Online Communities - New Trend for 2008

2007 has been the year for enterprise social media to finally reach the radar for many Enterprise Marketers, but I suspect that 2008 will be the year that online community and enterprise social media is adopted across the organization. We are seeing more and more organizations looking to manage their relationships with their customers, partners, vendors, and internal communications more effectively.

The key to success is approaching online community development strategically. Make your decisions based upon business priorities, not features. If you don't know what a "wiki" is, chances are you don't need one. What you need is a better collaboration tool. Features follow functions which follow business requirements. If you start with a business problem and then lead with a business solution that incorporates technology, you are 80% towards a successful technology implementation.

Share with me your success stories and your not-so-success stories.

Matthew Rosenhaft

VP Marketing

CoreSpeed

www.corespeed.com

What does Community do for Me?

Interesting week at PhocusWright Conference last week. For those of you not familiar, PhocusWright is the travel industry conference. CoreSpeed attended and had a market stand at the the conference. Interest how a few months makes a world of difference. Online Community and Social Media was the hot topic of the conference. Almost everyone I spoke with, not only understood online community, but was already working through plans to incorporate online community into their online strategy.

Interaction

Travel 2.0, like its bretheren Web 2.0 and Marketing 2.0 and CRM 2.0, all are about user empowerment with better interaction, better information, and control over how they choose to interact. Online Community is the right vehicle to drive better interactivity, user generated content, and search engine optimization (organic). Coupled with all the elements of a good marketing strategy, an online community provides the glue to tie all of the marketing elements together for a WOW! customer experience.

User Generated Content

Does anyone read the canned testimonials on company websites anymore? It is not like anyone is going to post the ones that aren't glowing with overwhelming praise. What about the ones that have 75% right and one thing wrong? What about the ones that qualify the experience as only right for a specific type of customer. What about the one that requests something be fixed? It is counter intutitive, but we all place more emphasis one the recommendations that aren't perfect "too good to be true". I hear over and over that we don't want negative posts in our community. I agree with them, but the question also arrises that if they aren't posting them in your community, where are they posting them? On the net, on their blog, telling their friends, or worse writing an article? At least, if they post in the community, you have an opportunity to address it, correct it, and possibly turn into an opportunity to fix the problem for the next customer, AND possibly even turn that customer situation around with your responsiveness. OR you can do nothing and hope it goes away or unnoticed in the next google search a prospect does on your company.

Search Optimization

Let's face it, having a blog 4-5 years ago was interesting, today it will probably not be read. I saw a wild figure of 1.4 million new blog posts every day in the blogosphere. If you aren't showing up on the first couple pages of a google search in your category, you are not creating enough online footprint. Online community, if done correctly, creates a much larger online footprint. It also does it with long-tail keywords (non-top 50 words to describe your company). The reason is that by having multiple partners, customers, and prospects write about your company's value in their OWN words, they choose variations of the value proposition that apply to their industry and their particular niche. HENCE, they generate a lot of secondary key words that are associated with your core value proposition. Additionally, the community enables really good internal and external linking, both great for SEO.

Bottom Line

The web is constantly changing and this is the next evolution. If they aren't coming back to your website, or worse not coming to your website, or they are not getting the interaction they desire to feel comfortable enough to buy, then you should consider community. At the end of the day, the definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results. So, what are you doing differently to compete, differentiator yourself, and increase your opportunities?

Live from PhocusWright 2007 - Definition of Online Community

a forum to share (travel) tips, positive experiences, pictures and more.

www.europeASAP.com

Joe Dugan

Live from PhocusWright 2007 - Definition of Online Community

People from anywhere in the world who have a shared interest and access to a common internet site.

Cathy Carroll

united airlines

PhocusWright 2007 - Definition of Online Community

"Community"  is the concept of collaborating to learn and share.

Alaska Airlines

Live from PhocusWright 20...

Look for us at the Phocus...

Members See More Information

The CoreCommunity is much broader and deeper than you would think when you visit as a guest. As much as 90% of the activity happens in the groups and much of that happens in Private Groups set up by CoreSpeed and its partners who use the community for client communication, account management, project management, support, etc.

I would encourage you to REGISTER in the community and experience the value of participation in this online learning lab focused on applying online community and enterprise social media. We have recruited 40 or so partners, many who are still bringing their groups live, to lead facilitated discussions around particular functional  areas of the enteprise; like sales, marketing, support, operations, project management, human resources, IT, etc. We also talk about topics like adoption, actionable outcomes of the interactions in the community, integration to web content and other business systems like CRM, ERP, PM tools, etc.

Please register by clicking the button at the top right, fill out a profile, send a post introducing yourself, and engage in a group. The goal is for you to take away the value of how community could work for your organization.

I look forward to meeting you here in the community.

Regards,

Matthew Rosenhaft

VP Sales and Marketing

CoreSpeed

www.corespeed.com

(678)872-9950

www.corespeed.com

SEO and Community

I have been giving periodic updates for the Search Engine Page Indexing for the CoreCommunity (in particular www.google.com) as a kind of test case to showcase the power of an active community in terms of search optimization if done correctly.

Before we launched the www.corespeed.com/community, the CoreSpeed website had 47 pages indexed, no visability on the key words: enteprise social media, branded online community, learning lab, etc.

About 6 weeks into the launch of the community and 4 weeks past the syndication of the group blogs, the CoreCommunity now has 2490 pages indexed and CoreSpeed has over 2500 and is now visable on the first page of the key word searches under both web and blog searching.

For those of you not familiar with SEO, someone described this as going from 0 to 60 in less than 2 seconds.

This is in part the benefits of an active online community with the right RSS syndication, but also it is also attributed to the CoreSpeed Community building model based upon recruiting partners to co-lead the community and provide thought-leadership around how to apply to community to the various functions of a business; sales, marketing, project management, HR and recruiting, finance, operations, support, IT, etc. These partners ARE EXPERTS in their respective disciplines and have agreed to lead a facilitated discussion around best practices.

I encourage you to join the community and the individual groups as they are rapidly coming online with new content, new members, and building the value for each of the individual groups. If there isn't a group for your particular business function and you can see how community could aid your industry, please let us know if you would be interested in leading a group in the CoreCommunity.

Our goal is to develop the CoreCommunity as a thought leadership center around online community building and enterprise social media.

• You can contribute to the community blog
• You also can have a personal blog. A personal blog shows up on your page with posts routed to the community blog by default. You can opt for those to only be on your personal blog.
• If you already have a blog, you can display your External Blog here.