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Social CRM Use Case 2: Socializing educational content for member retention

Maddie Grant
October 24, 2011
2 comments

Our [SocialFish] definition of Social CRM is “the discipline of applying social media to membership management”, and the 12 use cases in our white paper, ROI and the Impact of Social CRM, show this in action.  Here’s the second of a series of blog posts for Avectra on the use cases – including four completely new ones – and we want to hear from you if these are possible for YOUR association.  In ALL cases, you should be building your community on social media sites before you even think about ROI.

Socializing educational content for member retention
[Not so distant future, with the help of new technology]

 

USE CASE:  A trade association had been hosting 45 webinars per year using a well-known webinar platform that is not integrated with any other systems. The archives were seldom accessed, but the webinars were viewed as one of the top membership benefits, and many organizations use them to train their staff teams. The Social CRM team decides to implement a community platform, integrated with the AMS, that will serve as the new hub for webinar content. Members must log in to the community platform to participate in the webinar, and afterwards, they can access (and share and review!) the webinar archive in the same place. They can also have ongoing, asynchronous discussions about the topic in the community site. Since the change, webinar satisfaction has gone up, more member companies are accessing the webinars, and the trade association has identified several hundred new member contacts who accessed the content asynchronously after a “strong suggestion” from their boss.
The recipe:
  • Your goal – to improve member engagement around your valuable educational online content.
  • ROI = reduction of costs for creating new content by surfacing existing content; extending the life of existing content; increasing retention rates attributable to educational value of the association membership.
  • Level – Advanced
  • Tools – AMS, community platform, webinar platform
  • Low hanging fruit – existing content buried in archives.

What you need:

  • Great content! None of this will work without top-notch educational content that your members want and need.
  • Great usability and design – this MUST be easy for members to use or it won’t work.
  • Tracking of metrics: sign-in, views, discussions, renewals, new webinar registrations.
  • Community management for ensuring members know about webinars and the discussions around them.

We’re calling this use case advanced because it requires a holistic, social view of educational content.  Instead of members passively watching a webinar (or recording it for later and forgetting to watch it), and then having the archive lost to the midst of time, this use case is about making sure your webinars are engaging and participatory.  Interaction around this educational content happens during and after the actual day of the webinar, and new ideas for topics are easily surfaced, keeping your educational value fresh and top of mind.  There is a big technology piece to this one – hosting your webinars inside your community platform (we can recommend vendors that provide this service), and making sure engagement data is tracked.  This is a big focus for us – our Think Tank webinars are designed like this.

What do you think? Are you doing this already?

What other possibilities have you seen for member retention using social media around educational content?

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  1. Social CRM Use Case 2: Socializing educational content for member retention — SocialFish | Customer Experience through Social Media | Scoop.it says:
    October 24, 2011 at 8:43 am

    [...] Social CRM Use Case 2: Socializing educational content for member retention — SocialFish Social CRM Use Case 2: Socializing educational content for member retention http://t.co/iW2cwlGp... Source: http://www.socialfish.org [...]

  2. Social CRM Use Case 2: Socializing educational content for member retention | Social Media for Chambers | Scoop.it says:
    October 25, 2011 at 9:41 am

    [...] Social CRM Use Case 2: Socializing educational content for member retention Our [SocialFish] definition of Social CRM is “the discipline of applying social media to membership management”, and the 12 use cases in our white paper, ROI and the Impact of Social CRM, show this in action. Source: http://www.socialfish.org [...]

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