NetApp – Earning Value from Online Community

“Active members using our community to interact and engage with us controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period.

Active partners of NetApp engaging in the community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue over the same time period.”

- Navneet Grewal, Director Digital Marketing

Introduction: NetApp launched its first online community in early 2008 to help executives engage and gain a stronger understanding of the products and solutions offered by NetApp as well as to build awareness for the growing storage industry among IT professionals. The initial community, built on Jive Software, was growing in size but engagement behavior and value derived from the community was low. Beginning in August of 2008, NetApp hired Impact Interactions to rebuild their strategy, help the company better meet the needs of its community, and align reporting to real world business goals that demonstrate the value of their community.

Addressing the Issues: After a review of the community, a competitive analysis, and review of appropriate metrics, the Impact Interactions’ team identified several areas which were limiting NetApp’s business results. The main areas of focus for our work included:

1. Restructuring the community’s offerings and forums to meet member needs and provide a clear path to engagement and value (Products and Services categories were redefined to meet member expectations and to provide a stronger focus, changed the community’s architecture to allow member measurement using the Jive Software analytics, and reduced the categories of available forums in order to concentrate conversations in appropriate areas to reduce the cost and time of moderation)
2. Redefining processes of managing the community using our best practices (Engagement and escalation processes, internal subject matter expert recruitment)
3. External member recognition process
4. Alignment of content strategy to NetApp’s business goals (Increased percentage of thought leadership content to attract influencers & decision makers, added partner focused forum & content to recruit NetApp partners into the community as subject matter experts, refocused outreach to concentrate less on technical information and more on business results  like TCO, ROI, Customer Success Stories)
5. Internal team education (Training on B2B focused approach using Impact Interactions’ best practices and experience, reduced B2C tactics that focused on awareness and pushing information rather than building engagement and relationships with members)
6. Understanding key metrics to report to build a health index for the community while also setting achievable KPIs (key performance indicators)
7. Developed measurement framework utilizing Jive Software, Omniture, and Business Objects to deliver focused reports (Traffic – baseline metrics, Behavior – engagement metrics, Value – business metrics with an economic value $ assigned)

The team at NetApp realigned their community using Impact Interactions’ recommendations. One of the main changes was moving forum categories into distinct sub-communities on the Jive platform in order to increase visibility into how members were using each area of the community. Initially, all areas had been under a single community architecture which due to Jive Software analytic limitations reduced visibility significantly into how individual areas of the community were performing.

Social Media Supports Community to Engage Members: As part of Impact Interactions’ ongoing engagement with NetApp, we performed a full social media audit to understand how audiences outside of the community had their information needs met. Having the social media run by their Public Relations firm for the previous two years had achieved minimal results. This was due to poor alignment, execution, and messaging using social tactics such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, and Facebook were simply used as RSS fed message repeaters without a clear goal or objective for each entity. This caused the same exact message to be placed in multiple places despite different audiences. The result was that there was no integration of effort to utilize the strong results of the community with the marketing efforts of the PR firm’s actions. This wasted effort resulted in many lost opportunities for valuable engagement.

To correct this, as part of our strategy work, Impact Interactions recommended the following tactical changes to NetApp’s current strategy. First, the team needed to refocus social away from press release based activities to deliver integrated marketing, digitally relevant content, video, and thought leadership which was missing in action. In conjunction with this refocusing, there also needed to be a realignment of social effort to integrate community, NetApp.com, and digital marketing assets to better meet the information needs of multiple audiences using social tools. While the audiences are similar, there are differences in how segments like to gather information and interact with companies. This requires a stronger focus on each platform’s unique audience to meet their needs properly.  We also recommended that NetApp develop a social listening program to expand the influencers’ network and cultivate stronger relationships outside of existing channels.

For internal teams, we recommended that NetApp align internal efforts through social media guidelines and processes including the use of a social media and community playbook to educate multiple stakeholder teams throughout the organization. To allow for self-service reporting and measurement, it was recommended that NetApp develop a social media dashboard to report results across the enterprise, including CRM data as the value point to prove the importance of the social and community projects in meeting specific business objectives (and KPIs).

