axe, AT&T and Marriot. Plus, we’ll delve deeper and highlight some hero brands—Whole Foods, Mountain Dew, SAP and ESPN. You will also learn how the Telecomm industry is becoming a game changer with cross-channel integration and why Healthcare is (finally) starting to embrace community building.

To learn more dos and don’ts on successful online branded communities, you can register for the webinar here. The 2012 State of Online Branded Communities report is available for download as well.

See you on April 24th!

But, when it comes to engagement, how easy is it to measure the engagement-level of your Facebook fans or LinkedIn Group Members?  How easy is it to interact with them and nurture them?  How easy is it to get usage and engagement metrics out of Facebook, LinkedIn et al?  Is it even possible?  Can you act on the metrics?

External social sites are good for brand-building (or reach) but not for interaction or engagement.

A recent Gartner report cited that a mere six percent of marketers claim that marketing on social networking sites is their top priority. What is even more powerful is that 45 percent of those surveyed said corporate websites were key contributors to marketing success.  And from the customer perspective, four out of five customers claim to visit a website for product information and only a mere 19 percent would visit a Facebook page, according to Incyte Group.

So, while you need to be active on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for branding purposes; you also need to be able to build and nurture customer and user communities on your own web site for interaction and engagement.

Visitors to your site are interested in what you’ve got – why drive them to another site where they could get distracted? You need to engage your site visitors with both content & interactions.  And to an extent, this is already happening.  Forrester Research claims that nearly 70 percent of b2b buyers visit vendor communities for more information.

By shifting the approach to pull customers to your site, instead of pushing them to other over-crowded communities, you’ll be able to use your website for all sorts of new activities that can benefit your organization, such as engaging customers in online chats, which can drive down service and support costs; leveraging your customers’ collective brainpower to improve product development efforts (the power of crowdsourcing is limitless) an so on. You’ll also find new ways to increase brand engagement and build customer loyalty as well as enhance overall customer and partner satisfaction.  Examples of these can be leveraging customer feedback for new product development, monitoring the frequency in which a customer contributes to the community, determining partner support and much more.

There are two ways to build communities on your website.  One way is to have a new social or community portal that sits alongside your content portal, resulting in your online presence being powered by 2 disparate systems.  That is what I call ‘loosely-coupled’.  With a ‘loosely-coupled’ online presence – it is more difficult to set-up marketing campaigns; in addition, integration with your other business systems becomes twice as complex.  This isn’t effective.

The better way is to make your web site itself social … to manage your online presence with a single system that helps you both manage content and communities; to provide a holistic & immersive experience to your site visitors.

By leveraging a unified corporate site that is social; that both publishes content and interacts with the community, marketers can more easily and accurately measure and analyze the level of engagement, what products the customer is interested in, what questions need answering and have a stronger opportunity to cross-sell by linking conversations with other product pages.

Is your website a one-stop shop for both content & engagement? It should be.

One of our clients asked me recently, “Do you have tips on how to name our intranet?”

At that time, I didn’t. Our intranet at Vialect is called, simply, “Our Noodle.”

But that question sent me on a quest to discover how companies usually name their organizations. This blog post is about the different categories of intranet names I’ve found.



Five Types of Intranet Names

1. Words that signify the goals/vision of your intranet

Companies set up intranets to help them communicate, collaborate, increase productivity and team work, connect with each other, etc. Any word that conveys these ideals are appropriate for an intranet. Here are some real-life examples:

• iConnect (CCE)
• myNewport (University of Wales)
• hint (Rotterdam University)
• Staff (Linneaus University in Sweden)

2. Company name + vision word

This is a variation on the first category. You can combine your company name with a word that carries your vision for the intranet. Examples include:

• IFF Connect (IFF)
• 
Hagernet (Hager)
• One D-H (Dartmouth-Hitchcock)



3. Famous characters

You could also name your intranet after a famous person or character, whether fictitious or real. The character should embody your corporate ideals, or otherwise have significance to your staff, and relevance to your company’s vision and mission. For instance:

• Watson (LPK)

Since we have Watson, I’ve thought of a few other characters that might resonate with certain organizations, such as:

• Sherlock (knowledge management agency)
• 
Einstein (scientific company)
• Gabriel (religious communication)



4. Acronyms with double meaning

Of course, your intranet could simply have the same name or acronym as your organization. But why not spice it up by adding some double meaning. Examples:

• YU Link (York University)
  CoSMos (CSM)



5. Words with special meaning

By “special” I mean the word is particularly relevant to the organization, because of the nature of its business, or because the word ties in with their history or background. Some examples are:

• Passport (Trip Advisor)
• Switchboard (Fossil)
• Cube (Singapore company)
• Spot (OCA)
• Sphere (Canam Group)

I hope these intranet name ideas have sparked some possible names for your intranet. When naming your intranet, brainstorm different names from each category. Come up with as many potential names as you can, before picking your short list.

