From the BBC:
Digital neighbourhood watch plan

Talk about communities that are LARGE. There is a proposal for a 911 type community driven nationwide network of websites.

“The idea of a nationwide network of 911.gov websites has
been proposed by Maryland university lecturers Ben Shneiderman and
Jennifer Preece in this month’s edition of Science magazine.”

The two academics admitted there were many hurdles to overcome but said the grids could be set up within three to five years.

“You must get people engaged in advance, to try it and learn it and be part of it.”

<img src="/images/64360-56413/Mike_Walsh.JPG” height=”166″ width=”149″>
We had a great discussion with Mike Walsh, CEO of Leverage Software. Having reviewed Leverage software’s technology and successful implementation at InfoWorld where they have over 10,000 users, we wanted to understand more the vision and direction of communities from him.

The Key Takeaway: The ROI from having customers connect with each other can be measured by reduced time to prospect conversion, reduced time & cost of conducting sales references and alignment to new purchasing behavior.

The great reinforcement that people tend to value referrals and recommendations now more than interrupt based marketing was clear to me from our discussion. Mike and Leverage software’s vision for having customers talk to customers (many to many) instead of one to many discussions between companies and customers (via portals) is a very compelling one that allows organizations to tap into the power of many.

Here are the top 3 best practices that Mike recommends based on their experiences with over 113 communities:

1. Dedicate an owner for the community initiative to ensure it gets a desired focus and delivers results. In most organizations this is 3 people’s night job and they want to do a great job, but dont have the tools, time and experience to get it done right.

2. Ensure that you set clear goals and objectives: E.g: InfoWorld (one of Leverage Software customers) had a goal to increase Page views since that targeted customer page views for them results in higher CPM from their advertisers. Another e.g. is Salesforce.com had a conversion ratio goal from prospects to customers in a specified time period as their objective, which motivated them to setup an invitation community of their customers and prospects.

3. Surround yourself with community experts instead of trying to do it all alone, which may result in a sense of being overwhelmed
and also to make sure you dont make the rookie mistakes. Francois also suggested this in his piece on BMC best practices, since they mentioned to get it going too way too long.

Very interesting questions come up when we talk to Marketing organizations about putting together user and customer communities. In full 60%+ of the organizations we talk with the “community” is usually started either by Support team or the Developer team – since they are in the high tech vertical and the value proposition is to reduce costs from supporting and managing a growing customer base.

In the last few quarters Marketing teams have increasingly started to look at their communities and trying to learn and figure out how to message, share and position their company, new products and news with their “communities”.

It becomes obvious very quickly for “traditional” marketing executives and professionals that the community “does have a mind of its own”, its own culture and its own perception of news, quality and brand.

So the dominating question for marketing organizations with communities becomes – “HOW can I control the brand, message and perception of my company & our products with the community?”

Francois at the Emergence Marketing blog has written very eloquently about this topic with his case study of BMC. Of course, Alan Moore has a very strong opinion on this too.

Fundamentally if you are a marketing professional, here are items to consider and answer for your self and some solutions for engaging thriving communities.

1. Engagement vs. Moderation: Is your brand passive (staid, corporate, serious – which is the norm for many industries) or is it more active (fun, easy)? An example would be New York life (serious brand) vs. Aflac (fun brand). Based on the demographic, although they are in the same industry, their customers and users are different and the perceptions are different. In our experiences for both passive and active brands, community moderation is nice, but community engagement is more critical.

E.g: In a recent community board, a customer shared some information about a product that failed during their tests of daylight savings time and actually made fun of it. The reaction from the company was to remove that posting.

Our suggestion was to instead admit the mistake, make fun of it in a nice way (as people now call it the John Stewart-ization of mistakes) and provide the fix for the problem.

2. Control vs. Facilitation: Marketing professionals have to realize that they cannot control 100% of the message and brand perception any more. Rather than control we recommend you facilitate customers by incentives (not monetary) to align to the perception you wish to see in the community and reflective of your corporate goal.

E.g: At a large developer community, the new product (still to be launched) had a lot of buzz among developers, but there were several customers already comparing it to other existing products and calling it a me-too product. The company response was to state via a “moderator” that since the product was not yet released, any discussion or speculation was useless and hence not worth discussing.

