Social media has taken the world by storm. Right now, it is rare to find someone who has not joined at least one form of social media and even more rare to find people uninformed of the uproar.

The business world is highly impacted by this new change and has reinvented their customer outreach strategies to comply. Social media has become an interactive community that is arguably the best form of communication between business and consumer.

The first step to effectively use social media for your business is to understand the classifications of each respective outlet. Robert Howard, the CTO/Founder of Telligent (an enterprise collaboration software company), explains each community in depth;

• Direct Community: These are communities owned and managed by a company typically running proprietary community and enterprise collaboration software solutions. Examples include the National Breast Cancer Foundation’s community website, Starbucks’ blog, or Dell’s support community. The organization is responsible for running and managing the community and benefits from rich data and user profiles created within that community. These also would include private B2B and internal employee-targeted communities.
• Managed Community: These are communities started and managed by the organization, but run on consumer-facing social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Examples here include the National Breast Cancer Foundation’s Facebook Page, Starbucks’ Flickr group pool, or Dell’s presence on Twitter. The organization is responsible for running and managing the community, but does not necessarily benefit from the rich data and user profiles created within the community. Typically, the facilitator of the community (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) benefits the most from the underlying data.
• Participating Community: These are communities started and managed by individuals or groups of users, typically on consumer-facing social networking sites, but sometimes also with proprietary software. An example here would be a fan site for Microsoft’s Xbox or an independent Porsche enthusiast group. Typically the organization whose products or services are the topic of discussion can participate, but has no authority or access to the data created within the community.

Howard suggests the best strategies to control each individual community with the goals of increasing awareness, increasing revenue, and decreasing expenses.

• What is your objective? If you are running a digital marketing campaign, your strategy is different than if you are running a support solution. The difference in strategy is important for defining what the end goal is and how to use the various tools and technologies to support that strategy. For example, with a digital marketing strategy, you likely care more about authenticity and awareness than question/answer rates. It’s important to clearly understand your objective, because it helps define the technologies used to support it, the measurements to track the objective, and what role social media plays in the strategy.
• Who is your audience? If you are trying to reach a new or existing audience, your choice of solutions (direct, managed, or participating community) may vary. In a network strategy, you likely care about the relationships between the members of your communities. In this case, creating both direct and managed communities may be a good solution. The National Breast Cancer Foundation links its managed community (Facebook) to its direct community, for example.

• What are you measuring? What most savvy organizations have figured out about community and collaboration technologies is that they provide an abundance of data –- whether it is to feed a CRM system, mine for customer ideas and suggestions, or identify influential users. The real value is the deep insight and analysis that can be gained from the veritable goldmine of customer data found within your community. While some of this mining can be done on consumer networks, it doesn’t compare to the level of analysis that you can do within your own community.

Read the full article here.