Web 2.0 is Dead

September 13, 2012 by Leave a comment

You Don’t hear much about web 2.0 which was all the rage a few years ago. The concept of having a dynamic content management system for frequent updating to keep the content of a website dynamic and fresh is no longer sufficient. Technology moves fast and you can’t get any faster than real-time dynamic user generated content. This is why web 2.0 is dead and community 2.0 is alive and thriving. The introduction of Twitter and the mobile evolution has changed the way we consume data. We expect it to be dynamically served to us based on our preference and then we will engage when we find something interesting.

A recent Havard Business Review blog post by Bill Lee Marketing is Dead made me really start thinking about tis as I thought traditional marketing was dead 4 years ago. The more I thought about it the more I realized that not only is the way we market dead it has changed to how we engage and build relationships. So, what is next? Peer review and collaboration and I don’t think you have to look further than Amazon.com to find example of this as rudimentary as it is. Taking the web 2.0 platform and integrating a robust community experience is where digital marketing is headed. We as consumers don’t want to receive email blasts anymore and we don’t want to download your latest whitepaper. What we want is to search, find and discuss and you can’t do that with a static website.

If we look at consumers (inclusive of B2B as well) buying process, what we find is a desire for confirmation that the solution we have found via search is indeed the best fit for our need. That confirmation comes from peer review and user generated content. When I find a product that I believe has the specifications to suite my desire I want to talk to someone else who already bought the product and can verify if it was good, bad or ugly. What you will see companies doing very soon is integrating their social and community member discussion into their product pages on the website so there can be this dynamic user generated content to help confirm a prospects solution.

This accomplishes a few things. It opens up the transparency of your company product line to peer consumption and advocacy engagement with other potential prospects, ultimately shortening your sales cycle. Traditional marketing use to spend hours of effort finding and writing case studies for customers, then hoping others would read them. The case study is dead. Eliminate the middle man and put your prospects in direct contact with your brand advocates and let them sell the solution for you. While you’re at it put your customers in direct contact with your product engineers for dynamic product innovation.

This isn’t all without effort, but it will be a more efficient use of marketing dollars and with an infinite return on investment. A robust community, community management , content curation and strong advocacy program will be needed but you and your target audience will appreciate the direct access and honest engagement.

Filed under B2B Marketing, B2C Marketing, Community Engagement, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Web Strategy Tagged with , , , , , ,

Gamification for Communities

May 22, 2012 by Leave a comment

A few weeks ago we integrated the Badgeville gamification engine into our Jive community to recognize, award and motivate our community members for their participation. We launched project R.A.M.P official this week and our largest event in Las Vegas… So far the results have been nothing short of outstanding. The interest and excitement from our members to participate in the defined missions far exceeded my expectations. I haven’t had a chance to deep dive into the data analytics just yet but preliminary results suggest more members are interested in completing and viewing the profile as well as an increase of 25% in reply to discussions. I am a firm believer that social media and community programs are complimentary to existing traditional marketing programs. So, when we decided to launch rewards and recognition at our event it not only created an excitement for those attending the event it provided a renewed interest for engagement. 

It is a simple concept to recognize those who contribute the most and adding a leader board which features those members as the most active contributors seems to be a big kudos the our community members. However, the most intreguing result has been the outreach of our community members suggesting missions and actions that they would like to participate. Many of these comments have helped us define our Elite Program to engage our most active contributors. They have requested everything from speding a week in our development labs, to getting access to product engineers as well as roadmaps. This is exactly what technical community engineers and professionals want and what most companies would love to have. A passionate and experienced customer base to help innovate better products. When I launched communities five years ago the primary purpose was to connect our customer base with our product management teams for real-time product evaluation and feedback throughout the developement cycle. This agile methodology not only allows our customers to feel more engaged and responsible for the products they are implementing but also help innovate better features for product releases.

 

Stay tuned for more as I continue to monitor the progress and have a chance to provide some in depth metrics from our results.

Filed under B2B Marketing, Community Engagement, Gamification, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

What is Community 2.0?

April 3, 2012 by Leave a comment

Imagine by John Lennon painted a picture of what life might look like without barriers, silos of war and religion and everyone just accepted each other as they were. Now, imagine being able to engage in conversations across all communities, twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or any other social property also without silos or barriers. Communities are evolving and are not limited to just discussion forums. Engaging conversations are occurring all over the social web which can be tough to find and engage if you aren’t listening. However, this is really easy to do. There are several tools that allow you to monitor the web for specific keywords (either positive or negative in sentiment) and allow you to respond in real-time.

