Clearly all this didn’t happen by just implementing software. As with any digital strategy, it takes a well thought out plan that addresses how social media and collaboration map to your business goals. Even though Telligent’s platform can work wonders, it’s still just the enabler. 

 
Telligent & Goozex ROI Case Study

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Most likely, you’re not hurting for ideas from your user community to do something online. It’s the “something” that can present a problem. In short, make sure your business objectives map to specific company goals. If the CEO’s goal is to reduce support costs, you might want to start with customer service and work through the organization from that vantage point. You should also think about how to gain cross-departmental leverage with your approach. Just because customer service has blogging capabilities doesn’t mean the same process and platform can’t be used by sales and marketing.

2. Start Small And Build Incrementally

As the saying goes, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Invariably, creating content, developing the right user experience and managing content will take longer than you think. Often, it’s better to look at online community efforts as unique programs with unique requirements. Marketers know there’s no one size fits all anymore. In fact, more communities and brand messages are dictated and delivered by the customers themselves. With that approach, you can build, test and deploy smaller projects that allow you to re-direct and re-prioritize in midstream.

3. Set Realistic Goals And Expectations

Decide what you’ll measure. Ask yourself if you could walk into the CEO’s office and deliver tangible evidence that your online community is helping the business. While everything can’t be proven by hard numbers, you can show how your content is consumed, how the market perceives your products, or how sales now has a 360-degree view of your customers. And keep it simple. One organization’s goal was to increase the number of customer testimonials it could garner over a 6-month period. As a result of engaging with its customers online, the company was able to convert those participants into brand advocates.

4.Identify Your Partners

While you may consider yourself the SuperStrategist, you can’t do it alone. Fortunately though, access to world-class technology is no longer your biggest challenge — it’s human capital. While many times marketing will own the brand or community initiative, there’s a few more moving parts you need to be aware of. Technology-wise, do your homework and talk to a few analysts and end-users in your vertical. You’ll quickly find the platforms and tool sets have matured rapidly and will give you most (if not all) of what you need out-of-the-box. Strategic alliances can range from content partners and advertisers, to PR firms and other SEO or social media marketing firms. Odds are you can do most of the heavy lifting and planning yourself, but having a strategic resource to bounce things off and help you build a longer-term roadmap is key.

5. Develop a Community Roadmap

Again, think of your community with longer-term lenses. Don’t get too crazy, but take your wish list and siphon it down into manageable parts. For example, if your goal is to get every executive blogging, make sure you’ve developed an onramp for different skill sets and adoption paths. The approach you used to get the early-adopter execs creating content might not work for others. Less sophisticated users might prefer you show them how to upload a Video blog (Vlog) after you’ve taped them. The community roadmap will be your primer for how things will be delivered, sustained and measured. Marketers should also engage with toolset vendors’ professional services teams. There’s a good chance they’ve built their own roadmap.

6. Develop a Marketing Plan To Rally The Needed Support

Some of the toughest marketing you’ll ever do involves converting the naysayers or those satisfied with the status quo. Internally, market to those executives with phrases like:

• -“Do you know what our customers are saying about our products?”
  -“I want to reduce our support costs.”

“Are we capturing the right intellectual capital to speed innovation?”

Externally, always be ready to answer the question – “What’s in it for me?” Some findings show that as little as 1% are super-users, so be thinking about the value proposition for passive users and lurkers. Think about your users’ technographics (Forrester term) here. If you’ve identified your super-users, there’s a good chance they’ll be on the lookout for your Facebook page or RSS feed. Conversely, late techno bloomers probably won’t mind an opt-in email campaign.

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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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But hey, it’s not all about the technology. We’ll also explore some tactical things you can do with the toolsets and discuss the best way to build roadmaps that take advantage of what vendors offer in the social software sector.

What are you interested in learning?

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1. You can finally feel confident about starting an intranet initiative

It’s different behind the firewall. In fact, most business people will tell you it’s quite a challenge mimicking some of the things we take for granted on the consumer Web. Typically things like search, usability and basic collaboration are expected in anything that even smells of the consumer web. So why do we all give in when the experience shifts behind the firewall? We’re making sure you don’t have to give in. Once you’ve established how you intend to transform the way you collaborate, most community platforms will adapt with you.

2. The pulse of your organization becomes much more visible.

It may sound a bit cliche to talk about the pulse of a company, but with Enterprise 2.0 applications it’s almost eerie the things you can extrapolate when you see a bird’s eye view of an organization’s activity. Within seconds I can see who’s connected to who, how many discussions are taking place, or the statuses of my departmental colleagues. Once you start to see how connectedness drives conversation, you can glean intelligence from those interactions.

