The Telligent Blog

Welcome Neeru Sharma – Telligent’s Director of Product Management

Patrick Brandt — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:15:00 GMT

I am happy to announce the appointment of Neeru Sharma as Director of Product Management. In her role, Neeru will focus on shaping Telligent’s product strategy, product roadmap and delivering innovation, with specific emphasis on user experience.

Prior to joining Telligent, Neeru served as Senior Product Manager at Zynga, the world’s leading provider of social game services. While at Zynga, she led the design and development of new social features in some of the company’s most popular online games. She was also responsible for driving acquisition and retention of daily active users through Facebook. Prior to Zynga, Neeru worked in product management at PayPal and Amazon.com.

Neeru is a seasoned product management leader with deep expertise in customer experience, social gaming, Internet-enabled payments and marketplaces. With her knowledge and background, I know that Neeru will bring a lot of value to our current and future customers, especially in helping create exceptional social customer experiences.

Neeru recently relocated to Dallas from the Bay Area, and we are thrilled to have her leadership on our product team. Please join me in welcoming Neeru to Telligent.

Neeru Sharma
Telligent Director of Product Management

Marketing in an Online Community: Idea #2 from Our Infodoodle Series

Megan Yunker — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:39:33 GMT

As you know, we just introduced our infodoodle with nine ideas for social marketing back in April. Let me pause here for a moment because we got a lot of great questions about the infodoodle format. Namely, “did you mean to type doodle instead of graphic” and “what is an infodoodle”?

First, the answer is “yes – the doodle was intentional” (which as I’m typing this gives me a great idea for a t-shirt slogan…). People are more familiar with infographics, which are designed to convey complex information quickly and easily. In contrast, infodoodles are designed for pure, unadulterated storytelling fun. For great infodoodle inspiration, check out the folks at MarketingProfs.

Let’s go back to our nine ideas for social marketing infodoodle. In our first blog, we discussed idea number one: post industry news, product updates and announcements. We shared a fantastic real-world example from the Microsoft Office 365 Community, which brings us to idea number two:

#2 Engage experts and customers to share best practices

Today’s example of real-world greatness comes from Dell TechCenter. Dell TechCenter is an IT community dedicated to best practices for data center and end user computing. In it, Dell sponsors blogs about events and shares editorials and recent news in the industry. About 80 bloggers contribute to the community, with 10 to 15 regular writers who share their expertise.

Dell recognizes IT professionals for being experts on Dell solutions and services. The Dell TechCenter Rockstars program rewards IT professionals (and Dell employees too) for their contributions to online technical conversations in the community, in social media or on their personal blogs.

To learn more visit the Dell TechCenter community or read the customer success story. And, don’t forget that you can add the infodoodle to your website by following these instructions.

Next time we’ll discuss how marketers can use community for social ideation. Stay tuned!

Community Insights: Measuring the Health and Vitality of Your Online Community

Anna Van Sligtenhorst — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:18:04 GMT

Telligent just announced our latest version of Telligent Analytics, community analytics software that delivers insight into what’s happening in your online community. This new release is a huge leap forward because it offers flexibility and control on top of targeted, in-context key performance metrics. The three primary benefits are:

Big Data Source
Communities create a lot of unstructured data. Telligent Analytics transforms that data into a schema that is easily accessible to business intelligence tools and is optimized for access via APIs. With the latest release, you now have the opportunity to tap into the wealth of knowledge being created by your community and use it to improve customer experience.
Community Insights
Telligent Analytics ensures that the right person, in the right context, immediately understands how the community is performing. Leaders within your organization and community members alike now have the ability to view insights directly within the community, from the homepage, on dashboards, and within groups of interest. (And of course, your organization has the ability to set permissions to control who can see what.) We provide the flexibility to scope insights by any date range, by user role and by group. And with Telligent’s Widget Studio, you can craft custom community insights based on the Big Data Source.
Applied Analytics
Your community can now offer its participants dynamic and personalized recommendations of both people and content. Telligent Analytics looks at your community’s data, compares it with each member’s unique interests, and then delivers personalized recommendations to that member. Telligent Analytics doesn’t just tell you how your community’s doing; it applies the analytics to improve your community members’ experience.

