Key questions for B2B communities

There aren't many issues hotter than online communities for B2B marketers these days. Just about about every B2B company I know is trying to figure out how to advance existing communities, build a new one, or design a strategy. The benefits seem obvious, and everyone else is doing it, so you'd best not be left behind.

It's all well and good, but two rather practical questions keep getting in the way:

• How do you really make them work, given the extreme time pressures on would-be  participants?
• Where should you actually look to demonstrate return on investment?

Susan Zellmann-Rohrer tackled those questions head on the other day in a useful webinar organized by Mzinga and Communities Exchange. Zellmann-Rohrer spent years helping building Communispace, a top manager of private online communities for B2C and B2B clients, and is currently heading community strategy for EMC, so has more practical experience in this world than most.

On the first question, making them work, she highlighted three specific benefits that organizers should emphasize in creating a value equation for participants:

• Empowerment. Customers want to have a say on company direction and initiatives that affect them. If you can indeed empower that, they'll respond. But this means asking them for input, sharing inside ideas and information, and, most important of all, really listening and acting upon what you hear -- and reporting back on the results.
• Premium Content. What special and useful material can you provide participants that they would not otherwise see? Are there members-only publications? What about pre-publication drafts of important reports?
• Networking. This is the most obvious benefit and the first rationale for most communities, but it's hardly a matter of build it and they will network. Inviting the right people to join is the first, hurdle; actively encouraging and making it easy for them to connect to each other is the second. At EMC, for example, Zellmann-Rorher is tying a new online community directly into LinkedIn, so participants have easy access to more extensive profiles and networks than they would with EMC's community alone.

As for creating and proving the value, Zellmann-Rohrer suggested three areas to consider:

• Quality improvements. Has the community generated practical ideas to improve the quality of products and services?
• Customer advocacy. Are community members, especially the most engaged ones, actively advocating for the company, both within the community and outside?
• Co-innovation. Is the community becoming a vehicle to actually develop new product and service offerings? Zellmann-Rohrer cited research by MIT professor Eric von Hippel showing that innovation fueled by "lead users" in communities is highly correlated with commercial success.

The point of all this is that, beyond the hype, communities can indeed be extremely valuable to B2B companies, but not without a serious commitment to investing the time, giving at least as much as you get, and bringing a much more open approach to customer connections. Hmm... this is pretty much what we need to do with every other aspect of marketing these days, isn't it?

Comments

[Rob Leavitt]

Thanks Aaron; it was a great session. Thanks for posting the link, too; I should have done that myself! It's well worth a listen for folks who missed it. See you Monday.

Rob

[Aaron Strout]

Rob,

Great write up. I couldn't agree more that B2B communities are a hot topic right now and Susan (along with Bob of Riverbed and Josh/Rhett of Intel) did an excellent job providing some prescriptive recommendations during last week's webcast.

I'm not normally one to leave URLs in comments but if folks are interested in viewing the archive, they can check it out here: http://www.mzinga.com/en/AboutUs/Events/Archive/ (limited info is required for access - sorry for any inconvenience).

I look forward to catching up with you on Monday for coffee!

Best,
Aaron | @astrout