The Telligent Blog

Doug Levy Talks Authentic Customer Relationships vs. Social Media Hype at The Big Social

Patrick Brandt — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:08:00 GMT

Last month, I announced that New York Times bestselling author Paul Spiegelman will kick off The Big Social 2013 with his keynote on employee engagement. Today, I have the added pleasure of introducing our second guest keynote – Doug Levy. Doug is the founder and CEO of MEplusYOU (formerly imc²) and co-author of Can’t Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results.

MEplusYOU is a strategic and creative agency that helps brands outperform their competitors by building stronger customer relationships. Doug and MEplusYOU have helped some of the world’s most successful brands, including companies such as Procter & Gamble, The Coca-Cola Company, Pizza Hut, Louisville Slugger, Samsung and RadioShack. Through his work, Doug shows companies that the most successful marketing is oriented around fostering authentic and sustainable relationships.

Based on his recent book Can’t Buy Me Like, Doug’s keynote will focus on how companies can outperform their competitors by building more authentic customer relationships. The book discusses how businesses will succeed by embracing honesty, transparency and shared values over putting blind faith in social media. At The Big Social, he will discuss how any company can succeed by being authentic versus relying on hip social media promotions, viral videos or blizzards online ads.

Please join me in welcoming Doug to our incredible lineup of speakers at this year’s The Big Social.

Learn more about what The Big Social 2013 has in store here.

Doug Levy
Founder and CEO of MEplusYOU
Co-author of Can’t Buy Me Like

Community Insights: Tracking Responsiveness Within Your Community

Anna Van Sligtenhorst — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:11:00 GMT

Last month I kicked off my community insights blog series. The first topic from the four-part series focused on measuring the health and vitality of your online community. Today, I want to spend some time focusing on topic #2, which highlights how Telligent helps you track how responsive your community is to questions asked and discussions started.

To set the stage, first let’s take a look at the two primary types of forum conversations that Telligent supports: discussions and questions.

Understanding Forum Conversations: Discussions & Questions

Discussions are intended to get feedback and input about a specific topic – this helps to engage the group or community and encourages them to provide their opinions. With discussions, all responses are considered equal and can include threaded conversations with responses given to someone else’s reply.

Questions are asked by people seeking a specific answer (or set of answers), not just responses. Community members can either provide responses to the question (for example, ask for clarification on the question or more details about the problem) or provide suggested answers. The person who originally asked the question has the opportunity to flag one or more of the suggested answers as verified answers. These are typically highlighted as ‘Top Answers’ to help community members find relevant answers quickly.

Tracking Forum Responsiveness

Telligent Analytics provides a comprehensive view of how quickly responses are provided within support forums. Through Telligent Analytics, customer care can monitor key performance metrics such as responses rates and response times for a specific forum or set of forums. Response rate refers to the percentage of discussions/questions that have gotten a response by a specific date – the higher the number the better. Response time refers to the length of time it takes from when the question is asked (or the discussion started) to when the first reply is provided – in this case, the shorter the time, the better.

Let’s take a look at the example below.

From the report illustrated above, you can gather the following insights:

Introductions Forum: Community members are doing very well (100%) responding to discussions; however, they could improve on the amount of time it takes to provide these responses. Note that suggested answer and answer metrics are blank because Introduction is a discussion forum, not a Q&A forum.
Board Gamers Forum: The community is less responsive; only 60% of the questions have received a response and only 20% have verified answers. However, the answers posted in the forum were provided very quickly.

Reports are configurable and can be sorted by column or viewed for a specific date range. Detailed reporting is available at the forum level and includes 1- 3- and 7-day responses, suggested answers and answer rates. And, you also have the option to view responsiveness for people in certain roles, which means that you can assess performance of employees separately from the community.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be covering two additional types of community insights that we offer in Telligent Analytics – participation and content contribution. So be sure to stay tuned to the Telligent Blog. In the meantime, you can view the documentation on community insights to learn more.

Golf Gets More Social with Titleist

John Rabara — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:17:45 GMT

In 2004 I picked up golf as a way to bond with my dad. Fast forward six years and now I’m a member of Titleist’s online community for golf enthusiasts and players. In the community, members can share their golf stories, discuss tips for improving their game, ask questions about products and talk about golfing events.

I’ve learned two key things from the Titleist community. One, my game isn’t good enough for the Pro V1s. And two, the community has a very large and active following that loves to talk about everyone and everything that is Titleist.

I’m also head of customer care at Telligent. I think you can see where I’m going with this. To me, what’s so compelling about this community is how Titleist is able to build upon its leadership position in the golf market while creating a unique customer experience. They really understand their customers and give golfers a unique outlet to share advice, stories and tips.

