Business benefits of Business Social Communities
Reduce Support Costs
Tech support costs can be reduced by setting up tech forums where customers give the answers to problems that they themselves have faced and solved.
These tech forums can speed up issue resolutions. Since these communities build very large knowledge bases, someone else may be able to point to a solution faster than your own tech support can do. What customers perceive is a strong community and efficient service, not a cost-cutting measure.
Once a working support community has been built, you can take it a step further and have your tech support redirect e-mail and other support requests to the community as a first step - if it does not get answered then you jump in.
Drive Sales & Marketing
One of the biggest advantages of community-generated content is the fact that it is seen as a trusted source. When people see a good recommendation, high rating or positive review from another client, they typically give it a high ranking during their own decision making phase.
Furthermore, such content will lead traffic to your website (negative comments of course will have the opposite effect).
SEO is improved because the community naturally uses relevant keywords, and search engines rank user-generated content highest.
Creating year round events (e.g. VirtualWorld of VMware) by using event community sites is another way in which communities perfectly serve the needs of sales & marketing, increasing the numbers of attendees as well as their time spent on what is being shown and presented at the event.
Another current trend in sales & marketing is using social media tools not only as branding and outbound marketing tools, but also as lead generation tools.
Accelerate Innovation
Highly active members who place many comments will emerge in the community. Over time, they can even provide input to your innovation process.
At the simplest level, you can use your community to conduct market research by just listening and monitoring. This can be taken even further by eliciting more input from your most passionate users through idea contests, invitations to company events or other activities that reward enthusiasm.
A further step is then beta testing, getting your community members to share their feedback and ideas with you on user forums.
Overall, the collective input of a large group of people is simply more effective in identifying improvements or entirely new features. The open source communities have proved this.
Optimize internal operations
Improve collaboration across different parts
of the company.
Wikis, forums and social network tools make collaboration and group formation more intuitive and flexible.
Retain expertise and knowledge even when key personnel are absent
Building knowledge in the group increases productivity, and also prevents hold-ups when key experts are unavailable.
Lower communication barriers between internal and external groups
Collaboration with customers is motivating for them, increases available expertise and shortens product lead times.