Social Media + Communities


Whether you noticed it or not, markets have gone social, and so should your marketing.

People make most of their buying decisions based on peer recommendations and those influencing the most buying decisions are very active in online communities. Even if your biggest challenge is traditional PR to get mainstream media attention, your best bet is still to invest in social media “ with 84% of journalists using blogs as their sources.

We have a variety of offerings to help you leverage social media and other marketing 2.0 programs and techniques, including communities.

SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH & STRATEGY

How well are you leveraging social media to improve marketing effectiveness? Where are the greatest opportunities and risks for your organization? What’s the best way to get started? And then to measure what you’re doing?


Beeline Labs helps you assess how your company is engaging and leveraging social media across all aspects of marketing, sales, innovation and strategic communications and the works closely with senior management to craft a recommended plan of action.

Find out more here.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP COMMUNITIES

Whether your biggest challenge is category creation/influence, lead generation, sales, public relations and customer communications or new product innovation, we have successfully deployed thought leadership communities to help companies achieve game-changing results in any one of those areas.

Consisting of group-based blogs with recognized industry leaders as contributors, our thought leadership communities have led to:

  • The ability to create more citations in social and traditional media in 6 months than a company was able to achieve in 10 years prior to that
  • The ability for a company to take on a leadership position in a disruptive emerging technology category
  • A company being able to cut its lead generation costs through industry defining webinars by 90%, while increasing the quality of those leads
  • The ability for a company to reduce the cost of their annual users group meeting by 10% while increasing its reach by over 1000%
  • The ability for a company to engage with senior thought leaders within major government regulatory agencies
  • Hitting front page articles in major publications like USA Today and the Wall Street Journal

To get a feel for some of our thought leadership communities, visit:

Working with some of the leading lights in the field of technology, media, law, marketing & innovation, life sciences, and health care, we can quickly bring to bear the best resources to support your goals.

Extensions of those thought leadership communities include:

  • Physical and virtual events
  • Lead generation programs
  • Advocacy-based PR programs

COMMUNITY STRATEGY & PROGRAMS

Communities are changing how people work, live, buy and play. They’re extending the edge of organizations, engaging customers and employees in new ways and fundamentally reshaping best practices in marketing, product management, customer service, and human resources.

We’re working with clients to create community strategies that predictably deliver business results, assess root cause issues inhibiting existing communities from realizing their full potential, and create the content, facilitation and management processes needed for success.

Specialty community programs that we have developed for clients include:

  • Advisory board communities to help companies with their product and go-to-market roadmaps
  • Customer communities to get users to help companies co-design and co-market their products
  • Focused industry-based Business Raves to help companies with their market research and new market launches
  • Alumni communities for Universities

All community programs typically have physical as well as virtual components. Please contact us for more information on our community programs.

For more about our “2008 Tribalization of Business Study: How Communities and Social Networks are Transforming Business,” conducted with Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research, please see these preliminary results. (We’d be happy to meet with you to discuss results and implications in more detail. )



New! The 2008 Tribalization of Business

We've just released the findings of our first-of-its-kind study of how more than 140 organizations are employing online communities. The study, produced in concert with Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research, features data and insights on how small and large companies as well as non-profits are managing communities, measuring success, and deriving business benefits.

Find out more about the study and related activities and register to access the study.

Our services:

  • Social Media Strategy + Consulting
  • Online Communities
  • Content
  • Workshops + Training

New + Notable:

We've just launched a new community on marketing. Called Marketing 2.0, the effort includes a group blog authored by leading thinkers in the industry and a companion community for marketing enthusiasts to share ideas and best practices.

What we help you do:

  • Get people to pay attention to what you have to say and sell
  • Change the rules of the game in your industry
  • Increase the ROI for all your marketing programs

Why us?

  • Client experience: Fast, Intuit, University of Massachusetts, Communispace, Sun Microsystems, World Health Congress, Sapient, SupplyScape
  • No-nonsense, straightforward, hype-free, can-do style
  • Demonstrated ability to build programs that deliver results that matter
  • On the forefront of social media innovation: the Marketing 2.0 thought leadership community, our book, our blogs, our research lab, our blog publishing subsidiary

News & Views

Tune in to our News + Reviews section and you'll find an expanding resource with articles, white papers and pointers to market reports and intelligence you can't afford to miss. Also find out where we're speaking and where else we're hanging out.