Who am I?
I am married with two children. My wife and I run a ton for fun. I have run three marathons, four ultra-marathons (50K's) and 40+ half marathons. My wife is actually the "runner" of the family, as she has run a couple of 100 milers, 100k's, 50k's, at least 25-30 marathons and much more. I just try to stay up with her and stay as fit as I possibly can.
From a business standpoint, I am a versatile digital Community Strategist with 15+ years of experience. I have owned community vision, strategy, and execution. I have built four enterprise B2B communities from scratch. I have led the development and execution of community engagement programs and created compelling content for customer communities.
Branded Communities Improves The Digital Customer Experience
Customer Communities Drive SEO Growth and Brand Awareness - Go DIGITAL or DIE
Branded online communities help companies solve complex problems across many departments. Customer engagement lies at the heart of this. Building a true customer community that’s more than a support portal but still a one-stop shop for customers creates a seamless customer experience, provides rich customer data for organizations that propels product and revenue growth, and builds your brand through search engine optimization (SEO) growth and thought leadership.
Capturing search traffic through SEO is a big reason why B2B companies should pursue online communities.
From a marketing standpoint, community will bring leads and current customers to the site. When a user types in a question and community appears in the search results, they might think, ‘Who is this company? I didn't know they solved problems like that.’ Then when users log into the community, companies can capture their information, and now they’re a marketing lead.
An online community answers searcher questions in the way searchers are asking them. When your customers have questions about your product they go to Google to search. If you do not have the answer to that question, then you lose.
With community activity, companies will have thousands upon thousands of questions for Google to index. Because of the community’s effect on SEO, you will start getting more leads and increase brand awareness. Those results are a huge benefit for any company.
Conversations with Community Managers - Online Community Vendor Selection
In this podcast episode of The Community Roundtable, I share an inside look at how we chose our new community platform, best practices for evaluating platform vendors, and an in-depth look at the process of standing up a brand new community program.
Customer Communities Improve the Digital Customer Experience
Having disconnected business systems is a bad customer experience for your customers. It is highly important to create a seamless experience for your customers as best you can. Online communities do this for you. Chris talks about this in the videos.
My vision for communities has always been to create a one-stop-shop for customers to seamlessly find what they’re looking for. Customer Experience is the key. The last thing customers want to do is log into multiple systems to get information. I want to make the whole Digital Experience very seamless and easy for customers using community.
A long-term goal for many communities is to deflect support cases by helping customers to problem-solve in the community, where our strategy is built around providing the most relevant content.
Customers want to help themselves. Most do not want to get on the phone to get answers to their questions, most do not want to create a support ticket to get an answer in three to ten days. They want help now. Community helps to solve that problem with Self-Help.
Launching An Enterprise Community from Scratch
WEBINAR
I have led the development of four enterprise communities. In this webinar, I will provide you with some behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to see success, including how to mitigate internal politics, budget issues, vendor selection, relationship building, and how to get in front of the right people at the right time.
By the end of this webinar, my hope is that you you will understand:
- How to get in front of executives and get buy-in
- How to garner excitement regarding the community
- How to get community prioritized to the front lines when there are other priorities
- How to determine who you should work with within the organization
Branded Online Communities Improve Customer Retention
The main problem Customer Success teams are trying to solve with their customer community is around retention: How do we retain our customers at a higher rate?
When customers engage in the community, and they reply, ‘like’ posts, or add questions, you’ll generally retain them, and retain them at a higher rate.
As our community grows, organizations will have more information about their customers probably more than any other system or person at the organization.
Communities tell us what content customers are looking at, where they’re going, how long they’re staying on pages, what they’re talking about, what they’re interested in, and all these things that no one in the organization knows. This gives companies a competitive edge.
How To Drive More Traffic To Your Online B2B Community
Do you have an online community that’s open to more than just your customers? Is getting prospects exposed to the high-value conversations happening in your online community a goal for you? Are customers using your community less than you’d hoped? Read my blog, posted on Higher Logic's website found below or listen to my video on some best practices to drive traffic to your online b2b community
1. DEVELOP A GOOD SEO STRATEGY FOR YOUR COMMUNITY.
2. CONTENT IS QUEEN – INVEST IN IT.
3. SUPPORT SELF-HELP EFFORTS.
4. LINK B2B COMMUNITY TO OTHER DIGITAL SITES AND CREATE BANNERS