This post is the first recap of the case studies presented at the recent B2B Social Communications event held in New York City. Marcella Shinder (@marcyshinder), Vice President of Brand Strategy & Marketing, American Express OPEN, discussed the launch of OPEN Forum, an online community of small-business owners.

American Express’ marketing strategy is to promote their belief in entrepreneurs as one of the keys to economic growth. Their central brand promise is dedicated to helping business owners grow their business.

The website OPEN Forum is a tactic in the strategy to drive pull marketing. The three points of their pull marketing strategy are: Have something differentiated to say, get influencers to say it, and use social media to allow it to scale. This follows research which shows more older and affluent small business owners are using social media in the running and promoting of their businesses.

The site contains two main areas. The first is the idea hub, which is a space for business owners to blog about topics they are passionate about. The categories include innovation, lifestyle, managing, marketing, money, technology, and the world. This is a good environment for a small business owner to take the first steps into blogging, without committing to their own blog. Posts include the usual social media sharing buttons, and other registered forum members can give a post a thumbs up or leave a comment.

The other section is the connectodex, which is a creditialized community of business owners, as they have been approved for an AMEX business card account. Each profile must include a photo of the owner. This is a safe way for small business owners to connect to other business owners and begin to understand the power of social networking.

The new version of OPEN Forum just launched a few weeks ago and the numbers point toward success. They had 164,000 weekly page views and 4,000 business profiles.

By creating this community, American Express has found a way to engage and connect to their community, while both allowing their customers to connect with each other, and driving conversions to additional products and services.

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