Here are the first 1,100 words of the chapter on B2B social communities from my forthcoming book, co-authored with Eric Schwartzman, entitled Social Marketing to the Business Customer. The rest of the chapter will go into the various kinds of social communities and how to use them, with examples from the HR, food service, medical and construction industries. I’d appreciate any feedback on this opening passage, in particular:

Is this information useful to you?

Does it set the stage for a deeper discussion of social communities?

Is it appropriate to a B2B setting?

All comments are appreciated!

Spiceworks does a very good job of managing B2B communities. It has to; they’re critical to its business.

Spiceworks is a technology company that acts like a media company. Its namesake product is a sophisticated systems management suite for small and medium businesses (SMB) that it gives away for free. The SMB market is coveted by technology firms, and many of them pay Spiceworks for the chance to interact with the audience of over one million IT professionals for activities ranging from market research to product design.

Spiceworks sells advertising space on the software console its members use to monitor their networks. IT pros swap tips and tricks, review products and upload video tutorials. As the community grows, so does the value of the resource to all involved. Members have posted more than 15,000 product reviews and created hundreds of discussion groups. Their technical questions are now routinely answered within minutes.

Spiceworks builds the community into every facet of its operations, even asking members to vote on proposed new features. More than 400 people recently formed a buyer’s group to get better deals on backup software.

The Spiceworks community spreads beyond the website. As of this writing, nearly 20 user groups called “SpiceCorps” have sprung up around the North America and are spreading internationally. An annual user conference attracts thousands. Conversations long ago expanded beyond troubleshooting and now encompass product reviews, career advice and swap meets for software utilities. There’s even a long-running thread called “What Is the Funniest Thing A User Has Asked You?” It started in October, 2008 and had attracted more than 700 contributions 18 months later.

Essential Utility

Spiceworks represents the best of what B2B communities can accomplish. The social network is so essential to the company’s business that user generated content overflows onto the corporate homepage. Spiceworks staffers have a vested interest in optimizing member engagement because the company profits from it. In the process, it has learned much about what makes communities work.

It has learned, for example, that personal prestige is a huge motivator for community participation and that members will give generously of their time with no promise of reward other than helping a peer. It has also learned about the “1:9:90” rule: the vast majority of its content is generated by about 1% of its members, with another 9% kicking in occasional additions. Nine in 10 visitors contribute nothing but that’s OK. They get value from the submissions of the active few.

Online communities are a bit of a paradox. They are both the oldest form of social media and also the newest. Forums and discussion groups date back to the late 1960s and have been a staple of customer support for technology companies for 30 years. Internet newsgroups, CompuServe, The Well and other early communities had membership in the hundreds of thousands a decade before anyone had heard of a web browser.

Those early outposts looked little like the Facebooks and LinkedIns of today, though. The modern features that have made social networks the fastest-growing consumer phenomenon in history have created all kinds of new use scenarios, including some compelling B2B examples. Communities are the convention centers of social media. They are flexible gathering halls that can fill a wide variety of purposes ranging from product development to lead generation. The key is to get members to want to participate.

B2B Value

Discussion was the first “killer app” of B2B communities. Forums are particularly useful in B2B scenarios because they enable customers to solve often pressing problems quickly. Text-based discussion performs well in search results and active communities can save considerable customer support costs. In their 2008 book Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff cite the example of one unpaid Dell Computer customer who saves the company an estimated $1 million per year by answering technical questions that would otherwise require Dell resources. The most prolific contributor to LinkedIn’s “Answers” forum is Dave Maskin, a New York-based event marketing specialist who has answered an incredible 25,000 questions. Maskin refers to himself as “Mr. Lead Generator,” indicating that generosity is part of his business strategy.

The great innovation in online communities came in 1998, when Classmates.com introduced the concept of personal profiles and friends. Those metaphors are now a staple of every social network and provide a powerful incentive for participation. Profiles are a member’s personal homepage. Everything the member contributes, from establishing contacts with others to joining groups to posting status updates, is captured in the profile. The more active the member, the higher his visibility and the greater his perceived value to the community as a whole.

Friends are an online version of their real-world equivalent. When people create friend relationships, they exchange information that is not visible to others and they form persistent connections based upon trust. That’s actually how it works in real life, too. At their simplest level, friends connections are an efficient way to stay in touch. Members can always learn each other’s current address or job situation by searching within the network. In B2B communities, personal profiles are a way to register areas of expertise that others may find useful. Activities are a validation point. It’s one thing for someone to say he is an expert in direct marketing. It’s a more powerful message if he can to prove it by answering questions from other direct marketers. That proof is evident in the person’s profile.

Friends connections don’t necessarily have a professional component. “Community isn’t just about discussing products but about getting to know each other and making friendships,” says Nicholas Tolstoshev, a Spiceworks community manager. Online friends frequently become real ones when they arrange meet ups at trade shows and events.

Prior to the introduction of personal profiles, it was difficult for participants in online networks to build visibility. Recent experience has now demonstrated that visibility is the most powerful driver of participation. Most of the successful community organizers we spoke to use a recognition system that ties status ability to contributions. A few, like SAP, celebrate their most active members at physical events.

Spiceworks awards points to members who post well-regarded answers to other members’ questions. Valued members of the community are invited to participate in conference calls with Spiceworks developers. Their contributions are rewarded with low-cost swag like T-shirts. Community managers also publish occasional interviews with featured members, highlighting their contributions and career accomplishments. “Online status drives a huge amount of activity without our sending money out the door,” says Tolstoshev.

FohBoh.com, a social network for food service professionals, highlights new contributions by its members on its home page and invites others to congratulate them on their celebrity. TopCoder, a contract software developer that hosts programming competitions and licenses the best submissions to commercial customers, applies an elaborate algorithm to the code submitted by its members to compute the quality of their work. Leader boards are maintained for the major competitions and quality ratings are reflected back to individual profiles. Top coders win money and also visibility that leads to jobs and lucrative contracts.