Pulse rate faster as crowdsourcing community opens up to customers Barb Mosher Zinck Thu, 05/21/2020 - 05:42 Summary:Updating the Pulse community to incorporate a wider audience of marketers.(via Pulse)I first spoke with Mayank Mehta, co-founder of crowdsourced CIO community, Pulse, in late 2018 when the company was getting started. Flash forward to now, and the firm is expanding to attract not only CIOs, but tech marketers. I grabbed an update from Mehta about the changes at Pulse, including how the new customer solution leverages AI to engage and support community members.Taking the pulse If you missed my first article on Pulse, the story so far: Pulse is not your traditional research firm; it's a new version of the research model that leverages the 'wisdom of the crowd' rather than a small sample set of vendor customers. It is a social community for CIOs and other IT executives, where they can go to learn and share insights with their peers. The platform provides surveys and reports that members share with the community. And it's doing well. The company closed Series A funding this year, adding $10 million to grow the company.When Metha and I spoke almost two years ago, Pulse had 4,000 members. Today, it has over 17,000 and collects over 12,000 data points from these members to share with the community. Interesting note: 90 days ago, it was collecting 6,000 data points a day. It seems like COVID-19 has had an impact on the need for a community like Pulse.The Pulse Content CloudHere's where marketing and sales come into play. The Pulse Content Cloud is intended to give technology marketers the ability to survey the Pulse community and gain insights that will help them improve their marketing programs (and even product development). Marketers can run polls, surveys, do Q&As, and the Content Cloud will transform the results into ready-to-use pieces of content that marketers can use on their websites and in their emails and social networks (think infographics, survey snapshots, charts, and graphs). The nice thing is these assets don't require a designer, reducing the amount of time it takes to provide assets to a particular channel.According to Mehta, the reason the Content Cloud works is because it's:About real people - the key is quality data from people who are in the trenches every dayReal data - the only incentive these IT execs have to offer their insights is the knowledge they also gain from their peersReal-time - the insights are always up to dateIntroducing Customer Community Complementing Content Cloud is a new Customer Community offering. This is a membership community that a brand creates and owns within the Pulse platform. According to Mehta, a community is easy to set up - you can brand it and invite members to join through email (it will integrate with Salesforce in a future update). You can create newsletters, post information, and create customized feeds. There are also channels to enable the brand to break out its customers into contextual groupings (eg: a feed for retail CIOs, a feed for software CIOs etc.). Marketers can also target surveys to specific channels, whether that's by type of audience, size, product-used, or something else.(via Pulse )Mehta compares getting insights from a Customer Community to running a Google survey with your customers, stating that the community comes with third-party verification and validation. It also can help avoid the legal discussions/approvals required when you use non-validated insights.The benefits of having a customer community have been widely discussed. Creating communities on someone else's platform (ie: social networks) doesn't make sense, because you don't own the data or the relationship, the network does. But a private community is yours to build and grow. For example, many customers who exist in highly competitive markets or sell a product or service that can be commoditized see a private community as a way to engage and build relationships that build loyalty.Another interesting feature of the Pulse Customer Community is that brands can leverage AI to help them create engagement. For example, a community manager (marketer) can see a content dashboard of all the posts in the community. If they see something that looks like it's generating good engagement, they can click a button to kick off a campaign around that post. Pulse does all the work here. It looks at the interests and strengths of a profile through tags - members can self-select profile tags like interests and skills, but the system also learns these over time as well - then it starts by reaching out to 20 members with that post. If there's engagement by at least 8-10 members, it will then propagate the post out to a larger group (the next 100) and then the next 200 if engagement hits a predefined level. The idea is that users starts a campaign because they believe it will build engagement, but the system does the hard work and will stop the campaign if it's not having the impact expected, so members aren't inundated with content that isn't relevant and of interest to them.Pulse is making good use of AI to build engagement, but it has to start with a person, which I think is essential or we put too much trust in AI to create a human-like experience. This feels like a better mix of the two.Why a customer community?The Pulse Customer Community is designed to:Drive wider reach/awareness in the executive community.Empower customers with the right content to reach their customers. Mehta says that the firm watched and learned what was working for other B2C and B2B companies who were building and growing their brands. They wanted to know what they could do to ramp up data collection and reach for Pulse. One conclusion is that many brands today rely on their customers to help them sell. That being so, what better way to reach new customers for the Pulse community than to provide a platform where their customers could build their own communities, which could then help grow the Pulse brand? To that end, Pulse worked with a number of their customers to improve their community platform to ensure it was something their customers would want to use.My takeI like the direction that Pulse is taking to build their community. Today it is very much about relationships and helping each other do better work. Providing customers with the ability to create private communities is smart if those customers take the time to truly engage with their own customers and provide an experience worth spending time in. And yes, it certainly has the potential to help Pulse grow as well. I also still believe Pulse is taking the right approach to help technology executives make smarter decisions based on what's working with their peers (or not). Image credit - via Pixabay Read more on: Collaboration sharing and digital productivityDigital and content marketing