10 Ideas for Internal and External B2B Communities

There are a variety of brands and companies that currently employ purpose-driven communities to engage their customers and reap a variety of benefits and rewards, such as:

• Increased traffic and time spent on-site
• Cost savings on customer support
• Extended customer life cycles
• Insights that drive product development
• Increased revenue

While some may think that social media is only applicable for B2C companies, B2B companies can also utilize social media effectively. Here are 10 ideas for internal and external communities for B2B companies.

Internal Ideas
1. Aggregate all company sales materials and content, feature upgrades and news, so sales people can easily find everything in one place to share with prospects, and new employees can be brought up to speed quickly
2. Share best practices among employees who don’t normally communicate externally
3. Let your employees discuss and create marketing ideas. For example, have a contest to see who can create the best video pitch for the company, then put the winning pitch on the company website and reward the winner.
4. Let sales people create groups/clubs for themselves and/or different territories to share best practices and insights

External ideas
5. Community as a hub for all public company content – news, blogs, Twitter, videos, etc. – so partners and prospects can easily see what is going on.
6. Give best customers and partners access to exclusive content, training videos, partner materials, discounts, etc.
7. Give best customers and partners access to company experts
8. Include areas where partners and customers can request new features and products and comment on existing ones to drive product development
9. Use to keep people informed of existing product development cycles and company news
10. Let customers and partners answer each others’ questions.

What other ideas would you add? What B2B companies have you seen that are doing this well?

eWayDirect has the only solution that combines email marketing, website reengagement, online communities, desktop notifications, and search marketing on a single platform. Interested in learning more? Contact us today so we can help you or your clients generate revenue online and save money.

Tapping Into the Wisdom of Crowds With a Twitter Contest

Twitter is a great place to listen to what your audience is saying. You can do this to identify:

• Who's talking about you
• What they're saying
  
• Key questions that may come up repeatedly
• Problems with your product or service
• Praises for your product or service
• New ideas to drive product development

Twitter has many uses, but listening is probably the most important. If you're not listening, you shouldn't participate. We try our best to listen to what's important to our audience and then participate when we think we have something to add to the conversation.

We launched our Elevator Pitch Contest yesterday to tap into the wisdom of crowds on Twitter and get help with our elevator pitch. We really want to listen to what you think about us and have your ideas drive us. And hopefully, you will learn a little bit about us in the process.

We wanted to reward you for your thoughts and participation, so we're giving away a Flip UltraHD video camera every day to a random participant. At the end of the week, we'll choose the 10 best pitches and put them in a poll, so YOU can vote on them and determine the winner, who will receive a MacBook Pro.

We'd love to hear what you think about this contest. Feel free to leave a comment here, follow us on Twitter, or email me (jason at ewaydirect dot com).

For more details please visit the official contest page. THANKS for your participation! We can't wait to see what you come up with!

What Is Social Media?

Maybe this is the first blog you’ve ever read. Or maybe you read 25 blogs a day. Or maybe you don’t know what exactly a blog is.

For whatever reason, you’ve stumbled upon a blog about social media. Thanks for stopping by. You’ve probably heard a lot of buzz about social media and maybe have seen how some companies are taking advantage of it. But what the heck is social media, anyway?

As you may know, I’m Jason Peck, social media manager here at eWayDirect. And I cover social media, online communities, content, strategy, measurement and more on this blog. I've written a few posts on this blog since it launched last month. But now I'd like to take a step back and share my thoughts on what exactly the term “social media” means to me.

Wikipedia defines social media as “content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies.”

What is it really? Social media is the tools and content that enable people to have conversations online. Social media enables us to easily connect, communicate and collaborate with other people. In the past, communication was expensive and hard to scale. Today, social media tools and technology have reduced the time and cost of communicating with relevant audiences. The underlying principles haven’t changed much (people have been communicating in one form or another for thousands of years), but these new tools have opened up new possibilities for communication and collaboration.

