The Social Journey of Community, Web and Why?

January 15, 2013 by Leave a comment

What is the “Social Journey” and why is it important to integrate community and web together? I realized that some of you may be asking that question why would I put my team and community through this process and spend the level of effort to make it happen. Well, The answer is 48% and that is justification enough but I feel like I need to explain this concept of “The Social Journey” first before I get into the details of why 48% is the answer. The social journey came about as a discussion between myself and a few peers two years ago. The conversation kind of started around importance of social to the business and how we could better engage our customers, prospects, identify specific user behavior to provide some type of predictive analytics to improve their user experience. Help our users find the information being searched quicker and then suggest other related products or solutions that may be complimentary to the initial inquiry. Then measure, wash, rinse and repeat. This was the original concept of “The Social Journey” and our conversation soon turned to how Amazon provides the “more like this” function and how peer reviews help the buyer make a quicker decision.

This is the social journey. It is how you help guide your digital visitors through research, prospecting, defining and architecting a solution, validating that the solution will solve the problem and then assist with the buying process. This is the first step of the social journey, the journey of the prospect through customer. The second leg of the social journey is nurturing the customer through their implementation experience to ensure solution exceeds their expectations and help them become a loyal customer. The third part of the social journey is engaging the loyal customer to continue to build the personal relationship and uplift the customers stats to a brand advocate. The difference between to the two is: a loyal customer likes your product and will buy your product again. A Brand Advocate will defend and advocate for your brand as a respected peer in the industry.  I think I have to credit my good friend Nicolas for coming up with the title “Social Journey” as it make sense when explaining this process of digital engagement. Once one has reached the level of social brand advocate they then enter into a new phase of the social journey which essentially begins again. Only this time the brand advocates are the ones providing the peer reference to help validate ones research that they are selecting the right solution to solve their challenge.

Now, I bet you are asking “So, what does 48% have to do with this?” Welcome to the wonderful world of big data analytics. I am nothing if not a data and number geek but knowing my facts and having the information to back up my strategy has worked well to secure support and funding for my initiatives with executives. I’ll get into depth about the 48% in my next post as it worth taking the time to understand and leverage the exercise.

Filed under Community Engagement, Content, Marketing Strategy, Search Marketing, Social Media, Web Strategy Tagged with , , , , ,

Categorize community structure for improved site navigation

January 10, 2013 by Leave a comment

So, as my team continued our accelerated community 3.0 plans our next obstacle was how to categorize our community structure in order to align with our .com architecture and keep the navigation consistent between the two sites.

We have several issues. One is we have many products that have multiple communities some focused around support, others are beta lab forums, developer forums, education/certification and subject matter expert exchanges. We didn’t have to start from scratch as many of the .com categories fit but we released that just organizing the communities into topics didn’t really solve another problem of silo’d information not being discovered in search results. In order to really do this right you need to tag your community content to ensure the meta data is available so content appears in the appropriate search results. There was talk of having a 10 day tag-a-thon and we still may do that but that won’t make the first release so I’ll follow up on that later.

My main concern was still organizing the communities into product/solution categories so the navigation alignment with the .com site would be effective. There were two main tasks we needed to complete before we could integrate the unified web navigation. Determine what the categories would be and then determine which category or categories would be associated with over 200 communities. One of the great things about a community is it is a community which means there are hundreds of others like yourself who want to support your effort to improve the usability of the community. So, the first step was to update our community list, post the spreadsheet to our admin corner and engage our 200 community managers to associate one or more of the 14 categories with their community. Warning, you will have some overachievers who will say their community belongs in all the categories so you will have to edit to keep each community list to at most 3 categories.

While the community managers were updating the categories we needed to create the category landing pages that would be utilized by the navigation. As an example, if a web visitor landing on the .com home page, clicked on the community menu it will open up all the categories available like, storage, security, virtualization, infrastructure or backup and recovery. Because many different communities belong to a single category there needed to be a landing page that would surface all communities that were related. In order to accommodate the tight release timeline we did this manually, but plan to make these pages more dynamic. However, that comes back the tagging discussion I mentioned earlier and something we thought we could deliver in a following release.

The one thing about this exercise was it made us realized the level of effort that would be needed to re-architect the taxonomy and folksonomy of the site. Unfortunately I don’t believe there is an easy way to do this other than roll your sleeves up and get to work tagging content and communities. I have wondered though with the improvement of machine learning in search engines will we come to a point when categories, descriptions, tags and meta data won’t matter because all of the content will be indexed and available based on context. I need to do some more research into that concept but wouldn’t that be nice.

