The Secret Sauce Of Communities

THE COMMUNITY ROUNDTABLE — A lot of people might say that the secret sauce of communities is conversion, lower cost of advocacy, lowered support costs, faster information discovery, etc and they would not be wrong. Communities – done well – can drive a lot of specific business outcomes in a sustainable way while reducing the long-term costs. And for the most part, that is how they are currently being planned and deployed but there is a much bigger, larger value communities can provide to enterprises. Real-time data. And I’m not just talking about traditional market research which also can benefit from a community approach – see Forrester’s take or this overveiw. What I’m talking about is using communities to make the interface between the discussions going on within the organization much more permeable to the conversations going on outside of the organization...