There has been a lot of really good advice from Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester and others about building a successful enterprise community (http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44041,00.html). Yet we still run into a lot of people who are either paying the price for jumping into social media too quickly or who are scratching their heads trying to figure out what to make of it all. Since the proper knowledge, appropriate strategy, and right technology can make the difference between a raging success or a miserable failure, we wanted to reiterate a few of the lessons we have learned while “getting our hands dirty” by helping corporate enterprises build successful communities.
NOTE: This blog focuses on forming your own corporate community - a different strategy than joining Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Although both strategies have value, this is the first of a three-part series in which we will discuss the key issues of forming your own successful online corporate community. This first blog focuses on “purpose.”
Purpose: Ask yourself why you want to form an online community and if your audience already has the propensity to gather online. A good exercise is to see if the would-be participants of your community already assemble together in the real world to chat. If they do, then you stand a better chance of having a successful online community. If they don’t, then you need to come up with a really compelling reason for those people to gather. For those of you who are new to this, the “built it and they will come” idea is not working out so well. Your community needs to offer its participants not only compelling reasons to come to your site but incentive to come back with regularity and loiter for a while.
I don’t want to oversimplify this but the real world is a great testing ground to guide you for success online. For example, if you held a brainstorming meeting with your engineering staff focused on solving a specific problem, you would likely have a productive meeting with tangible outcomes. Conversely, if you took that same group of people and threw them into a conference room to “talk amongst themselves” with no guidance or reason for gathering – not much of business value would likely take place. Why should it be any different online?
Web 2.0 purists rightfully say that social media is transparent, inclusive, authentic, vibrant and consumer-driven and warn against any attempts to control or organize the conversation. We agree. Yet, you need to remember that your audience in large part, dictates these rules. For example, you should avoid product-driven conversations in your marketing communities – but your partner or customer communities will likely WANT to talk about your products.
This leads us to the second issue related to purpose – does your audience have a reason to develop a long-term relationship with you and each other? In general, retail customers do not tend to want or need that long-term relationship. The retail world has found much better success with customer-written product ratings rather than a traditional online community. On the other hand, B2B customers tend to naturally have a more compelling reason to develop a long-term relationship with you and each other. After all, if you have paid $100,000+ for a product, you are more likely to invest the time to learn everything about it and how others are using it strategically in business (which coincidentally is a great use of a community). Although there are examples of successful B2C communities, the B2B world seems to have an easier time of it.
A lot of people focus their attention solely on marketing and how to create a community of their prospective customers. As a result, often-overlooked audiences that are seeing tremendous success in corporate communities include employees, vendors, partners and customers. Regardless if you already have a community or want to launch one, it’s a good idea to keep your various audiences in mind and why each of them would want to congregate online in your community.
Third, a somewhat obvious but neglected element of successful corporate communities is that their participants share common interests, beliefs or philosophies, and receive multiple ongoing positive interactions while in the community. I recommend you identify what those common interests are and add content that fosters conversation around the common interests, beliefs, etc. We have seen that you can actually encourage the “multiple positive interactions” with both the right purpose and with the appropriate technology. A very positive and successful purpose for audiences like employees, vendors, partners and customers is learning. But this is where most “private label” communities tend to falter. A growing number of companies are seeing tangible success with a new bread of community called a social learning community that is the combination of a social community, an online learning environment, and a database back end with analytics and reporting services.
We are seeing failing community initiatives salvaged by redirecting (or narrowing) the purpose of the community and by reexamining both the audience and technology.
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