Building a community for your customers, members or employees can be a benefit to your organization.  Communities are a great way to:

• Facilitate open, two way dialogue with your audience
• Obtain direct and immediate feedback about your product or services
• Extend product reach and open new market opportunites
• Deliver information to customers and partners quickly and efficiently

By creating a community, you have the ability to not only reach your target audience and encourage the interaction listed above, but establish yourself as a leader and a thoughtful innovator of customer service and relations.

Communities offer a wide range of functionality from Community groups within an organization that can interact amongst the group members themselves, to a larger scale communities which includes forums, blogs, and community member interaction.

Determining which is best for you and your organization goes a long way in determining the best type of community set up and software. There is a wide range of paid and free community software packages available. Deciding which one is best for your organization can be overwhelming if you don’t have a good sense and idea of your community goals.

Establish these goals first, what do you want your community to do, who do you want to reach with your community, and what type of interaction do you want your community members to have?  These are all important aspects of being able to set up the correct community for your organization to further your web presence and customer interaction.

A few open source communities that I’ve recently interacted with and have found to be terrific are:

While Ning offered a great community structure previously, the changes that they are undergoing currently will provide an even better community structure in the future. Check out the proposed changes at: http://about.ning.com/announcement/

DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke) also offers a great open source structure that provides you with the ability to add and purchase modules according to your needs and customize as needed with a developer.  The support by the DotNetNuke module developers is also excellent and they can assist with alterations if necessary depending on your needs and the module.  I’ve found them to be more than willing to assist.

Communities allow you to reach your audience and interact in a larger and much more open way. Adding this ability onto your website and/or establishing a separate community site is a terrific way to engage your audience and members and provide them with a vehicle for quick and easy interaction.

Are you ready to market your company in today’s technology and social media stream? Based upon recent results, the average consumer and business is no longer using mail to deliver messages and engage consumers. Recent results posted by the USPS show a steady decline in mail volume over the previous three years results with a projected 10 Million piece decline from 2009 to 2010.

Internet usage, smartphones and social media have become more popular and show a steady increase in popularity not only from personal use but from business marketing as well. The below graphic displays B2B and B2C companies Social Media profiles and the popularity of social media in business marketing.

The emarketer.com reports that Social Media Marketing spending for B2B and B2C businesses is projected to increase over the next several months and years.  Customer Relationship Management and Brand Building will be the focus of business social media marketing practices as these play key roles to a company’s success.

Technology, internet and smartphones are the content delivery mediums today and your marketing needs to adjust to reach your target audience. Not quite sure where to start?

1. Start with a plan, who is your target audience and what is your message?
2. Make sure that your website is up-to-date and relays your company message.  Is your web site smart phone readable and friendly?  Can users interact with your website via their smart phone and current web browsers easily?  These are important as trends show that 83% of adults have cell phones or smartphones and, among them, over 35% have access the internet via their phone.
3. Create a Social Media Strategy – see related post with strategy and social media sites information found at: http://www.isisinternettechnologysolutions.com/social-media/social-media-adventure-continued/
4. Initiate Marketing Plan – how are you going to reach your target audience with your message? Social Media is certainly an item that will be used but there are also alternatives such as Personalized Email Campaigns and Personalized URL’s. These provide an alternative to customary print marketing and are personalized and targeted to that specific person or persons vertical market, enabling you to target your marketing message.

The key is to plan your marketing strategy, ensure that your message is reaching your target audience and engage your audience with your brand and customer relations.   Getting involved in Social Media is more than just posting, but involves interaction and getting to know/responding to your consumers.

This is a common question among many organizations and associations.  Should you become involved in Social Media as a company or not? The biggest challenge faced by associations is time and staff.  Everyone has had to cut staff and/or take on multiple responsibilities over the past year or so and no one  has the time to add another responsibility.  Social Media involvement does take a commitment whether from one or multiple staff members.

There are a few ways that involvement can be addressed that may fit into your company strategy and profile.

Should you become involved in Social Media – YES.  According to the Nielsen 2010 Media Fact Sheet, Time spent on social networking sites in the U.S. increased 277%; The average U.S. worker spends 5 hrs a month visiting social networks at the office; Facebook reaches 56% of the active U.S. Internet universe with an average usage of 6 hrs a month per user; Twitter grew 500% over a year; and 32% of all mobile web users visit social network sites.

Due to these statistics, it would definitely be in your best interest to become involved in social meeting as a company and marketing strategy.  Now, to what extent do you become involved?

This will really depend on your staff and time allotment.  Adding a blog to your site and providing content and resources to your viewing audience and member is a huge commitment but one that will pay off in the long one as establishing yourself as a knowledge leader in your field.  Blogs do take time and commitment to write, but is it possible to spend about 1 hour a week on your blog work?  Consider video blogging vs. writing a blog.  Make it a point throughout the day jotting/writing down blog topics and key points (approximately 5-10). Schedule an hour to sit in front of a video (does not have to be a professional production) and tape a 5 minute blog session on each topic that you’ve recorded. The video blogs can then be posted weekly to your site and based upon the number of video blogs that you recorded, you could have about a  months or a little more of video blogs to post that took you a few hours to complete.

Assign social media sites to various people in your organization. Arrange for these people to be in charge of each site and check/perform searches on the selected keywords for your organization, and interact with others. A schedule can be arranged where this occurs at least 3 times a day for approximately 1/2 hour each time. This provides some type of interaction with the social media main stream and enables your organizations name and content to be seen and discussed.

Becoming involved in Social Media does involve a commitment of time and resources. But if this is planned according to your companies goals and staffs schedule and abilities, can become a positive tasks to any ones day while increasing company awareness, site visitors and potential members.