Social help systems can benefit nearly every type of online business you can think of, but e-commerce is one area where it really shines. Lets take a look at five ways social help improves the customer experience and how some companies are using it to build brand loyalty with their users.

 

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1. In-line help for complex forms. The Internal Revenue Service is famous for deluging hapless U.S. citizens with frightening help docs filled with algorithms, charts, and tables. It’s unlikely anyone finds these useful and they’ve probably caused more than one stress-related eating binge. Don’t be like the IRS. Offer users in-line assistance if they run into issues while filling in forms on your site. As a bonus, since in-line support is easier to keep current and updated, it trumps PDFs any day of the week.

 

 

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2. Access to why certain information is required.  Though the U.S. government flunks customer service 101 when it comes to complex forms, it got a help feature right on another one of its sites. The State Department requires a lot of confidential information from visitors who are applying for passports online, which can be off-putting for many people. However, clicking on the question mark next to each input field brings up an explanation of why the data is necessary — a particularly useful feature for quelling fears customers sometimes have about sharing personal information online. Snag this idea for reassuring visitors to your website or use it to serve up info on error messages people may stumble upon while they’re there.

 

 

Amazon

3. Offer support and troubleshooting for users to work through without resorting to the company help line.  Don’t assume your customers want to call your toll-free number for support because, frankly, they probably don’t. Instead, take a cue from Amazon. It gives customers seven different ways to get the information they need, with phone contact coming in as a last resort. Users love having a batch of options to choose from and you’ll love that you can cut way down on your trouble tickets and support calls just by implementing this one simple feature.

 

 

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4. Provide straightforward answers alongside related topics. One sure way to delight customers is to turn them expert users who can navigate your product with ease. HTC‘s online product documentation strategy includes offering extra product education alongside product support material on its website. Customers can deep-dive into topics related to their question or issue and become product experts. Long-term, these become the loyal customers and brand advocates all companies love to have.

 

PayPal

5. Connect people with a community of users who are working through the same problems and may have identified the answers.  Where do your product experts and brand advocates most often end up? Sharing their knowledge and expertise with others in online community forums. Paypal smartly adds links to its onsite forum and pointers to the hottest discussion topics directly from its support pages along with . That’s a terrific way to encourage users to help each other work through common issues and free up your support team for other projects.

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According to a recent study conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Zendesk, customers value a quick response to an issue even if it’s not the answer they’re hoping to get. In fact, the actual outcome of a resolution scores pretty far down on the list of customer satisfaction concerns while things like having to explain a problem to multiple people irk customers like crazy.

“Survey participants who had indicated they had a good customer service experience were asked what specifically made that experience good. The most important factor cited by participants was a quick resolution of the problem (69%) followed by being helped by a pleasant person (65%). Interestingly, the actual outcome of the problem was least important with less than half (47%) indicating that their customer service interaction was good because of the outcome.”

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The survey results don’t detail what channels respondents used to access support (phone, email, online documentation, etc).  It’s clear, however, that providing users with multiple access points vastly increases the chances you’ll give them a great customer service experience.

Ideally, you’ll have a robust knowledge base filled with the most current product documentation so customers can serve — and help — themselves. On top of that, of course, you need a grab bag of other access points: a toll-free number, online chat, a dedicated support email address, and so on.  Oh, and you’ll need people to staff and manage all these various channels.

Clearly, the most cost-effective customer support methods take advantage of stuff you’re already doing elsewhere around the company. Your tech writers are assembling documentation and manuals, sales and marketing are showing customers around your product, and community managers are helping users find their way around best practices. Harness all that smart content and put it on your website!

Dimension Research’s survey tells us that a rapid response is a primary (if not predictable) desire of customers who reach out for support. You already have the answers your users need so make sure they, and you, can find it all quickly.

Read more about the survey’s results and findings on Zendesk’s website.

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There’s been quite a hue and cry this week over Adobe’s decision to shift Creative Suite to a subscription-only business model. Beginning in June, the company’s flagship boxed set of widely used tools like Illustrator and Photoshop will be moved to, and supported in, the cloud.

