What we do

Why Build an Online Community?

What are the benefits of an online community? Corporate online communities serve as many purposes as the companies themselves do. Some benefits to running an online community include:

Brand Evangelism

When you walk into an electronics store you'll see three kinds of staff: checkout clerks, stockers, and salespeople. Walk into a toy store and you see only Checkout and Stock people. There's a great reason for this. The toy store management knows they can't possibly train a sales staff to have the same passion, product knowledge, and commitment to closing the sale the 6 year old who talked you into going to the toy store has. A 6 year old is a compelling brand evangelist for a toy company. Your current customer base is the best brand evangelist for your products and services. By keeping them actively engaged, interacting with other customers, and giving them a sense of ownership in your companies online presence you can maintain and develop them as a base for repeat and referral business.

Product Development

An online community can function as a market focus group. And since it's less structured than a traditional focus group, and open ended, you can get better feedback and hear from your customers after they have had time to think and interact with each other. We can monitor discussion to report feedback, and also place our results in context by tracking not only a baseline poll result, but how many people discuss the poll question in forums, how many replies their statements get, whether these discussions sustain over time or not. An online community won't help you sleep better, but contextual feedback can tell you if your customers are concerned with the same issues that are keeping you up at night.

Customer Service and Tech Support

Customer Service and Tech Support must be important, because otherwise you wouldn't spend so much money maintaining them. Once your community has reached a critical mass people will gravitate towards the forums and discuss their customer service issues with each other, and ask each other tech support questions. You can even develop superusers or product black belts with a track record of sound knowledge and advice to ensure your customers get technical feedback from real experts: your most dedicated product users. A thriving community can save as much on tech support calls as the community itself costs to maintain.

SEO

If you have a website then Search Engine Optimization is always on your to-do list. You can buy your way to the top of a search engine's lists 2 ways: with money or with site activity. Most companies rely on money to build the site activity, but an online community can enhance your SEO efforts with far less investment than typical consultants or Ad buys cost. When you invest in developing a viable community, users will interact and converse with each other, and generate their own content, while viewing and commenting on each others output. A user who is engaging in a forum discussion will check in several times a day to reply to other users. A thread in an online community can generate anywhere from 8 to 42 views per written response. You can also insert content into your community that makes your site both more active and more relevant to intelligent search algorithms. Generation of user activity and user content organically grows your sites hit count, and drives you further up search lists, cheaply.

Web 2.0 Marketing

An Online Community can serve as a great vehicle for a 2.0 campaign. It can be your primary blog host, and a point of reference for outside bloggers to interact with you as part of a viral campaign. Your Community Manager can task hours each week to e-mail marketing, interacting on outside blogs and forums, generating press releases, and serving as your primary online brand evangelist, keeping your company in the forefront of online conversation.

Firefighting

All professional political campaigns now have staff dedicated to identifying and replying to any adverse internet content quickly and effectively. Most companies see the value in putting out fires quickly as well. Your online community will help you track your companies web presence, and bring issues up quickly. By responding just as quickly you can quash false rumors, and make sure your voice is part of critical conversations. The world is now a conversation ecosystem - you can't control WOM (word of mouth) but you can influence it, through professional online community management.

What are the Ingredients of a Successful Community?

Successful Communities all have several basic "ingredients" in common. They all start with a solid, actionable plan. They all rely on a fundamentally sound tech solution. And they all benefit from the daily involvement of a people solution.

Strategic Planning

Every Nattergalen new client initiation contains built in strategic planning sessions. Our clients depend on us to educate them in the capabilities of online communities, the means available to promote and operate them, and to develop a clear guideline of both specific goals tailored to the clients needs and a set of metrics to measure achievement of those goals. Once you have a clear understanding of the capabilities inherent to communities, your specific goals in building and maintaining one, and the intent that drives your decisions you are ready to create your community. There are two sides to online community development, the technical side and the people side. The name itself evokes the dual purpose of the environment. Online is a technical arena, and healthy communities rely on people solutions: skilled interaction with community members as individuals and groups.

Tech Solutions

A community is only as capable as the platform it exists on. Nattergalen has developed strategic partnerships with several software development firms who specialize in community building and hosting solutions. We can advise our clients on the capabilities of different software platforms and best practices to maximize their potential. Our in house web design capability can make sure your community is fully functional at all times and skinned to mesh seamlessly with your overall web presence.

People Solutions

Nattergalen is a people solution in a technical environment. Building a healthy community is like growing a garden. All of the technical work that goes into launching it is comparable to tilling a field. But to reap a truly beneficent harvest you need to work in that field every day, to water, prune, and sometimes even weed your garden. Nattergalen's professional community managers maintain this daily presence, growing your community, taking responsibility for all content within it so you can focus on maintaining the company effort behind the brand name. And we can manage these tasks with both high levels of skill and involvement within a cost effective framework.