Over the next several blog posts, we’ll cover each category of community insight (health and vitality, responsiveness, content contribution and participation) and then describe the first set of Applied Analytics solutions we’ve recently introduced. First, community insights for health and vitality.

Community managers are typically most concerned with how active and engaged members are in the community. With health and vitality metrics, Telligent Analytics provides answers to questions like:

How rapidly is my registration base growing?
Are my registrants remaining active over time?
How many of the groups within the community are active?
How much of our content is valuable to the community participants?
How much content are we creating?

Group owners are concerned about membership, engagement, and content growth within their micro-community in particular and can find answers via Telligent Analytics to questions like:

How active is my group?
What are my membership levels?
Are people subscribing to my group?
Are they bookmarking it for easy access?
How much content is available within my group?
How much new content has been created recently?

For communities where a primary business objective is social customer service, support leadership can track the health of their support forums, using Telligent Analytics to provide answers to questions like:

How far is my reach within my discussion and Q&A forums?
How many people are participating and/or benefiting from the support content within my community?
In the last quarter or the last year (or any date range for that matter), are partners creating a high volume of answers that people are finding, reading? Are employees?
What percentage of the answers provided within the community are a result of crowdsourcing? Is this percentage increasing over time?

Stay tuned for details on community insights for responsiveness, content contribution and participation, as well as people and content recommendations via applied analytics.

[Magnifying glass - Anlytics image source:] Big Stock Photo

Telligent Welcomes New Chief Operating Officer

Patrick Brandt — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:50:00 GMT

Today, I am happy to welcome our newest leader to the Telligent executive team – Brent Rhymes. Brent is joining Telligent as Chief Operating Officer, and will be responsible for the leadership of Telligent’s product strategy, partnerships, worldwide sales and marketing. I know that he will play a pivotal role in accelerating our growth by helping our customers achieve business success with online communities.

Brent is an experienced software executive and entrepreneur who brings more than 20 years of industry expertise to Telligent. Starting his first company at age 29, Brent has co-founded two successful technology startups including Knoxville-based FileKeeper, Inc. and Houston-based Software Realization Corporation.

I have personally had the pleasure of working with Brent during his time as CEO of iWave Software (which was recently acquired by EMC Corporation). The time I worked with Brent left me with an exceptionally high degree of respect for his leadership and interpersonal skills with customers. With his deep understanding of both technology and business, Brent will be a tremendous asset to not only our customers, but also to our partners and the growth of our company.

On a more personal note, Brent and his wife, Jennie, have four children and enjoy spending time camping, fishing and hunting. An active community volunteer, Brent also dedicates free time to helping out with child and youth sport teams in the community.

We look forward to working with Brent as he settles into his new position and becomes a part of the Telligent team.

Please join me in welcoming Brent to Telligent.

Read Telligent’s recent press release for more details.

Brent Rhymes
Telligent Chief Operating Officer

New Product Releases Enhance Social Customer Experience & Deliver Real Business Value

Rob Howard — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:20:35 GMT

Today, we just announced the latest releases of our award winning software: Telligent Community 7.5, Telligent Enterprise 4.5 and Telligent Analytics 4.0.

Telligent Community 7.5 is our newest version of social community software designed to enhance customer experience and deliver real business value by increasing customer engagement, innovating through social ideation and making social pervasive across customer channels. While, Telligent Enterprise 4.5 is designed to elevate customer experience management and deliver real business value by maximizing employee productivity, keeping employees engaged and driving product and service innovation through social ideation.

