Axero Pulse » Business

Social Community Software For Business Marketing Strategy

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:00:54 +0000

A Valuable Lesson In Community Building For Your Business & Gaining The Upper Hand With Search Engines

Those of you who regularly read updates on our blog may have read the post titled “Social Networking For Businesses & Advertising Space – Is Your Online Community Space Really Your Own?” where we discussed the risk associated with building a community on a hosted social networking website or a third party network which you may have little administrative control over. While it doesn’t happen to everyone who has a Facebook group or a community hosted by a Saas company the possibility is there and it’s a risk that needs to be considered.

Communities that have been built for businesses are often fragmented across different websites as we have said often and mainly because these websites and networks offer a ready base of users and traffic that would have been difficult or needed more time to cultivate. It’s easier to go to Facebook or to Linkedin where your customers are rather than go through the process of getting them to your site and that’s what most would do. There is however an important marketing lesson to note here:

When you build a business website, all the content that goes on the website and all the content created as a result of activity on the website by others accounts for some value as far as search engines like Google go. Google notes the content on your website whether it’s blogs or discussion forums, documents, comments and so on and this has an impact on the page rank or how valuable a resource your website is seen as. Considering this is a very important strategy for generating better search traffic which can account for more customers and more sales, ideally, you need to keep as much of your activity and content on your own website.

The mistake that many tend to make is overlook this fact and they end up having a blog like yourblogblog.wordpress.com or yourblog.blogspot.com a community like yourcommunity.ning.com and articles posted at yourarticlesarticles.ezinearticles.com. While all of these are still helpful and a small portion of the traffic will still find itself to the main company website by way of links and banners, part of the search advantage from all this content is lost out to the sites that these communities are hosted on where this content is finally posted.

When you use a social software platform which can be integrated into your own business website, you essentially build all your community and content assets into your website and search engines trace all of this to one location or website. That could be blog.yourwebsite.com, articles.yourwebsite.com, resources.yourwebsite.com, community.yourwebsite.com, forums.yourwebsite.com and eventually you ensure that your website is a single valuable online resource for those searching for relevant information also giving you the upper hand with search engines.

While continuing to build communities on other websites is a good strategy to continue with alongside your main social marketing strategy, the emphasis should be on building value starting in your own back yard which in this case is your primary business website. After all that is where you ultimately want your customers and prospective customers to go and that’s where you expect to start the sales process. If you’re out building a community, keep it close!

Social Software For Managing Customer Relationships

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:00:39 +0000

Keep Your Prospects Close & Your Customers Even Closer – The New Social Enterprise 2.0 Mantra

Customer relationship management is more traditionally synonymous with one-on-one communication with customers through various medium both online and offline. With the development of enterprise social networks and active business online communities, this is where a lot of the customer service is happening and also where customer relationships are strengthened and molded. This transparent interaction between customers and a business has picked up with more businesses using social enterprise software to build strong online communities and communication channels with their customers.

Don Hinchcliffe recently wrote in a post on the zdnet blogs on the topic of social CRMs:

For its part, Social CRM paints a vision of creating a deeper and more engaging community-based relationship with your customers, instead of the traditional approach of managing them, in a very Cluetrain Manifesto way. Part online community, part crowd sourcing, part customer service, Social CRM can create an emergent, collaborative online partnership with customers that can result in an array of improvements to business performance.

Online communities and enterprise social networks are virtual places where a business and its customer connect and engage in communication. The main difference as compared to traditional customer relationships is it’s more transparent and community driven as against the one on one communication. The dialog and interaction between customers is the driving force and they are the ones actively leading the process and that is something businesses need to understand in order to get it right. Used to the push sales tactics and driving customers actions by directing or managing communications is something companies need to be leave behind with social customer relationship management and they will have to learn to take a back seat and let the customers drive most of the activity.

