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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You can’t be a thought leader on Twitter. Discuss without getting verklempt.

Remember that hilarious skit called “Coffee Talk with Linda Richman” on SNL? You know, the one with Mike Meyers dressed up like a lady with a giant Brooklyn accent and even bigger hair? I loved that skit and one of my favorite parts was how he would give people a ridiculous topic to talk about and then say “Discuss!” So what does this have to do with social media? Well, recently a report by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth found that corporate blogging among Inc. 500 companies has decreased while Twitter and Facebook use has increased. Now, it’s great that companies are embracing these new social media outlets but are they missing out by focusing on micro-blogging as opposed to actual blogging? My vote is “yes” because it’s the business equivalent of companies throwing out ideas and saying “Discuss!” ala our friend Ms. Richman.

Frank Reed, managing editor of Marketing Pilgrim, wrote an article in response to the report that I happen to agree wholeheartedly with. Frank’s opinion is basically that companies who are just doing Twitter and Facebook while ignoring the power of corporate blogging are taking the easy road out. As someone who blogs in my personal time, I can attest to the fact that blogging takes time, lots and lots of time. It’s not like Twitter. You can’t be Linda Richman and throw out a topic and hope people have a valuable conversation about you just because you gave them something to retweet. You have to think about what topic you want to write about, do your research, and then sit down and write it. Then, of course, you have to edit it, proof it, edit it some more, change the title three times, and then post it. That may seem overwhelming to most companies both in the effort needed to compose a blog and the money spent while that person is blogging. Twitter and Facebook are cheap and cost effective making them very popular in a tough economy. In ten seconds you can tweet a quip out to all of your followers and then tell all your corporate buddies you’re a social media mogul. However, what happens when they try to find out more about you? If all you have to show for your communication efforts are one sentence Facebook status updates and a hundred tweets about how you’re a leader in your industry they’re going to sniff out the shallow facade from a thousand yards away.

Yes, blogging is time consuming. Yes, it might open you up to people disagreeing with you. But, in the end, is that a bad thing? Is it bad to defend your stance? Is it bad to show you are so much more than a status update or a tweet? The idea of being cheap and cost effective works great when you’re trying to justify the business cost of mass producing, say, toys for a kid’s meal. But you can’t apply that same thinking to representing your brand’s leadership. Do you really want your leadership to seem cheap and cost effective? Gaining the trust of clients isn’t about efficiency. In the end, they don’t care just about the fact that you know 5 different programs and have X number of other clients. That information might be a hook to get them interested but it’s not going to keep them around. They want to know that you really and truly know what you’re doing. Can you prove that in 144 characters? Probably not.

This post was dedicated to Barbara.

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#EPICFAIL – Lessons in PR disasters

When playing ostrich with your social media just makes things worse.

My husband is a runner (I sometimes run…right before having an asthma attack). He’s big into 5K races and is working his way up to 10K races and half marathons. Last year he very eagerly registered for a popular run taking place in the Washington, DC area. He thought it would be a great event being that we could all fly in, see his family, and maybe even cheer him on as he crossed the finish line. Fun for everyone, right?!

As the race got closer, things got weirder. You couldn’t park close to the race event unless you were riding with other racers. If you wanted to go to the race as a spectator, you had to go to a public transit station far away from the race location and then take a shuttle. The course was planned along a narrow route, part of which was on a highway. It went on and on and on. But, this post isn’t about the race and the ensuing race day debacle. It’s the social media debacle after the race debacle that’s the real story.

Turns out the race was so poorly organized that a Facebook page was started DURING the race about how bad it was. Over 1,000 people have liked this page to date. It’s a small percentage of the 22,000 that showed up to race but anytime a Facebook page about something like a 5K race gets that much traction, you know it’s bad. Here’s where the fun begins. Angry racers began posting comment after comment on this page about how bad the race was. From alleged dangerous conditions to sub-par goodie bags, it was clear racers were incensed. They didn’t keep their rage contained to the fail page either. They also made sure that the organizers knew how they felt on the event’s Facebook page. They left hundreds of comments blasting the race. Some were even demanding a refund of their registration fee. And what was the response from the organizers? Nothing. Not one comment was responded to within the comments section. Going further, users began accusing the organizers of deleting comments and one user (who started the fail page) was supposedly blocked from the event Facebook page. The day after the event an official apology was posted and promptly met with angry comments from disappointed runners and silence from the organizers (although they did manage to update their rules about what kind of posts would be deleted). Three days after that a second apology was posted with the exact same response.

If you look at the race’s Facebook page now, there still has never been any acknowledgement of the problems that runners mentioned in their comments. Instead, organizers state in their About page that any complaints could be sent to their customer support email address or they could call the customer support hotline. Note that I said it’s on their “About” page. None of that was mentioned on their main Facebook page. This, friends, is what is called “playing ostrich.” If you pretend it isn’t there, it never really happened. Rather than taking the opportunity to use their Facebook page as a way to sincerely connect with the consumers who paid a good chunk of change to be in the “race” they ignored their criticisms. Their lack of response was so bad that even the event sponsor threw them under the bus by releasing a statement voicing their disappointment.

So what can be learned here? Personally, I think the lesson to be learned is that ignoring what your audience is saying is tantamount to brushing them off and no one likes being brushed off. More and more, people are foregoing the informational vacuums of hotlines and customer support email accounts and going straight to the source: your Facebook page. This is a change that cannot be ignored. Companies can’t pretend it’s not there. People are going to say bad things about your company and it’s easier than ever to do so very publicly. The other thing they can’t ignore is the idea that those negative comments will be contained to the comments section of the wall posting. With the recent changes in Facebook’s layout, users can readily see not only what their friends are saying but what the friends of their friends are saying by way of the scrolling feed on the right hand side of everyone’s profile. It’s like a Clairol commercial gone bad.

