This is a controversial topic for sure.

While I spoke about Apple community a few days ago I mentioned how happy the community really was. Well today I am questioning that for sure.

I am not going to repeat all the $200 (or $100 depending on who you ask) fiasco with iPhone. Anshu mentions the very difficult time that Ismael had with ordering 500 iPhones.

Just to reconfirm: Apple made it so hard to order 500 iPhones that he had to do it 10 phones at a time.

I remember the book by Jack Welsh on GE, there was a chapter devoted to strategy and it was titled “Sometimes its all in the sauce”. Long story, but the only reason why a certain pizza place near his home did well inspite of bad service, not friendly staff and expensive food was that the sauce they put on the pizza was awesome.

Makes you think for sure: If you do create a great product, who cares about the community? They will come no matter what.

But most others (except Apple for e.g.) make OK products, not earth shattering, awesome, mind blowing products. That’s the number one reason to have the community then. Even with an ok product you can still have a great community that helps you get the experience to be great.

<img src="/images/64360-56413/iphone_comp_01.jpg” border=”0″ width=”420″>

I attended the Office 2.0 unconference yesterday. Being my 5th “unconference” hosted by Kaliya and Ross Mayfield here are some tips and tricks that I have learned about getting the best value from BarCampand Unconferences.

5 things to do:

a) Come with questions, get multiple perspectives: As you prepare to attend your unconference, spend 15 min while you are waiting in the line for the registration to come up with 5-10 questions you still need answers to. These help you plan your sessions better and focus on specific people you can seek to answer these questions.

b) Seek out people between sessions: If you want answers to specific questions you have, do it after. After you finish a session,  understand whose opinions  are valuable then seek them out later to get answers. Realize there are many in the discussion who feel like they are “experts”. Understand during your session whose opinion would be most beneficial to you.

c) Take notes, but process later: At least 3/4ths of the folks feel more confused after the sessions. The full impact of the major trends or answers to your questions will not be obvious until you spend 15 minutes thinking about the answers a day or two after the sessions.

d) Most folks attending conferences are expecting to learn to “experts” and network with peers. Unconferences turns this around by helping you learn from peers and network with everyone. Learning from peers is great as long as you know they tend to have a perspective of usually “one” experience or single project. Their results may not be typical.

e) If you are leading a discussion dont feel you have to be the “expert”. You may have volunteered the session to bring all the folks who care about this topic together. People appreciate it more when you get all the perspectives together rather than push your agenda forward.

What not to do:

a) Dont expect closure on all topics: The facilitator of the discussion is usually not a conversation police.
When discussions start on a topic, they may go to several topics.

b) Dont expect answers to all questions to be a simple Y/N: When you have experts presenting, they will tell you most times that “X works and Y does not”, when you have your peers, though, you will get “It depends”. This may be the most frustrating part of the unconference, but realize everyone’s situation is slightly or very
different.

c) Dont dominate the conversation as a session leader: You’ll find the answers to your questions will
never get answered.

IDC did a report on the market for Social Networking and white label business community software.

“ The social networking application market
is experiencing significant growth and change this year — setting the
tone for the next three years, according to a market forecast and
analysis by IDC. The social networking application market will grow
from $46.8 million in 2006 to $428.3 million in 2009. Along the way,
three social networking market segments will emerge. Social networking
functionality will be built into core communications platforms, and
used for many purposes other than consumer socializing.”

I participate in the Online Community Roundtable that Bill Johnston & George run every so often and have met with and spoken to Tim the community guy at Apple. Its a great event that comprises mostly of practioners, who meet and discuss the ins and outs of running business communities.

Tim (last name withheld by request) has a great job according to all of us who are struggling to get community traction and keep the ball moving forward each day. Their communities are full of passionate, happy (mostly) and smart folks that care deeply about Apple products. I know Jake personally as a good friend and this is pretty amazing. He’s going all the way to provide phone numbers and email addresses for NBC execs to tell them how they feel about their decision to not put their shows on Apple ITunes.

So I asked a few Apple fans about the top 3 things they like about the Apple community:

1. Great products drive passionate usage (& users): This one was obvious. I personally own 3 ipods, an iphone (but not a Powerbook yet). These products rock. If you see the most powerful communities they do have this common trait.

2. Give your community a sense of empowerment: The community feels they have a HUGE say in all matters related to Apple products.

3. Ability to make one-one connections with individuals that are like you in the community. The sense of discovery is amazing. Since I assume that most people that like Apple products love good design (I know this is judgemental) I tend to like most other Apple users. There are more meaningful conversations with these users.

Let me know if you have any questions for Tim and I’ll make sure to ask him.

Neil Patel has a great set of 10 tips to make that killer presentation. My best:

” Make them laugh – Although you want to educate your audience, you need to make them laugh as well. I learned this from Guy Kawasaki
and if you ever hear any of his speeches you’ll understand why. In
essence, it keeps the audience alert and they’ll learn more from you
than someone who just educates.”

Anshu (who I also met at BarCampBlock talks about SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions.

“So here is my point – either go with a “purist” SaaS definition and
accept SaaS as a relatively small niche market today with limited
adoption or expand your definition to include different SaaS models.
Don’t mix and match.”

I have talked with several vendors (Leverage, Ning) who offer SaaS and others who are pure software plus ASP (Jive Software) and customers doing it either way (Webex, VMWare, Symantec).

