Why Your Business Needs A Community

WIDS, Lausanne MeetupNovember 25, 2015

Why Your Business Needs a Community

Before we begin, I’d like to share a story.

You can read the story here http://bit.ly/WIDSNov

Let’s talk communityOnline Community:

People brought together by familiar digital behaviors and around a purpose, passion, need or interest on one or more channels.

The community is independant of a brand.

Twitter chats, Blabs, FB groups, G+ Communities, Linkedin Groups, Local meetups

Example: Women in Digital Switzerland

Branded Online Community:

Brand followers, fans or customers brought together by familiar social digital behaviors and common brand interest on owned (website) or non-owned (social) digital channels.

Website forums, microsites as well as branded social channels: FB groups, Twitter chats, Slack

Example: Autodesk Education Community

Community: use case and industryThe Community Roundtable survey 206 Community programs representing multiple industries and use cases, ages and sizes.

Respondents by Use Cases Respondents by Industry

State of Community Management 2015 Report

Community: size and age

State of Community Management 2015 Report

Respondents by Community Size Respondents by Age of Community

Five ways your business can benefit from community collaboration

How to get started1. Management’s buy-in and a team blessing (but don’t let that stop you)

2 Clear business goals or objectives

3. Understanding of community needs

4. Resources - people, technology and tools

5. Passion for people

5 ways to benefit from community

1. Customer Insights86% of fortune 500 companies report

communities provide insight into customer needs.

● Stay relevant: know PINs - problems, interests, needs

● Improve customer journey

● Optimize business operations

mycustomer.com

2. Customer ServiceIt takes 12 positive experiences to make

up for one unresolved negative experience.

● Engage customer advocates

● Empower to educate

● Loyalty increases sales 4 fold

Help Scout

3. Marketing96% of companies see the value that

customer collaboration presents for the marketing department.

● Campaign clarity

● Content creation co-collaboration

● WoM marketing, increase traffic & leads

Socially Enabled Enterprise

4. Product Development66% of companies say they turn to

community for product development.

● ‘Right’ feature development

● Increase time to market

● Reduce development costs

mycustomer.com

5. Brand Loyalty

80% of consumers say that authenticity will influence them to follow a brand.

● Empower to build trust

● Community ‘sells’ when they tell

● In crisis, Loyalty’s got your back

BazaarVoice

Case study:Building Community Into Operations

Paper.li - Content aggregation serviceGlobal community of 500,000 + publishers8 million visitors monthly

Challenge: Manage Content, Communicationsand Customer Service with 1.5 team members, that included me!

Solution: Community

1. Customer InsightsWe learned● Global community and universal

challenge: time, team, money● Willing to share knowledge● Internal Paper.li operations were

disjointed and not serving customers

We adjusted:● Shifted all communications to

helping and saving time, resources, money

● Empowered the community with knowledge to help others

● Placed people, not product, at the center of operations

2. Customer ServiceProblem: ● Team resources - lean (Paper.li)● High amount of 1 touch tickets● Content creation was extensive

Solution:● Train the trainer ● Empowered fans, champions and

subject matter experts (sme) to answer forum and from their social accounts

● Encouraged SMEs to co-author content

Bonus: Hired from the community

The Solution

Solution: Created a self-serve portalEmpowered users to answer forum

Impact:Ticket reduction overallQuicker response w/community help

3. MarketingProblem: ● Marketing messages a flop● Lack of resources (Paper.li)● Little conversations around Paper.li

happening socially

Solution:● Shifted from product to people● Empowered the community a blog

of their own● Created online communities to be

helpful, shine the spotlight on community

Bonus: Hired from the community

The solutionSolution: Paper.li Community Blog

● A platform to serve the community and their PINs.

● Powered by the community and edited by community

Impact● 30k views/month● Increased Awareness

through social sharing● Increase in subscriptions

The SolutionSolution: #BizHeroes Twitter Chat

● A weekly date with the community

● Resource for community driven content creation

Impact● 700,000 million

impressions Y1, 1.5b billion to date

● Increased awareness of Paper.li products

● Increase content, reduced effort

● Increased visibility of community members BizHeroes schedule

4. Product DevelopmentProblem: ● We needed to monetize● We thought our ideas were cool,

but…● Features were often buggy when

released

Solution:● Listened, talked, survey around Pins

and current features ● Prioritized community requests ● Created UAT testers out of vetted

community members, staging environment to test

The SolutionSolution: Community sourced features

● Publish Community to gather ideas

● Freemium feature development based on community feedback

Impact● greater user satisfaction● better alignment with

‘real world’ needs● increase revenue,

reduce in churn● Increased dev & team

satisfaction

5. Brand loyaltyProblem: ● “Daily is out!” Tweet was

controversial when launched● Competition was fierce, new

services arriving weekly● We were seen as ‘novel’ not a must

Solution:● Out reach to every person who

complained about Paper.li. No exceptions

● Re-tooled my roles to include community as a part of the process

● Created a ‘safety net’ that held our backs in time of need.

The SolutionSolution: Community-centric mindset

● Embraced all engagements, + and -

● Made community outreach a part of daily routine (not a ‘thing’ to be done)

Impact● Write-ups by friends and

foes● Rallies of love in times of

difficulty● Community that cares

Content Marketing Minds Article

The RewardThe crisis: Three day down time

● New platform migration had issues

● Paper.li was offline 72 hours

Impact● Publishers couldn’t

access papers● Newsletter weren’t

going out

The reward● The community had our

backs

The Outage Storify

To sum it all up:5 Things I learned building community

1. Find mutual cooperation points, but ask first what you can do for your community before asking what they can do for you.

2. Allow your community to tell your story for you and you will increase brand loyalty and build lasting relationships that will have a huge impact on your bottom line in coming years.

3. Give your community the same respect you would friends and family. Listen with empathy, leave your ego at the front door.

4. Handle your customers like people, not customers, and they’ll do the same in return.

5. Treat your community like and extended team members and you can improve quality of service and ease or off-set resource constraints.

Next steps

1. Don’t wait for anyone to give the go ahead. Set up monitoring tools and start listening!● TweetDeck (free), Hootsuite or SproutSocial (pay)

2. Identify pain points in your organization. Think about how an extended team of subject matter experts could help out● Offsetting content creation, testing new features, reducing costs in customer care...

3. Don’t let ‘No’ discourage you. ● Set up a small pilot project, work it into daily operations or take it on evenings.

4. Start profiling your champions internally. ● Show off how your company is already benefiting from them, or not.

5. Become the voice of the customer if your company doesn’t have one.

Thank you, let’s connect.

Twitter: @kdhungerfordLinkedIn: Kelly HungerfordBlog: KellyHungerford.com