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An urban legend says that government customers don't give references. But don't tell that to SAS Institute, which has built a thriving government reference community that includes the US Departments of Treasury and Commerce, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard, and dozens of other prominent state and local government agencies. I... read more →

One of the most thoughtful attendees and most probing questioners at last week's 2008 Communities Exchange Summit John Pasquarette, shares these takeaways. He also provides  a framework for moving forward with his community initiatives. This is good stuff - as he did during the conference, John focuses on the business case and... read more →

Some takeaways from yesterday's mind expanding presentation by Dell's Vice President of Communities and Conversations at the Communities Exchange Summit. The best community builders will be students of this emerging field. Why is engaging with customers online critical? About 500,000 people go online every day for the first time in... read more →

Notes from our afternoon session at the Communities Exchange Summit. Susan started with a simple framework. Communities must be "Purposed, Engineered, Mined" DEVELOPING A PURPOSE Susan is a deep thinker, and cites some heavy hitters for her foundational arguments. -- You need to address a critical question: if you let... read more →

Blogging from the 2008 Communities Exchange Summit. We've had incredible presentations from major B2B customer community programs: Intel (Josh Hilliker, Rhett LIvengood), Intuit (Scott Wilder), Oracle (Jake Kuramoto). Bill Johnston at ForumOne Networks gave results from their most recent research . . . Salesforce.com's Kingsley Joseph - who created SFC's... read more →

Bogging from the 2008 Communities Exchange Summit. Bob Gilbert is talking about

Just caught up with Kingsley Joseph, Senior Product Manager, salesforce.com, who created salesforce.com's IdeaExchange platform. It's being used not only by SFC but also Starbucks and Dell to attract large number of customers to their community sites, make sense of their input, de-dupe their feature requests, and prioritize them in... read more →

I recently had the chance to have a conversation with Bob Pearson, Vice President, Communities and Conversations, about how Dell is preparing for the future of digital media. Bob will be speaking at the 2008 Communities Exchange Summit on October 15. Q. Bob, Dell's impressive recovery from "Dell Hell" to... read more →

Forrester Research, as you probably know, is one of the world's most respected technology and marketing research firms. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Merv Adrian, Sr. Vice President, and Laura Ramos, Vice President, Principal Analyst, on why Forrester is bullish on customer reference programs. Merv and Laura... read more →

OK, having come out in favor of negative ads -- provided they're more artfully done than the typical hack job -- I thought I'd offer a suggestion for each of the campaigns. They are in keeping with the high road of negative campaigning carved out in the business world by... read more →