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.

But using competition to generate enthusiasm and interaction isn’t limited to Nike, a company with an obvious and direct link to the sporting world. Benefit Cosmetics, a San Francisco-based makeup company, has a sassy Facebook page that’s also taking advantage of users’ love of competition to encourage comments on its page.

Right now, for example, you can vote for your favorite Benefit product in the Beauty World Cup, a clever way to tap into the World Cup hype and also get some feedback from users on their favorite Benefit products. Benetint beat the Eye Bright pencil in last week’s match-up and will move on to compete against the winner of the Hoola bronzing powder vs. High Beam match-up.

The page also includes links to Benefit’s blog content—sometimes they’ll recommend a past blog post to answer a user question, or sometimes they just want to promote an event, product, or other information. There are videos, too, and currently there’s a contest going to share travel photos inspired by Benefit (i.e., “Bad Gal in Vegas,” which is a play on the company’s Bad Gal mascara); the contest could use more submissions, but it’s clearly an effort to address its global audience and to consider the brand’s global reach.

Many corporate Facebook pages suffer from a lack of personality and a lack of active involvement, but not so for Benefit and Nike. Kudos.

A common misstep I see is the tendency to rush toward social media without a clear idea of why. Facebook pages, proprietary communities, and Twitter accounts pop up all over without a clear strategy behind them. This doesn’t bother me as much as another habit I’ve noticed—because, after all, social media is relatively new (in the grand scheme of things) and companies will figure out their strategies soon enough, especially after diving in.

The other habit, though, is a bigger concern. Some companies rush toward social media with the assumption that that’s all there is—that social media should replace other communications channels and, for instance, that Web content is so “yesterday.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Rather than trade social media for other channels, I believe companies need to integrate social media elements with existing channels in ways that benefit both. Integrate community discussions into your Web content (and link from one to the other); bring your case study company representatives in as guest bloggers; include a real-time hash-tagged Twitter stream on your events landing page.

This blog post from SandersSays captures my point perfectly:

“When I asked him what his social media strategy was, his answer surprised me:

“You don’t need a social media strategy—you need a brand strategy that leverages social media. Don’t get off the brand strategy just because there’s a new communications channel; that’s how you lose the plot as a brand. Technology is the tail, not the dog.”

Wow. He’s spot on. I saw this back in ‘97 when companies had to quickly create an “Internet strategy,” often wasting tons of money on agencies, consultants, and painful meetings. What they eventually realized was that they needed to integrate this new communications channel in their brand promise/fulfillment approach to their customers. Those that did succeeded wildly in the coming years.”

How are you integrating your Facebook pages with your Web content? Or landing pages with Twitter streams?

Well, it turns out there’s more to the story. Nissan, in releasing its 100% electric Leaf,  a pioneering car in its own right, took Smart’s playbook and ran with it. There was the $99 reservation program just like Smart’s; there were the street tours in key markets to show off the car ahead of its official sales date (just like Smart); and there were blog experts within dealerships deployed to monitor and participate on enthusiast blogs. Again, just like Smart.

However, there was one key difference: When Smart launched the Fortwo in the United States, the company owned its sandbox. Early on, and in collaboration with Internet Brands, they launched Smart USA Insider in direct competition with a popular, third-party owned Smart forum. Smart USA Insider launched on June 16, 2008 with this message:

“…Smart USA Insider was designed to help Smart enthusiasts stay connected to each other and the Smart brand, and to complement the information provided on www.smartusa.com. The Smart USA Insider website offers Smart enthusiasts many social networking features, including starting and posting to message boards, forming local groups, uploading videos and photos, creating your own Smart page, creating a blog and building your network of Smart USA Insider friends…”

By contrast, Nissan heavily leveraged existing social networks Facebook and Twitter to both alert and update its buyer prospects of new developments in the launch of its Leaf. Although there is an official Leaf site, it lacks the community functionality that Smart USA insider has.

The decision not to launch a self-hosted community just yet has pros and cons associated with it. On the one hand, if the immediate challenge is to raise awareness among early adopters, there is little argument for not going fishing where the fish are. On the other hand, as prospects become owners—and by current projections that community is likely to eclipse 10,000 in the United States alone in the first model year—Nissan will want to encourage the adoption of, and participation in, its own sandbox to maximize its awareness and understanding of early adopter experiences as sales of the Leaf gain momentum.

Nissan must rely on this group of early hand raisers for word-of-mouth marketing, and their collective experiences will be critical in ensuring the Leaf’s continued success once the novelty factor begins to wear.

Smart anticipated this more than a year ahead of its launch of the Fortwo. Nissan, a company that has so closely emulated Smart’s approach in other respects, would be wise to begin building that sandbox now and making it the destination for all things Leaf, even as it continues to fish for prospects in existing third-party communities.

More and more, I’m starting to think I’m in the minority. Stats from a new eMarketer report support my “being left in the dust” theory. In early 2009, Twitter’s U.S. site traffic was a few million unique monthly visitors; by June it was more than 20 million. And that doesn’t take into account the users who send and read tweets via mobile devices and widgets.

eMarketer also predicts that if Twitter successfully shifts its focus in 2010 from audience building to revenue generation (read more about that and the company’s new “Promoted Tweets” strategy here), its adult users will grow to 36 million by 2012.

Here are some other interesting Twitter stats:

• Many 2009 Fortune 500 companies have Twitter accounts (though these stats don’t reveal the extent of engagement with Twitter): 27% of companies ranked 1-100; 20% of companies ranked 101-200; 18% of companies ranked 201-300; 16% of companies ranked 301-400; and 19% of companies ranked 401-500. (Source: Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research and Financial Insite Inc., “The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies,” February 23, 2010)
• A February 2010 Pew research report found that 14% of Millenials (ages 18-29) are on Twitter and 10% of Gen X-ers (ages 30-45).
• In August 2008, 29% of U.S. Internet users were using social networks, and 6% were using Twitter. By September 2009, 47% were using social networks and 19% were using Twitter. (Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009,” October 21, 2009)
• Moms use social media and Twitter more than the average adult. Of respondents surveyed between April and June 2009, 60.3% of moms used Facebook compared to 50.2% of adults surveyed. And 16.5% of moms used Twitter compared to 15% of adults. (Source: Retail Advertising & Marketing Association, “All About Moms,” conducted by BIGresearch, September 16, 2009)

I could go on and on with the statistics, but it appears that Twitter is not going the way of MySpace, especially if it can make good on its monetization strategy. So as I was writing and researching this post today, I started following three more people and I set a weekly reminder for myself to check Twitter. It’s a start.

Do you have a Twitter account? Do you use it? If so, have you developed a Twitter strategy? Let us know.