By Matthew Lees, Vice President and Analyst / Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group
Leveraging the potential of online communities and social media means:
1. Engaging customers with your brand and helping them hold informed and meaningful conversations about your company, your products, and your services wherever these conversations may arise. Your corporate Web site might be the center of your online universe, but it’s not the center of theirs. Sure, they come to your company-sponsored community, but they’re also talking about you in the other B2B and B2C communities they frequent, at social and professional networking sites, and inside the firewall on their company’s intranet.
2. Getting customer-related data to flow easily and appropriately between your own applications. Their data is in their community profiles and in your HR, CRM, sales automation, and other systems.
Integrating applications that share community content and customer data helps deliver on this potential. Integration is all about getting content to move in and out of the community, quickly and securely, to wherever else it may need to be…perhaps your corporate Web site, your service and support application, your CRM system, Facebook or LinkedIn, or wherever else your customers and their data are.
More and more companies are successfully integrating community content and data with other systems and networks. Here are a few examples:
• GlobalTravelBlog.com gives traveler enthusiasts an interactive,
map-based interface for finding posts of interest from experienced
travelers. The social media platform provider Awareness built this
mashup to integrate community content with Google Maps.
• Neutrogena lets its customers participate in its “Beautiful For Good”
community directly from Facebook, via an integrated application created
by LiveWorld, its community platform provider. If you’re a Facebook
aficionado, you don’t need to leave Facebook and go to the Beautiful
For Good site to participate.
• Logitech helps its customers find answers and solutions—whether these
reside in its own extensive knowledgebase or in its community forums—by
integrating its community platform (Lithium) and its knowledge
management system (RightNow Service). Search for “mouse problem,” and
you’ll be returned a single page that shows relevant and ranked matches
in both the Lithium-powered community and the RightNow-powered
knowledgebase. No more searching both areas separately. This
integration also helps Logitech’s support agents ensure there are no
unanswered questions in the discussion forums and lets them easily turn
effective customer-created solutions into more formal knowledgebase
articles.
Bryan,
Yes...we sure will be looking at the measurement of social media initiatives, wherever customer/brand interactions occur (i.e., in the company-sponsored community or elsewhere on the Web). Our focus will be on measuring the Impact -- we're in sync with you on the use of the "I" word -- on the business of such initiatives (as opposed to activity and "health" metrics, which do have their place, but are peripheral to what really matters).
- Matthew
Posted by: Matthew Lees | September 03, 2008 at 12:23 PM
Matthew,
Thank you for mentioning our integrated Facebook application. We think it can help companies such as Neutrogena meet the precise challenge that you mention: engaging with their customers or having them connect with each other in the places where they're already spending time online. Another challenge for those companies, too, is tracking and measuring the impact/results of those conversations and interactions on external sites and social networks.
Might this be something you'll cover in a follow-up post?
Posted by: Bryan Person, LiveWorld | September 02, 2008 at 04:43 PM
I think that most now agree that for content to remain effective and pertinent, it must actively include the insights of the people internal and external to an organization who actively use the content. Approaches that merely put a search engine over knowledge base and community generated content don’t work since the inherent deficiencies of either content remains. What is needed is knowledge base technology whose content has brand implications and requires editorial controls to put the proven Web 2.0 techniques into their technology, providing a truly collaborative KB 2.0 www.kb2dot0.com that leverages the wisdom of their community.
Posted by: Chuck Van Court | August 20, 2008 at 04:13 PM