Business Results Achieved: Over the last three years, NetApp continued to focus on meeting members’ needs in order to build engagement. This focus increased engagement significantly over time allowing Impact Interactions to implement its value framework methodology to demonstrate the economic value of the community to senior management. This framework was built using data from multiple sources including Jive Software, Omniture, and NetApp’s CRM system and was completed in 2011.

The measured results were impressive. As detailed in a presentation at iStrategy’s San Francisco meeting by Navneet Grewal, active members (defined as those who contribute more than 10 items in a six month period) using NetApp’s marketing community to interact and engage controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period. During the same time period, active partners of NetApp engaging in the marketing community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue to NetApp.

Summary and Takeaways: By realigning its community to focus strongly on influencers and business decision makers, NetApp has realized significant economic value from its community.

1. Lesson One: Don’t allow the limitations of your software platform mislead you into believing that value cannot be measured
2. Lesson Two: Use an architectural scheme that provides the most insight into member activities while providing a clear path for engagement to members
3. Lesson Three: Identify your audience clearly and provide content that meets their needs in order to build engagement both in controlled sites (community) and non-controlled (social)
4. Lesson Four: Be wary of using press releases as a major component of your social content strategy
5. Lesson Five: Each social site has a slightly different audience that is linked to your organization for a slightly different reason. Utilize a content focus that aligns to those needs rather than shot-gunning the same content everywhere
6. Lesson Six: Getting to the value is hard work. It requires relationships, strong data analysis, and the ability to combine your CRM data with your community and/or social data.

When organizations meet the needs of their audiences, the value realized can be substantial as the results of NetApp clearly show. To learn how your organization can benefit from our expertise, please contact us.

 

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What we have here is a failure to analyze

There’s one word that can simultaneously strike fear in the hearts of business owners while making communications gurus light up like a Christmas tree: analytics. This new digital world we live in has brought with it a boat load of data and where there’s data there’s the need for data analysis and market awareness. Now, sales data is typically pretty straightforward: We made X number of sales and brought in Y number of dollars. But what about marketing data analysis? Ah, that’s the one that makes people run and hide. Why? Because it’s never black and white. Are Likes the same thing as Follows? Is it something we can monetize? How much does reach matter? Do we even know what we’re doing?

I read a very interesting report yesterday by the Columbia Business School called “Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data.” It was all about measuring marketing ROI. Some of the stats in there were mind boggling and all in the wrong ways. For one thing, it seems that companies are playing a budgeting crapshoot:

“…but many managers aren’t measuring marketing ROI either consistently or effectively.
Only 43% of organizations are establishing their marketing budgets based on marketing ROI
analysis. By contrast, 68% base their marketing budgets in part on “historical spending,”
and 28% on “gut instincts.” When it comes to specific marketing spending decisions, 21%
are using financial metrics for little or none of those specific decisions, and 7% are making
all or most of those spending decisions with no metrics at all.”

Even worse, the people who are in charge think they know what they’re doing while those down in the trenches are shaking their heads:

“Satisfaction depends on your viewpoint: 54% of CMO’s are satisfied with their ability
to measure marketing ROI, but only 43% of those below the vice president level are satisfied –
perhaps because they are closer to the problem of determining how to most effectively
measure marketing ROI.”

The final stake in the heart was this one:

“In place of marketing ROI, many traditional measures are used. 37% of the respondents claimed that they used brand awareness as a universal metric to make marketing decisions. More troubling, of those using brand awareness, more than 60% said it was their only marketing ROI measure.”

Where do I begin?!

Get your ducks in a row

Well, let’s begin with KPIs. I’m going to go out on a limb and say people who say social media can’t be measured probably don’t have a good understanding of organizational KPIs and how to develop them. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, everything can be measured. The key to understanding KPIs, though, is that you can’t use someone else’s KPIs. You need to understand where you want to go as an organization and how each piece of your marketing scheme fits into that. You can’t track Likes on Facebook because Joe Schmidt at URCompetitor does. First you have to ask yourself: “What are we trying to do with each of these pieces?” Brand awareness? Driving traffic back to the website? Conversion rates on offers? Those are what you need to determine first and then you use the analytics to back it up.

