Say you are running a community (Support, Developer, Partner, etc.). Your marketing person gets wind of it and wants to learn more and tells his “executive team” – this thing is going to be huge. How can marketing get in on it?

You realize marketing always has had the opportunity to spend money without real ROI or justification, so you guess getting more budget wont be a bad thing for the community.

You also know that getting them in would mean some things good and some bad for the community.

So what’s your decision criteria to opt-in marketing to the community? Do you say lets keep it clean and simple? OR will you say lets have a party? Let me know.

BTW a side note: I subscribe to Todd And’s power 150 marketing blog OPML file and there is MORE content that comes from that to my feed reader than CNN, CNNFN, CBS Marketwatch, BBC, SJ Mercury News, NY Times COMBINED.

These marketing bloggers sure have tons of stuff to say.

Courtsey of grokdotcom. Poynter Institute released a report on eye tracking and people reading content online.

“When readers chose to read an online story, they usually
read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and
57% in tabloids…

Online, however, about half of readers are methodical, while the other half scan,
the report found. The survey also revealed that large headlines and
fewer, large photos attracted more eyes than smaller images in print.
But online, readers were drawn more to navigation bars and teasers.”

So people do read content online. The trouble is sifting through junk, ok and good to get through the great.

Talking about an effective community manager, lets discuss the typical character traits of such a person:

• Knowledgeable about the community’s domain
  
• Well connected to a range of community members
  
• Recognized by peers as competent in a broad range of community subjects
  
• Widely known and respected for his/her ability to facilitate a group of key contributors
  
• Maintains the group’s focus on establishing areas of common interest and priorities
  
• Puts the community as a priority over the company
  
• Is an educator and teaches the community about the company and its products, often in a non-invasive manner
  
• Uses the tools and communication style of the community
  
• Puts a human face on the company, both online and at events
  
• Connects the right people in the company with the right customers and knows when to get out of the way
  
• Pushes through barriers at the corporate level

I recently read the article “Twitter: All Trivia, All The Time” in BusinessWeek’s April 2nd issue.  I was amazed at how connected people want to be.  I have never Twittered myself but this is a perfect example of a very connected social network. 


If you don’t know what Twitter is, it is a Web 2.0 service that counts about 80,000 subscribers.  It’s service is a take off of instant messaging.  It lets subscribers send short updates about their daily “goings on” through cell phones and personalized web sites to groups of people instead of just individuals. 

The article indicated that people have used it to inform friends about hot parties, restaurants, missed meetings sickness, and panels.  Essentially what ever someone wants.

To me this is a perfect setup of how to get buzz going around a new initiative for a company.  For example, as your development team is producing something have them twitter cool key things about the product or service.  Let users twitter back about these features and it is almost like you are getting feedback real time.  A second example, is a marketing blitz around the launch of a new product.  Have key clients twitter how they are using/interacting with the product all day long. 

However, social networking is put to use it is going to be successful as long as it involves a certain amount of “fun”.

What do you think?

The Pharma industry typically tends to be a good leading indicator for things about software and enterprise software in particular. So I was naturally inclined to read this piece on CNNFN about Pity the poor pharma sales rep.

Here is a synopsis:
“It’s hard out there for drug sales reps–particularly if they work in places where gaining access to doctors is becoming increasingly difficult.”

“Kindler did not explain how the rep would win this coveted half-hour
with the doctor. But Joseph Tooley, analyst for A.G. Edwards &
Sons, said the best way for a rep to get a doctor’s attention is to
have a new product that’s demonstrated, through credible clinical
tests, to have an edge over its rivals.”

So lets review:
1. Sales reps use hard sell tactics – Same for software
2. Generics are preferred by many – Open source movement in software
3. Doctors are slamming their doors on pushy sales reps – Same for an enterprise sale rep

The one interesting thing is that new products that have demonstrated success and have a good product.

That is the easy part. But the other part is to get that information to doctors from other doctors.

That’s where you community comes in. Assuming you have a great product (big assumption) and your “problem” is getting the message about it to potential customers, the biggest champions would be your existing customers.

So if you are talking to the VP of Sales and want to get him to buy into online communities (especially if you are in an enterprise software company) the value of the community as a great door opener (based on the content and based on referrals from other customers) should be obvious.

RSS is a very easy way to get content that you are interested in to “come to you” instead of you going to get it. Syndication now allows for content to reach its audiences quicker and in an easier fashion.

With Mozilla now announcing that they are going to build social networking capabilities into the browser, it really gives a great opportunity to leverage content that’s within your community directly within the browser. Similar to the search widget that you see in most browsers now, when they also have built in social networking capabilities, it becomes easier for the community to come to the individual rather that being community centered.

So the marketer’s question will now be – how to ensure brand association when these capabilities simply facilitate great content exchange.

