Communities for business solutions customers

Euan Semple over at The Obvious? had this to say about business and social networks:

(If you don’t know who Euan Semple is, find out. He’s been into social computing for a long time, and when he speaks you better listen).

A key differentiator for businesses in the future will be their ability to attract high quality online networks of interesting and engaged users of their product or service and then delivering access to those networks to their new customers.

This is what I was talking about in my prevous post about communities in business. What I didn’t realize though, is that the ERP user communities are pretty well developed when compared to other businesses. The user groups associated with ERP vendors are way ahead of the user communities found (or not found) in other industries.

In his great book on branding, Zag, Marty Neumeier shows that building a community around your customers increase brand loyalty, and how this can be applied to an ordinary wine-bar. This is exactly what the user groups in ERP is all about, and they’ve been around for a long time now! When it comes to communities for users of business software, this is an absolute minimum of what an ERP vendor has to provide. I say absolute minimum because it’s time to go further than these simple discussion-clubs called user groups and create something truly innovative.

Explore posts in the same categories: business solutions, community, crm, erp, zag