We can thank Gartner for amplifying this one. Too many times marketers and brand managers get the GMOOT syndrome ( Get Me One Of Those) when it comes to online communities. Look across your business and identify areas where better communication and engagement with customers and employees could be improved. Many times an external community can serve multiple business units. For example, product marketers gain valuable customer feedback on how to position and develop new offerings while sales can harvest feedback and loop that data into the sales process. And don’t leave out inward-facing communities. There’s real movement from corporations that want to use the intrinsic value of collaboration and community to improve specific internal processes. Many times an organization realizes it’s a heck of a lot easier to pilot things behind the firewall. Another bonus is the bottom-up adoption and visibility you’ll have as you plan your external community.

2. Find The Influencers Or Brand Advocates

Content is again king, but not just content, quality content. We (Telligent) see micro-communities emerging almost daily that address very targeted issues and topics. Marketers needs to be smart about identifying influencers and customer evangelists. Just because someone is a prolific blogger or media creator doesn’t mean they’re best suited to serve your constituencies. Also many marketers overlook off-line participants, in other words, those that may not be digitally savvy or “joiners” as Forrester describes them. Remember, the offline world is where word-of-mouth resides.

3. Consider A Platform To Generate Media & Manage Your Online Programs

It may seem a bit ironic that the “choosing” step is a bit understated since I work for one of the toolset vendors (Telligent),but it’s by design. The platform is the enabling technology so It shouldn’t become the focal point of your community initiative. Don’t let features drive your community strategy.

4. Inventory Your Content Assets

When developing a community strategy, many times marketers and communication professionals realize there’s plenty of content right under their nose. Think about how to rejuvenate customer testimonials in more interactive format. Heck, invite the customer to blog with you. Better yet, film them and video blog it. You might even want to survey your business units and ask them what content is important to the business. After that, think about how to get that content to the web where it can educate prospects and customers, spur conversation and drive brand visibility. Lastly, after the content audit, put a plan in place to sustain the development of future content. Make sure you use the tools during the process. In other words, don’t let users create content in Microsoft Word and email the document. Better yet, have them blog it.

5. Develop a Measurement Approach

If you can’t measure it, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. But first decide what you need to measure. It’s much more than page views today. Your community strategy should establish metrics that map directly to your success factors. If your goal is to use social media to nurture the complex enterprise sales cycle, make sure you can track customer touch points between prospects and your sales staff. That may be something as simple as showing the downloads of the latest white paper or views of a recently taped interview with a product evangelist. If your prospects are interacting with your content, there’s a good chance they’re interested in your products or services.

The good news is that there’s plenty of business intelligence and analytics toolsets available to assist you in developing your measurement processes. Picking the right tool will provide you with the data you need. It’s then your job to use that data to drive additional engagement. If your last product release caused your forums to light up with fiery and negative comments, you might want to rally engineering and take a look at your roadmap. Because you measured the earlier feedback in your forums, you’re now armed with the data you need to show angry customers how version 2 will make their lives easier. Lastly, don’t forget about tracking offline interactions and campaigns to your community initiatives. Research shows customers will often start offline and move to digital environments. Have a process in place to greet (and track) your prospects as they enter your community. Some will get there through traditional media (TV,Print,Radio) and other by word-of-mouth. Either way, you need to know the entry points (medium) so specific media investments can be budgeted and prioritized.

We’d love your feedback on what else you’re doing to plan your community efforts.

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What’s The Platform’s Sweet Spot?

Does the vendor’s strength play unevenly towards certain elements of social computing. In other words, did they start out as a blog provider and magically reinvent themselves as as a platform play?

Can They Play Inside and Outside the Firewall?

The lines between external and internal communities are becoming increasingly blurred. If your vendor doesn’t have an answer for playing nicely with SharePoint and can’t turn that around and go external, move on.

What Are Their Social Media Credentials?

You can quantify this pretty easily. Do they blog? Are they good at involving customers in the conversation? If they haven’t synchronized their own communications, there’s a good chance they can’t do it for you.

Is The Platform Geared For Particular Verticals?