Titleist’s community is a model for other brands wanting to better understand and engage with their customers. Some key lessons you can learn from Titleist’s digital strategy for enhancing the customer experience:

Blend online and offline experiences. On the green or off, I can connect with Titleist. They hold in person events and activities at games, and I can also go online to get advice from golf pros and (fellow) amateurs about how to improve my game.
Add community into your social media mix. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, websites and a member of online communities. The key for a brand wanting to talk with me is to get me in each of these channels – I’ll ‘like’ a cool Facebook video, retweet a helpful golf tip and discuss the best nine irons in Titleist’s community. The key is creating a unified experience across these channels.
Design counts. Titleist’s community is very friendly on the eyes – it’s easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for, plus it matches the look and feel of the brand in stores and on its primary website. Stay true to your brand for a consistent experience.
Go mobile. Titleist has a great iPhone app for tracking weather and getting golf advice on the go.
Remember your brand loyalists. One of my favorite features of the community is My Game – you get all types of tools and tips that help you customize your online experience and improve your game. It’s like my own personal golf assistant.

Titleist is a remarkable example of a company that really gets customer care and knows how to convert customers to raving fans. Brands interested in creating a differentiated customer experience should check out Titleist’s case study to learn more about how it’s enhancing the customer experience through its digital strategy.

Also, be sure to take a look at our recent eBook that features 10 leading brands, including Titleist, that are using online communities for social marketing and doing it right. As you flip through the eBook, you will learn community best practices and design tips from the featured tech and consumer goods brands.

Multilingual Social Support Communities: How to Measure the Strategic Value

Rob Howard — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 19:42:48 GMT

From seeking expertise to crowdsourcing new ideas to discovering and sharing knowledge, organizations use online communities for support in a number of ways. So, you may already understand the importance and benefits of social support, but how do you implement it in the real world? Here are a few examples of companies that have achieved business results by implementing communities for social support:

AvidXchange reduced support cases 60% within 12 months and cut support case turnaround times by 50%
Kaseya increased customer engagement and participation by 300% year over year

Now, let’s take a look at social support on a wider scale. Do you have customers in various locations globally? Does your organization span across different language zones? Could you imagine non-English speakers enjoying content on your site and engaging with one another in their native language? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then multilingual communities are an important topic to you – and you are not alone. Analysts estimate that more than 90% of content never reaches non-English speaking audiences. Combined with studies that show that multilingual forums can save as much as $10 to $15 per deflected call, businesses are missing out by not using the language of their customers. Telligent understands the multilingual support issue that companies are facing, which is why we recently teamed up with Lionbridge to introduce GeoFluent for Telligent.

When implemented correctly, not only can multilingual support communities be very beneficial, but so can social support communities in general. But, how can you measure the value of social support?

To gain a better understanding, here are 8 ways to measure how social support communities lower costs and increase revenue.

Support (Cost Reduction)

Number of questions answered by members that are not company employees: This is a good metric to quantify the value of what the community is accomplishing for the business. This is a deferment of a support 'ticket' and there is no cost associated with company staff resolving the issue.
Number of questions answered by company employees: This is a comparable metric against calls per agent. However, for the business, the community answers have scale and one answer can be used multiple times (whereas calls and tickets cannot).
Views on answered questions: Again, this is a good indicator on reduction of tickets/call volume, as some percentage (the company has to determine) of these views will represent a deferment of a support ticket or asking another question in the community.
Top community members that answer questions (non-employees): Look into who are the top 10, 25, 50 participants in the community who are answering questions for your company’s community instead of company personnel. These are likely going to be customers.
Unanswered questions to answered questions ratio: A good general index of the overall health of the community, by category, will help a company identify areas where product documentation or community support coverage is weak.

Sales (Increase Revenue)

Customer activity: What customers in a buying cycle (or that may be starting a buying cycle) are active in the community? This can be expressed as a percentage of the total pipeline and can also be used to identify new pipeline that has not yet entered the traditional sales funnel.
Social Leads: New profiles created in the community should be viewed as top-of-the-funnel leads.
Web Traffic: More content in the community should translate to more overall web traffic through the site.

These 8 key tips will help make sure that you are on the right path.

You can learn more about social support, multilingual communities and Telligent’s new multilingual support solution during our webinar tomorrow at 10:00am Central – Telligent is teaming up with The Guild of Sommeliers for a webinar, hosted by GeoFluent, on language barriers and using automated translation to cost-effectively create multilingual global communities online. Geoff Kruth, Chief Operating Officer of Guild of Sommeliers and I will be guest speakers.

To register, click here and enter the webinar registration code 6613 in the message field. We hope you can join us!

Early Bird Pricing for The Big Social 2013 Ends TODAY

Megan Yunker — Fri, 31 May 2013 14:57:21 GMT

The final countdown has started for the end of The Big Social early bird pricing.
Don’t let the clock run out on you!

Preparations for The Big Social 2013 are really heating up – we recently announced New York Times bestselling author Paul Spiegelman as a keynote, posted an overview of the conference tracks and gave a preview of the sample sessions that attendees have to look forward to. With all the exciting news, we want to make sure that you don’t forget to secure your seat at the conference (and particularly while early bird pricing is still available). TODAY is the last day to snag yourself a ticket to The Big Social 2013 at the $200 discounted rate.

