Community

How social is your Web experience?

Online communities are becoming a business essential. The Web no longer is a one-way street. Users expect a two-way communication channel. Users increasingly demand a voice wherever they go online, including their bank, their insurance company, their healthcare provider and even where they work. And when they are denied a voice, increasingly they move on to someone who will listen to them.

Peers are more believable. According to the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer, "a person like yourself" is often viewed as an organization's most credible spokesperson. This effect extends from consumer to enterprise behavior. For example, corporate employees trust their colleagues' advice about which case study, HR article or productivity tool is best suited to meet their goals.

Communities keep your users engaged. Customers, partners, suppliers, employees and peers all have a perspective that needs to be heard. Enabling them to share their knowledge and opinions online with you, or with other members of your audience, contributes to the realization of virtually every business strategy. Whether you are selling products online and want people to linger on your site and return frequently, or you are trying to reduce your investment in product support and you want the first line of support to come from your users helping each other, engaging your audience online has real business benefits.

Give them a Voice that gets heard. With Vignette. Vignette's Community product line enables organizations to give a voice to this group of peer influencers, driving new levels of both internal and external audience engagement on anything from product reviews and content discovery to product development.

Video: Vignette Community Services Overview

The video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. If you are you using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Flash Player by downloading here.

Virtually every industry can benefit from online community

For example, banks that use blogs and forums may find that experienced home buyers educate first-time home buyers, and happy customers extol the pleasures of their experience with the bank. Similarly, permitting online ratings and commenting on retirement planning resources can help others find the best information and program for them.

Government agencies can employ tagging and tag clouds to help citizens locate resources based on their relevance to the larger public. And citizen forums can support public brainstorming sessions that lead to solutions to community challenges. These forums can also reveal and recruit passionate citizen leaders.

To cite a third example, technology companies can use ratings and comments inside the firewall to improve engineers' productivity by making the best and most relevant data easier for them to find. Wikis can provide a great, informal mechanism for capturing and preserving organizational knowledge. And connecting to customers over extranet-based forums and ratings can create a strong peer network and provide insight into areas of the business – technical support, for example – that need attention.

With communities on Public Web Sites, you can:

strengthen your brand
increase the loyalty of your key audiences
drive revenue

With communities on Internal Web Sites, you can:

increase your organization's informal networking
improve your knowledge sharing
drive productivity

Part of a complete Web Experience Platform
Instead of aggregating a number of disparate solutions to make your Web more social, the Vignette Community products are offered as a suite which is a component of our complete Web Experience Platform. This unified enterprise-class architecture delivers a broad variety of user-generated content services and applications – including wikis, blogs, ratings, reviews, polls, tagging and tag cloud, forums and comments.