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I'm a huge users of certain group forums in my own professional and personal life.
Some of these forums have played important roles in increasing my customer loyalty so I thought I'd share a few examples from the trenches to demonstrate how a group forum can help you...
Hunters and farmers. Most sales folks would tend to consider themselves one or the other. However, Brian Carroll, lead generation expert, contends a sales person needs to be a good farmer in order to be a good hunter too.
In a recent article in his B2B Lead Generation Blog, Brian discussed what he believes is the best way to reach out and form relationships with customers. And I agree with his thoughts...
I recently bopped around the Internet researching something or another. During my search, I came across an article a couple of years old that cautioned businesses about how the Internet undermines business productivity because employees waste time on social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online during work hours.
It got me thinking.
Maybe some employees do dither online. The funny thing is, though, I see the Internet in the opposite light. I realized I've become more creative because of the Internet. And the gains the Internet brings far away its cost...
In my last article, I highlighted Umair Haque's perspective of the shrinking advantage of traditional brands. However, unlike Haque, I don't believe branding value is shrinking but evolving. Today let's discuss methods in which a company can leverage the immediacy of online connectivity to maintain its branding advantages.
In my mind, it all comes down to this. For success today, a company has to be willing to listen to their customers and to work with them. And that means ceding partial control of the branding process to your customers.
If you're a marketing manager going "eep!" right about now, then you're not getting today's customer environment...
Communities of online customers are rewriting the rules of corporate branding. The reason is because they're spending more time talking with other consumers through various types of online connections than listening to companies with their traditional branding messages.
In other words, customers are wresting control of the branding message from companies. In an environment like that, how do you continue to be an influential voice for your own company and products?
We're going to talk about that today...
Growing up, a poster displaying the following quotation from Nixon adorned my wall because I loved its provocative message:
I know you think you understand what you think I said. I'm not sure you realize, though, that what I said is not what I meant.
Okay, now I don't know if the ex-pres actually said that or not but here's the point I want to make. Are you finding you need to say that your various communities, be they customers, partners, or employees?
Is your messaging being misunderstood or corrupted? ...
In a previous article, we discussed some of the benefits of building an online community. Among these are the opportunity to increase the visibility of your company with your customers, partners, and employees.
Today, let's have some straight talk about the resources your company will need to grow and maintain a thriving online community. Your friendly neighborhood IT specialist can give you the skinny on your technical resource demands so let's focus today on the personnel resources you'll need to grow and maintain a success online community.
This resource is probably more important in many ways than the technical one -- but it's also the one many companies are likely to short change. Because no matter how wiz bang cool your online community site is, if you don't have people maintaining it, then your community members will abandon you and your community will die.
The other day, I blogged about why the benefits of building a collaborative online community. Today's let's dig into the features and benefits for the various dimensions of collaborative community solutions.
First, a quick review. Community solutions are multi-dimensional and most are modular in nature, allowing you to take the ones you want and scale up later if desired. You can elect to push information out, pull it in or do some combination of the two.
Common options include: ...