It’s a bold move, but not a shocking one, as more software vendors see the benefit of pushing their business to the cloud. It’s certainly more cost-effective than shipping CDs and vying for product placement on crowded store shelves, to say nothing of how easy it is to roll out updates or patches.

Interestingly, Adobe’s other big seller, Adobe Technical Communication Suite, isn’t headed to the cloud. Why? The most likely answer is because desktop publishing tools are becoming increasingly obsolete. With its heavy focus on collaborative PDFs, this particular collection of apps doesn’t have much maneuvering room as companies shift away from reliance on PDFs as their primary information delivery system.

Internal document management and online product help manuals are key reasons companies use PDFs. While the former isn’t likely to change anytime soon, the latter is heading the way of the dodo bird because customers simply don’t like PDF support docs.

When it comes to product help, PDFs as an exclusive means of documentation will work against you. You may have the best product or service your corner of the market has ever seen but if all your supports docs are PDFs, you might as well be offering manuals on stone tablets.

Today’s product manuals aren’t really manuals in the traditional sense. They’re collaborative, fluid, current, living databases filled with knowledge. User Manual 2.0, if you will.

Here are five cold, hard truths about PDF product support:

crybabyPDFs make customers cry. Here’s a typical usage scenario: Have a product question, head to the company wesbite’s help section. Hope for a quick answer, get directed to a huge PDF instead. Make a sandwich while it downloads. Try searching the document for your question, get 93 hits on your search term. Sigh audibly.

Make a stiff drink, then bravely poke through each response to find a useful answer. Rejoice when answer #89 seems to be what you need. Cry when you discover the PDF hasn’t been updated in two years and the information is wrong. Launch laptop at the wall.

If you want to be responsible for tears and crushed dreams, make sure all your product help docs are PDFs.

A living knowledge base, on the other hand, lets users quickly find the answers they need. Since it’s easy to update and keep current, customers know they’re getting the right answers every time. Software vendors can take product support a step further with in-product contextual help that allows users to access information related to what they see onscreen — without ever leaving your app.

 

burning_moneyPDFs cost your company money. Static documents are expensive to maintain. Somebody (or several somebodys) need to constantly monitor them for accuracy, make changes as needed, convert and upload documents, and so on. The hours your team spends managing PDFs are far better spent helping customers directly instead of tinkering with static manuals.

A living knowledge base helps maintain itself by continually updating across all channels. It’s a collaborative system that gives customers and support agents the real-time information they need, when they need it. On top of that, you’re not paying team members to constantly update PDFs or losing money when frustrated users jump ship for a company with better customer support.

 

gogglesPDFs look unprofessional. Back when the world was on dial-up, websites were single-page affairs, and hosting space was a million dollars a GB, there weren’t many options for getting product help into the hands of users. Today, there’s simply no reason for companies to overlook technology that makes life easier for customers.

Do you really want to force customers to print out reams of pages at their own expense just to figure out how to use your product? Does it warm your heart to picture the PDFs you worked so hard to assemble shoved in a file in the bowels of someone’s hard drive and forgotten?

PDF product help docs make your company look dated and unprofessional. They send the message that you don’t value your customers’ time or resources. A slick online database filled with loads of documentation that’s easily searchable looks far more professional than an outdated website with huge files to download.

 


dunce_capPDFs don’t help users become experts.
The entire point of customer support is to help users help themselves, to offer them a buffet of options that assist them in finding answers quickly and efficiently. Done right, a good help strategy turns your users into product experts by giving them multiple access points to useful product documentation.

PDF-based support systems have a number of potential fail points and customers have frustratingly few options if the documents are wrong. Sure, they can call a toll-free number or open a trouble ticket, but those avenues make users more dependent on your support team, not less.

Knowledge-based help systems give users multiple channels for finding help and troubleshooting issues. Customers expect to have content that adapts to who they are and the channel they’re accessing. You can’t do that with a static PDF.

 

great_wallPDFs build walls around your teams. Data silos can’t exist within a living knowledge base that’s continually updated and accessed by everyone in the company. PDFs, on the other hand, are locked data points controlled by tech writers.

To be sure, tech writers are an extremely valuable component of product support, but they shouldn’t be the only source of branded product knowledge. Marketing, Sales, Support, Community Managers, and even ancillary support teams have value to add to your existing content, but they can’t do that if all your help docs are protected PDFs.