You could also have an intranet naming contest, perhaps in the lead-up to your intranet launch. Do let your staff read this post to help them get their creative juices flowing.

If your intranet already has a name, what is it? Does it fall under any of the categories I listed above? How did you come up with that name?

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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.

With a few years of research and some very valuable findings in hand, TCR has given those of us charged with community growth and social branding much needed insight into best practices and measurement tools that can empower us to keep our brands healthy, transformative, and thriving in the ever-changing social space.

The Community Maturity Model: Keeping Social Integrated

At the genesis of social’s alignment with business strategy, it almost seemed silly. The platforms were clunky. Smartphones weren’t a thing. And unless the target market was demographically likely to jump on new social platforms — which, let’s face it, in the early days was comprised of bored adolescents and some other questionable characters with too much free time — putting any real effort behind social branding was a waste.

That all changed when musicians caught on. In my earliest internettings, 95% of the branding I was exposed to was that of bands or solo artists, who used things like Myspace and LiveJournal to share music, distribute merchandise, post tour dates, blog about shows, and essentially, become more popular. To this day, musicians tend to be better at community expansion than the rest of us, probably because it’s absolutely integral to the health of their brands and as a result, is completely intertwined with the band’s business strategy.

We have to acknowledge that community and social efforts are no longer a separate focus; they must be integrated into financial and strategic planning, complete with their own risk analyses, budgets, goals, and analytics. TCR’s Community Maturity Model outlines the following 8 criteria to help make that happen (I’ve added some brief descriptions, too):

1. Strategy (listening to your audience, engagement, and message alignment)
2. Leadership (transparency, authenticity, and using modest self-promotion)
3. Culture (tone, type of communication, and allowing your audience to feel in control of engagement)
4. Community Management (defining cheerleaders, enticing fans, dealing with negative feedback, and acknowledging issues)
5. Content & Programming (setting your brand apart, sticking to a schedule, and providing real-life value through content)
6. Policy & Governance (making rules, taking risks, and protecting key customer retention)
7. Tools (find good ones)
8. Measurement (defining clear metrics, knowing how to turn analytics into benefits, and not relying solely on the numbers)

Check out the full Slideshare here.

Nuts and Bolts, Policies and Evolution

In its current iteration, community management is sorely underutilized. But as the practice puts down roots in the business space and experts develop, it will go from nebulous need to operational fixture, complete with the aforementioned best practices and criteria, trackable value adds, and solid parameters around team size and policies. But that’s not what makes community management so important.

One of the great things about capitalizing on community management is the way it allows us to reconnect with the humanity of our customers. Shifting advocacy control by establishing brand ambassador programs, or giving your brand a voice by creating content that isn’t product-specific, inspires conversations and engagement that goes beyond the buy-sell relationship. Companies with community managers know that cultivating these connections requires diligence, in addition to bringing themselves peer-level with their biggest fans.

Most importantly, they know that the best way to personify something is to put a real person behind it.

A Glimpse into the Future

Data continues to pour in as more and more research is done by TCR. “Time will tell what that means in terms of organizational performance,” says Research Fellow Maggie Tunning, “but it does validate the important role of communities in affecting behavior change.” The good news is that there’s hard evidence of community management’s benefits, trends are emerging, and soon, more companies will be able to translate this info into practice.

However, without research and collaboration, progress doesn’t happen — so do your part. Read through TCR’s 2011 and 2012 reports, and then take this survey to share the state of your company’s community management program. Get your sneak peek at the ongoing findings here.

Launching your intranet can be a nerve-wracking experience. In fact, it can be just as challenging than setting up the intranet itself.

