This week, I moderated another great webinar from the SocialMediaToday Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Online Community: The New Secret Sauce for Customer Centric Enterprises. The webinar included a perfect mix of speakers each with a unique perspective on online communities: Vanessa DiMauro, the CEO of the Leader Networks and a previous speaker on the Best Thinkers Series; Tamera Rousseau-Vesta, the digital and community marketing manager at Extreme Networks; and Nathan Roth, who leads the digital and social marketing for Koodo Mobile, Canada's fastest growing telecom company.
Vanessa got us started with some research on online communities. Some of her key points addressed - Why companies launch online communities as well as What characteristics determine if a company will be successful with their online community. Vanessa also showed us 3 models that all online communities can conform to: the Information Dissemination community, the Shop Talk community, and the Professional Collaboration community.
Then Tamera gave us an overview of the Extreme Networks community called 'The Hub'. She discussed the 4 stage of community strategy; Stage one - how can you make the customer experience better, Stage two - bringing the community to life, Stage three - time to grow and evolve and Stage four - setting the gold standard for community maturity. Tamera also discussed the need for a community content calendar which really intrigued the audience.
And finally, Nathan gave us an overview of the Koodo Mobile community and their objectives; support, advocacy and loyalty. Support questions get answered by customers on average of 6 minutes or less. No wonder they have won the J. D. Powers award 3 years in a row!
If you have ever been on a SocialMediaToday webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as: How do you police a community - or do you? Are their any tricks to getting the community engaged? If so what are they? How do you recognize, and incentivize your brand champions, while connecting them to prospects?
If that piqued your interest and you want to hear the replay of this webinar, please check out this link. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another SocialMediaToday webinar! The next webinar is on Story-Telling: To Crowdsource or Not to Crowdsource signup for it on the SMT website or just view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.