Collaborative knowledge bases tear walls instead of reinforcing them. If your own teams can’t use your product help effectively, think how your customers must feel.

Used sparingly, PDFs do have their place on a company website. They’re fine for media kits, press releases, printable maps, or for delivering information that rarely or never changes. They’re a terrible method for managing product support info, however. A real-time knowledge base is the help platform your customers need. It’s the new user manual.

Images: Storyvillegirl, Purpleslog, Elvissa, CogdogblogKeith Roper

 

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Imagine a company that actively discouraged its customers from buying or using its products. Imagine it quick, because a company like that won’t be in business for long. Sadly, some companies spend tons of money and hundreds of hours creating all kinds of marketing and customer service strategies only to shoot themselves in the foot by subtly driving users away with poor product documentation.

Take a tour of your website, wiki, and in-house forums to see if you’re inadvertently sending customers any of these discouraging messages.

“Don’t use my product!”  This is what you’re telling users when you don’t provide proper documentation around how to use your product. Unless your entire customer base can psychically divine how to interact with or troubleshoot your product, reliable documentation is critical. By “reliable” we don’t mean it must be “good enough.” We mean it must be excellent. What does excellent product documentation look like?

  1. Searchable: Microsoft TechNet knocks it out of the park when it comes to searchable content. The homepage is laid out cleanly and links to specific types of content are clearly displayed. A handy search box at the top of the page helps users drill down quickly without a lot of frivolous clicking.
  2. Proactive: Mobile device company HTC excels at providing current, proactive documentation. The site uses words like “latest” and “recent” — and means it. You won’t find a bunch of outdated info and broken links here.
  3. Approachable: Dell does a great job of making its content accessible to every type of customer it serves. Clear product categories and search options ensure even novice users aren’t intimidated or overwhelmed with a blizzard of options and information.

 

“Your time is worthless”  This is what you’re saying when you require users to jump through multiple hoops to gain access to your documentation. Customers shouldn’t have to register on your site, click though 43 subpages, and offer up the blood of a unicorn just to find out how to replace a battery.

Complex products sometimes require complex documentation, but it’s your responsibility to make the process as painless as possible. If you’re product is software, the solution is dead simple: in-app support. Expose documentation directly within your product so users never have to leave the app to find the answers they need. That’s some pretty heroic product support, isn’t it?

 

“Your feedback doesn’t matter.”  We’re all customers in some way, so we know you’ll agree it’s important to know that a company taking your money actually cares about you. When a user takes the time to offer input, share tips, or make suggestions, ignore them at your own peril. Your customers are down in the trenches, experiencing your product in ways you may have never thought about and have great feedback to share.

Customers don’t expect hand-signed birthday cards every year, but they do expect a measure of respect and appreciation that shouldn’t stop once their check clears. One of the best ways to honor customer feedback is to make it easy for people to offer it right on your site — and then listen to what they say. Customers are a great source to mine for nuggets of product knowledge and user stories that might not have occurred to you yet.

This type of customer engagement carries an inherent bonus: You can correct misinformation before it finds its way onto offsite meta-support channels like Twitter or Facebook. When feedback is a two-way street, users become their own product experts and you gain valuable insight into how customers experience your products.

We know no one plans on alienating customers but it can happen. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of running a lucrative business and overlook some potentially off-putting vibes you may be sending customers. Take a few minutes today to make sure your product documentation process sends the right message to users instead of turning them away.

 Image: Mollypop

 

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While some of the MindTouch staff was busy attending (and presenting!) at the LavaCon Hands-On Workshop in New Orleans, there was a really interesting conversation happening in San Francisco. During its annual user conference this year, social media marketing software company Lithium opened up a great dialogue about whether customer experience is just a bunch of hype and ways companies that talk the talk can also walk the walk.

Lithium CMO Katy Keim throws down the gauntlet of shame pretty early in the discussion, noting that “95 percent of [Facebook] and 70 percent of Tweets to brands are ignored.” She says something is “broken” and we agree. At a time when social media engagement is crucial to your brand’s success, those statistics are completely mind-boggling.

