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The Forrester Wave Report, which covers 9 of the 90+ community platform vendors, was published today. We’re thrilled with Telligent’s position:

Telligent Systems [and one other vendor] “Lead An Emerging Market.”

I’m personally very happy about all the hard work of the team here at Telligent. From the very beginning, we had a vision for building a comprehensive “community” platform, Community Server, and have continued to successfully execute that vision while at the same time innovating in areas such as analytics.

Nearly 2 years ago we started work on our analytics platform, Harvest Reporting Server, because we anticipated customers asking questions about all the great information stored within their community.  The Forrester report also states:

“Telligent’s most impressive feature is its inclusive reporting dashboard, which gives community managers a plethora of graphs, data, and scorecards to track changes in customer attitudes and behaviors over time.”

Capabilities such sentiment analysis, forecasting, expert identification, etc., help our customers reduce costs, measure their successes, and most importantly enable information to move faster through their organization.

We’re hard at work now on version 3.0 of our integrated analytics solution and version 8.0 of our Community Server platform. We have some incredible innovations that are coming in these next releases and especially in these challenging economic times. Telligent will continue to create investments that benefit our customers directly.

You can read the full report here: http://telligent.com/forrester-report/

You can learn more about Harvest here: http://telligent.com/products/harvest-reporting-server/

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Our marketing group at Telligent is ramping up on some client case studies, so I thought I’d share some from time to time. The latest one is from a company called Goozex, who’s built an online community for trading video games. What’s most interesting is some of the data they’ve shared as the community has matured.

Goozex says its online community is now responsible for more than a one-third (33%) if its recurring transactions, something that lowers the incremental cost of additional sales. The other piece that stuck out was how Goozex reduced its customer service workload. The company tells us nearly half of its service issues are resolved through its forums.

Clearly all this didn’t happen by just implementing software. As with any digital strategy, it takes a well thought out plan that addresses how social media and collaboration map to your business goals.

Even though Telligent’s platform can work wonders, it’s still just the enabler. 

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BtoB, the magazine for marketing strategists, recently reported on a Forrester Research study on social media’s relationship to CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with current and prospective customers. Forrester Research analyst Bill Band says social media initiatives help companies deepen their relationships with customers, especially self-forming groups of customers. Savvy marketers have begun using a variety of social media tools. These social tools and activities pay even greater dividends when combined with CRM’s (customer relationship management) ability to aggregate, analyze and make use of customer data.

The article states Forrester’s catalog of social media successes—enterprises using blogs, wikis, RSS, widgets and other Web-based social tools to talk to customers—isn’t all that new. What is new is the idea that these tools are a key stepping stone from CRM’s past to the future.

”What we found was there’s no need to wait; social technologies are already driving business results today,” said Band, author of a new report titled “CRM 2.0: Fantasy or Reality”. [Marketers] who wait will find it hard to catch up.”

So what are the next steps to put your business ahead of the game? Some key factors include:

· Define your social customer objectives

· Assess your CRM 2.0 capabilities and determine if you have the tools in place (Community Server!)

· Understand the social computing landscape

· Define your metrics for success (Harvest Reporting Server!)

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

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According to an article posted on eMarketer.com, B2B Marketers are plowing ahead in 2009. More than six out of 10 business-to-business (B2B) marketers surveyed in December 2008 by BtoB Magazine said they planned to launch new ad campaigns next year.

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According to Forrester Research, demonstrating Web 2.0 value is the biggest hurdle.

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I’m always fascinated at collaboration behind the firewall because it’s been such a tough road to hoe for so many years. Getting people to share what they know and to be generally open about their ideas is no doubt daunting for most.

I’d read about Best Buy’s social media efforts, mostly in the form of its Blue Shirt Nation project, but I hadn’t seen the depth of detail behind the company’s motivation until seeing the video below.

With all the talk about the inability to show demonstrable ROI in social computing, it’s refreshing to see a company lay out the benefits so clearly. Though all the gains from social media can’t be distilled down into hard numbers, there’s plenty of returns across the business. One instance was a substantial jump in 401K enrollments after users were encouraged to develop a social media-based campaign targeted at its younger, gen-Y workforce. Through the use of video, blogs and other user-generated content, 401K dissenters were converted after the benefits were delivered in a collaborative, engaging way.

