People talk about your company in online communities all the time. Do you know what they’re saying on Twitter? Facebook? Amazon? On your own community site? Get a handle on the buzz, find out how you stack up against the competition, and play an active role in shaping public opinion—build a social media monitoring and engagement strategy. It’s the most critical step in delivering value back to your customers.
We’ve led community strategy and development initiatives for more than two dozen publicly traded companies. Our solution: Make it easy for your team to find out what’s being said, share intelligence, collaborate on responses, and engage the public. To make it happen, we build on the Jive platform. We’ve found it to be the most enterprise-ready social business platform for public and private communities. Thanks to the recent acquisition of Filtrbox, Jive has reached a new level of learning and engagement. Separate modules make it easy to:
• Monitor the social web through powerful, easy-to-use dashboards. The foundation of a good social strategy starts with listening. Discover what people are saying about your brand and how they’re responding to your campaigns. Learn what questions they’re asking and what’s being said about your competitors.
• Share insights across your marketing, sales, support, and product development teams. Measure and discuss real-time chatter and how it impacts your strategies. Discuss your opportunities to control the flow of information, moderate discussions, and respond.
• Engage customers by turning your insights into actions, whether that’s responding to issues, countering misinformation, tuning marketing campaigns, or making changes to products. This allows you to build credibility and with it, a following. It’s that following that gives you the opportunity to market to customers and drive different types of transactions.
• Track and analyze how well people are responding to your message. See how social trends relate to commerce, including click-through to your product pages, how many community registrants convert to new customers, and if existing community members have increased purchases year over year.
Is it important to measure, track and optimize both market and direct engagement metrics. Market engagement is activity on third-party communities like Twitter, Facebook, and specialty industry sites, measuring your number of followers/fans, retweets, Facebook comments and links, and improved search engine ranking. Direct engagement happens on your own public-facing support site, partner site, or comment area. For example, the number of members in the community, unique visitors, page views, and subscribers to your blog’s RSS feed.
When you have the big picture, your teams can effectively engage customers. Ultimately, you’ll create the community of enthusiastic followers that evangelizes your brand and products.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 10:46 am and is filed under Community & Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.