Hi Joe M.,
I just saw your question about how to determine the right platform for your custoemrs when starting out and thought I'd throw out a few cents worth of thoughts. As the CMO at Lithium, we've worked with hundreds of companies and developed a set of best practices and solutions to drive customer community success.
A high level point is that you should start by clearly determining what your business objective is -- for example, are you trying to develop a community that can help reduce your customer service costs in the call center? to drive up your customer satisfaction index? to increase your lead generation? increase your sales? drive word-of-mouth marketing? crowdsource new product ideas? It is important before you start to have a good idea of what business result you are trying to achieve -- that helps to drive strategy and choices about social media. Ultimately, you should focus on choosing technology and solutions that help you address not only the business problem that you are focused on today, but that also have the breadth to help you address other business issues over time. I guess the core message is to take a long-term strategic view.
A second point is that one of the most important things is to determine how to harness the power of your advocates -- we call them superusers. A general rule has been proven over and over in the social world across properties like Twitter and Wikipedia -- the rule is referred to as the "90-9-1" rule. In essence, it is that 1 to 10% of the people in your customer community and network create the vast majority of the content that the other 90% come to read and consume. If you don't capture and engage those folks, you will not be able to engage the broader network and spread your word. So, your choice of platform must enable you to grab these folks and influence the behavior you want from them -- the critical component here is what we call a reputation engine underneath the platform.
A third point is that your choice must support a breadth of interaction modes for your customers. For example, some of your customers will want to engage in discussion forums; others will want to engage in idea exchanges with others in the community or with you as a company; yet others will want to read articles created from community content in a tribal knowledge base. Each of these is a different application and caters to a different use case -- not having all modes available may mean that you miss an entire segment of the population you are tryign to engage.
A fourth point is that your customers and prospects are mobile -- they move across the web in places like Twitter and Facebook, as well as move around the physical world. So, you will want to make sure your choices allow you to engage with them wherever they are - not just when they are at your website and community. People love theri communities -- give them the ability to stay connected at all times.
A final point is that none of this canhelp you achieve your business objectives unless you are able to pull these socialinsights and interactions back into your everyday business processes. This means that the ability to integrate these social discussions into your existing CRM processes and systems is an important factor in your choices and strategy.
Our customers like Cisco, Barnes& Noble, Best Buy, and AT&T are achieving great results following these principles -- metrics like $10M a year in supoprt savings; 66% increase in sales; 30% reduction in churn rates; 20 point increases in NPS scores. These are obviously high level points that anyone at the Lithium booths can elaborate on, but I wanted to at least seed the discussion and recap some of the points that are making our customers successful.
hopefully a little useful!
