7Summits Agency

An online community can create long lasting deep relationships with your key stakeholders. These stakeholders (your customers, employees, suppliers and partners) are all connected to you through relationships, and a community can add tremendous measurable value to these relationships.  Successful communities have several proven benefits including:

• Increased customer retention and loyalty through ongoing engagement that comes with building brand-centered communities.
• Shortened sales cycles, delivered by making critical assets and subject matter experts more easily accessible.
• Greatly improved attraction, engagement and retention of employees, ranging from highly optimized recruiting, to shortened time-to-productivity for new hires, to more effectively connecting a global workforce.
• Accelerated time-to-market (and time-to-revenue) by aligning innovation more directly with market demand. The result is new and derivative products, that your customers want, delivered to the market faster than your competition.
• Lower support costs by providing an open environment where other customers or partners can help address problems, dramatically improving your customer support team’s productivity.

To enjoy the above benefits, there are a few do’s and don’ts that will help drive your community to success, we have highlighted the most important points below.

Do:

• Begin with specific community objectives, that directly align to your business goals.  Clearly understanding what you are trying to accomplish, will ensure a more effective strategy.
• Provide excellent content that is open and free, while still giving your visitors a reason to join. (ie: exclusive content or discussions, tools, advice, etc)
• Create an activation and content strategy to steadily grow your community.  Start by recruiting thought leaders and advocates that align with your objectives.  Find these advocates by implementing a social listening program that identifies the specific influencers in your industry, then build an activation and content strategy around them.
• Implement sharing and referral functionality to facilitate word of mouth, and organic growth.
• Implement a system that rewards contributors. Community is based on user generated content, and rewarding contributors ensures a steady stream of new content and discussions.

Don’t:

• Launch your community without a beta group. Many communities are launched without involving users in the design of the community. This philosophy that “we know better than they do” is a sure-fire way to slow things down and leave members disappointed. Be sure to continually evolve the community based on member feedback and ideas.
• Offer up poor or excessive moderation. Some communities launch with the presumption that they themselves can hyper-activate the community, get everyone logging in, and things will start to happen all on their own. Do not assume the members will do all the work from the start or that they don’t need content or assistance after they have joined. On the other end of the spectrum, do not excessively moderate all UGS –that is a big turn off as well.
• Employ an inexperienced moderator. Some communities launch (especially business sponsored ones) and they just pull in anyone who happens to be “on the bench” to moderate the community. Underutilized employees do not make good moderators!

The process of creating a successful flourishing community is still a work in progress, and will continually evolve as technology, people, and the ways we work change.  With that said the above points are basics that for the most part won’t change, employ these basics and begin to see your relationships with your stakeholders grow.