Our recommended approach was to have the product manager have a private webinar with some of the key community members to provide an “early preview” and collect competitive intelligence and have the members of the community start to discuss the known aspects of the product with the forum.

3. Co-opting vs. Competing: Customers have often come up with the best positioning for some of the products in companies that I have worked at. Almost always they express it in simple, elegant terms compared to a marketing person who desires to get the most “spin”. This is not to say marketing professionals are always “spinning” or that there is not value in it. Some marketing people I have worked with almost always will not accept the “layman’s description” of the product, since they believe they have to sell the bigger vision and value so they can charge a premium – this sometimes puts them in odds with the customer’s true usage or unintended uses of the product, which creates a competitive dynamic. Why not co-opt instead the unintended use and market to it so you can get best value?

E.g: At a community forum, a certain member asked other participants for some experiences associated with a tangential use of a embedded software product for one of their other business units. The immediate next step was a call from the inside sales person that the customer was NOT licensed to use the product for that business unit.

Our suggestion was to instead engage the customer in trying to understand what they wanted to use it for and how could the company help, then figure out how to possibly up sell their products to the new business unit.

Bambi Francisco from CBS Marketwatch has a new article titled “When MySpace meets your HR department“. You know communities and social networks are hitting mainstream when CBS Marketwatch are talking about them. Some highlights:

“Procter & Gamble has begun to incorporate social networks to engage
with customers by launching a network targeting women called Vocalpoint.”

”
Media has already caught on fairly quickly to socializing their entertainment. Walt Disney (DIS
:

I listened to a good webinar by Bill Johnston & Patty Seybold on Measuring the Success of Online Communities. They shared into community types: Services, Developer, Professional / Peer, Affinity / Loyalty, Lead Customer and Virtual world communities. There was also a good discussion around metrics for different types of communities.

Bill had an interesting comment regarding a question: “How many resources did it take you to moderate and report on your site (he was previously at Autodesk and managed their communities) for about 10,000 posts / month. His answer for 1 FTE plus some limited hours for the reporting and analytics.

<img src="/images/64360-56413/tamara.jpeg”> Since I spoke with Tamara Littleton of eModeration about the same, I thought I would ask her the follow up questions I got from customers on the management and moderation costs of communities.

Here are some critical metrics that determine the # and cost of resources:

1. Post or pre moderated? Meaning are you allowing people to post and remove unwanted posts after the fact or the more expensive route which is to moderate all content before posting.

2. Duration of moderation: Do you wish to have postings moderated 24 hours (more resources) or only during business hours.

3. Do you need User Generated Content (videos, images) to be reviewed as well? – more expensive

4. Do you want alignment of moderation and community requirements to your overall marketing campaign, so a customer prospect generated if not qualified, can still be courted and managed to a point when they are qualified.

From Tamara:
“eModeration charges you per hour of resource. So you pay the same for video moderation, images, messageboards, mobile
communities etc.”

Depending on requirements the cost can be anywhere from $2500 a month, to
$30,000 a month.

Michael Krieg from Web Crossing came over to give us a great demo of their WebCrossing Community and WebCrossing Neighbors (social networking) solutions. Web Crossing is a company with a long history, (founded in 1984 by Tim Lundeen) they have been working with communities for over 15 years. They have about 20 people in the company and are very global.

The one takeaway: Internal communication ROI exists in reducing time to get key information and reducing email traffic, storage (not having store the same big PPT and Photos in 25 mailboxes), lower requirements for networking upgrades, and productivity savings from not having email clog the individual mailboxes.

The best part of the company is they “drink their own Merlot” by leveraging their community offering for internal collaboration and communication. Since they have employees at several locations, they use blogs, photos and wikis to share information – e.g. one of their employees attended a seminar in China and sent photos and posted his trip report on an internal blog.

Got us thinking: Are community capabilities the new watercooler for the globally spread out enterprise. With marketing in the SF bay area, support in Boulder CO, sales team nationally and development in India, even a small company such as ours needs to keep everyone in the loop and have meangingful conversations.