We listened to the feedback from our customers and partners and included several standout features in both releases to deliver excellent social experiences. Both releases include the following key benefits:

Real-time alerts will help to significantly drive social community engagement, increase community participation and keep your community members more informed and engaged.
The new message center with chat will make communicating quick and easy, serving to be a great collaboration tool for companies across all industries.
Social ideation will encourage community members to respond to challenges, suggest ideas and vote on the best ones. Ultimately, companies can come away with unique crowdsourced ideas.
New social media logins, such as Google, have been added to this release that will not only improve customer experience, but will also increase engagement and information sharing both inside and outside of your community. (note: this is exclusive to Telligent Community 7.5)

We also know that companies are looking to transform online conversations into actionable business intelligence, which is why we are proud to introduce the new Telligent Analytics 4.0 today as well. Telligent Analytics 4.0 connects people to the information they need to make decisions and gives community managers insight that allows for immediate action. Key benefits include:

Dynamic content discovery connects people to the content they need quickly. Personalized for the individual and based on community analytics, the community anticipates what resources would be valuable to each member and recommends content.
Dynamic people recommendations help community members build their personal networks through tailored network suggestions. By helping people find peers, mutual friends and experts, people recommendations help you create a more engaging customer experience.
The ability to share meaningful reports & social insight within the community is new in this release. Telligent Analytics 4.0 provides analytics for community health, vitality, responsiveness, crowdsourcing effectiveness, participation and content that can be viewed anywhere in the community. What’s really great about this is that you can get insight and take action immediately without ever leaving the community.
Expert identification helps community members better evaluate recommendations and content contributed by these experts by systematically identifying experts based on contributions and more.
Built with Big Data in mind, Telligent Analytics 4.0 is easy to integrate with other business intelligence systems so that organizations can tap into the wealth of knowledge created by members in your community.
Using Telligent's widget framework, companies can modify the reports to be tailored to specific needs, resulting in the ability to provide configurable reports.
The ability to delineate between the different types of contributors in your community is now an option. A better picture of the overall health of your community can now be captured by measuring crowdsourced contributions – comparing contributions from employees and contributions from the community.

Telligent Analytics 4.0, coupled with either Telligent Community 7.5 or Telligent Enterprise 4.5, give companies a comprehensive solution that provides a unified view into social customer experience.

For more information, view the announcements for Telligent Community 7.5 and Telligent Enterprise 4.5.

Sneak Peek #3: Gathering Ideas to Speed Innovation

Anna Van Sligtenhorst — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:26:24 GMT

Here’s another sneak peek at what’s coming as part of our spring software release. In addition to onsite notifications and chat, social ideation is another enhancement to look forward to. Social ideation encourages community members to respond to challenges, suggest ideas, vote on which ideas should be implemented and keep track of the status as ideas are implemented. This new offering provides quick ways for you to gather ideas on particular topics and get a sense of the importance of each idea based on up and down votes. For more advanced innovation needs, including project management, deep analytics, reporting and more, Telligent offers InnovationCast.

Creating Challenges

Community managers and group owners can create any number of challenges – within the community or within each group – to target idea gathering by specific topics or types of submissions. Perhaps you want to gather ideas on each product you sell, so create a challenge for each product. Or maybe you want to gather ideas on helpful training videos separately from ideas on good topics for training sessions, so create a separate challenge for each. And, you can control who in your community has access to participate in each challenge – for example, limiting some to idea submission and others just to voting, if that fits your business objectives.

Sharing Ideas

When you open a challenge and encourage the community to share their ideas, community members can:

Include all the details for each of their ideas that help describe them fully
Embed photos, images, documents and videos
Link to external site examples or other business applications to supplement their description
Categorize their ideas using hashtags
Mention other community members within the idea to call attention to people who helped form the idea or encourage specific people to build on the idea because it is in their area of expertise

Also, other community members can chime in with supplemental information for the idea. They have the option to provide commentary on why the idea is a benefit to them or share what concerns they have on why the idea may not work.

Voting on Ideas

An important part of ideation, beyond gathering ideas, is collecting feedback from the community as to which ideas have the most merit. Flexible options are provided to community managers and group owners so that the type of feedback that is accepted (if any) can be controlled. For example, you can encourage community members to vote ideas up or down. However, you also have the choice to allow them to only vote up if they agree with the ideas or only vote down on ideas they don’t agree with. You can also limit the ability to vote on any ideas within any challenge within a group.

