Blog

6. Because 59% of companies are already using social media as part of their marketing strategy, and another 23% plan to begin using it this year¹. You cannot afford to lose your competitive advantage in the current market, and with a free hosted solution like eCrowds, you can begin incorporating social media into your website and marketing strategy now at no cost.

5. Because eCrowds removes the barriers to use and understanding of social tools. We provide documentation and checklists to guide you through adding these features to your site, and provide you with great best practices and real-world examples. These all contribute to making it that much easier for you to get started with a social web content strategy today.

4. Because the effectiveness of SaaS content and community management is measurable. With features like a Salesforce connector, you can report on forum posts, idea contributions, and discussions being had on your site. Proving the value of your social marketing strategy has never been easier.

3. Because it will make your job easier. We've incorporated a handful of tools in the eCrowds system that make the jobs of marketers and content managers everywhere much easier. Automatically tweet new site content to Twitter, track and manage prospects with our Prospect Insight connector and change templates without technical know-how.

2. Because your community wants a voice and they want you to hear it. Make your constituents feel valued by giving them a place to share feedback directly with your company and making it easy. Furthermore, future prospects and clients can easily browse this information with eCrowds' search capabilities.

1. Because you don't have to invest anything except a very small amount of time. We're offering eCrowds for free through this year, and you can get started with managing your site's web content, adding community tools, and hosting your site, all for free. What do you have to lose?

¹ - eMarketer

Our current eCrowds users are using the system for variety of causes. Some manage their corporate intranet, some manage their website content, some have success communities housed as a subdomain of their current site with social media to facilitate collaboration. However, one of the key ways in which our customers are seeing added value is from reduced support times and costs.

Rather than having one system to manage your forum, one for customers to share ideas, and one for managing content, (and likely paying for all of them), why not accomplish all of these things with one free solution?

With eCrowds, you're able to drag-and-drop elements like a site forum right into your template, making its availability instant. Forums take just seconds to add to your site, but also, mean that it takes just seconds for your support team to get questions answered. Costs per interaction for a typical customer support center average approximately $12, however, via a self-service support option, like a user forum, these same interactions cost only a quarter (yes, that's right, $0.25) apiece¹.

And because we're offering the eCrowds content and community management system for free in 2009, you have every reason to see this reduction in cost at your own organization. Check out our "Getting Started with eCrowds" information to help you get your new site and support options set up, and sign-up for eCrowds for free today, and try the system for yourself through 2009!

_______________

^{1 Forrester, 2006.}

A few months back, we added a new feature to the eCrowds content and community management system, automatic Twitter tweets.  However aside from just showing you how to set up your connector to Twitter, it's equally important that we highlight the benefits of this feature.

Using eCrowds, you're able to create an unlimited number of Content Types, or predefined page types. For example, if you frequently post news releases, you can create a "press release" Content Type with predefined structured fields for title, author, start date, and content. Or, perhaps you frequently put up new best practice content and want your clients and followers to be aware of new posts when they are created.

Using the Twitter connector in eCrowds, you're able to select which Content Types are automatically tweeted to Twitter. Furthermore, you can customize the pre-tweet content to display something like "Company XYZ Best Practices:" or "Company XYZ News:" before each tweet.

This feature saves marketers tons of time when it comes to spreading their company links and content around the Web. Using the feature, without having to consciously think about doing so manually, tweets are sent to Twitter updating your stakeholders on whatever content you deem tweet-worthy. To learn more about setting up connectors, visit our Knowledge Base Connectors page. To try this feature in action for yourself, sign-up for your free account today and manage and host your site with eCrowds for free in 2009.