10 Ways to +1 Your Community this Year

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Cover of "Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Ap...

Long before there was Google+, the concept of +1 was used to address the topic of extraordinary customer service.  In 1993, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles wrote Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service.  In Raving Fans, Blanchard and Bowles cover three areas:  Deciding what you as a business want; Discovering what the customer wants; and delivering plus one.

So what did they mean by delivering plus one.  Here are some of the key points they articulate:

  • Being consistent in your performance to create credibility with your customers
  • Limiting the number of areas in which you want to make a difference so that you have a chance of doing them well
  • Promote more service and deliver more (as opposed to under-promise and over-deliver)
  • Meet expectations first, exceed them second
  • Be flexible

Since one of the primary reasons to have an externally facing online community is to deepen relationships with your customers, it seems that the +1 concept from Blanchard and Bowles fits well for online communities.  Here are 10 suggestions for ways you could +1 your community this year. Continue reading →

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Beware: Members Can HiJack Your Community If You Don’t Do These 5 Things

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A Best Practice of World Class Communities is to Encourage Ownership of the Community by Members

One of the strategies Telligent encourages for building World Class Communities is to encourage a level of ownership of the community by its members.  There are several benefits associated with this:

  • People tend to support the things they feel they have ownership of
  • The cost of managing the community can be lowered with community volunteers
  • Community members can often be more ardent supporters of the community rules and also more effective evangelists of your products than employees

This usually works well because the interest of the community members is in alignment with those of the company sponsoring the community.  The following chart is an example of the typical types of things both a set of customers and a company would be focused on:

The key is ensuring that the community’s interest stays aligned with the interest of the company that is funding the community, otherwise there is a problem.

Sometimes, Community Ownership can Turn into a Community Hijacking

Steve Pavlina had this happen to him with his forums that had been successful for five years.

Click here to read the entire post on Telligent.com and find out the five things you can do to avoid having your community hijacked.

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An Obvious Fit for Online Communities: Associations

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AssociationsIn the recent newsletter that Association Trends™ published, there was an article titled “Social media and how it’s changing associations.” This article focused on the theme of the recent ASAE 2012 Technology Conference, which was how to integrate a social media strategy into an association’s corporate culture. Social continues to be a growing trend, and it is starting to pick up in popularity among associations.

This trend should not come as a surprise since associations are perfect candidates for online communities built via social media.  A group of people with a common interest, that come together regularly to achieve a purpose and to establish relationships.  That is the definition of a community – and probably a pretty good definition of an association as well.

Click here to read the full article how associations should plan to use the Ant’s Eye View levels of engagement to move through Telligent’s social ecosystem layers.

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Pride, Prejudice, and Social Media

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pride_and_prejudice_largeOver the past year I have been adding some of the classics to my reading list.  The book I finished most recently is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  One of the things most striking about the book is the extreme focus on the level of civility when engaging with others.  The book is full of conflict, between families, neighbors, and would be lovers.  It is set during a time period that has a major concern over how things were communicated.  There was a real concern for how the message would be taken – what impact it would have on the feelings and reputation of the person to whom it was directed, and what impact it would have on the perception of the character of the person doing the speaking.

While there were a few too weak in character to express their opinions, most, instead, took the time to think through the most appropriate manner of communication.  Given this, I wonder what social media would have looked like in 18th century.  Continue reading →

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Why the classic strategy frameworks from McKinsey and BCG are still relevant

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7sSomeone on LinkedIn recently posted a question on whether  “our strategic models (such as McKinsey, BCG, standardized indicators, . . .)” are outdated.  The person wanted to know if there were some keys to give new meaning to strategic thinking that are better adapted to the current environment?

Before even attempting to answer that question, some serious clarification needs to happen.  First, McKinsey and BCG are not strategic models.  They are consulting firms that have, for the past 50 years, helped shaped the way the business world thinks about the entire subject of strategy.  In fact, they, and most notably the early pioneers of BCG, introduced the concept of strategy into the business lexicon.

Continue reading →

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