Filed under Community Engagement, Content, Marketing Strategy, Search Marketing, Web Strategy Tagged with , , , ,

Integrating community and web to improve your business

January 8, 2013 by Leave a comment

How do you integrate your dynamic community with your static website to improve your overall business? It is easier than you think but requires some thought and planning. Four months ago we started our journey to integrate our community into our existing website. It was something we had put quite a bit of thought into so when I was asked what I needed to accelerate the project and roll it out in 3 months I already knew the answer.

If you are a new company just getting started then you aren’t looking to build a website, you are looking to build an interactive community which just happens to look like a website. I’m a bit opinionated on this concept which you can read in my post “Web 2.0 is Dead”. However, if you are an established company that has evolved with the technology over the years then your business likely has a website, microsites, partner portals, communities and social pages all in an attempt to reach your customers. This is the problem most companies are facing and here is how to solve that issue.

First up is the design and user experience (UX). I am going to keep this focused on the design aspect because UX includes items, like single sign on, OAuth registration, User Behavior Profiles and analysis, traffic patterns, etc… all of which are important and need to be considered but when limited to a short deployment timeline with a hard go live date you have to focus on what has the greatest impact and work the rest into phased agile releases after.

Our community looked similar to our website from a branding banner perspective but it wasn’t really unified, they were still two very distinct web sites that didn’t have a consistent look and feel between to the two. In our case because the community design was lagging behind the web design it was fairly easy to apply the design theme to the community which mostly included the header navigation and ensuring the Website had a “Community” navigation in the main menu so when you switched between the web and the community the top navigation and banner remained consistent. However, the problem we ran into with this is communities are dynamic and are discussion forums are often created by members for products that your company may no longer sell, support or has been consolidated and renamed into another solution offering on the website.

So, the design was probably the least of our worries. Breaking down the silos and categorizing over 200 communities into 14 product solutions to simplify findability and navigation would now be the challenge we needed to focus.

In the next post I’ll build on this and share more details on how we defined and leveraged our community managers and members to help categorize communities for improving navigation.

Filed under Community Engagement, Marketing Strategy, Web Strategy Tagged with , , , ,

Getting comfortable out of our comfort zone

December 13, 2012 by Leave a comment

ravi-shankar-george

I noticed that Ravi Shenkar passed away at the age of 92. For you who don’t know, the Beatlesspent significant time with Ravi in the 60′s and 70′s and pushed their music in a direction that was certainly out of their “pop culture” comfort zone. It was a risk that paid off and innovated an entirely new direction of pop music that succesfully bridged cultures around the world. Sometimes in order to innovate we need a does of something different that may be some what uncomfortable to our own comfort zone. Ravi Shenkar did that for the Beatles when they were looking for a new perspective to innovate a new sound and launched their music in a totally different direction.

 Uncomfortable + Risks = Innovation

For the communities this year we entered into an uncomfortable area with game mechanics, live Q&A and social launches not really knowing what the risk would be but it was interesting enough to try.The result changed how we approach launching products, engaging our experts and providing a new experience for recognizing and motifying behavior.

 So, How uncomfortable will we get in 2013?

Filed under Executive Leadership, Management Style, Marketing Strategy, Web Strategy Tagged with , , ,

What is the value of a community member?

September 21, 2012 by Leave a comment

As I move forward with my community 2.0 initiative I realize how important it is to justify the value of our community members. Once you get beyond justifying the need of a strong social community strategy for your company the next step is secure the required funding to support your strategy. Most executives understand the need to be actively engaged with their customers but will want data points to back that up. After some #BigData analysis I now have that answer.

 

My initial analysis has determined that companies that have community members average purchase is 48% higher than those companies who do not have any community members. The answer why is elusive but some assumptions can be made. What we know is community members are much more informed about your products, much more engaged in options and are regularly looking for answers to help make their solution better. If you look at all those eagerly awaiting the release of the #iPhone5 and IOS6 today from Apple you can relate these assumptions. Those who purchase a new iPhone today will need a new charger, a new case and probably any other accessories that might enhance the value of their purchase. If you use this as an example for your company then you can justify the value of the community by educating existing customers and prospects on not only your core products but also any other accessories that will help make that solutions stronger and more beneficial.

 

The opportunity resides in member acquisition. If you can increase the number of companies who have community members by 1% the increase in revenue is substantial. This is the monetization justification that executives want before committing to investing more in your social community strategy. The formula to calculate this is really no different than my formula for determining SEO ROI http://bracerennels.com/seo/.

 

If you know your cost for member acquisition and what your investment is to convert hose anonymous visitors to active community members then you can relate what that increase will be in return on revenue from average purchase. There is also another assumption which is the more actively you engage your members from a company you have the larger that average purchase price will rise.

 

So, how are you measuring your community?

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

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