Saturday 17 May 2008

Leveraging Natural Networks for Business

Following on from my previous post, the first step in leveraging natural networks for your business to set up mechanisms to identify your ideal 'hubs'. Second is to focus on these individuals and try and get them evangelising about your enterprise. In the bricks and mortar arena there is little hope of exploiting member networks because you have no easy way of getting people talking to each other. The online channel however, presents the perfect opportunity.

The framework you will need in order to leverage the power of your customer network is to make sure your website provides easy user friendly opportunities for your customers to comment and review, possibly with profiles that display the sort of things they buy along with incentives for them to share this information. You will also need to procure and implement web analytics software to capture data and track customer behaviour and interaction. Finally if you’re a real future thinker you’ll probably want to invest in or develop network analytics software, employ some intelligent analysts who can both model your audience and help shift it from a random to a scale-free network, and of course build a forward thinking marketing department that can engage and increase the number of ‘hubs’ and turn them into your own personal evangelists.

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