Engaging across the social web

Business trigger: unusually diverse customer base

With no one industry representing more than 15% of its revenue, National Instruments has an unusually diverse customer base working on an equally diverse set of applications ranging from kindergarten robotics to rocket science. This makes it essential for NI to connect engineers working on similar applications with each other so they can get application-specific support. While National Instruments has successfully used forum technology since 1999 to resolve support issues, by 2007 additional technologies were needed to help meet the growing needs of their technical community in areas such as file-exchange, technical wikis, and social groups.

Solution focus: one phase at a time

In phase one of this initiative, National Instruments focused on giving engineers the opportunity to connect, collaborate, share, and innovate with a worldwide network of programmers via a branded online community. In phase two, National Instruments put a strong premium on utilizing social technologies both on their site and through popular outlets like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter not only to provide customer support and build community, but also to gather valuable product feedback, research new markets, drive sales, and increase awareness and loyalty. By approaching the initiative in two phases, National Instruments was able to put a thriving community in place before they engaged users on social networks.

Jive Social Business Software at work

In 2008, National Instruments launched the NI Developer Community, powered by Jive, to help the NI worldwide community of engineers and scientists discover and collaborate on software code, tutorials, and engineering challenges. A year later, in phase two, National Instruments integrated Jive social media capabilities to connect with its fan-base of engineers and scientists through popular social media outlets like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to "play where our customers play." Just launched at this writing: phase three, an internal community for employee communications and collaboration to complete the circle from marketplace to customer community to employee community.

Business value delivered

Two years following launch, their Jive-powered community has fulfilled a number of NI's broad business objectives, including:

• Ensure customer success by embedding rich content, including 3,000 example files, 60 technical blogs, 200 tutorials, 250 online user groups, how-to videos, and more.
• Gather valuable product feedback through projects like NI Labs (ni.com/labs) and Jive secret groups.
• Increase awareness and loyalty through blogs and groups in the online community plus proactive communications in social media outlets.
• Drive sales with natural connections between the Jive community and e-commerce, such as links to customized parts lists from how-to-video product demonstrations.
• Manage reputation by listening and engaging in conversations with customers on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs.
• Increase community membership and engagement using LabVIEW Champions (ni.com/champions) in 10 countries to help evangelize NI products to other customers and prospects.
• Promote both online and real-world connections with an integrated program that ties community-focused events to online groups.

The backstory

How to play where your customers play
National Instruments offers a wide variety of hardware and software products to empower technologists working on extremely different applications, ranging from robots and medical devices to the world's largest particle accelerator. Given the impossibility of creating all the support and technical content needed to address every engineering application its products were used for, NI felt the imperative to connect like minded users via community and social media so that they could help each other.

"What if we provided more ways for customers to collaborate online beyond our support discussion forums?" asked NI management. How can we take advantage of emerging social technologies? Responding to this leadership challenge took NI on a journey into uncharted waters and resulted in an award-winning social media strategy that leveraged a robust developer community on its corporate website to enhance how NI customers connect and collaborate with each other and with NI.

Taking up the challenge

The leadership challenge was taken up by a crossfunctional project team led by Deirdre Walsh, Community and Social Media Manager at National Instruments. The team went through the P.O.S.T. (people, objectives, strategies, and technologies) analysis process, which underscores analyzing each of these areas in the right order—in other words, ending not beginning with technology.

"After a lot of discussion, it really came down to a few major objectives, both on and off our site," says Deirdre. "It boiled down to customer success, product feedback, sales, awareness, loyalty, and reputation management. Strategically, this meant focusing on three key areas: content exchange, technical collaboration, and rewards and reputation."

Vendor search: 20 vendors vie for the spot

In addressing the technology question, the team evaluated developing a solution in house, expanding the existing support forum, and then looked at 20 different social media vendors. Jive's Social Business Software solution percolated to the top.

"Jive's platform had several characteristics that were particularly important to us," says Deirdre. "We had to have an extremely flexible platform that would let us do some pretty heavy customization, such as generating templates to help members exchange software code and tutorials. We also wanted an online community modeled after a house party. In other words, we wanted to provide a user experience where members feel comfortable striking up a conversation with people they haven't met. Jive's user experience is unmatched."

Social media capabilities put Jive over the top

"After going through our analysis process, it became very clear to the team that we needed to have a very strong connection between what our customers were doing on our website and what they were doing off our website," says Deirdre. "Jive's platform let us integrate everything we were doing with the socialsphere."

The team's goal, explains Deirdre, was to develop a "Social Media Pangaea," a supercontinent where all social conversations connect in one domain—a single social platform they could use internally to follow their marketplace and collaborate on what's happening there as well as engage in conversations taking place on both their customer community and the social web.

"We need to play where our customers play or our communications won't be 'top of mind'," says Deirdre. "Our Jive-powered customer community has become an extension of our branded communications strategy. We engage with social media like Twitter and Facebook to drive people to visit our customer community by spotlighting user-generated content, such as blogs and cool applications. From YouTube videos that teach you how to drive a car with your iPhone to answering support questions on Twitter, to engaging in meaningful dialog with customers on Facebook, National Instruments likes to play where our customers play."

Broad business objectives for social media engagement

Broadcasting the official corporate voice of NI on different social media sites was not an end in itself, explains Deirdre. The center of their strategy is their customer community, the NI Developer Community.

