Cadence just launched a new user community

Posted on 14. Jul, 2008 by Tom Diederich in Community Management, Corporate Blogs, Social Media

My company launched a redesigned version of its Web site yesterday which puts a new user community front-and-center (forums, blogs) on the homepage. The Web team did the hard job of building the new community and now it’s time for me to roll up my sleeves.

Cadence makes the software and hardware tools companies use to design the latest and greatest chips for computers and electronic devices. (I talked about what Cadence does — along with the kickoff of the blogging effort — a couple of months ago in this post.)

On the community front, I’ll be working closely with customers and non-customers (anyone can join) and have my work cut out for me in the coming days, weeks and months. Thankfully I have a wide network of social media experts whose brains I can pick from time to time — including Jeremiah Owyang, who had a great blog post today about our launch.

The biggest takeaway for me from his post today was this paragraph:

“What are some potential next steps for Cadence? To continue to reach to their community by aggregating all of the discussion in their market, not just Cadence centric content. By becoming an industry discussion hub, they could take expand mindshare from other competitors and customers. Examples of this would look like aggregating content from other blogs or forums that are not hosted at the Cadence domain.”

Very intriguing and something that had not crossed my mind until now. Hopefully I’ll be able to make this happen. I’ll also be relying on the community to tell me what they like, what they don’t like — and what they want to see in their new community.

It should be a fun ride.