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B2B Community Intelligence – GroupSwim

Bulletin boards, forums and wikis are a great place for your customers to get support and to form a community, but they are often difficult to use for finding information. Searches or tags that do not have any intelligence about what is truly important make it difficult to filter for relevant information. Your customers are often the most knowledgeable in certain aspects of your products and/or industry. It takes time and effort to create documentation to help and support your customers. Is there a way to tap into the expertise and effort of your customers to allow them to help themselves more effectively than you can?

GroupSwim’s unique product creates this intelligent community by tying together traditional board and forum functionality with semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise so that important information is easy to find. How does this all work?

  • Tagging – Tagging is a great way to get an overview about the subjects a post covers and is usually useful for searching. Typical boards and forums may allow tagging, but require people to add their own tags to posts, many of which do not. In GroupSwim, every post and comment (and any other content) in the system is automatically tagged using a semantic engine (you can also add your own tags) and your community can be pre-loaded with tags that are important to your industries or situation (including alternatives and synonyms).
  • Ranking – In busy communities, important posts are often missed or buried within a long list. Business readers do not have time to read an entire forum to search for answers. GroupSwim automatically brings important posts and content to the top to make them easy to find .
  • Expertise – In every community there are recognized experts in certain subjects. In traditional forums, these experts are found only through personal experience reading the forum. GroupSwim identifies experts by allowing readers to vote on posts and responses. These experts are identified for subjects and their responses and posts are ranked higher in searches and browsing. Customers can easily identify experts in each subject and build trust that they have the answers they need.
  • Search – Search is key to finding information buried in a forum, but GroupSwim combines semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise to give you intelligent answers. Searches include posts, tags, groups and member results all on one page. Search results can be ordered according to relevance, recent activity and popularity.

GroupSwim’s hosted application has member groups and privacy controls. Profiles are created automatically and contain all the activity for that person, including posts, tags, replied and ratings. Video, audio, documents, etc. can be posted and readers can create watchlists and subscribe to rss feeds to keep up-to-date on what’s going on. The addition of wiki-style pages is in the works for a future release.

Pricing is very transparent and is based on the number of users and file storage, with discounts for higher numbers of users. Starting at $150 minimum per month, this solution can be both affordable and scalable for even a small business.

If you just want a community for social networking, look elsewhere. But if you want to create an intelligent community to tap into expertise with little effort for a knowledge base, technical support site, or Intranet, add GroupSwim to your short list.

Update: I’ve created a B2B Knowledge Base & Discussion Board using GroupSwim. Please feel to check it out. I hope you consider joining if you’d like to have a discussion about the issues facing B2B Websites.

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GroupSwim
Information provided by CrunchBase

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B2B eNewsletters – Content is King

eNewsletters can be a great way to drive traffic to your website and keep your brand in your customers’ minds. Once you have an enewsletter vendor and an audience of people who have given you permission to send them information, you need to put together content for your enewsletter. In order to be most effective, you’ll need to send out an enewsletter at least monthly, preferably more often. What types of content are valuable to your customers (and potential customers)?

Announcements

Information about upcoming product or service releases, company information, and events are easy to write about. They are good information to keep your readers informed, but keep these short and sweet as most people are not as interested in your press releases as you are. If you have longer releases, post them on your website and link to them (this is the driving traffic to your website part).

Tips

Information about how to use your products or information your readers can use to improve their own work can be extremely valuable. Again, keep this information short and link back to longer articles on your website.

Case Studies

Put together a case study (or two) which shows how your products have been used. This is a great way for current customers to get ideas on how else to use your products and excellent advertising for potential customers. If you prepare a case study for each enewsletter you put out, keep an archive of these on your website and add an archive link on your enewsletter. Longer case studies should always be put on your website, with just a short summary in your enewsletter.

Surveys

eNewsletters are a great way to reach your customers and gather information that is valuable to your business and improving your products by adding short surveys (1 question is best!). Surveys are also a great way to make your readers feel involved with your business and create a sense of community. Share your findings with your customers by posting them in your enewsletters and keeping archives on your website.

Feedback

Encourage feedback and communication with your customers by adding your contact information (email and phone) and just plain out asking for it in every enewsletter.

Summary

While you should take the time to spell check and properly format your content, keep your voice friendly and relatively informal to make it easier to read. Provide your readers with valuable and timely content in short segments which link back to longer information on your website. eNewsletters can take a little bit of effort to create and write, but are a great way to connect with your customers and drive traffic to your website.

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Measuring Effectiveness of B2B eNewsletters – B2B eNewsletter Statistics

B2B enewsletters are a great way to promote your company and website, by periodically sending valuable information to your customers and potential customers. Valuable information will help you provide good customer support and keep your products and brand top-of-mind. There are two important parts to measuring the effectiveness of your B2B enewsletters: who your audience is, and what they’re reading and looking at within your enewsletter.

Audience

Hopefully you’re only sending your enewsletter to people who have requested that information be sent to them (current customers are usually safe). This is termed opt-in. Whether they have or not, you need to make sure there is always a link in your enewsletter for people to unsubscribe or you may be accused of sending out spam email (which can have legal repercussions). If you require your audience to confirm their request to be added to your email list, that is termed double opt-in. How much of your audience falls into these two categories is especially important if you have outside sponsorships or advertisers so they know that your readers really want to get your message. This is also important if you’re looking for an outside enewsletter to advertise in.

Interaction

Now that you have your enewsletter written and sent, how many people are actually looking at it? What are people reading and how do I tell if it is sending any traffic to my website? There are three basic stats to be aware of: number sent (or released), number of opens, and number of clicks. Number of sent/released will show you how many people the enewsletter is going out to (sometimes referred to as the circulation). Number of opens is typically measured by putting a small invisible image within the enewsletter (this is often done automatically by the enewsletter vendor), which triggers a count to a server. This should only be used for a general idea of how many times the enewsletter has been read, because this count is not triggered if a person’s email is not downloading images (either because they have it set to do it, or for some programs the reader has to click a button to request the images). If a reader does have images turned on, this can also be triggered if they happen to click on the email while going through their inbox. Number of clicks is where all the action is. The reader actually had to click on a link (and your vendor should be able to tell you what they clicked on). For links to your site a good web analytics program should be able to track these coming in from your enewsletter.

Next we’ll dive into more detail about the content you should consider for your enewsletters.

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