Link to the summary file with charts and results.

We conducted a 23 day survey of 112 high technology (mostly
software) companies in March & April 2007. The primary intent was
to understand their use of developer communities so we could help companies benchmark against each other.

·         61% of respondents replied via email and the rest were available to talk on the phone.

·         93% of the companies provide commercial software and the remainder were open source providers.

·         39% of companies
have over $500 Million in revenue, 35% $10 Million and $500 Million and
the rest were less than $10 Million in annual revenues.

Survey Highlights

1. ¾ (75%) don’t provide ROI information for their
   developer communities and don’t see the need from management to do so.
   One participant put it “Its so obvious what the ROI is that we don’t
   see the need to justify it”.
2. Nearly ½ (47%) of the communities are run with open source software and another 29% were in house developed. Most participants are looking for alternatives, but don’t see any “comprehensive provider” based on their needs.
1. “Everyone has a little bit and it is tough to figure out who’s the best, so we used open source to get started”.
2. “When we started there was no one, so we built it ourselves, now we
   are looking at alternative options and have budget for it”.
3. Biggest challenge of running a community still remains finding the right resources. 57% of the people claimed inability to get the right people to facilitate the community
1. “You pretty much need the right level of technical depth,
   customer-centric support, part trainer, part evangelist. I cannot think
   of more than 2-3 people in the company and outside that can do this
   well”.
2. “It’s a very fulfilling role, but very demanding in knowledge. We
   interviewed over 40 people to find out that the right person does not
   exist”
4. Some of the key benefits they get from the developer community:
1. “Our community created extensions and ported the software to other environments”.
2. “We get development support for our product 24X7 because of our Australia developer community”.
3. “At our user conference we had 4-5 developers get together and put
   a demo of the new offering and how it can integrate to Adobe Flash,
   which our product team did not even consider”.
4. “They were spreading the message to our customer base about the new
   SDK before it came out. We had a huge up tick in downloads when we
   released the product”.
5. “Our management wanted to find out where the holes were in the API
   before we published it. Our community gave 43 bug reports in the first
   3 hours of us putting it out – Awesome”.
5. While we expected most (if not all) developer community owners to report to Engineering or R&D over 30% said they reported to Marketing (fewer than 25% reported to Support).
1. “Our Marketing team looks at this as an addition to their user group meetings and annual user conference”.
2. “Our budget comes from the customer outreach & reference
   program, since we view developers as our customers. They are the ones
   that recommend our bug tracking tool.

There is a very beautiful post I read about the American Idol participant Sanjaya’s exit. I have not personally watched American Idol – my daughter does, so I follow along (to be a hip parent).

Mandisa is a prior participant of American Idol and knows what Sanjaya is probably going to go through the next few days / weeks. Here is a great example of how the community takes care of its own.

1. Pulls you up when you are down.

2. Gives you encouragement when needed

3. Helps you out when things are not exactly going in the right direction.

In the business world your customers are getting more encouragement from each other. That’s what makes them closer to you.

DATE: Tuesday, April 24 2007
TIME: 2:00 PM (Eastern Time) / 11:00 AM (Pacific Time)
FEE: Free!
WHERE: Live from your desktop

A purposeful and prescriptive web seminar presented by key industry players for executives and senior managers looking to invest in online communities & social networks.

Enterprises like P&G, Electronics Arts and ESPN are leveraging online communities to innovate with their customers, reduce support costs and foster bi-directional communication with their customers and employees. There are significant benefits these organizations have seen from their online community initiative including:

• Lower cost of lead generation & marketing by 39% by allowing customers to provide direction on new product positioning
  
• Reducing their cost of customer support by 23% by having customers help other customers
  
• Decreasing their revenue cycle time 15%; by leveraging partners & getting rapid feedback on their product introduction

The first step to understanding how to leverage online communities for your organization is to define the scope and learn how to justify it in business terms. This enables you to strongly position it with senior management to get buy in.

A case study of a business justification presentation that was used to secure internal funding for a community initiative will be shared.

An interactive Q&A session with our speakers will be included.

Prior to the seminar, submit your question to be answered during the Q&A here:
webseminarQ-A@sharedinsights.com. Questions are also welcomed during the seminar.

