Building Global Social Media Programs For Business

Is your company global? Are you building or running an online community for business for a global audience? If this is the case, your online efforts will need to be designed differently if you are really trying to engage your clients. Too often, the social media efforts and projects are led by the US team and do not take into account the needs of EMEA, PAC-Asia and other regions of the world in a strategic way.



For a global online community to be inclusive of world needs, there are a few steps you can take to ensure relevancy around the world.

In the planning phase of social media, include non-US stakeholders - invite them to key meetings, interview them about their regional needs to service their regions effectively, and be considerate when scheduling conference calls so that it is not a burden for them to attend the stakeholder planning meetings.

Talk to a select number of global clients to find out what their needs are for an online community. How can an online community better support their relationship with your company or help them connect with other global peers more effectively? Their needs are likely to be very different than US clients as regional delivery of products and services tend to take on their own flavor.

Consider cultural differences when designing the look and feel of the community. Are some colors better for all groups than others? How will the community or network look when the site is translated into different languages? Member acquisition strategies will need to take a different approach to work flow. Many countries are not as dependent on e-mail and Europe is generally more dependent on (or better at?) relationship building so perhaps there need to be a more individualized member invitation process than with the US.

Don't make stupid US-Centric mistakes in any language, messaging or member communications. A reference to Thanksgiving, for example, could be extremely off-putting to non-US members. Even mentioning "weekend" could be a problem as "weekend" can start on different days depending on where you are from. These are important nuances that should not be overlooked.

If the community is either sizable or important to the organization, leverage regional staff from your company to lead the marketing efforts and co-moderate the community with a US partner to ensure that you engage and interact correctly and make the most of your global community.

What Customers (Really) Want and How To Give It To Them

Social media is undoubtedly changing the relationship companies have with their clients. In the past, when we wanted to know what customers or clients thought, an organization would go out and conduct extensive focus groups or, more likely, make a hopeful guess and then create a product or service based upon that guess and hope it sold. But this is all changing. Customers and clients are intensely talking about the brands they like on blogs and in online communities. They are expressing their joys and frustrations on Twitter and other instant channels with our without your invitation. So now the challenge has moved from the act of formalizing feedback cycles through structured customer insight groups, to keeping up with the insights that are freely and frequently being offered 24X7.

Recently a study of 1300 American and multinational companies conducted by e-Consultancy found that less than half of the respondents had implemented a clearly developed customer engagement strategy. However, the study showed a high level of awareness of the need for such a strategy.

Executives are beginning to appreciate the importance of engaging customers online and to invest heavily in methods to capture the customers’ attention and retain consumers’ interest. However, one common misstep in the process is that companies often (too often) believe they know what the customer wants from them. They then often skip a critical step in the planning process – namely to ask the customers or clients what their needs and expectations are from the company. Instead, there is an inclination to either ignore the social channel, or to take it all at face value - and put equal weight to every tweet or opinion.

While ad hoc customer insights are decidedly important, not all clients are created equally. Some generate more revenue for your company or have a larger footprint than others and therefore should be given more attention than others. Due to the sheer volume of feedback from the social channel, the tendency is to focus on the "squeaky wheels" without heed to their impact on the large client ecosystem. Often times, the social channel feedback is centered on tactical issues - a problem with customer service, a broken product, a frustrating single experience – and do not focus on the more strategic issues that may be more important for the business to get a handle on.

Key clients would be well served by a customer engagement program that combines an informal and formal inquiry process. And, it should start with understanding where the prospective user base’s current process or experience gaps are – what keeps them up at night or causes issues, problems or inconveniences.

A driving goal of any social media program should be to use the digital channel to accelerate a business process and make it easier for the customers to interact with your company. Therefore, it remains important to explore, through both the social channel and more traditional insight programs, the points of customer discomfort and/or need.

Moderating B2B Communities: Keeping the Fire Lit

My friends over at eModeration invited me to be a "guest blogger" on their fantastic blog that covers topics on all things social. eModeration is one of the established moderation companies (founded in 2002). They provide outsourced moderation services for online communities around the world and in many different languages and are based in the UK (hence my fancy spelling on some words below).

Here is a repost of the interview which focuses on moderation best practices for B2B online communities or view it directly on their site. ...


We’re really thrilled that Vanessa DiMauro agreed to answer some questions from us about the challenging topic of business-to-business communities.

