Building Customer Communities
Last week, I attended a three hour presentation on SharePoint functionality. it was sponsored by a local I.T. consulting company.
SharePoint, for those of you who don't know, is a Microsoft application platform that enables companies to easily communicate, collaborate, share documents and can act as a portal for basic information workflow. SharePoint, used well, helps companies share knowledge and execute better.
For several weeks prior to the seminar, the sales team were beating the bushes, trying to attract local companies to sign up - to invest a morning listening to their internal expert share knowledge about how SharePoint works.
For the most part, I enjoyed the presentation, but afterwards sent a note to my rep with some suggestions because it seemed ironic that a company purporting to be SharePoint experts weren't using their platform to share knowledge and build a community of potential customers!
The approach might have been - now that you have SharePoint, let us show you how to get your company to use it well and how to build a collaborative culture within your company. Instead, they invited a room full of geeks to show them features and functionality of the software, in the hopes that somewhere down the road, we might need some development help.
Why not help the geeks sell the idea of collaboration within their own companies and then drive consulting from the dozens of business people who want to collaborate more effectively or work more efficiently?
Why not build a community of people who want to collaborate by developing and hostin an attractive and useful SharePoint Community site to foster enthusiasm, share stories, share knowledge and attract potential customers from the millions of people who were not at the seminar?
My advice to our hosts? Stop the local lecturing and start building a global community! Find ways to help the geeks evangelize. Make it easy for their end users to quickly gather confidence in using the tools. Once end user creativity is unleashed, the development consulting opportunities will abound.