If we break things down, we can see that there are three main buckets or types of technology and content that power social media. These areas definitely overlap, but these classifications may help you understand social media better. The most important part to remember is that while the tools are great, people are what make things work.

Communication

Blogs

• Websites for personal or business use that has regular entries consisting of opinions, analysis, news, pictures and/or video. The content is usually displayed in reverse-chronological order

Forums

• Online discussion websites or message boards

Social networking websites and communities

• Websites where people who share similar interests can interact and share information

Microblogs

• Platform for real-time, brief updates such as text, pictures, video or audio

Collaboration

Wikis

• Websites that use software that enables pages to be easily created and edited

Social news

• Websites where people submit and vote on news stories, determining which stories are popular and displayed more prominently than others

Social bookmarking

• Websites whose main function is allowing people to bookmark/save websites, categorize them with tags and share them with friends

Opinion websites

• Websites that enable people to rate and discuss various products or services

Multimedia

Video-sharing

• Websites that enable people to upload and share video

Photo-sharing

• Websites that enable people to upload and share pictures

Audio-sharing

• Websites that enable people to upload and share audio

Live-streaming

• Websites that are focused on giving people the ability to stream video and/or audio live

So why should you care about all of this? Here’s one reason. According to eMarketer, online communities and blogs are now more popular than email. Between December 2007 and December 2008, online communities and blogs reached a larger audience than email.

No matter how much the tools and technology change, social media is ultimately about conversations and people. I will be sharing more social media thoughts and tips on this blog in the future, but I want to hear what YOU think. What would you add to this explanation of social media?

Study Shows Connection Between Engagement and Financial Success

On Monday, Wetpaint and Altimeter Group released a study that shows there is a connection between the level of a company's online engagement and its revenue. According to the study, which looked at engagement of the top 100 most valuable brands (according to the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking), the companies who were most engaged grew 18% in revenue on average over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period.

So, while they were not able to show a direct cause and effect, there is definitely a connection between engagement and financial performance. In the words of the study, "Why do social media? Because it pays off."

Why does it pay off? I think it really goes back to the fact that social media is about people, and good companies are also about people. Companies that use social media the right way are probably more likely to be companies that do business as a whole the right way. The things you can do with social media--listen, engage and participate in conversations to provide excellent customer service and good content, build relationships and get ideas for new products--are probably things that great companies have done in other ways, too--and this is what makes them financially successful.

One of the best ways to fully engage your most passionate customers is by creating a community for them. Starbucks was mentioned in the study as having a thriving community and ranking as the most engaged brand. On their community (MyStarbucksidea.com) people can submit, comment on and vote on new ideas for ways to improve Starbucks.

One of the keys to the success of this initiative is that they didn't just build it and forget about it. Almost every department has someone responsible for monitoring their customers' ideas and putting them to use if it makes sense. They didn't just set it up and hope for results--they made sure the right processes were in place to take advantage of their community.

It's important that companies who are engaging with their customers online are doing it the right way--establishing a strategy and measuring results--instead of just investing a lot of time into a social network or community because it seems like a good thing to do. Whatever you do better be generating a good ROI.

A lot of times it is challenging to be able to measure results, especially on sites like Facebook and Twitter where brands don't own their data and really don't know what the true value of a fan or follower is. While there is definitely value in engaging on those sites and you can measure some things (individual campaign links or sales resulting from traffic from these sites), it may make sense to set up your own community, like Starbucks has done.

This enables you to get a good idea of who your best customers are and more easily identify brand advocates. You can still utilize other social networks to engage people but in some cases, it can make sense to drive people back to your own community, where you can really measure what is working and not working. Of course there are many aspects of engagement you may want to measure, but for most companies, it is really all about sales. If you're using a community platform such as the one we offer, which is tied in with our email platform, you can easily measure sales resulting from the community vs. sales from email subscribers and see the value of community members vs. email subscribers vs. general customers.

