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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What Have You Done For Your Community Lately?

If I could sum up the advice I gather from books and seminars about networking and building business relationships, whether it takes place on a social media site like “LinkedIn” or a face-to-face meeting, it would be this: “Ask not what your network can do for you, ask what you can do for your network.”

Now take that sentence and substitute the word “online community” for “network”. It still works. The members of a community are connecting to help each other professionally in some way. And they are certainly helping the sponsor of the community drive a business objective. Part of managing a community, just as in managing a network, is focusing on furthering the interests of the people you’re interacting with, rather on focusing solely on how they can help you.

I was reminded of this philosophy when I read “Seven Steps to Creating a B2B Community on Twitter.”  The article relays best practices for creating a relationship with your followers that is more about giving than taking to help build a thriving community.

What examples do you have of ways  you have created a win-win situation for your community members?

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Who Needs It? Dealing with Unwanted Content and Conversations in Your Online Community

by Matthew Lees

Every day seems to bring increased buy-in and understanding of how social media and online communities can positively impact organizations. But there’s still pushback around certain things. For example, community platform vendors, consulting firms, and agencies still regularly hear concerns such as “What if someone uses profanity?” and “What if they say bad things about us?”

Most of the content in your community – and throughout the social Web, too – is stuff you want. These are the questions and answers your community members share with each other and with you. They’re their problems and solutions, their interesting and relevant comments (even their uninteresting and relevant comments), their ideas, wish lists, and perspectives.

But there will also be things that you really don’t want, the content and conversations that you and the community could surely do without.

These things should make up a small percentage of the overall content, but it’s all but impossible to avoid them completely. (You’ll typically find a smaller percentage of unwanted posts in B2B communities than in B2C communities, and you’ll usually see a smaller percentage of such things in support-related communities than in affinity and engagement communities.)

Thanks But No Thanks
To be more specific, the unwanted stuff is posts and content that contain…

1. Inappropriate Language or Content. No surprise here…these are comments, images, or videos of a sexual, violent, abusive, or otherwise inappropriate nature. Note that this is about more than the use of foul language. There are a lot of mean and nasty things that can be said with perfectly acceptable words.
2. Advertising or Spam. Some advertising may be fine in your community. Often, though, it’s not. And I can’t think of a situation in which any community would want spam. (Is there a Spam community? If so, that would prove me wrong.)
3. Incorrect Information. You can’t fully control the quality of user-generated answers, solutions, and comments. Members will, on occasion, post information that’s incorrect. Usually it’s unintentional, but it can cause confusion or worse. Blatantly incorrect info is relatively easily fixable; gray areas can lead to disagreement, dissent, and (hopefully) healthy discussion.
4. Sensitive or Confidential Information. Some customers often have access to inside information, as do your colleagues, of course. If people aren’t careful, or if there’s miscommunication on when and where certain information can be shared, they can inadvertently say things they shouldn’t. This doesn’t happen often, but the cat does sometimes get out of the bag.
5. Off-Topic Comments. Such posts may be benign, but they’re either entirely irrelevant or relevant to another place in the community.

There are also a few types of posts that some may see as unwanted. But community managers and moderators worth their salt see these as acceptable, if not desirable (at least in low volume), since they demonstrate transparency and authenticity, and give community members opportunities to chime in on your behalf. These are post that…

•    Say Negative Things about Your Organization, Brand, Products, Services, etc.
•    Say Positive Things about the Competition

Be Prepared
So how do you deal with all these situations? Best is to have your ducks in a row beforehand. Here are some suggestions:

•    Have a good moderation plan, and a great community manager and moderation team. When dealing with unwanted content and conversations, moderators should be observant, understanding, firm, and fair. And know what you’ll do when you get each type of unwanted post.
•    Create appropriate community policies and guidelines, not only for community members, but for subject-matter experts and other internal stakeholders and participants.
•    Make friends with colleagues throughout your organization. It’s worthwhile, if not essential, to check in with the folks in legal, corporate communications, and pretty much all other business units. They can help with the Action Plan items that pertain to them, and help deal with unexpected things should they arise.
•    Have a library of stock replies at your disposal. This will help you respond to issues quickly.
•    Leverage the tools in your community platform. The moderation tools and accompanying workflow are important here, of course. I’m a big fan of content filters (for catching obscenities and other text strings) that trigger email notifications. And the ability to enable or disable anonymous posts can be helpful, as well, since people tend to take more liberties when they can participate anonymously.
•    Be aware. Be very aware. Technology won’t catch everything. There’s no substitute for paying attention.

