NetApp Case Study

Building a Connected Brand

“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

Customer

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.

Business Opportunity

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 audience.
• 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 benefits from its community offering:

• # 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.

“It took 2 months to go live instead of the 6 months we planned. Jive's hosting and professional services played a key role in the accelerated deployment.” John Summers, Community Manager
NetApp

Solution

NetApp Community powered by Jive's 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 between stakeholders.

Technology Selection

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 (wikis, blogs, discussions, people)
• Flexible platform- reflect NetApp brand and seamlessly integrate in NetApp's web experience.
• Open API to integrate with other systems - critical for single sign-on (SSO) requirements.

Implementation

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.

“WOW…what an outstanding answer. Adam, I am very appreciative of this detailed answer. It really addresses my question perfectly. Thanks for taking the time to answer so well.” Steve
NetApp Community Member

NetApp Community Stats

Community adoption and participation far exceeded NetApp's expectations.

• Over 9,000 registered users from 100 countries around the world in 8 months.
• 78% of community users are external (customers, partners, technology experts).
• Over 900 discussions.
• Over 50,000 views of popular discussions and documents.

Key Ingredients for Community Success

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

• Executive sponsorship - actively participate to make embracing the community part of the company culture.
• Forum moderators and content creators - gurus in the company were recruited 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.

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.

Results & Benefits

Adoption Beyond Expectations

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. 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 being just one-way)
• Establish a forum for customers and partners, to continually provide feedback

“Community adoption and activity has exceeded our expectations by 1,200%.” Carrie Rushing, Sr. Manager of Corporate Marketing
NetApp