With more than 200 million people around the globe now participating in one or more online communities, social networking has become an essential tool for companies to engage, listen to, and interact with customers and potential customers in ways that have never before been possible.

When they are successful, online communities–which allow interaction between members through blogs, comments, surveys, webcasts, discussion threads, brainstorms, chats, and other social activities–enable productive relationships to develop between members and the sponsoring company.

But, as some early adopters have found, the challenge for businesses is how to create and maintain communities that not only engage, inform and entertain their members, but also deliver measurable business value.  Finding participants is often easy; finding exactly the right participants–those who are most likely to be interested in your company’s products and services–is hard.

SocialMediaTodayLLC helps global organizations create purpose-built BtoB social communities that are designed to achieve specific, measurable corporate goals by engaging exactly the customers and prospects you most want to reach.

The Five Principles of Successful BtoB Social Communities

•  Design and build your community to achieve a specific business purpose.  Want to increase sales in a specific category or market?  Generate leads?  Build reputation with influential constituencies?  What we call “purpose-built.” If you’re  doing it just  because everyone else is and hoping for the best, that’s not a good reason. 

• Make it exclusive.  Decide in advance who you want to become community members, design the content of the community around their interests, and invite them to participate.  Other people may be able to read material on your community web site but only registered members should be able to interact with other members.

• Make your community only as large as necessary to achieve your business goals.  Research indicates that smaller, tightly focused communities produce more active, engaged and loyal participants.  Why try to become a Facebook when there are only a few hundred or thousand people that you really need to reach?

• Leverage existing resources.  Identify and incentivize internal “evangelists” to interact honestly and openly in community discussions.  Re-purpose appropriate internal content. Build a customized network of external bloggers.  You don’t have to start from scratch.

• Keep it real.  Online social communities depend for success on trust and transparency.  No overt selling.  No obvious agenda.  No talking when you should be listening.  No promises you can’t keep.  Nothing kills a social community faster than members who feel they’re being hustled. 

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, and we’d be delighted to talk you about how you can create a successful, purpose-built BtoB community for your organization.  Contact us today.