Email is not the most productive and we always get the 2 people CC on a list of 25 that believe that this type of information is “junk mail”. So then blogging about it and sharing photos in a community site gets the company “closer”.

With over 1000 customers, they have some good capability to fit the need. Blogs, Wikis, Forums, File Sharing, Chat and IM are all par for the course for any community / collaboration solution and they have all those capabilities. Their products are value priced starting at $65/month to about $2495 / month.

eModeration is a privately held company
(founded in 2002) by Tamara Littleton, who is their CEO. They have over 30 customers including GE, Nokia, Philips,
Infield Parking and Times Online.

They are about 20+ people and are based in London, UK
although the majority of their clients are in the US. One of the most interesting
parts of the conversation was the 3 best practices (see below) for community
moderation.

eModeration Limited is an international,
specialist UGC (user generated content) moderation company.  They provide
twenty-four hour community management and moderation to clients in the
entertainment and digital publishing industry and major corporate clients
hosting online communities.

User Generated Content is becoming an extremely important capability for communities. eModeration helps make communities safe for users, children and ensures that companies brands are protected. Their moderation services help make sure that the right environment, brand and tone are perceived by
customers.

Q) State your overall vision for your company
Tamara: We want eModeration to be the leading specialist moderation service for
communities and attract the best customers and employees towards helping customers get value from communities.

Q) What is your unique value proposition?
Tamara: Companies outsource their moderation to us, so they are entrusting their brand face to our capable hands. The thing that is unique about us is that we are a boutique organization that serves as an extension to their organization. We take their trust in our capability to moderate their community very seriously.  And we’re
incredibly flexible in our approach.

Q) What kinds of communities does your services power?
Tamara: Companies that cater to primarily consumer markets are our target. We help them ensure that there is a fine line between policing their discussions
and user generated content and at the same time making sure there is participation
that is encouraged.

Q) What are 3 best practices that you would recommend for customers around moderation?

Tamara:

1. Recruit lead figures and users into the community right upfront to give it credibility.
This gets customers comfortable.

2. Be honest and show candor. If you messed up (e.g. if your product recall notice was not shared before it actually should have been) admit to it and share a plan on how you intend to fix it.

3. Show transparency in moderation. If you have to remove someone’s content
because of unacceptable behavior, tell them what they did that was unacceptable and give them a chance to right the wrong and people will
learn ‘good behavior’.

Support communities are relatively easier to justify and track ROI metrics on, but marketing organizations are increasingly being the first to spearhead online communities – both social networks and also customers communities. Here is what we have heard from prospects and customers on why they are investing in online communities:

1. Diminishing returns from existing “get the message out” methods. Press Relations (PR) and communications have dramatically changed in the last few years. Used to be that if you hired the right PR firm (with connections) and had a good story to tell, you could issue a good press release, get it pitched to the right writers and get decent coverage. With the advent of blogs, RSS feeds, etc. there is an overwhelming array of choices for these audiences and “no one reads a press release any more”. Marketing teams still need to get the word out, and they are leveraging customer and prospect communities to do this in a more open and honest manner.

2. Fine tune their lead management process. Marketing teams spend good money on generating leads. Some of these start as suspects, then get qualified, become prospects, opportunities, then customers. But the key part of that sentence is the word “some”. Most of these leads are “not ready” or “unqualified”. Keeping an ongoing conversation with these “not read yet” suspects is an immense challenge. Since the cost of the lead generation was large, it is in the best interests of the marketing team to have an dialog with these potential targets until a point they are ready. Marketing teams are using communities to keep the “dialog ongoing” with suspects.

3. Getting your customers to sell for you. In a community setting “suspects” are going to be exposed to customers (good and bad) They are also more likely to listen and be influenced by existing customers of the vendor than others (such as analysts or press). There are downsides to this no doubt that I will address in another posting, but if you have a good product, suppor your customers well, they will say good things about it to other customers is what’s worked for us at most companies in software. This lowers cost of customer acquisition and is another reason why marketing teams are investing in online communities.

4. Non linear growth expections cannot be fueled by non linear investment requirements. Simple way of saying this is every CEO and hence the CMO wants to invest $1 and get $10 in return from marketing and they want it quantifiable. Marketing organizations are looking at communities to provide insight and also start to develop the “network effect”. More customers join the network because “everyone else is there” and the benefits to the customer are clear.

