Communities.cisco.com Reaps Rewards of Sound Strategy

Success in the B2B online community space seems to come from just the opposite of what many companies actually put into it: planning , teamwork and transparency. That’s right. Some companies we talk to or observe online still aren’t grasping the concept that communities need a dedicated team and strategy to thrive.

Communities.cisco.com, on the other hand, gets it. A platform that contains more than 50 communities for Cisco’s partners, customers and employees, communities.cisco.com, also known as Cisco Communities, has almost doubled its membership and has seen a 50% increase in overall traffic in the last year. Additionally, Cisco continues to see measurable savings and efficiencies as a result of the program. Allison Johnson, Social Media and Community Manager at Cisco, who has worked with Cisco for 5 years and communities.cisco.com for the past year and a half, discusses the ingredients that make up Cisco’s recipe for success and the challenges of managing a successful global community platform.

Q: What is your role at communities.cisco.com?

A:  At Cisco I manage the communities.cisco.com platform in addition to driving social media and digital marketing across the company.

When working on the communities platform I oversee the entire program at a macro level. My team and I work on everything from identifying technical problems and scheduling the bug fixes as well as onboarding new teams and setting up the overall program structure. We work closely with the community managers to help them reach their individual goals as well as goals we have for the program.

Sometimes we joke around that in my role I’m essentially a community manager of community managers. Every day is different and I never know what hat or situation I’ll find myself in. A main focus for us is our long-term strategy. People forget that communities are a long-term commitment and it’s essential to align your long-term plan with corporate strategies and initiatives. At the end of the day, the most important thing I can do is give the community managers the tools they need to be successful.

Q: What’s your vision for communities.cisco.com and its business purpose?

A: We set both short-term and long-terms goals for the program. Our 5-year vision is to sustain and create a global community program that deepens relationships with partners, customers and employees. Getting there involves building out some of our core areas to make them more engaging and relevant. We’re in the process of a study to learn more about behaviors. Currently we added a social share functionality to the platform to encourage conversations that are happening in the social web to interact and share with our communities.

Q: Tell us about some of the success you’ve seen as you’ve worked toward that vision.

A: This past year we saw tremendous growth in registrations (more than 50% to more than 110,000). Overall that is one of our largest success metrics. Monthly, we capture metrics and do analysis on our platform. This past year we’ve seen a lot of growth. Ways we hope to continue this growth are building out case studies and best practice sharing modules from these growth spikes.

A more specific example can be seen in our Partner Community. This private space was built for our Cisco partners and we have seen it contribute to reducing travel and increasing the productivity of Cisco experts. These experts travel most of the time and have little time for face-to face interactions with our partners. Now these experts broadcast training sessions for partners on communities, which achieves the goal of deepening relationships with our partners.

The common theme here is that the Web 2.0 technology that communities use can positively impact the business by encouraging innovation, reducing travel costs, opening communication and open up resources. Another way we’re positively impacting the business is that we are capturing and sharing frequently asked questions and conversations within the community. We have a wider reach and we’re able to answer more than one person’s question online. If someone else has the same question it’s all right there with a paper trail.  Communities.cisco.com have proven to be a very transparent, authentic way to communicate so more than one person is able to benefit.

Q: Those are impressive results. What are some recent milestones you’ve reached in terms of overall traffic and membership?

A: Our membership a year ago was at about 74K. We are now at about 113K. In 2011, we saw more than a  50% increase in overall membership and traffic. And, we’re also happy about the response time we’re seeing. Support questions usually get at least one or multiple responses within 24 hours.

Q: What are a few best practices you can outline that have helped achieve these results?

A: Open and frequent communications are a must when you are working with a group this large. We have an open bi-weekly Community Manager meeting to serve as a communication platform as well as a best practice share and overall time to update one another on the various projects we have in the works. We set the agenda in advance and we have an area in our own Community Managers Community, completely dedicated to presentations delivered and communications relayed in these meetings. We encourage CMs to bring up topics they want to cover as well as set the agenda for future facing meetings. Not limiting ourselves, we also bring in our external networks.  I think it’s really valuable that we’re always willing to learn from internal and experts about how to best manage the platform.

Additionally, every community has an established and committed community manager. You must always have one point of contact for each space. This way that person can drive communications about the community and content within their space. It is also imperative that they manage the editorial calendar. This is another best practice.

Overall the CM will coordinate with campaigns in different parts of the organization to drive awareness. Some may also work with hired moderators to make sure questions are escalated to appropriate subject matter experts. They should be focused on the communities health.

Q: What is the biggest challenge ahead of you?