Understanding Status

Keeping community members up to date on the status of ideas shared is important to closed loop innovation. Community managers and group owners can edit any idea to change its status (ranging from ‘under review’ to ‘coming soon’ ). Each community can change these statuses to reflect what is appropriate for their innovation cycle. Community managers and group owners can also include notes on each idea to provide details on why an idea is not planned or where it is in the development and deployment process. This way, the people who originated and contributed to the idea, as well as those who voted on the idea, are kept in the loop and know the details.

**Note: Challenges and Ideas will be generally available this spring with Telligent Community 7.5 and Telligent Enterprise 4.5.

[Idea Sticky Note image source:] Big Stock Photo

New Social Marketing Infodoodle! 9 Ideas for Marketing in an Online Community

Megan Yunker — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:41:12 GMT

Marketers need a plan and a good framework for creating a healthy, engaged community. The secret to success isn’t so secret - it’s all about understanding the wants and needs of your audience and then creating value for your community members.

To help you along, we’ve created an infodoodle with nine ideas for social marketing in an online community that you can apply to fit your content, your brand and your audience.

Each week, I’ll share a real-world example of how these ideas are being implemented. Let’s take a look at idea number one:

#1 Post industry news, product updates and announcements

Our first example comes to us from the Microsoft Office 365 Community.

The first blog post provides a great example of an announcement; that a new educational webcast is available for users of Office 365 who want to learn more about how to service and keep Office 365 running efficiently.

From the community, people can also learn that a product update is available; that the sign-in page for Office 365 has a new look. Because the announcement was published using a blog, community members can comment on the news and share it with their professional networks on LinkedIn and other social networking sites. Plus, Microsoft gets immediate feedback from its customers.

The Office 365 Community illustrates a lot of great community practices that marketers can use to create value for their brand’s audience – more than I can write in just one blog post.

How about you? Are you using an online community to post industry news, product updates and announcements?

PS – We’ve made it really easy to share our social marketing infodoodle. You can share it with your peers on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. And, you can even add the infodoodle to your website by following these instructions. Enjoy!

Reserve Your Seat at The Big Social 2013

Megan Yunker — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:51:48 GMT

Registration is now open for The Big Social 2013! Telligent’s annual user group conference, The Big Social, is coming back to Dallas for three jam-packed days of learning and fun (and, isn’t learning fun anyway…). This September, hundreds of our customers, partners and friends will come together to share best practices and real-world solutions for delivering excellent social customer experiences.

The Big Social is created for Telligent customers by Telligent customers. In 2012, more than 300 online community and social business professionals joined us for three days of incredible learning, including sessions led by more than 30 guest speakers from companies such as the American Marketing Association, Dell, Emerson, General Dynamics, Microsoft, Oxfam, Rackspace, Susan G. Komen, Texas Instruments and The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company.

We had an amazing conference last year. However, this year’s The Big Social will be even more engaging and informative, so we encourage you to make plans to attend.

When? September 23-25

Where? Downtown Dallas – W Dallas Victory Park

How to register? Visit The Big Social website to register online

Check out this quick video from The Big Social 2012 to get an idea of what's in store for 2013.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

PS – Early-bird pricing is currently in effect, so you'll save $200 by registering now.

PPS – If you attended The Big Social 2012, you're eligible for even more savings on your registration. Be on the lookout for your Alumni promotional code.

Sneak Peek #2: Using Chat to Speed Collaboration

Anna Van Sligtenhorst — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:54:11 GMT

Here’s a sneak peek at another enhancement we’re introducing as part of our spring software release – chat. Along with onsite notifications (which I blogged about last week), chat enables a more responsive and engaged community. This leads to more rapid collaboration and decision making.

How? With chat, community members can instantly connect and communicate via one-on-one and group instant messages. Here’s a rundown of the new chat feature.

See Who’s Online and Manage Your Online Presence
There are two ways to tell when someone is online.

