Building a B2B community takes time

This is an interesting video interview (by Jeffrey Cohen of the B2B Social Media blog) with Kirsten Watson, Director of Corporate Marketing at Kinaxis ( a supply chain management firm in Canada). Kinaxis set up an online community a year ago in an attempt to create an online space for supply chain management enthusiasts to meet and share information.  The results have exceeded their expectations and the community now has over 2,700 members and has, according to Cohen, led to a:

2.7X increase in traffic to Kinaxis.com

3.2X increase in conversions (leads)

Kinaxis Builds Social Media Community from Jeffrey L. Cohen on Vimeo.

This article from Fast Company explains more about Kinaxis's experiences and the lessons learned.  

For anyone thinking of creating an online community to support their B2B activities I think 4 key lessons come out of the video interview and which chime with my experiences of building something similar a few years ago:

1. Understand your market - learn what your suppliers and customers are doing online so you build a community that is relevant to them;
2. Be patient - Kinexis launched their blog in 2006 but it took a couple of years for it to gain traction;
3. Focus on SEO - optimise your sites to get up the rankings;
4. Don't use the community as a platform to promote your company - it has to offer real value to members if the community is to grow.