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Matthew Lees is a Consultant and Vice President at the Patricia Seybold Group. He researches and writes about online communities and social networking. I spend over an hour discussing the current state of communities and learning from his very varied and interesting background. A lot of his community experience comes from his work at MaMaMedia, a community website for children. I have also attended his webinar on Community 2.0: Measuring the Success of Online Communities so I have a good perspective on what he advocates and what his vision is around communities. |
Here are the 3 most facinating things I learned from Matthew:
1. More you know about communities than you dont: This was a question I posed on the future of communities. Most executives and senior people at large companies I have been talking to have a back of the mind trepidation about communities. I have heard from several people that “this is all new” and “there is so much to learn” and the dreaded “I am overwhelmed with this community stuff, so I am going to watch how it plays out for year before we do something“.
Most organizations that support User Groups, Customer advisory boards and focus groups already know about getting their constituents together in conversation. There are a lot of new “technology” and social nuances to be learned with online communities and social networks, but you dont need to throw “everything you know out of the window”. You are going to learn 70% new stuff everytime, so what you learned before is useful, but be open to learning more.
His advice – Good customer centric practices DONT change. Great user advocacy does not have to be thrown out of the window. Out of the world customer support best practices are not invalid anymore – the key is to leverage them for the new medium of communities.
2. Senior executives are investing in communities based on their “gut“: Since I have a background workingwith IT organizations primarily over the last few years, I have been tuned to “get me the ROI metrics” and “how do you justify this purchase with a return”. Lot of senior executives investing in communites are doing it based on gut feel – they know that investing in getting their customers to talk to them more frequently and listening to customers is needed, and even if the ROI is intangible and fuzzy they are willing to take the plunge.
3. How to elevate the discussion around communities beyond technology? This is by far the most frequent issue I hear from prospective community builders. There is so much technology and the jargon that goes with it – RSS, Wikis, Blogs, Tags etc.
The key is to ask questions around your business problems or problems that your users have and
how you can help leverage communites to solve those problems.
E.g.
How can we allow our customers to share content with each other about their experiences with our products?
How can we help understand how customers really use our product so we can make it easier for them?
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