Setting the basic guidelines and providing the platform is the first role of businesses and that can be done by starting online discussions, creating topics and being the catalyst in getting an active community going where the customers know they can freely interact with each other as well as the business. Once an active community is in place, gathering intelligence from the activity is equally important. This is where tools like “online polls” can come in handy while gathering more quantitative data. In a community however, though not quantitative, a lot of the intelligence is right there in the form of comments, posts, questions and other content posted on the platform. Questions on products directly to the business or even other customers could be an indication of interest in a product and building a solid process on gathering such intelligence and making it actionable information is something that needs to be worked on.

Whether it’s customer service, sales or marketing, each function can benefit tremendously from a well built online community and getting customers to participate more closely with the business. The software platforms are easily available and technically a social customer relationship management system can be put into place. The people and process is the bigger challenge and once you have that rolling, you’re on the way to building better, stronger relationships with your customers.

Member Profiles In Social Networking

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:00:44 +0000

Putting A Face To Social Networking For Business

It’s amazing how many people we work with everyday and do business with are people we have never physically seen or met with in person. With every passing year, this number seems to increase with more people opting to work from home, customers who you’ve connected with through email or phone calls, offshore colleagues and contacts you’ve made through social networks. In larger organizations it’s not uncommon to have co-workers who you’ve never met and you know them as another name on the intranet. Personal contact in business is slowly becoming a scarce interaction as we communicate and collaborate increasingly online. It’s still good to have a face you can put to a person you are working with and that face in today’s context is the user or member profile.

The profile is your online identity and though some may feel it’s not as relevant in the business environment as it may be on MySpace or Facebook, I would differ. With the spread of business interaction on social networks, many valuable connections happen online and the profile is very much what forms the first impressions. Whether you’re on Twitter, Linkedin, someone’s blog or your company’s social software based Intranet, you instinctively look up a person’s profile to learn more about them and decision on whether to connect with them and start a conversation is often influenced by what you take from their profile. While the nature of social software is based on human interaction, the lack of being able to put a face and personality to the person you are working with can play some role in building a level of comfort and trust. Once you’ve seen a photo you can associate with and learned a bit about them through their profile information, it puts you at ease and helps you identify with the person despite not having met.

This may seem a very small point in the scheme of things but it’s very important to working online because it’s what we do naturally offline. When you first connect with someone in your working life you first try to size them up, know something about them which will allow you identify who they are, what are their likes, what are their dislikes and you’ll tread cautiously till you have some idea. We look for the same when we work online. Even before speaking to someone for the first time, you would like to have a brief profile which would help you understand a bit about them and that’s why they are still an important part of social software based website even if it is for business.

So while some traditional corporate Intranets may still avoid a member profile feature in their software, in the world of “social” business we like having a human touch to our interactions and like having a personality we can associate with the people we work with. Don’t you?

The Role Of Community Software In The Online Marketing Strategy

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:00:49 +0000

Why Your Online Community Can Be Your Most Valuable Online Marketing Weapon?

Budgets for online marketing are divided among the several options available from spending on more direct advertising, sponsoring banners and buying Google Adwords to spending on SEO, social media marketing and similar tools. While each business works out its balance with the right mix of these it’s good to take an aerial view of the external community for customers and partners and understand it’s role in the overall online marketing context.

Here is a typical flow of an online marketing strategy:

first generate awareness –> accelerate branding online –> generate interest (generate sales leads) –> engage customers / nurture interest (or sales leads) –> retain customers and deliver customer service / support

If this is the objective of a marketing plan, then where would “building and online community” fit into the marketing equation?

Surprisingly, almost through all these stages! While with the right SEO techniques an online community can also generate early awareness among potential customers, one would typically attribute those costs to SEO, online advertising, email campaigns, newsletters, PPC campaigns and more push based campaigns. When it comes to online advertising like PPC, Adwords, banners much like offline advertising like print, television and radio, they are effective for a very limited time period.

That aside, they can only communicate a very small (limited) marketing message and still be very expensive. In case of Adwords, it’s usually a word or two, on television a few seconds, in print a limited number of words and pictures and so on. Eventually, to go beyond just creating initial interest you need to direct people to a place where they can get a lot more information and where you can communicate a more complete message whether a salesperson, landing page or website.

