Michael Thomas, CRMA President, and I created a generic community lead identification activities list as a continuation of our series on leveraging corporate online communities for lead generation. This list is the baseline set of community activities that can be used to build a lead scoring system within a corporate community. It is unrealistic to assume that you will automatically be able to filter browsers from shoppers with this model, but the goal is to build a scoring foundation from which you can add company-specific indicators to identify interest.

This post will not address the actual mechanism of lead scoring in this post, but rather discuss the actual activities within a community that you could score to for lead identification.

The Top 10 Corporate Online Community Activities for Lead Identification

1. Frequency of Tags from All Activities – the ability to aggregate all the tags from the pages viewed and assign scores based upon the frequency of tags = greater number of tags from content “hits” which indicates interest.
2. Joined Groups - weighted score based upon # of groups with specific groups scored differently
3. Content Posts – weighted score based upon frequency and which group posted
4. Connections – weighted score based role of connection; employees (ie product manager higher than customer service, finance, etc) versus other customers
5. Referrals – invite a friend submittals; higher score if same domain as referrer
6. Profile Completeness
7. # of connections – shows community activity and interest
8. Visits per month – shows community activity and interest
9. Time on site in last visit
10. Forwards content to friend / email address

Your goal in leveraging these activities within a community is to identify interest beyond the cursory. You are looking to leverage implicit behaviors beyond the stated, explicit information the user provides in their profile. Market research has long identified that people will say one thing when asked directly, but will do something different when observed. “Yes, I would pay $10 for this”, but then never pick up the item when observed.

The goal of a lead identification system is to separate browsers from shoppers. The best systems eliminate false positives and false negatives. A false positive is a unqualified lead that sales has to follow up on, but in reality has no chance of closing. A false negative is a missed sales opportunity because the buyer was never approached and went somewhere else to satisfy their needs. You never knew they were really looking until it was too late.

The purpose of embedding a corporate online community into your corporate website is to create more interactions on the site. Marketers are always looking to convert a higher percentage of the web visitors that come to your website. If you can engage more, keep them coming back, and help them qualify themselves; then your website has been significantly enhanced with an online community. Now, if you can do that and leverage the interactions and user generated content to drive better search optimization, even better.

Part 1 – http://rosenhaft.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/online-community-lead-scoring-part-1/

Part 2 – http://rosenhaft.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/community-lead-identification-part-2-linkedin-example/