What is Community 2.0?

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?