Today’s major buzz word, Web 2.0 has given birth to several conceptualized tools and platforms including Mobile 2.0, Conference 2.0, Radio 2.0, Map 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Media 2.0, University 2.0, amongst others. These concepts are witnessing an early adoption in Africa, whereas in Europe, the U.S and other parts of the world, companies have already adopted social media tools into their businesses.

Facebook has grown to become one of the most popular websites today because of its social utilities that have relevance for businesses. Even Barack Obama, the next President of the United States ran a successful campaign through community-based website as well as other social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Youtube.

In today’s highly competitive African markets, companies need to adopt Web 2.0 tools and technologies into their business model, if they are to attract new and existing customers and build their brands. These tools will effectively connect them easily with their clients and customers, who are equally looking for better ways to share their views and voice out their opinion about the company’s products and services.

How to Build Your Brand Via Enterprise 2.0

1. Create an Online Community

For companies that are customer-focused, they need an online community that fosters participation and recognition. When you setup a social network for your company, your customers become the primary focus of your businesss. Their participation in the community is somewhat similar to being part of other social networks they naturally use such as Facebook and Myspace.

If your company has a large customer-base, it is likely that you won’t know all your customers, but an online collaboration using the company’s social network would provide the opportunity for finding high-value and meaningful contributions that could provide key information critical to resolving customer issues.

2. Promote Conversations Within the Community

Customers value a community where their views and opinions can be heard by the company and are most likely to stay on your network and support your product brands when their opinions are appreciated by the company. Their contributions tend to add value to the company’s business as well as its products and services.

The big question is: How can the company’s social web community promote high-value conversations and content?

Experts have identified that in order to add value to your business, content and conversations should be dependent on a rating system and reputation model to rate each contribution made to your social networking community.

What this means is that, each contributor receives points that accumulates to build a customer reputation for your brand. Thus, customers with high reputation can be recognised through a reward program. According to Paulette Erijo, a social media consultant at Beezboz.com, an effective reward program would encourage continuous participation and keep loyal customers around your business for a very long time,

3. Provide Interactive Collaboration in the Community

Customers would like to participate in a community that allows them to interact easily with other potential customers. That’s exactly what some of the social media tools provide - an excellent way of sharing and using information via discussion forums, blogs, email subsriptions, RSS feeds, bookmarking tools, email alerts and so on.

Companies should provide tips and advice on how customers can use your products and services and allow for instant feedback from them. They should use a FAQ page to answer common questions or respond to every query on threads in the discussion forums and blogs.

4. Ensure a High-Value Community With Moderators

Experts believe that it would be very difficult or time and resource consuming to have every post or content practically reviewed before being published in a social networking community. But, I think there are a lot of advantages that can be derived from ensuring an online community devoid of objectionable or inflammatory words or languages - one that promotes appropriate values from contributors.

Thus, companies should have moderators on their social networks with the ability to unpublish or edit posts and comment replies, close forum topics or even ban users that do not respect the privacy of others or that violate the terms and conditions of usage of the social networking environment.

Of course, finding the right balance will vary from company to company, but in general, to ensure a vibrant and collaborative community, organizations should moderate by exception.

If you or your company are interested in integrating an online community to attract more customers, you can kindly contact me for further discussion.