Chat Lists: In the community, members can see a count and list of their friends who are online. They can expand the list to see more of their friends (the list is scrollable, and the ones most recently chatted with appear at the top), or they can use search to find any specific person. Search results include both online and offline friends, so members can either initiate a chat with someone who’s online or send a private message to someone who’s offline.
Hovering: An individual’s online presence is also shown when someone hovers over their username or avatar (as well as in the person’s profile).

Members have the ability to simply click once to immediately go offline or online. Once offline, they remain that way until they choose to switch their status back to online. When members are offline (because they’ve navigated away from the community or changed their presence) they cannot be contacted via chat. However, they can still receive private messages if this feature is enabled in their user settings.

Community managers can customize how members’ online status is displayed. During the installation of chat, they can determine whether community members appear online or offline when they first log into the community. Then from there, members control their own online presence.

Communicate Instantly
It is easy for community members to initiate a chat session. They simply double click on a person in their online friend list or click the chat link in the person’s user hover-over or profile to get the conversation started.

While chatting, members can hold multiple conversations with different people at the same time (all appearing in different chat windows). Members also have the ability to add people to an existing chat by dragging and dropping their name from the online friend list into the chat window.

Keep the Conversations Going
Chat conversations are kept for historical reference in each member’s inbox. And, members can pick back up on a previous chat by simply replying to that conversation within their inbox.

Chat is built on the new Socket Framework, which also serves as the foundation for onsite notifications. It can be extended to provide any form of real-time functionality including collaborative whiteboards, real-time text editing, real-time graphical analysis, real-time games and much more.

**Note: Chat will be generally available this spring as an option for Telligent Community 7.5 and Telligent Enterprise 4.5.

Sneak Peek: Using Notifications to Drive Social Community Engagement

Anna Van Sligtenhorst — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Here’s a sneak peek at the new notifications enhancement that’s coming in our spring software release. Today, community members receive an email alert notifying them when something of interest has happened in the community. Oftentimes, they read the summary from their email but don’t click through to visit the community. Why? Because they received all the information they needed directly in their inbox.

Yes, this can be a productivity boost for people who prefer to interact primarily via email. However, it is not the best way to create a more responsive and engaged social community. Our upcoming enhancement seeks to maximize engagement by keeping community members connected with real-time notifications delivered within the community experience on an as-it-happens basis. These notifications feel serendipitous, offering a sense of anticipation and interest that email can’t.

Members can control what notifications they receive live alerts for while online in the community, staying up to date when:

A new community registrant requests their friendship or starts following them
A friend mentions them by name within an ongoing discussion
Someone answers the question they posed
The group they participate in regularly is mentioned within a status message
Someone comments on content they’ve written
More people weigh in with comments on a blog post that they’ve given feedback on
Their content is rated or liked
A peer sends a private message
…and other similar scenarios

How do notifications work?

When something relevant to a community member occurs in the community, the following types of alerts appear:

A small, informational window displays in the bottom left corner of whatever page within the community the member is currently viewing.
A desktop notification appears (if the member has opted into these via their browser or operating system) when the community is minimized.
A visual indicator is displayed in the community’s navigation which, when clicked, shows the full notification queue, highlighting the notifications the member hasn’t read yet.

And, notifications can be modified and enhanced. Telligent’s enterprise social platform plugin model makes it easy for programmers to make modifications like:

Changing the text and call to action in the notification
Removing notifications that do not fit the needs of the business
Adding notifications for other key activities within the community or activities from custom applications or integrated systems
Adding new delivery methods for notifications, like SMS for mobile devices

**Note: Notifications will be generally available this spring with Telligent Community 7.5 & Telligent Enterprise 4.5.

[Speech bubbles image source:] Big Stock Photo

Community Managers: Time to Lay Down the Law

Jenn Emerson — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Believe me, I hate rules. I really do. But, without them your organization, product, society – any function or institution where people are involved – would eventually go off the rails. Unfortunately, dear human, it’s just in our nature.

