Seminars, publications, market research, and customer care centers are some of the most important tools in every business-to-business firm’s toolbox for understanding, attracting, and serving customers while keeping them loyal. But in a world of fierce global price competition, increasing transparency of business practices, and ever-rising complexity, these customer interaction channels are no longer good enough for most B2B companies. That’s why smart organizations—both large and small—are tapping into online communities to gain a huge competitive advantage: the ability to get much closer to customers and become more valuable to them. Among other things, online communities provide customer access to inside information on new and forthcoming products, provide places customers can share information and air gripes, allow companies to deliver custom technical help inexpensively, and show customers how to get the most from their products. 

As Developing B2B Social Communities: Keys to Growth, Innovation, and Customer Loyalty shows, online communities reinvigorate a company by helping it harness the knowledge of the crowd. Communities help you create strategic direction, develop new products and services, identify trends, sell more, serve customers efficiently, and provide better product support.  

This book details the transformational opportunities—and pitfalls—for creating online communities. Among other things, you will learn:

• Why B2B companies of all sizes now need to make online communities an integral part of their operations to maintain or expand market share.  
• How to create, launch, and manage customer communities.
• How to define and measure what you gain from hosting online communities.

The text takes a methodology-based approach for developing an online community, showing how to move from strategy to implementation in a structured way to achieve key business goals. Each chapter interweaves case studies taken from real-world examples—including companies like CA Technologies, Palladium, SAP, Taleo, and LexisNexis, as well as smaller organizations—and includes worksheets, metrics, and templates to enable readers to develop online communities. Best, Developing B2B Social Communities shows how an online strategy can work for enterprises of any size, because it is a supremely cost-effective way to gain knowledge, improve support, and market products.

What you’ll learn

• Why your B2B company needs online customer communities.
• How to build an online community.
• Which frameworks, tools, and metrics you’ll need to create the site and monitor progress toward goals.
• How other companies have leveraged online communities to become more customer focused, innovative, and tuned to market trends.
• How to integrate communities into the business processes of an organization so they have the greatest impact.
• How to create clear strategies for the social community that supports larger business goals.
• How to develop operational best practices that will provide the greatest return on your investment.

Who this book is for

The audience for this book is decision makers in B2B organizations looking to improve customer service and loyalty, engage in ongoing research and co-collaboration with customers, increase sales, identify new product ideas, promote product utilization, provide superior customer service, and address industry trends. Besides those holding C-level titles, this group includes strategy professionals, marketing directors and executives, customer care professionals, and senior technology leaders.