Content is now going to be the new brand definition. Companies that generate and facilitate the BEST USER GENERATED CONTENT will ultimately be the winners. Its very difficult to control user generated content for sure. Many of us who moderate and facilitate these communities know the community takes its own form and direction.

Manoj Jasra has a very thought provoking and interesting post on What will and will not matter in the future of search engine marketing. Suggest you read the article if you are into SEM, but here is a very interesting point as it relates to Communities.

Personalized Search: An interview with Bill states:

“Bill Slawski: I think that ultimately personalized
search is going to require site owners to know and understand the
interests of their targeted customers better, learn about where they
like to visit on the web, what communities they may belong to, how the
site owners can get involved in those communities, and what will
convince customers to become evangelists for a site.”

We have seen several instances of websites starting at blogs, then adding “sections” – WordPress does a great job of it. There are several companies that have just a link to their blog from their news and events section – All social media related.

So back to our question – what effect will communities have on website marketing and SEM?

1. Search engines dont currenty have access to password protected community sites. But increasing number of community owners will start to provide that access since the information contained in them may be more relevant for the person doing the search.

2. As users start to expect conversational marketing instead of the current interrupt driven marketing, we will see more use of community capabilities replacing the traditional “static” web pages.

3. User generated content from your community will have more relevance in search engine (which is somewhat scary) – look no further than wikipedia.

I met with Mario Sundar, a great guy and currently the Community Evangelist at LinkedIn yesterday. According to him there are 3 aspects to getting compelete feedback from his community:
1. The online community and his forums area
2. Blogs
3. Offline events

Triage on these three he says and you will get comprehensive information about what the community of customers and influencers need.

His role according to him is primarily involves interfacing with customers and users of LinkedIn and ensuring their voice is heard by the Product Team, Executives and Marketing.

Here is another link to Amazon’s web services (from Jeff) evangelist that you might find interesting. It details what’ expected from that role. Highlights:
1. Speaking Engagements
2. Blogging
3. Writing White Papers
4. Attending and managing Developer Meetings
5. Press Interviews
6. Building Sample Applications
7. Hosting Screen Casts

Jeremiah Owyang in his postings at
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/12/07/community-manager-resources/
talks about the role of a community manager and what a community manager really does.
Lets discuss this and expand on the responsibilities of an effective community manager

* Listening, responding quickly, informing and connecting the right folks.
* Leading the community and engaging the membership of other stakeholders
* Engaging the community around a company and its products, being a company champion, and most   importantly,  a customer advocate
* Organising community interactions and activities on a regular basis
* Generating an atmosphere of fun to keep the interactions vibrant
* Ensuring that the purpose of the community remains aligned with the personal aspirations of the members as well as the business goals
* Networking with potential new community members to promote community benefits
* Informing the right stakeholders in the company what’s happening, this can range from Engineering,
  Product Management, Product Marketing, Bloggers, PR, or forum moderators
* Creating an identity for the community to which people want to belong
* Engaging members & generating a sense of commitment to community activities
* Communicating community benefits and successes to wider stakeholder groups
* Establishing (with members) agreed processes for community activities and events
* Identifying objectives, roles and responsibilities for community members

Once the community is established, rotation of community manager responsibilities is a good way of
keeping the community vibrant, maintaining interest and increasing the scope of influence of the
community. This ensures that the work is not onerous.

Eric Sauve is the CEO and cofounder of Tomoye and a serial entrepreneur. Tomoye is a relatively small company (he wont tell me the exact number and said less than 50) based on Canada with offices in Washington D.C.

“Communities of practice are distributed groups of people who share a
common concern, problem, mandate, or sense of purpose. The concept of
community binds them together.”

Tomoye develops software that enables internal communities of practice. The US Army for e.g. uses them to manage a professional forum of leaders the world over- “Company Command”. If you are of a certain rank and are faced with a certain challenge at work, who better to ask than someone “like you” or someone who has been through the same challenge before.

So how can communities of practice solve real world business challenges?
1. A large (mostly consumer) software company merged with another enterprise software company. After the acquisition they had 1200+ system engineers. Each with some special skill or expertise. Cost of sales was way too high and they could still not get enough technical resources (since each region had only one type of specialist). Collaboration & community knowledge was the only option since they had to cut resources by 20%. Community of practice of “Technical Sales engineers” allowed them to understand and share insights into particularly unique situations from their peers when they encountered this before.

2. A mid-sized life sciences company had to get support and R&D engineers together to solve critical problems for clients. The previous model was support would take the request first, try to resolve it with the old tiered approach (tier 1, tier 2, etc.) then escalate to R&D. Frustrated customers (who paid for support) complained and threatened to leave. The client decided to develop a community of customers and other partner experts who have most likely faced this scenario before and had them help with support request upfront. This also provided a forum for the “experts” in the ecosystem to shine in the limelight.