I’ve got all this data but it doesn’t amount to any ROI

Are you sure about that? Here’s where I might blow some minds. To me, there are two types of ROI: tangible and intangible. Both are vitally important. Tangible ROI is, of course, money. You had X number of hard leads, Y number of sales, Z number of people coming to your site and making a purchase. But then there are the intangible. Do visits alone make you money? Perhaps you don’t see the dollar signs in your account but that doesn’t mean you didn’t get a ROI. Content consumption is a good example of an intangible ROI. You didn’t get a lead this month from social media but you improved your reputation. You personally reached out to 80% of the posters on your Twitter account. You have more mentions this month than last month and 95% of those are positive. Can your competitors say that? No, that doesn’t bring in direct dollars but your good reputation eventually will.

Dashboards are your friends

The beauty of business analytics these days is that you aren’t limited to spreadsheets and simple charts. I wonder if some of the resistance to truly analyzing all that data comes from the inability to get it into a format that’s easy for people to look at. I do a dashboard for a client every month that pulls analytics from at least 4 sources. The set up of the dashboard itself was indeed complicated but the hardest part was learning how to write the formulas. Thankfully, there are tons of resources out there so that shouldn’t stop you.

This dashboard is effective because we can look at all of this data and easily understand it. There’s no scrolling through hundreds of data points trying to find the one you need and compare it against the past. We simply pick a month and the dashboard dynamically changes to show us all the data for that month. I did another dashboard that was far more complex looks wise but, again, it allowed us to pull data from multiple sources into one place that was easy for the non technical people to understand. You could show and hide multiple data sets. You could customize the data to show exactly what you were looking for. The important thing to note is that neither of these dashboards shows sales data. It is all marketing/communication data that gives the clients insight into how users are consuming their communications.

As I said, the set up times for these can be intense but it’s worth it in the end. If you think it isn’t then just listen for that voice of your superior asking you to explain all the mumbo jumbo numbers in your 12 sheet workbook. It’s worth it.

Learn to love analytics

The bottom line is if you’re concerned about ROI you need to get friendly with analytics. They aren’t your enemy. Analytics are like the force in Star Wars. They’re in the sales, the leads, the blogs, the likes, the traffic, and the comments. They’re in everything and they ALL have an effect on your ROI. Please do yourself a favor and don’t rely on your “gut instinct” because that will just give you an ulcer. Also do yourself a favor and read “Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data.” It’s an eye opening report and well worth the read.

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Edelman Trust Barometer 2012 – Lessons for Social Media Teams

 

Last evening I was fortunate to attend the Chicago Social Club event hosted by Edelman’s Richard Edelman and David Armano. The topic was the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer and themes that it implies for business, governments, and NGOs.

One of the more interesting observations from this year’s study is the shift away from trusting government leaders and business leaders towards the average employee in an organization. I take that as a pretty strong signal that we’re starting to come out of the Great Recession of 2008-11. With the disaster of the past years playing such a large role in the average person’s life, it seems appropriate that looking to government leaders to lead us out of the mess would be strong. Trust that our elected leaders would help us find a path forward seemed like a good strategy at the time. However, looking back now, we see that in many ways our leadership in government failed us completely no matter which side of the aisle you support. That break down in trust pushed us back to what I would call our gut feelings. That is, I trust someone more like me than someone who is not like me. The statistics backing this up provided by Richard Edelman were interesting to say the least.  While Americans tend to be very parochial in viewing the world through an America first lens, the rest of the world experienced similar drops in trust for its leadership. For example, Brazil respondents reported a huge 50% drop in trust for their leaders despite their economy doing really well in comparison to the U.S. Europeans responded with a staggering 66% drop in trust of their leaders.

As Richard continued, a simple reason for this came through… there is a huge gap right now between actual performance by our government leaders and their words. The old adage “Words are cheap.” applies here.

So, you are probably thinking what does this have to do with Social Media and Online Communities. Well, in truth it has a lot to do with both.