So what’s going on here? Where is the disconnect between creating a good customer experience strategy and its execution? We’d better collectively figure it out quickly because Gartner analyst Jenny Sussin says social media platforms may soon become a primary channel of customer support.

Researchers over at Forrester are drawing the same conclusions. As analyst Kate Leggett succinctly puts it,

“Social channels are increasingly important. Online communities and Twitter have seen increases in usage rates in the past three years. However, satisfaction remains low for these channels, as companies have not invested in best practices for managing interactions on these channels.”

In summary, customers want to engage with companies on Twitter and Facebook so they take their issues and compliments to those platforms. Companies apparently know this but haven’t come up with ways to effectively manage these conversations, so comments from customers (and potential customers) are largely ignored.

This is not a good plan and nobody wins here.

Products that help businesses harness and manage conversations across multiple microblogging platforms are part of the solution, but a comprehensive strategy doesn’t end there. Twitter and Facebook interactions alone are far too limiting to take customer support to the level it needs in order to be effective. You need more.

Authoritative branded content and a deeply curated knowledge base on your website give you the building blocks you need to power official responses you offer in places other than your website. This will help you accomplish two important things.

Provide consistent and correct information. Nothing turns away a customer faster than seeing different answers to the same question. While troubleshooting product issues, it’s annoying to find conflicting answers among users. It’s unforgivable when they come from inside the company itself. A solid, in-house, continually updated knowledge base means your customers get the correct answers everywhere, every time.

Burn down information silos that hold your company back. In the early days of web-centric customer service, it was quite common to house product documentation in one area, techcomm in another, and miscellany like FAQs in yet another. It wasn’t the best solution, but it was based on the technology we had to work with at the time (read: not much).

Today’s tools easily turn mountains of disparate, siloed information into a cohesive bank of searchable data that’s easy to both update and manage. Customers and staff can find the right answers, right when they need it. That, friends, is one of the main goals of excellent customer support.

Twitter, Facebook, and the myriad other social networking platforms out there are fantastic ways to engage and groom customers. The people have spoken and decided that’s where they want to be able to talk with businesses, so go hang out with them. Before you head over to the social media snack lounge, though, make sure your house is in order so you can have them over for a full meal.

Image: Extranoise

SAP Logo

MindTouch is excited to announce our participation in the world’s premier business technology event and largest SAP customer-run conference, SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference. Come say hello from May 14th – May 16th at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. If you’re interested in attending, please let us know and we can extend special access to events during the show. You can also register here.

MindTouch provides the ultimate product support experience for users and customer service agents using a collaborative, self-service platform. With MindTouch, users have access to the most relevant product information minimizing the need to call or email an agent. Our multi-channel solution allows you to track and analyze customer needs and behavior so you can get the right information to them faster. MindTouch delivers a great customer experience which increases customer retention and loyalty, and improves your brand image. If you haven’t seen our latest product announcement, take a look at this MindTouch Overview.

The SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference boasts presentations from SAP executives and thought-leaders about the latest business technology trends and innovations. You’ll have the opportunity to learn best practices and approaches from your peers who have integrated the same SAP solutions that will help your business run like never before.

If you’re at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, don’t forget to stop by our booth 2627c.  Come see how the MindTouch solution has dramatically enhanced the product and customer experiences for companies like HTC, SuccessFactors, Autodesk, EMC, Wind River, Blackboard, Intuit and others.We’d like to offer you special access to events at the show. So if you are able to attend, or would like to set up an in-person meeting with MindTouch, contact us.

We hope to see you in Orlando!Click on the banner for information and to register for the conference:

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There’s an old business adage that for everyone person who makes a public comment on the internet about your company, there are dozens — perhaps hundreds — more thinking about you but not commenting. That’s not a huge deal if you don’t worry too much about customer engagement (something you know we don’t recommend).

But what if you believe that your user base is a fountain of knowledge worth tapping into? How do you turn lurkers into participating members of your community?

Make the process user-friendly — Nothing turns away an enthusiastic contributor faster than a 29-step registration process just to leave some feedback or advice for another user. While it’s fine, and sometimes necessary, to require contributors to provide basic information in order to join conversations, you risk running off a lot of people by asking for details about their address, hair color, and whether they prefer cats or dogs.

