Joshua Paul

Socious

Joshua Paul is the Director of Marketing and Strategy at Socious, a provider of enterprise customer community software that helps large and mid-sized companies bring together customers, employees, and partners to increase customer retention, sales, and customer satisfaction. With over 13 years of experience running product management and marketing for SaaS companies, Joshua Paul is a popular blogger and speaker on customer management, inbound marketing, and social technology. He blogs at http://blog.socious.com.

6 Key Customer Engagement Metrics for Improving Online Community ROI

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Posted on 2012-05-23

The Importance of Online Community Telltales

I took my daughter sailing for the first time last weekend. She was very interested in how I know where to steer.

I explained to her that there are pieces of yarn on the sails that tell me where to point the boat as the wind shifts. They are called telltales. If the yarn on the outside of the sail flaps, I make subtle adjustment to go in that direction. If the inside telltale isn’t straight, I point the boat in that direction.

If only online communities came with telltales….

Well, you’re in luck. They do. Every online community has key ratios that help online community managers and social strategists to...

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How Online Customer Communities Can Increase Revenue By 19% [Research]

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Posted on 2012-05-16

What would your bottom-line look like if your customers increased their spending with your company by 19%?

A 2012 study from the University of Michigan found that membership in an online customer community increased customers’ expenditures by 19%. Here is a visual aid to help you figure out what that would mean for your company.

The research details how the almost 20% increase in purchasing is directly attributed to joining and participating in the online community. It represents spending over and above what the customer was already spending with the organization...

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5 Tips for Using Online Community Analytics to Improve Social Engagement

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Posted on 2012-05-11

Take some time during your busy day to stop and look around.

These are historic times when it comes to an organization’s abilities to leverage the online communities it sponsors and the communities it participates in to improve business-level results.

The way this is happening is evolving too, just as we have seen in other areas of business.

Years ago marketing was done en mass and sales was done solely through one-on-one relationships. With the advent of CRM and marketing automation systems, organizations can nurture prospects with the right message for the right person at the right time with precision.

In political or advocacy campaigns, gone are the days of blanket canvasing and relying on a candidate’s shining personality to connect with an audience. They have been replaced by targeted social media campaigns and pinpoint micro-segmenting.

The Common Thread in These Revolutions Is Data

Businesses, nonprofits, and governments are using...

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5 Ways to Improve the Customer Experience & Why It Matters [Data]

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Posted on 2012-05-09

For some customers, engagement is not the golden ticket that you think it is.

Both business professionals and consumers are busier and more frazzled than ever. They don’t have time to engage on your terms. Chances are that your target audience wants help with the task at hand and then wants to move on. How can this bit of information have a significant impact on your business or membership organization?

A Little Customer-Centric Thinking Can Go A Long Way

According to a 2012 Corporate Executive Board study, customers value a simple customer experience over being engaged. Companies that focus on simplifying the customer experience and purchasing process have customers who are 86% more likely to purchase their products and 115% more likely to recommend their brand to others.

When it comes to customer retention and brand advocacy, the survey indicates that a...

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8 Ways to Use Video Effectively in Your Private Online Community

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Posted on 2012-05-02

The world is going visual! YouTube is the #2 search engine on earth. Pinterest has become the #3 social network based on sharing visuals. And tools like video sharing app, Socialcam, are seeing adoption skyrocket. How can you translate the popularity and comfort of video into your private customer or member community?

Watch this video to find out my 3 favorite ways to use video in a private member or customer community.

Here are 8 ways to effectively use video to engage your customers, members, prospects, employees, partners, or any other audience in your online community:

#1) Onboarding

Create a welcome video for different customer segments or member types that reinforced the value of your community and organization, as well as guides them to areas of the community where they can engage...

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5 Employee Groups That Should Access Your Online Customer Community Daily

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Posted on 2012-04-27

Online customer communities, private social networks where customers, partners, and employees are brought together by companies for the success of their customers, are often thought of as the domain of the social media team.

As they become more central to a business’s sales, retention, and customer management goals, online customer communities increasingly play a vital role in multiple departments....

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Why is the ‘24-Hour Rule’ Important in Building an Online Community?

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Posted on 2012-04-24

You and your team worked your tails off building an online community and now, only a small percentage of customers or members are using it. Creating and growing a new online community, even if it is built on top of an existing customer base or membership organization, takes a vast amount of planning and community management activity.

One of the most widespread challenges revolves around getting customers or members to use your online community as a resource on a consistent basis. An initial series of visits to your online community often look like this:

A busy customer or member visits your community.

They think it is cool and see the potential for adding value to their day. They decide to come back.

They visit your community again.

They don’t get value that they expected. They don’t come back for a while.

This...

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With Enterprise Online Communities, Simplicity Wins. Or Does It?

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Posted on 2012-04-20

With Facebook’s recent acquisition of photo effects and sharing mobile app, Instagram, it is easy to see how one could say that simplicity wins the day in social networking software. Twitter’s meteoric rise and the success of employee collaboration tool, Yammer, are also examples of the power of simple, easy-to-learn social applications with easy-to-use social networks.

Social business professionals have even written about the importance of simplicity in enterprise online community platforms. However, the reality is slightly more nuanced that that. Simple social networks have a dark side when companies and membership organizations try to engage their online communities to improve specific facets of their performance –...

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4 Steps to Strengthen Your Online Community Engagement Plan

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Posted on 2012-04-17

As we discussed in our video on understanding the online community lifecycle, there is no “silver bullet” to building a private online community. It takes time, understanding of your audience, and persistent value-added activity. Whether you are engaging customers, members, employees, prospects, or another stakeholder group, building community always includes a series of steps including onboarding, profiling, and nurturing.

With such a multidimensional engagement plan, where should you point your microscope when your online community is underperforming?

If you don’t have your community engagement plan fully mapped...

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How to Improve Customer Retention With a Private Online Community

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Posted on 2012-04-10

At you next customer conference or membership meeting, take an informal poll asking people why they do business with you? The data that you gather will be gold to your marketing, membership, and product management teams. While you’ll hear answers across a broad spectrum, but they will most likely have this theme in common:

We do business with you (or join your organization) because you uniquely solve a problem that we are willing to pay to have solved.

Business development and marketing people are highly skilled at zeroing in on the this theme and keeping the conversation about the prospect’s problems. However, many organizations lose this alignment once the sale is closed, resulting in drops in customer satisfaction and eventual decreases in retention.

How Private Online Communities Increase Customer Retention

Customers and members have low expectations of what they get from their vendors or the membership organizations they belong to...

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