Most online community best practices deal with how to engage with community members and get more of the good stuff. Knowing how to minimize and deal with the unwanted stuff is important, too.

And the best way to assuage execs’ concerns is to say “Yes, there will be some amount of unwanted and inappropriate content and conversations in the community. We can’t avoid that. But here’s how we’ll be handling them when they do arise…”

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Online Community – Moving Beyond Metrics to ROI

We gave a presentation on building ROI models for online communities at the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View, CA on June 10th. It was added because so many of the participants stated that ROI and calculating the value of their community was the most important issue they faced.  So, we didn’t have time to build a true presentation, but rather lead a workshop for participants to learn more. It was lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

Here are the summary notes taken during the session:

• Have to first identify what is the economic value of the community to the organization offering it: (Don’t confuse traffic or behavior metrics with value)
  • Cost Avoidance
  • Increased subscription rates or lower churn rate
  • More frequent purchase rates
  • Higher purchase level/amts
  • Faster close for large item sales
  • Reduce lead generation cost
• Once you’ve identified your value metrics, break down your metrics into 3 buckets to look at communities:
  • Traffic – PV, visits, visitors, etc.
  • Behavior – What they do when the get there, who they are, download/visit, contribution/member, responses by employees vs. customers
  • Value – can attach an economic value to it. Need $ to get to a true ROI model. See above list.
• You have to build relationships w/ the folks in your company. Need access to other systems. You cannot build ROI from community analytics provided by software vendors or from traffic and behavior metrics alone. 
• ROI Frameworks:
  • Cost Avoidance
    • The person who proposes the question needs to verify the answer. This is a feature needed in the platform.
    • # of community support resolutions X $ complimentary support resolution (1-800 number) = total cost avoidance -> economic value
    • Track over set period of time (e.g. quarterly or yearly)
    • ROI = (total economic value – total costs to set up and run forum) / total costs –> over one period and as a percentage
  • Increased subscription or reduced churn
    • Customer database compared to community database
    • cust. database = Average churn rate (e.g. the number of months the avg user subscribes) X price/subscription = customer value
    • Community database – look at active members and see if the churn rate is better or worse.
    • Price will be the same, so you’ll have to see if the churn rate was more or less. If subscriptions are longer, than you have a higher customer value for community members.
    • Shows you slowed the churn rate down.
  • More frequent purchase or Higher Purchase level/amts
    • Use your eCommerce DB or CRM system
    • What is the avg amt customers spend/purchase?
    • go back to comm DB and parce out active members and compare to ecommerce DB (which ones spend more/purchase?)
    • Do comm members have a higher spend/purchase? active comm users X avg $ they spend = economic value
    • Need to trend this and see how it fluctuates.
    • what is the average number of items in completed shopping activity? (e.g. 1.6 items) Do comm members buy more?
    • Avg cost/item X avg # items = economic value
  • CRM decrease cost
    • Want to find what avg value of customer is
  • Faster close of sale (Good for large purchases like software or hardware systems)
    • How fast are organizations moving through your CRM system to sale?
    • Identify active organizations in community DB to compare them to avg organizations.
    • How long does it take the avg. organization to go through sale stages? What’s the cost/sale? Do active organizations in your community go through more quickly and spend more?
  • Lead generation cost
    • Similar to above, but use cost to generate a lead for average customer versus those which originate in community/social media campaigns
• How can you tell if a user came to your comm and then bought your product through a 3rd party reseller? You can’t unless your resellers provide access to their databases which is next to impossible to get.
• Users of support communities become brand neutral after their issue becomes resolved.
• Hidden costs of community for ROI Analysis, make sure you count these:
  • Servers
  • development costs
  • customizations
  • widgets
  • maintenance
• Make sure that you are amortizing your costs across the same time period as your economic value or you will skew your results.