Providing customers and users with an external community to come together, collaborate and have discussions goes much beyond simply providing more information around your business the way a static company website would do. Other than providing customers with a platform to interact and share, it provides marketing with a platform to execute on many stages of an effective online marketing initiative.

Accelerating Branding: Social software platforms for businesses and building communities tap into word of mouth effect and sharing aspect which has made web 2.0 technologies stand out in today’s world. Companies that offer an external community for their customers on partners on their website have observed that after working on building their initial membership, the community in turn helps spread the word and attract a larger base of users with similar interest around the website. Features such as RSS, sharing posts, photos, videos and other content through email and other social sites trigger the spread of awareness about the community and results in a growth in the number of users. In turn, there is an ever increasing number of users who are aware about a business’s brand.

Generating Interest & Generating Sales Leads: While this can also be done by a more static website which can carry a lot of information which can drive interest, an social software based website has the added advantage of a variety of web 2.0 content such as on demand video, podcasts, webcasts, discussions, blogs and more which can all add to helping sell the business and quite indirectly as compared to a sales person. A product or business which is clearly backed by a community of customers becomes an attractive option to any user who can clearly see third party support and not just representatives from the business saying it’s good because they work there. With the ability to freely interact with other customers, ask questions, get opinions and find solutions to problems on the community, it can be an extremely effective tool in selling.

Engaging Customers / Nurturing Leads: Perhaps the area where an online community platform can score over any other solution, keeping customers engaged and having their attention over prolonged periods of time is where many marketing organizations let potential business slip through. Even after initial awareness, a user will only buy if they need something offered immediately. As for all the others, you need a way to keep them engaged and nurture them till they are ready to buy. Whether to develop customer loyalty or to nurture potential customers till they are ready to buy, building an online community is a great solution to hold on to your customers.

Customer Retention / Customer Service: A well-built external community for customers can go on to deliver customer support and customer service which ultimately results in satisfaction. Creating a central resource of support documents, building a knowledge base and providing a platform for them to find solutions to not just issues around products or services but a wider support platform where the community helps each other can result in happy existing customers as well as other users who can turn customers.

With social community software platforms being such versatile tools for marketers to execute on their various objectives, more businesses are pushing their online communities as one of the most prominent features of their websites. Used in combination with advertising and other media to reach out to customers, it provides a central base to gather, nurture and hold onto a business’s most valuable component…..it’s customers.

Social Networking For Business – How Big Is The Audience?

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:00:33 +0000

Creating A Social Software Environment That Allows Everyone To Participate

When considering a social software plan, one of the questions we’ve observed that businesses have is … “how big is their target online audience?” … and that is high on the list of criteria while determining if it makes sense to invest in a community or social software platform for their business. After all, if they are to focus their time and energies on engaging audiences online, they need to know if that audience is big enough to put in this effort. The answer we believe is….YES — there is a big enough audience out there for just about any business, and social software is a great way to engage them. Just to put this into perspective — based on research they conducted for a 2009 report, Forrester’s Groundswell blog says:

“More than four in five US adults online now participate socially”

That is saying something! The Groundswell blog post “Social technology growth marches on in 2009, led by social network sites ” also carried the very interesting “Social Technographics Ladder,” which gives an insight into the types of people one is likely to find participating socially online.

What is interesting from the point of view of businesses looking to build a community around their websites as part of their social marketing plan, is that they attract participation and cater to almost all these various profiles providing something for everyone.

It’s a platform for Creators both from within the business or external users (who have signed up) such as customers or experts in the field to publish blogs, articles, videos, podcast and other content. The creators are an essential component of any successful social plan as they contribute towards the content and are the ones responsible for starting conversations and igniting discussion. In the social networking and community software environment it’s easy to open up this role to external users and allow virtually any member to contribute as a creator, taking the burden away from internal resources and employees who would otherwise be solely responsible for driving content.

Critics are an equally important part of the equation as you always need their comments, reviews, and participation to carry on a discussion -or- create the activity within the community website. They drive the discussion, and it’s often their participation that intrigues others interest of Joiners and Spectators who may not directly join the conversation but are nevertheless interested in the discussion and activity. Collectors add value in the form of distributing content, creating wider awareness and contributing in some form to the activity.

