• Tight communications, via asynchronous formats like mailing lists, to make sure that everybody can be kept informed about everyone else’s progress, questions & concerns
• Full tracking of all collaboratively built artifacts, from specifications and designs to source code and QA test results, so all participants have rapid access to the precise deliverables that everyone is working on or are using as references
• Some form of workflow, whether via a proscribed process or implemented through tracking software, to make sure that everybody knows not only what they are responsible for, but what everybody else is working on as well
• Security: You need to establish technical means of ensuring that not only the relevant development teams have the ability to view & modify the work in progress, other random individuals at either location, or internet crackers, cannot have any way to get at the project
• Manageability: When setting up your collaborative environment, aim for a structure that will support more than just the one team you may be collaborating with today. For example, setup your mailing lists, issue tracking, etc., on a per-application or per-project basis, so that each distinct collaboration initiative has its own workspace. This ties back into security: you need to choose and configure tools that support multiple collaborative efforts, where distinct remote teams only have access to what they need
• Internationalization and localization: With a developer community that includes offshore development teams internationalization and localization issues arise, both with the collaborative development tools and the work products the teams are creating. It will not help your cause to mandate the use of tools that many members of one team cannot understand because of language barriers. Putting multilingual people in key positions can help relay information to teammates who may only speak one language

<img src="/images/64360-56413/visit.jpg”>
David Armano has a provoking post on moving customers from visitors to engaging them and finally allowing them to share with new visitors. Good visual.

Where’s the sausage has an interesting piece on “How customer complaints good for business“.

“A great story from Oliver on his experience of how restaurant Sticky Fingers responded to a bad experience he had with them. He blogged about his complaints, which prompted a response from the local supervisor.”

From the original piece, Oliver says –
“Every single person who came into contact with this free catering event
walked away with a terrific story to tell about Sticky Fingers, a new
appreciation for their brand, and a rekindled taste for their delicious
food. (I expect at least half will be having a meal there inside of the
next two weeks, myself included.)”

Getting feedback from customers good and bad is to be expected when you run a community. Encourage it and ensure that you overdo your response on the positive side.

1. All viral adoption is “perpetuated“. For every one successful case of HotorNot there are thousands of Suqidoo and besides the fact that you have to make a product or service something to get passionate about, building a community around it “just does not happen” with 10 users telling 10 other users.

2. The communities that thrive are the ones that are built one participant at a time. Its slow, painful, measured and very effective. Connect with community members, take a genuine interest in their needs and most importantly cater to their specific need as much as you can within the confines of your “community”. But make it each persons own community.

3. Community value increases exponentially with increased participation. It cannot be a linear value proposition. If that was the case, the “network” effect would not exist. To ensure the value increases exponentially, you have to let the community jointly own the direction & its future.

4. “Marketing” is not a four letter word for communities, but “Control” might be. You have to ensure that people know about that the community exists. Does not mean you spam them like Facebook did, or keep nagging them like BirthdayAlarm. On the other hand trying to “control” the community discussion, direction and future is the quickest way to get a competitive community built by the users without you.

5. There is no pixie dust, silver bullet or magic trick. No software program enables your community to happen, regardless of how much it promises to be “just like Myspace”. No consultant (including us at Canvas Group) can make magic happen – although we wish we could. It take good focus, set goals, a lot of hard work (segmenting your users, micro targeting your initial adopters and encouraging feedback) and a little luck.

Its amazing how working and being with our community has changed my own perspective on news and events. On a flight back from Orange county today I spent some time thinking about the ways I get news now versus a year ago. My top 3:

1. Daily RSS feeds from over 148 bloggers – politics, sports, community, marketing, startups, entrepreneurs (No CNN, Rediff, MSNBC or NPR). If a blogger talks about it I would know.

2. Daily TIVO recording of Jon Stewart show. We have a limit of 30 min max TV daily at home for all of us. Mine is done in 22 min.

3. Email discussions with friends and other associates.

How has social media changed your news consumption?

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