Register at
http://www.sharedinsights.com/events/webseminars/overview.aspx?e_id=E1ACC3FFBB0E48E09A6BA855845DEEFE&pcode=FYMXX22

A developer community is a powerful product development mechanism and faces several challenges before it reaches its full potential. Lets look at a sample list of challenges here:

• Geographically distributed collaborative work tends to result in significantly reduced communication between team members
  
• Ever-increasing pace of development makes it difficult for developers to stay up-todate and collaborate on the most current technologies
  
• It is challenging to maintain quality and productivity among all participants despite the physical and cultural distance
  
• Operational challenges exist: For example, you need to ensure that everyone is working on the same edition of the source code and has access to the same information about requirements, data models, customer issues, etc., It is easy to have Team A and Team B accidentally work off of different code bases, such as different versions of a common component and wind up trying to integrate incompatible work
  
• Social challenges also come into play. If the teams adopt an “Us” versus “Them” mindset, they may work at cross-purposes, with Team A being slow to adopt Team B’s work due to distrust or outright disdain for who Team B is and what they are working on. This is exacerbated by time zone and language differences that make communication difficult

“HOW NOT TO GET JETBLUE’D”

“Industry Experts Explain How Successful Companies Use Online Collaboration and Community to transform Customer Support…”

A purposeful and results prescriptive free web seminar presented by key industry players for executives and senior managers looking to understand how to use online customer communities to transform traditional customer support.

Date: Thursday, April 19 2007
Time: 10:00AM (PDT)/1PM (EDT)
Live from your desktop

Enterprises like JetBlue have spent over $21 Million in customer support, and advertising and public relations after the storm outages that wrecked their brand image. Many companies including Intuit, Cisco Systems and others are leveraging online collaboration and community tools to foster bidirectional communication with their customers and therefore provide more valuable customer support.  There are significant benefits these organizations have seen from their online community initiatives including:
 
1. Increasing quarterly customer satisfaction by 11% without increasing headcount
2. Reducing new customer support initiation by 17% over 1 year.
3. Reducing the cost of customer support by 23% by having customers help other customers

Leading companies are leveraging online communities & social collaboration solutions for in-house support or to create a more open community of customers and support personnel. This free webinar by Canvas Group and Web Crossing will help attendees:

1. Understand the dynamics of online support communities, and how to leverage those dynamics to create strong customer loyalty
2. Learn how to measure, manage and report the return on investment from your support community
3. Help your customer find answers to their support issues by having other customers help them rather than simple self service

Speakers
Mukund Mohan, CEO of Canvas Group, and Michael Krieg, VP for Web Crossing will present. Invited to attend are those in Customer Support Services (director and VP-level) and Online Community (manager-level and up).

An interactive Q&A session with our speakers will be included.

Title:  How Not To Get JetBlue’D

Date:  Thursday, April 19, 2007

Time:  10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.3.9 (Panther®) or newer

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/930179425

Karl Long talks about the McKinsey report on Web 2.0 (we covered it before). He opines on something I dont necessarily agree with:
“IMHO companies are still uncomfortable talking to their customers
directly, actually, uncomfortable allowing “employees” to talk to
customers directly. They like the idea of social networks and
communities, they are easily distinguished from the “company.”

Really? Can you distinguish communities from “the company”. The community is most often an extension of your brand, its presence and your interaction with customers. So how can you disassociate yourself from the community?

If you are, then you are not leveraging the value proposition of communities to extend your brand.

Do you really know who’s on your community?

I think most people expect that if a community is “private” or “invitation-only” then they would end up knowing each other. But if you are running a public community like Digg and expect users to self police, then that creates another mess. Business Week reports on Cleaning Messy Boards, where companies are turning to new tools to prevent “hate-filled arguments or meaningless drivel”.

Every one of our communities does NOT allow anonymous comments, message posts and unidentified participants. That’s the advantage of a Business to Business community versus a Consumer community. We know the users well, their background, most cases have had offline interactions with them at events, etc. so it becomes easier to participate and eases the discussion online.

So then if you do know everyone in your community will you prevent a competitor from joining ?