A well-planned intranet launch is half the battle won. To help you in the planning stage, here are 7 questions to ask yourself:

1. What resources do you have for the launch?

Take a look at the budget, time, and workforce available to you. Don’t settle for crumbs in your organization. Let management know, if they want good user adoption of the intranet, they must invest in its launch. If you’re short on manpower, get other departments involved.

2. Are you launching a brand new intranet or relaunching an existing one?

It’s probably easier to launch a brand-new intranet than to relaunch one that you’ve overhauled. After all, if you’re relaunching the intranet, it’s probably because the previous one sucked. Which means staff members have a lot of negative feelings and experiences towards the old intranet.

So when planning an intranet relaunch, think of how you’re going to address negative attitudes towards the intranet. You’re promising something better and brighter — how can you give credibility to that promise?

3. Is the intranet ready?

This may seem common sense, but you’ll be surprised how many intranets are launched before they’re ready. Test, test, and test! Some bugs will always escape testing, but be as prepared as you can. Also make sure the most frequently used content and forms should have been uploaded. You don’t want to disappoint your users when they log into the intranet for the first time. Make sure the intranet makes a good first impression.

4. What’s the best approach to launch the intranet?

Our friends at intranetizen have identified 5 different approaches to an intranet launch. Which one is most suitable to your organization?

5. What information do your staff need to get excited about the intranet and remember to use it?

Time to think like a marketer. What features and benefits of the intranet will resonate most with your co-workers? Is it the ability to communicate without using email? Collaborate on documents? Hold virtual meetings with co-workers from across the country?

What types of communication materials or collaterals would be most effective? Consider brochures and posters. But don’t forget T-shirts and computer mouse pads. Even screen savers can be effective.

Many companies produce launch videos to get their staff excited about the intranet. Check out this impressive collection of intranet launch videos.

And don’t forget about training staff to use the intranet. Will you have in-person training sessions? Produce quick-start guides? Create a YouTube channel? Whatever you decide is best for your organization, have a plan for intranet training.

6. Should you create a launch event?

If you decide to have a Big Bang Launch, then you’ll need to organize a launch event. It could be an in-person event, such as serving cake and tea as your CEO “unveils” the intranet. Or, if your company has offices in different locations, you could have a virtual event instead, using something like Google Hangouts or Spreecast. Or why not a combination of both?

Whether in-person or virtual, a launch event is a good way to signal the “opening” of your company intranet.

7. How will you follow up?

This is a very important questions, but one that most intranet managers forget. After you launch the intranet, what will you do next? After all, you need to sustain the staff members’ interest in the intranet, and motivate them to keep using it.

You’ll also be tweaking and constantly improving the intranet. Few intranets are perfect from the get go. What are your plans for getting feedback from users, tracking your intranet metrics, and implementing improvements?

We hope your find these questions useful when you plan your intranet launch. Let us know how it goes!
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The path to a vibrant and engaged BtoB social network, with a healthy content supply chain, begins with building a community of followers passionate enough to contribute content and stir up conversation about your product or service that motivates others to learn more. That is the best situation to be in – to have your top contributors endorsing and defending you without your prompts.

I’ve been a part of such a community for 5 years, as a leader of the SAP’s Digital, Social and Communities marketing team. Our flagship customer community, the SAP Community Network, will celebrate its 10^th anniversary in 2013. We enjoy 2 million unique visitors a month and generated155 million pageviews of content created by 30,000 contributors in 2012.

Here’s my take on three steps to generating successful social content from and for your community of customers, partners and influencers:

1. Discover. Use a mixture of listening tools like NetBase and Twitalyzer to conduct audience research (it usually takes more than one tool to get all you need). Always start by learning a) what is being talked about, b) who the most influential voices are, and c) where their virtual water coolers are found. You’ll learn the keywords of the conversation you want to join before you jump in, helping your message resonate with real customer pain points.  Create a scoring mechanism to prioritize the influencers who are most valuable to you. Then, find ways to engage in conversations with them. Connect them with your subject-matter experts to give them insights that help them become “in the know” about your products and plans where appropriate. Influencers love gaining more influence and building their reputation, often more than financial rewards (you’d be surprised how true this is).
2. Empower. The biggest “amen” moment during my comments at the BtoB 2013 Digital Edge conference in San Francisco recently came when I said, “Marketers need to create an environment that enables rich information exchange among community members – then get out of the way”. We know the majority of social media teams in companies reside in the marketing organization. But I view our jobs as enablers and “conductors”. The real task is to get your internal experts (product management, designers, etc.) to talk to customers and influencers about how products are designed to solve business problems. It can be hard to get your experts to be on the front lines of communication. But there’s tons of lessons in it for them too – direct customer feedback for starters!
3. Publish: Here’s something that IS in the realm of marketing’s role in social media marketing – finding ways to highlight the most engaging content on your channels. You can link to popular blogs or discussions in your hosted community, or via Facebook posts, or tweets/retweets or Linked In comments. Feature links to your most popular blogs in your next monthly newsletter. There are plenty of ways for you to give this organically generated content “legs” and get more exposure for it.

