The Social Journey of Community, Web and Why?

What is the “Social Journey” and why is it important to integrate community and web together? I realized that some of you may be asking that question why would I put my team and community through this process and spend the level of effort to make it happen. Well, The answer is 48% and that is justification enough but I feel like I need to explain this concept of “The Social Journey” first before I get into the details of why 48% is the answer. The social journey came about as a discussion between myself and a few peers two years ago. The conversation kind of started around importance of social to the business and how we could better engage our customers, prospects, identify specific user behavior to provide some type of predictive analytics to improve their user experience. Help our users find the information being searched quicker and then suggest other related products or solutions that may be complimentary to the initial inquiry. Then measure, wash, rinse and repeat. This was the original concept of “The Social Journey” and our conversation soon turned to how Amazon provides the “more like this” function and how peer reviews help the buyer make a quicker decision.

This is the social journey. It is how you help guide your digital visitors through research, prospecting, defining and architecting a solution, validating that the solution will solve the problem and then assist with the buying process. This is the first step of the social journey, the journey of the prospect through customer. The second leg of the social journey is nurturing the customer through their implementation experience to ensure solution exceeds their expectations and help them become a loyal customer. The third part of the social journey is engaging the loyal customer to continue to build the personal relationship and uplift the customers stats to a brand advocate. The difference between to the two is: a loyal customer likes your product and will buy your product again. A Brand Advocate will defend and advocate for your brand as a respected peer in the industry.  I think I have to credit my good friend Nicolas for coming up with the title “Social Journey” as it make sense when explaining this process of digital engagement. Once one has reached the level of social brand advocate they then enter into a new phase of the social journey which essentially begins again. Only this time the brand advocates are the ones providing the peer reference to help validate ones research that they are selecting the right solution to solve their challenge.

Now, I bet you are asking “So, what does 48% have to do with this?” Welcome to the wonderful world of big data analytics. I am nothing if not a data and number geek but knowing my facts and having the information to back up my strategy has worked well to secure support and funding for my initiatives with executives. I’ll get into depth about the 48% in my next post as it worth taking the time to understand and leverage the exercise.

Integrating community and web to improve your business

How do you integrate your dynamic community with your static website to improve your overall business? It is easier than you think but requires some thought and planning. Four months ago we started our journey to integrate our community into our existing website. It was something we had put quite a bit of thought into so when I was asked what I needed to accelerate the project and roll it out in 3 months I already knew the answer.

If you are a new company just getting started then you aren’t looking to build a website, you are looking to build an interactive community which just happens to look like a website. I’m a bit opinionated on this concept which you can read in my post “Web 2.0 is Dead”. However, if you are an established company that has evolved with the technology over the years then your business likely has a website, microsites, partner portals, communities and social pages all in an attempt to reach your customers. This is the problem most companies are facing and here is how to solve that issue.

First up is the design and user experience (UX). I am going to keep this focused on the design aspect because UX includes items, like single sign on, OAuth registration, User Behavior Profiles and analysis, traffic patterns, etc… all of which are important and need to be considered but when limited to a short deployment timeline with a hard go live date you have to focus on what has the greatest impact and work the rest into phased agile releases after.

Our community looked similar to our website from a branding banner perspective but it wasn’t really unified, they were still two very distinct web sites that didn’t have a consistent look and feel between to the two. In our case because the community design was lagging behind the web design it was fairly easy to apply the design theme to the community which mostly included the header navigation and ensuring the Website had a “Community” navigation in the main menu so when you switched between the web and the community the top navigation and banner remained consistent. However, the problem we ran into with this is communities are dynamic and are discussion forums are often created by members for products that your company may no longer sell, support or has been consolidated and renamed into another solution offering on the website.

So, the design was probably the least of our worries. Breaking down the silos and categorizing over 200 communities into 14 product solutions to simplify findability and navigation would now be the challenge we needed to focus.

In the next post I’ll build on this and share more details on how we defined and leveraged our community managers and members to help categorize communities for improving navigation.