So, we create rules to keep us moving forward towards our goals for a better society, better product or even a better life in general. Clearly, this mandate is for online communities too.

It’s a standard feature in all world-class communities. Just type the search term “community guidelines” into Bing and you’ll get a long list of pages featuring the community guidelines of all the top online communities.

These guidelines are not just some obligatory element you have to add, however. Your guidelines give you, the community manager, and your team of moderators the confidence to make decisions. You have the “law of the land” to back you up when you have to delete a spam profile, a troll, or other offensive content.

Fever Bee’s Richard Millington has a good perspective on guidelines. While I don’t think guidelines are a waste of time, I agree that putting a positive spin on your community rules or guidelines is the right approach. Tell people what they can do and they are more likely to do it.

Our guidelines here on Telligent try to cover all the basics so there is no question about what is expected in our community. If you are just starting out and working on building your guidelines, you are welcome to copy down ours and customize them to your community goals and voice. (I know when you are starting out or starting over, sometimes you just need a good jumping off point.)

However, keep in mind that you don’t want to over regulate. Putting too many constraints on your members can easily stifle conversations and snuff out your community’s fire. If your community is about promoting wildflower preservation, don’t put the kibosh on conversations that shoot off into Redwood preservation or hothouse flowers. Your job as the community manger is to guide those conversations with your own finesse, not with rules.

Keeping Your Online Community Clean

Anna Van Sligtenhorst — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:00:00 GMT

For public online communities, the time and effort it takes to keep the community clean of offensive content can sometimes be daunting for community managers. Spammers employ creative tactics to gain the attention of your community members and steer clear of automated spam filters (and diligent moderators). One approach to mitigating spam is to require that every comment be screened by a moderator prior to making it public; however, this practice can negatively impact legitimate contributions from community members.

Telligent provides a number of automated moderation tools to help protect against spam. But, what if you could also use crowdsourcing for moderation – leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to guard against spam? With Telligent’s abuse management system, you can save time and deliver a better customer experience by empowering community members to moderate content. And, you can do this while still enabling moderators to have the final decision on what content stays and what content gets removed.

The abuse management system taps into our dynamic reputation engine to determine when to automatically hide content. And, it empowers content authors to moderate content through a comprehensive appeals process. The following four components of the abuse management system, along with existing automatic moderation tools for spam filtering, provide a comprehensive solution to keeping your online community clean and safe for all to benefit from.

Crowdsourced Abuse Flagging
Community members can flag any type of content within the online community as spam or abuse. For example, if a community member sees a comment that is offensive, a forum answer that includes a questionable link or an inappropriate status update, that person can simply flag it as spam. By including members in the process of keeping the community clean, you are more likely to find inappropriate content and quickly.
Automatic Content Hiding
Within the reputation engine, three scores determine when to automatically hide potentially offensive content. The engine takes into account how effective the person reporting the content has been at eliminating abusive content from the site (Abuse Reporter), whether the content author has had content hidden in the past (Abuse Creator) and the abuse score of the content itself (Content Abuse) which increases each time someone flags it as abusive.

Depending on these scores, it could take just one community member flagging the content as abusive for it to automatically disappear from public viewing. Community managers can make adjustments to these scores to give more or less emphasis on previous behaviors.
Author Appeals Process
When a question, answer, comment, status update or any other community content is automatically hidden, the content author receives an email. In it, the content author is given a chance to appeal if he or she feels the content was hidden in error. The author then has an opportunity to provide an explanation to the moderator as to why the content should be reinstated within the community.
Moderator Overrides
The appeals queue lists all flagged content and provides moderators with tools to:

Review the content in question
Scan through the history of the content author in order to better understand both the positive and negative contributions that person has made
Read the appeal from the content author

These tools provide moderators with the ability to either remove the content from the community or make it visible.

Since moderators can be responsible for the entire community or just specific groups, the appeals queue only displays content to moderators that they have access to within the community. For example, a single-group moderator only has access to flagged content within that group, whereas a community-wide moderator can access all groups within the online community.

