Top 5 Reasons to Have a Branded Online Community

Mike King

Online communities and the types of interactions they foster are why the branded online community has become a critical marketing channel for many. According to Wikipedia, an online community is an online social network of individuals who interact with one another to pursue common interests. Among companies that have online communities, the reported benefits include improved customer support quality, a better understanding of customer and prospect needs, higher user engagement, a more loyal customer base, and better cross promotion effectiveness. Research from Forrester indicates 60% of those surveyed have a branded online community and 15% were planning to add one in the following 12 months (1). Why has a branded online community become such a strategic aspect of marketing? We asked clients, partners and industry leaders what are the primary drivers for their companies. Here we share the top five reasons why a branded online community is so important.

branded online community

 

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Don't Outsource Your Forum Search To Google

Mike King

Online communities are becoming increasingly popular for building relationships with clients, users and prospects.  But companies are finding the current technology lacking in areas like flexibility, extensibility, theming and search.  This blog, one in a series covering forum-related terminology, is focused on faceted search.

Faceted Search Results

What is Faceted Search?

Yonik Seeley, the creator of Solr - an open source enterprise search platform written in Java, gives an excellent description of faceted search in his post on the topic.  “Faceted search is the dynamic clustering of items or search results into categories that let users drill into search results (or even skip searching entirely) by any value in any field. Each facet displayed also shows the number of hits within the search that match that category. Users can then “drill down” by applying specific constraints to the search results.”

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