3. You’ll accelerate the way you find resources and expertise.

Information is the lifeblood of today’s organization. If you can’t filter the flow and capitalize on the important bits and bytes, you’re at a competitive disadvantage. With online communities, the gold nuggets of information come in the form of activity streams, rich user profiles, and answer-rich forums and message boards. It’s not that you’ll rid yourself of those hallway sprints to find Jenna in Marketing, it’s more about being prepared to ask her the right question at the right time.

4. You’ll have one-click access to fundamental Web 2.0 applications like blogs, wikis, forums and groups.

I don’t mean to harp so much on the technology here, but we’ve found that online communities are a great way to provide a hands-on rollout of social computing 101 exercises. In a short time, you’ll be able to stitch together quick scenarios for various departments that paint the bigger picture of how all this stuff actually helps them do their job. I can tell you first hand that community usage will equate to all sorts of creative ways to share information, connect, and communicate. And isn’t that what we’re all striving for after you strip away all the Web 2.0 hyperbole?

5. You can easily incorporate your day-to-day activities and enhance your workflow — instead of disrupting it.

This is a big one because we all know a big Achilles’ heel of any software or services rollout is adoption. For us social media users, adoption comes day one. When you’re provisioned as an employee, community integration with the intranet is a big part of that onramp. The fundamental things you can quickly accomplish — building your profile, blogging, joining a group, etc — all become a part of the way you work inside the firewall. You quickly find yourself easily cutting and pasting content and letting that content live where it needs to live. The world of file shares and dormant repositories of data become a thing of the past because valuable artifacts and discussions can be surfaced via tagging, voting and threaded discussions. And if you’re a SharePoint user, you’re sure to like the expanded capabilities related to blogging, wiki publishing and a cool email gateway that allows you to post and respond remotely to forums. How’s that for flexible workflow?

6. You’ll have the IT group on your side when you decide to champion an Enterprise 2.0 approach.

You know who you are. You’re the tinkerer, the strategist, and the solo freedom fighter dead-set on making the mess inside the firewall a better place for knowledge workers everywhere. You’ll have the confidence to strut into the IT group’s weekly meeting and prove you won’t be making their lives miserable. After your IT team sees the back-end and how easy online communities are to deploy, they might even bring the donuts to your weekly meeting.

7. You’ll have the line of business execs in your corner when you pitch the CIO on enterprise and intranet 2.0.

Before you head to the CIO’s office, you’ll be armed with case studies from happy business people that loved the Evolution use cases you (IT) had them adopting in a matter of hours. It shouldn’t be a surprise that you IT types like modern community platforms. They set out to make it as easy as possible to incorporate a lot of the tools and tasks you need to deliver services to the business. IT users love to have hooks into things like Active Directory, Exchange and the portal de jour, SharePoint.

8. You’ll reduce your email.

It’s interesting how our company nicely stigmatizes email. Fact is, with Enterprise 2.0 applications you quickly learn when email is inappropriate or just doesn’t cut it. There’s really no reason to email someone when you can post a message to a Group or Forum, see a colleague’s status, or skim a blog or wiki post. If anything, Evolution will open your eyes to all the options you have to communicate and collaborate.

9. You’ll reduce your meetings.

No really. On numerous occasions I’ve circumvented the dreaded “I could’ve avoided this meeting” syndrome. With Web-based collaboration tools, there’s plenty of ways to become a real self-service employee and find the information you need. That means having actionable content that’s timely, accurate and even archived for future reference. We like to describe this as surfacing your valuable corporate intelligence and activity. For example, if you’re trying to schedule a meeting with Mike in Product Engineering and notice his user profile status says “finishing up client specifications doc”, you might want to avoid sending that Outlook meeting request. If you had an RSS subscription to Mike’s blog, you would have had that insight.

10 . You’ll have some innovation on display as you try and recruit all those Gen Y Workers.

Across the board you’ll hear companies, especially large ones, stress the importance of recruitment and retention of younger workers. How can you expect to lure the youthful digital natives if you can’t build the right village around them? Evolution provides a helluva start to the blueprint.

11. And finally, you can actually be a part of the conversation instead of just watching it on the sidelines.

Have a gripe about something that doesn’t work? No problem, you have all sorts of ways to submit feedback. You can find an appropriate group, participate in a specific forum, or create a blog post that’s highly visible across the community software landscape. Flexibility and understanding the way people interact and engage in digital environments underscores much of the vision those of us have in Enterprise 2.0 tools and community platforms.

Did I get your attention? Email me if you’d like to arrange a briefing.

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The social media stuff is probably the most important thing we do today, from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the other elements of our marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. The social media stuff is much more strategic… It’s about how to use social media to power the fundamentals of the business. That’s what we’re focused on.

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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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