http://ow.ly/hsc9k, 15 Best Practices to Drive Community Attendance & Engagement , A Get Satisfaction customer community will help you deliver excellent customer support at a lower cost, drive product innovation, and acquire more customers. Our customers have achieved great results: • Mint.com reduced support tickets by 75% • TechSmith generated 1,200 product ideas from 445,000 participants • Kiddicare brings customer conversations and praise to relevant places on their website In order to achieve these results, you first have to promote your community and get your members to engage. The good news is, there are some proven best practices that make it easy to get people to your community and encourage them to interact with one another. Check out our latest eBook, Playbook For Promoting Your Get Satisfaction Community And Driving Engagement to learn 15 best practices.

1. PLAYBOOK
FOR PROMOTING YOUR
GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY
AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT
a publication of

2. INTRODUCTION
If you’re reading this eBook, you’re probably at least somewhat contemplating) a new customer community, without feeling like you
aware of the extraordinary business benefits that can be realized by necessarily have the resources, skills, or experience to drive people
creating a branded community where your customers can connect there. It’s a legitimate concern. An empty customer community
with others about your products and services. is unlikely to provide much value to anyone. But a vibrant, active
customer community is a great resource for consumers at
You may have heard how Mint reduced their support tickets by
every stage in the customer lifecycle—from pre-sale research
75% by using theirs for self-service and social support, or how
and discovery, to post-sale setup and support questions, to the
TechSmith used Get Satisfaction to test their new version of
activation of brand advocates who can be leveraged for social
Snagit and solicit tons of real-time feedback. You may have been
support and new customer acquisition.
impressed by the way Kiddicare allows prospects to ask questions
about specific products on the eCommerce page, without ever The good news is you’re not alone! Get Satisfaction powers more
leaving the shopping flow, or the way Enphase’s community than 70,000 customer communities, and these communities
consistently comes up on top in search results. have taught us quite a few things about driving attendance and
engagement. This eBook will explain the best practices for each.
If you’re reading this eBook, though, you may also have been
confronted with the daunting task of having (or even just
Contents
INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
PROMOTING YOUR COMMUNITY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
ENGAGING YOUR COMMUNITY MEMBERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 1

3. PROMOTING YOUR COMMUNITY
The first step in creating an effective customer community is community in your site’s navigation, so visitors know where to go to
getting your customers to the community. The data we collect with share their feedback and get their questions answered.
our Community Health Analytics have shown that the business
benefits and health of a community are directly correlated with how Example:
many people are participating in the community. Take the time to
drive attendance to it, and you will reduce support costs, generate
marketing content, and drive product innovation and testing by the
community.
There are several things you can do to drive traffic and encourage
community participation. Follow these best practices to get started.
Bring Relevant Customer Conversations
into your website!
Your customer community can only be as effective as it is visible,
so make sure it’s open, inviting, and easy-to-find! Get Satisfaction
offers simple, out of the box code (or widgets, for you techies
out there) that allows you to embed community conversations
anywhere on your website. Announce it on your blog
Get Satisfaction offers seven widget types, which allow you to Your company blog is as a great resource for your customers
expose relevant customer-generated content anywhere you regarding everything YOU-related, so be sure to leverage it when
want on your website. Filter by topic type, for example, to expose promoting your community. Write a post announcing your new
conversations about a specific product next to it on the page; use community. Explain its purpose, outline a few best practices or
the “Company Updates” widget to place dynamic information and community guidelines, and include instructional screenshots. You
announcements in the About Us or News page. Include a link to the have more leeway to go into depth in a blog post than you do over
social, so take the opportunity to give specific instructions as to
accessing and participating in your community.
PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 2

4. Promote it on Your Social Channels The same goes if you have a Twitter account. Promote your
Speaking of social…if you’ve got a Facebook Page (who are we community early and often. Use bit.ly or other link shorteners to
kidding? Even your grandmother has a Facebook page), you’ll want make the link to your community 140 character-friendly. Encourage
to use it to point your friends and fans to your new community. people to visit your community with a Tweet like: “We’re here for
you! Get your questions answered quickly with our new
Add the Get Satisfaction for Facebook Application to make both
@GetSatisfaction community,” or follow HootSuite’s lead in the
your community and your Facebook page more effective. Just
example below:
add and connect the app to your Get Satisfaction account, and
content posted in the Facebook App will be mirrored over in your
community and vice versa. This makes the feedback you receive
on your Facebook page more actionable and archivable, and
drives traffic and engagement in your community. It also comes
with a number of other handy features like single sign-on, private
feedback, and configurable prompts. Get Satisfaction’s integration with HootSuite allows you to bring
interactions from Twitter, Facebook and other social channels
into your community, connecting your employees, customers,
and prospects. This allows answers to questions posed in social
media to become persistent resources for other customers
and prospects. These conversations in your Get Satisfaction
Community become part of your social knowledge base and are
highly indexed by search engines, improving your community’s
SEO.
PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 3

