Hosting a forum for customers to help each other can significantly reduce support requests — and save companies heaps of money.

2021 may bring some normalcy back to the workplace, but some changes are going to stick. Here’s what you need to know.

I talk to dozens of B2B marketers every month in my work and I always start our first conversations by asking, among other things, what their goals are. Almost inevitably, they'll start with "I just care about generating leads.

It's no secret that changing your gender ratios starts by making sure there are women in the pipeline. But how do you make that happen? It may not be enough to say the language in your job postings is "balanced." Instead, consider changing the "requirements" section to "We anticipate using skills like these to be successful" to encourage more women to apply.

Hubspot has an article of six examples of how to better use social media to increase your subscriber list. Lots of lessons for anyone who is integrating social and email communications to expand their brand reach.

Maybe we simply reject the concept of "rejected candidates" and think of it as "talent recycling." Maybe changing the label will get companies to start to realize that the process of enraging a hundred people (who talk VERY LOUDLY to their own communities, I assure you) just to find one person to whom to make the offer (which will be rejected 40% of the time!), is insane. To that end, FireFish has some rudimentary (and yet somehow NOT standard practice in most companies) ways to get more out of your recycled talent.

I have yet to find a professionally satisfying "talent community." Why? Because "community" speaks to two-way conversation and most talent communities are email blasting tools with new labels on the tin. But I have to imagine that we must (by now) be on the precipice of actually getting talent communities right. Why? Because companies around the world are finding the value of building communities of customers and prospects, so that thinking will trickle down to us at some point. Right?

I will admit right now that I have yet to see a "talent community" which is actually more than just a mailing list and job posting spam. A community is a place where there is two-way interaction including between members, not just a set of targets to blast with email. (By the way, if you read that as "that's why I shouldn't build a community, you're missing the point: there's a huge opportunity here to build a community because everyone wants one and no one's done it right yet!) So it might make sense to take this opportunity, as you pivot the brand and figure out your strategy going forward, to think about getting serious about your own community.

Has anyone come across a legitimately good (not “good enough”) talent community? I still haven’t. But I have hope that it can be done, especially when I see consumer-side communities grow. Here are some examples on a strong community and how they got that way. P.S. the word “community” suggests two-way communication. P.P.S. If you think spamming people with open requisitions is a “valuable service,” try again.

Speaking of community, we’re not the only ones struggling with the idea that we want to get people excited to learn more about us before we have the right role open. Turns out, consumer brands are trying to figure out the same puzzle. The first question you should ask is: what can I help my community members do?