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NetApp is an industry-leading provider of storage and data management solutions. It has a presence in over 100 countries, thousands of customers, and a culture of innovation, technology leadership, and customer success. NetApp solutions deliver value, speed, and efficiency to their customers; and its web experience includes a network of over 2,200 partners.

Building a connected brand with Social Business Software

How do you deploy an online community that reflects a new brand that you are in the middle of developing? Select the right platform, leverage people who have done it before, have the solution hosted to mitigate risk, and collaborate closely with stakeholders.

Brand awareness by connecting employees, customers, and partners

In late 2007 NetApp started a branding initiative with three primary objectives:

Clearly communicate who they are and what they do
Reach beyond existing customers and traditional technology audiences
Collaborate on an on-going basis with employees, partners, and customers

NetApp conducted extensive studies and surveyed thousands of customers, partners, and technology experts. The majority of respondents stated that they wanted an interactive community to facilitate the sharing of knowledge around product, technology, and business concerns.

The launch of the new brand was scheduled for March of 2008 through a global campaign that included major advertising and a redesigned website.

One portion of the redesigned website and branding effort included the creation of an online community. Due to the initiative's aggressive schedule, NetApp needed a comprehensive community platform that could easily match the company's new branding efforts. NetApp expected the following benefi ts from its community offering:

"Engaging in active online conversations across the enterprise value chain is a must for any brand that wants to be relevant and competitive."

Tracy Hansen,
Senior Director of Corporate Marketing, NetApp

Accelerate the branding initiative
Enable technical discussions and collaboration
Connect global teams and user groups
Centralize access to documentation
Leverage Web 2.0 technologies in the NetApp web experience

Why Jive?

NetApp chose Jive for the following reasons:

Ease of use ensuring rapid adoption: "People will not participate if it's not super intuitive."
Integrated Web 2.0 technologies: one-stop shop for wikis, blogs, discussions, and people
Flexible platform: reflects the NetApp brand and seamlessly integrates NetApp's web experience
Open API to integrate with other systems: critical for single sign-on (SSO) requirements

To accelerate the implementation, NetApp decided to have the community fully hosted by Jive. The utilization of experienced consultants from Jive further accelerated the deployment of the community. Meanwhile, NetApp used Jive internally to collaborate on the development of the new brand.

NetApp community stats

Community adoption and participation has far exceeded NetApp's expectations:

Over 90,000 registered users from 100 countries
Over 4 million monthly pageviews
Over 80% of community users are external (customers, partners, technology experts)
28% of all web traffic is driven by the community

"Community adoption and activity has exceeded our expectations by 1,200%."

Carrie Rushing,
Sr. Manager of Corporate Marketing, NetApp

Key ingredients for community success

To ensure the success and adoption of the community, NetApp focused on four key areas:

Executive sponsorship: to make embracing the community part of the company culture.
Forum moderators and content creators: to provide exceptional thought leadership (this is not a level-one support function).
Dedicated community manager: to constantly monitor and feed the needs of the community and to quickly identify and exploit new opportunities.
Monitoring: to ensure that open questions get answered and escalated if necessary.

Jive at work

NetApp employees continue to post a large volume of critical content and answer both technical and business questions. Users and competitive partners are helping each other succeed in their NetApp deployments. And NetApp's community is helping to deliver upon the objectives of the company's branding initiative:

Engaged a broader audience in both technical and business discussions
Expanded brand awareness and loyalty
Tapped into a much richer pool of ideas that help drive company and product priorities

This is possible thanks to the ability of the NetApp community to:

Connect people—customers, partners, and employees
Engage in discussions and support user groups
Share information—best practices, documentation, code, downloads
Share news—company, products, events
Solve problems—leverage the community of experts to answer questions
Spawn on-going discussions from newsletter articles (instead of one-way communications)
Establish a forum for customers and partners to continually provide feedback

What's next?

Building on the initial community success, NetApp has now deployed both a successful support community as well as an internal collaboration community called NetApp Live. Additional areas of future community growth include building collaborative workspaces for partners and expanding the community to include partner-specific discussion areas.

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
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