Category: social networks

  • Customer Communities Are Critical For Business Transformation

    The last few years have seen big brands make extraordinary investments in developing massive “digital transformation” and social media programs. On one hand, these programs have yielded moments of customer connection, advocacy and insight. Unfortunately, for the majority of programs reliant on mass social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, organic reach has dropped effectively to 0 and companies are now forced to…

  • Aligning Your Enterprise Community Strategy With Your Customer’s Career Journey

    Aligning Your Enterprise Community Strategy With Your Customer’s Career Journey

    Use these three contexts to help create a bigger and better future for your company’s community.

  • AI Use Cases For Communities & Networks

    AI Use Cases For Communities & Networks

    For business leaders shaping online community strategy, AI holds promise to help solve two of the biggest challenges with online communities: 1) Quantifying the value of community investment and delivering timely and actionable insight and 2) Managing large networks of relationships at scale.  

  • Announcing the C3/A3 Project: The Connected Future of Communities, AI & Automation

    Announcing the C3/A3 Project: The Connected Future of Communities, AI & Automation

    A new set of technologies is emerging to augment human cognition (AI), enhance human agency (Agents) and shape digital experiences and outcomes by taking advantage of a rich set of tools and APIs (Automation). We see these three technological forces (AI, Agents and Automation) as the next immediate wave of disruption in digital experience, and…

  • The Customer Community

    Image © Leigh Prather The last few years have seen big brands make extraordinary investments in developing massive “digital transformation” and social media programs. On one hand, these programs have yielded moments of customer connection, advocacy and insight. Unfortunately, for the majority of programs reliant on mass social platforms like facebook and twitter, organic reach has dropped effectively to 0 and companies…

  • Want to Know What Community Members (a.k.a. Customers) Need? Just Ask.

    Are you “Member Shy”? In its most basic form, a community strategy is a balance of an organization’s goals and its member’s (a.k.a customer’s) needs. Organizations have methodologies for developing goals and objectives, yet I continue to be surprised at how many organizations are missing research as a core part of their online community development process. Even for organizations…

  • The Secret Ingredient for Customer Lifecycle Marketing? Community Management.

    Clearly Customer Lifecycle Marketing is incredibly valuable when all stages of the lifecycle are addressed. So what is the problem? Based on my direct experience and years of studying the intersection of marketing and online community, I would assert that building meaningful relationships at scale is still an undeveloped function in the majority of most…

  • Preview of the Brands & Collaborative Economy Research Project

    In March I embarked on a series of qualitative research projects to help organizations prepare for the disruption and opportunity emerging from the Collaborative Economy, and understand what resources they need to be successful. Wave 1 responses are in and the analysis is almost finished. I wanted to share a preview of the results to date. The full set of results will be published…

  • Dr. Strangeshare or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the “Collaborative Economy”

    I have a confession to make: I can become really obsessed with labels. Back in 2008, when I was producing events and conducting research focused on Online Communities for Forum One, the word “social media” hit broad adoption. I had countless debates with my colleagues about what we should title events and new research initiatives…

  • Thoughts on Managing Your Social Vendor Relationships

    Let’s face it – the vendors you rely on for social media & community platforms, services and advice have you outnumbered and surrounded. Between account reps, sales reps, relationship managers, executive success partners and the rest of the cast, most vendors have a veritable army of skilled professionals whose primary purpose is to maximize revenue derived from their relationship…