“Strategic Communities" is the topic of this month’s Marketing Cloud Twitter Chat, taking place at 2 PM ET on 6/13. We’re looking forward to a lively discussion around the topic and hope you’ll be a big part of that. To get you revved up, here's more insight into succesful customer commnuties.

Business communities come in many flavors. Use them to accelerate your internal collaboration, increase visibility into your value chain, and work with partners and suppliers to deliver better, faster products. Work directly with your customers; serving them, helping them have experiences worth sharing, and innovating with them. Bring your partners into the conversation. While business benefits of communities are undeniable; according to a University of Michigan study, customers who are in customer communities spend 19% more.

Recipes for success differ, but what does a successful community even look like? Are there many definitions of success, or do they all have the same thing in common? Is success the same thing as engagement? When running communities for a business purpose, create a community that’s both thriving and meeting strategic business value.

While communities are unique in their purpose, vision, implementation and value -- they are all similar in that their goal is to get people to come together and create something bigger than themselves. How do you get people to come to your community when they have so many other resources competing for their time? How do you get them to stay there? Even better, how do you get them to choose to work together?

When you are running a community as part of a company, you have to continuously demonstrate the community’s value -- after all, that’s what gets you the funding and the strategic seat at the table you need. How do you advocate for community in the beginning stages? Do you start with a big launch or start small and prove out value? How do you align your community to key business priorities? If you can quantify your community’s contribution to the original goal you set out to meet -- then you can measure its business value. But first, you have to know why you created the community in the first place.

To discuss these questions and more, please join me, Erica Kuhl , Trish Forant, Melanie Thompson and Gustavo Chavez for a lively and informative @marketingcloud #mcloudLIVE tweetchat this Thursday, June 13 at 2 p.m. EDT / 11 a.m. PST. Just track the hashtag on Twitter and join the conversation. We look forward to your insights!

If you missed last month’s Twitter Chat, Connecting Social Media to Your Business Goals check out this blog post and view the conversationsin the Storify synopsis.  And, as we plan to do for each of our monthly Twitter Chats, we’ll recap this chat, and share it with you on Friday. Be sure to look for your Tweets.