One point to remember is that the value of communities really is derived from active members, not all members. So define your active members with criteria that meet your behavioral key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, an active member can be someone who posted in a forum, downloaded a featured whitepaper, uploaded content, or viewed a webcast in the past month. For B2B especially, it doesn’t have to be an activity within the past week as most B2B community members average 2-3 visits per month unless they are deep into the sales cycle.

The number one issue to watch out for when building your ROI framework is the use of proxies. If you cannot get the data, don’t guess at a proxy for the value because the more proxies you utilize the bigger the house of cards that you build.

Lastly, value can be a set of different items. For a subscription based community value can be both churn rate differential and purchase levels. ROI is not a single value formula, it is a multiple value formula in most cases as there is marketing value in support communities and vice versa. So make sure that you are at least attempting to capture as much of the value drivers as possible in your analysis.

Want to learn more about online community or social media ROI? Contact us today or leave a comment.

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B2B Communities – What Works

We gave a presentation at last week’s Online Community Unconference (site is open to the public as of June 19th per Forum One) in Mountain View, CA on B2B Communities. We weren’t surprised by the number of attendees looking to learn more about the best practices for running a B2B Community, but were surprised a little bit by some of the misperceptions on managing them.

Top Best Practices for B2B Communities:

1. B2B Community Members have higher expectations than B2C members. You must engage with them as they want to engage with your company just as much as they want to engage with their peers.
2. B2B Communities require internal SMEs to engage early and remain committed to meeting member needs until external SMEs can compliment the internal SME efforts.
3. Third party applications like Twitter and Facebook should not be used as external competitive communities, but rather should be utilized as beacons to drive traffic to your community and key information.
4. 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.
5. When budgeting for B2B communities, be realistic. For example, no single vendor of software or web design or implementation services will ever come in exactly where they quote when you want additional features or customization. So build a small cushion into your budget to be safe.
6. To attract business decision makers, you must focus on how they will use the site… not how you want to market to them.
7. The higher the level within an organization your potential members have attained, the lower the amount of time they will have to spend on your site. So don’t waste their time!

In short, B2B communities can deliver impressive results when managed properly with a focus on those segments who deliver the value to your organization. Don’t be all things to all people, that strategy is doomed to fail. To learn more about the best practices for B2B communities, please download our presentation , ask questions in the comments area below, or contact us.

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Online Community – Understanding the Myths

Are You Blindly Following the “Wisdom of the Crowds” ?

Last year, we presented this topic at the Online Community Unconference in NYC to a standing room only crowd. It’s a fun topic, albeit one that elicits strong opinions and discussions. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who is new to online communities and social media, this presentation can help you understand and avoid some of the classic mistakes being sold by the blogosphere and ‘gurus’ every day online. It’s available in our Social Media Resources area as a pdf that you can download.

For this month’s Online Community Unconference (June 10th in Mountain View, CA0, we are updating the presentation to cover even more myths that continue to gain a following despite impacting the results of communities and their teams. For example, are you using B2C thinking in your B2B community? Are you sure you need to be on third party platforms like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others? What about metrics, are you confusing traffic with value? What role should volunteers play in your community?

These and other topics will be discussed in our talk. We hope that you’ll join us.

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The New Reality – What It Takes To Get Hired In Social Media

The economy is tough, but social media keeps growing. Impact Interactions is growing this year and once again is adding staff. We’re also trying to help those impacted by the economy and those coming right out of school to understand what working in social media is really like.

From our experience, here is what it takes to get hired:

• A focus on business skills like written communications, presentations, and statistics
• Understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective
• A basic understanding of Marketing, eCommerce, Advertising, and Sales
• Experience as a team member who’s used the power of collaboration to help everyone succeed
• A positive attitude
• A “relaxed” professional appearance (you know what business casual means)

Did you expect that?

Notice what’s missing?

