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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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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Executive Use of Social Media – A Collection of Research (Part 1)

 

There’s been a shift in social media. Have you seen it? Business to business companies in industries beyond the traditional early adopters are utilizing social media more effectively today to build awareness, generate business, and nurture customers than as little as six months ago. Research that has been published over the past year shows that B2B social media is not only becoming more prevalent, but is also expected by customers, prospects, investors, and recruits.

In the video below, we’re going to interprete the relevant research from multiple sources in order to present a pretty compelling analysis for using social media in the business to business setting. In Part 2 of this topic, we’ll show you how several companies such as Cisco, Intuit, ShipServe, and Impact Interactions have used social media in the B2B setting to achieve real business results. We’ll also provide you with a measurement methodology which will help your team to quickly identify areas where action is necessary as well as where you are successful.

So in the words of the immortal Warner Wolf, let’s go to the video tape!

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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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Management Efficiency – Using Dashboards for Executive Reporting



HI to all the readers of the Impact Interactions blog! My name is Robert Hu and I work at Impact Interactions as a manager of client services and I will be blogging about my experiences with how we manage social media and reporting.

We have been using tool called Xcelsius for almost 2 years now and it has worked wonders for all of our clients. No more 50 slide decks which no one ever read. With Xcelsius, we can now put all those charts, graphs, and other visuals that we had to repeat in the PowerPoint deck for each category into one simple visual which the user can filter to see what they are looking for. This not only saves so much time but also gives a more coherent story about what is going on with the social media strategy. Instead of putting 15 slides of the same line graph for each region, we can have just one graph the changes depending on which region the user selects.

Another benefit of a dashboard is that it can display data from multiple sources. As shown above from our dashboard, the data from traffic, behavior, value, and listening are all congregated into one simple view. This means that if you wanted to view the number of Twitter followers for this quarter you would click on the traffic tab. You can then go to the behavior tab and analyze how many of these followers are retweeting your content and finish by calculating the worth for all these tweets, followers, and retweets in the value tab. This process does not just apply to one social media tool, all of your social media offerings can be displayed in the dashboard which allows you a easy way to compare the results of each tool.

So you might be asking with all of these tools being displayed at once how do I compare the ones i want? The great thing about a dashboard is that you can filter out data that is important to you, therefore one dashboard can be distributed to multiple levels of management. The first screenshot shows a typical graph in a PowerPoint presentation, there are so many lines that it becomes confusing which competitor is doing better. But with the filters in a dashboard you can easily display only the competitors that you want to compare your company with which makes visualization of the data much easier.

Simplistic, versatile, and aesthetically pleasing, dashboards are the future of reporting and offer an enhanced way to view your data and make decisions from all your metrics.

Click here (flash required) and see for yourself on how a social media dashboard can look like and please let me know your thoughts on your own reporting experiences.

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The Social Media Dilemma

Last week several members of the our team attended the iStrategy Conference in San Francisco. Along with our clients Cisco, SAP, and NetApp, I hosted a panel discussion on B2B Social Media: Moving Beyond the Hype. (You can get the download of the presentation slides here.)

As is often the case with conferences, the best part is usually the networking that we do at lunch, cocktail hours, and late night at the hotel bar. What I found fascinating about this particular conference and its attendees was the dilemma that many are in relating to social media. Whether business to consumer or business to business, the same issues continued to come up in conversation. That is “how can we manage so many sites and messages and still deliver results?”

Of course, we’re an outsourced provider of social media and online community services so it would have been easy to say “Hire us!” But I really wanted to uncover the underlying reasons for the issue and why it was causing so much angst amongst the attendees. In short, there were four main reasons:

1. Budgets for social media remain very limited at larger organizations who are just getting started. That translates to minimal staff to get the program up and running.
2. Staffing models are not clear. Too often there is a single person or a team of 3 to 6 members running the entire social media program with responsibilities split between full time and part time activities.
3. There remains far too much focus on which tool to use versus the appropriate content for the audience. Choosing a tool is easier than gaining commitment for content generation and teams are falling into the “if you build it, they will come” type of thinking because there isn’t a clear social content strategy for their firm.
4. When it comes to measurement, social media practioners remain focused on traffic at the expense of value. I heard a lot of questions about “growing” followers and fans but hardly any about gaining business value from using social media tools. (In fact, when our client NetApp discussed how they found value (hundreds of millions of dollars of sales), not a single person tweeted about it. When our client Cisco discussed how they believe 90% of internet traffic will be video in the coming years, everyone tweeted about it. Think about it, which is actually more important to resolving your social media dilemma?)

So where does this all lead? Well, it reminds me of the early online community period back in 2000 or so. Companies wanted to interact with their customers and inherently understood that this was a good thing to do. But they didn’t know for sure how to go about it. In many cases, companies made community management 10% of ten people’s responsibilities to get to the 100% effort and focus. Back then that didn’t work, and from the comments of the folks I spoke with last week it’s not working now either.

What we’ve learned is that social media takes a team with multiple roles to achieve success. From an executive champion who can get budget and support for the project to facilitators who know how to properly interact with the social audience, there needs to be a team to achieve success. To only have a social media manager who is responsible for using all the tools, training/monitoring internal users, scambling for useful content, measuring success, and recording best practices is never going to work in most cases. Not everyone is a strategic thinker, nor is everyone able to tie back their activities to business objectives (or even define them), nor is everyone able to interact with online audiences appropriately.

