PlanetNTF

Building out an enterprise social network (ESN) goes beyond just connecting employees to each other. Talking about a company’s ESN one might picture a single network, but in reality many companies will operate with several / many interconnected communities and networks. That’s one of the reasons that community platforms, ESN platforms and private social networks need to be built on open standards. Disconnected communities and networks perpetuate silos. Integration is really critical.

Customer communities are used by companies for many different activities, support and service, marketing, and sales. As customers interact in the community a great deal of valuable content is developed. The value of that content is greatly increased by providing a method for sharing. Beyond the content the interactions in the community provides useful insight into the members behavior. Using analytics to examine the data, a great deal can be added to a prospect’s / customer’s profile. The information can be used to provide a much richer customer experience. The problem though, is getting that information into the right hands inside a company. Most communities are disconnected from the internal systems and thus, create data silos.

A great description, why Communities make sense in communicating with customers and Business Partners. This is why the idea of a Social Portal hosting not only the company web site but social functions including communities is so powerful. Talking about my own work I am extensively using Communities to get my job done:

• The EULUC-platform to communicate with the German users and User Group DNUG - and now you guys out there.

• User Communities are today an extremely important instrument to have a two-way-communication and discussion with your customers. In my previous role as Marketing Lead for IBM Collaboration Solutions in Germany I was (and I still am) leveraging the EULUC-community. This is the platform of the German IBM Collaboration Solutions User Group running on the newest release of IBM Connections. It is being hosted by Softwerk and holistic.net, two German Business Partners. The discussions on EULUC and the two blogs, which Stefan Krueger and myself have been cultivating, became an indispensable part of our communication an Marketing mix. Our German customers know in between that they will always find the newest information in this community. And of course the blogs offer the opportunity to post different kind of information's from press and blog clippings up to personal comments (which are made visible as personal statements). The click rates are impressive: the IBM Collaboration Solutions Germany reached 3.650.707 clicks as of today (May 28, 2012). Of course EULUC is not a one-way-communication vehicle for marketers. It is much more. It is a real community, where we as a vendor get and want feedback and where lively and of course sometimes controversial discussions. And I know that even our competitors are very active readers of the Community … It is a place, where you can meet the experts, not only the IBM experts but the experts from our customers and partners. Not a surprise that the Meet the Expert-blog and community is highly used.

• IBM SmartCloud for Social Business to work with my suppliers.

• One of the most appealing use cases for me is working with my supply chain and my partners. As a marketer I am obviously organizing campaigns and events. External suppliers are always involved in these projects, e.g. our PR Agency Text100, our event agency, my partner in crime CPP, Freelancers, Speakers etc. What are you doing in these projects? You define Milestones, you are assigning and hopefully tracking tasks, you are sharing and collaborating on files, you write meeting minutes and much more. Of course you need to share and track all this information. So typically files and info's are send by Email, tasks are managed in extensive spreadsheets, which are again being distributed by Email. And we all experience the disadvantages of Email for sharing and tracking projects, information and files.  A few years ago I changed the way how I manage projects and in particular events away from the Email centric approach to I would call the the „Social Business“ way. I am using with my suppliers IBM's Smart Cloud for Social Business. I am setting up a project community and activity in the cloud, invite the internal IBMers to the project, include my external suppliers and manage the whole project collaboratively in this community.

• Communities on ibm.com to collaborate and innovate on different topics.

• The German IBM Web team around Petra Baeuerle did set up the IBM BlueBlog, a group blog, where IBM'ers like myself are posting their views in German language. The Community, Blog and other functions of IBM Connections are available on ibm.com to be leveraged by IBM'ers, customers and partners for their special interests and topics. I used to run some communities on ibm.com, e.g. around our two IBM Social JamCamps, which took place 2011 and 2010. This power of Social is unbelievable important to energize your web site and it is the reason, why we have most recently extended functionality and integration of the IBM Exceptional Web Experience Suite to provide an even deeper and smoother integration between the traditional Portal and WCM with the social functions of IBM Connections.

These are only a few examples out of my life, where I leverage communities. There are many more beyond Marketing in Product Development, HR, Sales and many more functions. I strongly believe that we will see more and more Communities leveraged. They will be a Communication and Dailogue Hub between the Enterprise and its external eco system, crucial for running the business successfully. I am looking forward to the next release of Connections which will even extend the capaibilities of linking internal and external communities together, And to finish this posting, I would like to reference again to this great graphic from Dion Hinchcliffe visualizing the importance of communities for the Next Generation Enterprise: