Communities, Content and Search

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Communities, Content and Search
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Definition

• A Discussion
• An Engagement
• A Place to Start a Conversion

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Definition 2

• A Marketing Tool
• A product marketing managers dream
• Cross-sell, up-sell, offers, etc (carefully)
• A Customer Support Environment
• A Feedback Tool into Product Development
  lifecycle

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Definition 3 and Why We Are Here!

• Food for Search Engines

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Gartner Definition

• Informal knowledge capture
• Capitalize on community involvement to drive
  higher leverage and productivity
• Delegate to the community what the community can
  do more quickly and effectively
• Relevant for improving business processes that
  rely on access to people sharing best practices
• Accelerating innovation
• Driving change

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Suggestions for external communities support

• - Jive Software
• VMware
• Nike
• Apple
• LiveWorld
• Telligent
• Small World Labs
• Vinette rating and tagging.

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Lithium- ROI?

• allowing them to drive word-of-mouth marketing
• reduce costs with peer-to-peer support
• accelerate innovation by tapping new ideas
  directly from the customer base
• Nintendo Tech Forum

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So what do you need

• Customers talking about you or seed it
• Searchable content for users, for search engines
• Consumer travel is the classic
• Restaurants try search for bin 36 on
  opentable.com
• Apparel Nike online
• Business site the best and first DELL

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Narrowing it down to accessible for search
engines, on-site content

• Members only? Password protected?
• Nofollow
• NoIndex
• Duplicate content (threads and messages dups of
  each other?)

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Optimizing the content Starting Threads
Keyword Usage

• Moderators/Community manager to create
  topics/threads (that help with all things
  mentioned in definitions) with top keywords. Must
  be relevant

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Optimizing the Content

• Tags and category entries by community adds
  keywords to the page
• Tend to be reused if they are suggested by system
• Breadcrumb of thread with new headlines
• Dynamic creation of meta tags and titles

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Long Tail Optimization
Failed to create database tables
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Internal Linking to tell search engines where you
want them to send people

• Dont leave it to faith use sitemap.xml files
  for the key, permanent forum areas. Regularly
  create them.
• Dont move content if a large community
• Duplicate content avoidance (canonical tag)
• Example VMware Community cross-linking into
  product threads

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Domain Usage

• Subdomains
• Keep the possibility of another listing to
  dominate the first page
• Continues the power and influence of the main
  site, domain
• Directory
• Internal linking opportunities of power transfer
  and sharing are higher
• At root is a powerful position
• Separate site
• Doesnt take advantage of company domain power
• Another(!) site to manage

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People Profiles

• Visible or not?
• VMworld not visible using robots.txt and
  Google webmaster tools to stop indexing
• VMware indexed people are always surprised it
  isnt private
• LinkedIn Prime example of a great community with
  scaled down public profiles

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Search Queries with 8 Words Continue to Rise

• http//www.marketingvox.com/search-queries-with-8-
  words-continue-to-rise-043547/?utm_campaignnewsle
  tterutm_sourcemvutm_mediumtextlink

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QA with Audience

• Question 1
• Community content is super rich but as a company
  that needs to sell products do you want to drive
  people deep into the site where there may not be
  much marketing/selling and maybe even negative
  stuff going on?

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QA with Audience

• Question 2
• Do you want to put 'marketing/selling' deep into
  the site in the forums and communities?

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QA with Audience

• Question 3
• Do searchers want to land in a community to get
  answers to questions or would datasheets be
  better. Do they trust their fellow users more
  than the company providing the product or service?

Virtual Center Upgrade
site
forum
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What is available to the search engines from your
community?