Jumpstart Your Community With Awareness

They made it to Forrester's list of top Communities providers for interactive marketing because of their ability to create branded communities. So it should come as no surprise that Awareness has launched a set of Best Practice Communities based on what they say are the top eight social media marketing use cases and business goals.

Just released today, Awareness now has eight best practice communities - Awareness Best Practice Communities (BPCs) - available to help organizations jump-start their social media marketing initiatives.

Sony Corporate Voice Community: see the real thing

The communities are as follows (with Awareness' own descriptions):

1. Corporate Voice Community: Facilitate a dialog with your audience in a personal, "humanized" voice that builds trust through ongoing conversation.
2. User-Generated Content/Microsite Campaign: Build demand for your products and services through a contest or other viral marketing program and encourage interaction among users through content submission and voting on the submissions of others.
3. Enthusiasts Community:  Increase brand awareness by stimulating a common passion in your audience while encouraging members to share thoughts and ideas.
4. Associations/Subscribers Community: Increase customer satisfaction through an exclusive, "velvet-rope" community for customers, association members, or subscribers.
5. Loyalty Community: Enhance customer loyalty by communicating with and rewarding your top customers.
6. Innovation Community: Generate new product ideas by encouraging customers share ideas and knowledge.  Provide a forum to rate customer ideas for product and service enhancements in order to, confirm or modify current product plans, and turn potentially negative feedback into constructive criticism.
7. Peer Support Community: Reduce customer service and support costs by providing a vehicle for community members to solve others' problems. 
8. Event Community: Build and maintain buzz leading up to and following an event.

These best practice communities are based on the experiences Awareness has had with their own customers and what they try to achieve with their communities. They are designed to be configured and up and running in a matter of days. You can read full descriptions here.

FlightCenter - Enthusiasts Community

Awareness CEO John Bruce says it all: "Our goal is to provide marketers with an easy-to-use, low risk solution to deploy social media marketing." [] "Marketers want to know that their social media initiatives are aligned with their business goals, can be rapidly deployed and have a clear way to measure success."

The communities are white-label, which means they can be styled to match your brand. They can also be customized to your specific requirements, but you may want to run them as is first to get a feel for how a best practice solution works. Once you get things going, you can start to tailor the community to your customer needs - Awareness calls these Custom Assemblies.

Custom Assemblies

If you aren't sure which of these types of Best Practice Communities you want or need, you can combine them into a larger community. Still not sure? Attend the Awareness webinar on Social Media Marketing: Best Practice Communities on January 28, 2009 at 2:00 PM EST.

So they didn't make the number one spot on the Forrester Wave for Communities, but being one of nine in a sea of thousands tells you that Awareness does know their bread and butter and wants to help you with yours.

With social media marketing such a hot commodity these days, having a pre-baked best practice community ready to go should help you get your own initiatives up and running quickly.

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