 Let’s look at what was discussed in terms of corporate trust. CEOs are the second least trusted group following government leaders. In their place in the trust hierarchy, the trust in the “average employee” has risen significantly. To me, a compelling reason for this rise is due to the employees using social media to communicate with each other, customers, prospects, with their network effect spreading the information faster and better than traditional communications. Bloggers play an important role as an information resource, but so do content curators who help audiences skim through massive amounts of information quickly. When Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are used to then spread the information through a network, the message is amplified. With the right source, tone, and level of information, trust is built. We see this all the time in online communities. Those members who reply to others frequently, with good information are trusted more by members than those who don’t answer or engage. That applies to both company personnel and non-company members.

Along these same lines, what struck me as interesting was that of all the industries measured by Edelman technology was trusted the most by respondents. While this has been the case for many years, with the shift towards trusting average employees over CEOs, it makes sense. Companies like Cisco, SAP, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple have had open communication channels with their customers, prospects, partners, developers, and other stakeholders for years. We know that these communities are populated with employees who care about their community members and their information needs. When managed properly, communities build a lot of trust. The movement towards external communities using social media (LinkedIn Groups, Facebook fan pages, etc.) will continue to generate trust for the companies that execute them properly. But it begins with a dedicated group of employees who truly want to engage.

During one of the questions asked, Richard Edelman said “The rise in trust of the average employee to #4 in the survey is controversial to clients. Those who want top down communication not horizontal or peer-to-peer communications find this trend really hard to take. But in the end, you have to allow for the dispersion of ideas.” Unfortunately those companies see the risk as too great versus the potential reward.

In our experience over the past twelve years, we’ve seen those companies that keep their eye on the reward make gains that bring value to their organization using communities and social media. Those that focus on the risk not only don’t bring the value they could, but also make the social media mistakes that you read about in the media. So, which do you want to be?

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Psychographics: Not just another buzzword

Way back when I was in college, I actually majored in electronic media production. Don’t confuse this with journalism. I enjoy writing but I wasn’t made for being in front of the camera. I’m far too shy and, frankly, too nerdy for that. I loved being behind the camera and working hands on behind the scenes. There are many skills that must be learned on the road to becoming adept at media production. We covered the physical aspects of production such as running a programmable audio board, working a camera switcher, and spending long hours doing non-linear editing in dark editing labs surrounded by half empty bags of chips and stacks of DV tapes. However, as we all know, media is so much more than the physical aspects of making it happen. We also spent a lot of time talking about the social side of being involved in media production. How does mass media affect society? How do the way scripts for news programs influence opinions? How do the colors we use in graphics lure or repel viewers and users? All of these minute details are vitally important and go way beyond simple statistics about audiences. We’ve all heard of demographics: race, gender, age, etc. But the statistics that really matter are actually not demographics but psychographics.

Now, the term psychographics might seem like some mumbo jumbo word that a marketing executive made up to sound smart. In reality, it’s far from some buzzword someone came up with on their way to a client meeting. Demographics represent what people are. They are finite and don’t change. You are the age you are even if your fake ID says otherwise. Nothing will change that. Psychographics, however, represent what people think and how they act. What kind of car do they drive? Do they drink soda? Do they like horror films or dramatic films? Are they calm and calculating or do they fly by the seat of their pants? All of these things are keys to understanding how media in all its forms affects people. That’s why psychographics are so much more powerful than demographics. A demographic doesn’t tell you much. Say you have two 30 year olds, Jim and Joe, from similar income households and who both hold advanced degrees. All of those are demographics. What do we know about these two people? Not much when you think about it. We know we can make generalizations about them because they are in the same groups. However, do we really know what makes them tick? Do we know what they like? Do we know what kind of communication they’re most likely to respond to? We can take a guess, but in the end, we really don’t know.

Now, let’s look at these two people using psychographics. Jim likes coffee in the morning, does the majority of his shopping online, is addicted to his smartphone, and currently drives a hybrid car. Joe has oatmeal for breakfast every morning while he reads his local newspaper. He also does the majority of shopping online but doesn’t use a smartphone and doesn’t like social media sites. He drives to work in a car with average gas mileage. Now what do we know about these two gentlemen? We now know a lot about them. Not to mention, the information we know about them is much more valuable. Demographically, they are equals. Psychographically, they are quite different.