As this study shows, there is a link between engagement and financial success. While it may not be clear what this overall link is, there's no reason you can't measure your own results and see how they're affecting your revenue, especially if you have your own community.

10 Tasks for Managers of Branded Communities

If you already have an online community for your customers, congratulations! (Shameless plug: if you don’t, feel free to get in touch with us so we can tell you more about our platform.)

But the truth is you can’t just build an online community and hope it will run completely on its own. Communities are about people. It’s important to designate a community manager to help grow the community and interact with customers there (and other places your audience frequents online). The community manager’s ultimate role is to be the human face of your organization—someone who will interact with your audience and help build trust. This requires some specific roles and skills. So here are 10 tasks that good community managers should be able to handle.

1) Community Facilitation

All communities need help in order to grow. As a facilitator, the community manager posts topics for discussion, responds and guides discussions along the way. Contributing thoughts and ideas that members of the community discuss is definitely important for the growth of any community.

2) Content Creation
A community manager must be skilled at content creation geared towards helping the business promote what it wants to the community. This includes knowing enough about the company’s products and services to write intelligently about them. Community managers should be very familiar with blogging and know how to post video and pictures if necessary. This content should be relevant to the audience and engaging. Content is king—cliché, but true.

3) Feature Development
The community manager should work with the tech team on coming up with new features for the website, based on the company’s goals and what the community wants. This also includes ideas for new features that can help improve the company’s products and services, based on feedback from members of the community.

4) Moderation
Sometimes people don’t follow the rules. It is usually the community manager’s job to moderate user-generated content and remove things that are inappropriate. Eventually, the community may police itself (especially if you give people tools to flag inappropriate content), but some type of moderation is always necessary, especially at first.

5) Member Recruiting
Even if you give members all the tools they need to share your community with their friends, a community manager should be expected to help grow the site, especially at first. This includes hands-on actions such as identifying where the company’s audience is on other websites and reaching out to them there, as well as brainstorming ideas for promotions/contests that may provide an added incentive for people to invite their friends.

6) Customer Support
Social media and customer-centric communities enable companies to provide outstanding customer service, which is becoming more and more a key differentiator for many brands. A community manager should have enough knowledge to answer basic questions about a company’s products or services and can pass questions on to the appropriate department if necessary.

7) Company Enthusiasm
A community manager must love both the job and the company, and this enthusiasm should show in everything he or she does to build the community. The individual should be excited to tell community members about new products, promotions, services, events and upgrades. If the community manager doesn’t truly enjoy the job, people will notice. A community manager should truly be passionate about both the community and the company’s products or services.

8) Market Research
Customers often reveal things in a community about your company that might not show up in a survey or focus group. It is the community manager’s job to identify important insights and opinions, which can help improve a company’s products or services or lead to new ideas.

9) Metrics/Reporting
There are a variety of metrics that can be tracked in a community. While the metrics you want to track may vary based on your business objectives, a good community manager should track both quantitative and qualitative measures to see what is working and what isn’t working. It’s very important to track content and behavior, find out how these various metrics affect your goals and identify what this says about your community and company.

10) Listening
The most important thing a community manager can do is listen to the people who make up the community. What new features are they looking for? What improvements on products or services do they want? What do they like best (and least) about the company? Communities provide a great opportunity for companies to listen and hear what is really important to customers. There are more companies now than ever trying to shout at and promote their messages to customers, but companies that truly listen will enjoy greater levels of respect and trust than those who don’t make the effort.

These tasks need not take place only inside the community website. It is important for the community manager to find and go where the audience is and reach out to people on other social networking websites, blogs, and message boards—wherever the audience is located. This will help your company reach a wider audience, and you may even find that there’s a new market for your product or service.

Remember, online communities and social media are ultimately about people and conversations. A good community manager should be able to complete the tasks above to help you achieve your business objectives online.