At SAP, we are constantly improving and honing our model to orchestrate our well- regarded professional social network. We could not do it without our 30,000 passionate contributors – that’s the priceless part of our equation.

Have you tried moving from a traditional “bill of materials” content creation process to a community – driven approach? How have you done it and how has it worked for you?

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.

Search for the term “Community Manager” on any online job board, and you’ll likely find tens of thousands of positions that need to be filled. But if you’re the one doing the hiring, how can you make sure you find a community manager worth his or her salt? Is there a standard set of must-have skills for every prospective employee who wants to manage your social media presence?

We asked Marjorie R. Asturias, president of social media and content marketing agency Blue Volcano Media, what she looks for when hiring community managers for her company. Her answers may surprise you! Either way, they’ll be instructive — and that’s whether you’re looking for a job as a community manager or looking to hire one for your organization.

The Surprising Skills That Are Most Important

Over the past three and a half years, Marjorie and her team have provided community management services for dozens of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Though her clients are quite varied, they all need community managers who care about, understand, and will represent their businesses effectively on social media.

Marjorie says that the most critical criteria she looks for when evaluating potential community managers are “writing skills, insatiable curiosity, and an attention to detail bordering on obsessive.” In other words, she said, “I’m looking for a really good reporter or journalist.”

For Asturias, being a great community manager is not necessarily about being extremely adept at social media. In fact, she says that it starts with being a great writer first. And as a former newspaper journalist and freelance writer, Asturius knows first-hand what good (and bad) writing looks like. “I’ve had to let go otherwise promising hires with great attitudes and a love of social media, but who really just can’t write.”

Curiosity Is Key

Regarding the requirement of already-mentioned insatiable curiosity in her community managers, Marjorie says this is particularly important when representing clients, products, and services that may not appear to be as “sexy” as other popular brands on social media. For example, when she picked up a new client in the architectural signage space, she had to do some initial research to find out what that term actually meant.

As a result, she discovered myriad examples of how important and pervasive architectural signage actually is in our every day lives — directional signage in airports and hospitals, for instance. This provided her virtually limitless ways to represent her client on social media that would go well beyond its traditional target audience.

“I encourage all my staff to research the businesses and the sectors they represent,” says Ms. Asturias. “They don’t need to become signage experts or anything, but they should at least have the curiosity about a client’s business to find innovative ways of representing and promoting that brand on social media.”

Attention to Detail

There is a significant difference between writing for yourself and writing on behalf of a brand. When representing dozens of different brands simultaneously, there is no room for error. Marjorie says her team’s attention to detail “means ensuring that every tweet, post, and comment is perfect and perfectly timed since we are representing our clients’ hard-earned brand to an audience of potentially thousands, if not millions of people.” The devil they say, is in the details!

Advice for Prospective Community Managers

Ms. Asturias also provided some advice for would-be community managers looking for work in this field. “Brush up on your writing skills. That means perfecting your spelling, grammar, syntax, and style. If you have to go back to community college to take a few courses or hire a writing tutor to help you out, do it!”

She says it “goes without saying, but if you want a job in social media, you must ‘do’ social media, and invest at least a few hours a day in building your networks, writing blog posts and promoting them via social media.” Asturias says it’s also good strategy for prospective community managers to keep up on the social media industry by reading and subscribing to relevant blogs. “Read the best social media blogs religiously. You’ll get a good feel for current trends and how businesses are using social media successfully — or not!”