 

Engaging in those conversations allow you to act as a social concierge and help answer or even guide discussions to where helpful resources and or knowledge experts might reside. There was an interesting comment on VirtualGeek Blog where someone had said how it could be difficult to navigate the web for answers across all the social properties available. This is where a content linking and syndication strategy can help casting a wider web with links all back to a central location for information. So, when someone performs a search they may get multiple hits across twitter, Facebook, .COM and images but ultimately they all lead back to the relevant conversation regardless where they click.

 

Now, if we assume this web search is performed by a prospect or even an existing customer, then they are probably already made the decision of what it is they want. What most web visitors are looking for is confirmation that their choice and solution is the correction solution for solving their challenge. So, what if when we navigated to the product page of a website we could see community conversations about similar topics and peers discussing the same challenge we were looking to solve. Not only can that visitor engage directly with peers who may have already solved this problem they may innovate new solutions the company hadn’t considered. Guess what? You not only just reduced your sales cycle by providing a customer reference of someone who has already solved the challenge but may have also helped drive creative product innovation via peer collaboration.

 

This is Community 2.0: Where prospects looking for a solution, can engage with customers who already have the solution and then are transformed into product advocates to help drive better and more innovated products. These three social personas (Prospects, Customers and Advocates) are transforming how companies do business and interact with their customers. This is Community 2.0.

 

How are you engaging your community?

Filed under B2B Marketing, Community Engagement, Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

Twitter Flash Mob: A Social Experiment

February 17, 2012 by Leave a comment

My colleagues and twitter nation had a little mischievous fun this week. Over the last few years most large technology events have some sort of Twitter board that streams the event member tweets using a particular hashtag. So as a colleague of mine was watching the twitter monitor he decided to send a tweet and watch it appear. Then he thought began thinking how many tweets would it take to dominate the twitter board for a short period of time. And so the Twitter Flash Mob concept was born. Given the relationship of the event sponsors and the demographic of the attendees an inside joke tweet was created based on a poorly translated arcade game phrase (#AYBABTU) that became and internet phenomenon. Clearly as I collaborate toward a holistic localization strategy for communities this is a good example of how important it is to get translations correct.

#AYBABTU

All your base are belong to us

So, the concept of a Twitter Flash Mob came to light and several of us in the network decided to send the same tweet all at the same time to see what would happen to the twitter display. I can only say it was a tremendous success and those that were familiar with AYBABTU had a good laugh and even those who didn’t, still found it amusing to watch. There is a great write-up and video of the event from the creative genius who had the original idea here Social Media Experiment 1 TbaaS.  Check it out it is pretty cool.

However, I now know what consequences we might expect from our friends at our next event which could get interesting.

Filed under B2B Marketing, Social Media, Twitter Tagged with , , , ,

Communicating Social Media Guidelines

June 30, 2011 by 1 Comment

When we all jumped into building marketing strategies for Social Media a few short years ago coming up with policies and guidelines was the first place we started. And because there wasn’t any precedent for these guidelines we often made them up and remember mine were five bullets in a PowerPoint deck. Basically, it said be professional, be yourself and don’t be stupid or vulgar. But that was the easy part.

The challenge for most organizations is to encourage the participation with clear guidelines. EMC Corp. today launched a good example of this on YouTube (I didn’t have anything to do with the creation of this video but some really smart people I know did) in a fun, fresh and entertaining way to educate and enable employees to participate in social media engagement without fear. The title is “Evolution of Conversation: Social Engagement @ EMC”. This short video was timely launched on Social Media Day #SMDAY, great marketing strategy there folks, and a great peak into a large company setting the bar for social engagement.

I was fortunate enough to join the SocialMedia.org team in San Francisco last week where several large companies got together to talk everything social. We have come a long way in the last few years and have moved the social media marketing conversation internally from “what if someone says something bad about us” to “how can be better engage our customers in conversation.” This is a huge leap in a short time for Social Media Marketing.

So, how are you spending your Social Media Day #SMDAY?

Filed under B2B Marketing, Marketing Communication, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

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