Did the vendor grow up in a particular industry? If so, you might find the product cluttered with unnecessary or thin layers of specific applications you don’t need. You’d be surprised how much big paychecks from certain clients influence a product roadmap.

A good sign of a platform’s maturity is how many partners have latched on. The key here is to let the solution providers, integrators and digital agencies make the platform hum. While most of the time you can find a good contingency of subject matter experts (SMEs) on the vendor side, the channel is the ecosystem that makes things tick.

Have They Worked With Agencies Before? 

What About 3rd Party Alliances?

This is critical as you expand your online efforts. Whether it’s a CRM integration,or an e-commerce application, the odds are you’ll want to extend your social computing platform as your community grows. Take a close look at who the vendor goes to market with and how they leverage each other.

Send me your questions, I’m putting together a second version now.

First posted on the Telligent blog.

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You could think of it as a Facebook-like application with just the right amount of administrative flexibility to keep the IT guys happy.

A marquee client for BrightIdea.com is Cisco, which uses the platform to create custom portals that spark collaboration with customers, employees, or partners. According to Greeley, Cisco has seen impressive results using the platform, generating more than 700 ideas from almost 1,500 members in 100 countries. Try to do that with some Web-based surveys and polling widgets.

Greeley told me that many companies lack business focus when deploying a social computing strategy.

“Deploying generic social networks without a specific business objective is like putting up playgrounds at the office; it may be fun for a while, but don’t expect it to improve the bottom line,” said Greeley.

What I really like about Brightidea is how it has honed in on a particular business driver. By looking at how a company can manage innovation, Brightidea takes the best-of-breed approach instead of trying to be all things to all people. Greeley says once it perfects that piece, it can move on, driving deeper into the enterprise and affecting other more traditional areas of collaboration.

That focus should certainly give WebStorm 5.0 a leg up in the battles to provide social computing infrastructure to large corporations over the next few years.

Companies are finally realizing the more you can apply the fundamentals of Web 2.0 to specific business objectives, the better the chance at ROI.

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• Facilitates content distribution. (remember when you had to send content to webmasters and the IT bottleneck?)
• Ensures brand integrity. It’s the easiest digital billboard you’ll ever create.
• Highly portable and mobile-friendly. Great newsletter and email marketing add-ins.
• Feeds users’ habits of consuming bite-size chunks of micro-content.
• Zero maintenance as content is automatically updated via XML and RSS feeds.
• Drives blog and RSS subscribers.
• Social Network (SoNet) ready content that’s easy to integrate and publish to.
• They’re a poor man’s enterprise mash-up.
• You don’t need a “Dummy’s Guide to Widgets” to create them.

                       

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Through ongoing analysis of AttentionStreamâ„¢ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, Attensa displays feeds in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader. Subscriptions can be displayed in a “River of News” view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds

And Scott and I had a good exchange about sharing some of Attensa’s inner RSS workings. When I told him I should just blog the whole document, he quickly fired back that “marketing is all about experiments and a little risk.”

Well said.

 
Attensa Screenshot

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Jeff Gundersen, CEO of Executive Connections, offers some help in a recent Ad Age article where he lays out a digital primer for tech-hungry CMOs. He describes the digital dilemma:

They (CMOs) often don’t have the direct marketing, analytic/segmentation and customer-relationship-management-consultative skills to lead integrated media and marketing programs, combining general advertising, branding, direct, promotion, PR and digital elements.

Today’s marketing world is less and less about stand-alone campaigns that use one medium at a time and more about an integrated approach that speaks to your customers when and where they want. The kicker there is just because you find your market, doesn’t mean they’re ready to engage. Gundersen expands a bit further using the increasingly pervasive “micro” term, used to describe everything from the nature of today’s content to the characteristics of markets.

We are moving toward a marketing world that is driven by a direct-marketing opt-in, predictive modeling and tracking approach. Marketing in the future will not be about the masses but about understanding micro-segments of customers and using tools that enable marketing to get more granular and take campaigns to a one-to-one level.

I heard someone describe it recently as “customers are now looking for marketers instead of marketers looking for customers”. That’s earth-shattering, if not exciting.

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