Blog

As someone who works in marketing, I'm constantly researching new trends, ideas, and techniques that can aid B2B organizations in more effectively communicating with their target audiences. Recently, I've come to find that many B2B marketers could be much more effective in their efforts if they were less focused on jargon and more focused on transparency and adding value.

Web users looking to download a white paper or request a product demo are often required to fill out a form to do so. This is completely understandable; if there is prospect interest in learning more on a subject or product, it makes sense that the vendor of that product be informed in case further communication needs to be established. However, this "something for something" mindset has been taken to the extreme in the B2B marketplace.

Product and service transparency and a willingness to provide valuable content and resources to prospects are key in establishing trust with a vendor. As marketers, constantly trying to lure prospects with lackluster articles and requiring they give you more and more information to do so diminishes vendor trust and credibility greatly.

What ever happened to telling your story? Freely providing anecdotes, customer case studies, and real-world examples that tell your organization's story is crucial. These types of resources that demonstrate your company's value proposition and benefits should be transparent and easily available to those looking for them.

If your marketing department wants to capture prospect data, consider making a small portion of resources available via form submission, but make sure you also freely provide content that tells your story. It's important to strike a balance between making your brand value transparent and attracting and converting prospects. So marketers, please focus more on telling us why we should care about your brand and product, and less on the constant quid pro quo mentality.

The eCrowds feature line-up is a pretty powerful one -- content, community, and SEO management in-one, it offers a diverse selection of features that make it a comprehensive SaaS tool for managing corporate websites and microsites. However, equally as important as the diverse set of product tools you get with eCrowds, is the diversity of employee and community interaction you can facilitate on your website by using them. The Hannon Hill Customer Success Community is a great example of a diverse team of product experts collaborating and communicating with an equally diverse team of product users and prospects.

Powered by eCrowds, the Hannon Hill Customer Success Community is a subdomain [http://success.hannonhill.com] of the larger Hannon Hill site [http://hannonhill.com], which is managed by the company's bake-and-push content management solution, Cascade Server. Using eCrowds, the Hannon Hill team has been able to incorporate additional functionality with their larger corporate site, and provide a realm for their corporate community to interact by sharing content, best practices, and new product ideas.

Using eCrowds has opened the door for easier two-way communication between Hannon Hill and its constituents, and has allowed the organization's product engineers, developers, support staff, and services team to easily engage in discussions directly with the community to resolve issues faster. Hannon Hill uses eCrowds to power their entire Customer Success Community, including the Cascade Server Forum, the company idea exchange, which allows users to share new ideas for the product directly with Hannon Hill engineers, and the community's blog.

In the past, the company relied on phone calls, emails, surveys, and feedback forms on their site for gaining insight into customer and prospect wants and needs. Leveraging the power of the eCrowds system, the Hannon Hill team is now able to both "talk" to its community and "listen" to it by making it easy for stakeholders to post ideas, ask questions, and collaborate with other Cascade Server users. The Hannon Hill Customer Success Community is just one example of a corporation effectively using eCrowds to gain powerful insight into its client-base. For more information on eCrowds, check out our quick Flash video, or sign-up for your free account today!

Ever since my interest in marketing began, I've witnessed the pervasive trend in which companies focus only on the sale (end), and not the experience (means). I've thought a lot about this notion, wondering why, if you could ensure customer loyalty and good word of mouth marketing about your company,  would you choose not to?

How is this relevant to managing a website or B2B Web community? For the hundreds of thousands of companies who fail to reach out and embrace their current customers via a multi-channel effort, tremendous value is being lost. According to findings presented at Forrester's recent Customer Experience Forum, those companies that have chosen to use diversified efforts, including social media, to solicit feedback and increase transparency, have benefited greatly from doing so.Those companies who haven't embraced the idea of the two-way feedback loop, on the other hand, are missing out on some serious benefits.

According to the information presented at the Forrester Forum, opening the feedback lanes to your current clients drastically improves their customer experience. When customers have a positive experience with a company/vendor, they are 14% more likely to buy another product from that same vendor. Furthermore, 15.8% more customers are reluctant to make a switch from the current company or vendor when satisfied with the current experience. Even more telling, companies who embrace their current customers via community tools, social media, etc. are providing an experience that results in 16.6% more of their clients recommending that company.

With more sales, higher customer loyalty levels, and positive word-of-mouth communication about your company being the result, why not embrace your customers? Although it's extremely important that your organizational efforts at improving the customer experience be multi-faceted, you have to start somewhere right? Why not get started with adding community tools to your website and monitoring the results? From what was presented at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum, without these efforts you have valuable customers to lose, with them, you have everything to gain.

In a recent post of his, famed social media guru, Jeremiah Owyang, discussed the influx in "pollination" of social content from vendor web sites to social communities. Leveraging tools such as the "AddThis" button to allow users to share and bookmark content, organizations are throwing bits and pieces of content around the Web like rice at a wedding. While there's nothing wrong with spreading corporate web content socially, doing so can also leave marketers and communication specialists in a panic trying to read and locate every conversation being had about their companies. Owyang's prediction? In order to continue adding and maintaining value to the corporate web site, organizations must aggregate and re-centralize these conversations within the context of their own web sites.

I found this post from Jeremiah Owyang to be of particular interest. Here at eCrowds, we're in the business of melding web content and community discussions. Since it's launch at the end of last year, the goal of the eCrowds system has been to allow organizations to seamlessly tie social tools to corporate web content and facilitate conversations right from their own site.

Using content types as the building blocks of the system, eCrowds provides an easy way for even the least technically savvy folks to create and manage an endless variety of pre-specified page types. To facilitate site collaboration, users can visually drag and drop a variety of social modules to include in the template for any content type. For example, if a user wanted to edit the "blog post" content type to include comments below the page content, it would only take a few clicks of the mouse to drag the comments module into the blog post template. eCrowds provides the instant ability to make web content social and facilitate communication inline.

In addition, because eCrowds provides automatic connectors to share content with sites such as Twitter.com, there's little need for integrating additional tools like the AddThis button to share content across the Web. Using eCrowds, you're able to manage your site content, harness the wisdom of your crowd, and add value to your site by bringing the community discussions to you.