How to Start a B2B Community
If you love Web 2.0 tools the way I do, you probably came to the quick realization that they’re powerful tools for creating a community
But added together they don’t equal a community. You can launch all the Web 2.0 tools you can think of and still not have a community. So the question quickly becomes: How do you create a community, especially in B2B? It’s easy to see opportunities in B2C around, say, yacht racing, NASCAR and even beer drinking (yes, Budweiser just launched bud.tv).
But what does it take to get a B2B community under way?
To answer this question, I enlisted the help of expert community builder Mukund Mohan. He’s the CEO of Canvas Group and a fellow blogger who publishes BestEngagingCommunities. He will take us through the 3 reasons to start a B2B community, provide 3 examples of existing B2B communities, and dig into the what, when and how of community building. I hope you enjoy hearing this one as much as I enjoyed producing it!
How to Start a B2B Community a podcast with Mukund Mohan
About Mukund
Mukund Mohan is CEO of Canvas Group. Before Canvas Group, he founded and sold 2 successful startups. Prior to that, he was head of product marketing for Mercury Interactive with responsibility for the direction and customer success of the company’s application management solutions. Mukund also was Vice President of Operations at Consilient, a software company focused on process automation. In that role, he managed a team of sales and services personnel and was responsible for customer success. In addition, he has held product and management positions at Ariba and Asera. He began his career at Cisco Systems.
Great interview, Paul. Community is such a hot topic right now, but most of the real experience and good examples are on the consumer side, so it’s helpful to get this perspective on what makes B2B different. I’ll be especially curious to see what happens with the Deloitte CFO community, since actually bringing together C-level executives in an ongoing online community is probably the hardest challenge of all.
Work.com (blog) is an example of a new B2B community where experienced people in business share expertise through contributing business how-to guides. I’m also curious to follow the Deloitte CFO community…one of the biggest challenges in creating a B2B community is figuring out how an extremely busy audience can best contribute…
I’m trying to Start a b2b community blog to help others start a business with blogging
More and more, we are seeing B2B companies leverage a three-tier sales model to close both transaction and enterprise level deals. We drew this out on the white board so we could share with you.