That’s right, you do not have to be a Facebook addict or have 2,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn. You don’t have to know how to build a widget to update a user for when the top 20 members are on the site. If you use Tweetdeck, great. If you have no idea what it is, no problem.

Yet, when we give career talks, advice to job seekers, and interview our own candidates they focus on their Facebook or MySpace skill, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or what online community they use. What are we focused on? Simple, can the candidate learn our business while building strong relationships with our clients? Can the candidate make the client look good while understanding that he or she will be in the background?

Afterall, Social Media for all its wonderful claims of revolutionizing the world is really just another set of tools to increase the efficiency of business in meeting their goals. Direct mail, robo-calls, telemarketing, advertorials, infomercials, email campaigns, listservs, click-to-chat, click-to-call, and other marketing tactics helped businesses gain efficiency in their marketing efforts. Social Media is doing the same thing. The underlying principle is to use the correct tool set to engage your customers in a way that benefits both sides of the relationship. (It really is that simple.)

But you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.

The great push right now is to find employees who can help companies understand social media and measure the results of their efforts. Think about every online community, web 2.0, or social media conference you’ve attended or read about… what is the one area that is always a topic of interest? Measurement and monetization.

Success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc. There are so many people who want to work in Social Media today, but few are willing to demonstrate their business acumen to get the position. We saw this in the late 1990s in the online community world, again in around 2003 with the blogosphere, and yet again in 2005 with the early social network companies. And here we are almost ten years later with the same issues.

So do you want to work in Social Media? My advice to you is brush up on your business skills first. Worry about your number of followers on Twitter later.

What do you think? What skills do you think it takes to work in Social Media?

Mike

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Invasion of the Marketers – How to Deal with Paid Promoters in your Community

THEY’RE HERE…….

That’s right, the brand cheerleaders have infiltrated your community and are destroying the ‘authenticity’ of the dialogue. And guess what? IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE AS MORE MARKETERS USE THIS TACTIC AS THEIR ‘VIRAL’ MARKETING CAMPAIGN.

In a recent “scandal” running through the online community world, Royal Caribbean has been using sponsored members to promote its cruises across many communities such as Cruisecritic, TripAdvisor, travel blogs, and other sites where potential cruise customers might be lurking. While Consumerist has a great write-up of the details, and Tripso.com’s Anita Dunham-Potter has more details, the tactic is not new and will always be with us. And even though folks like Jeremiah Owyang are identifying the sponsored conversations in blogs, the trend towards using online communities and social networks is increasing each week.

As a professional moderation company, we see the campaigns hit across the multiple communities we manage for our clients. We see the trends quickly, whereas a moderator working for a single community may spot the campaign a little slower. Either way, you must act because these campaigns, like spam are not going away anytime soon.

The real issue is how to deal with this issue in your community when it happens.

Early on in the 2008 Primary Election season, we noticed a large number of posters in the AARP Issues & Elections community supporting Rudy Giuliani. No matter what the criticism by the Democrat/Liberal members of the community, these folks came back cheery about how wonderful Rudy was and what a great President he would make. While not as rampant as the “Royal Champions” of Royal Caribbean, they were persistent nonetheless.

We’ve also seen product supporters for Life Alert, The Scooter Store, and every multi-level marketing program on the market today in the community.

In each instance we’ve used several steps to push back on these folks and out them as the marketers that they are. Your moderation team should see the trend before your members start to complain and take action.

Steps to Take to Clean Up Your Community:

1. Start by checking out when the ‘cheerleaders’ registered. Most marketers who use this tactic do not have enough control over their posters/viral team. So, what ends up happening is they all start registering within a few days of each other. If you see a pattern of registrations, the marketers have hit your community and you must take action.
2. Get your own hyper-affiliated enthusiasts up to speed with what is going on. Give them the okay to confront these posters with questions about are they receiving anything for their posts, are they sponsored by the brand they promote, etc.
3. ENFORCE YOUR TERMS OF SERVICE! In the case of the Life Alert and Scooter Store cheerleaders, they continually posted links to the store where you could purchase the product. They violated the TOS for advertising in the community, so our moderators were able to remove the posts.
4. TRUST YOUR MEMBERS TO RECOGNIZE THE CHEERLEADERS FOR WHAT THEY ARE! Most folks recognize that someone who never is critical of a brand/product/service is biased. In most communities, those folks lose credibility among your longer term members. Some of these members will call out the cheerleaders in public, reducing the credibility of the cheerleaders.