For those of you who haven’t joined Telligent for our annual user group conference before, The Big Social is designed for customers by customers. The Big Social invites attendees to share best practices, real-world solutions, insights and ideas for delivering social customer experiences through online communities. Last year, 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, Microsoft, Oxfam, Rackspace, Susan G. Komen, Texas Instruments and The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company – just to give you a little taste of what you have to look forward to this year!

The Big Social takes place September 23-25 in the heart of downtown Dallas at the W Hotel. Whether this will be your first time at The Big Social or you’re a regular, now’s the time to register so that you don’t miss out on the lowest price available. Find out more and register now at http://telligent.com/bigsocial/p/register.aspx.

PS – In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing even more details about our 2013 conference, so stay tuned to the Telligent Blog!

New York Times Bestselling Author to Deliver Guest Keynote at The Big Social 2013

Patrick Brandt — Tue, 28 May 2013 18:02:00 GMT

Our favorite social time of year is drawing near once again – I’m referring to The Big Social, our annual user group conference, of course. Set to return to the heart of downtown Dallas, September 23-25, The Big Social 2013 will be bigger, better and even more social.

For those of you who haven’t joined us for The Big Social before, it brings online community leaders from all over the world together for three days of incredible learning. And, what makes it so incredible is our customers – who design and deliver the majority of it. For example, last year’s conference included more than 30 guest speakers plus 24 breakout sessions, four training workshops and keynotes from distinguished business leaders.

Speaking of keynotes, I am happy to announce that Paul Spiegelman, Chief Culture Officer of Stericycle and founder and former CEO of BerylHealth, will be kicking things off this year. Paul is a highly sought-after speaker, author and expert on employee engagement, entrepreneurship, corporate culture and customer relationships. He has written several books on employee engagement including Why is Everyone Smiling? The Secret Behind Passion, Productivity and Profit , which takes a look at “Top Small Workplace” BerylHealth and shares how companies can implement similar techniques to make their company a top place to work as well, and also Patients Come Second: Leading Change by Changing the Way You Lead, which recently hit #5 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Paul also co-founded the Inc. Small Giants Community, a global membership organization focused on the promotion, implementation and advancement of “business mojo” (six characteristics defined in the book, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big) as a primary philosophy for running a successful small business. The organization is made up of small business leaders around the world who define success by more than just their financial bottom lines; success is also defined by their contributions to their communities, a dedication to great customer service and the creation and preservation of workplaces cultures of excellence.

Paul’s keynote will center on the transformation that is happening in leadership today – from one focused on financial metrics, to one focused on purpose and meaning. He will share tools for living the mission statement, recruiting great talent, supporting high-potential employees, engaging stakeholders and measuring and monitoring success by discovering the Culture IQ for your organization.

Interested in learning your Culture IQ? Take the five minute Culture IQ test here. We will compile results and report them during Paul’s keynote at The Big Social.

I think that we are all in for a treat. Please join me in welcoming Paul Spiegelman to this year’s lineup of exceptional speakers for The Big Social 2013. Learn more about The Big Social here.

Paul Spiegelman
Chief Culture Officer of Stericycle
Founder of BerylHealth & The Beryl Institute
New York Times Bestselling Author

Marketing in an Online Community: Infodoodle Series Tip #3

Megan Yunker — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:39:46 GMT

In my previous blogs focused on marketing in an online community, I shared two tips – one pertaining to recommendations for posting content and the other around engaging customers to share best practices. Now, to continue the infodoodle series, I want to spend a little time focusing on idea three:

#3 Gather and discuss customer ideas for R&D

A great real-world example is Nextplora, a full service market research firm that is paving the way in social market research. It engages more than 50,000 consumers online to refine brand strategies, generates product ideas and gauges customer satisfaction for leading brands, including Kraft, L’Oreal, Danone and McDonald’s.

Nextplora’s approach to market research focuses on getting product ideas and customer feedback via new, innovative social means. Their solution is built on the Telligent platform and uses the InnovationCast™ application to gather new ideas. Ideas are grouped into “stages of an ordinary day” rather than marketing categories. Examples of the different idea categories include: work, dress, study, fun, food and learning, and several others. Participants can then earn small incentives when they make comments, ratings and reviews on different ideas and are also incentivized to post new product ideas in the community.

Overall, the community has reengineered the research process, engaged customers into the innovation process and created a more free structure for practical new product and service ideas. This process even created a new customer acquisition tool and has resulted in more than 8,000 ideas within one year. Quite impressive!

To learn more, read Nextplora’s customer success story. And be sure to check out the infodoodle for more marketing tips in an online community!

PS – Next blog, we’ll switch gears and highlight tips for pre-sales support and training.

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.