Recently, I’ve helped a growing number of customers develop what they’re calling a corporate community strategy. While their goals vary to some degree, the desire to grow or improve “community spirit” is a constant, and they all want their strategy to encompass both external and internal efforts and in online as well as offline environments. These organizations recognize that it is community that binds teams (whose members are strongly connected) with networks (whose members are only casually or potentially connected), which enables information to be shared more relevantly and questions to be answered more quickly, leading to faster and better deliverables by the team through a phenomenon that I’ve coined as the Collaboration Funnel.

However, many of these organizations struggle to come up with a comprehensive strategy – mainly because they have had so many disparate community-oriented initiatives in the past. While there isn’t a single formula for success, the default approach that I recommend is to identify and leverage a solid foundation in terms of an existing strategy, rather than trying to come up with a new one which tends to become yet another silo. Most organizations already have a well-established Corporate Communications Strategy, though it’s typically focused around public relations. Well, I’d say that it’s about time for every corporate communications strategy to include customer relations, partner relations, and employee relations rather than just press and analyst relations! Such corporate communications strategy must also be expanded to include new social media channels such as blogs, forums, and Twitter in addition to traditional channels such as email and press releases.

Separately, many organizations have developed a Corporate Community Strategy, but it’s usually focused on geographic or local offline communities. I believe that every corporate community strategy ought to include online environments as well as internal interests. A corporate community strategy should be inclusive and expansive rather than exclusionary and narrowly focused.

The key advantage of building on an existing corporate communications strategy or corporate community strategy is that it forces marketing and HR departments to align their respective goals and objectives for community development, which will likely result in other departments doing the same. Moreover, how organizations communicate with their customers, partners, and employees is gradually converging with the way these organizations are striving to build vibrant communities around their products and services.

So, what organizations have been exceptionally successful at evolving and converging their corporate communications and corporate community strategies? SolarWinds, whose corporate community efforts are spearheaded by Dawn Lacallade, is a Telligent customer that I’ve frequently highlighted. Dawn and I will be jointly presenting a webinar next month about how to derive measurable business value from implementing a holistic corporate community strategy, so look for an announcement soon, and I hope that you’ll be able to join us.

Texas Instruments is another relevant Telligent customer reference, for which our founder and CTO, Rob Howard, will present a case study on December 16 at the Word of Mouth Supergenius conference – there’s still time to register if you hurry!