As a business, you launch individual social initiatives, such as actively using Twitter, starting a single blog or posting a video, you are essentially the only “Creator” and you work towards attracting spectators, joiners, and critics. Those are the roles left open for your community to fill. With the social networking and community software option however, participants can select the role they wish to play within the community — and automatically, some will actively contribute as creators and critics while some may become joiners and others only as spectators. The key is for you provide a platform that includes everyone — and let them decide what capacity they would like to participate.

So what kind of a participant are you?

Policy And Implementing It On Social Business Communities

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:00:49 +0000

Online Social Business Communities & Mitigating Legal Risks They Can Bring Up

A online discussion started by a community manager for his company’s internal social network brought out an issue which is critical to the smooth operation of online communities both internal and external. One of the users on their internal business website network copied and pasted an article off another site possibly without realizing it’s a copyright violation. When you build a community for the business and have a number of different users actively adding to content, linking and posting, there are almost always a risk for copyright infringement in some form or the other. Even if not deliberate, not everyone will be as aware about copyright and licensing issues as the next person and without moderation of every single post and activity before publishing (which is not viable for most) it’s always possible some copyright violation happens on the site which can snowball into messy situation with the owners of the content.

It’s clear that it may not be possible to be 100% sure this doesn’t happen so the objective is always to mitigate the risk and ensure that everyone is aware of it. This is done through educating users and putting in a policy. While most people may not directly be involved with plagiarism, something as simple as adding a picture for a blog post they published and later discovering that picture was copyrighted is enough to start a legal course of action.

It’s important to create a comprehensive policy which explains things like use of images. video, the need to use quotes and references while using extracts of other peoples work and it’s just as important to be able to explain this is simple terms. If every user that signs up is made aware of the policy for using the community or network the risk of them doing any of this (at least knowingly) is reduced. However, it’s good to be able to consider and account for what can be done should this still happen. What do you do if there is still content posted which is a violation of policy or copyrights?

This is where administrative capabilities come in handy. If your community platform has good administrative capabilities it gives you the option to step in and moderate content and user activities where it’s really required. If the software being used doesn’t give you moderation abilities, it can put you in a tough spot knowing something needs to be done but doesn’t let you take any action before someone else does.

A number of platforms put together by assembling various open source software components don’t offer this level of administration which is then really not suitable in a business situation where you, as a business, are held more accountable for everything published online. It’s like having the most comprehensive policy in place and not having the ability to implement it. The ability to moderate the community and content is the last line of defense against issues caused by such copyright violations.

Here are a few things that can be done to reduce the risk of copyright and content duplication:

Develop a user policy which is easy to understand and ensure all users have read the policy on sign up
Re-enforce the policy through offline training for internal networks where location is not an issue and by discussing it on the community where it’s not possible to educate users offline
Have a community manager or moderator who is assigned the responsibility of scanning the activity and content on the site daily and raising a red flag for any violation of the policy
Contact users who have violated policy through internal messaging or email so they understand what the risks of their actions are.
Moderate and take down any copyrighted content as soon as possible as a last resort

With a good user policy, constant awareness and the ability to implement the policy and keep the site clean and free from legal issues unwanted trouble can be kept at bay.

Ownership Of Social Networks

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:00:51 +0000

Third Party Social Networks Vs Business Owned
Communities As A Social Marketing Strategy

If there is one lesson that has held true for social marketing, it’s that you have to learn to rely on customers to drive it for you — they will always have control. The third party social software space, which includes all the big social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, form a massive platform for people with common interests to get together and start conversations. If some of those people are your customers and the topic of conversation involves your business, that’s a big concern for you … right? This is a big concern shared by many businesses all over the world. Customers are likely to start conversations around your business with or without the businesses involvement, so the real challenge is “how can a business get more involved in this conversation” and have greater control over their social networks.

Building a community on a social network can be a great way to build a closer relationship with customers, build brand advocates from a customer base, and also help provide a platform to communicate closed loop marketing. Unfortunately, third party social networks only provide limited control — and businesses may find it very challenging to achieve these objectives without a greater degree of administrative control over their community and content.