While moderating abuse is the least fun aspect of managing an online community, it is essential to community health and vitality. You can learn more about Telligent’s moderation capabilities in our product documentation on Telligent.com.

3 Online Community Lessons from Social Media Week

Katie Josephson — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:30:00 GMT

Social Media Week 2013 in NYC just wrapped up. There was a flurry of events on topics ranging from business to social impact to advertising and lifestyle. I attended events at JWT advertising agency on disruptive companies from diverse industries (film, fashion, technology and social impact) and at 92Y with the folks from The H(app)athon Project.

It wasn’t a series on how to get ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’, but instead focused on where social and digital strategies are taking businesses in the coming years. The stories were particular but the lessons are broadly applicable.

Since we’re all about online communities here at Telligent, here are three insights from Social Media Week that can be applied quickly in your customer-facing online communities.

No one wants to be marketed to (via Chloe + Isabel). Problem? Your sales and marketing teams are probably trying to sell something. But when people are in the process of buying stuff, they will look online for reviews, ask their friends or peers what they’ve bought and inquire whether they’re happy with the purchase. Instead of throwing marketing messages or product specs against the wall and seeing what sticks, give your customers some kind of valuable resource that they aren’t getting anywhere else – a dedicated networking and discussion area for a particular interest or industry, exclusive access to people, resources or opportunities, etc.

Who gets it right? Titleist elevates its digital strategy by integrating its website, online community and social media presence. It gives golfers a central place to talk about all things golf, get advice from peers, learn which equipment is best for their game, interact with golf pros and gain opportunities to win cool prizes. Conversations about products come up naturally, but the community’s focus is really on creating a way for golfers to enjoy and discuss the sport with fellow fans.
Reciprocal relationships drive the most value (via Catchafire). This sounds intuitive, and it is, but it’s a point worth expanding upon. In an online community, customers are giving you ideas, sharing feedback and offering up their time and expertise to peers. In turn, you’re handing out resources, providing access to your subject matter experts and recognizing the top contributors. Keeping this balance is key to ensuring that you and your customers get mutual value.

Who gets it right? GameInformer.com does a great job of promoting its magazine through its online community. Gamers can talk about games and devices, vote in polls, share reviews and get recognized for contributing their expertise in the community. Top contributors also get special privileges:
- Featured blog(s) among peers
- Access to elite forums
- Ability to create group
Create emotional experiences between purchases, instead of relying on traditional ads alone (via Bedrocket). People might not be over the moon about every blog or video you share. That said, you can help your customers get support more quickly and easily, facilitate helpful connections or enable customers to discuss an interest or passion with peers. Tapping into those needs and delivering a meaningful solution, instead of going for a hard sell, is more effective.

Who gets it right? Hitched is a wedding planning community where couples can discuss ideas and find goods/services for their wedding from other engaged couples. They can also read vendor reviews and find recommendations from a broad range of couples to make their day unique. At the same time, they can keep details of their weddings a surprise for family and friends. The community relationships are so strong that Hitched created a spin-off community, The Mumdrum, for couples who started having children.

Did anyone else attend Social Media Week and get any good ideas?

Katie Josephson
Product Marketing Analyst

Good References for Great Community Management

Jenn Emerson — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:00:00 GMT

If you are new or ‘newish’ to community management, you are undoubtedly sifting through a trough of information and advice to help you establish your role.

Been there, done that – and still doing it! As a community manager, like many professions, you will never “master” the art. You can only get better and find your groove. The rest of the time you are learning and discovering new and better ways to grow and improve your social community.

I recently curated a short list of the top blogs and articles that I continue to refer to or use as inspiration. I hope sharing it will help you find that something you’ve been looking for to spark an idea or achieve your goal. I’ve got lists for both the strategic and technical side of community that will help community managers who are new to Telligent technology.

STRATEGIC

The Community Maturity Model

This one is an oldie, but goodie. Folks in the community management field refer to this chart often, especially when building a strategy and/or a team. It is easy to get mired down in the daily minutiae of community management – this can help you realign your objectives.

