Customer Communities
Executives value the opportunity to exchange ideas, experiences, and perspectives with their peers.
Companies can therefore engage executives by creating customer communities that provide opportunities for peer exchange on issues that matter to their customers.
Customer communities have become common in the consumer sector, and are starting to appear in business-to-business industries.
They remain relatively rare at the executive level, because executives are much busier, more demanding, and less likely to contribute to online discussion boards.
Truman Company has developed a successful approach to creating and sustaining executive engagement in Customer Communities.
As an example, we have helped IBM design, launch and manage The Center for CIO Leadership -- a vibrant global community of nearly 1500 Chief Information Officers.
The purpose of the community is to advance the CIO profession and help CIOs become better business leaders. Members contribute to original research, participate in a peer mentoring program, have have access to relevant expertise through webinars and a curated library of materials.
Central to the Center success has been the contribution of organizations such as Harvard Business School, INSEAD, and the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR).
The website for the Center for CIO Leadership is http://www.cioleadershipcenter.com