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We had a great discussion with Mike Walsh, CEO of Leverage Software. Having reviewed Leverage software’s technology and successful implementation at InfoWorld where they have over 10,000 users, we wanted to understand more the vision and direction of communities from him.

The Key Takeaway: The ROI from having customers connect with each other can be measured by reduced time to prospect conversion, reduced time & cost of conducting sales references and alignment to new purchasing behavior.

The great reinforcement that people tend to value referrals and recommendations now more than interrupt based marketing was clear to me from our discussion. Mike and Leverage software’s vision for having customers talk to customers (many to many) instead of one to many discussions between companies and customers (via portals) is a very compelling one that allows organizations to tap into the power of many.

Here are the top 3 best practices that Mike recommends based on their experiences with over 113 communities:

1. Dedicate an owner for the community initiative to ensure it gets a desired focus and delivers results. In most organizations this is 3 people’s night job and they want to do a great job, but dont have the tools, time and experience to get it done right.

2. Ensure that you set clear goals and objectives: E.g: InfoWorld (one of Leverage Software customers) had a goal to increase Page views since that targeted customer page views for them results in higher CPM from their advertisers. Another e.g. is Salesforce.com had a conversion ratio goal from prospects to customers in a specified time period as their objective, which motivated them to setup an invitation community of their customers and prospects.

3. Surround yourself with community experts instead of trying to do it all alone, which may result in a sense of being overwhelmed
and also to make sure you dont make the rookie mistakes. Francois also suggested this in his piece on BMC best practices, since they mentioned to get it going too way too long.