5 Benefits of B2B Success Communities by Roland Crepeau

5 Benefits of B2B Success Communities

Hannon Hill Corporation 950 East Paces Ferry Road Suite 2440, Atlanta, GA 30326 303 6 www.hannonhill.com o: 678.904.6900 f: 678.904.6901

Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................... 3 Build Transparency & Credibility ............................................................................................................................ 3 Improve Quality & Depth of Content & Make it Relevant ..................................................................................... 3 Give Your Best Community Members a Voice in Shaping Your Company ............................................................. 3 Now is the Time...................................................................................................................................................... 4 Drastically Improve ROI .......................................................................................................................................... 4 About eCrowds ....................................................................................................................................................... 5 About Hannon Hill .................................................................................................................................................. 5

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5 Benefits of B2B Success Communities

Introduction If you're in marketing, chances are you're always looking for ways to add value to your organization, its community, and its message. While there are many distinct applications on the market that provide some of the tools needed to build an online community around your product or service, there are some solutions that combine the added value of community building with the convenience of consolidating the systems that power your web presence. Building an active customer success community can benefit your organization in countless ways; we've outlined the top five reasons to engage customers and build brand with online corporate communities below:

Build Transparency & Credibility Allowing your users to vote ideas both up and down, suggest product ideas without censorship, and make their voices heard affords your organization two benefits: improved transparency of information and opinions, and added credibility. Eliciting both positive and negative product and service reviews improves your organization’s reputation in the eyes of prospects by showing them you have nothing to hide. This creates an immediate sense of trust between prospects and your organization. In addition, by being open and honest with product and service-related information via the use of wikis and discussions, you will earn respect from stakeholders. Beyond simply gaining stakeholder buy-in though, embracing all types of user reviews and feedback, will also earn your business respect from prospects and the most cynical of web browsers.

Improve Quality & Depth of Content & Make it Relevant Most content and community management solutions out there allow you to select to which people you do and do not grant community access. Limiting access ensures the right community members will contribute to your success community. In many cases, a user community limited to those members that actually have a vested interest in your offerings, is best. Private customer and prospect communities result in active and invested contributors who continue to add to discussions, ideas, content, and comments. Additionally, assuring contributions and activity form the right group ensures your community will be a dependable and relevant resource in addition to reassuring your community that they are dealing with a credible organization. Solutions that provide the ability to tag and rate content also afford added-value by tying content together with keywords, enhancing correlation, and strengthening your overall web content.

Give Your Best Community Members a Voice in Shaping Your Company With so many solutions in the marketplace, it may be difficult to determine which tools will be of most benefit to your company. Think about what means you'd like to make available for community involvement. If your company's offerings are best suited to be discussed via a corporate wiki, make sure the solution you choose provides wiki functionality. Along these lines, providing a forum, idea exchange, discussion platform, blog, and best practices wiki may also benefit your community and its communication about your products and services. Make collaboration a click away and engage your community so you can tap into their collective wisdom. Keen insight gained from suggested new features, product improvements, and new ideas can only benefit your

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5 Benefits of B2B Success Communities

organization in shaping its vision and offerings in the future. Additionally, some platforms allow you to recognize your most active and valuable community members, by keeping track of number of posts, community ratings of each user's feedback, and the like. Furthermore, improve relevancy and "stickyness" of your web content by allowing your community to draw correlations between different ideas, tag content, and rate contributions to give further momentum to the best ideas and insights.

Now is the Time With the recent influx of popularity in social networking, social media, customer communities, and Web 2.0 functionality, so too has there been an equally impressive influx of vendors on the market selling such solutions. While these vendors are competing for the limelight in the market of brandable content and community platforms, now is the perfect time to capitalize on competitive pricing and market momentum. Again, it is critical that your organization evaluate which tools it needs to truly build its brand and community. Blogs, forums, idea exchanges, discussions, and wikis are all key tools to look for in a community and content management platform. Make sure you have a functionality checklist put together before researching solutions. For example, if your organization only needs one, or a handful of these tools, one platform may be much better suited for you than another. Where some solutions provide true wiki functionality, for example, others do not; this is something to keep in mind when shopping for a community and content management platform.

Drastically Improve ROI Countless studies have been conducted and conclude that organizations benefit tremendously by fully engaging their communities. Not only are there inherent organizational and financial benefits to doing so, but online success communities streamline prospect/customer/vendor interactions and collaboration. However, one of the main arenas in which to look for improvement due to use of such a platform, is your organizational ROI. For example, community users spend an average of 54% more than non-community users1. For these members, the sentiment that they are attached and invested to your organization and its products or services, is meaningful. These users come back consistently to contribute to your community, and end up bringing more than just sales dollars to your company. These individuals display high levels of customer loyalty, another aspect that is increased tremendously with creation of corporate success communities. In fact, community users visit sites nine times more often than non-community users visit those same sites2. There is something to be said for improving your community and its collaboration. Additionally, processes are streamlined by doing so. Costs per interaction for typical customer support average $12 via a contact center, whereas support via self-service options, such as success communities, is only $0.253. However, not only are there financial benefits to using a content and community building platform at your organization; it is also the tacit and intangible benefits, such as building loyalty, adding value, and gaining industry respect, that truly speak to the benefits of using a content management and community-building platform. 1

Ebay, 2006.

McKinsey, 2000.

Forrester, 2006.

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5 Benefits enefits of B2B Success Communities Communit

About eCrowds eCrowds is an on-demand on demand content-centered content centered community platform that merges the best of content management and social web 2.0 elements. eCrowds allows organizations of all sizes to harness the wisdom of their community community via the use of blogs, wikis, forums, and idea exhange functionality. The eCrowds community platform provides an onon-demand demand means to capitalize upon the collective wisdom of web 2.0 communities by providing a realm for the sharing of ideas and content. eCrowds eCrowds is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, and is ideal for businesses of all sizes, including: technology companies, mid-sized mid sized marketing companies, and midmid sized b2b organizations. For more information about our platform, visit www.ecrowds.com. www.ecrowds.com

About Hannon Hill Founded in 2001, Hannon Hill is a leading provider of web content management software and creates web marketing solutions that give people and organizations the freedom to manage their Internet, Intranet, Intrane Extranet et and Portal content with ease. ease. Most recently, Hannon Hill was recognized by Inc. Magazine, Magazine placing 247th amongst the prestigious Inc. 500, representing the top 500 fastest-growing fastest growing private companies in the nation. Located in the high-tech high tech capital of the South, Atlanta, GA, Hannon Hill continues to deliver high-quality high quality content management solutions. Its products enable users to easily update their websites through an easyeasy-to-use use web interface. Hannon Hill's content management management solutions allow users to maintain up-to-date, up date, accurate, and meaningful website content while decreasing associated costs. Hannon Hill continues to accelerate its customers’ online success. Hannon Hill’s WCM solutions provide core content management management capabilities for management management of online information. Our O solutions have been implemented in all types of industries, including technology, health care, marketing, real estate, higher education, energy, hospitality, and publishing. We provide a comprehensive comprehensive tool set that provides all the necessary modules to manage the complete content lifecycle.

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