This week, we were lucky enough to connect with Enterprise 2.0 and social media expert Rachel Happe. Rachel pens The Social Organization blog, which explores the ways in which social media is changing communication and organizations, and is the founder of an incredibly important group, The Community Roundtable. The Roundtable is a network of community managers and social media practitioners looking to advance the adoption of online communities and role of the community manager. Rachel gave us her insight on customer communities -- what makes them successful, who's doing them right and what your company can do to drive adoption. Enjoy the read, and let us know what you think via comments, Twitter, Facebook, and even on our own HelpExchange Community.

1) What do you think are the keys to implementing a successful customer community?

At The Community Roundtable, we've put together a framework called the Community Maturity Model that has eight core competencies to being successful with community. They are:

    * Leadership
    * Culture
    * Community Management
    * Content & Programming
    * Policies & Governance
    * Metrics & Measurement
    * Tools

While those are the disciplines required for success, success also depends on the goals for the community – is the primary goal for customer support or to create customer advocates? Those two different goals will create a difference in strategy, culture, content, and how the community is managed. Engagement rates will also look different. Support communities need to create accurate and trusted answers, which is a very different thing than creating passionate brand advocates who do a variety of really interesting things with your product or service but may not be the people who help with specific technical issues.

2) In your experience, what are the most successful ways social media and community managers can drive community adoption?

Community adoption is driven by content, conversation, and people who are worth the target audiences' time, because participating in a community requires a time commitment – it's not a read and leave type of thing. Most of your audience is not going to be passionate enough about the success of your product to commit a lot of time – they are, however, interested in their own success. Scope the community around the success of your target audience and include everything required to foster that success, even if your own product plays a relatively small role in that.

3) What are some examples of companies doing social community right? What are some of the strategies they've employed?

There are a ton of good examples but some of my favorites are SAP, Intuit, Southwest Airlines, EMC, EDR, Nike, and Newell Rubbermaid.  Even that small list represents a lot of different approaches and a lot of different goals but they are all managing to engage and develop a new rapport with their customers through new “social” channels.

4) You said in a recent blog post that "savvy customers can easily know more about their vendors than the vendor employees do." Can you elaborate on why this is a good thing for companies and how it can be used for their advantage?

I think companies generally want to do the right thing by their customers – they have good intentions. However, in big complex organizations it is really hard to maintain consistency over the lifecycle of a customer – from lead to end of life. Often the internal champions of cross-functional consistency don't get heard because they don't have hard data by which to back it up.  Having customers talk online with each other helps the voice of the customer take higher priority within companies and it in turn drives quality improvements that are good for the customer and the company. A recent example I heard about was a large retailer who uses market research communities to generate feedback from design through merchandizing – they have improved the quality of their product and reduced waste in store inventories that used to get donated or written off which drives higher profitability – all while making the customers involved in their community pretty happy. It's truly a win-win.

5) There have been a lot of case studies done around successful customer service communities. Why do you think customer service is often cited as a successful use case for enterprise communities?

Customer support was one of the first functional use cases where hard cost savings benefits were easy to track from communities. Customer support organizations because they are typically very operationally disciplined – know exactly how much each transaction costs them.  In many cases customer support is separate from the rest of the organization so they were looking for discrete ways to improve product experiences and may not have too much influence over quickly improving product quality. They set up communities so information could be exchanged in a scaled way to more customers. It turned out to be pretty successful.  From a budget perspective – which is also critical in the success of customer support communities – the investment and the return are both attributed back to the same group, which is not always as easy to do when building an advocacy or market research community.

About Rachel Happe

Rachel is an independent consultant helping organizations understand how to become "social." Rachel has over fifteen years of experience working with emerging technologies including eCommerce and enterprise software applications. She has been both a product manager and a management analyst, and brings multiple perspectives on technology development and use to her research.

Until recently, Rachel was Mzinga’s Sr. Director of Social Media Products and was responsible for the product management, marketing, design, and documentation of Mzinga’s Social Media Application Suite and Mzinga’s Social Enterprise solutions.

Rachel covered the enterprise social media market for IDC prior to joining Mzinga. While an analyst at IDC, Rachel published groundbreaking research; The Social Enterprise (Dec '07), Modeling the Digital Marketplace (Sept '07), The Landscape of the Digital Marketplace (May '07 ), and the first enterprise social networking market forecast (Aug '07).

You can follow her on Twitter at @rhappe.