Question

Topic: Strategy

Online User Community Strategy

Posted by doggie1979 on 12/21/2010 at 9:42 AM ET 250 Points
We are a marketing and technology services organization for higher education. We have an online user community that has around 2000 members representing both decision makers and end users of our products and services. I have a few questions about your user community strategy:

1. Who in your organization "owns" strategy for your community?

2. Do your staff get involved in discussions on the community or is it a pure user only discussion strategy? If you do not allow staff participation, how to you prevent clients sharing misinformation with each other (e.g. providing an incorrect answer to a question posed on the forum about a product).

3. How do you encourage increased interaction between clients on the community? We are seeing people post a question then not get an answer until sometimes several weeks later - I am sure this is discouraging.

Any other feedback/advice you have on running a successful user community would be helpful.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 12/21/2010 at 7:49 PM Accepted
    Are you asking these questions about the MarketingProfs Know-How Exchange community, or is "you" really a generic "you?"

    Trying to figure out what you're asking.
  • Posted by doggie1979 on 12/21/2010 at 8:19 PM Author
    I am not asking about the Know How Exchange. I am asking MarketingProfs members about their user community strategies. We are trying to figure out how to move forward with our own customer user community which has not had much of a strategy thus far. Does that help?
  • Posted by johnwhitepaper on 12/21/2010 at 11:28 PM Accepted
    Re: #1, Have you tried user conferences? You may find them expensive, but if you're not succeeding at online community-building, try the old-fashioned way. There are platforms for online user conferences as well.

    Re: #3, Take a look at some of the case studies for the company Service-now.com. They seem to be wicked-smart at pulling their customers into the position of evangelizing for their product, which is SaaS-based ITSM software. eRead Ohio at The University of Akron is also doing a good job of building community; they have the advantage that their users need to come together for training. (Disclosure: Both of them are clients.)
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