A: I’d say it is taking the platform to next level. As I mentioned before we recently added social share into the platform, but what else is out there? It will be a challenge making communities an easy go-to Web 2.0 tool. There are so many different ways we communicate day-to-day whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, e-mail or text messaging. It’s hard to make sure there’s one central place to go to. From a platform perspective, technology and communities will continue to evolve and it’s my job to monitor this space and help drive what will make communities a better platform and program, without losing sight of our goals.

 - Lauren Bittner, the author of this blog, is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their online community management efforts with their business goals.

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Branded Communities Are Doomed? Not so fast.

By: Miranda Young, September 30, 2011

Engaging your audience isn’t always an easy task and in times like these, when everything has to be monetized, it’s easy to get scared off by the seeming inability to truly measure the value of your online community. To some, online communities really don’t earn their keep or are really only there to preach to the already existing choir of users.  In our experience, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Online communities can be both the lifeblood of an organization as well as a platform to attract those ever elusive new users/consumers. We’ve helped several major organizations grow their online communities into vital repositories of information, communication, and conversation.  Not only that, we’ve seen these communities facilitate huge ROIs for their brand.

Richard Millington, founder of the UK based Fever Bee Community Consultancy, recently wrote an article titled “Why Branded Online Communities Are Doomed.”  Some of what he wrote has merit, but, in our view, a lot of it doesn’t because we’ve personally seen the opposite happen.

Communities CAN be an important source of revenue

“At the moment, most branded community efforts fail. Few attract more than a handful of active participants. Even those that succeed, barely deliver the ROI they promised.” -  Richard Millington

While this may be true of some online communities, blanket statements about their ability to both attract active participants and deliver the ROI they promised is patently false. We helped NetApp build their online community which has gone on to produce over half a billion (yes, billion) dollars in partner owned sales revenue. Cisco has seen a ROI of over 100% from their online community.  And there are other companies all over the country and around the globe that are seeing direct monetary benefits come out of their online communities.  Whether it’s through direct sales coming out of those communities or greater brand awareness, over all, B2B and B2C communities can and do work.

Communities aren’t just for loyal customers

“If you’re trying to reach new audiences, a community is the wrong choice. Why would people join a community for a product/service they don’t buy?” - Richard Millington

Again, this is not what we’ve experienced in our many years of helping companies build out their online communities.  If you’re trying to reach a new audience communities can be one of the BEST places to turn to.  When reading that question, we ask the question back “Why would someone buy a product that they haven’t asked other people, people who are already users, about.”  Communities are where they can get their questions answered and it’s someplace where, once they do become a user, they can return to.  They know the community will be there to help them and having a robust, active community there for your prospective customers is a benefit rather than a waste as Mr. Millington would have you believe.  Not only that, often times these communities help stave off customer support calls by answering questions within the community.  This, in turn, saves the company money and also builds quality relationships among new and loyal users.  Those new users will look to the community as a source of information and turn into loyal users resulting in even more revenue as they continue to buy more products and support your brand through word of mouth advertising.

Size matters but it can’t be one size fits all

“Communities don’t need a big launch, they need a small launch…They need very high levels of personal contact. They need to be directly invited. Most importantly, they need to be prompted for the first few weeks to participate in discussions.” -   Richard Millington

Yes and no. Mr. Millington is right that companies need to focus on nurturing their communities and even help guide the conversations sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that the community as a whole can’t be big at launch.  Directly inviting members isn’t going to get you far when it comes to building your community. We have found that only 3-5% of all invited users or users who find the community feature will go deeper than one page into the new community.  Even then, only 15-20% of those will actually stay long enough to come to their own opinion about what you’re offering and only a few of those will actually post anything. We prefer to advise our clients to look across their entire audience for places where users share interests and create a larger group of members and visitors that can interact with the community from that.  The size of the “starter” community should be based upon a percentage of your entire audience not a finite number of 50-100 as Mr. Millington suggests.

Communities are here to stay

“We need to understand that communities take time, but it’s an investment which pays off many times over.” -  Richard Millington

Now this is something we can all agree on. Communities take time but, like Mr. Millington says, it’s an investment which will pay off in the end.  Done right, online communities can be the keystone of your overall communication plan. We’ve seen them be successful time and time again. Online communities are far from doomed.  We’ve seen quite the opposite.  They can and do have measureable monetary and social effects on both new and loyal users and they are a powerful tool in your arsenal of social media tactics.

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EMC Documentum Developer Community Takes Support to the Next Level

Today Impact Interactions follows Jerry Silver and the EMC Documentum Developer Community on a long, successful journey the site started in 2001 as a place for tools and code to its current state, the full-fledged flourishing community bursting at the seams with member-generated content that it is today. Impact Interactions’ interview with Jerry offers important insights into the best practices that have not only allowed the community to align with Documentum’s business goals but have also nurtured its progression beyond a basic online support space for its members into a valuable destination for them to enhance their reputations and expertise.  Learn from Jerry as he covers everything from how to maintain a steady, well-organized flow of content via the involvement of subject matter experts to tips on recognizing employees and non-employees in a way that results in their ongoing participation.