On a more technical note, Asturias advises that community managers in waiting should focus their attentions on learning the ins-and-outs of the “big give networks” that dominate the industry: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Managers should also experiment with different social media tools. That’s a big asset for any prospective employer, according to Marjorie.

Finally, she advises that everyone these days should have a website. “It makes it easier for a hiring manager to learn all about you and your background without having to hunt down every single social media account and published article that you have.”

What else should a company consider when hiring a community manager? Do you have any advice for people looking for work in this field? Let us know in the comments below.

[Image credits: GoldMoneyNews, izzyplante, Emilio del Prado, Ravenshoe Group, Ben Hanbury]

We know the importance of trust in the workplace. Without trust, employee engagement and productivity suffer.

We’ve also seen how the intranet can be used as a barometer for the level of trust in an organization.

When that level is low, can the intranet help improve the situation?

Certainly!

In fact, we’ve identified at least 12 different ways your intranet can help build and strengthen trust in your workplace.

12 Ways and Intranet Can Build Trust

1. Information sharing

Management and supervisors can use the intranet to share information with staff, especially during changes. As part of project management the intranet can be used to make expectations tasks and expectations clear.

2. Success stories

Celebrate staff successes publicly by publishing them on the intranet. This way, employees know their co-workers are capable and can be relied on to achieve goals.

3. Trust-building standards

Make it clear that flaming and other disrespectful behaviors are not acceptable, nor allowed, on the intranet.

4. Freedom of expression

Provide a safe platform, such as a blog of discussion forum, for everyone to express their feelings and opinions in a professional and respectful manner. Staff who voice dissenting opinions shouldn’t be chastised.

5. True brainstorming

Keep brainstorming areas of the intranet safe. Remember when brainstorming that ideas shouldn’t be criticized or shot down.

6. One vision

Use the intranet to “market” your company’s vision and values. Use a tagline or motto, images, even colors to serve as a constant reminder of what your business stands for.

7. Common goals

Remind staff/team members on the intranet about your common goals. Celebrate milestones as you get closer to your goal. This fosters a sense of group accomplishment, that “we’re in this together.”

8. Feedback getting

Check in on staff opinions frequently through intranet surveys and polls. Employees trust employers who listen to them.

9. Teach to build trust

Set up a training wiki page to help managers and employees develop and improve their communication and other trust-building skills.

10. A welcome mat

Create a portal just for new employees, to help them feel welcome. Help other staff get to know them, provide new people the information they need to get settled in and acclimatized to your organization.

11. Get personal

Encourage staff to fill out their user profiles, so they can inform others of their expertise and background, and get to know each other on a more personal level. Knowing each other’s capabilities helps build trust.

12. Increase ambient awareness

Use intranet status updates, news blogs, and employee spotlight to increase ambient awareness. This helps foster a greater sense of belonging, which in turn, enhances trust.

Do you make the most of your intranet to strengthen trust in your workplace?

If you’re still using a traditional intranet, or don’t have an intranet yet, take a look at Noodle intranet software. It’s easy to use, affordable, and offers traditional intranet features plus tools for social sharing and collaboration. Click here to learn more.

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Are you looking for an intranet software? Download our free guide, “20 Questions: What You Should Know to Find the Best Intranet Solution for Your Organization” (No registration required)

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The usual reasons offered for online customer community failure include: the members weren’t ready for online discussions; the software wasn’t what we expected; the subject matter experts didn’t produce enough content; the customers were too “traditional.” These deflections don’t address the root cause of your community’s failure. It was the result of your firm’s organizational process, strategy and execution.

In 2012, Gartner predicted that by 2014 70 percent of proprietary communities would fail –a sizable group of investments generating little or no return for some of the world’s largest enterprises. At the same time, use of social channels continues to grow. A recent Forrester report (Understand Communication Channel Needs To Craft Your Customer Service Strategy, March 2013) states “Online communities and Twitter have seen increases in usage rates in the past three years. However, satisfaction remains low for these channels, as companies have not invested in best practices for managing interactions on these channels.”

Not all communities are doomed. For those who succeed, the returns are enormous.  Online communities are growing in importance for mid-size to large organizations, especially in this era of tight budgets and greater focus on customer retention. The case for online communities is based on an increase in customer satisfaction and customer retention, which lead to increased profits. The business case for customer community initiatives is overwhelmingly positive.  For example, Forrester calculates that a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion in revenue. (The Business Impact of Customer Experience, 2012).