"We aren't trying to double the number of fans on Facebook," she says. "Instead, we're using Jive and its social media capabilities to engage engineers on Facebook for a number of broad business objectives: to ensure their success, gather product feedback, increase sales, manage our reputation, increase loyalty, and grow the NI Developer Community. We look at how 'actionable' the conversations in these outlets are. In other words: Do they drive visits to our site? Do they help support users? Jive's platform made it easy to establish the thriving community we needed to have in place before we engaged users on social networks."

To establish momentum and embed the community with rich content in the early days of the launch, the project team challenged the NI application engineering organization to create 300 pieces of new code and make them available on the NI Developer Community for downloading in one week. They also engaged leaders in R&D and the product marketing department to create technical resources for users. These organizations were happy to comply since the open, wiki-based platform ensured the content would be up-to-date and edited by subject area experts. Community content, Deirdre reports, is now self-generating, much of it from customers who visit the site and NI engineers who regularly contribute to blogs, groups, and discussions.

NI social media teams

With the Jive platform, NI teams have access to Jive's rich social media capabilities from which they can monitor and highlight conversations on the social web, share them internally if they need to, or respond right then, on the spot. They come from a variety of organizations across NI, including Marketing, PR, Advertising, Product Support, and IT. Some examples of how NI social media teams use the Jive social media console include:

• When NI social media team members see a support issue expressed on Twitter or on Facebook, they follow a two-minute rule of thumb: if you can resolve the issue in two minutes or less, then jump right into the conversation. Otherwise point them to the NI official product support channels.
• The PR team follows bloggers influential in their marketplace in real time using Jive's social media capabilities, which allows them to immediately respond, if necessary.
• An "NI Buzz" space gives broad visibility to market trends and observations to employees and executives throughout NI—providing crucial market information to everyone who needs it.
• A monthly summary of those market trends and observations— with comments and interpretations—is distributed to a broader executive audience, keeping everyone across the organization up to speed with what's happening in the NI marketplace.

"Overall, the activities of our social media soldiers have helped drive marketing goals," says Deirdre. "Beyond 'fans, followers, and readers' we measure 'actionable conversations' in social media to help connect the conversations happening off the domain with real business objectives."

Customer community without borders

In both concept and execution, the NI team has developed a customer community without borders by leveraging the ease with which they could use Jive to initiate and engage in conversations taking place on the social web and drive them to the NI branded community. Multiple individuals and organizations—inside and outside NI—put Jive to work:

• Marketing spotlights community content and pushes customers on the social web to the NI Developer Community with links to blog posts about new robotics products, for example, or case studies they call "Sweet Apps," a less formal approach to sharing customer solutions through blogs.
PR follows popular blogs in real-time and chimes in on the conversation when appropriate, which gives them a better ability to manage conversations around the NI brand.
• Events teams establish groups on the branded community for the major events NI sponsors, which gives them a place to generate excitement and connect to customers before the event as well as leverage those online conversations for their SEO strategy.
• LabVIEW user groups (more than 200 to date) now connect both offline and online, which strengthens their connection to each other and to National Instruments.
• NI Labs showcases new technologies in a virtual research center just before they are ready for release. Members can download and test these pre-alpha features and provide feedback directly to the NI engineers working on them.
• R&D engineers blog regularly about LabVIEW best practices and new software features. Their blogs are an easy way for LabVIEW community members to collaborate with key developers.
• Product marketing maintains secret groups, where they have private conversations with leading users in new markets they want to enter. They use these groups to get feedback about products and features well before beta—at the drawing-board stage—leveraging customers as "co-innovators."

NI wins B2B Marketing Communications Award

National Instruments annually hosts the industry's premier technical conference called NIWeek for 3,000 of the world's brightest engineers, scientists, and educators. Because National Instruments understands that those attending are their most loyal users, they launched a campaign across of a mix of channels—online and offline—to energize and "supercharge the power of their word-of-mouth" as they released a new version of their flagship product, LabVIEW. The campaign consisted of:

• An interactive pavilion that bridged the online and offline worlds
• Online community-focused events that encouraged networking and word-of-mouth evangelism
• Recognition and rewards for outstanding online contributors during the Breakfast of Champions
• Education on the various ways to stay connected and find technical resources during and after NIWeek via the keynotes, the "Byte Sized Information" technical session, and a unique training session for company partners
• Broadcasts in the form of videos, forums, and blogs on the NI Developer Community, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and Google Maps
• A virtual conference experience for the 140,000 community members who couldn't attend on www.ni.com/niweekcommunity
• Content for evangelists to share with the rest of the community, including videos, example code, and tweets

Because of this campaign, and despite the downturn in the economy, National Instruments had record attendance at the 2009 NIWeek conference. By bridging the online community and social media efforts with the real-world enthusiasm of its rabid user base, NI successfully drove sales, gathered valuable product feedback, increased awareness and loyalty, and improved self-support. This campaign won the 2009 B2B Marketing Communications award from the Marketing Leadership Council.

Stay tuned

The social web has completely changed how companies manage their brand. How National Instruments uses Jive to improve customer engagement across their branded community and the social web foreshadows what companies in the future will be doing routinely. The next phase of the initiative, NI's just-launched employee community, brings their initiative full circle. Stayed tuned for an update.

Learn More About Jive

Jive Social Business Software brings the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to your enterprise.

Download our Customer Service Resource Kit and learn more about customer and support communities
Watch our video demos and see Jive in action
See all of our case studies