Sure, the temptation is great to mine visitors to your site for information you can share with marketing and sales, but don’t do it. The goal is to make potential contributors feel valued for what they can offer your community, not your company’s bottom line.

Do an attitude check — Is your community approachable? Is it friendly and welcoming or filled with blowhards impressed with their own amazing skills? Even if your community members are made of glitter and unicorn fur, there are plenty of internet introverts out there who are intimidated by large communities with their own ways of doing things.

Some companies appoint established community members to be greeters or mentors who job it is to help newcomers get the lay of the land. The benefit here is three-fold. Helpful members appreciate it when their expertise is recognized, existing members have a reason to participate responsibly to get on the company’s radar, and new members see you care enough to make sure they feel welcome.

Incentivize the troops — Obviously, not every member can be a community leader so figure out other clever ways to encourage participation among users. The incentives you choose should be based on what drives your specific user base. In some cases, unlocking participation-based badges and avatars is motivation enough while the potential to earn discounts or tangible goods carry more weight in other communities. Gamification, incentives, and loyalty rewards are remarkably effective when they’re well matched with the users earning them.

Do nothing — This advice may seem counterintuitive, but it might be the right answer in some circumstances. Take, for example, the small startup with a team that’s already overextended. A few weeks after launch, the marketing team (or, more likely, the marketing person) notices site traffic is off the charts and starts brainstorming how to capture these visitors and hold them close for all eternity.

That’s a noble plan but probably not where your focus should be right then. As we’ve said before, become the authoritative voice in your industry and people will keep coming back. Offer the right answers at the right time, in the right place and you’ll solidify your place in their browser bookmarks. Spend time creating good content and building an excellent customer experience strategy so users want to be a part of your community. Once you’ve built a rock-solid base for them to stand on and a terrific product they’ll be proud to support, then you can figure out how to further encourage members to participate in your community.

We could spend days throwing around more ideas on how to lurkers into contributors but we’d rather hear from you. What’s worked for you? What didn’t? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image: worthyfm

 

 

 

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Earlier this year I promoted Damien Howley to Vice President of a new department we named Customer Success. It is the responsibility of this department to support customers, train customers and to make sure that customer feedback is internalized at MindTouch. Last week I shared an update about new features in our latest semi-monthly product release. I’m proud to report that many of those were derived directly from customer feedback. Moreover, based on your customer feedback from interviews conducted and feedback provided via email surveys we’ve made some sweeping improvements to the MindTouch Customer Support infrastructure.

Overview

We’ve launched some enhancements to our ticketing, chat, documentation and support plans. These improvements will make it easier for you to get the answers you need.

  1. To start, we’ve moved to a new ticket management system which uses both email and the MindTouch Ticket Creation Workflow to provide a quicker and easier ticket creation experience.
  2. Next, we’ve improved the documentation.
  3. Lastly, we’ve launched new Support Plans to complement our Standard, Premium and Enterprise licenses.

How do these improvements affect you?

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Well, your support and product help experience should be significantly more seamless.  Specifically, we are improving our toolset and you’ll still have access to the same support channels.

Documentation (NEW)

Still available at http://help.mindtouch.us. Now includes top issues, instructional guides, create ticket workflow and support plans.

Submit a Ticket:  

Available at http://help.mindtouch.us or by emailing support@mindtouch.com.

Phone:  

Still available at 619-795-8459 at the Enterprise Support plan level.

Thanks for being a loyal customer and please feel free to let us know what you think of the changes.

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This week’s product release included a raft of bug fixes and several great new features. The most exciting, in my opinion, is a new control for page level file attachment management.

New File Attachments Management

We have completely redesigned the file attachments control to be more intuitive and to add some great new features.

  • Descriptions to your files can be added and this is indexed by the MindTouch search engine. This helps provide context about your file attachment without requiring your end users to open it.
  • There is a new search control that allows users to search the page attachments. This will filter attachments bases on search queries against the filename and the file description. This does not search the contents of the file, but of course the site wide search still does offer file content searches.
  • Sort files by Filename, Modified date, Size of file, and the Added
  • The file attachment controls like “Move”, “Upload New”, “Delete” and “View all Versions” were redesigned to be more intuitive.
  • Rather than paginated files the experience is an infinite scroll.

attachment manager

Aaron Mars and Theresa Manzo deserve credit for the design and implementation and Corey Ganser for the write up.

