A typical B2B community is one that is created by a company intent on reaching and connecting customers to a) the organization or b) each other. And it starts by asking a question – what do you want to build the community around? More succinctly – what are your goals? For some firms it is a stated desire to get feedback from customers or partners and make a closer, ongoing connection with them. For others it is to reduce costs by having customers help other customers. Still others desire to market to their customers in new ways using the latest social media tools. Whatever your goal, be sure to define the “what” of your community before investigating the “how”.
After defining the goal (customer loyalty, lowering support costs, feedback, keeping customers informed, etc.) the next step is put a small team of people together who are highly motivated to seeing the community come to life. Like many Web 2.0 communities, the best ones are built around the notion of high focus, high tailoring, niche-type destinations where collaborators can easily engage.
Early on your launch team will want to do two things. The first is to identify the key influencers who should be invited to join the community and whose presence will inspire others to join and participate. The second is to pre-seed the community at launch with topics and conversations that relate to the overall goal. But note that very quickly the team should be prepared to step away from micro-managing the conversation and let the community organically shape the content and topics on its own – because it will.
What about ROI? In many B2B communities the ratio for those visitors who read versus those who add content is roughly 25 to 1. This means that every successful interaction potentially influences another 25 visitors on average. Since influence is often correlated with purchase intent, start with the proxy that 2-5% of sales made to community members were influenced by the community itself. Then you can refine the proxy value by surveying your members. And for those B2B communities engaged in self-service customer support the cost avoidance equation is just as straight forward to measure.
However, the best thing about online B2B communities is that they are (in essence) the daily expression of what used to be annual or sporadic conversations of a highly important and valuable nature. So putting a ROI on this part of the model is much more qualitative. But there is little doubt that if your business can leverage the opportunity to connect important constituencies together in a real-time fashion, you will gain timely insights, customer credibility, and improved profitability (via increased sales, decreased costs) that otherwise were going untapped.