Vanessa DiMauro is the CEO of Leader Networks, and a pioneer in business-to-business community building, with over fifteen years experience in creating successful online communities and networks. Vanessa takes the approach of a cultural anthropologist to help businesses effectively use social media to get closer to their customers, generate revenue, innovation and tangible ROI.

eModeration: Let’s start with the basics. What defines a B2B community? How fast are they growing - is it a slower take-up than the consumer communities?

Vanessa: B2B communities are communities of practice that are dedicated to bringing a clearly defined professional group together. Some focus on thought leaders within an organisation, others occur within a company to increase global collaboration, and still others are industry-specific. The emphasis is largely on knowledge sharing and networking within an industry or professional setting. Commonly, these communities are “gated” or have a threshold for membership. While many are free to join and can get quite large, they are focused on the advancement of information sharing, subject specific content, and professional collaboration. For example, within the legal community there is a B2B community called Martindale Connected created by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell to service legal practitioners. Another example is Palladium Group’s Execution Premium Community that brings together strategy practitioners within enterprise to share best practice. These are examples of password protected communities but there are also examples of B2B communities where the content is shared on the open web but the information exchange is private such as Integrative Practitioner – a community for holistic health care providers.

Recently there’s a significant rise of B2B communities, as the use of social media is becoming more widely adopted by enterprise. The policy field is starting to settle into some normative behaviours so more large organizations are looking to B2B communities for customer care, innovation, product and service ideas, and best practice identification. But, yes, they are definitely less common than consumer communities as right now social media is focused on the channel as a marketing tool, but there is so much more to social media application than just consumer marketing.

eModeration: What kind of global impact is the rise in B2B communities having?

Vanessa: We live in a global economy and B2B communities are helping companies accelerate their pace of reach and innovation on a number of different fronts. Take for example the Palladium community I mentioned earlier. With this community, more than ½ of the membership base is non-US, and there is a large Middle East footprint. The mere fact that there are so many global leaders sharing information and experiences in the same space serves as a trigger to thinking about business challenges differently. Also, the members’ peer network is no longer isolated to those people with whom they have regional contact and therefore can extend the platform of collaboration to reach the far corners of the world. From a business perspective, this has a huge impact on the global economy as decision-makers now have greater exposure to a wider range of ideas, services and peers without having to travel, with an enlarged diversity of perspective to those that are regional or country specific.

eModeration: What advantage can be gained from a business setting up its own community - and what are the perils?

Vanessa: There are many advantages that can be gained from a business setting up its own community – they can increase customer intimacy, accelerate new product ideas, generate revenue, surface trends that can be used to launch new service offerings, and most importantly, when built right, they can create a business ecosystem of trust so that the clients or affiliates keep the company top-of mind year round as a trusted source, and not just interact with them at the point of sale.

The most successful B2B online communities solve a difficult challenge – they accelerate a business process in ways that are either faster or better than done in an in-person setting. Because decision-makers, do not have the luxury of time, clear community strategy is a critical success factor with B2B online communities. Most of the communities Leader Networks advises on are new lines of business for a company and need to generate revenue as well as offer additional, clearly defined business benefits to the organization.

It is imperative that the community focuses deeply on servicing the needs of the members:finding the right balance between supporting the goals and objectives of the business while simultaneously servicing the members to fill specific needs in their professional settings. Companies often forget this part about the understanding the member needs, often believing they know what their prospective members want and need without asking them directly. But this is where the missteps often occur as they are usually incorrect. At Leader Networks, we conduct research to find out from the prospective members what business processes they need help with, what keeps them up at night, what the hardest part of their job is. Look for trends and then, and only then, map the tools or the features to solve the problems.

eModeration: What would you say are the fundamental differences between a consumer community and a B2B community, in terms of demographics, objectives, platforms and need for community management?

Vanessa: Most of our understanding about online communities comes from the consumer side as that is where the media tends to focus, so the B2B side of the community equation is often overlooked.

There are many core differences between a consumer community and a B2B community across all those parameters! The member base tends to be older so the design needs to be streamlined and offer fewer features and functions than for a younger audienceship. Because members tend to visit less frequently but for longer durations, the site refresh cycles need to be less rapid but more content-rich. In many cases, successful B2B communities serve as a trusted advisor to the members in terms of steering them to the information and people that they need to be aware of – so the role of the B2B content and community staffs are really to bubble up a limited amount of information that has high value to its audience ship.

