Communities News & Articles

The success of Moxie Software's social business platform is further proof that it's important to provide the right tools for both the employee and the customer to engage, share and work together.

We are all overwhelmed with content on a daily basis. Our feeds blink in and out of our peripheral vision, our 7 communication streams ping and honk and shout for attention, our searches result in 600,000,000 results. How we prioritize this information stream and glean insight and relevance from the flood is an ongoing evolving process. The wisdom of the crowd is here to help.

Community is something that social media excels in building, cultivating and maybe even repairing. But headfirst and with nothing more than smash and grab intentions of getting a cheap sale from a community is foolish and not the point.

It’s time to face the facts: your brand is no longer a simplistic 2-dimensional depiction of what you say it is. Of course, you want to be deliberate with your messaging -- but that’s just one dimension. You can have the most polished brand messaging and customer case studies, but if your customers’ experiences diverge significantly, it will affect perception. This divergence is sure to come to light via social channels. Vendor-made claims are now verified by prospects against feedback of existing customers, and stellar user experience can catapult a little-known brand into the social media hall of fame.

Three major components of today's customer experience management efforts are the three "C's": Content, Community and Commerce. It goes without saying that all three are important for success in today's world of online commerce, but all too many implementations are ineffective because they ignore an unspoken, and perhaps the most important "C", the Convergence of each of these key areas.

A final reminder that at 1pm ET, 10 PT today we are holding our monthly tweet jam. We will focus on the 3C's of Customer Experience: Content, Community, Commerce. The hashtag again is #CXMChat, the discussion topics:

1. Content, Community, Commerce: Which is your top CXM focus and why?
2. Is CXM maturing as a discipline and how is it changing organizations?
3. Do you believe orgs need a more abstracted role called "Experience (or Engagement) Architect"?
4. How is ecommerce evolving in the age of CXM?
5. What do you think is the big opportunity for CXM in 2012?

Check out the list of panelists attending and get yourself ready to settle in for a fast paced discussion on customer experience.

You can watch the event right here, or join us via your Twitter tool of choice. See you soon!

A Few Reminders

• Introduce yourself with your first #CXMChat tweet. Include your name, job title and organization you work for.
• Subsequent tweets must start with the question number you are responding to and the #CXMChat hashtag. For example, "@bigbird Q5 We very much believe sentiment analysis works #CXMChat"
• Please don't pitch products or services; stay knowledge focused
• Keep the discussion professional, but informal
• Remember that this is a public chat — be thoughtful

“Who are your top five power users?”

I recently attended JiveWorld11, where a key theme in many of the presentations, as well as most of my conversations, was compliant communities. I’ll admit to being a little bit surprised, because to date, Enterprise 2.0 and social media practitioners seem to be, if not completely unconcerned with compliance, at least less concerned than they should be.

The session abstract promised that “We will discuss how knowledge communities can have a positive impact across global teams and how to start, grow and sustain a knowledge community.” This 200-level session (#SPC240) followed the keynote on the opening day of the SharePoint Conference held last week in Anaheim, so the room was packed, expectations were high, and the stage was set…

In the new world order of technology and the web, we often associate social media or social networking with Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. However, just because you have a Facebook page or Tweet on Twitter doesn’t mean you’re a social business. Just because you microblog on some cloud-based CRM system doesn’t mean you’re a social business. And social business is not just about the marketing hype of the cloud itself. A social business is one that views its entire value chain as a set of collaborative networks called communities and embraces technology that focuses on the relationships, conversations and business activities that occur in these networks.

Facebook has 700 million-plus members. LinkedIn, the business equivalent, has well over 100 million members. Twitter has a user population well in excess of 100 million as well. A business looks at these social media tools and wonders what benefits they bring to the top and bottom line.

In one of the talks I give, I use a picture of African women carrying large jugs of water on their heads. Given this is usually a talk on collaboration, I get lots of puzzled looks. The picture is not about collaboration, but to make a point and be a focus for a story.

I had to opportunity to chat with Gina Poole, VP Rational marketing at IBM on the communities play in supporting developers, partners, customers and children in need.

I don't think I really have to tell you that the phrase "if you build it, they will come" is a lot of crap when it comes to building a successful online community. So let's look at some things you should do if you want to be successful.

If your organization is planning to successfully transition to social business, there's much for you to learn from these key lessons I have observed over the years.