Vario Creative Blog has a great piece on Business Websites with a Human Side.
Highly recommend you read the entire piece.
“What we’re missing is the human side; the fact that a business is a
community.  If we’re doing our brand right, our customers really want
to think of themselves as part of the team. “

Some important highlights as it appeals to communities:
2. Become the go to source for information on your industry.  You are professional, act like it.  Blog on industry issues,
and bring those blog posts forward to your homepage.  Actively solicite
questions, and answer them on an open format, such as a blog or forum

4. Participate in the online community at large.  Post on forums, comment on blogs,
and do so without trumpeting your products.  It may seem counter
intuitive, but the truth is the web is a place where less can sometime
be more.   By taking part in the online discussion, you will create
good will.  The problem is such groups have extremely limited tolerance
of overt commercialism.  Be careful.

6. Sponsor niche communities in your industry. 
Community sites such as forums generally offer advertising at extremely
competetive rates.  Get your name in front of the right eyeballs by
sponsoring a site where your potential customers would be found.

Referred by My educated Guess

I have been on twitter for a few weeks but never really used it all that much. Got a nudge from a couple of friends so Friday was my “okay lets twitter day”.

Here is a real account of what happened. Most of you that know me would easily agree I have a tendency to “measure every damm thing I do to get better” – but that’s my personality type. I have been an early adopter ofmost web 2 stuff, but only to see if it will save me some time, make my life simpler or make me show that I am as smart as my wife.

I sent my “friend” external twitter  to my closest friends (8 to be exact), not the public mukund one – since that’s for every one else. If you know me well you know my nickname and that’s my “friend” twitter name.

1. Friday 7:54 am: At school; dropping off the kids; I have a few min before the “door” officially opens, so I twitter “I am at school waiting with the kids.” Friend calls me in 2 min – says his forgot to pay $5.50 for his son’s “hot lunch” at Stratford. This is lunch money. He is about 7 miles from school. Asks me if I can go to the office and pay for. No problem I say. If he had to come by from work and drive to and from, it would have taken him 27 min (he is 7 miles each way) and Sunnyvale  by lanes and roads are average 29 miles / hour.

Savings: Gas 14 miles (he drives a 2001 minivan, assuming 14 mil/gallon – saved $3.29 (current costco per gallon price at Fremont). Plus he saved 27 min and at his current pay, that’s $28.8

2. 8:17 am: Both kids are at school, get into the car, my blackberry buzzes. Another friend says “@#$#@$ gas is now 3.92 at SFO.” I have to drive to meet Tom SFO (Market and Embarcadero). Prompted me to check my gas tank – hmm I could use gas.

Savings: My Audi takes 13.5 gallons and at 32 cents savings over SFO, I saved $4.32

3. 4.28 pm: Decide to check out early. Gotta prepare for Rishab’s birthday. Wife calls, saying can you pick up a few things before you come home? Gives me a list of 4 things. I twitter “Gotta go pick up stuff from Whole foods”. I get an immediate SMS and emails from 2 other friend’s wives – they give me a list of 3 other things. Mukund, we are coming to the party tomorrow, so we will pick up the stuff from your home. Average distance to the three friends to Whole foods (to and from) is 17 miles.

Savings: Total miles = 51, cost of gas @ 3.29 = saves 9.87. 3 friends saving 47 min each (not standing and waiting in the line, driving) totals 141 minutes and at their pay it saves us another $56.4

Total savings: 9.87+ 4.32 + 56.4 + 3.29 + 28.8 = $102.68

I know this is not much, but for something I like to do and the amount of time it took it was GREAT ROI – for my friends and their wives.

Here’s what I learned about using twitter for productivity gain:
1. Dont sign up to be followers for a bunch of “known influential twitterers” – much as I like some of them its too much information with not much value. – Keep it close to your friends and really people that can benefit from knowing “what are you doing”?

2. If I could setup folders of friends who I want to send messages to, that’s better. Beats email – which is SLOWWWWWWWW.

3. If you have a globally located team – like we do at Canvas Group, then twitter is awesome for team based collaboration. No point getting frustrated that Kalpesh is not returning calls quick enough from Bangalore because I know he’s with his friends at a bowling alley where connectivity is poor.

I have been Twittering for the last few weeks – as you can see from the widget on the right. I live on my Blackberry so here’s the easiest way to twitter using blackberry.

1. Get an account on twitter
2. Download Google talk for blackberry
3. Setup IM to Gtalk in Twitter
4. Add twitter@twitter.com to your google talk contacts
5. Send all twitter messages as if you are chatting with twitter@twitter.com

VOILA!