A New eBook on Social Marketing in an Online Community

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

Telligent is one of C+R’s primary community platform partners. We’ve been using their Telligent Community software as the basis for what we call mrTelligent, our proprietary community platform, that’s been optimized for marketing research, especially research with a more qualitative orientation. mrTelligent underlies our own in-house communities as well as some of the client communities that we manage, and we’re very pleased with its capabilities, its well thought-out design, and how easy it is to extend and customize.

When Telligent asked us to be one of the use cases in a new eBook they were preparing about Social Marketing in Online Community, we were happy to agree. Now that it’s been released, we could hardly be more pleased by the result. Telligent has a long history of providing thoughtful advice about planning, building, managing, and using communities to address business issues, and they’ve again done themselves proud.

C+R is the sole marketing research provider that Telligent includes in its case studies, and our Vice President for Online Immersion, Erin Barber, did a great job with an overview of some MR-specific applications of online communities. Marketing researchers will also be interested in the story on managing the continuing innovation process at HealthStream, which spotlights the InnovationCast product that’s also built on the Telligent platform.

Customer and consumer communities are enjoying a new surge of interest among marketing researchers, it seems. Clients are discovering that partnering with a research supplier who can build and manage proprietary communities as well as provide a full range of custom quantitative and qualitative research services really boosts the effectiveness of their entire research program. In an era when companies are demanding faster, better, more efficient ways to gain fresh, deep insights, using multiple suppliers for custom research and community management is just a hindrance.

From C+R’s vantage point, we’re finding that our ongoing involvement in a client’s community enables us to be smarter about their business issues and provide deeper insights when we tackle their custom research. And, of course, the knowledge we gain from conducting custom work helps us draw added value from the activities we conduct within the client’s community.