This is where business owned, hosted social networks score over a third party community. It gives you better control over the content and direction of the conversation around your business — although not complete control over the actual conversation itself (which defeats the purpose of involving customers). A number of social marketing experts have said that customers are constantly looking for place to discuss their experiences and share views with other customers like them.

With third party networks for a business, even as an administrator, you have just as much influence over the activity and conversation as any other member on the network. It has its advantages in the ease of which it can grow, owing to the large size of the parent social network — but from the businesses point of view, it provides very little room to achieve specific marketing objectives and very little control.

While in theory, the business may be termed a group owner or administrator on a third party website — it’s very important to understand that privately owned and hosted social networks offer a far greater degree of ownership in it’s true sense, and from a marketing stand point, that’s the level of ownership you need. So, while investing in a comprehensive social marketing program (while third party social networks will still play some role), investing in building a business owned and managed social network offers some clear advantages for marketing to tap into and build those stronger relationships with customers.

They include:

Better administrative control over content and conversations
More control over the direction of the community
Greater ownership and control over the space which can be used for branding and marketing messages
Can be integrated with your other software platforms
Can be customized and scaled along with the growing community
Communities can be divided in to strategic sub-communities to enable more focused targeted marketing
More control over the software also enables the implementation of more analytic and tracking tools to measure effectiveness of marketing and attribute results to specific areas like blogs, message boards, photo sharing, RSS and so on

While both third party and business owned communities are important components of the social marketing mix, if you are looking for a way to control the online conversation around your business and take control of the social marketing direction, a community that is managed and owned by your business can help you claim that control.

Social Networking as a platform for e-learning

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:00:39 +0000

Social Networking Vs Learning Management Systems As A Platform For Businesses Learning & Development

It is said the best kind of learning comes from participation and interacting with others. The learning that doesn’t come from having to study a prescribed course, but rather comes from sharing what you know and taking what you can learn from others in a collaborative environment. E-learning is usually associated with the former structured learning modules delivered through learning management systems and e-learning software platforms. These software platforms are great in the sense that they are geared towards structured learning and are well equipped to measure whether the knowledge has been delivered effectively through tests and other tools. There is a new competitor in the software arena, equally capable of delivering great learning … can you guess what kind of software this is? You got it … social networking platforms.

Let’s assume you are a software developer working on a project assigned to you. In the traditional business online learning environment, one would perhaps log in to the learning management system, select the courses relevant to the project requirements (or be assigned courses), go through the content within those modules, and then take a test to measure the learning. The objective is to equip you with the knowledge that you may need, given the tasks you have ahead. The courses and content are professionally designed according to the training and development objectives of the business.

In a similar scenario with a social networking platform, one would typically log in and collaborate with others on a project using the social network as the common working space. If you have questions or seek some information, you simply log into the network, pick the information you need from archived articles, reference documents, FAQ pages, or other content, much the way one would use a library.

Then there are the more interactive options of messaging questions to someone on the network, starting a discussion group, posting a question to a forum, chatting with other humans, and interacting with others to find answers. This format is based on a mentoring system, where just about anyone within the network can assume the role of a mentor and share knowledge.

This sharing based learning is extended, being able to post informative documents, blog posts, videos and links to other sites within the network to share what you’ve learned with others in the group. This in itself makes sure the best content and learning resources available online get shared on the social network, and the site itself becomes a rich resource of knowledge that is there for members to learn from.

Both of these software platforms offer a medium for learning and development, they have their strengths and weaknesses, but it’s worth noting they offer a different form of learning. LMS offers structured learning, which is more ‘push’ based, and social networks offer ‘pull’ (self service) learning, based on sharing and interaction with others. It can easily be compared to the kind of learning you encounter in a professional institution or that you encounter while working or interacting with colleagues, friends, and other social situations. In conclusion, both of these kinds of learning are essential to an all round development of knowledge, and both LMS and social networking software platforms will find a place in the learning and development frameworks of businesses.

