It’s tempting to start a community on every platform, but it can be difficult if you don’t have the internal bandwidth to manage every platform. In our experience, it’s best to write separate posts for each network to take advantage of the style and features unique to each community. You want to leverage the special features of each platform. A lot of social platforms let you simultaneously post to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you have multiple, intersecting communities, the key is to not reflexively treat them all the same way. We’re about to do the same thing this summer. For example, we did a massive product release in summer 2013 where we included 67 features that came from customer ideas.
CIRRUS INSIGHT FOR MS OUTLOOK FOR MAC SOFTWARE
Having a community means we can get almost real-time feedback on our new software releases as well as a constant flow of ideas for future features. Leverage Skills Inherent to Your Business
We strive to provide a steady stream of quality content to the community for continuing value and to stoke conversation. Today, I love seeing our customers respond to questions online on LinkedIn, Quora, and in the Salesforce Success Community where they recommend Cirrus Insight to other Salesforce customers. (We should have invited prospects to our original Chatter group!) Our customers are our best brand ambassadors and a true extension of our marketing and sales team. The community is so valuable for attracting prospects since they can talk directly with existing customers. If I were starting again, I would cast a much wider net. We started by just focusing on customers. As a result, we had a high rate of participation and were able to build a unique community vibe. We had a thousand or so people in the group and it was different than other online groups because Chatter is a Salesforce-specific tool. You need to quickly get a critical mass of early adopters for the community to take on a life of its own. As a Salesforce partner, we launched our first community for customers and partners using Chatter. Make sure you stand out in the crowd, and make it valuable for members to join the community.
There is “community fatigue” since everybody already belongs to various groups and followings on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. To establish a community around your business, make it unique. And we frequently direct traffic to our blog where readers can write comments and engage in debate. That makes it easier to invite replies and start conversations.
And as a result, it’s more valuable than a mere list. Whenever possible, we send out email announcements from a real person on our team, rather than from our company. It’s more dynamic and vibrant and chaotic. By contrast, a community is characterized by communication among and between members. You can reach out to a list of customers or subscribers or volunteers or voters. Look for a Community Where You Can ContributeĪ list implies one-way communication. Successful entrepreneurs have the ability to identify the most promising ideas from other companies and industries and then remix the ideas for use in their business. For example, we use UserVoice to gather product feedback and ideas from a broad community of users and business owners so that we can continuously improve our software. As an entrepreneur, you want to be part of a community so that you have access to “idea flow” in the same way that investors need “deal flow” to source the best investments. The value of building a strong community for entrepreneurs is in the ideas. Follow them YEC spoke with Bruce about his experiences building a community for customers and stakeholders in his business, and what others interested could learn about the process.
Cirrus Insight also includes power tools for salespeople in Outlook and Gmail including email tracking, follow-up reminders, and mail merge templates. It intelligently syncs emails and appointments from Microsoft Office 365 and Google for Work to matching leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, and cases in Salesforce. Cirrus Insight automatically keeps Salesforce CRM up to date for sales teams. Brandon Bruce is co-founder of Cirrus Insight, a bootstrapped software company in Knoxville, Tennessee.
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