Building an Online Community - white paper

Have you been thinking about starting an online community for your business? Wondering what the benefits are?

Online Communities, a white paper by Lithium Technologies, outlines best practices and deployment tips for increasing brand loyalty, sales and customer satisfaction while decreasing customer care costs. Lithium shares its answers to four important questions:

1. What is an online community?
   
2. What does it take to create a successful community?
   
3. What are companies doing with online communities today?
   
4. What is the business case for online communities?
   

Does your website have a FAQ page? A community forum? Do you answer questions in a blog? There are many ways to field real and potential customer questions before they arise. Being proactive costs less than fixing a problem after the fact, and builds customer loyalty and satisfaction. Studies also show that online community users buy more, and buy more often than non-community users.

Reach out to your customers. They'll love you for it!

Process trumps Content

In the last few weeks, I've been focusing my attention on networking and content, while in the back of my mind, I've been wanting to add some real meat to this infrastructure I've been assembling. When you surf the internet, do you just see a bunch of websites and content and information? I don't. I don't just have a website and a blog and some social media pages — I have a dream. I have an idea for how to realize it. All of this stuff is just part of the Process.

Today Seth Godin asks What are you good at? "Process... refers to the emotional intelligence skills you have about managing projects, visualizing success, persuading other people of your point of view, dealing with multiple priorities, etc. This stuff is insanely valuable and hard to learn. Unfortunately, it's usually overlooked by headhunters and HR folks, partly because it's hard to accredit or check off in a database.

"As the world changes ever faster, as industries shrink and others grow, process ability is priceless. Figure out which sort of process you're world-class at and get even better at it. Then, learn the domain... that's what the internet is for.

"One of the reasons that super-talented people become entrepreneurs is that they can put their process expertise to work in a world that often undervalues it."

Dang, Seth – you nailed it!

How about you? What are your unique talents? How can they help you in your Process?

Who has time for social media?

I spent the last couple weeks testing what happens when I link my site to social networks like Facebook and Twitter (I was already linked to my LinkedIn profile). There has been a marked increase in visitors to my site and blog. 

In this new media world, there are obvious benefits to using social media and networking to encourage new visitors to come to your site. More visitors means more potential clients. After less than two days on Twitter I racked up two dozen Followers without even trying. What's not to like? Some people on there even have tens-of-thousands of people following their "tweets".

But hang on. For one thing, wow - that's a lot of information coming at me all at once. I had information overload after only modest effort. Plus, I bill clients by the hour. Time spent tweeting is time away from building a website for an existing client. And if my clients are all out tweeting, they aren't doing that thing they do, either. 

I had been studying the activity of professional social mediacs. How does a small business owner of a product or service manage the time it takes to go make all of these social contacts? You can't spend ALL day at the water cooler.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing outlined his routine for social media yesterday. For those of you just starting out in social media it will seem very time-consuming (and perhaps a little OCD). You will probably say that you don't have the time to devote to such a strategy. But keep things in perspective: Rome wasn't built in a day, John Jantsch markets for a living, and even modest effort really does create measurable results.

Here are the goals I've set for myself for 2009:

• Update my Olsen Creative website once a month (I also added news links so there's new content on there every day)
  
• Post to my Short-term Strategies blog once a week (set to distribute posts to my website and Facebook notes)
  
• Create and maintain a del.icio.us list of bookmarks (I've started a personal list, but want to create one for business)
• Twitter about olsencreative at the beginning and end of my day (I had a deadline today and didn't tweet about it - just got to work)
  
• Start a Facebook Page for Olsen Creative
  

Are you using social media? What services? What are your goals?