1) What is your role at EMC and with the community? How long have you been with EMC?

I work in product marketing, covering Documentum xCP, a family of products for Application Composition, Business Process Management and Case Management.  I’ve been here for about 3 ½ years.  Within our marketing group we’re organized by product and also by channel.  In my case, the product is Documentum xCP, and the channel is social media and community for xCP and related products.  Developers are a key constituency for my products, which has led me to the role of manager of the Documentum Developer Community.

2) What is the community’s purpose and when was its inception?

As the name suggests, the Documentum Developer Community is a destination for developers that build on the Documentum platform. We also provide lots of great content covering all technical aspects of the platform, such as administration, integration, and performance tuning.  The community is completely public and complements our support forums, which are currently only accessible to customers with a support contract. That said, we’re putting plans in place to make the support forums public and to integrate them into the community.  So the community’s primary purpose is to meet the needs of our members. It supports them in the use of our products, helps them build their knowledge, recognizes them for their expertise, and allows them to network and share information with other developers.

For the company, the community is a channel for increasing product satisfaction and engaging directly with our customers.  We learn a lot about how they’re using our products and the direction they  need us to take  to meet their business and technical needs.

The community grew organically from a home grown site that was launched in 2001 and primarily provided downloads of developer tools and sample code, to the site that you see today.  It’s part of the larger EMC Community Network (ECN) and runs on a commercial platform (Jive SBS).  Downloads are still important, but we now offer considerable interactive, member-generated content – wikis, blogs, discussions, videos, polls, etc.

3) Tell us about your membership. How has it changed over time? Who are they? Customers? Partners? Employees?

ECN has around 200,000 members, but that’s across all of EMC.  We don’t break the numbers out by community since all communities share a common user base.  I can tell you that our community alone gets more than 20,000 unique visitors every month, and many of those visitors make repeat visits during the month and beyond.  Because the community has evolved over 10 years it’s difficult to say how much it’s grown over that time.  Participation is roughly 20% by employees and 80% non-employees.  A large number of partners participate but we don’t break them out as a separate group.  We are looking at programs to more directly engage partners.

4) Give us some examples that demonstrate how the community has achieved its business  goals.

In terms of meeting member needs, the numbers speak for themselves.  The number of unique visitors is growing, as is the number of first time visitors.  We’re able to maintain that momentum through a steady stream of new content, in addition to  programs like developer contests that offer substantial prizes and generate a lot of interest and useful content in terms of contributed code and expertise. Our last major contest had a $50,000 prize pool.

A key business goal for our division is to encourage an approach to development based on modeling and composition, rather than writing raw code.  This approach is supported by our newest toolset, Documentum xCP, and is a transition for many of our members who are familiar with our legacy APIs and more traditional, code-intensive methods. This has therefore become a focus for the community, and we’ve seen interest shift towards the xCP and composition related information, which is now the most popular content on the site.  It includes a substantial and growing library of “xCelerators” – sample applications, pluggable components, design patterns, and best practice guides that extend our product set in highly useful ways.  So the community has also become an effective distribution channel for product extensions that is much more dynamic and agile than the traditional release cycle.

We’re also starting to track how the community contributes directly to revenue generation.  This is a challenging problem, but we’re figuring out how we can correlate community participation with sales wins and repeat business.

5) What are your greatest challenges and how have you addressed them?

Our community is very content rich, which is great but poses challenges in navigation  – just finding the right content.  One approach that works is to enlist subject matter experts to “curate” content. For example, we have created index pages that guide members to relevant information.  We’re also in the midst of a usability review and expect to revamp the user experience in the near future.  Unlike most marketing Web sites, which are highly architected from the outset, community content grows organically, as new industry topics become relevant and emerge .  While  “too much” content is a nice problem to have, it does mean that a periodic refresh of the community design and navigation is required to keep up with the constant flow of information and interaction communities contain.

Member engagement is another challenge that requires some investment.  For the past couple of years we’ve focused on internally produced content. Getting employees to  participate amidst other competing priorities can be difficult.  It requires persistence and constant evangelism.   What works well is to find employees that are inherently motivated to contribute, and to recognize and reward their participation to create incentives for others to follow.  The reward doesn’t have to be monetary. It seems that just seeing your product or latest blog post featured in the community can be reward enough. We’ve even seen team members compete for who gets the most page views in a month.  We’ve recently had some success with a leader board that tracks the most popular content and the most prolific contributors for a particular segment of the community.  That seems to be working. I’m starting to be approached by more groups that want a presence in the community.