Yet too often, that is what we are asking our social media managers to take on 24/7. It is a dilemma.  In our experience, the best way for social media teams or managers to solve this dilemma is by achieving and sharing relevant customer social wins with their stakeholders. These social wins can be qualtitative (commentary that shows intent or influence) or the full quantitative (number of new registrations added to the marketing database for example). Wins gain momentum internally, uncertain results help projects remain as second class cool things which don’t really add to the business. Which can you deliver to help you solve the dilemma and get what you need to be successful?

I’d love to hear how you are solving the dilemma at your firm. If you have questions, post them and we’ll help…

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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 to Exhibit at SocialTech 2010 (October 26)

Are you attending the upcoming Marketing Profs SocialTech 2010 event in San Jose on October 26th? If so, we hope that you’ll come say hello and bring us your social media questions. Our team will be exhibiting at the event and will be available to answer questions that you may have regarding social media for technology companies.

The Impact Interactions team has a long history of helping B2B Technology companies. In 2000, our president Mike Rowland helped Cisco Systems launch and manage its first online community, The Networking Professionals Community (NetPro). Mr. Rowland also helped SAP launch its first online community, the SAP Business Community as well as an additional 18 local language communities around the globe. Both NetPro and the SAP Business Community won multiple awards for their excellence in meeting member needs. Since then, Impact Interactions’ team members have helped multiple B2B technology companies ranging from Cisco to SAP to NetApp to IBM to Intel understand how to use social media and online communities to generate leads, lower support costs, educate staff, and extend offline events.

“Too often companies focus on the tools or third party sites like Twitter or Facebook, then wonder why they aren’t getting the results they anticipated,” states Mike Rowland, president of Impact Interactions. “In the technology industry, the users are very sophisticated and have clearly defined needs that must be met to succeed. Our methodology begins with defining success from a measurement point of view. We then build out key performance indicators (KPIs) to track our success based upon three categories of measurement: Traffic, Behavior, and Value. Too often marketers substitute traffic metrics or behavior activities for value. This is why so many senior executives have difficulty believing that social media is effective, even in technology companies. In order to demonstrate true value to the organization, you have to move beyond traffic and behavior and find the economic value of social media activities.”

Recently, Impact Interactions was selected by Cisco to help with its launch of the Cisco Support Community Hall of Fame and Expert program, as well as the NetPro Poland and CSC Japan communities. Our continuing work for Cisco also includes social media reporting, community moderation, and social media consulting projects for the marketing and support channels.

Work for SAP includes partner channel social media enablement activities, Best Performance program training for partners in EMEA, as well as dashboard creation and management for SME online activities.

NetApp activities are focused primarily upon the NetApp Community, a leading information source for storage professionals. We also are working with NetApp to create a measurement methodology which proves the value of the community and corresponding social media efforts to senior executives. Additionally, we created measurement dashboards for NetApp’s management team.

Visitors to the Impact Interactions exhibition space at SocialTech 2010 will be provided with the opportunity to sign up for a free 45 minute consultation after the event to answer their specific social media questions. The event is being held at the DoubleTree San Jose on October 26, 2010. More details can be found by visiting the MarketingProfs’ event site.

“We look forward to meeting with attendees to share the best practices we developed over the past ten years helping our technology clients succeed,” states Mr. Rowland. “If social media is to move past the hype and become a successful long term strategic asset for companies, we have to demonstrate not only what works but how success is measured.”

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Moving Beyond Counts & Traffic – Social Media Measurement That Works

Lots of interesting research coming out on Social Media recently. We take note because the results and conclusions continue to demonstrate that measurement remains a high priority for executives, but what is delivered is not meeting their needs. Let’s take a look at some recent examples of companies surveyed about their social media efforts from a measurement point of view.

First a study from White Horse of 104 companies using social media shows us that when companies try to measure the success of their social media efforts, that very few (less than 15%) are able to get to an ROI for their work. They continue to use traffic and participation (we put that in our behavior metrics) to demonstrate success.

Here is another study which demonstrates a similar point, that companies are using social media traffic and behavior metrics as a measurement of success. This study completed by King Fish Media in June 2010 has great information; unfortunately, it reveals that while many companies say that they have a social media strategy in place they don’t understand how to measure its results.

Perhaps it is the way the research is presented versus the actual question asked, but when you read the measurements used for value they are not representing economic value in most cases. Rather, marketers and others measuring social media continue to focus on representing traffic as some sort of proxy for value. Worse, many still believe that the number of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook is a valuable metric to use to demonstrate value. They couldn’t be more wrong…

Even the famed Guy Kawasaki is promoting an idea that the more followers the better during a TweetChat on MarketingProfs…but his perspective is the larger the audience from a sheer numbers perspective the better your results will be. In our experience, that is just not true. We see that the more QUALIFIED followers you have, the better your results MIGHT be.Why? Because the value of a follower is zero until they do something that brings value to the organization. If all they are doing is following and never taking action, can you assign a value to them? We think not. Have you analyzed your followers? How many are customers? How many are prospects? How many are competitors? (How many have followed your account to simply build their own counts through an auto-follow?)

So where does all this lead? Well, if you are attending theiStrategy meeting in Chicago on September 15-16, we’ll be there to address this issue. I’ll be presenting this topic on the morning of the 16th to the attendees.

I’ll demonstrate a stronger methodology for using a more integrated approach to your social media efforts which allows you to focus only on the metrics that really matter… those that lead to economic value for your organization.

For those of you who cannot attend, the presentation will be added to our social media resource center after the meeting ends. For those of you who are attending, please bring your questions!

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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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