Here we are, nearly three full months since I ventured back into the corporate world to try to prove, mainly to myself, that social media IS the communication form for today. Since we are all in this together I thought I would start sharing some of the baseline activities we have been doing and results we have been seeing. Firstly thought let’s start with some intro info so you know what we were looking at doing and with whom.

Company Name: BreakingPoint Systems

Product: We help network equipment manufacturers and service providers test network devices before they are deployed in live networks. You know; servers, routers, firewalls, ISPs, UTMs, etc. Our testing platform is the only one designed to test these devices with actual application traffic at realistic speeds of 10 gigabit per second and upwards. This has become critical since these network devices don’t simply push traffic from place to place anymore, instead they can recognize the traffic (aka “Content-Aware) and make decisions based on business needs.

Audience: Network engineers working in R&D and QA labs.

Goals: From a qualitative standpoint our goal is to obviously engage with our community, learn from what they are doing and ultimately create an open dialog with our users, prospects, partners and industry folks. Quantitatively this has meant a few things in terms of measuring success, which I won’t share in detail here, but numbers have been attached to:

1. Web visitors
2. Blog comments
3. Inbound links to our blog
4. Comments to the blog
5. Sales leads

Not surprisingly I looked to many of you for inspiration, posted several questions on Twitter and obviously used much of what Forrester has been detailing, specifically Jeremiah Owyang and Peter Kim. I really took to heart the sub head of Jeremiah’s report “Online Community Best Practices” which read:

“Communities Are A Powerful Tool, As Long As You Put Members’ Needs First”

Thus we embarked on our own community building in mid-May with the launch of our new website, blog and more.  I created a four-phased plan that would take me through “Finding where my audience was”, “Determining what they were discussing”, “Concluding how to best engage in a conversation” and finally “Maintain the community to optimize the conversation”. I would say that today we are probably done with the first phase (although I believe that probably runs throughout the lifetime of the community), earnestly involved in #2 and figuring out #3.

Brass Tacks

During phase one we used a blanket approach, mainly because our audience is truly everywhere online and this was the best way to see where action would create benefit. Remember, our goal was to find out where our audience was hanging out online because nobody had really done this before in our industry. This meant setting up:

BreakingPoint Labs
RSS Feeds
Twitter
Facebook
Ning
Squidoo
LinkedIn
Flickr
Vimeo
YouTube

In Part II I’ll dive into the results that we saw from these activities in all of their glory (or in some cases, gory) and then take a look at what we did internally to use social media as a sales information tool.

–Kyle Flaherty