Now that we have an active core of internal contributors we need to encourage more non-employee-generated content, beyond discussions.  For that, we’re looking at introducing reward and recognition programs that will identify community MVPs and provide incentives for increased participation.  I believe that recognizing a member’s expertise and contributions to the community is the best incentive, but sometimes you also have to help things along with the occasional iPad giveaway.

6) What are three best practices that you’ve taken away from this community?

We’ve recently become more consistent about tracking metrics, and I regret that we didn’t do this sooner.  But don’t just track metrics for their own sake.  Make sure you’re measuring meaningful activity, and that the metrics lead to actionable results.  For example, we started tracking the top searches.  These indicate members’ interests, which helps with content planning, but also tells us what they’re having trouble finding in the community.  That prompts us to use curation techniques like index pages to help them discover and browse to content instead of searching for it.  Metrics have also helped us sell the value of the community to senior management, who are more willing to invest in community programs if they can see a measurable impact on revenue or customer satisfaction.

A continuous flow of new content is important, but equally important is the organization of that content.  Many community managers understand the role of moderation, but don’t realize that curation is just as important.  Moderation is mostly about ensuring that community content is appropriate and that responses to questions are given when needed, but curation is about making content easy to find and keeping it up to date. Note too, that these are different roles that require different skill sets.  A non-technical community manager can handle moderation tasks, but subject matter experts who understand the content and the members’ needs are needed to curate.

Finally, recognize that B2B communities differ from B2C social networks, and have a distinct set of challenges and approaches.  In a B2B community, the company is much more welcome as an active participant, and in fact is expected to play an active role.  B2B customers want to engage with their vendors and get to know the personalities behind the products, and that personal connection can be a powerful tool for winning and sustaining customer loyalty.

7) Is there anything we may have missed that would give the world a great example of how your community is benefiting EMC?

Many vendors host a community to answer post-sales support questions and think they’re done.  That’s a necessary starting point, but it isn’t really a community until it becomes an integral part of the members’ professional lives.  I think our community has evolved well past its support roots to become a valuable destination for our members to enhance their reputations and expertise.  And it’s proving to be an effective channel that engages customers at all stages of the “buy cycle” – pre- and post- sales – which brings real value to our business.

Jerry Silver has over 25 years of IT development and marketing experience, specializing in content management, collaboration, application development, Web technologies, BPM, and social media. Jerry spent 15 years at Oracle in a variety of technical roles, most recently as Principal Product Manager of Oracle Application Server Portal. He also served as Director of Product Strategy with content management vendor NCompass Labs, now part of Microsoft, and was Director of Product Management for XMetaL, a leading XML authoring tool. Jerry is currently Senior Product Marketing Manager for the EMC Documentum xCP Platform, and is also responsible for the Documentum and xCP Developer Communities.

Blog: https://community.emc.com/blogs/ecmteam
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JerrySilver
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jerrysilver

- Lauren Bittner is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their social media efforts with their business goals.

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Cisco Service Provider Community Makes Business Personal

We invite you to read and learn from Impact Interactions’ interview with Deborah  Strickland, Manager, Social  Media  and Digital Marketing for Cisco Systems. Deborah manages the Cisco Servicer Provider Community for executives in the mobility industry, as well as many other social media projects. Listen to Deborah discuss the challenges of creating a collaborative online environment for a group and a level of professionals who not only compete, but also typically avoid sharing information. Join us and allow Deborah’s innovative strategies for engaging her target audience and generating fresh, compelling content to pack some punch to your online strategy.

1) Describe your role at Cisco:

I manage a team of other social media strategists and web developers who work across mobility, video, routing and switching, and data center products. We cover events, product and solutions announcements. In January we worked on the Videoscape announcement at CES, the Consumer Electronic Show, and we recently promoted an online TelePresence concert with the singer Jewel. This was in collaboration with AT&T and Marriott.  We also completed our first series of tweet chats for our mobile and video campaigns.

2) Describe the Cisco Service Provider Community and your business goals.

The community started in June 2009 as part of an experiment to increase our global influence. We wanted an open platform where we could discuss the technical and business details of the challenges global operators have in regard to upgrading, managing and identifying revenue opportunities for their networks.  It was not intended to be a forum for product or technical support issues; there are plenty of those already.

A secondary goal is to give our internal subject matter experts (such as solution managers, product engineers, and marketing managers) an opportunity to participate in a public arena where they can showcase their expertise and make themselves available for ongoing conversations. The community is a way to get our experts’ names out there where they can write in a more natural format (as opposed to the highly edited format of a white paper), and put a personal face on our content. Plus it gives them a taste of social media and eases them into the idea of being conversational.

