Community generated content is all the rage these days. You see it on the established brands like Amazon, eBay and Flikr. You see it on all the new social shopping sites like Kaboodle or ThisNext. Then there are sites like Wikipedia or Yelp that are comprised solely of community content. The decision that many corporations face is how to determine what kind of community content to adopt and how to leverage its voice during the sales cycle.

I bucket community generated content in several categories – There is emotional content – like the positive or negative impressions of your products or product ratings. There is educational content – like user generated FAQs that augment product knowledge on your site, or add to your training material. There is relationship content – like discussion groups or forums which bring like minded users together to share ideas.

Educational Content

For most companies, community generated content as a learning tool is a good place to start. You will never be able to write all content that your users need yourself, and have it available in all the languages that you support. If you are comfortable with giving up a little control, the ROI that you gain by giving users authoring rights is quickly seen. You’ll also be surprised by the quality of contributions. You’ll quickly see who your brand advocates are, and how the user community puts peer pressure on itself to create very useful content that can be used during the sales cycle and for customer support.

Emotional Content

Emotional content is all the rage these days as customers want to have a voice – they want a venue to easily express an opinion, critique an answer, rate a vendor or a product, or append a comment to an article. They also want to be able to story-tell, like for example, to share their insider information on how to best utilize a capability of your product.

This emotional content is very valuable as customers of today trust information from peers more than information from companies. By allowing this content on your site, customers can pull information that they need, on their own terms, in order to make purchase decisions and for customer support. By being vocal, customers can also impact the type and quality of information being delivered. This, in essence, puts them in the driver’s seat, allowing them to influence the relationships that they have with the companies with which they do business.

You should allow emotional content and you should unobtrusively monitor their feedback. This will help you engage in a two-way healthy conversation with them, and will also allow you to pinpoint the ardent supporters of your brand. It will also help you validate product roadmaps and strategies making sure that your offering stays in line with customer demand.

Relationship Content

I think of relationship content as the content generated in discussion boards or blogs which bring like minded users together to exchange ideas. Typically, these users can be categorized as 70% lurkers (those that read posts but never contribute) and 20% joiners; 9% are regular contributors and only 1% can be classified in the elite category. These are your MVPs – your user group leaders, your super-contributors.

Knowing what your distribution looks like is key to knowing how to use them. You want to see whether your elite users represent the voice of your entire community, or whether their contributions apply only to their line of business or specific situation.

If your elite are a good overall representative sample, working with this elite set is easy – you can listen to them for feature requests, you can bounce ideas off them and you can monitor their posts to ensure that their goals are aligned with your business.

However, if your elite contributors do not represent the opinions of the community you need to identify which ones are your advocates and which ones are severely dissatisfied. In all cases, you need to reach out to them, and cultivate a relationship with them of openness and transparency. Your greatest contributors can be your best advocates and your dissatisfied elite can give you insight on what processes may be broken in your organization and give you an opportunity to turn around these individuals.

Community content in all its forms allows customers to influence the relationship that they have with companies. Communities shape buying behavior by their recommendations, reviews and ratings. Communities can influence product roadmaps and strategies. Communities can help expose your organizational weaknesses and give you a chance to address them. And companies will have a greater success in creating a loyal customer base if they know how to listen, how to respect and how to use the voice of their communities.

Company: KANA