This document provides an overview of building and leveraging online communities for marketing and customer support purposes. It discusses the benefits of communities, examples of existing successful communities, key elements to consider, and an 8-step process to develop a strategy. This includes monitoring social media, setting goals, training employees, designating community owners, determining resource needs, choosing technology options, assessing risks and mitigation tactics, and building a business case. The presentation aims to demonstrate how communities can increase customer engagement, acquire leads, reduce support costs, and provide other strategic benefits to organizations.

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1. Why Communities
2. Community Examples
3. Social Media Add-ons to your site
4. Key Elements of a Branded Community
5. Obstacles and Risks
6. 8 Steps to Building a Strategy
7. How eDynamic Can Help
8. Q&A
What We Will Cover Today

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The Social Ecosystem
The social ecosystem spans across internal and external
communities

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1. Build and affinity and increase customer engagement with
your brand
2. Acquire leads
3. Reduce support calls and emails and give peers the
opportunity to support peers
4. Advocate your position as a company that cares
5. Create a market positioning as social media savvy
6. Help you stay competitive (your peers are probably already
there)
7. Gain insight and learn about your customers
8. Ideation
9. Team Building
Why Communities

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Examples

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Examples of Existing Communities
Nike Running:
The group participation is huge and the conversations
flourish around running challenges.
Goal: ↑ affinity

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Examples of Existing Communities
MyCancerHub:
“I need help and to know
that I’m not alone. But
also, I need to figure this
out, share my story, and
learn from others how to
survive”.
Goal: ↑ affinity

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Examples of Existing Communities
Intuit Small
Business Online
Community:
• Active participation with key
influencers –accountants
• Users can post success
stories to escalate their status
within the community.
• Leaderboards of the most
active participant with points
allocation to provide
encouragement
Goal:
↓ support costs
↑ affinity

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Examples of Existing Communities
American Express Open
Forum Small Business
Online Community:
Learning, sharing
Pushes content out to many
areas driving significant
traffic to Amex.com
Goal: ↑ affinity

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Examples of Existing Communities
RIM has two communities focused on affinity and support
Blackberry:
• “At a glance”
• Recently solved
• Blog feed
• Visually appealing
Goal:
↓ support costs
↑ affinity
↑ usage

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Examples of Existing Communities
Goal: Ideation,↑ affinity

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Facebook Community
Goal:
↑ lead
generation

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Twitter Community
• Find out what’s happening in
the world, what’s tending.
• Learn about a very specific
category.
• Promote yourself and your
opinions.
• Promote your company.
• Share Expertise
to Build Credibility.
• Grow Your Network.
• Provide support.
Goals:

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Internal Communities
Yammer
Goal:
↑ employee
engagement

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Social Media
Add-ons to Your Site

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Social Media Add-ons to Your Site
Show activity to encourage more participation. “Faces you
know” drive engagement

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Social MediaAdd-ons to Your Site: LinkedIn

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Twitter Feed
Add value to your site; look up-to-date and newsworthy and
brings the outside web to your site

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POLL

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Why Social Media
Communities

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Why Social Communities for Support

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Why Communities for Social Marketing

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1. Customer-focused community building tools
2. User profiling and reputation management
3. Integration with the social web
4. Actionable analytics
5. Skilled moderators
6. Initial seed content and contributors
7. Workflow connection to traditional CRM systems
Key Elements of Community

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Obstacles and Risks
Other: access to knowledge base, tools, training

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POLL

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Building a Strategy

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1. Monitor
2. Create Goals
3. Train your employees
4. Decide who owns it
5. Resources
6. Create Options
7. Risks and Mitigation
8. Build a business case
Building a Strategy

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Start with free tools
 Listen
 Learn
 Understand
 Document issues, benefits, sentiment…
 Measure and build a baseline
Building a Strategy: Step-1 Monitor
•Google Alerts
•Twitter Advanced Search
•Icerocket
•Addict-o-matic
•Boardtracker
•Social Mention
•Seesmic
•TweetDeck
•Scoutlabs($249/mo)
•Radian6 ($500/mo)
•Any many more

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Building a Strategy: Step 2 – Create Measurable
Goals
Example goals:
 Community page views constitute x% of total site traffic
 Member questions are resolved in a timely fashion (24 hrs)
 Sentiment, passion, reach, strength goes up by x %
 Churn down x%
 Contest entrants = x#
 General consensus amongst social media committee that:
 the sentiment is positive
 the content is of high quality and up-to-date
 good participation by community by more than 2% of members
 some ideation and member understanding has been derived

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 Develop policies and practices to ensure they guide the
conversations in the right direction
 Provide the right tools and access to information so they can
provide informed responses
 Create one to many relationships so everyone in the community
can benefit & repeatable answers through knowledge bases
Building a Strategy: Step 3 – Train Your Employees
Consider it similar to press training

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Building a Strategy: Step 4 – Decide Who Owns It
Marketing
PR
Call
Centre
Sales
Digital
Marketing
IT
Everyone

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Building a Strategy: Step 5 – Determine Resource
Requirements
People Resources:
 Typical requirement based on research: 1.5 technical resources to moderate almost real-
time for every 50,000 members
 After a certain volume, economies of scale kick in and the community starts to support
itself

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Building a Strategy: Step 6 – Chose Options
1. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter only
2. Just use social add-ons
3. Build your own
4. Buy a community software package
 Telligent
 Lithium
 Jive
 Salesforce.com

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Building a Strategy: Step 7 – Determine Risks &
Mitigation
• Risks of not doing anything
• Risks of only using free tools like Twitter and Facebook
• Risks of negative sentiment
• Risks of not being able to respond fast enough
• Going over budget

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Building a Strategy: Step 8 – Build a Business
Case
Costs Year 1
Capex Cost to build the front end of the community $100k to $200k
Opex Cost to “rent” the hosted application $100k to $200k
Hard Benefits o Reduced calls to support centers
o Decreased churn
o Up-sell cross-sell
o Acquisition
Soft Benefits o Increased affinity
o Higher engagement with the Brand and product usage
o Increased connectedness
o Facilitates support for more complicated issues
o Enables vendor /3rd party support
o Stay competitive with peers

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