3) Give us an example of this “personal touch” and some of the benefits and challenges of using it.

In one instance, a colleague of mine was meeting mobile operators in Asia to explore the monetization of 3G and 4G networks. I proposed to her that she do something a little different than the usual post-event summary.  Although she wasn’t able to name specific customers, we turned her business trip into a series of travel stories. She did a great job of giving a daily wrap-up recorded from her hotel room. She included local photos and videos of where she happened to be, the food she was eating, and a summary of her customer conversations. This shows that we actually go out and talk to people. We’re not just sitting here in our cubes 3,000 miles away from the action. In this case it was the first time this person did a blog, let alone a video blog and she was a natural. It showed other people on the team how they could use storytelling to get their point across sans the Power Point deck.

People are also more apt to want to reply back to blogs, discussions and other community content if the content is not dry. Our content is written in such a way that you know the person who’s talking. It’s just like you met them at a dinner party.

Some of the content on business sites is really dry. We’re changing how people communicate. The challenge is that the writing on many corporate websites is very reviewed and edited.  People who are used to writing in that style find it hard to relax and be conversational. There can be a sense of fear of participating in social media in a corporate environment. Yes you have your own voice and are telling a story, but you’re also very aware of the approved messaging, competitor commentary, and the fact that you can’t take back what you said. Once it’s out there, it’s there forever.

4) How do you prove the value of your content to your executive team?

One example I use is the comparison of how many views a white paper on Cisco.com will get as compared to how many views that same content gets if we repurpose it in creative ways.  A lot of money is spent on developing white papers, but if they aren’t getting viewed, you’ve wasted time and money. There could be many reasons why a piece of collateral isn’t getting consumed so part of the challenge is to experiment and repurpose that same data into different formats that are easier to digest and share.

I identified one particular white paper that wasn’t getting the views we had hoped, but we knew would be of greater interest.  When we divided the white paper into a series of  blog posts, reworded it slightly , added some photos, and dispersed questions throughout the blog,  we received more than 1,200 views (as opposed to 43 when it was posted on cisco.com)

5) What’s the lesson to be learned here?

You don’t have to start from scratch. There is content in your organization that is valuable, but is not getting used or read. Sometimes content on Cisco.com may be hard to find because the site is so big. If you see content on your corporate site has value, but you are disappointed in its usage you can correct it and repurpose it in many ways. You can’t just post it and forget it, and expect people to come to you and hope they find this great piece you wrote. Bite-size pieces are so much easier and inviting for people to consume. You need to rethink how content is created and distributed. You can always provide a link to the detailed document, but quick summaries of the main points are what most people want to find when they only have a few minutes  to get their questions answered.

6) How does the use of 3^rd party applications like Ulitzer.com, a content aggregator which allows articles on the community to be picked up by search engines and RSS feeds, factor into what you’re trying to achieve?

I believe it’s more important that your content get consumed and that people can find it easily than it is to force the audience to come to us to read it. Why spend time creating content that no one can find? It’s about presenting the information the way your audience likes it. We go where the audience is and reference back to the community. Content aggregator systems are sometimes controversial (are they farming or ‘scraping’ content?); but I see it as experimenting  with where your audience is and their preferences. We also use SlideShare to repost some content which also allows readers to post comments (a feature not supported on cisco.com).  For many reasons, corporate web sites are often restrictive in how content can be viewed and distributed. So why not re-create some of it and post it elsewhere?  I would rather  it get consumed than force users to come to me. The days of controlling where and when users consume your content are dead.

The more places you post your content and the more formats you post your content in, the easier is to find. If we only posted videos on our community it wouldn’t work. We also post a written transcript so it’s easier for search engines to find us. A search engine can’t (yet) look inside a video and tell you the video is about. I’ve also posted the audio portion of a video for those who like to listen instead of read. Options. It’s all about options.

You have to educate yourself on what search engines like. Positioning on the page matters, for instance. There are many guidelines but they are always changing. We’ve gotten better and better at  getting our key topics to achieve higher placement in search results.

7) How do you engage experts to provide content?

There are two ways: By writing content that is somewhat controversial and by asking the right questions.  You don’t need all the answers; but being able to invoke thought and spur discussions (in favor or not), is the goal.

It’s also the way you present the content on the page. You also need to put some personality into it. Remember that only a very small percentage of your community will actually reply with comments. The vast majority people are listeners and observers of information. They’re not likely to take the time to rise up and make themselves known. They have better things to do. Even on sites like Amazon where there are so many comments, the huge majority of the users never post a comment. Don’t expect participation relative to the size of your readership. Keep in mind that not everything of value can be measured. Life isn’t that simple.