Despite their best efforts, many of the brands who use this strategy are not that sophisticated in selecting who they use for the job. For example, in the “Royal Champions” case, the cruise line worked with Buzz Metrics to identify its promoters and then recruited them with trips and perks. But they recruited a 14 year old! (Cruiserccl, who at the ripe age of 14, professes that program hasn’t changed his posting habits.— Yeah right, he’s a good example of the quality that some brands go to for finding cheerleaders.) How many cruises has a 14 year old gone on which would qualify them as a cruise expert?

We see most of these efforts fail because they follow the same patterns as spammers. As a community moderator/manager, you must watch the trends in your qualitative content and be ready to act. The text may not always be similar, but the tone and message in these campaigns will be. Use the tools that you have and the top members in your community! If you let these campaigns in, your members will begin to think that you are getting paid something for the campaign. This can only have a negative impact on your community.

Just as with spam email, some marketers think that paid cheerleaders as a viral campaign is a great tactic. But in the end, most of these campaigns are run poorly and have the potential to actually damage the brand that they were set up to promote. Along the way, they can also damage your community if left unchecked. To learn more about dealing with cheer leading campaigns run in your community, please contact us.

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Community Myth Busting – OCUE2009 Presentation Notes

This entry is a summary of a presentation we made at last week’s Online Community Unconference East meeting in NY. The session was attended by roughly 20-25 members and lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

The idea of the session was to drive discussions regarding many of the common ideas around community that have been published/promoted/blogged about as if they were absolutes rather than the experiences of a few. The topics covered the following:

1. 90-9-1 Rule- Comes from concept of Participation by Jakob Nielson. Worked pretty well in early 1990s when published. Major impacts on this idea have been adoption of online communities since 1990, broadband adoption, social networks, etc. We find that the numbers don’t hold and should not be relied upon in selling a project to management or in goal setting due to the wide variances we’ve measured with over 40 communities over the past eight years.
   - At Participate.com, we modified the rule to use as an outreach rule of thumb.
   - At Impact Interactions, our clients have ratios all over the map
   - It’s more important to measure the quality of interactions as it relates to your objectives instead of trying to work towards a specific ratio
2. Self-Policing Communities – Using volunteers to moderate and report violations is a hot trend for organizations to buy into right now. But it’s been that way since at least 2000 when we spoke of hyper-affiliates and enthusiasts. Our experience has shown that most community members cannot be relied upon to keep the community moving forward.
   - Volunteers will catch some violations, but mostly report content that they don’t agree with. This forces community team to review content twice or more which is inefficient
   - Volunteers are good at defensive work (spam, porn, etc.) but do not align with your organization’s objectives in most cases and won’t faciliate most B2C communities (B2B support communities, they usually will keep the conversations moving forward towards a resolution.)
   - Data in our presentation that we’ve been tracking each year for clients shows that members generally report about 20-30% of all violations in any given month. You still need moderation…
   - Our surveys of multiple community members (both B2B and B2C) over time shows that members don’t want to be classified as a tattle tail, nor do they believe it is their responsibility to keep the community free of junk, nor do they want to handle being attacked for removing or editing members’ content for violations.
3. Personas – There are strong feelings around this topic. The term authenticity comes up quite a bit when discussing personas when what is really meant is transparency.
   Great conversations on this one, with no conclusion reached about using personas or not.
   - Most personas get blown by members because the host creating the persona doesn’t think through the process and character, misuse the persona to cheerlead the organization and its products, is so unbelievable (master of health issues, political issues, computer technology, astrology, etc.), or is used to sell in the community. All of these are wrong and should be avoided.
   - Where personas work well is very, very limited. In new communities, personas can help seed conversational content and help demonstrate norms. In a flame war, they can help diffuse the situation (especially in the case of unjust attacks). Over time, as the community grows, the role of the persona should diminish.
4. Volunteers/Hyper-Affiliates as Good Guys – Beware the myth that your top people will always love and support your community.
   - The more volunteers/hyper-affiliates you have is not always a good metric
   - They don’t always follow the rules and have no objectivity
   - When a volunteer or hyper-affiliate turns against you, the result is a much larger confrontation than you might think.
   - Once enabled, it is very difficult to make changes to your site/community without a large time commitment to deal with the criticism of your volunteer network.
   - Letting volunteers and hyper-affiliates run the community demonstrates favoritism on the part of the host organization in the eyes of many non-recognized members. It is a double edged sword which if not carefully managed can have very negative consequences on your community’s conversion and engagement ratios.
5. Community ROI cannot be measured – Everyone is familiar with the cost avoidance argument to measure ROI. But after that, the conversation usually stops because the thought is that it is too hard to show the economic value of the community.
   - Don’t confuse value with ROI… they are not the same!
   - You can measure the economic value generated by your community using multiple data sources and methods. We’ve measured the online community ROI for sales (influence on purchase & intent), Marketing (awareness and loyalty), lead generation (development and qualify leads faster), and e-learning (higher achievement and registrations). They all require certain data that doesn’t come just from the community’s metrics.