Here are the top considerations why for a pure play SaaS:

1. Multi hosting and multi tenancy: Architecturally this “should” lower your total cost of management. For example if you as a vendor are hosting more than one customer at a server, the total cost of ownership should be lower.
2. SaaS (technically) will allow you to scale linearly (so will costs). Primarily because you can keep adding into a cloud of computing power, as opposed to scale by the box that ASP services offer.
3. The only negative I have heard is the perception of lack of privacy/ security. If you are in the same namespace as other customers in the same box, there might be a chance data integrity might be compromised.

Here are the top reasons someone chooses ASP:

1. They like a particular software offering the best, and believe the option offered by the vendor is functionally superior to other SaaS providers. Given all things same, most customers seem to prefer SaaS solutions though over ASP.
2. The ASP solution has most likely been around for longer providing a more “stable” platform. E.g. in the community space the software / ASP vendors have been around for 3+ years where as pure play SaaS have been around for less than that.
3. The functionality of a pure play software solution is percieved to be more comprehensive since most of the engineering effort goes towards developing functionality versus architecting the offering for multi tenancy.

Here is why I have heard customers software and host internally:

1. They have very high internal security and privacy policies. They believe since customer data and information will be hosted on the community, it is important they be reponsible completely for it
2. That’s the only way they do business. Due to financial and amortization reasons, they purchase the software outright and then “own” it. After 4+ years (typical amortization schedule),Inte the software ROI goes directly to the bottom line. This is a little old way of thinking in my view, but its the widely held view.
3. Integration with their CRM and other systems. This is by far the biggest reason I have heard. SaaS and ASP vendors offer little in means of integration to existing systems for customer identity, internal rewards systems and CRM solutions.

For most customers, this is not an either / or option. There are clear reasons why you would choose one versus the other.

What do you think?

I had a discussion with Ian Kennedy, product manager of MyBlogLog on Thursday. For those that dont know, MyBlogLog is a pretty nifty site that connects you (As a blogger) to your visitors. Users register at MyBlogLog and when they visit blogs (or websites), thanks to cookies, tracking and other technology they can be tracked so people know who visited your site. Its be great for me to meet my readers and personally I have made quite a few friends because of it.

Ian and I met at BarCampBlock a couple of weeks ago during a discussion around Mobile Social Networks. Ian’s been with Yahoo! with over 2 years so I was keen to understand the community building that MyBlogLog went through. They have a strong and vibrant community. We will continue the conversation in a seperate post on the interview.

If you use MyBlogLog, what key questions do you have that I can help get answered?

Back from a good long break from blogging. It was relaxing. Just trying to figure out where this was going. Will post more regularly. For all the RSS feed readers. Thanks.

Here’s a brief writeup about NVidia:

NVidia Developer Community

http://blogs.nvidia.com/developers

Top 3 good things:

• NVidia is planning to have a public developer forum where the developer community makes it possible to make PC games that give the users a differentiated and improved experience over the console. Current forums are private and a public forum would make it possible for the community to help itself and others by making it open to anyone
  
• NVidia‘s community site provides links to documentation and performance information for its products and technologies. This is important for developers who can get a feel for the company’s products before using them
  
• NVidia‘s community site has a link to its job postings where job openings are featured and instructions are provided for members to check out its employment site talent.nvidia.com. This site makes it possible for job seekers to search for jobs, view job listings, create an account and apply online
  

Top 3 things to improve:

• NVidia‘s community site has only 1 job posting. More job postings from its employment site can be listed on its community page so that it becomes easy to access for developer member job seekers
  
• NVidia‘s online store link could have been provided on the developer community main page as this can provide developers an easy way to browse through and purchase NVidia products
  
• The link to NVidia‘s forums at http://developer.nvidia.com/forums does not work. Forums are a great way to communicate and share information. It would be great if NVidia fixed this bug and made forums available
  

Here’s a writeup on SAP Community Network

SAP Developer Network
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn
Business Process Expert Community
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/bpx

Top 3 good things:

• SAP Developer Network (SDN) and Business Process Expert (BPX) communities have a unique Points program that offers many benefits:
  a)The top 50 contributors receive special recognition on the homepage
  b) Each forum page lists the top 3 forum contributors with their point totals, giving members a chance to establish themselves as experts
  c) Top contributing companies are recognized on the contributors’ corner, giving them added credibility with their customers & prospects
  d) The most active members receive generous, non-financial rewards: praise, recognition, fame, even the occasional T-shirt
  e) Being a top contributor on SDN or BPX helps members build their reputations. Experts are sometimes tapped for special assignments or professional opportunities


• SDN offers a Premium Access Zone, where you can access premium content: including best practices, tips and techniques directly from the experts. This is a great way for developers to get information & learn from SAP experts


• SDN has a concept called online meetups which is like a webinar, only a lot more interactive. This should encourage developers to meetup with their peers to get  exposure to the latest products and technologies
  

Top 3 things to improve:

• The content in the Premium Access Zone is not available for free. Making this content available for free would encourage more developers to hear from SAP experts and use/accept SAP products in the marketplace


• Community sites are available in only 3 languages: Chinese, Japanese and Korean. More languages can be covered to encourage developers from around the world to contribute to the communities


• A SAP Business expert has the business knowledge and IT savvy to make business process innovation happen in real-time by adapting, composing and executing end-to-end business processes using composition tools and enterprise services. SAP can tap this talent and use this community’s services to train developers (for a fee if required)