Miriam Kutcher, VP of Marketing at IDC Insights was kind enough to sit down with me earlier this week to discuss the IDC Insights community.  Our discussion covered the community's goals, process, milestones, as well as success metrics for the community.  Miriam does of a fantastic job of talking about how she is linking the community to real sales at IDC! A video of our conversation is below:

To see the IDC Insights community in action, just visit: http://idc-insights-community.com or follow them on Twitter at: @IDCInsights.  You can find the blogging tips presentation that Miriam refers in an earlier post of mine: 10 Tips for Better Business Blogging.

I love the way Miriam measures her community's ROI through the SalesForce integration.  I would love for others to comment on how they are measuring their community ROI (if they are measuring it)?  

Our partners start as potential clients, just like yours. We've stopped calling them "clients" as often as possible, because the kind of business relationships we hope to form are more realistically a partnership, because instead of seeking to sell someone a strategy document and walk away, we want to get our hands dirty, educate as we execute, and build something that the combined team of New Marketing Labs and our partner will feel proud of when we're done.

When we work on social media projects for companies, we still start with the basics:

1. How do you make money?
2. Who buys?
3. Where are they?
4. What do they respond to (as far as you know)?
5. What's working right now?
6. What do you need MORE of?
   
   

We work out how we can set into place the following:

Dashboard - how will we measure everything?
Methods - which approaches do we think will work?
Materials - what can we create and what's already in place?
Database - how will we capture and make business from the information we gather?
Effort - who will play roles in the process, both at NML as well as our partner organization?
Education - what do our colleagues need ahead of time to be successful in using social media in their business communications and digital marketing mix?
Interfaces - what parts of our partner's organization have to be ready to receive new information from our social media efforts?
Crisis - what do we do when something goes wrong?
Deep Wiring - do we want to make this more than marketing, and make it business communications?

It's fun working these questions out. It gets us to some very interesting points in our process, and we don't end up just talking about Twitter. When we work from this methodology, we find really interesting opportunities.

When I think about these questions and how they've evolved as part of our New Marketing Labs methodology, I get more and more excited about what we have coming up in the months to come. See, we learn from every project. As we build something of interest for one partner, we go back and see whether we could have served our other partners in a better way. The evolution means that we can share our lab experiments and bring things even further faster. Because we're not just talking and writing, we have hands-on experience with what works and what can be improved.

Rolling into 2010, we're all about the needle movement, and how we can help partners improve their channels. We'll keep you posted as things move ahead. I'm excited to get pushing into 2010. We've got some new partners that have come on in the last several weeks, and still more that I want to build relationships with. Each opportunity is another chance to find something that drives the space as a whole forward.

What's your first big idea for 2010? (There I go with another question again!)

Photo Credit: Transguyjay

On a plane ride the other day, I started feverishly writing notes about what comes next for social media and its place in business communications. The companies who work with us buy into the belief that we're not only using tools like blogging, Twitter, Facebook, video and more for marketing, but that we're intending to take it deeper. We feel that these tools are as important to a company as the phone on your desk, or email. We see social software as the new nervous system and the new dialtone of an organization. With that in mind, here's what we're working on with clients in that regard, in the form of some questions.

How Do We Share? - We work through the various ways that social tools allow information to flow, internally and externally. We do this from a few perspectives: make the content WORTH sharing is first, and then make the technology easy to share is second. For instance, when we work with people on their live events, we build packages of tools together that will spread the video, the photos, the tweets, and all the other inspired content, so that their events extend further.

How Do We Develop Relationships That Yield? - We push that a big number isn't important; a number that indicates your loyal community is important. Relationship-building on the web goes beyond a hokey loyalty program tied to % off for purchase. We look for ways to improve community interaction, ways to empower our clients' customers, and other ways for people to feel more connected and valued than in the old models of marketing.  But, that doesn't mean that we don't measure social media efforts because we do.

How Do We Equip Better Interactions? - With so many people interested in how presence management (such as companies using Twitter as a means of connecting with customers and suppliers) changes the game, we're looking for ways to wire that deeper into the organization. Shouldn't your sales team know that your top customer is having a tough time at the office, so today might not be the day to try and collect on the payment due? What happens when hotels and airlines go beyond the customer service and reservations marketing and deeper into quality of service throughout the organization. Can we empower even more in that regard?

As New Marketing Labs moves deeper into 2010, that's what the team is planning on covering. We're extending our relationships with our current client partners, and we're excited to talk with people about what comes next for all these tools and how to integrate them into your marketing and communications efforts. It's your business; it's our passion.

Photo by: alexanderdrachmann