• Beyond Ideas: Building Collaborative Innovation Communities

    Open Innovation Communities – where companies and customers collaborate on ideas for new products and services – can be one of the most valuable ways to invest in community engagement. Unfortunately, this type of community is also one of the most difficult to get right. Many companies have experimented with this type of  Open Innovation…

  • Influencer Apocalypse? No, But There Is a Community Opportunity

    Influencer Apocalypse? No, But There Is a Community Opportunity

    To say current conversations about influencer marketing are heated would be an understatement. With estimates of influencer marketing industry size ranging well into the billions of dollars, “influencers” certainly seem to be on the minds (and in the budgets) of marketers. Let’s be honest – influencer marketing currently seems to be a bit of a…

  • Customer Communities Are Critical For Business Transformation

    The last few years have seen big brands make extraordinary investments in developing massive “digital transformation” and social media programs. On one hand, these programs have yielded moments of customer connection, advocacy and insight. Unfortunately, for the majority of programs reliant on mass social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, organic reach has dropped effectively to 0 and companies are now forced to…

  • Aligning Your Enterprise Community Strategy With Your Customer’s Career Journey

    Aligning Your Enterprise Community Strategy With Your Customer’s Career Journey

    Use these three contexts to help create a bigger and better future for your company’s community.

  • The Value of Community Ecosystems

    The Value of Community Ecosystems

    In short: many organizations are missing the community opportunity because of a short sighted focus on transactional value in the context of specific use cases. Growth-minded companies are fully embracing community as a concept and integrating community ecosystem development practices into the fabric of their business with great success.

  • AI Use Cases For Communities & Networks

    AI Use Cases For Communities & Networks

    For business leaders shaping online community strategy, AI holds promise to help solve two of the biggest challenges with online communities: 1) Quantifying the value of community investment and delivering timely and actionable insight and 2) Managing large networks of relationships at scale.  

  • Developing Communities for Collaborative Innovation

    Developing Communities for Collaborative Innovation

    This is a short post to recap the online workshop I did with David Spinks of CMX about developing Collaborative Innovation Communities. Below you will find an overview of the session, the slide deck from the session, a link to the companion worksheet and the working list of brand-based CI communities and innovation platforms we’ve…

  • Announcing the C3/A3 Project: The Connected Future of Communities, AI & Automation

    Announcing the C3/A3 Project: The Connected Future of Communities, AI & Automation

    A new set of technologies is emerging to augment human cognition (AI), enhance human agency (Agents) and shape digital experiences and outcomes by taking advantage of a rich set of tools and APIs (Automation). We see these three technological forces (AI, Agents and Automation) as the next immediate wave of disruption in digital experience, and…

  • Building Modern Communities #SwarmConf

    I was honored to be asked to keynote the SWARM Community Managers Conference in Sydney this week, hosted by conference Co-Founders Alison Michalk and Venessa Paech. The conference featured a range of topics and an impressive group of expert practitioners sharing their views on Community building. My keynote focused on the need for a modern…

  • The Customer Community

    Image © Leigh Prather The last few years have seen big brands make extraordinary investments in developing massive “digital transformation” and social media programs. On one hand, these programs have yielded moments of customer connection, advocacy and insight. Unfortunately, for the majority of programs reliant on mass social platforms like facebook and twitter, organic reach has dropped effectively to 0 and companies…