5. Send a newsletter announcement Promote from your other support resources
Your internal database is a good place to start promoting your Odds are, there’s more than one place your customers can turn to
community, since the people who read your emails tend to be the have their support questions answered. Be sure to announce and
ones who are most interested and engaged with your product. promote your community from all of these places—online tutorials,
Include a link and some basic information in your monthly static FAQs and Knowledge Bases, Bulletin Boards, older forums,
newsletter. etc. This will redirect your customers looking for answers to product
questions there to your community, which is a more effective place
Add links to the footers of email responses for self-service and social resolution than static, more traditional
A healthy customer community will reduce the number of email help centers.
exchanges you have with your customers since they’ll be finding
the answers to their questions on their own in your community. Use Surface it in your application
your email exchanges to drive them there by including links to your A customer community is a great, in-app way to identify bugs, test
community in the footers of all relevant email correspondence— product updates, and collect real-time feedback about your web or
support emails, trouble ticketing responses, and marketing emails. mobile application. Provide access directly to the community from
within the app, and install a Feedback Widget to capture in-context
Example: feedback and questions.
Record a welcome video and post it
What a better way to greet your customers and set a warm,
friendly tone than with a video? It doesn’t have to be fancy. Create
a quick video using an iPhone or webcam to welcome members
to your community and explain its purpose. You can also include a
screencast explaining how to effectively use the community. Post
the video in your community as well as on your YouTube channel
and SlideShare account.
PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 4

6. Example:
Get creative! members. Incentivize people to participate by offering coupons,
Run a contest, host a give-away, send a press release, or think of points, or other prizes. Don’t forget to keep the big picture in mind
other fun ways to promote your community! This will drive new by creating a contest, for example, that will generate content that
members to your community as well as energize established you can then reuse for marketing or other purposes.
PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 5

7. ENGAGING YOUR COMMUNITY MEMBERS
Once you’re doing all you can to encourage your users to get to your Rapid response time
community, you then need to create a “sticky” experience for them Giving customers — especially when your community is fairly new –
so that they continue to return to the community to engage with the quick satisfaction of a rapid response to their question is a great
you and other customers. Follow these best practices to create an way to engage them and reward them for using the community. If
engaging community for your customers: they feel like their voice is heard and responded to quickly, they’ll be
more likely to return to the community again and again.
Seed your community with content
You probably already have an idea of the questions and issues that Be human and use a friendly tone
your support team receives most often. Place your FAQs in there This suggestion might seem obvious, but we’ve found that not
right off the bat as topics, so the answers will already be available everyone intuitively gets how important it is to be human and
when your first customers come looking for them. use a friendly tone in your community. You want to start building
relationships with the customers who visit your community, but
Periodically post topics or content to generate ideas and drive
you’re not going to do that with an unfriendly tone and a bunch of
engagement, such as asking for feedback on future products. You’ll
customer service jargon. Be human and genuinely empathetic. Not
be amazed at the gems of ideas your customers have to offer when
sure if your response sounds authentic or not? Say it out loud to
prompted.
your coworker. How does it feel coming out of your mouth? How
Educate your customers does it sound to them? The answer to those questions will let you
The better your customers understand the way you want them know whether to post your response or keep fine-tuning it.
to participate in your community and what they can expect from Include your picture as an avatar, so your customers know who
you, the more likely they’ll be to use it to truly engage with you. they’re talking to. Always be honest. Honesty builds trust, which in
Provide content to help your customers understand how to use turn builds relationships and breeds loyalty.
your community and what its purpose is. Let them know the hours
you’ll be responsive there and how long they can expect to wait Solicit ideas and sharing of best practices
before they hear back from you. Include some best practices and Your community members use your products and services
community guidelines so they feel confident participating. everyday, so they’re a great resource to leverage for product
innovation. Ask for ideas from the community, feedback on specific
PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 6

8. features or products and encourage them to share their own best
practices with your products and services.
Example:
Prezi routinely turns to their community to test out product ideas, solve problems, and gain real-time feedback:
Positive reinforcement and speaking up on your behalf, the fewer questions you have to
Be sure to encourage your customers when you see them chiming respond to. Consider implementing a Champs program as a way
in and helping each other. The more open, friendly and helpful to systematically incentivize and activate brand advocates and
your whole community is, the more new visitors will want to champions.
stay. And the more Champions you have answering questions
PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 7

9. CONCLUSION
There you have it. Driving attendance and engagement to your will turn them into brand advocates whose conversations can be
community is not some mysterious, daunting task, but rather used as rich word-of-mouth content that drives down support costs
something which you can do quickly and easily using the tools and brings in revenue.
at your disposal. By building a thriving community with lots of
So, try our suggestions for yourself, and let us know about your
customers, topics, and conversations, you are building engagement
experience in our own community. Your customers and your
with your consumers at every stage of the customer lifecycle. That
business results will thank you for it.
Interested in learning more about how a Get Satisfaction customer community can help you acquire
more customers, drive product innovation, and deliver excellent, low-cost social support?
877-339-3997
to schedule a demo, or visit us at
https://getsatisfaction.com/corp/solutions/index
PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 8