Why the wide gap between success and failure? One reason is some organizations are much better at managing large-scale innovation initiatives than others – those which do not skimp on process will emerge the victors. Eventually, most organizations will figure out how to leverage their community investment and learn from community-driven insights. But it will take time to change their core business processes to reflect and integrate this customer community-supplied data. Struggles to achieve online community success can be attributed to a few common missteps.

Business Goals Don’t Match Community intentions: The online community strategy and goals need to be clearly articulated to insure the mission, vision and execution are reachable. Once these are defined, able leadership can guide the creation of an online customer community that successfully blends business and member needs.  Too often, community programs are skewed toward business priorities, forsaking the promise of value made to each customer and member. Every community must serve its customer-members — without members, there is no community — and not the other way around.

“Tool Talk” Before Business Strategy: Organizations large and small have a propensity to make the online community software purchase without a careful analysis of their business objectives, technical requirements and customer preferences. The result is an online community that provides what the tool has to offer – and not what the business, IT and customers want or need.

Building Mausoleums Instead of Sherpa Tents:  Social business success means constant innovation through iterative cycles, driven by member feedback. Enterprises, often very skilled at long-range planning, try to plan a large, long-term community effort. That’s a recipe for disaster.  Communities, by their very nature, are in constant flux from changing member needs, business objectives, technical improvements and online social norms. Community programs and plans should focus on short sprints — not big-bang approach. In the social business world, planning that spans years is simply not an option. Think this way: build, learn, evolve; build, learn, evolve; build, learn  …

Failure to Feed the Content Beast: The iterative cycle of innovation also requires a constant flow of new information into the community. This is especially important for new communities, where access to insightful content and provocative ideas is what brings first-time visitors back a second time and, eventually, an expanding population of members. Engaging content builds a growing community.

Poor Community Management Skills: There is no shortage of information on this topic, often in painful and painstaking detail. Community management is a professional role. Managing relationships online requires dedicated, experienced professionals with wide range of specialized skills, who are treated with the same respect and expectations as any other skilled managers.

Excessive Exuberance:  The old saying “you achieve what you measure” is especially true for social business.  It is common for online customer communities to track the wrong metrics – ones that don’t matter to the business but are the easiest to gather.  Likes and fan numbers only go so far in determining value. Achieving real success is means taking on the difficult task of measuring the impact an online community brings to customer satisfaction and other business success measures.

Lack of Business Integration: This is the biggest misstep of all, for fledgling online communities and established, successful ones alike. To be truly effective and valuable, an online community must have an impact on core operations.  Organizations may struggle to create a repeatable process to mine the data from the online community to inform new product development, R&D, influencer relations, partner and supplier programs and market messaging, but this is the way customer insights can be brought to bear on all aspects of the organizations operations.

Lack of Strong Executive Sponsorship: Any innovation project needs effective leadership and commitment from the business. Recall the Standish Group CHAOS report findings?  The number 1 reason why IT-dependent projects fail is the absence of a fearless leader willing to take charge.

I share these failure factors not to frighten but to forewarn.  Online communities, when successful, can transform an organization and are an imperative for the future. Who wouldn’t want to develop better mechanisms for learning from their customers, prospects, employees, partners and other stakeholders?

So what does it take to succeed? Review this Customer Community Readiness Checklist

Your presence on online communities can be a powerful tool for business growth and customer retention. There are many sites available that can be used in different ways and some businesses excel at managing multiple communities. Whether you have a Facebook Fan Page, strong Twitter following, have an established blog or online community forum, or are just beginning to dabble in social media communities, read on for some important community building tips.

Social media management isn’t an exact science but it is a bit of an art. The right approach could work beautifully for your business.

You can’t always direct every activity on your social profiles but you can be an active participant to ensure that you are managing your presence effectively.

Pay Attention to Spam and Trolls

Where they exist, spam filters are vital. Your blog comments, for instance, need to be moderated so that spam doesn’t turn up live on the page and disrupt the experience of the community. People won’t likely leave comments or bookmark your posts on social media sites if they see spam there — it’s a sign of poor community management and a neglectful business practice. It can’t all be put on autopilot and it can take effort and resources to manage spam and stop the trolls on your online communities but it is essential to do.