Best Buy simply found a way to engage passionate employees and gave them a voice. That’s a return on participation (ROP) in my book.

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According to a recent eMarketer article, blogs have long had an avid following. But corporations are finding that blogs can be a secret sauce to building solid relationships with their customers.

And for icing on the cake, the study also found that 40% of blog readers—and 50% of frequent blog readers—have taken an action after viewing an ad on a blog.

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1. Prioritize Your Business Objectives & Pick Your Target

Most likely, you’re not hurting for ideas from your user community to do something online. It’s the “something” that can present a problem. In short, make sure your business objectives map to specific company goals. If the CEO’s goal is to reduce support costs, you might want to start with customer service and work through the organization from that vantage point. You should also think about how to gain cross-departmental leverage with your approach. Just because customer service has blogging capabilities doesn’t mean the same process and platform can’t be used by sales and marketing.

2. Start Small And Build Incrementally

As the saying goes, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Invariably, creating content, developing the right user experience and managing content will take longer than you think. Often, it’s better to look at online community efforts as unique programs with unique requirements. Marketers know there’s no one size fits all anymore. In fact, more communities and brand messages are dictated and delivered by the customers themselves. With that approach, you can build, test and deploy smaller projects that allow you to re-direct and re-prioritize in midstream.

3. Set Realistic Goals And Expectations

Decide what you’ll measure. Ask yourself if you could walk into the CEO’s office and deliver tangible evidence that your online community is helping the business. While everything can’t be proven by hard numbers, you can show how your content is consumed, how the market perceives your products, or how sales now has a 360-degree view of your customers. And keep it simple. One organization’s goal was to increase the number of customer testimonials it could garner over a 6-month period. As a result of engaging with its customers online, the company was able to convert those participants into brand advocates.

4.Identify Your Partners

While you may consider yourself the SuperStrategist, you can’t do it alone. Fortunately though, access to world-class technology is no longer your biggest challenge — it’s human capital. While many times marketing will own the brand or community initiative, there’s a few more moving parts you need to be aware of. Technology-wise, do your homework and talk to a few analysts and end-users in your vertical. You’ll quickly find the platforms and tool sets have matured rapidly and will give you most (if not all) of what you need out-of-the-box. Strategic alliances can range from content partners and advertisers, to PR firms and other SEO or social media marketing firms. Odds are you can do most of the heavy lifting and planning yourself, but having a strategic resource to bounce things off and help you build a longer-term roadmap is key.

5. Develop a Community Roadmap

Again, think of your community with longer-term lenses. Don’t get too crazy, but take your wish list and siphon it down into manageable parts. For example, if your goal is to get every executive blogging, make sure you’ve developed an onramp for different skill sets and adoption paths. The approach you used to get the early-adopter execs creating content might not work for others. Less sophisticated users might prefer you show them how to upload a Video blog (Vlog) after you’ve taped them. The community roadmap will be your primer for how things will be delivered, sustained and measured. Marketers should also engage with toolset vendors’ professional services teams. There’s a good chance they’ve built their own roadmap.

6. Develop a Marketing Plan To Rally The Needed Support

Some of the toughest marketing you’ll ever do involves converting the naysayers or those satisfied with the status quo. Internally, market to those executives with phrases like:

• -“Do you know what our customers are saying about our products?”

-“I want to reduce our support costs.”

-“Are we capturing the right intellectual capital to speed innovation?”

Externally, always be ready to answer the question – “What’s in it for me?” Some findings show that as little as 1% are super-users, so be thinking about the value proposition for passive users and lurkers. Think about your users’ technographics (Forrester term) here. If you’ve identified your super-users, there’s a good chance they’ll be on the lookout for your Facebook page or RSS feed. Conversely, late techno bloomers probably won’t mind an opt-in email campaign.

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We can’t wait to connect with a bunch of you at BlogWell on Jan. 22 in Chicago. If you have no idea what BlogWell is, that’s OK.
All you need to know is that it’s a half-day session showcasing
how a bunch of big companies use social media. That’s it.

So take a few seconds and watch Andy Sernovitz’s video.
Then go and book your flight. You’ll thank us.

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