Customer Communities 2.0

The word is beginning to spread

PC World ran an article today entitled "Boost your bottom line with a Blog". Its worth a read as it adds further credence to the notion that social media and web 2.0 tools can be used as sales and customer service tools. If you develop a blog and enable people to comment and interact with you in a knowledge-based area where your expertise is the reason your customers use you, you can only benefit from the exposure and equity gained from the interaction.

MyCatalyze - the user in mind

MyCatalyze is a customer community powered by (run by) iRise, a leading software company that specializes in software visualization and usability software (too many softwares in this sentence, I know) - and therefore the community is targeted at business analysts and "usability professionals".

MyCatalyze is a busy and vibrant site - there are plenty of posts and content. iRise clearly takes it seriously, as they've dedicated a Community Manager to the project and he does a great job in creating posts and starting conversations, as well as getting emails out to users on a regular basis. 

Really, this is Sales 2.0. There is nothing in MyCatalyze that makes you think iRise is trying to sell you something, but the bottom line is that because of the quality and objective nature of the site, you can't help but think iRise is clearly the market leader and a cool company. There are job opportunities (not restricted to iRise), and users can network and communicate with each other. This is not an iRise User COmmuity (there is another community for that), so therefore it is an outreach by the company to establish brand leadership through its non-sales approach. On top of this, the company will get valuable feedback from the users about issues that will enable it to develop better products and services.

There are some issues with the platform (run by Mzinga) but these are clearly getting worked out. Another good thing about the community is that it discusses the problems with itself -giving you an insight into the community as it evolves.

Outside influences?

Wall Street Journal writer Shelly Banjo yesterday posted an interesting article about how small businesses can use content generated by bloggers to create a vibrant and active website, and therefore potentially attract more sales prospects or customers. The article is at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120526706660828097.html. Her own blog (http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/03/18/matching-blogs-with-small-businesses/?mod=googlenews_wsj) discusses her article (very narcissistic) with some extra pointers about how to go about finding bloggers and blogs that may be useful for your own site.

With blogs, RSS feeds and other freely available useful content, it seems logical that businesses - especially small businesses - could leverage this value to create something of value on their own websites. Certainly better than 6 pages of outdated, flat HTML (with a picture missing).

More of this to come, for sure.