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Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, authors an interesting blog called Web Strategy by Jeremiah. I like peeking in on his articles because they focus on how companies can use web tools to connect with their customers. A topic near and dear to us over here at Community Network.
One of Jeremiah's articles from last August focused on The Three Spheres of Web Strategy, complete with a cool graphic that shows the overlapping relationship among the spheres...
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...
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.
As a marketing professional, I spend large chunks of my day thinking about my company or client's corporate brand or identity and finding ways to communicate the essence of the brand to customers, prospects, partners and other audiences. When I do my job well, then the company readily attracts prospects and retains customers. If I don't, then we lose business opportunities because others won't recognize who we are or what we do.
One way to successfully communicate is through collaborative online communities.
Now, if you're a company with a strong consumer focus, the idea of creating online communities is more obvious. What if you're focus is B2B? And what if you're organizational focus isn't business at all?
Does an online community make sense for you? ...
I'm pleased as punch to partner with Intellicore Design to offer companies collaborative community solutions, offered on Salesforce.com platforms.
Intellicore Design is the brainchild of Cynthina S. Heinsohn, software developer extraordinaire. My marketing and communications and sale expertise compliments her design skills.
We've worked together for too many years to acknowledge and in a variety of roles. One of the things we enjoy the most with each other, though, is collaborating. With our long-time friendship, we're able to zip into the heart of a situation, stimulate each other's creativity, and get things done.
What we're most enthused about right now, is finding ways to stimulate connection...