5. Long tail effect. Addressing niche markets never serves the large vendor. E.g. If you make software the monitors servers and systems, there will always be thousands of little devices you dont support because the cost of supporting them does not justify the investment. But customers still need these devices monitored. So, customers create the monitor for you and are willing to share it via their community to others (sometimes for a monetary benefit). With this the new prospect benefits, the company benefits (new market addressed) and the customer benefits (potential revenue stream).

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Objective setting is the most crucial part of your initial community development and management plan. I have been a part of a fair number of useless objectives and in a lot of cases confused them with “goals”. So here is what we have learned.

Here are the 3 steps we follow to help customers. See if it works for you an tell me if you would like to see some changes.

1. Decide on your objective (not goal which is more long term) for the community. Objectives have to be:

a. Specific – Objectives should specify what they want to achieve.
b. Measurable – You should be able to measure whether you are meeting the objectives or not.
c. Achievable – Are the objectives you set, achievable and attainable?
d. Realistic – Can you realistically achieve the objectives with the resources you have?
e. Time – When do you want to achieve the set objectives?

If you need more information on setting good objectives in general there are several resources.

Here are 3 examples:

I. We want to build a support community of 70% our users (2000 administrators) to achieve them to find service information quickly and reduce our support calls by 30% by Dec 2007.

II. We want to build a social network community of 900 influencers (with the title Architect) within our prospect and customer base by Dec 2007 to reduce our cost of lead management by 25% and increase prospect conversion rate by 20%.

III. Our intent is to build a internal sales support community of our 100 sales reps, engineers, marketing and sales support personnel to facilitate sharing of RFP, RFQ, Objection handling, Competitive Information sharing to increase our active opportunities by 30% by Q1 2008 and improve our win rate against competition by 15%, keeping our sales support staff the same.

2. Agree on the current baseline of 3-5 metrics that you want to track, measure and report on. They dont have to be ideal, they dont have to be available in an automated dashboard and they certainly dont have to be set in stone for the rest of your community development.
I have seen a lot of customers skip the baselining process only to pat themselves on the back after they see some uptick after 3-5 weeks not realizing that it was not any better than before the community was started.

Here are some metrics to track as an example:

a) Current # of support cases generated online
b) Current first hour closure of generated cases
c) # of cases handled online by support personnel
d) # of active knowledge base cases that have a rating over 3 in “usefulness” and their usage
e) # of opportunities where the source of lead was an existing customer referral

3. Automate the process of collecting the data that move the metrics you chose above. Even if the “automated” process is an individual in your team collecting logs, putting it in excel and graphing them – do it. The way this helps your objective setting is to ensure that these reports FORCE you to go back every so often to check if your objectives were right when you started or you have to modify them.

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I had a phone conversation after CMO 2007 with a VP Marketing at a medium sized company based in Florida. His top of mind item (as a takeaway) from the conference was creating a series of dashboards for giving him “visibility into the next trends within his industry”. So in my attempt to try and discuss Online communities, I asked him why communities did not make it on his top 5 “strategic intents” list.

There is a very good summary of CMO 2007 by Foghound and the key point I took away was:

“CMOs Lauren Flaherty of Nortel and Dan Henson of GE stressed the need
for more predictive insights and analytics. “It’s about the headlights
not the taillights,” said Flaherty. “You’ve got to measure real time,
looking at the future not historical data. That’s why Tracking studies
don’t provide value.““

I can understand if your CMO or Marketing head attended this show that they are looking forward to being “more aligned with sales and the business” and hence are not exactly willing to listen to the best ideas around building a customer community.

The one takeway: My suggestion to you is to position communities within the context of learning from your existing customers sooner, hence its a leading indicator which is better than focus groups, sales forums and other means to learn trends within your industry.

There is really no better source of good information about your customer base than fostering an ongoing with customers in an open, candid and open dialog about their issues, trends affecting them and challenges they face.

The next conversation you should have with your team is putting together a business case for how this will be justified and aligned to the CMO’s goals.