Partners as Co-Creators of Community Content

Christopher Detzel returns from a vacation to Paris, France and Switzerland. He discusses tourist activities he did like visiting the Eiffel Tower and Louvre in Paris. In Switzerland, he visited the Swiss Alps and Lake Geneva where he did mountain hikes, picnics, and exploring the natural scenery. Nicole Saunders shares that she has had a busy summer with home improvement projects and work picking up. She mentions the heatwave made it difficult to work on home projects that week. Nicole expresses excitement about the growth at work. Main Topic - Partner Engagement in Online Communities Nicole explains that partners can play a critical role in online communities, but there is often a concern they will just try to sell. However, in her experience this has not been a major issue. She finds most partners want to build brand trust and be seen as a resource, not just sell. Many partners become moderators in their communities and share expertise for free to demonstrate knowledge. This helps build relationships and leadership visibility. Nicole allows partners to include logos but asks they don't overtly promote unless a user directly asks about their product or service. Christopher emphasizes that customers rely heavily on partners for purchasing decisions and recommendations. So it's important for partners to be knowledgeable about the product. Partner engagement in community helps raise awareness. He shares how partners help answer customer questions and even assist other partners in the community forums. Chris also engages partners in community webinars, where partners have asked to co-market these to their own audiences - bringing in more attendees from different companies. Nicole agrees partners make excellent webinar speakers because they understand diverse customer use cases. She highlights how partners actively participate in forums, lead community webinars, provide product feedback based on their experience with multiple customers, and more. Originally Nicole did not want partners leading user groups out of concern they would be self-promotional. But she found partners have the most interest in driving ongoing engagement so she now allows, and encourages, partners to lead groups. Measuring Partner Engagement Success Chris asks how to measure the success and value of partner participation. He inquires whether Nicole collaborates with partner/alliance teams on goals and metrics. Nicole focuses on factors like ticket deflection in forums from users helping each other instead of contacting support. She also tracks which community groups have the most consistent meetups, often those led by partners. And she solicits direct feedback from partners on the value they feel they gain. Christopher looks at influenced pipeline from community webinars featuring partners and calculates leads generated. He stresses needing to view community as one touchpoint, not the sole driver, and partnering with other teams to quantify value. Nicole emphasizes using surveys to quantify impact when hard data is lacking. This includes surveying partners directly about leads, customers, and other business value gained from community engagement. Christopher concludes by reflecting on the valuable exchange of community engagement ideas. Nicole agrees discussing these insights helps them both continue improving their community strategies.