This is why understanding your audience in BOTH areas is so important. Demographics will give you a more narrow audience. With demographics you are at least hitting the group of people the might be interested in you in the ways they may communicate the most. Using demographics, you get a good idea of where you can dig deeper with your information gathering. With psychographics, you have a target audience. You know how they communicate. You know they prefer Twitter over Facebook. You know they are on their smartphones and would potentially respond to an app or a Facebook interaction more than an email. You know that they are eco/health conscious based on the fact that they tend to buy more organic and fair trade products. These are the ever changing things that can make or break your social media campaign.

When planning any kind of interaction, whether it’s B2B, B2C, or even in a community environment, you can’t forget the “social” part of social media planning. It goes without saying that by truly understanding your customers and users, you can better understand your business. You can understand where your business is going and what kinds of changes or interactions your customers will approve of and respond to. It’s not just about connecting with the right age group or the right gender. It’s about connecting with the people who truly have the potential to make a difference to your bottom line. That’s why psychographics will always be much more than another mumbo jumbo buzzword.

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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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Emotional Engagement – The True Measure of Your Success

Engagement, engagement, engagement. It’s a mantra that we in the social media industry not only hear about but talk about endlessly. But one aspect of engagement that gets missed is the idea that an emotionally engaged user is much more valuable than a user who simply hits a like button. We’ve always advised people that Facebook Likes shouldn’t be the basis of measurement for success. This is because a Facebook Like isn’t a true measure of a user’s emotional attachment to a brand. It takes mere seconds for someone to hit the Like button but it takes much more for them to feel so passionate about a brand that they not only hit the Like button but also go on to engage with you as a brand directly as well as go to their friends and family to continue the conversation you’ve started. Users who are so loyal to a brand that they will have offline conversations in addition to online are much, much more valuable to your brand than the user who simply gives you a digital thumbs-up.

Recent Gallup research shows that brands have very little influence on the decision of a consumer to purchase their product or service. Instead, they seek out the opinions of their spouse, children, friends, and others. At the very bottom of the totem pole are company sponsored Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. So does that mean that Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets are useless to brands when trying to cultivate their audience? Hardly. It simply means that brands cannot rely solely on putting up Facebook posts or sending out Tweets with quips about company information or the newest rebate. Brands must focus on truly engaging users if they want to build an audience that will, in turn, go out and spread the word. Brands have to put in the time and effort to create passionate engaged followers.

When brands don’t nurture these relationships they are opening the door for a larger audience to speak negatively or ambivalently about them. Look at the chart below that describes the different types of engaged users. What should stand out to you is the fact that an actively disengaged customer is just as likely to talk to others about your product as a fully engaged customer, just in all the ways you don’t want them to. When brands have Facebook pages that exist only to fill some percieved need to be on Facebook and don’t engage the people on those pages, they risk alienating their potential audience. The problem then becomes not only the fact that people aren’t giving you Facebook likes, but that they are also now talking poorly of you offline and that is something you won’t be able to track with metrics. Putting effort into truly engaging those who engage with you on social media sites and focusing on the quality of your interactions over the quanitity of your interactions will, in turn, have a greater reach and potentially be longer lasting over time.

 

 

 

 

 

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Executive Use of Social Media – A Collection of Research (Part 2)

In part one of the presentation, we focused on looking at the research that has come out during 2011 about social media for B2B companies and how you can use that research to understand how to use social media in your organization to solve your pain points. In part two, we’re going to look at several companies who are doing just that. Through published case studies and an example from Impact Interactions itself, we’ll see how you can utilize social media in a manner which generates real economic value to your firm. So let’s get started.

As always, should you have any questions or would like to comment, please do so below in the comments section.

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Consumer Focused Social Media: Are We Building a Brand or Simply Throwing Money Away?

If your social media strategy is all about coupons and discounts for your company, you’re not really getting the point of social media from a business perspective. Sounds a bit arrogant right? Well, let me explain what we’ve seen over the past several weeks as we analyzed a segment of the retail space…

Company A (Large U.S. Based firm in the Womens’ Apparel category) – Analyzed 400 tweets, 293 were related to promotions for a 10% coupon. Analyzed 125 wall posts, 96 were related to the same promotion.

Company B (Large U.S. Based firm in the Sportwear category) – Analyzed 200 tweets, 127 were related to a BOGO (buy one get one) offer. Analyzed 63 wall posts, 48 were related to the same offer.

