Social Knowledge Base: The Key to Customer Engagement?

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) May 13, 2011

We spend a lot of time talking about customer engagement and what it really means in today's connected, digital world. Probably the best way to understand it, is to sit down and look at the use cases. So here's one for you, maybe you don't recognize it, but it's a fairly obvious one none the less: social knowledge bases, or in very simple terms product help.

Going Where Your Customers Are

Help docs and marketing/sales are not two things most people would quickly put together. But think about it. What is one of the most obvious use cases for help/product documentation? Engaging with your customers when they are looking trying to find information out about your products is a perfect way to encourage loyalty, cross-sell/up-sell and promote your brand to others.

The funny thing is, most organizations haven't updated their help documentation technology in a really long time — think html, think beginning of the internet. Think boring, hard to use, pain in the ….

Now consider this: People come to your website for two really important things:

Because they have a problem
They want to be an expert

So by focusing on the content you make available on your website, you can help people find the information they need and you can slowly move them up the ladder of engagement. What's the ladder of engagement? Here's a glance, but essentially people engage with your brand at different levels. The higher up the engagement ladder, the more they are engaged and the more likely they are to buy and/or promote your brand.

Ladder of Engagement

(Side note: I did a search for images of a ladder of engagement and found a ton of different interpretations, just ignore the pic of Prince William and his father, that's a different ladder altogether)

Enter Purpose Driven Communities

Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch (news, site), understands (and explains) this use case very well. In 2009, he knew that the company couldn't survive by being simply another generic social software solution. They had to differentiate, and they chose to do that by focusing on purpose-driven communities, on Help 2.0.

At first he didn't see the value in focusing on technical documentation. After all, who really pays attention to technical writers and what they do? Well, the organizations who buy your products do. Fulkerson says that the most fertile ground for sales and marketing automation is your help content.

Think that's a bold statement? It's not really when you think about it. Supporting and engaging with communities is an important aspect of any marketing strategy today. Purpose-driven communities like those offering product help are about more than simply offering a place to store product help documentation. Add in some curation analytics and you will find out more information about what your customers want and need, be able to drive the right content to them and encourage/support engagement through social tools like commenting, rating, etc..

The idea of the purpose-driven community and its value to an organization is not something only MindTouch sees. Matt Goddard, CEO is r2integrated, also agrees that peer to peer engagement in communities like this (things like advice giving, advice seeking) are driving new decision making behaviors and brands need to recognize and support the communities that drive that. In Goddard case, he speaks not just about communities owned by the brand, but those not owned by the brand. However, in either case, the opportunity should be obvious.