Online Communities—the Heart of Social Strategy - Lithium

online community
fundamentals
An online community at its most basic level is a collection of
social engagement and enlistment apps where we can create
personalized social experiences, manage and moderate
conversation, reach a global audience, and drive website
traffic with SEO.
Every successful community solution has four basic
ingredients if expected to engage and enlist social customers
to behave in ways that benefit the community: Utility,
Relevance, Health, and Reach.
Community Utility
Great communities are useful—first and always. They should
be places where human interaction is easy, where social
customers become easily engaged because they can quickly
find what they need and collaborate to solve problems. They
are principally platforms for social customers to collaborate
with each other and the brand, offering things like how-to
content, tips and tricks. They should be places where the
most useful content can be rated, ranked, tagged, curated and
organized to facilitate an easy search-and-find.
Community Relevance
Like all social customer experiences today, community
experiences must be—and stay—relevant. Communities
that offer personalized dashboards, customizable content
and personalized control over the community experience
are better aligned with member needs and interests and
therefore more deeply engaging. Communities that strive
to remain fresh and relevant to their social customers enjoy
higher participation rates—and better community health.
Community Health
Healthy online customer
communities do a number of things
right. More than featuring strong
traffic, membership growth, fresh
and relevant content, they are
also responsive, interactive and
lively. The healthiest communities
put a strong focus on these last
three components, often fueling
interactivity with gamification—the
introduction of gaming dynamics into
the community experience in order
to motivate greater participation and
contribution.
share this whitepaper
community social
engagement apps
forums
blogs
ideas
contests
q&a
Community Reach
Today, brands are expected to have enormous reach if we
want our social customer engagement and enlistment
strategies to succeed. By starting with community first and
then extending that out to the greater web with smart social
integrations, we not only show up where our customers
hang out, but we bring all the benefits of community with us.
Community experiences like peer-to-peer support, a place
to give feedback and testimonials about brand experiences,
to achieve rank and reputation, enter contests, exchange and
vote on ideas—all designed to engage and enlist our social
customers in helping to drive our business goals.
For more on community health, download The Lithium
Community Health Index – a measure of community traffic,
members, content, responsiveness, interaction and liveliness.
ratings & reviews
surveys & polls
videos & photos
knowledge bases
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