Conditional Content Blocks

One of the many highly valued features by content creators using MindTouch is the ability to easily permission content blocks based on a User or Group enlistment. Why is this valuable? While it’s not immediately obvious, this use case is very common. Let’s use a customer example. Blackboard.com, a MindTouch customer, has user personas that are student, teacher, (school) administrator, (system) administrator or Blackboard support agent. Using conditional content, a single MindTouch article can serve different content to each of these viewers to personalize their experience. In the past, accessing this feature in MindTouch was a bit clunky. Now we’ve added the capability to the Format drop-down in the MindTouch Editor.

MindTouch administrators can still set custom conditional blocks for specific user groups in the control panel. These custom blocks will also show up in the Format drop-down. If you are interested in more  information on conditional content, you should read the help article.

For more information on this week’s product release, such as bugs squashed or other new features, you can read the full post at the engineering release blog.

KM_influencer

In an effort to chart the power nodes in the social graph of various technology industry disciplines, MindTouch has a history of  researching and producing a list of influencers. This began as an internal project to understand sectors important to MindTouch and since 2009 MindTouch has published these reports to the advantage of the community at large.  Last week we shared our internal annual report of Techcomm influencers that we produced using LittleBird. This year, MindTouch also analyzed Knowledge Management influencers. As has been the case in the past, MindTouch is again making this list available to the community with the hope that this will strengthen the community, create new relationship and hopefully spark some discussion.

If you have customers, knowledge management is a huge deal companies can not ignore. As the complexity and cost of KM tools becomes more accessible the usage of these tools are spreading to small and medium enterprises that previously couldnt afford the cost or complexity. Moreover, these technologies are getting dramatically better as the become more collaborative. As we’ve mentioned before, all content streams eventually lead back to your company’s doorstep so harness that knowledge and manage it well.

Knowledge management is part art, part science, and maybe even a little voodoo. Here’s the first 25 influencers in our list of folks who really know what KM is all about:

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  1. weknowmore
  2. David Gurteen
  3. Dave Snowden
  4. Stan Garfield
  5. Nancy White
  6. VMaryAbraham
  7. Jack Vinson
  8. Euan Semple
  9. Alice MacGillivray
  10. knowledgetank
  11. Ian Thorpe
  12. Richard Hare
  13. Peter West
  14. Gauri Salokhe
  15. Chris Collison
  16. #KMers Chat
  17. Stuart French
  18. KM Australia
  19. John Tropea
  20. KMWorld Magazine
  21. Christian DE NEEF
  22. Mario Soavi
  23. ewenlb
  24. KM Asia
  25. Steve Dale

Here’s the entire list of 100 names to know in #KM. Now, before you get riled up because you know that Kate Leggett and Esteban Kolsky are hugely influential and they (or someone similar) are not in the top 100, consider this:

Aaron Fulkerson writes

GetLittleBird does an amazing job of assessing influencers based on a variety of factors native to Twitter (today just Twitter). One principal indicator of influence is the number of influencers that follow a given person on a specific network. In this case, that network is Twitter. If one is not active on the network being measured will they rank highly? No. Does this mean they are less influential? Yes, on that network.

We know there are several profoundly influential people not represented here. However, it should be clear that this list constitutes a core group of influencers in the KM space on Twitter.

Most Influential KMAre you on the influencer list? Congratulations, here’s your badge! You’ve earned it for your work in pushing the edges of your field. You’re an innovator who’s elevating and promoting your field. Thank you. Grab the code below and display your badge with pride. You’re in excellent company.

Grab this snippet to add your badge to your website or blog:

<a href="http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2013/04/10/influencers-in-knowledge-management" title="MindTouch Most Influential in KM"><img src="http://cdn.mindtouch.com/www/KM_influencer.png" alt="Most Influential in KM" border="0" ></a>

Check back to find out who made the list of top 100 influencers in customer support and customer experience or follow us on Twitter to find out right away when we post the next list.