The Necessary Evolution of Symantec Connect and other Enterprise Communities

By just about every measurement, Symantec Connect is a huge success in enabling users to troubleshoot their issues, allowing users to network and exchange information and insight into how to maximize the strength of their Symantec products, but also in innovating in terms of a community solution. No other community from any other enterprise company provides their users with the breath of functionality in terms of forums, videos, idea exchange, article libraries… and all in one integrated space. That being said, the future of Symantec Connect’s success is outside of these protective walls. It’s in the vast ocean of Symantec-oriented discussions that are initiated every minute of every day on Twitter, Facebook, thousands of other forums, blogs, and links being shared between users.

For example, using a real-time listening platform, we can see that just in the past week, “Symantec” has been mentioned in:

192,000 forum threads

http://www.livedash.com/search_forum.php?query=sym...

6,291 Tweets

http://www.livedash.com/search_twitter.php?query=s...

23,032 Facebook comments
(no public livedash URL / private area)

85 links across social networks shared a total of 3,403 times

http://www.livedash.com/search_web.php?query=symantec

2,040 news and magazine articles

http://www.livedash.com/search_news.php?query=syma...

10,003 blog articles

http://www.livedash.com/search_blog.php?query=syma...

18 times mentioned on national TV

http://www.livedash.com/search.php?query=symantec&...

The sheer scale of this can feel extremely overwhelming. To put this in prospective, all of the discussions on Symantec Connect are roughly 2% of the Symantec discussions on the Internet. The next generation of Symantec Connect should strongly consider investing in seamlessly integrating with these millions of other outside discussions, providing workflows for both community managers and “superusers” to use, and creating automated ways of drawing some of these conversations into the Symantec Connect community. If the Symantec Connect community can effectively invite just a small percentage of those discussions and users from outside the protective walls of Symantec Connect, you will have more people pleased about Symantec due to improved support, more content and solutions being generated on Symantec Connect, and most importantly, more brand advocates that will defend and support the company in the future.