What Does Digital Community Mean to You?

[Hannah_Garland]

What does digital community mean to you? Community is a constantly moving, changing and vibrant thing and digital community allows people from all backgrounds to connect. Microsoft has a unique opportunity to create a community for hundreds of thousands of partners worldwide to engage with each other, share ideas and do business together. With this context in mind, we want to know:

1. What does digital community mean to you? How do you use it?
2. How can digital community integrate with your business and help it grow?
3. If you could create an ideal digital partner community, what would it look like? How would partners benefit from it?

Every opinion on this topic is welcome. We look forward to reading your feedback!

[PerWerngren]

Hannah,

Great questions! 

1. Digital communities are important for me for networking and knowledge sharing/gaining purposes. As digital communities has little geographical borders it makes the world smaller and more accessible!

2. Digital communities can be levereraged for marketing purposes as it can, and should be, be part of an integrated effort. Facebook, LinkedIn and this platform can all be utlized but they serve different purposes and cater for partly different audiences. For me marketing is nowadays always integrated digital marketing.

3. I think that this platform, the Microsoft Partner Community, is a great platform but we need more active users. It's a chicken and an egg dilemma but what will help is when partners start to use this platform for finding other partners for P2P activities. And when I mean P2P, I mean when someone brings an opportunity to the table and not just trying to find someone that wants to sell their stuff (i.e. resellsers). We also need to eliminate the need to always log in - should be like LinkedIn or Facebook where you are always logged in!

Regards, Per

[Hannah_Garland]

Thanks, @PerWerngren ! In regards to #2 - which audiences do each cater to and what purposes do they serve, in your opinion? How does that influence community structure and strategy?

[PerWerngren]

Hannah, 

In my opinion, on the Microsoft Partner Community (MPC, you have only partners which is a little bit our own club and therefore a great place to bounce ideas between peers.

On LinkedIn you have every professional you have ever met, or want to meet. And on Facebook you have everyone that is on LinkedIn plus your friends that you have no professional connection with.

Regards, Per