8)  What guidelines do you give your experts for contributing?

We give them recommendations for how to get their articles to show up on search engines. We work with them on modifying posts so they are less rigid and more casual. There’s a difference between textbook writing and something that is visually appealing. Most people quickly scan an article first to see if it’s worth it to slow down and read it. Laying  out the article with sufficient white space and easy-to-find inflection points is critical. It’s also important to insert questions throughout the article. No one wants to read through pages of dense copy trying to figure out what the author’s point of view is.  Get to the point!  Our community does not want read a doctoral thesis. They have very little time. They want to see what’s new, get inspired, learn something new, and move on.

– Lauren Bittner, Social Media Consultant, Impact Interactions.

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Upcoming Event – Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators, San Jose CA, May 4-5 2011

Impact Interactions’ president Mike Rowland to present “Ten Years in the B2B Trenches: A Practioner’s Guide to Maximizing the Return on Your Community” at Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators Conference, May 4, 2011 in San Jose, CA.

How many online communities really succeed at meeting their objectives? Does yours? Online communities are proven tools for expanding the conversation with your customers, prospects, and fans. Whether you are looking to reduce your support costs, generate leads, nurture customer relationships, or build awareness for your products, online communities require a clear purpose and processes to deliver results. Managed properly, online communities can deliver a stunning ROI that will impress even the most jaded executive. Drawing upon ten years of experience and examples from Cisco, NetApp, SAP, Ace Hardware, Intel, and others, Mike Rowland will discuss many of the best practices and issues that impact online community success (including how to use social media with your community). This three hour session will help attendees to understand the best practices for building, managing, and measuring a focused B2B online community. The last hour of the session will be dedicated to answering your questions utilizing a panel of top B2B community management executives from Impact Interactions’ client teams. To learn more about this great B2B focused event, please click here.

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Impact Interactions Welcomes Experienced Social Media Professionals Lauren Bittner & Adam Crawford!

With our continued growth here at Impact Interactions, we’ve recently added two experienced professionals to help our clients’ social media and online community projects succeed. Please join us in welcoming Lauren Bittner and Adam Crawford to our team!

Lauren Bittner (Social Media Consultant) brings over nine years of professional experience in the social media and loyalty programs to help our clients drive deeper, meaningful relationships with their members. With consulting and management experiences ranging from IBM and McGraw-Hill to Allstate Insurance and Ace Hardware, Lauren has a strong foundation in the B2B social media world. She will initially support the Hall of Fame and Expert member recognition program at Cisco’s CSC as well as support additional projects both for Cisco and our other B2B clients.  Prior to joining us at Impact Interactions, Lauren helped improve usability for client sites as well, bringing another dimension to our services for clients. Lauren got her start in social media at online community pioneer Participate.com.

Adam Crawford (Social Media Consultant, Business Development) is an experienced social media professional with over ten years experience in helping large organizations with their social media and online communities. In his experience, Adam has managed teams of moderators for such diverse companies as NBCi, ATT, AARP, and Ace Hardware. Further extending his social media experience, Adam was an Account Development Manager for Open Text, a leading Enterprise 2.0 content management and social media software company for the past five years. This gives Adam a wide understanding of not only the processes and procedures for social media programs, but also a solid understanding of the technology requirements needed for success. Prior to Open Text, Adam worked for Participate.com as well. In his new role, Adam will help Impact Interactions with Business Development and consulting work.

Please join me in welcoming Lauren and Adam to our team.

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B2B Social Media Best Practices: SAP Best Performance for Partners Program

Over the past several months, we’ve been helping SAP’s Partner Enablement team to understand how to use social media to further their goals of increasing partner sales and adding new partners to sell SAP software to the small and midsize enterprise (SME) market. Because there is a lot of confusion over using social media in a B2B setting, we’ve built a training methodology which takes the best practices from our ten years of experience in B2B social media and community work to simplify and help SAP’s partners.

The methodology is built around a very simple, yet powerful concept: Restaurant menus. Our training workshops provide teams with the questions that they must answer to successfully utilize social media. The goal is to clearly identify your strategy and objectives, then build a menu of tactics to support your effort.

So, are you a Pizzeria or a Fine Dining restaurant? Do you have a limited menu or an expansive menu with ever changing offerings (think of daily specials)? Does your audience have the time for a five course meal or do they want take out? Do you have multiple chefs or is there one person making your pizza?

By answering these and other questions, B2B teams begin to gain clarity in their objectives, audience, content strategy, and measurement requirements. Once we complete this session, we move into the tactical way to utilize social media in order to build out the menu of offerings.

