Posted on October 23, 2008
Leveraging Virtual Communities
BY JASON CORMIER
One of our readers just asked me what "virtual community" refers to regarding point 3 in my post about the top 5 things Chief Marketing Officers want.
Although virtual communities can be defined within a broad range of social media properties (like Facebook) - CMO's are saying, I wish to leverage them so I can better "understand my target audience."
This discussion can quickly get more involved than how a company might use Facebook, because now we are talking about the use of intentional business tools. One local company and customer of ours that provides the kind of tools I'm referring to is HiveLive.
With the goal of better understanding a target audience, one of the advantages of using a virtual (online) community platform comes in leveraging multiple audiences. The audiences I'm referring to specifically are employees, customers and partners.
If you can effectively create the space through which these audiences can participate - you are fostering a new means of sharing, exploring and learning. The results? Better communication, marketing, innovation and loyalty.
If you would like to dig into this deeper, Jeremiah Owyang did a comprehensive report on community platforms for Forrester only a couple of months ago.
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