Company C (Large Internations firm in the Apparel category) – Analyzed 320 tweets, 148 were about a buy X amount of merchandise online and get a coupon for 20% off your next purchase. Tweets autoposted to Facebook. (YIKES!)

Is this what social media has become for the B2C market, a platform to push coupons?

What our analysis, limited as it may be, is showing us is that the Retail market is simply building an audience which activates only for a deal. Yes consumers want a deal, but do you as a seller only want your customers to come to your site when you offer a coupon? Doesn’t really seem like brand building does it? While many companies get it right (see Nike for one and Zappos for another), many do not. It’s as if these companies are competing with the Groupons, Living Socials, CouponDeals, etc. of the world rather than focusing upon their customers’ needs and building their brand in the process.

Maybe B2C social media marketers could learn from how B2B companies are using social media to build relationships.

“But Mike, that won’t work. You have to capture the shopper’s attention.”

I’d agree with you on that, it’s how you do it with social media where I differ… Let’s go about this use of social media in a different, more consumer-brand friendly way. Start with your brand. Is this something that you continually want to cheapen by constantly incentivising followers/friends to only care about when they get a discount? More importantly from a business perspective, how does constant couponing impact your margins?

Really successful social media programs understand that there are steps to reach success. First there is audience building, then engagement and activation, which in turn leads to value for the company. Too often companies lead with activation, skipping the audience building and engagement processes that generate loyalty. Audience building is time consuming, but works to give your company an group of followers and fans who actually are interested in your brand and products. (To learn more about why followers and fan counts are not a measure of influence, read this.) Audience building takes compelling content that excites and interests your potential customer. Social Media activities which compliment your existing brand building activities help to build audience. Use your branding messages from Television, in-store promotions, print, etc. to expand your reach to social media viewers.

Engage with your fans and followers. Pay attention to their content. Are they retweeting or tweeting a positive mention for your brand? If so, send them a direct message and thank them. Does a customer want help with store locations? Sure they could go to your site and use your store locator, but why not engage and ask them what city they are near and then give them a list of locations? What about that person who complains about a poor experience? Engage with them by apologizing and offering to have customer service contact them. Post content about your product line, post content about what your company is doing in the communities it operates in, post content about industry news from news sources you trust, and post pictures of people using or wearing your products.

Remember visual ques are just as important as customer reviews. That’s why so many brands pay celebrities to use their products in public. Social Media just allows a larger group to do the same thing. User generated content is a powerful tool to utilize in social media, yet we see very few brands even try to do this without offering a prize or coupon.

And that goes back to the point of this post, by providing incentives as your main content on social media, you are doing a disservice to your brand. From our blog post on incentives, “Remember that it’s EGO that drives the participation of your top members. They crave recognition for their efforts, not trinkets.”

That message holds true today for your best customers… so engage with them, give them an opportunity to shine, then recognize them. Otherwise, you’ve doomed your social media audience to be a zombie group which only activates for a coupon, not because your brand is of interest.

Zombie Image from: http://neighbourhoodzombiewatch.wordpress.com/

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Welcome to Social Media Week Chicago!

What are you doing this week?

If you are like many folks, you’ve got an interest in social media and perhaps are working for an organization helping with their social media. This week is all about you! Social Media weeks are one of the best opportunities for people who are passionate, curious, slightly interested, skeptical, and totally immersed in social media to network and learn more about how social media is being used successfully. There are many different events around Chicago this week. Even better, you can follow the Social Media Week activities around the globe thanks to Nokia.

To get started, all you have to do is start at the SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK web site and register.

We’re excited to meet with our friends in social media here in Chicago as well as to learn more from companies that are successful with their applications of social media.

We’ll be attending a couple of events after hours here in Chicago:

Chicago Icons – Wednesday, September 21 from 5:30 to 8:00 (Hosted by the Chicago Social Media Club)

Taste of Social Media Served up SMCChicago Style - Wednesday, September 21 from 3:00 to 4:30

If you are attending either of these events, we’d like to connect. Our president, Mike Rowland and Senior Director of Client Services, Lauren Bittner will be attending these functions. We look forward to meeting you!

 

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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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