Like offensive spam or useless attempts at self-promotion or thread hijacking, trolls who look for attention have no place on your online communities, either. Delete offensive or harassing comments so that your community feels safer and is a pleasant place for everyone who visits.

Community Management and Moderation is Key

Don’t leave your blog comments, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and other online places deserted like the wild west or you’ll be overrun with spam and don’t leave it like a ghost town, either. Active engagement with visitors is important. It may take time for you to find your feet, so to speak, but some research and investigation into social media management (or hiring someone with social media management skills to do it for you) will pay off in building a strong community online that brings about good results for your business.

Consistency and Response Matters

Posting consistently is also important. If people don’t see anything new from you for weeks or months they will lose interest and leave or your scarce updates will mean little to nothing to them.

Be sure to respond to others promptly, too. Compliments and complaints need to be addressed whether posted privately or publicly. Not only is this important for your reputation management but it creates opportunities to demonstrate your commitment to customer excellence.

The way you respond is important as well. Professionalism is important but so is ensuring you’re appealing to your target audience. Knowing your audience can help you set the right tone for your community.

Not only are your social community updates going to be the face of your company to customers but they will be to the industry at large, too. Put the customer first on your communities and you’ll increase your chances of doing well.

Reviews and Assessment

Calculate for return on investment so you’ll know where to spend time, effort, energy, and in some cases — money. Which communities is your most profitable website traffic coming from? What sorts of microblogging updates get the most likes, votes up, or re-posts? Looking at the online community management activities of competitors and industry mentors can help.

Whether you consider yourself the mayor of the virtual ‘town’ you create or the neighborhood watch, keeping a close watch on your online communities will help you get the most benefit out of them.

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.

The elements of your online communities

There are several different elements that contribute to the success of building strong and effective online communities that will support your business efforts and aspirations.

Discussions: Having meaningful conversations with people who you want to be a part of one of your online communities is the ideal place to start building. If you feel that a person might be appropriate for one of your online communities, you should start to cultivate a relationship with that person. If is very important that you don’t discount the connections that people have with each other. Those are connections that you possibly don’t have on your own. People really do need other people and you are no exception. If you want to cultivate a new relationship, you should start to engage the other person in meaningful discussions. As your relationship starts to deepen, information will be shared, such as connections to other people, that will prove useful for everyone. Always remember that you are connecting with people so that you can help them. Of course, the other person will have the same perspective that you have. They will also be in it to help you and your business.

Valuable content: The quality of the content that you are posting and sharing is just as important as the content itself. It is through your valuable content that people will start to notice you and will want to interact with you on a regular basis. You can present content in several different forms, such as written content, videos, photos that accompany written content, etc. It is very important to make sure that the content continues to be interesting and educational. People love to walk away with information that they didn’t know before they looked at your content.

Be as creative as possible: Creativity is so important when it comes to attracting other people to your content. Creativity doesn’t hit everyone in the same way or at the same time. Inspiration can come from all over and each person expresses that in a different and unique way. A great way to become creatively inspired is by exposing yourself to new people and new situations. It forces you to look at things differently than you may have ever looked at them before. You may be surprised at the ideas that are sparked.

Relatable context: Undoubtedly, content is critical to the success of your business; however, context is just as important to your success. No matter how well written your content is, if it doesn’t touch your readers on a personal level and they can’t truly relate to it, it won’t matter. You need both to be a success. It is a really good idea to do as much research ahead of time as possible so that you really connect with your audience and understand what they need and want.

Create a buzz: If you want to have a great impact on your readers, you need to create a buzz. In order to do that, you should get as involved with your communities as you can. Go to as many appropriate events as you can and jump into discussions with the various members of your online communities as you can. An effective approach is to ask questions, answer other people’s questions and post and respond to comments that relate to a specific article online.

Your online community needs a purpose: Your online communities must have a reason for existing and a good reason at that. That purpose not only needs to be important to you and your business but it also needs to be important to the other members of your communities.

Conclusion

Online communities are essential to the success of your business. The members of those communities are one of the important elements in your business’s ever-increasing success. Without other people, you won’t really get anywhere in your business. You should understand how important the communities are to all aspects of your business. It is also important to understand that in order to build successful online communities, you will have to put in effort and time and really nurture your communities to make them what you want them to be.

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