The Tendo View

With approximately 500,000 registered customers across its four primary communities—Cisco Developer Network, The Cisco Learning Network, Cisco Support Community, and My Cisco—and community efforts on all major social media channels, Cisco knows a thing or two about sustaining successful B2B communities. And that includes one key tenet: When it comes to starting a B2B community, many companies believe that if you build it, your customers will come. Not necessarily true.

Tendo recently spoke to Jeanette Gibson, director of social media marketing at Cisco, about how to build, grow, and maintain communities. But before we begin, a quick disclaimer: Cisco is a Tendo client.

What are some of the most important considerations when starting a B2B community?
You need to know that you’re committed for the long haul. If you’re thinking about creating a community, you should understand that it’s a long-term relationship.  Think about how you’re going to sustain it over time versus just putting up a community for an event or a launch.

You can’t just open a community and expect it to be self-sustaining right away, and that’s probably the biggest lesson to learn for every company. You also need to understand the audience you’re serving and why it’s going to your community. If it’s for support, don’t clog it up with a lot of marketing messaging.

How did Cisco determine the audiences it was trying to attract?
A lot of the audience growth in our communities happens organically. For example, people will self-select into the learning community because they have a specific goal around achieving certification for Cisco. And customers are going to Cisco both on Facebook and via our own Web community to get help in achieving their goal. 

In addition to giving customers communities in which they can help each other, we’re trying to get more people to join the Collaboration or Virtualization communities to help influence their peers in the sales process. At the end of the day, we know that B2B purchase decisions are made by peer influence.

In general, we want to make it easy so customers can go to whatever community meets their need at any given time—whether it’s on Twitter or Facebook or Cisco.com.
 
What tactics do you use to grow your community?
We have different ways to bring them into the community. On Facebook, Twitter, and our blogs, we spread the word that we want to have a two-way conversation. For example, with a data center launch, we use the blog and the community to post videos and opinions, so we can talk to people whether they’re in the research phase of the purchase process or they’re ready to make the purchase.

We’re trying to add more social capabilities as well as incentive programs to communities. Our MVP programs, for example, identify “top talkers” and give rewards to customers who help each other. In addition, we’re creating more ideation capabilities with communities so customers can give us feedback on what they’re hearing, what trends they see, and what we should be thinking about.

Does Cisco have dedicated managers for its communities?
With the Developer and Support communities, there were dedicated managers from the start. But as we built new communities that focused more on thought leadership, we had to provide training so that employees recognize that communities are an organizational responsibility.

Monitoring a community can’t just be someone’s night job or weekend job. If you’re building a community, you have to have a community manager. We’re helping managers understand that it’s about nurturing the community over the long term and that they shouldn’t get into it unless they’re prepared to assign staff and resources and nurture the community properly.

In addition, we have a social media advisory council to address broader issues around creating award programs for customers and long-term sustained engagement, and to help us connect the dots because we’re such a big company.

How do you evaluate and/or measure the success of your community effort?
We look at both quantitative and qualitative measures. We’ll look at the number of customers who had a question and whether it was resolved to determine if coming into the community lead to a successful result.

We’re also looking more and more at engagement. We want to make sure customers are helping each other and that we’re reducing the number of support issues that arise. There are huge opportunities to get customer feedback. If customers are in the support community, for example, and they have product feedback, you need to make sure there’s routing internally so that product managers and engineers get that information.

What is the most important piece of advice you would give fellow marketers about launching a B2B community?
Listen to your customers and make sure you’re meeting their needs. Remember that you’re creating a community for them—not you. It’s not for you to market to; it’s a forum that facilitates two-way conversation so that you can serve customers in a new way.

It’s so important to make sure you’re transparent and authentic, and that you’re creating the community for the right reasons: to help customers get more information about your company and connect with your peers. It’s not a marketing vehicle; it’s an opportunity to help the customer.