We’ve uploaded the presentation as a pdf on our web site in our Social Media Resource Center.

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Why Does Everyone Believe Community ROI Is So Hard To Measure?

Just finished reading Jeremiah Owyang’s blog on ROI for online communities and social media. The entry is here. Jeremiah’s suggestions are accurate and some of the comments from our colleagues are really helpful. Here is our commentary which we’ve also posted on Jeremiah’s blog:

What I find interesting about this topic is the general disagreement of the relevance of ROI in the discussions of community and social media experts. We’ve attended events, webinars, and industry meetings, where people were unclear or downplayed the importance of this measure for social media and communities. Others in the Social Media space blog frequently that ROI is either tough to do or not relevant.

At Impact Interactions, we believe that ROI is a crucial element of the community building and management process. You must start building your framework before the community even launches, then refine it over time. But you cannot use just the metrics from your community, you must align them with additional data from within the organization (CRM records for B2B for example).

For B2B support clients, we measure technical questions answered by members as a cost avoidance measure to demonstrate the scalability of the community versus call center costs. We supplement it with survey data on customer satisfaction, purchase influence, and information utility. It all adds up to a large ROI.

For a marketing focused B2B community, we built a framework that demonstrated the influence that the community had in influencing sales of multi-million dollar contracts. We mined the transactional data and compared it with the CRM records to develop a pattern of influence on sales velocity, lead generation, and sales.

For a B2C automotive parts company, we compared sales transactions from the companies e-commerce database with community transactions to find the ROI for the community. It also reinforced the powerful notion that community members were buying more frequently than non-community members and that each purchase transaction was larger than those of non-community members.

For a B2C subscription based service, at Participate.com we demonstrated that community members churned at a rate 50% lower than non-community members, resulting in millions of dollars of revenue and profits.

Each of these clients had an ROI on their community of over 100% once their communities scaled.

It is not hard to develop the ROI framework, but it does take time and relationships within the organization to get the appropriate data. If you are a community manager, you need to build a network outside of the community area in your organization in order to align the community’s analytics with your organization’s focus and goals. Only then will you be able to tap into CRM or e-commerce databases to validate your framework.

We have some basics on B2B ROI in presentations available for free in our Social Media Resource Center on our website. Please feel free to visit and download the presentations. In our introductory deck on Impact Interactions, we have quotes from Cisco, Mercury Interactive, and ATT on their ROI from their online community efforts. Here is the link: http://www.impactinteractions.com/social-media-resource-center.html

What Jeremiah has posted is absolutely spot on. But is up to you as a community manager to act. In this environment, you cannot afford to have your community (and job) viewed as a soft application that doesn’t produce tangible, measurable results. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.

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