Community Social Software – Towards Two Way Marketing Communications

Tim Eisenhauer — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:07:58 +0000

Turning Your Marketing Communication Into A Marketing Conversation With Community Social Software

I came across an interesting statement while browsing through conversations in a community on social software. It came from a sales communication professional working with a global hotel chain — and having seen marketing sales communications in the industry evolve in the 17 years she has worked there, she observed:

“Nowadays, no one wants another newsletter, so we’re hoping to make our online community a robust forum for sharing ideas and best practices in a conversational format.”

Marketing and sales communications are going through a change, just as they did some years ago with email and newsletters. As peoples in-boxes are flooded with marketing messages and SPAM’s, the effectiveness of these mediums have taken a beating over the last few years. Despite the practice of opt-in email marketing becoming more widely accepted, people who have been bombarded by push-based marketing communication are now moving towards pull based forms, where they can search for and consume the content that they are interested in rather than receiving these communications from businesses. The other real drawback that automated email marketing and newsletters have is in today’s context of Web 2.0 and social software, where conversation is the mantra — these mediums are more one-way communication.

Selling today is more about being able to solve your customers problems and less about pitching a product or service hoping they will take the bait — and this is where more traditional marketing and sales communication is losing out where online communities and social software enabled websites are making ground quickly. Communities that offer a platform for dialog between businesses, customers, and other stakeholders rely on this conversational approach and hope to solve problems and provide solutions to customers. It offers a platform to build stronger relationships with customers and helps them build trust in the businesses through this two-way conversation.

Communities used for marketing conversation can help address the challenge that many businesses face today with the change that’s become apparent with the way customers respond to newsletters and similar channels. Through blogs, forums, document sharing, videos, and other rich content that customers can simply access when they have a requirement or problem they need to address, business can strike those conversations using their community platforms. It needs a dedicated effort and may not be an instant shift, but the online community is looking like the platform of choice for customers and businesses — and marketing and sales communications will be more conversation centric in the days to come.

The Licensing Cost Reduction Angle Of Social Software Communities For Business

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:04:31 +0000

The Impact Of Social Software & Online Communities On Enterprises Suffering From Inflated Software Licensing Costs

There are several financial arguments for taking a social networking platform for business and investing in building an internal collaboration platform or internal community for an enterprise or business. There is reduction in travel expenses, creating a better communication platform which can reduce phone expenses, allow for flexibility of employee and partner location, reducing workspace costs and more. To really be able to justify investing in an internal social software platform to the financial heads of a business there needs to be a strong case but with clear cost benefits, it comes across as a sensible move. Let’s take a closer look into just one cost that several enterprise businesses spend a small fortune on “software licensing costs”.

In a typical enterprise business environment, you’ll find different kinds of stakeholders –including different types of employees, partners and so on. They may each have very different computing requirements: some quite basic and some may need more extensive software capabilities. Yet, most businesses issue similar hardware and provide standard installations of software across the board.

Now, an employee in sales may need the latest version of Microsoft Office and SharePoint to create and upload sales presentations and share documents, but someone in another function may not. The practice or need to install a fresh license of collaboration and communication software like SharePoint, Lotus Notes and other groupware for every new employee or stakeholder that’s now part of the wider organizational network can be expensive.

Just imagine in a larger organization how much that could add up in license fees each year? To think some of the employees may need an additional user license just so that they can use the internal messaging, instant messaging, or group notification function within the organization, is it really a justified cost?

This is where social networking and business collaboration software can play a crucial role in reducing unwarranted licensing costs. By migrating a lot of the common everyday internal collaboration and communication functions to an internal social software platform and making that the core internal interaction platform for the business the dependency on more expensive licensed copies of other software can be drastically reduced. Once that dependency on that software is gone, it will end up being used only where it is really required and doesn’t have to be used across the board just because that’s the standard internal platform the company works on. Most businesses have been stuck in this trap of having to invest a considerable licensing fee every time they add on a user or need to scale perhaps for a lack of a better solution. Now that there is good solution that is cost effective, scalable, and makes good financial sense, should we still be paying those inflated licensing costs each year?