10 years in the trenches- Best Practices for Your B2B Community

Our Experience Our Clients include: Other organizations we’ve helped while at Participate.com: 2 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved. Global Experience: Where We’ve Launched Projects

The Evolution of Community Value “We have seen an overall lower churn rate among our customers, which really points to the power of community to enhance customer loyalty and retain customers.” – Ed Plaskon, ATT 2002 “We realized an ROI of over 100% from our online community.” – Helen Lechner, Cisco 2002 “It’s a cost avoidance argument. The savings total is in the low six figures every quarter, and over $1,000,000 in the past two years. Support site visitors have more than tripled while calls to support engineers have actually declined.” – Patrick Saeger, Mercury 2003 4 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Today, Value is Beyond Support Cases From our recent Value Analysis with NetApp: Active members using our community to interact and engage with us controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period Active partners of NetApp engaging in the community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue over the same time period So, how do you achieve this type of success with your community? It’s in the details… 5 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Who “Owns” Community? Big Question in communities about communities and LinkedIn groups is: “What group controls communities in an organization?” Answer:Whoever controls the content for the community’s members should control the community. 7 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Focus on Goals First… What will audience gain from a business perspective by joining and participating in your community? What will your company gain by offering the community from a business perspective? Sample Goals: Support: Deliver cost effective support solutions to our customers within one business day of engagement Marketing: Provide 24/7 interactive access to product/services information to help generate/nurture contacts/leads Developer: Build strong external team of members who utilize our code and expertise to extend our product base for their organizations 8 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Then Develop Key Performance Indicators Conversion Percent of New Registered Members / First Time Visitors Engagement Percent of Active Members / Total Unique Visitors Percent of Total Downloads/ Total Registered Members Value Number of discussions rated answered by initial member Number of customer organizations represented by community registration data Number of contact us submissions from community members 9 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Organizational Structure The single most important team member for your success is an Executive Sponsor who understands the power of communities Obtains/defends budget High level evangelization Executive voice of the community (blog, welcome message, etc.) Organization follows the goals you are trying to achieve but requires a few roles to succeed… 11 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

The Executive Sponsor 12 Our Community will deliver unique opportunities for our members that reward our company. Pictures courtesy of AMCTV.com (http://www.amctv.com/shows/mad-men/cast/ ) ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

The Content Manager 13 Content is King. Exclusive, targeted content helps communities to grow. Pictures courtesy of AMCTV.com (http://www.amctv.com/shows/mad-men/cast/ ) ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

The Community Manager 14 We must gain internal resources to build our results. Pictures courtesy of AMCTV.com (http://www.amctv.com/shows/mad-men/cast/ ) ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

The Analyst 15 We must look beyond basic traffic metrics to uncover value! Pictures courtesy of AMCTV.com (http://www.amctv.com/shows/mad-men/cast/ ) ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

The Technology Manager 16 99.9% uptime folks. That’s what I’m talking about. Pictures courtesy of AMCTV.com (http://www.amctv.com/shows/mad-men/cast/ ) ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Tactical Approach to Deliver Strategic Results Your tactics should deliver the metrics you need to measure and achieve your KPIs Tactics include: Content focus and placement (type of content, feature to use) Content delivery (video, blog, whitepaper, seed posts, etc.) Events (online and offline) Online/Digital Marketing (Promotion) Outreach (MORE PROMOTION!) Yes, this includes social media, email, newsletters, etc. Member recognition (external and internal) 22 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Membership Recognition Programs Recognition is one of the most powerful tools in a community, yet it is often overlooked Don’t rely on out of the box features like stars ratings to recognize your top members  Community is about relationships, so build them with your members through contact not technology Featured members provide visual incentive to newer members to contribute while rewarding your faithful or stronger members Early on, at Cisco’s NetPro community we interviewed our top members then posted their responses as blogs in the community Now, you can do so much more Longer term, beware point systems as they provide a disincentive for newer members to contribute How does a new member ever catch up to a member with six years of points? Instead remove the friction by creating a Hall of Fame or MVP program which de-emphasizes points and rewards the strength of the information provided by members 28 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Members as Moderators 30 * Actual content reported on a unique basis meaning that the same post reported ten times counts as a single reported instance ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Simplify Your Measurement Categories This is your base line information (counts) Traffic – How many? Visitors, Visits, Page views, Referrers, Posts, Uploads, etc. Behavior – What did they do? Who are they? Page views/Visit, Posts/Visitor, New Registrations/First Time Visitors, Repeat Visitors, Subscriptions, % Customers, etc. Value – What did we gain by using this? Revenue, Leads, Lower Support Costs, Brand Awareness, Purchase Influence, Insight This is what Day to Day Management should focus upon This is what Sr. Management cares about Traffic & Behavior DO NOT EQUAL VALUE (but they do help drive it) 32 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Community Life Cycle Determines Where to Focus Measurement Low Maturity Middle Maturity High Maturity ,[object Object]

Over-reliance on host company personnel to answer questions, create Tweets, etc. Minimal blog comments or ratings on content

Member to member interactions are inconsistent

Host company SMEs play role, but external SMEs role is growing. Content being Tweeted and used in 3rd party blogs, comments are sporadic on blogs.

Member to member interactions are the majority rather than minority

External SMEs help drive future enhancements to community (ready for major recognition program)It is not traffic that determines the maturity of an offering, but the behavior of members interacting with each other 33 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Traffic Metrics For a new B2B Community project the initial reporting should focus on traffic – Unique Metrics are best! Traffic metrics are the main focus until the visitors begin to interact more fully with your offering, meaning multiple members adding content and interacting with each other (maturity of audience starts to improve) Key metrics to follow: Visits, Visitors, Page Views, Registrations, Referring Sites, Geographic Location of Visits, Top Pages, Top Entry Pages, Top Exit Pages, # of Followers/Friends What traffic tells you: How effective your outreach and third party social media efforts are in driving visits to your main site How effective your content is in meeting member needs What content is popular with visitors and what is not 34 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

Behavior Metrics Behavior reports on what visitors do once you get them to your site – Looking for more maturity from your audience in terms of how they use your offering Key metrics to measure are in ratios, not simple counts Page views per visit, Page views per visitor, new registrations per total visitors, new content added per visitor, repeat visitors, new discussions, posts, rate of reply, retweets, Mentions (+/-), Comments added per entry, etc. Behavior metrics tell you: How effective your offering is in converting visitors to registered members (conversion) How interesting is your content (consumption) Are members building your site into their routine (engagement) How healthy is your community (engagement) 35 ©2011 JTS Online Holdings Inc. dba Impact Interactions. All Rights Reserved.

10 years in the trenches- Best Practices for Your B2B Community

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10 years in the trenches- Best Practices for Your B2B Community

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