And, most importantly, from a moderation perspective, it is an entirely different skill set. The most effective moderators serve the community members as a liaison between people and ideas. Their role is really to facilitate interactions on the site: connecting people with each other so that they can find likeminded peers, developing relationships with members so they can cultivate strong user generated content and help senior professionals succeed.
Especially when the B2B community membership contains very senior professionals, they will require a higher degree of tactical hand-holding to operate the site. But the content and ideas of the community will naturally be driven and directed by them, because they are the thought-leaders. Experts may have a hard time expressing the details of their thinking because they have come to rely on experience-based expert systems. They make decisions tacitly. One example I like to use is the difficulty experienced drivers often have when trying to teach someone how to drive. I just *know* how to do it, but some of the detailed steps elude me because I have done it so often. This is the same with professionals. So, effective moderation often helps experts break down their ideas through a series of questions and idea-exchanges to help them articulate their ideas to others effectively. When a B2B community can get experts to share best practice online, then everyone in the community benefits and time spent on that community is valuable to all.

I offer a webinar-style presentation Social Media for Business: How is it different that offers an in depth look at this subject.

eModeration: Many thanks Vanessa for those insights into the specialism of B2B communities.

If you’ve found this interesting or want to ask questions, please leave comments below, or contact Vanessa directly via:

Vdimauro@leadernetworks.com
http://www.leadernetworks.com
http://twitter.com/vdimauro
http://www.linkedin/vdimauro
http://blog.leadernetworks.com/


About Leader Networks: Leader Networks is a research and consulting firm that helps clients create social strategies and professional online communities. They help their clients harness the power of new digital rules and tools to drive measurable business benefits, including increased revenue, productivity, and customer loyalty; decreased costs and cycle times; and the ability to engage business buyers as co-creators in the product/service development lifecycle.

Palladium Group Case Study on B2B Community

For those of you who are following the business to business (B2B) world of social media, there is a new player in town that I am very excited about! My client, Palladium Group, just announced that they have launched a global online community for strategy practitioners called the Executive Premium Community or XPC for short.

As the Palladium brand is so strong and respected - the creators of the Balanced Scorecard methodology, led by the famous Doctors Norton and Kaplan, and offering the whole enchilada of best practice – we needed to make sure this community would serve the Palladium brand, and more importantly, the clients well. So there were a number of things we did to ensure its success and here is our story ....

First, we talked to clients - lots of them - to find out what they needed get from the community and also from interacting with each other through in-depth interviews and surveys. Never once did we "tool talk" with potential members especially because of their seniority, their focus was on getting access to people and information to serve their work within companies so that is where we focused. These professionals are often isolated practitioners within enterprise and needed a platform to share their ideas, exchange experiences and form connections around the world.

Second, we focused many months of strategic planning effort on how we could best serve the membership base - what could we give them that would delight them and more importantly, make them want to log in frequently and engage with each other. Offering two levels of membership - free and platinum level (for a fee) and a sponsorship model we ensured sustainability to financially support growing the community features over time.

Third, we tapped into a wealth of amazing content - from conference presentations, videos, interviews, papers and created an enormous library of best practice so that no matter what stage the member was in, in her experience as a strategy worker, there was something of value.

The design focused on a clean and easy to use interface - as we were aware that executives don't have a lot of patience with new-fangled technology and kept it the streamlined. We used Awareness Networks for the platform and they were fast and easy to work with.

And, we trained internal thought leaders on how to best use social media to help their clients and provide leadership online. Through a series of "Thought Leader" training sessions we taught people about the rules of engagement online - be social, share your wisdom, be especially responsive and the importance of asking good questions.

And finally, we spent three months in beta refining the site - and worked with a dedicated group of 300 active foundation members in order to have them test drive the site, provide feedback, supporting their ability to contribute user generated content and generally insuring it was ready for prime time before opening the doors. We now are entooled with a clear member onboarding plan, welcome kits to help guide the newbies, and an elegant member invitation process.

This was one amazing journey! Since our formal launch this week the community is growing *really* quickly with members around the world, activity level is very high with the average member spending more than 15 minutes online per visit, and proving to be a valuable contribution to the world of b2b communities.

We at Leader Networks are proud to have been a part of the Execution Premium Community (XPC) - here is the press release! Even though the community is "gated", meaning people need to apply to gain access and must be an active practitioner within an organization, here is an online demo).