NETTING IT OUT

Your online customer community is up and running. You’ve selected a technology platform and integrated it within your Web site. Customers are posting questions and comments; lead customers are providing answers and commentary. And you’re keeping an eye on how things are going.

But you’re looking for more…more ways to help customers solve problems, to learn about customer interests and needs, to turn visitors into members and lurkers into active participants, and to strengthen the relationship between all customers and your brand. In essence, you’re looking to engage your community members more deeply and regularly.

Implementing best practices can help move your community forward. The practices covered in this report have been developed from direct experience, from online and offline research, and from interviews with executive stakeholders, community implementers, community facilitators, and community members. They represent the best current approaches to leveraging technology, human resources, and strategic thinking to engage your customers and build a vibrant online community.

LET PARTICIPANTS DESIGN THEIR OWN COMMUNITIES

“If you build it, they might not come.” This should be the mantra for any organization that wants to nurture vibrant online communities. Just because you launch an online forum, don’t expect customers or business partners to flock to it. If you want to nurture successful communities, the first rule of thumb is to let the members create their own community to serve their own needs.

Community Built by Partners for Partners

Here’s one example. In 2004, a large global enterprise software company was faced with a problem: how could it provide its channel partners access to each other? Interestingly--and importantly--this request was coming from the partners themselves, who wanted to connect with other developers and vendors in the network.

The company already provided its partners, both Value-Added Resellers (VARs) and Independent Service Vendors (ISVs), with powerful tools and in-depth information to help with their marketing and sales initiatives, support efforts, training requirements, and more. But the kind of information provided by a software company is very different from what you can get from others who are in your shoes. So the partners also wanted to connect with each other, to compare and share their own experiences.

The easy part for the company’s vice president of Channel Enablement was realizing that an online community would be the best medium; more daunting was the prospect of defining the community, its goals, and needs.

After some struggling, the path to a solution became apparent when the company asked itself: “Instead of our developing this, why don’t we let the community do it?” So it pulled together an advisory council from key international partners, and asked them to define what they wanted out of their community.

Working with the advisory council provided the specifics that addressed the needs of the partner community. For the partners, this meant confidentiality, security, and ease of use (especially the need for a single login to both the community site and to the existing registration-required partner portal). For the company, one of the top priorities was ensuring that the partners maintained their own content, limiting the company’s day-to-day involvement.

A vendor and platform were selected, with the community site built, tested, and integrated within the company’s Web site in late 2005.

More than six months later, the community now consists of about 1,000 partner members, with about half of those considered to be “actively involved.” Success has been measured anecdotally via positive feedback from the many satisfied partners, as well as semi-scientifically via the number of partners that have increased revenue from their participation in the community. The company is not sharing specifics, but some partners have done “exceedingly well.”

The VP of Channel Enablement described the community as created “by partners, for partners.” The partners are deeply vested in the community, largely because they played a key role in defining it.

But keeping community members engaged requires constant attention. The good will and equity you develop early can easily be lost through time. While there’s no better way to get things off to a running start than by involving your customers in formative decisions, following best practices to engage community members--tried and true approaches and methods--will help ensure that your community will continue to be successful.

Engaging Customers in Online Communities

So what do we mean by engaging customers? Customers are engaged in online communities when:

* They contribute frequently (at least once a week on average)

* They’re interested in the subject matter

* They’re comfortable in their surroundings

* They have access and tools to get what they need

* They have opportunities to contribute

* The community has something to offer them

* They know the company is an active participant

* They enjoy themselves

As a customer-centric executive, your goal is to create the right set of conditions for these things to happen as a matter of course. You want to make it the path of least resistance for your customers, partners, and/or other stakeholder communities to enjoy, to gain value from, and to participate enthusiastically in your online communities.

PREREQUISITES FOR AN ONLINE COMMUNITY

The best practices covered in this report are, for the most part, the prerequisites that will help customers co-create a vibrant online community. They won’t guarantee that your community will take off, but experience shows that if you don’t adopt these practices, your community is much more likely to fail.

In this report, we provide an overview of best practices required for all types of online customer communities, whether B2B or B2C. (In fact, most are best practices for any type of online community, customer-focused or not. We point out when a given practice is more suitable to one type of community than another.) See Table A for a list of the best practices in engaging customer communities.

Best Practices in Engaging Online Community Members
PLEASE DOWNLOAD PDF TO SEE THE TABLE.
Table A. This table summarizes the best practices we have identified for engaging community members.

GETTING MEMBERS TO PARTICIPATE

Engagement is all about participation. All community members fall somewhere on a spectrum of participation, with members getting involved in different ways and to different degrees. For example, some members will visit the community only occasionally, when looking for answers to specific questions. Other members will check in regularly to interact with peers on topics of interest. And still other members, those who have a sense of ownership, will connect as part of their daily routine to answer questions and guide discussions.

These members, and all others on the participation spectrum, find value in their involvement with the community. The best practices in this section help you understand what’s important to members, so you can provide more value and increase participation.

Give (Appropriate) Control to Members

With a customer-centric philosophy and the right technology platform, your community members can have the tools and capabilities to control their own environments and connections to the community. Members become more engaged when ...