The Tendo View » community

B2B communities: It’s not about you

Siobhan Nash — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:09:59 +0000

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.

Local Dirt creates community, brings food close to home

Siobhan Nash — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:12:41 +0000

I love when technology solves a real problem and brings together people or businesses that otherwise wouldn’t find each other, or, at least, wouldn’t find each other easily. That’s what Local Dirt is doing for those interested in finding, buying, and selling local food.

I find this interesting not only because I’m a consumer but also because I’m a partner in a small farming business and have often been stymied by the question, “How do I …?” As a consumer, I was frustrated by not being able to find fresh local food. Ironically, the crops cultivated in the agricultural community in which I lived were grown primarily for processing or for seed, not fresh for market. Really, the only way to find fresh local produce, nuts, or other products was by roadside signs.

For example, there’s a family-owned apricot farm in a neighboring town. Bremmer’s Farm has delicious fruit, and I looked forward to buying a small lug of apricots every summer. However, the season is short, lasting anywhere from one week to a month. Had I not been driving the county back roads and seen the hand-lettered signs adorned with metallic ribbon (the kind used to keep birds out of fruit and nut trees), I never would have known about this local gem.

With Local Dirt, though, I could search for a particular food product, such as apricots, or a seller in my area and then order the product online for pickup at a local farmers’ market or farm. The system automatically generates the purchase order and emails it to you, the buyer. All that’s left to do is to pick up the order and pay the seller. The system works similarly for businesses, except they search under a “wholesale” section and can have the products delivered on a given date.

In addition, Local Dirt is providing local food-related information on its blog, called The Local Farm. You can go there to learn more about Local Dirt’s process, as well as trends, initiatives, and research.

Besides connecting farmers with businesses, distributors, and buying clubs, Local Dirt is tapping into the growing trend of people (locavores, as they’re called) interested in eating more locally grown and eco-consicous food. In case you were wondering, a lot of locally grown food from small farmers is organic.

Local Dirt is a great example of finding an audience (or multiple audiences, as the case may be), filling a genuine need, and creating a community in the process. To me, this is technology at its best—improving business, stimulating local economies, and providing access to great products.

How compelling content intersects with social media

Charlotte Ziems — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:24:57 +0000

I read a great blog post on ProBlogger a couple weeks ago that asked, “What is compelling content to you?” and was interested to look at the comments for how readers answered the question. To spare you from scrolling through them (but I do recommend taking a look), I compiled this list of adjectives from comments for what compelling content is:

Funny
Tells a story
Uses images/visuals
Has personality
Inspires learning, thought, action, sharing, passion
Solves a problem
Teaches
Is new or offers a unique perspective
Makes the complex simple
Easy to digest
Resonates with reader—connects—personalized
This acronym for compelling content seems to sum it all up: SUCCESs = simple-unexpected-concrete-credible-emotional-story

Almost universally, compelling content has these effects on readers:

Makes them come back or subscribe
Draws people in
Makes people share or want to share the content
Compels action
Makes them read to the end

The comments—especially those defining compelling content as personable, passionate, resonating, something you want to share—made me think about the intersection of social media and more traditional content, and whether/how social media is shifting readers’ expectations of what they want from an article, or a blog post, or the newspaper or anything they read. I took a risk last week by writing about my new dog in a weekly “business” email, but I got more response from that than I usually get when I focus solely on business issues. Was it the photo? Or the subject? Or the fact that it was personal?

How can social media be integrated into your corporate Web articles so that readers respond in ways that social tools are encouraging—e.g., they can comment, they can share the article (via email, Digg, etc.), they can subscribe (RSS), they can be drawn in with visuals or polls or rich media or any element that invites a click so they can experience a different facet of the subject, they can take an action based on what the article has taught them by clicking on something that offers a next step, they can see how many other readers ranked it highly or shared it, etc.

I loved how some of our HP clients worked together this week to make sure blog posts teased the audience about the fiber channel over Ethernet story, and then tweeted about the article once it was launched. And the article’s most visually prominent call to action was an invitation to join the conversation on the blog itself.

I wonder, as Web articles support marketing campaigns that incorporate Facebook pages or Twitter accounts or a video series, how corporate marketers can effectively integrate those elements into the articles. And how the organizations might have to work differently to ensure articles and social media elements are well-coordinated.

Check out the follow-up post to the above, How to Get in Touch with your Readers Needs [and Produce Compelling Content], for the author’s principles (he focuses on blog content, but I think the concepts apply to other types). And let me know what you think!

Who needs a social media staff?

Charlotte Ziems — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:46:24 +0000

Earlier this week, I attended the Society for New Communications Research NewComm Forum. As a 2009 SNCR Fellow, I moderated a case study on how Embarq—a telecom company in the Midwest—is using social media to improve its brand reach and customer service. You can read a recap of it here from HP’s Mia Dand, who’s in charge of social media analysis for the part of HP that sells enterprise products.

What I found interesting about their case is that they leveraged existing customer support staff to monitor (with Radian6) and address (using Twitter/phone/email) customer issues; they didn’t have a social media “staff.” Then they ran a YouTube campaign in which customers submitted 48-sec videos on what they’d do if they had an extra 48 seconds (which is the speed difference between high-speed Internet vs. dial-up).

The most useful session was one conducted by another 2009 SNCR Fellow, Vanessa DiMauro, on B2B online communities. It’s hard sometimes to find social media info specific to the B2B case, but her preso was chock-full.

Autodesk: A 2D Site Holds the Promise of 3D, but Falls Short.

Tendo Communications — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:06:42 +0000

Creator of ubiquitous 3D software AutoCAD, Autodesk.com provides an online experience that is not unlike its product: Easy to operate if you know how to do it. If you don’t, you’re kinda out of luck.

BRAVO

The Service & Support section of the site is outstanding. It features excellent documentation—written in clear, concise language—on all products and easily downloadable patches and upgrades.

Unlike some sites that strain to create “Web 2.0″ content, Autodesk really seems to be using its 2.0 capabilities in a smart way. Well-executed interactive content such as demos, Tips & Tricks, and product overviews engage users and provide quality information.

No review of Autodesk.com is complete without a mention of its excellent user communities in a section called Area. An easy registration process gives users access to a well-designed world of specialized content that includes separate areas for topics (3D Animation, Civil Engineering, etc.) and user groups (students, partners, resellers, etc.) in addition to discussions and blogs.

TRY AGAIN

A beautifully designed home page gives way to subsequent page levels featuring a distractingly narrow column of text with photos that look like they’re patched in with MS clip art. We were also troubled by the UE on the pages themselves—subheads that looked clickable but weren’t, and vice versa.

A bigger distraction for us was the inconsistent tone of the content. Formal in some cases and informal in others, the uneven writing made it unclear who the audience is. For example, much of the site is written in fairly technical language, but in places, fairly common terms such as API are spelled out. We’re pretty sure that most users who come to Autodesk know what an API is.

A final beef is that users must purchase products through a reseller; there’s no way to purchase Autodesk products online. Though we understand the complicated dynamics of partner/channel selling, we think that there’s got to be some way to work it out so that Autodesk.com can turn prospects into customers—immediately.