Not all tactics are appropriate, nor does B2C social media strategy always deliver the intended results. By understanding how B2B social media tactics differ from B2C and work together to deliver results, our client SAP has generated significant results. In terms of helping partners succeed in a tough economy, it’s Best Performance for Partners social media program delivers training and information efficiently to help each partner organization succeed in meeting its revenue and lead generation objectives. For SAP, the partners who are participating are learning better ways of marketing and selling which benefits SAP directly in the form of revenue achievement.

For SAP, the Best Performance Challenge is an innovative way to build its partner channel competency each year. The Best Performance Circle, composed of the top partner organizations in EMEA and India, reinforces SAP’s commitment to its partners by using an online community to strengthen its relationship with a key part of its sales ecosystem.

The video below by Raimund Mollenhauer, Head of Enablement & Talent Net for SAP Partners, SME EMEA & Global describes how SAP is using Impact Interactions’ methodology today to deliver results:

The innovation continues at SAP with future roll-outs of additional Best Performance initiatives. Their use of social media not only speeds the adoption of these initiatives, but also delivers value to the partner channel in a cost effective manner.

To learn more about B2B social media best practices, our workshops, or social media for channel management, please contact us or ask a question here on this blog.

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B2B Social Media – Moving Beyond the Hype

Several of our team members were in London for the annual Internet World Exhibition held at Earls Court between April 27th and April 29th. As one of the few exhibitors and speakers in the B2B Social Media Industry at the show, we noticed a lot of confusion about using social media and what social media could do for a B2B focused organization.

For example, we noticed a large number of email vendors selling the idea that email is social media (it’s not). The idea of renting a list of unknown people to send your message to was presented as social media (it’s not). Lastly, there is so much confusion over using social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for business that we spent much of our time helping people learn the basics of the applications and why they might want to consider using them.

But just as important to us, there were many people who were disappointed using social media as they didn’t get the results they wanted or thought that they would. Why? Because in most cases, their companies were using B2C techniques to engage with the B2B audience for their services. Many were following the common theme of retweeting others, constantly updating their Facebook pages with product information, building a network of as many followers as possible, and joining as many groups as they could on LinkedIn. And most of it was a gigantic waste of time.

At Internet World, I presented a short case for why B2B Social Media is very different from B2C. The presentation covered the idea that most people are focused on the tactics at the expense of their strategy by following the common wisdom of social media experts and gurus who only understand B2C marketing. B2C is concerned with building awareness, then trial. That’s why couponing is so effective for B2C. B2B is concerned with building relationships. It’s harder and takes much more time than B2C social media tactics. But in the end, it leads to tremendous value when executed properly.

You can download the presentation’s slides here: B2B Social Media – What Works 2010. The slides are helpful when viewing the actual presentation below: (Quick Note, the edited video below is courtesy of Seminar Streams, so you’ll have to register or log in to see the video. Or enter our username Impact and our password impact. The video will play right away and you won’t have to search for it.)

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about using B2B Social Media for lead generation, customer support, training, channel or partner management, or another specific purpose, please contact us.

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

by Matthew Lees

Part 1 looked at community-side metrics. This is the data you get from your community’s Web server log files, your community platform database, and any third-party analytics systems (such as Google Analytics or Omniture) that you’re using.

It’s also the data that you – as a business sponsor, community manager, or other stakeholder – likely have direct access to. And while it’s important information, it’s used primarily to help ensure the health of the community, not quantify and provide insight into business value. For that, you need to tap into business-side metrics.

Business-Side Metrics
These are the metrics that do 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.

Where to look in your organization and who to build relationships with depends on what you’re after. Here are four common business cases for B2B communities, with an overview of their potential business value as well as mention of the relevant business-side metrics, location of these metrics, and people who can help you access and understand these metrics and what they mean for the bottom line.

1. Service and Support. Reducing contact center costs is one of the primary business goals of a community in which customers help answer each others’ questions and solve each others’ problems (via what’s often called “peer-to-peer support”).
Business-side metrics: number of incidents (by source, e.g., phone, email, chat, etc.), first-contact resolution, agent hours
Where the metrics live: contact center analytics system
Who to make friends with: not only the VP of Support, but also the manager who is the most fluent with the call center’s reporting and analytics

2. Product Development Feature Set and Road Map. Here you’re probably looking for (a) ideas for new products and services, (b) ideas for new features and functionality, (c) ideas around improving customer-facing processes (i.e., making it easier for customers to do business with you), and (d) the prioritization of these ideas. These ideas and their prioritization by customers can improve processes, reduce time to market, and give you higher confidence that your product road map is what your customers want.
Business-side metrics: number of customer ideas that are implemented; number of existing ideas that were validated by customers; time to market; dollar value of reduced time to market (can be a squishy number)
Where the metrics live: product tracking system; business process systems (ideally these all track the sources of ideas)
Who to make friends with: product development / R&D teams, particularly the keepers of the road map and features/capabilities lists