The answer to this situation is so simple. Respond. You can’t respond to everyone in a media crisis but you can do more than post and run. Take the time to reach out in a place where others can see you doing it. They need to see the olive branch being handed out. Even if you can’t offer compensation, the least you can do is spend some time responding to those comments. If you look at companies that have the highest customer satisfaction rates and loyalty, you will also see that they are masters at responding. There’s no posting and running. If they see a critical comment, they take notice and they make sure that everyone else who saw that comment sees their response.

By playing ostrich this company was met with a giant PR nightmare. Angry comments, a Facebook page dedicated to them dropping the ball, a petition with people vowing to boycott any future races, complaints to the BBB, and a slew of nasty articles in local papers. Ouch. Let this be an example to all those who think their social media pages are just there for information. They aren’t. They are a voice for your consumers and your consumers will let you know when they’re madder than a snake that’s just been stepped on. They WILL turn on you. The question is will you be able to stop them?

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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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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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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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Why Social Media Shouldn’t Be Treated Like a Shiny New Toy

We’ve all seen it happen. A kid begs their parents for the latest and greatest toy because ALL of their friends have it. The toy gets bought, played with in earnest for a week or two, and then is promptly set aside only to collect dust and create clutter. Then one day the child’s parent walks into the room to find something and is totally overwhelmed by the mountain of junk they have to sift through to find what they need. The same can happen to your company’s social media campaign if you aren’t careful.

Too often, companies launch Facebook and Twitter sites before fully understanding why they want them. They don’t know what it does or how to use it but they know their competitors have it and they assume they need it to give them an edge. So, they get their Facebook page going, send out a few Tweets, and make ready for the waves of new fans and maybe even some customers. Except, the fans and customers don’t come. Why? Because the company didn’t think about what they were going to do with their new toy once they got it and now it’s just another waste of money.

Social media has power; a lot of it. But you have to wield that power in the right way. We at Impact Interactions strongly believe in what we call the “Beacon Strategy.” You want to utilize certain tools in ways that will guide new users to your main repository of information (your website), not leave them lost in the sea of digital clutter. Facebook and Twitter can’t replace a robust website full of quality information, nor should it. These are simply tools, lures even, that should be used judiciously. When considering how to use these tools you must first know where you’re going, what you want to achieve, and how you can measure your success. Once you have determined those things then you can go out and make the investment in developing a social media campaign. Always understand the why of your campaign before you think about the how and then make a commitment to nurture the campaign over time rather than letting it sit and get dusty next to the last latest greatest business toy you just had to have.

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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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Why Blogs Work in B2B – Featured B2B Magazine Article

I was recently interviewed by Jon Vanzile for an article he wrote for B2B Magazine (6/6/11) titled “Is Blogging Over?” along with our client, Jeanette Gibson of Cisco. The article is in response to a New York Times article in February claiming that blogs are losing their marketing power, especially with younger audiences due to the growth in Twitter and Facebook. When we spoke about this, I told Jon that this isn’t the case from our experience in the B2B world. In fact, blogs are a cornerstone for B2B marketers (or should be) who are looking to develop stronger relationships with their customers, prospects, and stakeholders. Here is my quote from the article about why blogs work for B2B marketers:

“When you look at the B2B market, what’s necessary is thought leadership, and you cannot get thought leadership in 140 characters or a Facebook post.”

Think about this for a moment.

We counsel our clients that the main difference between B2B social media and B2C social media is the needs of the audience and the buying cycle timing. For B2C, social media is about building awareness and then trial. B2B is much more complex, it is about building awareness then relationships with the audience. Why? Because in general, the sales cycle for B2B is longer than B2C so more effort and information is necessary to help your prospect move to become a customer.

Blogs can play a big role in this relationship building process by highlighting your company’s thought leadership in the industry. Companies want to buy from companies that will be leading the industry and can demonstrate staying power. By providing executive views of the world to your audience, you help them to understand that your company is a leader and will be there in the long term to help your customers.

Can Twitter or Facebook do the same? No, they cannot. Here is a better way to use these tools in your B2B marketing.

We work with our clients to use B2B social media tools like Twitter, Facebook (yes, it does work in B2B), LinkedIn Groups, and YouTube in their online marketing mix. But we recommend a stronger process of using these tools as a complimentary set of tactical processes that support business objectives. We do that through our “Beacon Strategy.”

Just as a lighthouse helps ships to find safe harbors, the correct use of social media tools can help your audience find the best information you can provide quickly and efficiently on their time. Social media in a B2B setting works best when it works together with blogs and compelling content to educate and help audiences to learn more about your products, services, view of the industry, and support issues. By pointing your social media content on third party sites such as Twitter or LinkedIn Groups back to your controlled website, you have the advantage of measurement while your audience has the advantage of learning more. B2B social media requires measurement. Friends, followers, group members, etc. don’t mean anything until they are engaged in a conversation or contact process with your firm. Why? Because you cannot measure anything of real economic value until the person completes an action. Those actions should take place in your harbor, not somewhere in the vast ocean that is the internet.

Getting back to the article, B2B blogs when clearly written with compelling content are one of the best destinations in your safe harbor for people to learn about your company. In a project we did with SAP back in 2004 and 2005, we saw that one of the best indicators of whether a company was moving towards purchase was their reading of the SAP Executive Blog Series. This was a series of blogs by SAP Board Members and top executives at the time (people like Hasso Plattner, Shai Aggasi, Leo Apotheker, etc.). Why? Simple. Before a company spends thousands of dollars on your products, their executive team wants to know if you are aligned with their interests and if your company is truly customer focused. Blogs help to show this to your audience.

So, are blogs dead? For B2B marketers looking to use relationship marketing, the answer is a resounding NO!

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