Crowsourcing has risen thanks to Open Source programming and volunteers who work in their spare time. This process has taken some time to reach the business level but now some big names have chosen to use that path to implement features and grow their business, this would become a big trend for the year to come. Mass market companies are trying hard to use social media as a marketing tool, but crowdsourcing as part of social media would be their path to success if they can well understand how the successful companies have turned it as their competitive advantage. Read More

Advocates in the web space are the breed of users any company is looking for. Because they’re a salesforce you don’t pay, because they’re a salesforce that generate more confidence in your company and in your products, because they’re experts who would provide you with end users needs and desires, those people can become your trump card to speed up your business growth and build your reputation. To be able to follow the same growth FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threadless, 37Signals, and many other companies (as well as many artists and music groups) have generated, the point is to be able to detect those advocates and to know what to expect from them. Read More

Dell is the major actor in the social media marketing field these days. With a 42 people team over the web and leveraging web tools to raise their reputation and get more understanding from their consumers and customers, the computer company has become the best-in-class example of community management. But Cisco seems to be starting the same work, lead by Lasandra Brill. She’s sharing with us this case study about how they built a community for the launch of one of their product, using Web 2.0 tools: Read More

Leveraging the global brain is one of the objectives of the community creation: generating more ideas, more information, more feedback, more insights, and ultimately sparing time and money in the process. And Loyalty and increase of the purchase cart are consequences of the community management. But to achieve such results the community has to be lead and set to answer results. Otherwise all your efforts would turn into a short term and non business focus content, and eventually misunderstanding between the community and the brand hosting it. Read More

We don’t know how to calculate the return on investment of social media efforts. Yet. Basically because hardly none of the companies that are trying to leverage that new breed of communication channel has put enough money on it and connected their business strategies with those efforts. But one example tends to prove social media and community management has changed the course of their business: it’s Dell. Read More

What purpose do you need a community for, what can you expect from your community members, what is the proposal you have to validate with them to insure the work you do with them can be owned by the company, when and how to analyse the data you’ve gathered and what to do with the results? Shaping your community is the same as shaping a surf board. Knowing where you want to go and the different steps to follow is a value added to your company. Here are some tips about how to shape you community to fit your needs. Read More

Generating a communication strategy to engage with your community is related to your business objectives. Whether you are willing to develop your loyalty rate, awareness, reputation, and stickiness, you have to take into account some key concepts to make your social efforts valuable. Being user experience centric, thought leader, sharing with your customers and prospects are parts of the requirements and if you’re not aiming at or able to do it, you should make sure to change your company mindset before. Because social is about discussing and being agile. Read More

Managing to connect with your community and share with your consumers and prospects about what’s cool in your business life, and above all why it’s cool and awesome to be by your side, is great and you’re done it properly so now each person you’re speaking with using any social media tool has become one of the people you can count on to make your business bigger. They’re engaged with you, and you’re able to put them into different cluster according to their level of collaboration and use of your product/ service. Here’s the time to connect them with your business to make them help you keep focus on your business growth. Read More

Once you’ve gathered your community around your blog, community platform, fan page (if you’re willing to use Facebook), website, or any other tool (Jason Calacanis is using a mailing list), the first step to leverage it is done. And now is the main part starting. Keeping on generating content and activities to invite continiously your customers and prospects to engage with you and collaborate in creating the best user experience ever. It means being consistent and innovative. Read More

Making people feels like they’re part of your company is another important point to generate traction and stickiness from your community. Press releasing and messaging users about new features and business development isn’t the essential content you have to push. Showing you’re working to provide them with a more interesting user experience is right, but what they want and need is why they’re right using your service or product. To achieve that point you have to get along with your community and highlight what’s currently at work and who in the community is inspiring. Read More