Fit and Finish: Insight from the Ironworks User Experience Group

NASDAQ Online Community Story

At long last, here is the video podcast of my interview with Bruce Hashim, VP and General Manager of NASDAQ.com, regarding the launch of their online community.  I shared the transcript and background in this earlier post.

 

 

NASDAQ's New Online Community for Investors

NASDAQ has long had a great brand and reputation within the investor community.  But the company realized last year that it was missing an opportunity to engage its constituents in new ways and help them network with one another.  NASDAQ asked Ironworks to research their users' needs, craft a social media strategy, and build an innovative investor community (community.nasdaq.com) on the new Version 8 of Ektron CMS400.net.

I recently asked Bruce Hashim, Associate VP and General Manager for Nasdaq.com, about their experience:

Bruce, what were the business objectives that drove you to create a community site for NASDAQ?

Bruce Hashim:  Engagement. We want our audience to engage around our brand, engage with one another and engage with us.  We didn’t want our audience to come to our site, get a quote and leave, we want the audience to see the depth of our site and increase loyalty.

Does a Social Media Strategy hamper organic community growth?

We had another interesting discussion on this week's Association Chat (#assnchat) Tweet-up (Tuesdays at 2:00 ET).  I recommended that associations (and all organizations for that matter) have a social media strategy to effectively leverage the plentiful tools that are now available to engage members and customers in productive online conversations.

However, I was challenged by my friend Jeff De Cagna who I respect as a thought leader in the association community and one who challenges conventional wisdom.  Jeff is a skeptic of strategic planning and suggested that a social media strategy is likely unnecessary and may be perceived as too controlling.  He recommended that you hand this off to smart people and let the communities grow organically.  It sounds to me like he believes that if "we build it, they will come" or perhaps "let them build it, they will keep coming back."

The Aughts: Ten Things We Thought We Knew

As the year and the decade rapidly come to an end, many sites and publications are posting retrospectives, best of lists, worst of lists, and what to watch for in the coming year.

I thought it would be interesting to go back ten years – to the beginning of the “aughts” – and list ten things we thought we knew.

 - "This dotcom investing frenzy is not a bubble. No way”

 - “AOL is so much better than CompuServe and Prodigy. Looks at all these disks I have for free hours!”

 - “The new Google search engine is cool. But there’s no money to be made in providing search results.”

3 Reasons Why Every (almost) Organization Needs Social Media

1 - You can better manage the online conversations. People will talk about you and the issues you care about. They might as well do it on your site.

2- If you don't, your constituents will assume that you have something to hide. Do you? Transparency means opening the communications channels.

3 - Social media tools can help facilitate knowledge sharing with and among your customers, members, the public, etc. You can get credit.

When should an organization NOT use social media? When conversations must be regulated by law or you don't have any good answers when people are critical.