3. Customer Acquisition and Lead Generation. Communities are a great way for people to go beyond what they read on your Web site and in your marketing collateral, to get a sense of how people are using your products in the real world. So prospects are part of the community ecosystem as well as existing customers. A vibrant community full of helpful, engaged customers can be effective in moving prospects into your sales pipeline.
Business-side metrics: number of new accounts that came in through the community, new revenue from these accounts
Where the metrics live: CRM system or other sales tracking application
Who to make friends with: the sales team, particularly the sales operations manager who tracks sourcing

4. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty. Numerous studies have shown that online communities can have a positive affect on customer satisfaction and loyalty. The tricky thing in demonstrating this for your own community is to separate out cause and effect. Communities can be self-selecting; your most satisfied and loyal customers are probably over-represented in your community. For them, the community didn’t cause their high level of satisfaction, for example. Any surveys you do to measure satisfaction and loyalty should take this into consideration.
Business-side metrics: survey results; customer satisfaction / loyalty methodology or system, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Where the metrics live: survey results database; satisfaction, loyalty system
Who to make friends with: the marketing specialist who measures customer satisfaction and loyalty for your organization

Legwork and Relationship Building
You may have noticed that the business-side metrics are really just the ones that your organization and your colleagues are already using to identify and analyze business value. You’re just looking to apply and tune them towards quantifying their impact from the community.

Of course, while the methods may be familiar, it isn’t necessarily easy to compile metrics and estimate dollars saved and/or generated. A lot of it comes down to doing the legwork and building relationships with the right people. Ideally determining community ROI is at the top of their priority list as well as yours. It will take time and attention to come up with ROI hypotheses, test them using data you’ve tracked down from wherever it lives, analyze the results, revise your hypotheses accordingly, and iterate. Hopefully your colleagues become partners in these efforts.

So how do you build these relationships, make those allies, and get the information you need? We’ll leave that for another day. But experience shows that chocolate helps…

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

by Matthew Lees

In recent months my research, writing, and client work has (happily) focused on one of the hottest topics in social media…calculating ROI. For a variety of reasons, determining quantifiable ROI of social media programs and online community initiatives presents a variety of challenges. There’s nothing new in this statement; people have been trying for years to make it easier to figure this out. But ROI keeps fighting back. It’s getting to the point, though, where business executives will be expecting a more quantified understanding of the impact customer communities, for example, are having on the bottom line. Knowing that it’s “the right thing to do” from a customer-centric perspective isn’t going to cut it much longer.

One of the challenges is the fact that some (or even most) of the information needed to measure ROI isn’t in a convenient location.

Last year in a post called “B2B Communities – What Works,” Mike Rowland discussed a handful of essential best practices for B2B communities. He wrote: “You can measure the ROI for B2B communities, but you cannot get there by using only community software metrics and/or web analytics packages like Omniture or Google Analytics. None of these provide true value metrics that have an economic value associated with them. To get to ROI, you must build relationships within your organization so you can obtain real data on customers, leads, ecommerce transactions, etc.”

Right on, Mike. 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.

Community-Side Metrics
The relatively straightforward part of the legwork compiling the data you do have direct access to. This is the information you can get from log files, your community platform database (often through an analytics dashboard), and, if you use one, a third-party analytics package (such as Google Analytics or Omniture). The types of things available from these community-side sources include:

•    Traffic and Usage. Pages served, page views, visits (and unique visits), time on site, etc.
•    Membership. Total members, new members, active members, reputation and ranks, etc.
•    Activity. Posts, comments, ideas, invitations, votes, ratings, subscriptions/notifications, downloads, views (e.g., of video clips), time between posts, etc.
•    Search. Both quantity of searches and specific search terms (such as top 20 search terms)
•    Other. Moderation (e.g., moderator touches), referrer pages, etc.

Ideally you’ll be able to break down this data based on important parameters, such as time and location within the community. For example, you’ll probably want to look at the all-time number of members, as well as the number of members over a given time period (typically week-over-week or month-over-month). And you may want to look not only at total pages served within the community, but also at pages served within particular areas (such as forums, blogs, idea sites, and so on).

Community-side metrics can be very useful, but, as Mike wrote, they don’t illustrate economic value. At least, not in and of themselves. They’re certainly useful in terms of knowing whether or not the community is healthy (three consecutive months of decreasing page views, for example, might tell you that something is wrong), but they only get you part of the way toward determining ROI.

Up next…building relationships and doing the legwork to identify the business-side metrics that get you the rest of the way there.

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