World Class Communities Publish Guidelines

After defining the purpose and strategy of your social community, you have to let your community members in on it. That’s where community guidelines come in handy.

TECHNICAL

Community Management Guide for Telligent Software

The Telligent documentation team provides loads of information and instruction for all Telligent products, including specifics for community managers. I refer to this documentation wiki frequently as I work on improving the organization of the community (there are a number of ways to handle member permissions and so on). This documentation helps define the choices and how to implement them in your Telligent community.

Community Setup Guide

Whether you are establishing your community built on Telligent's platform or you just inherited one that could use some TLC, this is the right guide for you. It walks you through the initial steps, from authentication to organization, necessary to create a safe and secure environment for your members and your content.

There are a lot of sources of inspiration and advice out there. Hopefully, my suggestions can help you gather your own ideas and build on them. Do you already have a special book, blog, discussion or document you frequent? I’d love to hear about it. Please share here in the comments. If you are already a member of the community on Telligent.com, please share your thoughts here in my recent discussion post.

[Helpful tips image source:] Big Stock Photo

Online Communities – Recognizing and Rewarding Participation through Reputation

Anna Van Sligtenhorst — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Reputation, gamification, badges and rewards are all hot topics these days, especially in the context of online communities. By recognizing and rewarding community participation, you foster a valuable cycle of engagement. Your customers, partners, prospects and even employees create content (ask questions, start discussions, share thoughts via blog posts, build collaborative information in wikis, upload documents, photos and videos, etc.) that others within the community view, rate, like, comment on, download, subscribe, tag and share.

You must recognize the authors of this content so that they develop a reputation on specific topics and in groups or micro-communities within the broader community. With this recognition, they will be motivated to create more content. And so the cycle continues. Then other community participants will see the recognition that these content creators are receiving, and as a result, they will jump into creating content as well.

Not only do you build your knowledge base quicker than you ever could by just relying on internal resources, but you also create a very high quality source of answers and support. This content can be appropriately targeted to each new prospect, partner or customer who uses your product or service to increase conversion. If your community is public, you reach a new and broader audience via search. How exactly? Watch as answers in your community start to bubble to the top of search results for the topics most prevalent within your community.

Underlying all these benefits is Telligent’s dynamic reputation engine. Put simply, it assigns a value to every piece of content within the community – from blog posts to wiki pages – as well as any custom application built on the platform. Scores are calculated based on how community participants interact with the content (e.g. liking and commenting). Community managers have control over the weight each interaction has on the score, as well as how quickly the score for each type of content declines over time.

We use dynamic content scores in many ways within online communities:

Provide answers. When people search for specific topics within the community, the highest quality content shows first. This helps people find answers or the information they need to make an important decision quickly.
Recognize authors. At both the group level and the community level, the reputation engine rolls up the score for each piece of content a person has authored in order to showcase group expertise and top contributors.
Keep the community clean. The community uses each individual’s overall quality score as an input into the abuse management system, which reduces costs by distributing the moderation load across all community participants. (I will share further details about Telligent’s abuse management capabilities in another blog post coming soon.)

One of the beauties of the Telligent solution is that you can expand on these capabilities to address a wide range of needs that may be unique to your online community. You can add new ways of rolling up dynamic content scores to reward and recognize. You can add new interactions that weigh in on what quality means. And the use of reputation within your community is not limited to just earned expertise:

Assigned. You can assign permissions and badges to individuals or groups of people who have a specific role to play within the community. For example, employees are uniquely identified and can see private content that your customers, prospects and partners cannot see.
Self-Identified. You can empower your community participants to self-identify their unique expertise. Members can showcase their area of expertise on their user profiles which enables them to be found by people who are interested in or searching for specific topics.
Earned Engagement. You can encourage the interactions that have the most impact on your business objectives by using our points system.

Reputation can be used in myriad ways to drive the quantity and quality of content, feedback and social engagement. I encourage you to experiment with the different forms of reputation to determine which is the most effective for growing and evolving your online community.

[Gold Compass image source:] Big Stock Photo