First things first, thanks to all of the comments and thoughts that people sent about the first Blog. A quick reminder that my focus in this Blog is partnering, and how to be more successful in this endeavor. A broad review of social media is not part of my aim.
Now to business, what does one do with this new found knowledge about social media. The answer is lots of things, customer support and brand building are two of the most popular, however we are going to concern ourselves here what you can do to enhance the partner business, starting with the partner portal.
If you jump into the old time machine. remember the promise of Partner Portals. Private secure islands in the wonderful world of the web. They promised to replace binders, monthly mailers, banks of people on the phone. Partners could get product information 24x7. We all spent tons (“tons” is a technical term meaning way more than planned) money on our portals. Then they grew from informational to active with deal registration, participate in contests, lead distribution, certification, yada, yada.
What happened? They didn’t get used to the degree envisioned or by the people and partners we most wanted. Partner portals are a good but not great tool. The fatal flaw in my experience....too many. Every vendor and each distributor developed one (sometimes more than one) and it overwhelmed the individual. A mid sized VAR has 100 to 150 product lines which means for each sales person has an overwhelming number of passwords, all with different formats. They can end up largely private library’s with few visitors.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”
George Bernard Shaw
What to do? Let Facebook or LinkedIn (or your favorite) host your portal and leverage their existing community, make it easy for individuals to use. There are 250 million people with Facebook accounts, 45 million at LinkedIn, many partner employees will have existing accounts. Any that don’t have accounts certainly have heard about the services and are likely to be open to joining. This goes a long way toward solving the access challenge. Monthly operating cost = 0.
After you have set up an account for your business, next steps: populate with relevant content, invite individuals at partners, encourage questions and comments to establish a community, make announcements, keep the content relevant. You are striving for active participation, relevance, a true Web 2.0 portal, not a yesterday’s web portal, which means that your team must be actively involved in the conversations. To stay relevant you must answer the questions, deal with the controversial issues out in the open. The process will allow greater transparency with your partners and help build trust, but it may be uncomfortable dealing with issues in the open, be ready. Both LinkedIn and Facebook have security setting that will help you manage access, it appears to me that Facebook’s settings may be the better fit for this model.
The next step is to leverage the API’s or interfaces provided by these platforms. You can use the API’s to write applets to do deal registration, or manage coop funds or integrate into exiting applications. LinkedIn’s Intelligent Applications platform is designed to get LinkedIn into your applications and the ability to get your applications into LinkedIn. LinkedIn and others support Google’s OpenSocial set of API’s which promise more options. Facebook started out open and extendable, heck there is even a “Building Facebook Applications for Dummies” book. An ancillary benefit of the platforms is that they are already encompass the mobile user.
After all this, get it used. Recruit your most engaged partners to use the platform, to start conversations, to tell other partners how cool and useful your partner “portal” is, get on the phone with editors to tell them what you are doing, give speeches about your creation, publicize successes, create a buzz.
There is an elephant in the room...Advertising. Yes you will have to put up with advertising (not on the mobile side, today) but it is a small price to pay to leverage existing communities to ease the communications burden with your partners, build communities around your business at a fraction of the cost with easier access for your constituents than a “DIY”(Do It Yourself) portal. Leveraging the technology is great however the true cost is building the community and these services give you a “leg up”.
Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research. “Extending useful business applications on top of existing business communities will bring a new opportunity for efficiency — business communities will be more productive.”
Become 3-dimensional in your partner interaction with Web 2.0. Leverage the platforms and existing communities, build an applet to extend the platform if you need to, but concentrate your effort on keeping to the message fresh, establishing a dialog and electronically reaching out to your partners.
