A vast part of brand awareness and business success today points directly to online communities and consumer advocates shaping brands, driving growth and increasing revenue. But if brand advocates and online communities are assets that can bring value to a business over the lifetime of the company, then why are so few brands today investing in the resources needed to build them and help them flourish? Loyal community members are known to purchase more, foster deep brand affiliations and advocate more strongly for a brand than non-community members. This presentation covers key takeaways that can be applied to any type of business. This presentation was created for the Women in Digital Meetup, Lausanne, November 25, 2015

1. Why Your Business
Needs A Community
WIDS, Lausanne Meetup
November 25, 2015
Why Your Business Needs a Community

2. Before we begin,
I’d like to share a story.
You can read the story here
http://bit.ly/WIDSNov

3. Let’s talk community
Online Community:
People brought together by familiar digital
behaviors and around a purpose, passion,
need or interest on one or more channels.
The community is independant of a brand.
Twitter chats, Blabs, FB groups, G+
Communities, Linkedin Groups, Local
meetups
Example: Women in Digital Switzerland
Branded Online Community:
Brand followers, fans or customers brought
together by familiar social digital behaviors
and common brand interest on owned
(website) or non-owned (social) digital
channels.
Website forums, microsites as well as
branded social channels: FB groups, Twitter
chats, Slack
Example: Autodesk Education Community

4. Community: use case and industry
The Community Roundtable survey 206 Community programs representing multiple industries and
use cases, ages and sizes.
Respondents by Use Cases Respondents by Industry
State of Community Management 2015 Report

5. Community: size and age
State of Community Management 2015 Report
Respondents by Community Size Respondents by Age of Community

6. Five ways your business can benefit from
community collaboration

7. How to get started
1. Management’s buy-in and a team blessing (but don’t let that stop you)
2 Clear business goals or objectives
3. Understanding of community needs
4. Resources - people, technology and tools
5. Passion for people

8. 5 ways to benefit from community

9. 1. Customer Insights
86% of fortune 500 companies report
communities provide insight into
customer needs.
● Stay relevant: know PINs -
problems, interests, needs
● Improve customer journey
● Optimize business
operations
mycustomer.com

10. 2. Customer Service
It takes 12 positive experiences to make
up for one unresolved negative
experience.
● Engage customer advocates
● Empower to educate
● Loyalty increases sales 4
fold
Help Scout

11. 3. Marketing
96% of companies see the value that
customer collaboration presents for the
marketing department.
● Campaign clarity
● Content creation co-
collaboration
● WoM marketing, increase
traffic & leads
Socially Enabled Enterprise

12. 4. Product Development
66% of companies say they turn to
community for product development.
● ‘Right’ feature
development
● Increase time to
market
● Reduce development
costs
mycustomer.com

13. 5. Brand Loyalty
80% of consumers say that authenticity
will influence them to follow a brand.
● Empower to build trust
● Community ‘sells’ when
they tell
● In crisis, Loyalty’s got
your back
BazaarVoice

14. Case study:
Building Community Into Operations

15. Paper.li - Content aggregation service
Global community of 500,000 + publishers
8 million visitors monthly
Challenge: Manage Content, Communications
and Customer Service with 1.5 team members, that
included me!
Solution: Community

16. 1. Customer Insights
We learned
● Global community and universal
challenge: time, team, money
● Willing to share knowledge
● Internal Paper.li operations were
disjointed and not serving
customers
We adjusted:
● Shifted all communications to
helping and saving time, resources,
money
● Empowered the community with
knowledge to help others
● Placed people, not product, at the
center of operations

17. 2. Customer Service
Problem:
● Team resources - lean (Paper.li)
● High amount of 1 touch tickets
● Content creation was extensive
Solution:
● Train the trainer
● Empowered fans, champions and
subject matter experts (sme) to
answer forum and from their social
accounts
● Encouraged SMEs to co-author
content
Bonus: Hired from the community

18. The Solution
Solution:
Created a self-serve portal
Empowered users to answer forum
Impact:
Ticket reduction overall
Quicker response w/community help

19. 3. Marketing
Problem:
● Marketing messages a flop
● Lack of resources (Paper.li)
● Little conversations around Paper.li
happening socially
Solution:
● Shifted from product to people
● Empowered the community a blog
of their own
● Created online communities to be
helpful, shine the spotlight on
community
Bonus: Hired from the community

20. The solution
Solution: Paper.li
Community Blog
● A platform to serve the
community and their
PINs.
● Powered by the
community and edited
by community
Impact
● 30k views/month
● Increased Awareness
through social sharing
● Increase in subscriptions

21. The Solution
Solution: #BizHeroes
Twitter Chat
● A weekly date with the
community
● Resource for community
driven content creation
Impact
● 700,000 million
impressions Y1, 1.5b
billion to date
● Increased awareness of
Paper.li products
● Increase content,
reduced effort
● Increased visibility of
community members BizHeroes schedule

22. 4. Product Development
Problem:
● We needed to monetize
● We thought our ideas were cool,
but…
● Features were often buggy when
released
Solution:
● Listened, talked, survey around Pins
and current features
● Prioritized community requests
● Created UAT testers out of vetted
community members, staging
environment to test

23. The Solution
Solution: Community
sourced features
● Publish Community to
gather ideas
● Freemium feature
development based on
community feedback
Impact
● greater user satisfaction
● better alignment with
‘real world’ needs
● increase revenue,
reduce in churn
● Increased dev & team
satisfaction

24. 5. Brand loyalty
Problem:
● “Daily is out!” Tweet was
controversial when launched
● Competition was fierce, new
services arriving weekly
● We were seen as ‘novel’ not a must
Solution:
● Out reach to every person who
complained about Paper.li. No
exceptions
● Re-tooled my roles to include
community as a part of the process
● Created a ‘safety net’ that held our
backs in time of need.

25. The Solution
Solution: Community-
centric mindset
● Embraced all
engagements, + and -
● Made community
outreach a part of daily
routine (not a ‘thing’ to
be done)
Impact
● Write-ups by friends and
foes
● Rallies of love in times of
difficulty
● Community that cares
Content Marketing Minds Article

26. The Reward
The crisis:
Three day down time
● New platform migration
had issues
● Paper.li was offline 72
hours
Impact
● Publishers couldn’t
access papers
● Newsletter weren’t
going out
The reward
● The community had our
backs
The Outage Storify

27. To sum it all up:
5 Things I learned building community

28. 1. Find mutual cooperation points, but ask first what you can do for your community before asking
what they can do for you.
2. Allow your community to tell your story for you and you will increase brand loyalty and build lasting
relationships that will have a huge impact on your bottom line in coming years.
3. Give your community the same respect you would friends and family. Listen with empathy, leave
your ego at the front door.
4. Handle your customers like people, not customers, and they’ll do the same in return.
5. Treat your community like and extended team members and you can improve quality of service and
ease or off-set resource constraints.

29. Next steps

30. 1. Don’t wait for anyone to give the go ahead. Set up monitoring tools and start listening!
● TweetDeck (free), Hootsuite or SproutSocial (pay)
2. Identify pain points in your organization. Think about how an extended team of subject matter
experts could help out
● Offsetting content creation, testing new features, reducing costs in customer care...
3. Don’t let ‘No’ discourage you.
● Set up a small pilot project, work it into daily operations or take it on evenings.
4. Start profiling your champions internally.
● Show off how your company is already benefiting from them, or not.
5. Become the voice of the customer if your company doesn’t have one.

31. Thank you,
let’s connect.
Twitter: @kdhungerford
LinkedIn: Kelly Hungerford
Blog: KellyHungerford.com