Your customers are talking about you. Are you listening? Online communities are a great way to start capturing the Customer Conversation and use it to start transforming the way you interact with your customers. This community guides you through the steps of Building, Managing, and Measuring online communities.

Online Communities

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Online Communities Overview

Building a solid plan for your community that is focused on goals, people, engagement, and community characteristics helps ensure a vibrant community. Join in on the conversations with other members who are examining their online community strategy and are in the process of designing their community.

Community management is vital to a successful community. Ensuring adequate participation, assisting in community growth, encouraging membership, etc. are active roles the community manager must partake in.

Determining what to measure in online communities is a difficult task. Standard web metrics are not enough. Levels of participation and engagement metrics are just as important.



Recent Blog Posts

Barry Tallis

I wanted to kick off a new round of blog posts that focus in on the design process that the team here at Jive took to design and build Clearstep.

The main driver for Clearstep was to help our customers answer the question, "What do I do next?" As part of our professional services organization at the time, I helped a number of our customers out with this question. It was just natural for Jive to create a community to focus on the non-technical aspects of using our software for Online Communities as well as Internal Collaboration.

 

The concept for the project started about a year ago, initially as a subspace on the developer community, then was transfered ownership an external consulting firm, before I took the project over. That's lesson #1: Have a dedicated project stakeholder associated with the community that has access to the resources necessary to complete the project. I took the project over in early 2008 and started the design process, using the same methodology I've been coaching our clients through. It is this process (reflected in the tag group organization in the Build community) that I will be blogging on over the next couple of weeks.

 

Our rollout plan was fairly aggressive once we nailed the purpose, design, and structure. I'll go into more details in a subsequent approach around our rollout strategy and plan, but one of the big decisions we made was to go live early on our latest Clearspace Community 2.5 platform (BTW - we just announced availability of it today!)

 

One of the reasons we decided to run Clearstep on beta code of Clearspace Community was because of the Groups and Friending functionality. We knew that one of the big goals of Clearstep was to connect people who are in the process of implementing social technologies to people who have already done it. You will be noticing some changes over the next couple of weeks to make this more apparent on Clearstep. We will also be featuring some community managers and others who have "been there, done that" and have them post about their experiences.

 

Also, I knew that no matter what, the community will evolve and shift based on topic interest. Despite all our best research on what the right taxonomy should be, we know that community members would want to talk about certain things that don't necessarily fit into the overall community structure. Thus, we have started implementing the Groups functionality. Again, over the next couple of weeks you will see specific groups form that are more focused around a specific topic, or group of people. For example, there is a OMS Group (Online Marketing Summit) that is available for anyone to join. This group is targeted around those who attended the Online Marketing Summit that I spoke at over the past couple of weeks. If you have suggestions of what groups you would like to see created, let me know.

 

So, over the next couple of weeks you will see a series of posts talking about what it took to design and build this community. I will be posting about our goals & objects, member personas, community characteristics, content management plans, and go-live checklists. Stay tuned!

0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: clearstep, community_design
Barry Tallis

I just got back from Chicago yesterday evening, after a wonderful time at O'Hare (not....got on plane, and then had to deplane and board another plane because the brakes didn't work)...

 

Anyways, I was in Chicago speaking at the Online Marketing Summit (http://www.jivesoftware.com/news/events/oms).  There were about 120+ attendees in the room, all with a marketing background.  I had asked how many of them had a blog/forum on their website, and about 50% of the room raised their hands.  Then I asked how many of them have a social media strategy and only about 10% of them raised their hands.

 

That was pretty starteling for me.  Having a blog, forum, community, facebook page, etc. should be part of a social media strategy.  I'm always talking about "its not about the technology".  As part of my presentation I gave a quick Social Media Primer to help set the stage of the importance of having a social media strategy:

 

1) Traditional Marketing & PR tactics have changed.  There is a great video on youtube that explains this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkOHsjZKBB0

 

2) Understand the Value of Conversations.  Content isn't king anymore.  According to a post by Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing - Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

 

3) It's Not About the Technology.  Strange to hear that from a software company, but it's absolutely true.  The technology needs to enable the strategy, but not BE the strategy.  Having a blog is not a social media strategy.  Having a place where customers can express their opinions, provide suggestions, talk about their experiences with your products are some example objectives of a social media strategy.  A blog just enables that.

 

4) We understand that Influence, Engagement, and Participation is important.  If you can get your A-listers / influencers talking to each other and engage in that conversation with them, then you have a very powerful force at your disposal. In the October 9, 2006 edition of the New York Times, there was an article entitied "Letting Consumers Control Marketing: Priceless."  In that article A.G. Lafley, chief executive at the Procter & Gamble Company stated, "Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation.  We need to lear to begin to let go."

 

5) Understand how to get started.  This will be expanded in a followup blog post, but the 4 high level steps are:

  • Determine your social landscape (Market, Competitors, Audience, and Corporate Readiness)

  • Define Goals & Objectives

  • Develop a plan

  • Monitor & Meausure

 

6) Value & Benefits of Social Media

  • Feedback on products and services

  • Enhanced, viral brand reputation

  • Increased sales

  • Better customer service

  • True understanding of customer pain points & needs 

 

I'll be speaking on this at future OMS events in Houston, SF/San Jose, Portland, Seattle, and Atlanta.

8 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: social_media, getting_started