To engage members, many associations turn to a community platform and to engage corporate partners they turn to a marketplace.
Here's the problem with this thinking:
Community engagement and commercial conversion are currently siloed, but they go hand-in-hand. Let's look at what happens on the trade show floor. Corporate brands and attendees meet, learn collectively, and conduct commerce. Oftentimes educational programming leads to brand exploration & networking.
Brands, members, and show attendees are all demanding a meaningful digitized experience that allows for networking, content sharing, and commercial opportunities. A new model exists, called social commerce, which brings these three aspects together to delight all your stakeholders.
I recently had the pleasure of joining Dave Coriale from Delcor Technology Solutions on his podcast, Reboot IT where we navigated the differences between digital marketplaces, communities, & social commerce platforms and when to tap into each option as an engagement tool. Tune in and take a listen!
Written By: Erica Bishaf, Founder & CEO of CampfireSocial
CampfireSocial is a private, branded social network and commerce solution (social commerce) that provides organizations 365/24/7 access to their stakeholders while creating a modern member, subscriber, attendee, and exhibiting partner experience that is monetizable to ultimately own the voice of their industry. Our solution takes the interconnectivity of community, content, & commerce and digitizes the experience.
We help organizations:
CampfireSocial also offers engagement consulting to better tap into the needs of your members, show attendees, and exhibiting partners. Contact our strategy team at strategy@campfiresocial.io to learn more.
Meet the Author
Erica Bishaf is an award-winning global brand strategist (24 years), market research professional, and a 2X tech startup founder. Her startup experience includes CampfireSocial, the private community & marketplace platform, and Pet Gotcha Day!, the immersive video platform for animal shelters. In addition to her passion for startups, she has worked for consumer-packaged goods companies such as Kraft, Nestle, Kimberly-Clark, the Illinois Lottery, and MillerCoors in a variety of roles encompassing global product innovation, package redesign, brand equity, shopper & retail insights, and strategic planning. In 2015, Erica started her own consultancy where she led projects for startups, growth stage companies, Fortune 500, trade & professional associations, top 10 trade shows, and private equity firms that focused on building brand & communication strategies, strategic planning & workshop design, innovation, segmentation identification, UX/UI design, consumer journeys, A&U work, uncovering shopping & retail touchpoints, and more. Erica has also built teams from the ground up for three organizations. She enjoys bringing an entrepreneurial lens to her work to identify new opportunities for growth and using quantitative and qualitative methodologies plus financial data to accomplish her clients' goals. Her clients have said that 'Erica is a keen observer of human behavior who can translate observations into action and one who spurs others to better thinking and better results.' Erica can be reached at erica.bishaf@campfiresocial.io.
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