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Tracking Down Online Community ROI (Part 2: Business-Side Metrics)

April 29, 2010

Posted in Uncategorized

Business-side metrics are ones that show business value. Unfortunately, for most online community use cases, such data lives in places that you probably don’t have direct access to or control over. This is where the legwork and the relationship building that Mike Rowland referred to in the previous post come into play.

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Determining Online Community ROI (Part 1: Community-Side Metrics)

April 26, 2010

Posted in Best Practices, Measurement & Reporting

To get at community ROI (whether for B2B, B2C, or any other type of community), you’ve got to track down data from several sources – particularly from sources that you probably don’t have direct control over or access to – which takes building relationships, making allies, and a bit of legwork.

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Baseball and Social Media Success: It’s the Little Things

April 20, 2010

Posted in Best Practices, Social Media Industry

Baseball is ultimately about the small moments. A game may ultimately hinge a grounder that just glances off the diving second baseman’s glove with two outs in the 6th inning, an alert runner on second tagging up and taking third on a foul ball the right fielder catches halfway in the stands, or a sacrifice bunt that moves a runner into scoring position.

As with baseball, it’s the little things that matter in social media. For every video that goes viral – the social media equivalent, perhaps, of a home run – there thousands of seemingly insignificant interactions with customers in branded communities and throughout the social Web: the reply to a question in an online forum, the blog post that gets retweeted, the Facebook post that announces an upcoming event. It’s the aggregate of these day-to-day interactions between you and your customers, readers, subscribers, users, and partners that have the biggest long-term impact.

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What Have You Done For Your Community Lately?

April 16, 2010

Posted in Best Practices

“Ask not what your network can do for you, ask what you can do for your network.”

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Blogging for Business II – What to Look for in a Blogger

April 15, 2010

Posted in Best Practices

There is no well-defined or industry-accepted profile of a B2B blogger, but certain characteristics and skills indicate the likelihood of success. Bloggers don’t grow on trees, but they can be found just about anywhere in your organization. Getting the right people to blog is half the battle in running a successful B2B blogging program. There are thousands of B2B bloggers out there…but there’s always room for more.

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Thinking Past the Community’s Launch: A Warning from “The Candidate”

April 13, 2010

Posted in Best Practices

The weeks and months preceding the launch of an online community are full of planning meetings, discussions of issues that inevitably arise, all kinds of decisions by a dozen different people wearing a dozen different hats, technological configuration and development, graphical work, customer outreach, testing, and much more. Most of these things are geared toward getting the community looking and functioning the way everyone envisions it will, so that it’s ready when the flip is switched and it goes live.

But the community’s launch is just the beginning.

The laser-sharp focus on the launch of a community, sometimes to the exclusion of what will happen afterwards, always reminds me of the ending of the 1972 movie “The Candidate.”

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Blogging For Business – B2B Best Practices

April 12, 2010

Posted in Best Practices

As long as your writers are providing a point of view on the content, the length doesn’t matter. A few sentences detailing why an article link provided is valuable often is more widely read than the long entry. Remember, B2B readers often have less time than B2C readers who are reading for enjoyment. Because of this dynamic, a short and to the point style is often preferable.

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